Twitter For Marketing: It’s Not Just Mindless Tweets

When it first appeared on the social networking scene, there wasn’t much benefit in Twitter for marketing. Twitter was dominated by mindless chatter and too much useless information about everyday activities. But now, things are changing.

The early Twitter asked, “What are you doing?”, which solicited a lot of pointless babble about what was being eaten for breakfast, who was their favourite on American Idol, and how someone was feeling. Twitter was not taken seriously at that time, and most tweets were either frivolous banter or social grooming.

However, the new Twitter asks, “What’s happening?”, as Twitter positions itself to become a source of news and information. Now, people actually look to Twitter to receive up-to-the-minute news and keep track of what is happening in real time. And, they’re not just watching general news. Twitter users are keeping an eye on events that affect their niche, and getting instant updates due to Twitter’s instant capabilities.

As a marketer, you can make great use of this new Twitter. By providing good niche-related news and information to your Twitter followers, you can position yourself as an authority – someone your Twitter followers start listening to as a source of good information. When your Twitter followers become conditioned to listening to your tweets, you can start adding promotional tweets into the mix. By retaining your position as a provider of valuable information – preserving a good ratio of informational tweets to promotional tweets – you’ll get good response from your Twitter followers.

To ensure efficient and effective use of Twitter for marketing, watch the free video at  http://TwitterVendingMachine.com

Find Michelle MacPhearson

Michelle MacPhearson is an internet marketer who integrates social media and Web 2.0 technologies and innovations into her marketing, and helps others do the same.

You can find tons of resources at her blog, MichelleMacPhearson.com. You may be particurally interested in the “Steal This Niche” series of posts, which is a set of videos walking you through the keyword research process. What’s even funner is that when you’re done watching the videos, you walk away with a high traffic and low competition keyword that you can target and build a site around. Yes, you really can steal Michelle MacPhearson‘s niche!

She’s also active on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. If you’re using any of those services, you can connect with Michelle MacPhearson there and get up-to-date and innovative online marketing tips she sends out regularly.

One of her most acclaimed free reports, Social Media Daily, has been touted as better than paid products on the topic. Within Social Media Daily, Michelle MacPhearson walks you through the process of using Web 2.0 and social media sites to build the link popularity of your own site. It’s link building on the cheap, and this resource is the most comprehensive out there.

Another free resource you might enjoy is the Social Media Myth, where Michelle MacPhearson explains the reason most marketers aren’t having success with their social media marketing and devises a simple plan for you to follow. Unfortunately, we try to do too much with too little, the Social Media Myth is the answer.

Ways to Be A Successful Affiliate Marketer

Business owners who are interested in finding affiliates to promote their website may use Craigslist for the purpose of finding these affiliates. It may seem logical to post affiliate opportunities in the jobs section of Craigslist but it is important to note this is against Craigslist’s job posting policies. Business-minded people who may never have thought of opening up a business do so with Internet-based businesses. The main reason is that there are no brick and mortar start-up costs.

Article marketing is one of the most effective ways to market a product. Affiliate marketing with the use of articles is no exception to this rule. Article marketing is key to successful affiliate marketing . Articles and blog writing is in interesting way of doing the business. The affiliate marketers write the articles about the topics that are of people’s interest.

Start a conversation with a person without trying to sell to them. Later on, while you are chatting, mention the product you’re reselling. Start researching for products online, with the parameters you’ve developed. These products must be solution-oriented and offer an affiliate program ! Start with blogger.com the search engines love it, its easy to use and its free. One drawback to blogger.com is that they sometimes drop your blog without warning.

Building an opt-in email list is one of the best ways to gather prospects. Offer a newsletter or an e-zine. Building an opt-in email list is one of the best ways to gather prospects. Offer a newsletter or an e-zine.

Link Popularity is one of the factors that search engines use to determine search engine rankings.Therefore, to enhance your link popularity, you must launch an aggressive reciprocal link campaign. Link popularity is the only way of getting free traffic to your site. Try to build more and more links.

Offer a newsletter or an e-zine. Better yet, offer bonuses to your prospects to encourage them to subscribe to your newsletters. Offer a newssheet or an e-zine. Better yet, offer to your prospects to foster them to endorse to your bulletin.

Attracting people to your pages may be the first step you may take out. Do everything for a high search engine ranking. Attracting people to your site should be the first step you should carry out. Do everything to achieve a high search engine ranking.

