Written by Philia
TKA Contributing Author

Regarding social networking, I’ve noticed that the internet marketing world seems to be divided into three groups. First you have a group of people who see absolutely no place for social networking in internet marketing. If you spend much time talking to the individuals who subscribe to this way of thinking, you’ll hear that social networking is a complete waste of time and that social traffic just doesn’t convert.

The second group is comprised of internet marketers who are proclaiming that internet marketing as we know it is dead. This group is saying that backlinking no longer works and that the future lies exclusively in learning to leverage social networking sites such as Twitter.

The third group believes that social networking isn’t likely to replace traditional SEO strategies any time soon – if ever. Those in this group view websites like Twitter as just being another tool that they can use to promote their websites. This is the school of thought that I personally subscribe to. I don’t believe that backlinking is dead and I don’t believe that the future of internet marketing lies exclusively with social networking.

What You Can Expect To Learn in This Lesson

In this lesson, I’ll talk about what you might realistically expect to get out of Twitter when using it to promote your websites. I’ll talk about what Twitter is and why it’s so popular. I’ll explain how to set your Twitter account up so that it can benefit you the most. I’ll talk about how I’m using Twitter to promote a new site that I’ve just launched. I’ll share a couple of strategies that can be used to promote your websites with Twitter. I’ll even talk about the controversial issue of trying to measure the ROI on the time that you spend using Twitter.

While you’re reading this lesson, you’ll notice that I’ve had to black out some of the information in the screenshots that I use for examples. I’ve had to do this because Twitter doesn’t allow the use of screenshots that show profile pics, usernames, or tweets associated with other users. Where possible, I’ll use screenshots of my own Twitter account. When I can’t do that, I’ll black out the necessary information so that I remain compliant with their TOS.

Is Using Twitter Going To Make You Rich?

As I mentioned above, I view social networking sites like Twitter as another tool that we can use to promote our websites. It’s unrealistic to expect that simply because you promote your website with Twitter that you’re going to instantly start making $1,000 a month online. Let me be very clear when I say that Twitter is just one of the many tools that you can use to create a social footprint for your website on the Internet.

I don’t believe for a second that using Twitter is crucial to a website being successful and becoming a nice source of online income. I do, however, believe that when this platform is used strategically to promote the right kinds of websites, it can be an effective tool that may result in increased revenue.

How Twitter Can Help You Promote Your Website

There are three ways in which you can benefit from using Twitter:

1. You can use Twitter to connect with people and form relationships that might benefit you or your website in some way. Social networking sites such as Twitter are primarily used for the purpose of bringing likeminded individuals together and providing a platform for exchanging ideas which makes them ideal for meeting new people.

2. You can use Twitter to get people talking about your website. When people start talking about a website, it’s possible for the site to receive word of mouth referrals. This can be one of the most successful types of advertising for a website.

3. You can use Twitter to generate a flow of traffic to your website. I’ve personally experienced mixed results with social traffic from Twitter. On a couple of my sites, I do really well with social traffic but on others, not so well. I’ll talk more about this later in this lesson.

Why Forming Online Relationships Can Help You

If you’ve ever tried to convince a website owner who happens to be in your niche to let you submit a guest post to their site simply by sending them an email, you probably realize that in most cases, your email is just going to be ignored. If, however, you are able to find some common ground with the website owner and establish a bit of a friendship, your chances of them agreeing to let you be a guest author on their website goes way up.

In our offline lives, many of us go out of our way to help our friends and family members. If you’re anything like me, you’ll often agree to do things for your friends that you would never consider doing for a perfect stranger.

This same principle holds true in the online world. Many of us will really go out of our way to help other TKA members. We’re willing to spend time helping them because we have established some common ground and in many cases we’ve formed a certain level of friendship.

A perfect example of this in action is the TKA forum. If a perfect stranger happened to send an email asking for help solving a problem that they were having with their website, most of us would probably just ignore the email. However, when someone in the TKA forum says that they are having a problem, it’s not uncommon for several members to reach out to them and try to help.

