Archive for Twitter
How to Use Twitter to Build Your Prospect List
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I have a few posts on my blog about how you can use Twitter to promote your business online. For example, you can use it to build your credibility and to get people to your website. But of course, you need to have followers for any of that stuff to work, right? Maybe you’re just starting out on Twitter, or maybe you have followers but you seem to have hit a plateau and your number of followers isn’t increasing. I have a few tips for some simple ways you can build up your Twitter following…
1. Follow other experts in your niche/field – I call these your mentors – other people in your field who have achieved what you’re trying to. By following and interacting with these mentors, you’re going to be reaching out to their thousands of followers who are obviously interested in the field or niche you work in. If those followers like what you have to say, they’ll in turn follow you. Here are some things you can do to start interacting with your mentors and at the same time their followers.
• Tweet about how they’ve helped you – I know that I have taken classes, attended teleseminars/webinars, or otherwise learned some great info from my mentors. So if you’ve learned some great stuff or they helped you succeed in some way, tweet about it. Let them know how they helped you or what they did for your business. They’re going to appreciate the kind words and most likely will re-tweet it. This will get you in front of all those followers, and also work on building your relationship with that expert.
• Re-tweet their messages – This helps you in two ways. They’re probably going to thank you for the re-tweet, which gets your name into their Tweet stream. Also, you’re offering helpful information to your own followers, which continues to build your reputation as a resource of good information.
• Always be thinking about how you can help them. You have to remember that Twitter is about relationship-building, not just about pushing your own information out there. Take your list of mentors you want to build a relationship with, and then start working on that. (Remember that you don’t just want to focus on potential clients or customers, but you also want to develop relationships with people who are already at where you want to be.)
2. Following people – When you follow someone on Twitter, many times they’ll click through to your profile. If they see Tweets that are of interest to them and you’re not just pushing Tweets out about “Buy my stuff,” then there’s a good chance they’ll follow you back. Don’t just follow people randomly though, and be sure you don’t exceed the allowed follow-to-following ratio. Try to keep the # of people your following less than the # of people following you. Now if you’re just starting out, you can begin by following people who are following those experts we just talked about. You can also search at sites like Twellow.com to find people who match your target market.
3. Automate, but automate wisely – You can certainly automate parts of your Twitter strategies, but remember that Twitter is all about interaction and relationships. So be sure you only automate tasks that don’t require a response or that you don’t need to be directly involved in. Once you get to hundreds and thousands of followers, you’ll definitely want to pull some tools in to help you with both the automated and personal tasks involved with using Twitter. Two tools I recommend are Hootsuite and Tweet Adder. Hootsuite is free and used online through their website, and allows you to schedule Tweets and post status updates to multiple sites at once. Tweet Adder is a download to your computer (it costs $55, but has a free trial period), and allows you to automate the process of adding followers. It also allows you to search for the right followers that fit your ideal client profile.
If you’re just starting out on Twitter, or are wanting to really ramp up your followers list, I’ve given you some good ways to get started. Twitter is a great way to start getting more traffic to your website and adding prospects to your marketing list. So take advantage of it! I hope this gets you started.
3 Natural Ways to Use Twitter to Promote Your Blog
Posted by: | CommentsTwitter is more than a trendy way to chit-chat with people from around the world; it’s a powerful promotional tool that can be very effective if you want to promote your WordPress blog easily and quickly.
There are hundreds of sites and programs that tell you how to make money with Twitter. But if you believe in being genuine, ideally posting and replying to Tweets in real time, then anything that promises to fully automate the process, bring in a huge number of followers within minutes (quantity vs quality), or resorts to sneaky tricks, should be avoided.
Is it possible to use Twitter successful as a promotional tool in a natural way? Yes, if you know how to use it properly. When used properly you can attract new customers and meet like-minded people who can help you to improve your business whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned marketer.
3 Natural Ways to Use Twitter to Make Money with WordPress Blogs
1. Research Your Blog’s Niche
By entering what you want to research in the Search feature in Twitter you can see what people are talking about in the niche you’re targeting. This can help with ideas for blog posts, articles, products or at the very least deliver interesting content to your Twitter followers if you simply retweet what you find.
If you want to conduct searches that are more comprehensive and automated than what Twitter offers out-of-the-box, you can use one of the many free or paid services that give you more options. Twitter search services analyze information on Twitter based on the keywords you specify, e-mailing you the results daily or weekly.
2. Network
Twitter allows you to network with people in your niche(s) from around the world.
It’s worthwhile to be friendly and chatty with fellow Tweeters, to trade tips and techniques or simply use Twitter for entertainment at times, but if you are serious about making money with your Wordpress blog and growing your business, it’s wise to use Twitter to find people who can help.
To learn more about anyone you meet on Twitter be sure to:
- read a few pages worth of their tweets
- read a good number of their retweets
- see how they interact with other Twitter users via replies. Do they reply to other Twitter users or do they just churn out pitches/tweet their own horn for the most part? Are they a real person tweeting in real time, or possibly just a bot or someone a marketer hired to tweet on their behalf?
- visit the website they list in their profile and find out more about them in the About section (hopefully they have one).
- look at who they follow. Do they seem to be doing reciprocal follows (the number of followers they have is close to the number of people they follow) or are they more selective about who they follow? (much smaller number of follows than followers). If it’s the latter, you can get a sense of what and who they value by looking at the profiles of the people they follow.
