gplus.to is a useful service that turns your Google+ profile link into a short URL you can share with others on Twitter, Facebook, and through e-mail. All you have to do is grab your Google+ ID number from your profile and define the nick name you want your link to use. If your name is not already registered, you will get a short URL in a flash. Here is how I am using my short URL for Google+:

As you can see, the URL given is pretty short and easy to share on Twitter or in your e-mail signature. Google+ may be a new social network but it has all the potential in the world. The sooner you start building your connections, the better off you will be.

Credit: sxc.hu

No matter how much value you offer through your Twitter account, there are always going to be people who will criticize you for everything you do. Perfection is impossible on Twitter or on your blog. You are going to make mistakes, and there will be people who will bash you no matter how much value you offer them thereafter. The last thing you want to do is getting into a shouting match with someone on Twitter and embarrass your brand. Twitter may be a tad bit less personal than Facebook. That does not mean you have the freedom to go at your followers and start a cursing match (the only person who can pull it off on Twitter seems to be the legendary Dana White).

Nobody likes to get criticized. Some can handle criticism better than others. Still, you won’t find too many people who get up in the morning hoping to find hate mail/tweets in their inbox. There are two ways to deal with negative feedback in social media. You can stop everything and start blaming yourself or the world. The better way to approach this is to try and learn from your mistakes and figure out how you can offer even more value to your Twitter followers.

If you have gotten negative feedback on Twitter recently, here are 6 ways you may want to go about addressing them:

1. Listen and listen good: A lot of people don’t seem to listen on Twitter. If you are the only one talking, you are not going to learn anything nor are you going to build solid relationships with people. Maybe the criticism that you are getting is valid. A year go, people started complaining to me about using a certain URL shortener for my tweets. I could have just ignored it. I decided to go with bit.ly and ow.ly instead.
2. Don’t insult: some people just can’t take negative feedback or any sort of criticism. If that is you, Twitter may not be for you. Twitter is a social network with emphasis on the word “social.” Even if the God almighty came down from the heavens and showed off amazing powers, there are still going to be people who’ll not like it. Insulting your followers does not reflect too well upon your brand nor does it give others any encouragement to follow you on Twitter.
3. Investigate: just because people are criticizing you, it does not mean that you are wrong or they are wrong. You won’t find out unless you investigate. So you have got to listen to what people have to say and do some research to see if your followers are right.
4. Don’t overreact: there are two ways to overreact to a negative tweet. You can either get too aggressive with your critics or start begging them for forgiveness. Overreacting does not solve anything. Everybody makes mistakes. Just learn from it and move on. Don’t just give up on Twitter because a couple of people don’t happen to enjoy your tweets.
5. Learn from Mistakes: everybody makes mistakes. The key is what you can learn from your mistakes. If you don’t study your mistakes, you are not going to learn anything, which means you will continue making those mistakes over and over again.
6. Don’t change who you are: not everyone is going to like you. Don’t just change your personality to appease the few that hate your style. It’s always easier to be yourself and see where the chips fall. I am not suggesting you should not try to improve your content. But don’t stop tweeting about a certain topic that you are passionate about if a couple of your followers don’t like it.

Twitter is a social network. Some people will like you and some won’t. Not all criticism are constructive. You should still put some time to figure out which ones are valid and try to learn from your mistakes. Remember, nobody is perfect.

Linkedin Share Button is a very handy WordPress plugin that adds a Linkedin button to your website and gives your visitors an easy way to share your content with their network on Linkedin. This plugin does not require you to know any coding, so almost anyone can deploy this on blogs.

Linkshare Share Button has plenty of options that you can pick and choose to get the most out of it. You can choose to display the button on your posts, pages, and even your search results. Three button styles are included, and the position of your button can be modified too. The downside? You’ll have to have a WordPress blog to run this plugin.

Those of you who don’t have a WordPress blog can always do it the hard way. Just grab one of these buttons and use the right link to send your stories to LinkedIn:

Will LinkedIn bring you a ton of traffic? It depends on your niche and how much time you spend connecting with and engaging others on that site. But there is no reason not to test this button out on your blog.