I often hear people say that Twitter traffic just doesn’t convert. My answer to that is that sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t. In my own business, I have experienced both results. If your main objection to using Twitter is because you believe that the traffic that your website might be able to get from it won’t convert into affiliate sales or Adsense clicks, try to put that aside for now and think of Twitter as a way of forming mutually beneficial relationships with other website owners.

These relationships probably won’t directly result in more sales or clicks but in an indirect way they really can. Let me explain what I’m talking about in a bit more detail. If you are able to negotiate link trades or submit guest posts because of the relationships that you have made in Twitter, your site will benefit from these links by climbing in the SERP’s. As your website climbs in the SERP’s, the amount of search traffic that your site receives will increase and most of you will agree that search traffic does convert.

In a minute we’ll talk about how to use Twitter to form relationships with other website owners but for now, allow me to explain what Twitter is to those who may not be very familiar with it.

What The Heck Is Twitter Anyway?

For those of you who have never used Twitter, let me take a minute and explain it to you. Twitter is a social networking website that facilitates the sharing of brief blurbs of social media to the individuals who are in your Twitter social circle. The types of information that can be shared on Twitter include text, links, and photos. Using Twitter to share information is sometimes referred to as microblogging.

If you want to understand Twitter, you should first have a basic understanding of the terminology that is related to this social networking platform.

Twitter Username:
When you sign up for a Twitter account, you’re going to choose a username. You’ll use this to log into your account but it’s also the identity by which other Twitter users will come to know you by. Just like email addresses have a particular format such as “yourname@domain.com”, there’s a format for identifying Twitter usernames. This format is: “@TwitterUsername”. Whatever your username is, adding the “@” symbol before it is a way of indicating that you are referring to your Twitter identity.

Twitter Followers:
After you sign up for a Twitter account, you’ll want to do a couple of things before you can begin using the system. You’ll want to convince people to “follow you” and you are going to want to start “following” other Twitter users. When you follow someone, anything that you share on Twitter will be automatically shared with everyone who is following you. Similarly, whenever someone that you are following shares some information on Twitter, you’ll also be notified. Without followers, the things that you tweet may not be read by anyone at all.

Tweets:
The Twitter system makes it possible for you to post 140 character microblog posts for all of your followers to read. Whenever you “tweet” something, that tweet will be displayed on your Twitter profile page and in the home timeline view of all of your followers. It will also be visible to anyone who searches Twitter for a phrase that contains the keywords used in your tweet.

Retweets:
If someone reads a tweet and they enjoy it, they have the option of sharing that tweet with their followers. When they do this, it is called “retweeting”. It’s considered rude to retweet something without crediting the original tweeter. A retweet is typically formed with the following syntax: RT @username – original tweet.

Replying To a Tweet:
Twitter users carry on public conversations by replying to something that one of their followers has tweeted. To signify that your tweet is intended to address a particular Twitter user, you simply use this syntax: @username of the person you are addressing – reply.

For example, if a Twitter user by the name of @TwitterUser tweets, “Is anyone getting together for the convention this weekend?” you could reply by tweeting, “@TwitterUser – I’m planning on attending. Let’s meet up on Saturday for dinner!”

Why Twitter Is So Popular

When Twitter was first launched, it became an overnight sensation. The reason people took to it so rapidly is because the developers of the website created a way for their users to broadcast what they are up to at a particular moment in time.

When you think about it, the concept was really quite brilliant. Most casual conversations start with questions like, “How are you doing today?”, “What are you up to?”, and “How’s life treating you?” Most people are inherently interested in knowing what is going on in the lives of their friends and family members. The designers of Twitter realized this and created a platform for their users to share information with those who might be interested in what they are up to or how they are doing.

Instead of getting on the phone to check in with all of your friends, you can simply sign in to Twitter and read that your friend Joe is spending the weekend camping with his family. You can find out that your friend Amy is down sick with the flu. You can learn that your cousin Fred is getting married. The possibilities are virtually endless.

If you’re wondering how knowing that your cousin Fred is getting married could possibly help you to grow your online business, I don’t blame you. Looking at Twitter in its most simple form like this is the reason that most Internet Marketers discount Twitter as being a viable tool for generating traffic or increasing sales.

