Golden Rule of Twitter

Twitter is all about building personal relationships. Like every thing else on the Internet, it follows the GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) principle.

If I’m following you on Twitter and you feed me crap, I’ll ignore you. On the other hand, if you feed me good stuff then I’m likely to read your tweets and may be even click on your links.

So, here’s my golden rule for Twitter:

Attract > Interact > Give back

• Attract like-minded followers
• Interact with them by replying to their tweets
• Give back by providing interesting content and links to good content not just a sales pitch

If you follow that golden rule, then you can successfully use Twitter in your business to attract qualified traffic, build a loyal following and ultimately make more money.

I’ve released a new Twitter for business training program. Learn more about Twitter: Zero To Hero In 14 days.

Video Distribution on Autopilot

Submitting your marketing or promotional videos to video sharing sites like YouTube, Yahoo Video, Zippy Videos and others, can definitely bring you a lot of targeted traffic to your site, and boost your search engine rankings practically overnight.

The problem is it does take a lot of time to go from site to site uploading your videos. I have found a very handy solution to this problem. It is called “Video Traffic Assistant.” You can download a free copy of the tool form there. Use it to submit your video to the top seven video sharing sites, all on autopilot.

If you are not comfortable making your own video, you can head over to “Ask Mr.Video.” Perry Lawrence started this site to help videographers, Internet marketers, and business owners boost their income by showing them how to easily produce videos that sell. There is also an excellent video community with very friendly folks who are willing to help.

How to Pimp Your Profile on Twitter

What is the first thing people check when they get to your page to see if they want to follow you? Your profile information and/or picture. For now, let’s concentrate on that all-important profile.

Head over to ‘Settings’ and you’ll be presented with a screen that looks like the image below.

1. Put your real name in here – unless of course you want to promote a name that represents your special niche. In that case, put a full business name or a pseudonym.
2. You can change your username here, if you do decide your first choice was not the best, you can fix that here.
3. Your contact email where all your notifications will be sent when people follow you etc.
4. Your time zone just so people can see when you are posting.
5. This is important – this is your chance to advertise yourself! Put a link to your blog or your main site here. Avoid using an URL for a sales page as this may be too “salesy.”
6. The one line bio – this is 160 characters of pure advertisement – you may need to rewrite this a few times before you are satisfied and make it fit within the character limit.
7. For location just put country or state here. Better to be careful rather than being sorry later if you reveal your city, state and Zip.
8. Choose a different language setting here if you want.
9. Select if you want your tweets to be private. Note it doesn’t stop people from following you; it only stops them from seeing all your tweets in the public area.

Make sure you’ve saved your changes and that’s it for the profile section. If you wish, head over to ‘Devices’ and you can input your phone number and then use txt messages to update your Twitter account.

Next, head over to ‘Notices’ – this regulates what email notifications you wish to receive. If lots of people start following you, then it might get a bit tiring to see hundreds of emails coming in, you can turn that off here.

Last change to make is the @Replies setting, by default it is at ‘@ replies to the people I am following.’ What that means is you only see the replies people send to you, or people you are also following.

I’ve released a new Twitter for business training program. Learn more about Twitter: Zero To Hero In 14 days.

Are You Getting Sucked Into The Twitter Time-Sink?

These days you can’t help but read glowing reports/news about people tweeting their way into popularity and success on the Internet. It seems if you are not actively participating in the social networking phenomena, you are doomed.

Even though I was skeptical at first about Twitter’s benefits to my business, I admit, I’m a convert now (you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/DiYMCoach). I have made some really good connections there in a very short period of time.

Once you start tweeting (is it tweeting or twitting?), it can become very addictive. That’s where I see a problem for online business owners. You start out posting a few tweets to make business connections and to connect with your customers but before long you are spending more time socializing than you are working. You’ll wonder where the time has gone, losing hours to tweets, tweaking and twalking.

Even if you are one of those Tweeters that sit on the sidelines and be a silent observer, you can spend an awful lot of time reading each and every tweet that comes your way. You sign up for feeds and get alerts when other tweeters post tweets. Pretty soon, the sheer volume of tweets and information overwhelms you.

Your business can suffer if you spend more of your time on Twitter. As a home business owner or a small business owner, you are the only employee in most cases. Your time is precious and you could be twittering it away literally. You know the old cliché, “time is money” but for a solo-preneur, time is even more valuable because it is how you make money.

While your intention is to show your human side to clients and build a personal relationship, doing too much socializing can have the opposite effect. It can turn off some customers because they perceive you as becoming less professional by being too friendly. You also run the danger of blurring the lines between your personal and business connections. What you say to a buddy may not go over very well in a business setting, causing you an embarrassment in the future.

On the flip side, if you are all business and only tweet about your products and services, others may see you as a “spammer.” That’s a sure kiss of death on any social network. As an online business owner, the last thing you want do is to give your business a bad name in the eyes of potential customers. It is a fine line to walk especially when you only have 140 characters to use, so use them wisely.

Have a plan when using Twitter for business purposes. Restrict your tweets to business posts only during working hours. Save personal tweets for later in the day when you are on your own time. Having separate business and personal accounts will help.

Mike Phillips, the Senior Editor of  Website Magazine said it best when he wrote, “Social networks are notorious time-sinks. You need to have a presence out there, but it’s more important to focus on your company. After all, if you business falls behind or worse, fails, nobody is going to want to be friends with you anyway.”

I am working on a special report on making a good business case for using Twitter and social networks. Stay tuned!

I’ve released a new Twitter for business training program. Learn more about Twitter: Zero To Hero In 14 days.

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