Tweetwally: a very helpful tool that enables you to keep an eye out for topics that are important to you on Twitter. Pulls everything together and saves you time.

Twittorati: the name should ring a bell. This is Twitter meets Technorati. Bloggers can use this tool to find out about highly popular links. When you are stuck and have no idea what to write about, a trip to this site can help.

Tweetvisor: Tweetvisor is a powerful web-based solution that lets you manage your Twitter account more effectively. It makes it easy to manage your Twitter lists, gain more followers, keep track of what others are saying on Twitter, and even schedule future tweets.

Trackur: Trackur is a premium online reputation management service that should be used by more popular bloggers and small businesses to set up alerts and track brand-related news on the Internet.

Trackle: one of my favorites, Trackle can monitor your brand, track your competitors, and alert you when something new happens in your niche. This is also a premium service.

These 5 tools can save you some time and keep you informed of developments that are important to your business (blog). Are you using any of these tools?

Here is an example of the information you will get when you use RankSpeed to search online (in this case I searched for the term “netbook”):

You can update your search results by applying good, popular, and other filters available to you through RankSpeed. You can also change the time-line and the matching criteria for your searches as well. What I like about RankSpeed is that it gives you the source of its information as well. So you can easily figure out who has tweeted about your product or website. It’s also possible to find people who are interested in (or are talking about) your brand.

RankSpeed is still in its early days and not perfect. But it is based on a very decent idea and can provide value if you need feedback on a website or product. If you are looking to go beyond what Google has to offer and want to find out what Twitter thinks of your product or service, RankSpeed can be a very useful tool.

Fixed Social Plugin is an amazing little plugin that is worth a try for anyone who’s looking to get more exposure for his/her content on sites such as Facebook, StumbleUpon, and other top sites. This plugin is very flexible. It lets you pick and choose the style of your buttons and also the ones you want to show on your blog.

You also have control on where your buttons show up. They can show up horizontally at the top of your blog or vertically on the right side of your screen. You can even no follow the links to avoid leaking PageRank.

I would have loved to have the option to customize the look and feel of this plugin further from the back-end. However, the plugin is pretty easy to install, and you can always change the settings if you know some coding. What I like about this plugin is the fact that it sits these buttons on the top of your page in a non-intrusive manner. It may not work for every blog, but it’s worth a try. Probably the easiest way to make your blog more social friendly.

A few days ago, I wrote a piece about toolbars that you can add to your blog to promote your Twitter and Facebook accounts and expand your online presences. Meebo’s social bar is one of the better ones on the market today. Meebo not only makes it easy to add a social bar to your blog, its blog toolbar is very customizable as well. So you can pick and choose what you want to promote on your blog.

The customization process is pretty straight forward. All you have to do is drag and drop the service you are looking to add to your footer bar on to your bar. You can also customize the order of your footer-bar buttons by dragging them around.

The toolbar is pretty speedy and doesn’t slow down your site. You can easily install it on your blog as well. If you happen to be running your blog using WordPress, you can download Meebo for WordPress plugin to get the job done. A general code is also available just in case you are running your own proprietary platform.

All in all, if you are looking for a toolbar that adds value to your blog and lets your visitors get engaged with your blog, Meebo’s toolbar is a good one to consider. It’s easy to create, customize, and add to your blog. It’s free as well. Worth testing.

Delicious is one of the most underrated social bookmarking services around. There are plenty of social bookmarking services that can drive traffic to your blog, but if I were to rate Delicious among these services, it’d be in the top 2. If you can get people to submit your posts to delicious and help spread the word around about your blog, there is no reason you can’t gain lots of traffic for your efforts. Of course, you need to be involved on Delicious, and your content needs to be top notch. Last but no the least, you need to tag your content properly.

