I made this post on another forum, before starting Tweedz. This may be of use to some of you:----------------------------------------------------------
Here's something I've been doing recently that is easy to do and sends me about 50 people a day, pretty much on autopilot...It won't work for everyone, but may give some of you some ideas.
First, I (and Mary Murtha) have a forum that discusses politics, religion, current events, etc.
The forum exports an RSS pheed. Note: Our TOS states that any submissions are given to the public domain, so you can use our pheeds too, if you want.
Next, I created a Twitter account, specifically for this forum.
Then, I went to www.twitterfeed.com and set up an account to take the RSS pheed from our forum and post it automatically to the Twitter account.
So now we have Twitter update multiple times a day with our forum posts, all on autopilot.
Twitter also exports an RSS pheed, so I submit (and ping) both RSS pheeds, the one Twitter makes and the one our forum makes, giving us twice the exposure.
Now, I use Twitter Friend Adder (check for WSO) to add and delete friends. Because the forum is targeted to politics, news, current events, etc, I searched for Twitter accounts of well-known liberals and conservatives, such as Fox News and follow them.
For my IM account, if I follow someone, about 35% follow me back. It isn't that way with this niche, as less than 10% follow me back.
However, by adding them I see in my stats that they are not only checking out my Twitter account, but they also check out my "homepage", which is the forum. This accounts for about half the traffic Twitter sends.
The other half of the traffic comes from people clicking on the links in the updates themselves. I can tell because these links use a redirect like twirl, etc, so they are a different "referrer".
I've had plenty of Twits respond with comments about the comment posted, and they've all been 100% positive.
But I'm not done with the automation and re-using the content...
I use my own mailing list software which let's me use RSS pheeds for the content. I believe aWeber does, also.
So I add my forum RSS pheed to a newsletter that also includes RSS from Yahoo for news and entertainment, as well as a custom RSS pheed I made from Wikepedia content that contains what happend on each day in history.
To recap, the newsletter contains:
1. The newsest posts and comments about topical subjects for the day.
2. Yahoo most popoular news stories for the day
3. Yahoo entertainment news stories of the day
4. "Today in history" from Wikipedia
Again, this is all "self writing" and I never have to write a thing directly.
So, if I or anyone else makes a post on the forum, not only does it update the forum, it also updates Twitter as well as my newsletter, and I don't have to lift a finger.
And, this also gives the forum's readers the option of following the forum using email or Twitter.
We haven't monetized any of this in any way, and use it as a demo for automation, so I'm going to post the URLs so Warriors can visually see what is going on.
You can see the forum at:
http://duelz.com/duelz-debate-forum/
The specific RSS pheed is:
http://duelz.com/external.php?type=RSS2&forumids=2&lastpost=1&nohtm l=0&fulldesc=1
The Twitter account is:
http://twitter.com/duelzcom
Email newsletter:
www.Duelz.com/newsletter.html
If you learn how to automate like this and "repurpose" User Generated Content, you can produce high quality content, 100% on auto-pilot, so instead of spending your time creating content, you can spend that time MARKETING AND PROMOTING.
Again, NONE OF THIS IS MONETIZED!!! It is just a demo of how to use RSS, Twitter and User Generated Content, and prove to everyone that automated content can also be high quality content, as well as demonstrate how to use RSS to syndicate across different media.
If you have questions or comments, I'll try my best to answer any and all...