Evaluating Options

 

Well, now that "Pilgrim" is out, I am finally emerging from my production cave to re-evaluate my online marketing strategies and how I can make the best use of my evaporating time.

I'm looking into Twitter, which I've avoided because the nature of the beast lends itself to sharing only short thoughts with little substance, and I'd much rather share ideas than tell you all that I'm eating cereal or mixing audio (in which case, I'm not really doing either because I've wasted time to stop and say that I am.) But I've learned that I CAN use Twitter to let folks know when a blog post has gone up or a podcast episode has been published, which sounds cool! And I think I've got it worked out so that I don't have to do anything extra to make that happen. I don't know, it's set up now, so this post will act as a sort of "test".

I'm also currently wondering about MySpace. I'm very hesitant to add anything to my "posting ritual", which already takes up more time than I'd like. I've been unable to find a tool that will allow me to simultaneously post blogs to Typepad, Blogger, Facebook, my two Ning groups and Myspace, so I currently manually copy and paste my weekly posts for both blogs into all of those places.

I'm looking for ways to subtract time from this ritual and I've got my crosshair on my MySpace web presence.

Is it worth it to keep a presence there? If so, is it worth it to paste my blog posts there? I get comments regularly on Facebook, Blogger and Typepad, but it's been almost a year, maybe more, since I got a comment on MySpace.

Should I just keep the two pages (one personal and one "Spirit Blade") with LINKS to my blogs but not worry about actually copying my blogs to them, or should I keep those blogs going on those MySpace pages, even though it's the same blog material you'll find on Blogger (Paeter's Brain) and Typepad (Spirit
Blade Underground).

Recently, it was suggested that I try "Ping.fm", which I had tried a year ago. This free service allows you to update multiple social networks at once, but a year ago I didn't get any further than signing up because they weren't compatible with all of my social networks. So I tried it again today.

Ping.fm failed me again.

It lured me in with the promise that I could post to all of my social networks, but when I began to create posting groups (so I can post to some social networks and not others) it revealed that if I choose "blogging", my options are severely limited. It looks as though the only places it can send blogs to, among my social networks anyway, are Facebook, Blogger and Typepad. I can only microblog and do status updates at all the others. So again I am faced with what to do about Myspace and Ning. Especially Myspace.

Should I continue to copy my blog posts there, or just put a referral link on the Myspace page and hope they check out my Typepad blog?

Any web geniuses out there that have this problem solved?