You can always work hours on producing your killer content, and your readers may or may not take the time to add your content to delicious. But you can always push the issue by adding a delicious button to your blog posts to make the process easier for your visitors. I have talked about a few solutions that allow you to display Facebook, Twitter, and Delicious buttons in your posts, but you don’t really have to use a third party solution to get the job done. Delicious has already provided us with a set of free tools that your visitors can use to bookmark your blog posts fast.

One of the easiest way to add delicious to your blog is by grabbing the button code from Delicious. It’s a very simple text button that once clicked it will open up a window that lets your visitors bookmark your posts.

Delicious Tagometer Badge is much more sophisticated and lets you display the tags your visitors have used to bookmark your blog posts as well as bookmarking trends for your posts. This badge also shows how many people have bookmarked your posts, which could be useful to your new visitors.

Remember that in order to get the best out of Delicious, you should take time to get involved. You can always use your blog to promote your Delicious account and connect with other Delicious users. Here are just a few other tools you can use to add your Delicious profile to your blog.

A lot of bloggers underestimate the power of Delicious. But the above tools are all free and worth testing on your blog. You can customize their look and feel as well. If you haven’t given Delicious a chance in the past, it’s great way to start bringing more traffic to your blog in 2010.

Here is a question a lot of new bloggers struggle with: how do you drive traffic to a blog? New bloggers are often less patient than the more experienced ones, but the question is very valid. Without traffic, you are not going to get the exposure you deserve for your work, and you are not going to be able to properly monetize your blog. It’d be hard to stay motivated if you work hard on your content only to see others who have much lower quality content get all the exposure and traffic you are not getting. But traffic may be nearer than you think. The social media is a great place to start if you want to significantly improve the amount of eyeballs that visit your pages. Websites such as Digg, Twitter, Reddit, and StumbleUpon are all very effective traffic drivers in their own ways, so you do want to make sure your content is being shared on those networks.

You can always add your content to the top social networking sites by yourself. But a better way to approach this is by giving your audience the tools it needs to spread the word about your content. You’d be surprised how effective this tactic can be. With that in mind, here are 5 methods to bring the social media to your blog:

Digg Digg: one of the best social media plugins for WordPress platform. It’s very flexible and designed to enable your readers to add your content to their favorite networks fast.

Boost Post: if you don’t want to mess with plugins on your blog, you can always use this service to install the appropriate code on your blog. Add the services you prefer and copy & paste the code. That’s all.

Tweetmeme: not only one of the best web services to find out about the hot content on Twitter, it comes with widgets and chicklets you can use on your blog to encourage your visitors to follow you on Twitter and retweet your posts.

Socializer: it’s a simple bookmarking service that gives your readers even more options when it comes to sharing your content on the web. Great for more niche blog and those who just want their content to be promoted everywhere.

MyBlogLog: a cool service by Yahoo! that lets you build a more solid community around your blog. You can also grab the widgets available through this service to promote your activities on social networking websites.

There you have it. 5 exciting services that let you empower your readers and encourage them to share your content online. Of course, your content needs to be of high quality if you want to succeed.

Your take: what services are you using on your blog to help others promote your posts?

In the past few weeks, I have talked about how you can optimize your blog for the search engines and making it future proof. One of the best ways to do that is by optimizing your blog for the social media by giving your readers the option to share your content on top social networking website. Whether you are writing a technical blog or one about your own life, people may find your posts interesting enough to want to share them on Delicious, Twitter, Facebook, and more. Boostpost is a cool handy service that lets you give you users the option to do just that.

As long as you are targeting one of the more popular social media sites on the web, Boostpost should have you covered. It comes with a set of attractive button widgets that you can install on your blog to let your users share your stories and get you more exposure in the long run.

The service is actually more straightforward than it looks. All you have to do is define the services you want to use your blog and copy/paste the code into your blog. You can also use the footer widget that will make all these buttons in the footer of your blog. That could come in handy if you have a busy-looking design. If you prefer to keeps things easy, you can just get the all-in-one button for your blog.

Boostpost doesn’t make your content worthy of getting mentions on social networking sites, but it does give your users the tools to spread the word about your content. The next part is providing your users with the content they want to share with others.