Email Marketing News and Tips

If you are like most people I know, twitter is something you have heard about but are not sure what it’s for or why you would use it.  One of my friends says his teen-age daughter calls twitter “Facebook for old people”.  But there are some very fun and useful things you can do with it.

Say you’re looking for Jackson Browne tickets for his upcoming concert.  My wife told me she wanted to go and I really meant to get tickets when they came out.  But I got distracted and I missed them.  So now I’m looking for tickets on craigslist.com.

But looking for tickets on craigslist poses a problem.  I have to remember to look!

What if I could get each Jackson Browne post to craigslist sent as a text message to my phone as soon as it appears.

Here’s how:

1. Get a twitter account.  It’s easy.  Just sign up Here.
2. Add your cell phone number as a device under the “Settings” section of twitter and enable it to receive direct messages by setting the “Device Updates” to “Direct Messages”.
3. Go to craigslist.com and find what you are looking for:
   • In my case, Jackson Browne Tickets in the San Francisco Bay area
   • To get there I went down through the various menus to get to tickets in the sfbay section
   • Then I typed in “Jackson Browne” in the Search box
4. Once you are on the page with just the craigslist items you are searching for, notice that at the very bottom right hand corner of the web page is the little .
5. Click on the and the special RSS page of your search will come up.  Copy the entire link out of the address bar of your browser.  Mine looks like this:
   • http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/tix?query=%22jackson+browne%22&minAsk=min&maxAsk=max&format=rss
6. Now create a new TwitterBlog at the boomerang web site HERE (http://boomerang.com/page/twitterblogcreate.aspx)
7. On the TwitterBlog form, type in your twitter username, your password, and your email address (don’t worry, we promise not to use this information for anything else)
8. After you have signed up or signed in, click on the “Add New TwitterBlog” link and paste in the RSS feed url you copied from craigslist. For craigslist, make sure it ends with “format=rss” or you may have copied the wrong link
9. Click the “Test RSS URL” button
10. If the link is good and it returns the last posts from the page then you can click on “Direct Message” and save your new TwitterBlog.

OK, it seems like a lot of steps but they are easy. The next article that gets posted to your craigslist search will get sent to your twitter account and out to your phone.

Let us know if you have difficulty and we’ll fix it!  Happy TwitterBlogging!!!

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