I’ve been squatting on my personal twitter account for almost 3 years now.  I finally hooked up a client to alert me to tweets in real time.  After hooking that up, I promptly dropped a whole pile of professional acocunts I had been following for products or services I was interested in.  I dropped them because Twitterrific would keep popping up with some company saying stuff like “Good morning Twitterverse”.  Are you kidding me?  How annoying.  I assume these companies think they need to keep talking to keep their name in my face.  Well, there isn’t a single company I kept following that does stuff like this.  I don’t care how much I liked your product or service.

Don’t mix professional and personal tweets in your professional twitter account.

People who follow you professionally will end up dropping you if you throw too much fluff in there.

I’m guilty of getting too technical in my personal account.  I’ve tweeted when the fedex and ups api’s have been down.  I’m confident that 99% of the 30 people following my personal account don’t care about that.

So I’m going to stick to things on my personal account that may be of some interest to family and friends.  Any professional stuff needs to go elsewhere.

Personally I’ve started a twitter list for professional food related stuff in the Chicago area.  I’ve picked out mostly local folks who stick to talking about food almost all the time.  It’s something I’m passionate about and am excited to keep tabs on.  There’s some cool organizations and chefs which I’m not including in the list though because they’re mixing way too much personal in with the professional.  If half of my list is inside jokes and talk about what tv show they’re looking forward to, the list would get real boring, real quick.

I hope more and more professionals can catch on.  There’s some professional conversations I’m really interested in but don’t have the desire to put up with the noise that follows them.

I posted some tips on making websites for search engines at the office.

I’m putting together some new marketing websites and need to come up with a design.  I can either pay a designer or find a premade template.  In past years, website templates have looked very unprofessional.  I started looking around at the current state of website templates and am impressed with the stylish xhtml/css options at Template World.  They offer some solid free selections, I’m going ahead with the $50 bucks for the members section since the templates are so good.

Adding some spices

With any of the templates I pick here, I’m going to take a little time to tweek things.  Template World doesn’t take the same approach as other template sites.  They offer a relatively small number of higher end templates rather than countless thousands of low end templates like the other guys.  So I’m not going to be able to find a template that has everything where I want it but with a little css work and some istock photo shopping I’m get something really slick.

I didn’t give any marketing related thought to either of these pages and still ranking is pretty solid.

Think about it a bit and put up something useful on Squidoo … you’ll end up becoming an authority on the subject pretty quickly.

Speaking of SEO, nichelaunch.com is a friend’s directory service. It will be worth the effort to get your name out there.