Tip: Send out personal, relevant replies to other people’s Tweets, not spammy Direct Messages, to introduce yourself. It’s also smart to occasionally retweet other people’s tweets if the information is suitable for your followers. Retweeting is an easy, fast, non-invasive way to show interest in and respect for other members of the Twitter community.
3. Promote your blog and products
I save this for last because you should do it, absolutely, but it’s one of the most misused and abused things on Twitter. If you’re in online marketing, and even if you aren’t, at some point you will get a spammy follower who direct messages (DMs) you with an offer that is neither personal nor useful and just wastes your time. Some marketers tweet offer after offer, often nothing more than an affiliate link, to try to sucker people into buying yet another get-rich- quick system, etc.
Ideally you should promote your blog in a variety of ways on Twitter, not only by posting links to products for sale. Provide value and interesting content, not just offers. Post links to articles on your blog that also promote your products and services, or your views, etc. and share your thoughts about other products and services, even free ones, that your followers might find helpful.
Yes, there are many sites and articles that are devoted to how to use Twitter to make money, but if you care about delivering value to your customers and potential customers and form solid business relationships, then using Twitter in a more natural way, in my view, is the better way to go.
Lillea Woodlyns, an active member of Australian marketer James Schramko’s private coaching forum, offers tips and reviews of the best tools and techniques to make money with WordPress blogs To sign up for her FREE series, ‘WordPress for Success’ visit: http://www.speedonlinewealth.com/blog/about-lillea/
5 Twitter Tools To Help You Tweet Faster
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As I find myself having to coordinate multiple Twitter accounts every day, I have compiled a list of Twitter tools that keep me from having to be on Twitter 24/7. Here’s the list of tools I use almost every day to keep Twitter from taking over my life.
1. Hootsuite - My absolute favorite Twitter tool! This website allows you to type in your update once, and it will populate your Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook account all at the same time. You can also have multiple accounts of each kind, so for example, I can have all of my clients’ accounts set up one place. Not only can you post to your personal Facebook profile, but also fan pages. You can pick which account you want which update to be posted on. And you can pre-schedule your updates, if you have some ideas planned out and don’t want to forget them, but maybe you don’t want to post them right now. Of course, it shortens your links for you, and you can track how many clicks you get on a link. A great tool to use.
2. Twitterfeed. This website makes it easy to update Twitter and Facebook with your latest blog posts. Just put in your RSS feed, and every time you publish a new post, it will automatically send out a Tweet or Facebook update.
3. SocialOomph. Another great website. There’s a free and a paid version. I’ve never used the paid version, so I’m only addressing what you get with the free setup. I personally use SocialOomph mostly for the keyword alerts. You can put in keywords you want to keep track of, and any time there’s a tweet with that keyword, you’ll get an email letting you know about it. If nothing else, set up an alert for your name and your company name. You can also use it to automatically follow people or set up an automated welcome message to new followers, if that’s how you use your account.
4. Refollow. A great way to manage and track your followers. Log in using your twitter username and password, and you’ll be able to see all of your followers and everyone your following. You can sort them multiple ways. For example, you can see who’s following you that you aren’t following. Or people you follow who aren’t following you back. You can sort by people who have @mentioned you. You can follow and unfollow from here too.
5. Qwitter. I just found this one. Qwitter emails you when someone unfollows you, and tells you what tweet you posted when they unfollowed you.
These are the tools I use, and they have definitely made my life much easier. So take some time, try them out, and see how they work for you. Then come on back, and let me know if you liked them as much as I do. Or maybe you have your own tools you use that I didn’t mention. If so, let us know about them.
Also, if you want some free help putting together your marketing plan and how to implement some of these tools, enter our “Plan Your Success” contest.
You can also receive a free copy of my new ebook I’m working on – How to Make More Money By Promoting Your Business Online – by taking my online survey.
Have a great day!
Increase Your Web Traffic Using SEO
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Too much web traffic? Never!
So, you have a blog or a website. You have your product or service ready to go. Now you just need customers. So how do you find them online? Well, a good start would be to get them to your website to see what you’re offering. And a great way to increase your web traffic is by using SEO to get your website in front of potential clients or customers.
Here’s some tips on just how to do that:
- Start with good keywords. Do some research up front. You can use tools like Wordtracker or Google Adwords to see which keywords are going to result in the most traffic to your website. Then use these keywords in your website content, blog posts, articles, etc.
- Now that you have your keywords and are using them on your website, start creating content on your site. Try to add at least 2-3 new blog posts a week, and if you can commit to it, add a new post on a daily basis. By consistently creating new content, you’ll keep the spiders coming back to your site and constantly indexing your site.
- You’ve created content, so now promote that content. Every time you put up a new blog post, talk about it. Send it to your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn account. Talk about it on any other networking sites/forums/groups you belong to. Bookmark it on the bookmarking sites you belong to.
- Interact in the social networking community. Build relationships with peers, mentors, prospects. Be a resource of information. Comment on other blog posts, with meaningful comments that add to the conversation going on or to the original post.
- Finally, submit articles. Write one article a week, remembering to integrate your keywords. Submit that article to article directories.
All of the above will lead to increased web traffic to your site/blog, increased subscriptions to your newsletter or free offer, and ultimately increased sales and increased income!
If you want some free help putting together your marketing plan on how to implement some of these tips, enter our “Plan Your Success” contest.
