Marketing and Lead Generation | Swyzzle

My monthly book club has recently picked me to be the lucky member that chooses the next book we read together. To get everyone excited for my choice–and give them a convenient place to buy it–I decided to make a Swyzzle show that introduces the book! Check it out:

My friends and I across the country love to give and receive mixtapes, and our favorite music for spring afternoons in the park is a popular theme. With Swyzzle, I can distribute my online “mixtape” and allow my friends to purchase and legally download the mp3 files from Amazon in no time flat! I made this mixtape especially for those sunny spring afternoons and the friends I miss across the country–and like a personalized, musical ecard, I delivered it straight to their inboxes. Check it out here, then try your hand at making one yourself!

Ah, Twitter…our favorite hate-to-love-it web application. Since Oprah Winfrey’s first “tweet” on Friday, the once-tiny website has been innundated with at least a million new members and more traffic than ever. People like New York Times’ Maureen Dowd have a different opinion of the site, however–Dowd “would rather be tied up to stakes in the Kalahari Desert, have honey poured over me and red ants eat out my eyes than open a Twitter account.” Clearly the ranks are divided, but for small business owners and bloggers alike Twitter has become a powerful business tool. Tech blogs especially are known to be frequent posters, and only applications like Tweetdeck prevent total Twitter feed proliferation by such media. Swyzzle, being both a web business and a blog, loves to use Twitter to tell our followers what we’re up to–which is particularly important if we’re working through a kink in the system or need to tell you about our latest online doodad. If you’re a Twitter enthusiast like we are, follow us and we’ll provide the entertaining updates!

As happy as we are that our new Swyzzle Editor is running smoothly and looking sleek, there’s one enormous step that we need your help to take–tell us your thoughts about using our new interface! There’s no testing like actually helping you, our member, understand and navigate the software. Make a mixtape, a travelogue, a scrapbook, or a wish list–then let us know what you love and what you would like to see done differently. Is anything unclear? How do you like our new logo and snazzy color scheme? Whatever you would like to tell us helps a bunch. So drop us a line or a comment on this post and give us your thoughts!

My good friend Nick recently had a lovely birthday party in Downtown Athens, GA–and I thought it would be a great opportunity to make an awesome Swyzzle show! I love that you can even put video in the background of a show with Swyzzle–it’s one of my favorite little tricks to use! Check out the result:

We’ve finished ironing out the little kinks that were keeping us from having our tutorials posted as actual swyzzle shows, and now we’re proud to show you the result! On the main page of Swyzzle.com, as well as in the help section of the blog, we now have posted the tutorials you’ll need to get started making really snappy and polished-looking shows. A few of the Swyzzle ProTips shows–our advanced tutorials–will be posted tomorrow. Here’s a peek at what you can find more of on the main page:

You may have noticed that we’ve recently added our lovely flamingo logo to the icon that appears in your internet browser next to our page name. Many blogging platforms support this tiny icon, called a “favicon.” For TypePad users, it’s especially easy to do…here’s a step-by-step to try on your own blog:

1. create the image you would like to use, making sure the dimensions are 16 x 16 pixels.
2. save the file as favicon.ico (standard for favicons), using an icon generator, like favicon from pics
3. go to the Control Panel on your typepad account, then click on Files
4. making sure you’re in the “home” folder, upload your favicon.ico 
5. Voila! Next time your blog is opened, the favicon should appear in your browser’s tab or title window!