Building Mailing Lists, List Building, Social Media, Niche Marketing

According to Mashable.com, a leading authority on social media, there are currently over 12 million users on Twitter. Another resource called istrategylabs.com reports that 46% of Twitter users are college grads, and another 17% have post graduate degrees. Furthermore, 47% are between age 18 and 34, and another 31% are between 35 and 49. Males and females are evenly ranked, with women accounting for 53% of users and men 47%. If your target market falls within these demographics, actively participating on Twitter is probably worth your while.

Twitter is simply a micro blogging service. What does that mean? It means that you write short updates (140 characters maximum) called “tweets” and send them out to your followers. And it is a marketer’s dream come true – it’s an easy way to stay in front of your target market and showcase your authority for free.

The myth around Twitter is that Twitter users (called tweeple or tweeps) tweet about useless information such as what kind of coffee they had with breakfast. Yes, some of that exists and it is actually important as you’ll see below, but once you understand the power of connecting on Twitter, you may become a Twitter convert, just like me.

So, if you’re on Twitter or considering starting, the question becomes, “what do I tweet about that will make this a useful tool for me?” Here are some categories you can consider for your tweets. There are others but these will get you started:

Industry Tips

This is a big one. You are on Twitter to showcase your expertise, so industry tips act as your credibility builders. Here’s how to do it: Create a list of high value tips (remember – no more than 140 characters long) and send one or two out every day. If you don’t want to have to manually do this yourself every day, consider a free tool called TweetLater.com to set up your tweets in advance. If your tweets are really good, others will send them out to their lists as well. This is called a “re-tweet,” and it’s a super way to quickly build your list of targeted followers.

Here is one of Meredith’s recent tweets that had a great response:
Connect Others: Be willing to connect others even if it has nothing to do with your business. What goes around, comes around.

About Your Business

Use this category sparingly. In other words, if you use Twitter as a place to advertise your products and services too much, people will stop following you. This is not what Twitter is about. It is really about raising awareness of you and your business and impacting others. Use the 80/20 rule here. For every eight tweets about things other than your business, you can post two things about your business.

Here is an example:
Hey Columbus: I’ll be on Fox tomorrow at 7:45 where you can see me interviewed about my new book, Flourish!

Re-Tweets

When someone re-tweets you, they are giving you the highest compliment you can get on Twitter! It means that the person who re-tweeted you thinks that what you said is worth sharing with their own list of followers. This is like having someone ask you to a meeting so they can introduce you their entire list of contacts. When you get a re-tweet, send them a short tweet thanking them! Re-tweet others who are tweeting things that you agree with or want your followers to read.

If you are not familiar with Twitter, the example below probably won’t make a lot of sense because of all of the abbreviations, but they are necessary given that you only have 140 characters. Abbreviations are outside the scope of this article, but just know that it’s really not as scary as it looks!

RT @getgreatcopy: New blog post: The Sixth Habit of Highly Effective Communicators http://bit.ly/ 175XGS Gr8 stuff Jan, as usual.

Quotes

Tweeps seem to love quotes. If you are also a fan of quotes, compile a list and send one or two out every day. Again, you can use TweetLater.com to set these up in advance so you don’t have to manually enter them every day. Simply set up these tweets for a month and then watch your re-tweets happen!

Here’s an example of one that Meredith recently posted:
“The pursuit of pleasure must be the goal of every rational person.” Voltaire

Invitations

Invite tweeps to your free events. No-cost events like teleseminars are great to tweet about because people love to share high-value, low-cost information with their lists. When you provide something without a cost – a workshop, teleseminar or report, your tweets about it are likely to get re-tweeted, which provides you with greater exposure to your target market.

Here’s an example of one of my recent posts:
How 2 write your book in a weekend – free telesemimar w/ @donnakozik. http://bit.ly/127GtU

Personal

Include some personal things that are going on with your life. What you choose to include is entirely up to you; however, be sure to be relatable. You don’t have to share your deepest inner thoughts or too much detail about your family, but sharing something about what you did over the weekend makes you more relatatable. Remember, Twitter is about connecting with people. Other people on Twitter want to connect with people – not stale businesses. People often connect on a personal level over food, pets or hobbies. This is why these seemingly unimportant tweets are actually very fruitful. These are pretty safe personal topics. General things about kids are another hot topic under this category. Just be aware that anything you say is out there for the world to read.

Here’s an example Meredith tweeted recently:
Interesting pop culture moment: Told a story to my sister, who lives in Vietnam & realized she doesn’t know who Sara Jessica Parker is!

As you can see, Twitter is simply an online forum for connecting with others in 140 characters or less. Big and small brands are using Twitter to connect and impact their target markets and locate joint ventures. Can you, too?

About The Author
Meredith Liepelt, President of Rich Life Marketing, offers a free report called “101 Ways to Attract Ideal Clients, Build Your List and Raise Your Profile,” which can be downloaded immediately at www.RichLifeMarketing.com.

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Twitter has made some revisions to its terms of service, to address issues like advertising, tweet ownership, APIs, and spam. There’s not as much news in this as one might expect, but there are some things worth noting, namely, Twitter’s stance on who owns tweets.

“The revisions more appropriately reflect the nature of Twitter and convey key issues such as ownership. For example, your tweets belong to you, not to Twitter,” says Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone.

With regards to advertising, they’re leaving “the door wide open.” Stone says they want to “keep their options open.” So nothing concrete there.

