My life story is being featured on StoryOfMyLife.com this week, along with my wife, Tanda’s story. It was serendipitous how this came about! I had seen the website and had an impression of how it could be a great resource for grandparents. So I planned to write a review for my GrandparentsTLC.com blog. I was going to contact Story of My Life for more information. My goal was to share with grandparents how they could use the site as a tool write their life stories, then share them with their family. Their stories are stored forever as a legacy for future generations.

Then one day a couple of months ago, one of the head people at Story of My Life contacted me saying they would like to feature me and my wife on their website. Well, needless to say, I was thrilled! So they had a professional storyteller interview us and write our stories. When the stories were complete, we reviewed them, and requested a few minor changes.

To get information for my review, I had a phone call the lady that originally contacted me. I also suggested that we coordinate the date to feature our stories to coincide with my review. It worked out perfectly!

I have to say that the experience was very enjoyable. Tanda and I are impressed with how professional and courteous everyone is at StoryOfMyLife.com. We feel honored to be featured by Story of My Life. It is an well engineered website, and so easy to use. And it’s free! They are doing wonderful things there.

Now that the stories are published, I’ll confess that I didn’t quite know what to expect for the number or readers. I wondered how many readers would click one of the links to my three websites that are listed at the end of the articles. Well, I am totally amazed at the results so far! They really know how to make a story go viral!

• Views so far on Shayne’s story at Story of My Life: a few thousand in the first 24 hours. 110, 000 in the first 48 hours.
• Views so far on Tanda’s story at Story of My Life: 16,000 in the first 24 hours.
• Views for the most popular story there: 548,664 after 255 days.

My story was published Wednesday, Feb. 4th, 2009, and Tanda’s was the next day. Please read my review of the Story of My Life website on GrandparentsTLC.com. It also has the links to our stories on their website.

Enjoy – Shayne

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What is twitter? Twitter can be a fun way to keep in touch with your family and friends. Here’s the description from the twitter home page: “Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?” So twitter is like a personal blog, only with shorter and more frequent entries. It’s a microblog; a communication tool you can access on the web. It can also integrate with text messages (SMS) on your mobile phone.

Take two minutes to watch this easy to understand intro to twitter by CommonCraft.com.

I’ve been active on twitter for about a year now. It’s becoming more beneficial to me in several ways, such as connecting with new folks, and promoting my GrandparentsTLC.com site. But it took me few weeks to figure out what the big deal was with twitter. I’ve seen several new tweeple struggle to learn how to successfully build their little community of friends and followers. Many of them go about it in an ineffective way. I recently tweeted about this -

I see folks joining twitter – some of them famous. Someone should write a guide of things to do before promoting yourself on twitter. Dec 6th from twhirl

When I see someone new following me, I want to learn about them. So I check out their twitter profile, read their bio, and click on their website. Sometimes I get a follower that is new to twitter, who has not taken the time to set up their profile information. Some of these people are following lots of other folks, but not too many follow them back.

One problem is twitter’s recommended steps for setting up a new account. It’s missing a very important step: setting up your profile information. This should be done before following anyone, and before your first tweet. Your profile needs to include your photo, bio and your website.

I usually advise people to use their real name and photo. To make your name more readable, capitalize your username, as in ShaynePacker. (If you already have a twitter account, you can fix the capitalization in your account settings. As long as you only change the capitalization and don’t add or delete characters, you won’t hurt anything.) If your twitter ID is your company name or product name, you should capitalize it.

Here are the steps you need to take. Even if you have a twitter account, double check each step to make sure you’ve done it completely, as they are all important.

1. Create a twitter account.
2. Set up your information for people to see.
3. Create your first status update.
4. Find your friends and new people to follow.
5. Start engaging followers in meaningful conversation.

(Tip: right-click or command-click the links below to open them in a new tab so that you can refer back to this tutorial.)

✔ Step 1. Create an account at twitter.com using these guidelines.

• On the signup page, capitalize your first and last name, as in ShaynePacker.
• Skip the next invitation page, Are your friends on Twitter? You’ll do it later in step 4.
• Skip the next page, the home page. You’ll update your status in step 3.

✔ Step 2. Set up your information for people to see.

• Click on the Settings link at the top of your twitter page.
• Fix the first text field (Name) so it is First name, space, Last name (with capitals).
• Set your time zone, URL, bio, and location. (Make your bio interesting.)
• Click on the Devices tab if you want updates to come to your mobile phone. Enter your phone number. (You can decide this later if you want.)
• Click on the Picture tab, and upload your photo.
• Click on the Design tab, and select a theme you like. (You can change this later.)

✔ Step 3. Create your first status update.

• Click on the Home link at the top of the twitter page. It asks, “What are you doing?” Update your status so your future followers will know you are real. You can type anything; perhaps “Signed up for twitter. Setting up account.” Enter one or more updates.

✔ Step 4. Find your friends and new people to follow.

• Click on the Find People link at the top of the twitter page. 
• Then click on each of the tabs to find your friends by their name or email address, your address book, etc.
• Another tool for finding people you know or want to follow is search.twitter.com. Try typing their name or nickname, their website, or some other identifier.
• Now go searching for other interesting people. Read their profiles and check out their website before deciding to follow them. Then click follow, and send them a tweet that lets them know who you are or why you’re following them.

✔ Step 5. Start engaging followers in meaningful conversation.

• Ask them for advice. Ask questions. Ask how their family is doing if you know them.
• Offer tips and advice when you see others asking for it.
• Be open in your conversation. Go with the flow.
• Talk with people, not at them.

So now your twitter profile should be complete and people will be able to get to know your quickly. Enjoy twitter! And don’t forget to follow me on twitter. I’ll follow you back. Please let me know if this tutorial was helpful by commenting below. Be sure to include your @TwitterUserName. You can also tweet about this article to your followers. And bookmark it below. Any of these things will be appreciated.

There are several good blogs and articles about twitter. Twitip.com by @ProBlogger and friends is one I highly recommend, particularly some of the beginner’s articles.

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