If you sign up for a Twitter account and simply start collecting a following of your friends, family members, old high school buddies, and coworkers, you’ll be disappointed with the results. I don’t care if you get every single person that you went to high school with to follow you on Twitter; the chances of them being even remotely interested in your online business is very slim.

Is Twitter Going To Replace Search Engine Traffic?

As much as I like the traffic that my sites get from Twitter, I like the traffic that Google sends me much more. In my opinion, nothing beats ranking at the top of Google with a portfolio of juicy keywords. In fact, this low maintenance search traffic is responsible for the majority of my monthly income.

Even though I love my Google traffic, I think that we as internet marketers can learn something from traditional brick and mortar offline businesses. Owners of offline businesses would absolutely love it if they could replicate what we have going for us in our online businesses.

We work to rank our websites for keywords in Google through backlinking, and when we rank number one for those keywords, we can pretty much count on receiving a certain number of targeted visitors to our website day after day, week after week, and month after month.

In the offline world things just don’t work this way. The closest thing that an offline business has to ranking for a good keyword in Google is the physical location of the business. The best case scenario for a business is to be located in a very busy part of town where the types of people who frequent that part of town are also the types of people who might be interested in the product or service that the business provides.

Unfortunately, a great location can only do so much for a business and in reality there are only a limited number of these prime locations for business owners to set up shop. This means people who own businesses that might not be located in the ideal part of town need to get creative if they want to draw new customers into their stores. The way they do this is through advertising. The business owners who run the most interesting and creative advertising campaigns achieve much better results than those who simply run an ad in the yellow pages.

The ideal customer an offline business can have is a person who has a need for a product or service and comes looking for a particular business to fill that need. These types of customers walk through the doors of a store with the intention of buying something. This is very similar to people who are looking to purchase a product or service online. The difference is that they use Google to find a website to spend their money on.

Just like offline businesses don’t always have the best location, not all websites can rank on page one of Google. When a website isn’t ranking well in the SERPs, creative advertising on sites like Twitter can be used to create a flow of traffic, get people talking about the website, and possibly even result in some natural backlinks.

The Role That Social Metrics Play In Ranking Websites

A lot of people are speculating about what role a website’s social footprint plays in the ranking algorithms of search engines. At this point in time, all we can do is guess because Google is not exactly known for making press releases about this kind of thing.

That being said, it’s my belief that social metrics will be more important to online businesses in the months and years to come. We already know that Google is very interested in social networking; otherwise they wouldn’t have spent millions in the development of Google+ and they wouldn’t have created the +1 button for webmasters to display on their websites.

The plus one button is a great way for Internet users to cast their vote about what websites they find value in. Although +1 isn’t nearly as popular as the Facebook “Like” button is, I believe that someday it will be. When this happens, Google will have millions of people voluntarily providing them with data that they can then use to judge the overall popularity of a particular website.

I also think that we would be pretty naive to think that Google won’t use their new “popularity meter” in some way in their ranking algorithm in the future. To take this a step further, I really think that this will lead to a morphing of search engines and social networking sites into what might be considered “social search engines”.

Why Creating a Personalized Twitter Profile Page Is Important

Unfortunately, much of the activity on Twitter that we see these days isn’t actually associated with a real life, flesh and blood human being. Many people use computer programs to try and automate the process of promoting a website or business with Twitter. A few people use this type of software responsibly but most are just trying to spam other users and collect information. Because many people realize this, it’s really important to take steps to show other Twitter users that you’re actually a real person and that they aren’t simply following a machine.

When most of us are creating a website in WordPress, one of the first things we do is customize the default Twenty Eleven theme, or even replace it with a purchased theme like Thesis or Catalyst. Then, many of us put a custom header on it and tweak the theme a bit to show the world that the site is owned and maintained by someone who really cares about it. We do this to make our sites stand above the millions of low quality, spammy, Internet Marketing sites that are on the web.

It’s important to approach creating a Twitter profile page with the same mentality. Whenever someone is thinking about following you on Twitter, one of the first things they will often do is check out your profile page.

