Twitter as a marketing tool? Is it right for you?

So you finally signed up for Twitter because everything you read says that Twitter is the new gold mine, you have to use it. Now you have a twitter account, can you condense your stories, memories, or pearls of wisdom down to 140 characters? Honestly I wish most people I meet were able to do that.

Twitter ettiquette says that you should follow people who follow you. With that in mind, the reasonable things to do would be to run out and start following people with the expectation that they are going to return the favor. Maybe they will, but in most cases – if they do, who really cares? Just because someone is following you does not mean that you are on their radar.

I am still having a really hard time coming to terms that Twitter is an effective marketing tool for ‘everyone’. I can see in certain circumstances where a direct line to someones ear would be a good thing, but you need to be realistic about yourself. Are you interesting? Do people tend to ask questions when you tell a story or do they just glaze over?

If you listen to the internet marketing gurus like Perry Belcher, you can create a million dollar empire overnight with a Twitter account and an internet connection at Starbucks. What Perry doesn’t make a big of is that he has a list of millions of people, so when he sends out an email telling people to follow him on Twitter, they will. They would probably cut their thumbs off if he said it was going to be an ‘over night cash machine’. I’m rambling.

I don’t know enough about Twitter to tell you how to use it effectively for business, which is actually a good thing. Because even without knowing much about it, I do know how to get followers and I will share it with you. Here it is. Tweet. I have set up my content hub to automatically post to Twitter whenever I make a blog post. I haven’t been posting about Twitter, I haven’t really even posted anything that interesting, but every time I do post, my Twitter account is notified and a link to my post is sent out. Every time I do this, I pick up 5 followers almost immediately.

My last couple posts have been about affiliate marketing and about my love affair with SENuke, nothing special. It’s clear that the Twittersphere is full of marketers who are searching for keywords and automatically following the author. What does this mean? Nothing. They are following me in hopes that I will return the favor and follow them, and I do, but they aren’t reading what I am writing. They are just taking a gamble that I am going to read what they are Tweeting about and that I will visit their site and buy their product, and I won’t. I don’t read other peoples tweets and in most cases people don’t read mine. Essentially what you have is a giant room filled with people, all talking at once, to no one. Occasionally there will be someone interesting but in general I find that the only people I actually pay attention to are people who I have actively gone looking for. Courtney Love is a good example, her Twitter account is like watching a car crash in slow motion. Its interesting in a really morbid way.

Twitter, to me, is the obvious electronic culmination of our innate narcissism. We are our own biggest fans. But Twitter is also necessary. Twitter is the beginning of true real time search, the new breed of search engines are pulling data in real time and using it to determine search importance. Spammers are already figuring out how to game it like we used to game lycos in the late 90′s. Twitter is a place that you need to be, even if you don’t know why. Again, rambling.

So now you’re sitting in front of your Twitter acccount, feeling obliged to write something but don’t know what to Tweet about. Let me give you a few very basic pointers to get you on your way. And as simple as these seem, people are charging for this information.

1. Customize your profile. Make sure you at the very least add a picture of yourself. Fill out your profile, be compelling, be interesting. Don’t be overly salesy

2. Don’t pollute your tweets with a bunch of garbage, if you do happen to make a Tweet thats interesting, people will see the rest of your tweets about your cat and they won’t follow you. Keep in mind that the people who do actually read what other people are tweeting about are following hundreds, maybe thousands of people, they don’t have time to sift through garbage.

3. Check out some of the applications like Tweetdeck for following your favorite people

4. Make sure that you include keywords in your tweets that pertain to your business. Those are going to be what put your Tweets up on people radar.

5. Make sure before you follow someone that is following you that you check out their follow vs followers, if they are following 50,000 people and have 100 followers, it’s a spammer.

6. If the profile of the person following you has a picture of a girl in a bikini – block them, it’s spam. Think about it.

7. Do not try to sell you services in 140 characters. EVER. Twitter is about news and opinions, don’t even try to recommend your own product anonymously – it won’t work. Use Twitter to show you are an intelligent, insightful person, that cares about improving the lives of other people.

8. Be funny. Legitimately. If you’re not funny then don’t try to be, but if you are witty, try to include it in your posts.

9. Be relevant. A good way to attract followers is to Tweet about things that are in the news RIGHT NOW.

10. Be open and honest. The one thing I do like about Twitter is that it mimics life and the thought process really well. Remember that first impressions mean everything. When you meet someone you can usually tell if you like them in a 140 characters or less right? It’s the same online.

10.5 ( I really want a clean 10 things list but this just popped into my head) don’t have someone else Tweet for you. It’s OK to have someone represent your business, but not you.

I hope you got something out of this post. I actually didn’t write it for you, I really wrote it to get more followers on Twitter. I think I mentioned the keywords that I wanted enough times. This should be good for another 5 or 10 followers who are never going to read what I have to say, and I plan to return the favor.

Affiliate Marketing : Put Your Links Everywhere

I opened my mailbox today and pulled out the usual assortment of bills and junk mail. I found a piece of mail that looked like it was a check. I was not expecting any money so I thought it was clever advertising. I opened the envelope and sure enough, there was a check in there for $235.00. Not a lot of money, but it’s money right?

I could tell by the name of the company that it was from an affiliate program for dating a dating site. I haven’t done any affiliate marketing in a couple years so I had no clue where it would have come from.

I looked up the number of the company that issued the check and called them up. The referral was from a webmaster referral to an online dating site called Fling.com (don’t click the link if you are offended by nudity). I dug up my old login for the webmaster program, www.HugeTraffic.com, and logged in. Sure enough I had a webmaster sign up and go active (sent a signup) last month. That’s $200 for me.

Getting links in front of webmasters is no easy feat. It’s really competitive, however somehow someone stumbled on a link that I had put up somewhere and signed up.

The lesson here is that you should always be putting links up. They might not do something now, maybe not next week. In fact if you don’t have any traffic and you start making pages then furiously checking stats you will probably be disappointed, but if you place a link up anywhere you can, whenever you can, you will definitely have a repeat of my experience today.