Let me tell you what this post is not. This is not a post about building your follower count, or using Twitter to drive clicks to your website, or fancy ways to monetize your profile. There’s plenty of that garbage out there already. This is also not a list of best practices from professional bloggers and twitterers. For that I recommend heading over to Twitip.

What this post is, is an illustration of how I have been using Twitter since I started in about July ‘08. I am not trying to tell you how you should use it. That would be like me telling you how to use the telephone properly. Twitter is a communication tool, and everyone will use communication tools (email, blogs, phones, txt, their mouths…) differently for different situations.

How I have used the platform to date has really worked well for me, and since people ask me about this all the time, I thought it prudent to get it down on paper. Well… you know what I mean. Oh – if you would like to follow, here’s me: @rickgalan. Read the rest of this entry »

With all the coverage on basically every marketing or SEO blog, you are likely aware of Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and even Ask’s announcement a few weeks ago of support of the Canonical URL Tag. It was big news (well.. big news if you are an online marketer.. if you are a normal person it’s actually pretty unexciting). Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz even referred to it as the “biggest change to SEO best practices since the emergence of Sitemaps“.

Now that all the freaking out about change has died down (Holy crap! Google changed the color of their wallpaper! Quick, let’s all write 300,000 blog posts about it!), I wanted to share my thoughts on this development (go 300,001). Read the rest of this entry »