The image below shows a brand new Twitter profile that I’ll be using to promote one of my new websites. This is what a profile that hasn’t been customized looks like. Notice that there’s nothing at all on the page to tell my potential followers anything about myself or why they might want to follow me.

You might think of the profile page as your “Twitter Sales Pitch.” I suggest that you take a few minutes and add the elements to it that might entice someone into wanting to follow you. The more interesting your profile page is, the higher the likelihood is that someone will actually follow you and be interested in what it is that you have to say.

How to Modify Your Twitter Profile Page

Fortunately, it’s much easier to create an interesting Twitter profile than it is to choose and modify a WordPress theme.

Step 1:
Click the “Edit your profile” link on your profile page.

Step 2:
Upload a photo that will be displayed as your Twitter avatar by clicking on the “Browse” link.

Step 3:
Decide what you want to display as your real name. This will be displayed next to your Twitter username. This can be your real name or a pen name that you use as the author of the content on your website.

Step 4:
If you would like, you can enter your location in the next field, but I usually don’t bother. Whether you do this is really up to you. If you’re promoting an offline business that has a physical existence in the real world, it would probably be a good idea to include the location of your business.

Step 5:
In the next step, add the URL of the website that you are promoting with the Twitter account.

Step 6:
If you’re feeling creative and ambitious, you can change the default Twitter background as well. Many people, including myself, create custom backgrounds with a sidebar. If you’re creative about how you use this space, it can help drive more traffic to your website since Twitter doesn’t really give you much space to use for self-promotion on the profile page.

The image below depicts an example of how making a couple of little changes can make a Twitter profile much more interesting and inviting.

Using Twitter to Form Relationships

Some people subscribe to the belief that the ultimate goal with Twitter is to collect as many followers as you possibly can. In the process of doing this, they often follow tens of thousands of random Twitter users with the hope that following tens of thousands will result in thousands of people following them back. If your goal is to use Twitter to connect with likeminded individuals, I suggest that you spend your time searching for people who are actually worth following instead of taking the high volume and random approach.

I’m going to use myself as an example of how to form relationships that might benefit me on Twitter. I have a brand new website in the niche of social media marketing, socialmediaspringboard.com. Keep in mind that the site is very new and I haven’t had a chance to establish a name for myself in this niche or build any authority with the website. The site is based around using social media marketing tactics to promote a website or business.

My plan is to use Twitter to develop relationships with people who own similar websites. Since the site is brand new, it doesn’t get any traffic at all, so I’m hoping to use Twitter to develop an initial flow of traffic until I start getting some search engine traffic.

It’s really important that your expectations are realistic if you decide to use these strategies. Thinking that I’m going to become best buddies with major players like the founders of Twitter simply because I follow them would be setting myself up for a big disappointment. It’s much more likely that I’ll be able to develop relationships with other website owners who are at a similar stage in the game as I am.

Follow someone who has 1,000,000 followers because they are ultra-popular, and they will probably follow you back but they won’t be likely to interact with you. Follow someone with 100 followers who is just trying to get their foot in the door and they will also probably follow you back but they are more likely to be willing to get to know you and engage in conversations with you. It’s this second group of people that I want to become friends with.

It’s important to keep in mind that Twitter is a tool that can be quite useful if you have the necessary social skills to use it effectively. In your offline life, you may have a friend who introduces you to one of their friends. It’s not realistic to believe that you’ll instantly have a great friendship with this person just because your friend introduced you. This is where your social skills come into play. If you’re good at developing meaningful relationships, there’s a much better chance that the person your friend introduced you to will eventually become a good friend of yours as well.

Using Twitter to foster relationships is the same in many ways. You might think of Twitter as a friend who can introduce you to someone who may eventually become your friend as well. While Twitter can facilitate the introduction, whether the friendship actually develops will be entirely up to you.

Steps I’m Taking to Promote My New Site on Twitter

Step 1:
Before I can make use of Twitter to accomplish any of my goals, the first and most critical step is to make sure that my website is “up to snuff” BEFORE I start reaching out to other website owners. It’s really in my best interest to take the time to get the site looking nice and put some really great content on it before I begin using Twitter to promote it.

