Archive | Blog

Twitter can be a powerful marketing tool once you discover how to optimize it for your business needs…

Don’t focus on number; focus on quality. Rather than seeing how many thousands of people you can follow in the hopes they will follow you back, focus on finding the highly targeted members who are a good match for what you’re promoting. Read their profiles and follow people who are interested in your niche; whether it’s gardening or race car driving or Internet marketing.

Think of your Twitter followers as you would a mailing list – a thousand highly target people who are truly receptive to your products are worth far more to your business than a 100,000 randomly selected people. That’s why Twitter isn’t about who has the biggest follower count – it’s about making real connections with real people.

Don’t blast links to the exclusion of great content and making real connections. Certainly you want to promote your brand with your latest blog post or product, but you won’t get the results you seek unless you’re also forging connections, developing networks and growing relationships as well.

If you spend too much of your time pushing your products and boosting your own ego, your followers will run for the hills faster than you can say, “Whoops!” Plus, if you’re not interacting with your followers, your followers are forgetting you altogether.

Don’t slave over content. If you’re already producing content elsewhere on the Internet, then Twitter is a breeze. For example, craft 3 or 4 tweets for each blog post that highlight something interesting you covered in your post, and do the same for articles. New product? Pull out some nuggets of information and share it freely with your followers.

Don’t tell your followers what you had for breakfast unless there was something truly interesting about it. Cornflakes or eggs are NOT tweet worthy, fresh alligator is. Some folks on Twitter feel it’s their duty to report every little thing in their lives. Yawn! If you’re on Twitter to market, then leave this mundane stuff out of your tweets.

Do share the latest news in your niche. This is easy – sign up for Google Alerts using terms relevant to your niche to receive the latest news each day, and then write a few tweets from this content. Presto! That took maybe 5 minutes, and you become the informed person people want to follow.

Do offer your Twitter followers sales and coupons. Since the very nature of Twitter is fast response, you can give followers an incentive to follow you by offering them special deals, such as a 50% discount for the next 20 minutes.

Do provide immediate support. Dell Computers has been combining product discounts with customer support and a request for feedback from Twitter users for sometime now – and their efforts have added millions to their bottom line.

Do elicit customer feedback. Ask questions such as, “What’s missing from our latest product?” What’s your toughest challenge?” “What would you like to know concerning how to ____ ?” And so forth. This is a great way to get information on how to improve your current products and what products you should roll out next. Be sure to acknowledge the responses you receive.

Do run contests. People love contests and you can really capture their interest with this. First, make the contests short – no more than an hour in duration. Second, make them fun. You might ask followers to send their best example of a web page with a funny header, or to guess what you did to earn money in junior high, or to write the best headline for toothpaste for elephants. Encourage your followers to retweet your contest and be sure to award prizes to the winners – free copies of an e-product or Amazon coupons work great.

Do retweet. By reposting useful content to your followers, you can build goodwill, increase your followers and get your own content retweeted as well.

Do run polls. You’ll find new people to follow and you’ll collect dynamite tips and insights from your followers. Plus it’s a great opportunity to engage your network and further build your relationships. Not sure how to run a poll? I’ll cover that in tomorrow’s article.

By using these steps you’ll find that Twitter is a great place to build relationships with your customers, find new customers and even enjoy the process of relationship building also.

I want to tell you what it takes to be successful online. But first, let me tell you a story…

Growing up, our neighbor had a bull who was just about the most stubborn thing you’ve ever encountered. If you wanted it to go out to the pasture, it would steadfastly refuse to go and instead would spend the day in the barn. If you wanted it to come in out of the rain, it would stand out there in the pasture until it was soaked through and through, and still it would not come indoors to dry off. And so it went. No matter what you wanted this bull to do, it always seemed resolutely transfixed on taking the opposite course of action.

In Internet marketing, we often wonder why success comes so hard. Perhaps if we learn just one more technique, it will all fall together for us. Perhaps if we buy one more course, one more ebook or attend one more webinar, it will all make sense and money will rain down from the sky. And a month later, and a year later, where do most marketers find themselves? In the exact same place they were before.

Now you might wonder what a stubborn bull and a struggling Internet marketer have in common, and it’s this: Both of them already hold success within themselves. The bull doesn’t need an ebook on how to come in out of the rain anymore than a struggling marketer needs a 20th or 40th ebook on how to make money online.

What the bull and the Internet Marketer both need to be successful is simply a change of mind, or more specifically adopting what we might call a success mindset.

Rather than cursing the journey out to the green pasture when we’re standing in the barn, or the rain when we don’t have sense enough to come inside, we need to merely change our thinking, and by changing our thinking we can change our actions, and thereby our results.

Instead of cursing the gurus for having lists of fellow marketers ready to promote their products to thousands of people, ask yourself how you can get into a position where you have a long list of fellow marketers who love to promote your products. (Stay tuned to my articles and I’ll show you how to do that.)

Instead of getting frustrated that you can’t seem to monetize Twitter, find out what others are doing that’s working and copy and improve upon their methods.