Internet has provided a lot many ways to the unemployed people to make money online but that does not mean that it does not have anything to offer to the people that are merchandisers. The cure to their decreased sales average also lies with the internet. Internet marketing with affiliate programs is in constant motion. What that means is things are always changing.

Facebook is a social networking website devoted to promoting interaction between its members. You can use the Facebook application as a way to share stories, find friends or if you are trying to make money blogging , use it as part of your internet marketing strategy . FaceBook and Twitter are the most popular now, and both have special areas for networking with other Internet marketers. Now you have a captive audience for your site.

Competition is extremely fierce for affiliate marketing. This can be shown when there is a product launch. Competition is extremely tight in the internet world. You must always be one-step ahead of your rivals to ensure that you capture a significant share of your target market.

Self Improvement With Mindpower

Personal development is a popular field for online teachers and coaches. Also known as self improvement coaches, they range from Tony Robbins to John Demartini. It is worth knowing that you can spend a lot of funds on mindset coaching, and while it can be worth every dollar, it can also be achieved a lot cheaper. Most, if not all, of it is available for free in libraries and online. Just search Yahoo and you will have plenty to sink your teeth into.

Personal Development

While personal development is important, it is also vital to understand the balance required between your personal family life and the time you spend on self improvement. Building your mindset can be life changing to your family in a very good way but it can also be detrimental if you are stealing away all your energy and attention from them in your quest to become a mindpower guru.

Social Media For Motivation

Look for online sources to enhance your mindset. While Googling it is always good, think about the peak performance sources that is available on Social Media. You will find sources galore within social networking sites and that can be a free source to start your peak performance quest. Remember, big pricetags is not always the best option. Dig around on sites like Ning, FaceBook and Twitter to see who have the contacts for you to start building your own personal best to the levels that you have only dreamt of in the past. With a bit of luck, you will soon be exactly where you wanted to be and that day may come sooner than you expect.

Online revenue Need Not Be Complicated

One of the simplest and most overlooked aspects of online marketing is that it’s not complicated. More precisely, there are a lot of “experts” who try to make it complicated. Aside from whatever motivation they might have to do that online profits occur from one simple equation –

Traffic + Conversion = Sales

– performed over & over again

There are MANY ways to get traffic (visitors) to your site and cause them to take some action or “convert,” which will either result in more leads or (less frequently) result directly in more sales to your business.

So here’s the other simple rule — you only need to master 1 or 2 traffic methods and 1 or 2 conversion methods, and you will make money. When you drive you only need to know two pedals, and you don’t need to know EVERYTHING about internet marketing in order to add revenue to your business.

With that in mind, there are a few basic traffic techniques I’ve implemented in some of my sites and client sites that have universally and consistently WORKED. Here are a few of those methods — but remember, you only need to pick one or two:

Increasing Visitor Count

1) Twitter is a highly effective means of targeting your niche and developing the conversation with your customers and prospects. There really is nothing like it. However, most businesses don’t know how to use Twitter effectively. They spam with “sales tweets” — “Look at the cool new thing I’m selling.” The 80/20 rule is highly effective — 80% of your tweets should be about something interesting, funny or otherwise engaging… a question of the day like “What’s for lunch?”… anything to get people talking, laughing, thinking… Also, keep it consistent and be generous with re-tweets. A few tweets a day go a long way toward establishing a rabid list of followers. The wrong thing to do is to Tweet like a madman for a day or two and then disappear for a month. Or worse, don’t reply when someone direct messages you or @messages you. That’s like ignoring someone at a dinner party when they ask you to pass the gravy. You WON’T get any dessert.

2) Video marketing is a very fast way to rank your site and get lots of inbound traffic. Keep your videos consistent — don’t show up one day in a baseball cap and dark lighting, talking about the rain, and another day bouncing in a jungle gym screaming about business leads. Consistent message, consistent tone, consistent look & feel. Also, be sure to put a call to action in your video’s description, as well as the full URL of your website’s landing page, and use appropriate keywords.

3) Article marketing is an evergreen method for outstanding traffic generation, with one HUGE caveat — mix it up! Putting the same article on 400 article directories will get you nowhere fast. You will get a bump in traffic from all the inbound links until Google figures out they’re all the same article and basically count it as one link. There are content spinners out there that alter the content of your articles automatically, but you have to be very careful here as well. Most content spinners change a word or two to replace it with a synonym, or they mash up the article randomly so the output is basically junk that cannot be read. It has to pass human review. So if you’re looking for a quality content spinner, ideally you want to be able to change the entire sentence many times throughout the article, and then have it spin those into hundreds of different articles. That’s the professional way to do it. At the bottom of your article, have a call to action in the information field; a blurb about you (the author) and a link to a free guide the reader can pick up at your website.