The reason this is important is that you only get one chance to make a good first impression. When I decide to follow someone and reach out to them to make a connection, they may want to know a little bit about who I am. The easiest way for them to learn about me is for them to pay a visit to my site. Having a visually interesting site that offers intriguing information in its niche will go a long way towards creating a lasting impression with people.

This is exactly the opposite of the way many of us have approached Internet marketing in the past. In the past, we usually didn’t pay much attention to how our sites looked because we realized that until the sites were ranking well, the only people who would actually see them would be ourselves.

If you are hoping to form relationships with other website owners in your niche, you don’t want to show them a low quality website because their first impression is likely to stick. If they have a really great looking site that has authority in its niche and you later approach them for a link trade or ask them to accept a guest submission, it’s going to be difficult to overcome that initial first impression and get them to agree to your proposal.

If the first impression that your website makes is a positive one, when you have cultivated a bit of a relationship with them and you approach them with a proposal, the chances are higher that they will agree to it.

Keep in mind that a lot of the people you will be approaching and asking to let you guest author on their site will be bloggers and most bloggers are concerned about their reputation. Many of them will be reluctant to let you link out from their site to your site with a guest submission if your site isn’t top notch. They don’t want to embarrass themselves by recommending mediocre websites on their blog. Do yourself a favor and spend the time to get your site looking nice before you start promoting it socially. It’s really tough to say, “Hey, I know my site used to look horrible and the content on it was awful but it’s much better now. Care to give me link?”

Step 2:
The next thing I want to do is find people who are worth following. Most of us are quite fond of our grandparents but following them and having them follow us isn’t likely to do us much good. What we want to do is follow people who have websites in our niches or in related niches.

Here’s how to go about doing that. The first thing you should do is click on the “Who To Follow” link that is located at the top of every page in Twitter when you are logged in.

After clicking on this link, you’ll see a screen that is used for finding people who you might be interested in following that looks like the image below.

I usually enter keywords that are associated with my website in the search box and click on the search button. After I do this, Twitter will display a list of users that match the keyword I used in the search.

The next thing I like to do is click on the usernames that appear to be associated with my niche in some way so that I can learn more about the Twitter users that I might want to follow.

Clicking on a Twitter username of someone you find interesting will result in more information about the user being displayed to the right of the list. It will also contain a link that you should click on that is labeled “view full profile”.

After you click on that link, the Twitter user’s profile page will be displayed. This is the page that is going to tell you who you’re dealing with. You’ll almost always see a little blurb that describes who the user is and below that, you’ll often see a link to their website. The image below shows the profile page that I’m going to be using to promote my new website.

You can also see that I’ve added a brief “bio” to tell people who I am. Twitter only allows you to use
160 characters here so it’s important to choose them wisely. I like to slip a call to action statement in with my bio. Most people, however, simply use this area to tell people who they are. What you do with this section of or your profile is entirely up to you. I should point out that you can slip a link into your bio but since you only have 160 characters to work with, I prefer to place my link in the next section of the profile. Below the bio, there’s a place to put a link back to your website.

Next, you’ll find a list of the most recent tweets that the user has sent out. I like to skim over these tweets to get an idea of who the person is. I’m more interested in following people who appear to be engaging in conversations with other Twitter users than people who just blast out 100 tweets a day that all say “come visit my website or buy my affiliate product.”

I also like to take a minute to peek at the website that is listed on the profile page to get a better understanding of who this person actually is. When you have armed yourself with some knowledge about a particular Twitter user, it’s much easier to strike up a conversation with them.

If you decide that you would like to follow someone, simply click on the button that is labeled “Follow”.

After you click on the button marked “Follow”, it will change and say “Following” which is depicted in the image below.

After you have followed someone, it’s really just a waiting game, and you’re hoping that they will follow you back. Some people will but most probably won’t. My experience has been that you will need to follow a lot of people to get a few who follow you back.

Step 3:
Whenever someone follows you on Twitter, you will receive an email at the email address that you used to sign up for your Twitter account. You can’t reply directly to this email to contact the individual but you can click on the link in the email which will take you to their Twitter profile page.