As far as APIs, Stone says developers using Twitter APIs authorize Twitter to make content available. There is a separate set of guidelines for APIs that can be found here. It is still a work in progress. Current guidelines are as follows:

- Identify the user that authored or provided the Tweet, unless you are providing Tweets in an aggregate form or in anonymous form in those exceptional cases where concerns over user security and anonymity are involved.

- Maintain the integrity of Tweets and not edit or revise them. Tweets may be abbreviated for display purposes and as necessary due to technical limitations or requirements of any networks, devices, services or media.

- Get each user’s consent before sending Tweets or other messages on their behalf. A user authenticating with your application does not constitute consent to send a message.

- Get permission from the user that created the Tweet if you want to make their Tweet into a commercial good or product, like using a Tweet on a t-shirt or a poster or making a book based on someone’s Tweets.

Spam guidelines are the same and can be found here.

The Tweet ownership stuff has already received some criticism for further clouding an already unclear subject. “If Twitter can do what they want with ‘our’ tweets, including reproduction for their own (financial) gain, what do we actually ‘own’?” asks Shéa Bennett at Twittercism. “If Twitter loses our data, closes our accounts or goes out of business, do we still own those tweets? Or are they retrievable in any way?”

Twitter’s terms of service are not necessarily finalized though. Stone made it quite clear that they are still open to feedback, and will make adjustments if they deem them necessary. There is even a feedback link right on the terms page. So if you have concerns about anything within, don’t hesitate to let Twitter know.

About the author:
Chris Crum has been a part of the WebProNews team and the iEntry Network of B2B Publications since 2003. Twitter: @CCrum237

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Ordinally posted on: April 16, 2009

I just finished my very 1st video!!!
This is a big deal for me, the reason being that, since the time I first started the coaching sessions with Alex Jeffreys, and the video training classes with Dave Kaminski, I have set my goal for this year to move all my business projects and websites into the video marketing mode. I will soon add www.ThreeToedCrow.com as the main portion of this blog just for video marketing.

The video is entitled “List Building (Red Bull Edition) remix”
(Select the HQ option “watch in high quality”)

Why Video Marketing?
There are several reasons why I have chosen to go ‘head long’ into video marketing. As the years have past, I have stayed with static website pages. Traffic and sales on those sites are now almost non existant. By placing a video on the same site about that product or service, will keep the site visitor interested in what you are offering, thus increasing sales. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about …

Earler today a friend of mine asked me to make a video ad for his recording studio located in New Jersey. They use the new Pro Tools HD 8 by Digidesign. In doing a little research, I visited the Digidesign site, and on several of the pages within were very cool video clips of their new audio recording software- I almost wanted to buy it, it just LOOKED so good! And that’s the key! I could actually visualize it, see how it works, experence it … and it was good!

With the social media sites and video sharing sites available to everyone, you now have a viewing audience 2nd to none. You can showcase your site, goods, services, from several sites like YouTube and GoogleVideo.

One of my goals for this year (when I have time that is), is to go into all of the sites I have, decide which ones I am keeping, and then upload at least one video per site which targets that site.

Want to make web videos? As I mentioned, I took video training classes with Dave Kaminski. If you’d like more info on creating web videos, please visit CreatingWebVideos.com

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When I woke up this morning and started thinking about last night’s coaching webinar w/Alex, the first thing that came to mind was “Linking, Twitter & Blogs… oh my!, Linking, Twitter & Blogs… OH MY!” Linking I get. It was one of the things I was going to focus on today. Linking with other sites and ‘social networks’ like DIGG, MIXX … fast exposure on Google, okay. Visiting and posting on similar blogs in which helps in building a reputation, exposure… it’s the people not the product, important I get it, but Twitter?

I spent (maybe wasted) an hour or so there today trying to figure out what benifit this could provide, and mainly try to find others in the “Fortunate 500″. I honestly don’t have time to just hang out there and chat. Uses: Potential customers? OK… Search Engine spiders finding my Twitter page? Alright … Can someone please comment on what else I seem to be missing here?

Blogs and blogs of blogs …
These things are amazing! I knew about blogs helping in SE rankings, but I wish I had used more of these like we are using them now. If I had, my business would look quite different I believe. I think Alex’s point about using the YouTube method and keyword searching for other potential blogs to post on was right on. Confession- I’ve never been one for casual conversation. Writing articles, now I could get into that, but to talk just to talk … I’m finding it difficult to just jump into an existing conversation (blog post). Anyone else out there feeling the same way? Show of hands … Well I guess it’s time to go knock on a few blogs and say “hello”

Oil Rig Hopping (or as I’ll call it “Crosstown Traffic”)
The Interent can be large place (like an ocean), but put in prospective, it can actually be rather small. [Que drums, background vocals and kazoos] “It’s like Crosstown Traffic …” You can be talking with, buying from, or selling to, someone next door or across the planet with a click of a mouse. Just like writting lyrics to a song, you need a hook to catch the attention of your listeners. In Internet marketing it’s very similar. You need something to attract people (potential customers or “fish”) to your PPP pages.

“Net Work” a fisherman’s story
I personally have always made the mistake of using the “shotgun” approach to fishing. Give a lot of options/choices, let ‘em have it (kaboom!) and then wait for the fish to float to the top. Doesn’t really work =( You really need one strong net, one good hook to be an effective Internet fisherman. Target your audience, cast your hook and – happy fishing.

* Kazoo background melody in Crosstown Traffic provided courtesy of the Jimi H. Experence

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