Visitors Taking Action

1) Keep it simple. The landing page has to do ONE thing — get people to ACT. For this reason, it’s been called a SINGLE ACTION PAGE. Pear it down to the bare essence of what you need the visitor to do. Consider placing a video on the page with a very simple message, “Hey thanks for stopping by for my free whizbang. Just type in your first name and e-mail address and I will rush it right over to you. In just a moment after you send your information, you’ll get an e-mail with a confirmation link. Click that link and I will instantly send your free whizbang.”

2) Direct, direct, direct. Notice the video script in #1 above — see how we instructed the user on exactly what they need to do? And then we told them what to expect next, and what they would then need to do. And we closed with a reminder of the benefit — the free whizbang.

If you have trademarked the term “whizbang,” then I apologize in advance.

3) Test, test, test. ALWAYS have two versions of your landing page operating at one time. You can optimize your landing page using freely available Google tools in the Web Optimizer toolbox. You really can’t go on “gut” here — the data will be you every single time. Even on PPC ads, we have literally seen the addition of a question mark in the ad increase conversion by 16.8% So test, test, test.

Conclusion

These methods work on any business in any industry. Here is some social proof –

Local landscape designer increased her traffic by 7,342% (yes seven thousand percent)

 

• Local artist went from three visitors a day to an average of 41 visitors a day

 

• International digital publisher had zero e-commerce and started converting 16% of all traffic to revenue within 72 hours of implementing one traffic strategy and one conversion strategy

 

• Changing a landing page to a simple design on an e-book site turned conversion from an anemic two sales per week to eight sales a day — on the same traffic.

 

I hope this helps your business. The average business fails to do what it takes to drive traffic or achieve conversions to their website. While they exercise 20-30 traffic methods on average, they don’t do a single one effectively.  There are many sources online to learn about effective marketing strategies, including free resources and some almost-free, like the definitive guidebook  750 Traffic Techniques.

Do-it-for-you solutions are also available; experience guides the appropriate strategy for the website and market. The biggest challenge business owners face is knowing which strategy to implement. Experimentation can be very costly in terms of time and lost sales… The key is to find a reputable marketing firm that offers a full range of customized services as well as downloadable products and courses to assist every website owner at every budget level.

5 Ways to Smarter Web Marketing (Design, Content, SEO, 0800 numbers)

The online marketing world is growing and all successful businesses have now invested in an online presence to communicate with their target audiences. There are now more channels than ever to exploit with the advent of Web 2.0 and the rising importance of social media.

A good website is a must for any organisation and their marketing mix, so here are 5 ways that you can maximise its success:

1. Make sure you are getting the best that you can afford when recruiting an individual or agency to design and build your website. For the best results, use a digital designer that specialises in website design to create the HTML combined with a programmer to build the back end of your website.

2. Become THE authority in your area of expertise (e.g. mortgages, swimming pools or travel) by providing lots of meaningful content on your website, blogs, articles and press releases that actually point to your site. This will keep Google coming back to your site and help to improve your organic search ranking (SEO).

3. Once your site is looking good and the content is regularly updated you can then utilise many online tools to start sharing it with others. Post news on Facebook and Twitter for example, bookmark your content on Digg.com or del.icio.us and add an RSS feed to your site that will send content directly to people as you post it.

4. Start marketing your website via a host of online methods:

-Organic search through search engine optimisation (SEO).
-Paid search using Google Adwords, for example.
-Email marketing.
-Social media.

5. Google Analytics can tell you how many visitors are coming to your website – but you can also work out how many callers are originating from there by using a memorable non-geographic telephone number (e.g. an 0800 number) on your site and/or in your paid search marketing. For example, 0800 numbers are free to call from UK landlines which means that you are highly likely to receive more sales and enquiries if you use them. In fact, research by the Institute of Direct Marketing has found that using an 0800 number can increase response rates by up to 185%. You can also see exactly how many calls you are receiving via your website if you combine an 0800 number with online call statistics which are easily added to your number. Additionally if you employ the same strategy with your PPC advertising you can see how many calls you are receiving via your ad and whether it’s a worthwhile ROI.

In all, there are a variety of successful techniques that companies can employ to maximise their websites’ potential. The above 5 tips offer a good starting point as to achieving that aim; generating more online visitors and seeing precisely how successful your efforts actually are by combining your web marketing with a memorable 0800 number.