How to use twitter to promote your onlineshop – part 2

In the last article we have asked ourselves a few questions about twitter and if it fits to your product- and marketing environment. Now you might want to have some tips how to use twitter for your marketing/e commerce endeavors. Here you go:

1. Be useful!
There is nothing worse than sending out useless links to products noone was interested in in the first place. This is nothing less than spam, so don’t do it! If you want to use twitter, make your information useful. This means i.e. sending out gift coupon codes which will give your customers 5% off of their next purchase. For one many might retweet your offer due to its usefulness to everyone but it will also give you a great way to track your success on twitter if you use a special keycode. Read more »

How to use twitter to promote your onlineshop – part 1

Twitter has been a phenomenon for some time now - at least for us early adopters who play around with every new tech or application we can find. Although there have been some discussions about whether or not twitter has reached the masses, with just a few million users I think this is hardly the case…yet. Nevertheless twitter has been hyped as the new thing and I have to admit that I enjoy using it very much. And so do all the marketeers and social media specialists out there, proclaiming twitter as THE new tool for social media marketing. That begs the questions - is twitter really relevant when it comes to effective marketing? Lets see… Read more »

Getting started with Ruby on Rails

Yes, it has been a while since I wrote my last post on this blog. It seems there is always something keeping me away from sitting down and writing something useful. At the moment, this reason is Ruby on Rails. Over the last 2 years I got more and more frustrated with my inability to implement my own ideas due to a lack of profound knowledge of programming languages like PHP or Ruby. All my professional life I’ve been very design/usability centered and I don’t want to change that, but I want to add some knowledge “from the other side” to my portfolio. That’s why I started to learn Ruby on Rails. Long story short, I wanted to share some links with you which should get you started with Ruby and the framework Rails.

Where to get it

http://rubyonrails.org

Books

Agile webdevelopment with Ruby on Rails - This is a great book to get you started with RoR. Buy it and you won’t regret it. Although I’m not a big fan of books when it comes to teaching yourself something, this book really helped me to get started. Now I’m using it as a reference while I try out tutorials on the web.

Screencasts

http://railscasts.com - Great screencasts, although you need some knowledge about RoR to understand what he is talking about. If you have never programmed in your life, read a book first!

http://peepcode.com - Another great source for screencasts if you are willing to pay for it. I think they cost about 9USD and in my opinion, they are worth their money.

Tutorials

Nettuts - Starting with Ruby on Rails from scratch - Week 1 to 4 - This was the tutorial that got me interested in RoR, but I never actually tried it. It is build on  an older Rails version which doesn’t really matter, so try it out.

Getting started with Ruby on Rails - If you read my blog, you know that I love Smashingmagazine.com. They have released a two-part article about ruby, explaining why it is so good and how it works. Read it! :)

This is a really short list and there are many many more tutorials out there. Start with those mentioned above and use google to find other resources. Have fun!