I wanted to do a little something different and dissect a post that I did this weekend. As I write this, I have no clear reason to writing it other then discovery, but I have seen several things that interest me. With writing, sometimes it answers my question, sometimes I get the help of my wonderful readers but it’s all a process!

So here we go. About 10 PM on Saturday I wrote about the domain name Twiter.com and how the owner of the domain name is asking for trouble as the domain name parking page with full of the Twitter (trademarked) term.

How did I come about writing about it? I made a typo when trying to visit Twitter.com. This brought me to the parking page and my first thought was… WOW. It wasn’t until later that night I decided to write about it, but I did take a screen shot when I visited Twiter.com .

When I write a new post on DotWeekly.com, using the plugin TwitterTools (TwitterFeed now as TwitterTools isn’t working and the developer seems to care more about promoting his "other service" instead of fixing a bug ) it get’s posted in my Twitter account.

Fast forward a little bit until Monday morning (today) and I check my stats for the weekend. I more focus on links in, most popular posts and search engine keywords that were used to find my site or posting.

At that point I see my Twiter.com post was getting A Lot of attention.

This is where I like to dig around to see what caused such a stir so I can repeat it and learn the things that worked the most!

So far, I can tell it caused a stir around Twitter.com itself. These did not come from Retweets, unless people were lazy and simply didn’t include the RT or @yofie.

Using my bit.ly link that the story got posted in my Twitter account with, I checked the stats using the search function on bit.ly.

Now from my bit.ly link, I got 78 clicks, but from "other" bit.ly links that others created and sent directly to the same story, I got nearly 1,600 more clicks.

The question I ask myself.. If these all didn’t come from Retweets, how did people see the story and post it to their Twitter accounts? There are pages and pages on Twitter of people posting my story.

You can do a search on Twitter.com and use the search term twiter.com or twiter.com typo for a more refined search and see what I mean. Here are a couple:

Now one thing you will see in common, what is posted is nearly the same. It grabs my full title as it would be posted in a search engine. Secondly, most bit.ly links are all different and lastly….. all the tweets in the SS about, and the majority in all related tweets are From TwitterFeed!

*Rubbing eyes* *Opens a few more windows in my browser* *Sip of coffee*

TwitterFeed aka TwitterFeed.com is an RSS feed reader service that allows you to feed your blog via RSS to your Twitter.com account.

Well, it says your blog, but it appears to allow you to put in any feed really!

Another thing is common are they were nearly all posted 1 day ago. This means on Sunday, about 12 hours after posting the story.

I wish that answered my question totally, but it calls for more digging.. I was thinking the TwitterFeed service worked like Google News Alerts or Blog Alerts and people had the typo Twiter.com as a keyword… and it feed their Twitter account with my story. (this might be a good idea for a service, maybe I should remove this part) Since I wrote about it here, and see a service like this come out…. anyway…

As you can tell, I am trying to figure this all out as well as I write it

So from this point, I can only tell that somehow all these people had got my story via TwitterFeed, which then feed it to their twitter accounts, but how did they all get the story in the first place or what RSS reader did all these people have set up?

I did a blog search using part of my title and only shows 8 results so there is no way all these people had posted the story on their blogs.

I do rank #7 on P1 at Google for the search term twiter.com also, but I didn’t see any "major" services carry my story either.

All this is pointing back to TwitterFeed, but what RSS feed(s) were/are these people grabbing is the real question! If I figure it out… I plan on hitting that keyword again but right now, I can not seem to come up with an answer. I didn’t see it posted on Digg or anything like that.. hmmm, Can you help? I seem to be stuck at this point.

Update: I sent some replies to the people that posted a tweet with my story to try and find out some more info. I did get a reply and it appears that I was in the right ballpark.

Google Alerts! Since TwitterFeed works with RSS, it appears these people have it set up for Twitter keywords to publish on twitter and in their accounts. I am still not 100% sure which Google Alerts they had set up, as there is Google Blog Alerts and Google News Alerts.

Since DotWeekly.com is not in Google News, I am putting two and two together and am going to say it was Google Blog Alerts. Hundreds, if not more basically Retweets were created from this one story and has resulted in nearly 1,700 bitly link clicks alone with people coming to DotWeekly. let alone the amount of people that saw the title which included DotWeekly.com.