And so it goes. Playing victim is telling yourself that it’s too late to get into the Internet marketing game, that all the great niches are gone, that you’ll never be able to do what others have already accomplished, and so forth. Playing victim is standing out in the rain and refusing to come inside, or standing inside and refusing to head for the green pastures.

Victims don’t make money, they make misery – whereas a success mindset constantly asks how a negative can be turned into a positive, and how a shortfall can be remade into a windfall.

Every time you find yourself reacting negatively to something, correct yourself by seeing it as a challenge rather than a problem or obstacle. Do this enough and you will program yourself for success – after all, you cannot help but be successful if you are constantly taking positive action – and you can only take positive action when you first think the positive thoughts that lead to that action.

Also, learn to think long term. Success isn’t leaping from one idea to the next, never settling on a course of action. Success is found when you choose your path and then stay on that path until you reach your destination. True, the trip may not unfold as you plan, but so long as you keep your eyes on the prize and continue to move forward, you cannot help but succeed.

And you don’t need to invent new markets – rather, you need only find a market that is already profitable and then find ways to improve on what is being offered to that market. Find out what it is that people want, and not only deliver it to them, but go above and beyond in ways that are so extraordinarily helpful and pleasing, your name becomes synonymous with incredible value in that niche.

Forget magic bullets or new fangled programs that proclaim they will change everything for you in the wink of an eye. Instead, choose your niche, create your squeeze page and/or website and/or blog and focus on building your list with quality subscribers and new customers. Forget the gimmick that places thousands people on your list in a week who give you bogus email addresses or couldn’t care less about your niche – it’s a waste of your time and resources. Better to have 50 people on your list who are truly interested in your niche than 500 people who aren’t. And better to have 2 proven buyers in that niche than 50 freebie seekers.

By focusing on finding a system that puts 5 or 10 great leads on your list each day, in short order you will find the method that works for you, day in and day out. And once you’ve got it, it’s a simple matter to ramp it up so that the 5 or 10 become 50 or 100 or more. But it all starts at the beginning, at finding what works to bring in that first truly interested subscriber, and then the second and so forth. There are no shortcuts. True, there are many who will sell you on the idea that you can make your fortune or build your list overnight, but ask yourself this – who prospers when you purchase their product? Always it is them, while you are left with a little less cash and a little less hope.

Let others search for the holy magic grail of traffic that instantly floods their site with traffic. The thing about floods is while they are fast and deep, they’re also messy and short lived. Instead, gradually grow your business on a rock solid foundation that can withstand any storm. Think of grabbing a few hundred or thousand dollars overnight, only to be left with no more income, versus doubling a penny each day for 30 days. Which would you choose? The doubling penny, of course. Yes, it leaves the cupboards bare for the first days and weeks – but then what an embarrassment of riches you receive as it builds and builds into a solid income that arrives day and night, regardless of the economy, trends, quirks in the market, competition and so forth.

And success is not just a matter of mindset, and not just a matter of choosing a path and sticking to it, finding what works and doing more of it – it’s also about developing your skills as a marketer. What if this week you master how to write and submit articles that send traffic and links to your site? Perhaps next week you master setting up a blog and writing a post each day. And perhaps the week after you learn how to make short videos that inform and drive traffic. If each week you pick one new task to master, in less than 3 months you will know more than 95% of marketers out there. You don’t need to master everything, but you do need to master some things – and those things are again determined by the particular business you are building.

And here’s the kicker – when you’ve chosen your path to success and know what it is that you want to accomplish, you can go back to all those many programs you’ve purchased in the past and extract the jewels of information that do fit in with your business. Because now that you know your destination and you have a good idea of how to get there, you’ve also gained the discernment necessary to find just the right information you need to get you there faster.

This method costs you nothing but time – yet it can add mightily to your bottom line. As you already know, a buyer is worth far, far more than a simple subscriber, and here’s how to get buyers added to your list for free…

Step 1: Create a short report that solves a key problem. In other words, one problem, one solution. Simple. Now give it a great title. In fact, spend as much time on the title as you did writing the report, because the title has to grab attention and get people to read it cover to cover.

Step 2: Repeat step 1, only with a different problem and solution in the same niche.

Step 3: Set up a squeeze page to offer Report #2 for free in exchange for your prospect’s email address.

Step 4: At the end (and possibly the beginning) of Report #1, write teaser copy to entice them to go to your squeeze page and grab Report #2. If you did a good job of giving great content in Report #1, this should be easy because they’re going to be eager to read more from you.

Step 5: Go to forums and give away Report #1 with Master Resale Rights. This means they can sell the report or give it away with paid products, but they cannot alter the report in any way. This is crucial because you don’t want your link altered or removed.

Step 6: They add your report as a bonus to their paid products, or sell it outright for a nominal fee such as $7. People read it, love it, and go to your squeeze page to give you their email address so they can get more great stuff from you, like Report #2.

That’s it. It’s a system you set up once and forget about, other than periodically checking to see how many new buyers have been added to your list. The beauty of this system is 4-fold…

– It’s fairly easy.

– You only have to set it up once and then you can forget about it.

– You’re building a list of buyers and buyers ONLY.

– You’re building your list on other people’s traffic.

Brilliant!