If my intention is to establish some type of relationship with a particular Twitter user, I’ll click on the email button which will result in a popup window opening up that will allow me to send a 140 character message to the person.

I like to take this opportunity to compliment the person. I will usually write something like, “I checked your website out and I really like it! I’m looking forward to reading your tweets. Thanks for following me back!”

My experience has been that the first thing most Internet Marketers will do is blast out an email to their new followers that includes a link to their website. This may work in certain circumstances but if my goal is to get to know the person, I think it’s probably counterproductive to hit them with an email asking them to do something for me right out of the gate. This is like introducing yourself to a new neighbor and asking them if you can borrow their lawn mower in the same conversation.

Step 4:
Now that you’re following someone and they are following you, it’s time to cultivate the relationship. There’s really no secret to doing this. You cultivate online relationships much the same way that you cultivate offline relationships. You engage in conversations, you compliment them, you ask questions, and you answer questions. You do whatever it takes to get to know them and establish some common ground.

Sometimes you’ll just “click” with someone right away, and other times it’s will take a bit longer to establish any kind of a friendship. When it comes to building lasting relationships, it takes as long as it takes. There’s no hard and fast rule to go by when it comes to determining when the right time to ask for a link trade might be or when the right time to ask to be a guest author on someone’s website might be. The best advice I can give is to work on the friendship first and then ask for something when it feels right. If you try to reverse the order of this, you’ll probably disappointed with the results.

How to Use Twitter to Find Customers

Now I’d like to share a strategy that I’ve used quite successfully to drive traffic to a couple of my sites and on these sites; this social traffic is actually resulting in increased revenue. I should point out that I’ve used these same tactics on other sites that I own and I either didn’t get much traffic or the traffic didn’t convert.

I’d also like to point out that the reason I believe I’m having success with this method is because I’m promoting some affiliate products where my commissions are usually between $30 and $50 per sale. If my site was only monetized with AdSense, I don’t think I would use this method because of the time that is involved.

To understand why I’m having success with this strategy, you first need to ask yourself this question; “What is it that people usually tweet about?”

If you’ve never used Twitter before, you probably can’t answer that question but if you have, you probably realize that people tweet about whatever happens to be on their mind at any given moment. This phenomenon may seem insignificant but I find it quite interesting and I think you will too.

It’s not uncommon for people to tweet about things that they would never just walk up to their friends and say. For some strange reason, many people feel uninhibited when they are using Twitter and they’ll often reveal very private information about themselves. It’s this “need” that Twitter users seem to have to tweet about everything that they are thinking about at the moment that we can use to our advantage.

Every year, millions of dollars are spent on collecting market research data. The reason these firms are willing to spend this kind of money is because the more information they can collect about who might be interested in buying a particular product or service, the better chance they have of actually selling it. These advertising and marketing agencies will go to great lengths to find out exactly which types of individuals should be targeted when creating advertising campaigns.

I like to think of Twitter as my own private market research tool. Let me explain what I’m talking about here. Let’s say that I own a website that I’m trying to sell cheap computers on. If I want find people who might be interested in buying a cheap computer from my website, I can actually perform a search on Twitter using my keyword and every Twitter user who has recently used that keyword in a tweet will be displayed in a list.

After I find these people, I can utilize a couple of strategies to get them to follow me. I like to call these types of people “Targeted Twitter Followers” because they have already told me that they are interested in the product that I’m trying to sell on my website.

I’m sure you can see how having 1,000 followers whom you know are interested in buying what you have to sell can be much more beneficial than convincing 1,000 random people to follow you. If your search reveals that a person is tweeting about the keywords that are in your niche, the chances of them being interested in your tweets and buying something from your website are much higher.

How to Get Targeted Twitter Followers

I have two methods that I use to collect a following of targeted Twitter followers. The first involves doing a search from within Twitter with a phrase that contains my keyword. I should point out that it’s important to enclose your search phrase with quotes. When you do this, only the tweets that contain the exact phrase that you are searching for will be displayed in the results. If you forget to use the quotes, every tweet that uses any combination of the words in the phrase that you searched for will be displayed.

