Social Media Archives - SLee and Topher

How Twitter Improved My Blog

October 14, 2011 By Topher Leave a Comment

Want to take your blog to the next level and drive in masses of new traffic and new customers?

There are two powerful ways that you too can use Twitter to drive in thousands of new readers to your blog each month and enable your blogs to go viral, getting them in front hundreds of thousands of new prospects.

Twitter Badges

The first and perhaps easiest way to reach new prospects for your blog with Twitter is by using the Twitter Badge in your blog posts. This enables readers who really love one of your blog posts to instantly re-Tweet your blog post to their Twitter followers with just one click. This gets your blog out in front of tons of new potential customers without you doing a thing.

The badge also acts as a counter and show how many times your blog posts have been re-Tweeted by others. This also boosts your credibility. People like to like things that others think are cool too. So the more times that a blog post has been re-Tweeted the more perceived value it has. Along with your blog analytics this can also act as a guide to help you create better blog posts.

Obviously common sense tells you that creating more posts like the ones that have been re-Tweeted the most will help you to boost your traffic even further and will be of most interest to those who are help in you promote your blog by re-Tweeting your content.

Tweeting

The second incredibly powerful way to use Twitter to promote your blog and drive in new readers is by Tweeting clips from your blog with a link back to it. In contrast to just bombarding Twitter followers with sales messages this gives you a way to offer real value and funnel your followers through to conversion.

The 140 characters per Tweet allowed by Twitter is very restricting so use URL shortening tools like bit.ly to make them smaller and get more into each message. Note that if you sign up for bit.ly instead of using the free version you will be able to use custom URLs. If you are using a WordPress blog, which is highly recommended you can use the new Publicize feature to automatically syndicate your blog posts to Twitter and Facebook.

Multiple Accounts

Don’t just limit yourself to one Twitter account either. Professional Internet marketers use multiple Twitter accounts to reach different niche markets and drive in even more traffic. You should also be having all of your staff members and contractors Tweeting links to your blog posts as well in order to reach their followers and their follower’s followers.

One real estate investment education company has used this strategy to generate an average of 800 views to each of their daily blog posts and become ranked number 1 in their category by the Inc. 500. Just think about it, that’s almost 30,000 more hits on your blog each month. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out you only need a small percentage of those readers to buy from you to make a killing online.

How to Get Free Energy in The Sims Social

September 21, 2011 By SLee 3 Comments

After my last post, I’ve noticed several of you are coming here to find out how to get free energy in The Sims Social. (If this sentence doesn’t make any sense to you, please read the other post and then come back to this one!)

Here are all the ways I know to get free energy in The Sims Social. Oh, and by the way, thanks for pulling yourself away from Facebook for a while to read this.

Out of Energy? Oh, noes! Follow these tips to get some more energy for free!

1. Good Things Come to Those Who Wait… Even in The Sims Social

As you know, your energy bar maxes out at 15 (unless you were already at 15 and got some bonus energy for visiting a friend). When you use an energy point, it will refill in 5 minutes. It’s 5 minutes per energy point, so if you use all 15, you’ll have to wait 5 minutes x 15 points = 75 minutes before you’re back up to 15 points.

2. Get Free Energy from Friends

Sometimes in The Sims Social, your friends will send you a gift, which often (if not always… I’m not sure if it varies or not) is an energy bar. Consuming an energy bar will give you +1 energy point.

You can access your stash of energy bars and other goodies by clicking on the “Craft” button in the bottom-right corner of the screen and then clicking the “Backpack” tab.

3. Earn Energy for Free by Doing Activities in The Sims Social

When you complete activities in the game, a variety of bonuses pop out. If you are meeting a need of your sim, it will be a green smiley face, boosting your sim’s mood. If it is something that requires the use of an energy point, you will almost always be awarded with some simoleons. Every now and then, completing an activity will give you a bonus of +1 energy.

Another way to earn energy for free is by collecting other bonuses in the game. As the illustration here shows, if you are able to collect 8 Goodwill, 7 Love, and 3 Buzz, you can combine those bonuses into Energy Coffee, which will give you +5 energy. (At level 14, you unlock the ability to make a small cup of coffee that gives you +3 energy.)

Combine Your Bonuses to Make Some Sims Energy Coffee

4. Complete an Offer for SimCash and use the SimCash to buy Energy

This last way I know of to get free energy in The Sims Social is a little more involved. EA set up an in-game payment system for players to convert something outside of the game into SimCash. You can then use the SimCash to buy all kinds of things in the game, including energy.

So, what do you have to do to get SimCash? Good question.

You can either buy it with Facebook Credits, a Credit Card Payment, a mobile payment, a PayPal transaction,

…or you can EARN it by completing offers. No doubt EA has affiliate relationships with the companies these offers are through, so they get a commission of some sort when you complete the offer.

I shared this referral link in my other article on The Sims Social, too, but this system is highly similar to the work-from-home program run by Project Pay Day, where you can be the one getting the commission, instead of EA, and then buy all the SimCash you want with real money… just saying.

While most of the offers available for SimCash require some sort of purchase, if you look carefully when you’re in the SimCash offers screen, there’s a tab for the free offers in the top of that pop-up. Complete the offers and you can get your free SimCash and then your free energy.

So, there you have it. Four easy ways to get free energy in The Sims Social. Do you know of any other ways? Leave a comment below.