If you're tired of spammers and leery of Twitter attacks and how that may affect you, here's a cool solution, free to try out: TwitChuck. Here's how it works:

TwitBlock – A Twitter Spam Solution

    * TwitChuck scans Twitter validating hundreds of spammers everyday.
    * We block these spammers from your account, meaning they cannot follow or reply to you.
    * We actively scan your friends and followers list, ensuring FriendChuck is as effective as possible.

Here's how this tool rates my Twitter account: PatsiBlogSquad:

YES: we recommend that you follow patsiblogsquad. This user follows the Twitter guidelines, does not spam, and is in general an interesting individual. (Aw, shucks ;-))

Highlights for this user:

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I just ran across this end-of-year check list for reviewing your business blog posts. It ties in with the 2 posts I wrote last week, about doing a mid-summer review of your content marketing efforts and How Do You Know if Your Content Marketing Is Working.

This is also a great way to review your content marketing efforts at the half-way, mid-summer point. Are you on track with your Content Marketing Goals?

• What were your most effective blog posts in terms of numbers of page views?
• Which posts generated the most comments?
• What email promotional subject lines got the best open rates?
• Which email newsletters titles got better open rates?
• Which white paper or special report got good download rates?
• Where did your most qualified leads come from?
• Which teleseminar or webniar topics got the most registrations?
• What were the press releases that got the most clicks?

You should also be taking a look at the quality of your writing, especially for your blog. If you want a good review of some sophisticated blog writing concepts, read Sonia Simone's review of the best of Copyblogger for 2008.

Related Posts:

5 Ways to Enrich Your Blog Posts

How Do You Write to Entertain?

Content Marketing Goals: Educate

Content Marketing is the Buzz-du-Jour among marketers everywhere, both on and offline. I have encouraged you over the last five years to write relevant content on your business blogs that provides good information, builds relationships, entertains and converts readers to clients.

But here's the thing: how do you do all that when you write a blog post? Many business bloggers are using their blogs like e-newsletters. They write an article on a topic and post. Your blog isn't a newsletter, it's different.

In fact, some of the smart clients I've worked with to set up their blogs and train them tell me, "Oh, content isn't a problem for me. I've written dozens of articles. I'll just copy and paste them into my blog."

Wrong. Blog posts are meant to be conversations, not one-way information vehicles. It's not a lecture, or a newsletter. It's somewhere in between.

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I'm really upset at the recent article about Facebook over on Copyblogger. Here I've been spending valuable and scarce free time over on Twitter, ignoring Facebook. Now I've just found out I might be missing a crucial traffic builder.

I'm not completely missing the boat, I do have some presence over there at Facebook, just not visiting it daily. My blog posts and twitter updates are automatically fed into my Facebook page. It's a good thing, too. Turns out there's a huge pool of potential readers on Facebook and we need to be nurturing them too.

Go read this article and make up your own mind about where to spend your marketing minutes…

How Facebook is Gunning for Google (And Killing SEO) by Mike Wasylik

(And for those of you who care why I've been so absent on blogs and emails lately, I've been in an intensive Spanish course for the past two weeks. It's beginning to cramp my work and play time, and anyone who knows me will understand that my time on the tennis courts is sacred. You can shorten my work day, but don't you dare try to shorten my tennis time. Something has to go, and it's my time spent blogging, tweeting and surfing other sites … Pero hablo bien Espanol ahora!)