If I was searching for a list of Twitter users who are interested in buying a cheap computer, I would try and put myself in their shoes and anticipate how they might be feeling and what they might be inclined to tweet about. Then I can create a list of search phrases to use.

If my searches aren’t resulting in very many people who are using the particular phrase that I’m searching for in their tweets, I’ll shorten my search phrase to get an idea of what people are actually saying. For example, I might search for “cheap computer”. This phrase is going to return many more results than if I simply searched, for “does anyone know where I can get a cheap computer”.

It’s worth pointing out that very short search phrases such as those that only contain your main keyword, are likely to return a lot of results from other social media marketers who are trying to do the same thing that you’re doing. After you do a few searches, you’ll see what I’m referring to. If every tweet that is displayed in the list of results is simply intended for the purpose of trying to get someone to click on a link, you’ll want to broaden your search a bit. I have the best success with phrases like, “my computer broke” vs. phrases like “cheap computers”.

The image below shows an example of what you might expect to see when you do this type of search in Twitter.

After I search for a phrase, I like to look at the list of results. If you look at the list of results that came up with this search, you can see that all of these people have something in common. They all have broken computers and if I have a website that sells cheap computers, they might be interested in buying one from me so I’d love to have them as twitter followers.

What to Do After You Find a Potential Customer on Twitter

Finding potential customers who might be interested in buying a cheap computer with Twitter is only the first step. The next thing I would need to do is reach out to them in some way and let them know that I might be able to save them money on their next computer. I like to do two things when I find a potential customer in Twitter.

The first thing I like to do is follow any users who have tweeted something that may indicate to me that they might be interested in buying something from my website. When I follow them, they’ll be notified that I did so and hopefully they’ll follow me back.

Not all of them will and as a matter of fact, only a small percentage of the people you follow will actually follow you back. Herein lies one of the core elements of my Twitter strategy. I’m not interested in collecting 10,000 random twitter followers. I’m primarily interested in creating a following of people who have already expressed an interest in what it is that I have to say or sell.

The next thing I like to do is to reply to the Twitter users who have expressed an interest in what my website has to offer. You should know that you can reply to people’s tweets even if they are not one of your followers or if you aren’t following them. All you need to do is send out your own tweet and mention them in it.

Here’s how I would do this with any of the users that were displayed in the list of results in the image above. I would simply tweet something like “@username – I heard that you broke your computer. You might like to know that I’m offering 50% discounts on computers right now at: http://mysite.com.”

It’s probably worth mentioning that if you see the letters “RT” in a tweet or before a tweet, the person is simply doing what is called “retweeting”. It’s a way of quoting what someone else may have tweeted and tweeting the same thing to their friends. The RT abbreviation is a way of crediting the original tweeter with the tweet. I usually ignore retweets when searching for potential customers on Twitter because in most cases they are simply regurgitating what someone else said and the tweet may not represent their actual thoughts or interests.

Things to Keep In Mind When Using Twitter

After you’ve started collecting a list of followers, it’s time to start tweeting, but what should you say in your tweets? Let me just say that a common pitfall that many Internet Marketers fall into is blasting their Twitter followers with a constant stream of tweets that contain nothing more than links back to their websites. This might work once or twice but if you overdo it, your followers are likely to get annoyed and unfollow you. You might even get your Twitter account suspended for being a spammer.

I like to try and maintain a “give and take” balance when I’m sending out tweets. Some of my tweets contain brief bits of useful information and others contain a short “pitch” followed by a link to a post on my site. The useful information is the “give” and the tweets that contain a link are the “take”.

Allow me to share a couple of examples of the types of tweets I might send out.

“Give” Tweets:
• “I’m excited to announce that I just found out that you can get a free upgrade to the Lion OS if you buy a new Macbook Pro.”

• “I just installed OpenOffice on my new computer and I think it’s as good as Microsoft Word but it’s free! Saved me a bundle!”

“Take” Tweets:

• “I just learned a cool trick that gave me a 45% discount on reconditioned Dell computers! Click to learn how: http://mysite.com.”

