A Blue Star

For the poor SOB that are still using Visual studios 6, I have uploaded a copy of the service pack 6 to my website for reference.
Feel free to download it, you have my sympathy

http://www.abluestar.com/dev/sdk/vcsetup.exe

Introduction
There has been a lot of talk recently about the micro blogging. Micro blogging is a blogging platform that lets you post very small updates about your life, to help keep you and your friends up to date with each others lives. The services are kept very simple so anyone can use them easily.

Two of the biggest players in this field are Twitter.com and Tumblr.com. I don’t have any friends on any of these services so I decided to try them both out and see what they are like.

Who is more popular
One for the first things I do when evaluating two different online communities is look at the usage statistics. I usually will go with the bigger company, more stable, more secure, etc. According to compete.com twitter.com seems to have a pretty good lead on tumblr.com.
+1 point for twitter.com

Domains
I like having my own sub domain, personal preference that comes from the old geocities days. tumblr.com provides a sub domain while twitter.com doesn’t.
https://twitter.com/funvill
http://funvill.tumblr.com/
+1 point for tumblr.com

Who owns your data
I am very paranoid about losing my data or a free service that becomes pay and holds my data ransom. These are things that wake me up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. Lucky both of these sites allow for offsite backups and YOU OWN your own data. They also let you use your own domain just incase your mini blog ever becomes super popular and you want to switch services.
+3 points for twitter.com
+3 points for tumblr.com

Post categories
tumblr.com lets you identify posts under media types such as text, photos, links, chat, audio, video, etc. twitter.com doesn’t let you set a category.
+1 point for tumblr.com

How do I create a new post
Both allow you to post via IM, Email, Phone, Client, API, etc
+5 points each twitter.com, tumblr.com

Themes look and feel
Twitter.com only gives you the very basic theme options, good enough for most people. Tumblr.com other hand gives you full control while keeping it simple enough for the basic user to use.
+2 points for tumblr.com (I really like there theme viewer/editor)

Conclusion
Go with whatever service has more of your friends on it. There both pretty much the same. If you are the first or a trendsetter I would suggest tumblr.com. I personally will not be switching off of Wordpress myself. Wordpress is just too powerful and I can host it on my own servers (+10,000 points) my own paranoia wont let me use any of these services for too long.

9 points for twitter.com
12 points for tumblr.com

If you build it they will come. That’s the mentality that most people have when building there first website. That’s just not the way the internet works. You have to advertise, you have to tell people that you exist.

Ask your self how you found the last item you purchased from the internet.
Did you search with Google? What search terms did you use? Did you stumble upon it from someone else’s website? Did you read a review about it and searched Google for it? Put yourself in the mind of your customers, how do you expect them to find you?

The first thing you should do with all new domains is manually add them to the search engines like Google or Yahoo.
http://www.google.com/addurl/
http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
You can pay some money to be included in there index quickly but I never have found it to be worth the money that charge.

The next thing I would consider is setting up a google/yahoo adwords campaign. Depending on your product or service, you could run a successful adwords campaign on as little as $10 a month. It all depends on what keywords you want to use. Selecting the right keywords is an art in its self, there are plenty of book out there that are just dedicated to helping you select good keywords. Ask yourself this question what search words would your customers use to find you?
http://adwords.google.com/
http://publisher.yahoo.com/

Next is to manually get the word out there. This step can be one of the hardest and most time consuming steps. What you need to do is get people talking about your product, get people to link to your website from theirs, get people to promote your service/product for you because they believe in your product.
- Write a review of your product and add it to a consumer reports website
- Ask a blogger or review site to do a review of your product/service
- Find people Forums/blogs/that are talking about your competitors and suggest your own.
- Create links back to yourself anyway you can.
- Be creative,

Search engine optimization (SEO) and advertisement are huge subjects. I only slimed the service in this article.