• “Today only! Get a free printer when you buy a Toshiba laptop. Click here to get one of only 100 coupons! http://mysite.com/coupon.”

How to Write Effective Tweets

Remember, you only have 140 characters to convey your point or convince your followers to do something so it’s a good idea to choose your words wisely. Whenever I’m tweeting, I like to ask myself two questions. The first is for the “give” style tweets and the question is: “Does this tweet actually offer any real value to my followers?”

If you can consistently provide tidbits of useful and interesting information to your followers through your tweets, the chances of them continuing to follow you are much higher.

The second question is for the “take” style tweets and it is: “Is this tweet interesting enough to convince my followers to click the link?” If I were to simply tweet something like, “Click here to learn about computers: http://mysite.com”, the number of followers who will actually click on the link is probably going to be pretty low.

If, however, I tweet something like, “This trick can save PowerPoint users tons of time! Click here to see it: http://mysite.com”, people might click your link because they are wondering what this trick actually is and whether it will really save them any time when using PowerPoint. This second type of tweet is much more likely to bring traffic to your website than my first example.

Dealing with the 140 Character Limit

You may be wondering how you can possibly say anything useful and still include a link back to your site in only 140 characters and I don’t blame you. If the URL to the page that you are linking back to is http://mysite.com/100/how-to-save-money-when-buying-a-new-17-inch-toshiba-laptop-computer/, that doesn’t leave you much room to say anything interesting if you try and slip that link into a tweet.

The Twitter system tries to help you by automatically removing the “http://www.” portion of any links that you include in your tweets. They will also truncate the link to about 38 characters. Even though they shorten the link, it’s quite easy to make links even shorter and add a click tracking feature while doing so.

There are two ways of dealing with Twitter’s 140 character limit. The first is to use a feature found on the WordPress post editor screen called “Get Shortlink”. The screenshot below shows how I can take a really long URL from a post on my new website and shorten it quite a lot. The URL for this example is: http://socialmediaspringboard.com/234/lets-talk-about-whether-its-possible-for-social-traffic-to-actually-convert-into-sales/. If I were to try and use that URL as link in a tweet, it would use up 120 of the 140 characters that Twitter gives me to work with.

After clicking on the “Get Shortlink” button, WordPress will shorten the link to: http://socialmediaspringboard.com/?p=234 which is much easier to fit in a tweet.

Now I can easily insert a link that has a ridiculously long URL in a tweet and still manage to say something interesting. In this example, I was able to write a tweet that includes a link back to the post on my website and I had 33 characters to spare.

The second way is to use a URL shortening service to shorten long URL’s. Google has a free service called “Google URL Shortener” that can be accessed at http://goo.gl and there is another popular free URL shortening service called Bitly that can be accessed at http://bitly.com.

Like I mentioned before, both of these services are free and they both keep track of the number of clicks that the shortened URL receives. If you were to shorten the long URL that I used in the example above, Google’s service would change it to: http://goo.gl/CWMK3. If you were to use the bitly.com service, the URL would be shortened to: http://bit.ly/r9wG7q .

What About Measuring Your Results When Using Twitter?

I think the difficulty of measuring the impact that using Twitter might have on a website is one of the main reasons that many Internet Marketers hate using it. Most of us want to have some way of quantifying the results of our efforts. It’s not uncommon for new TKA members to ask questions like: “How many links will it take to reach number one in Google?”, “How long will it take to get to $1,000 a month?”, or “How much should I be earning if my site receives 200 visitors per day?”

There’s a natural tendency to want to be able to place cold hard numbers on these types of things. Similarly, people usually want to have some way of measuring whether the effort that they have put into promoting their website or product with Twitter is worth the time and energy that they have invested. It’s not unlikely that many of you will want some way of measuring the ROI from the time that you spend promoting your website on Twitter.

Some of you may see increased revenue with these methods; others may not. Some of you will be good at developing relationships with these methods that eventually result in more backlinks to your websites; others may not. Some of you will have better public relations skills than others and will be able to get other Twitter users to start talking about your website.

When it comes to trying to measure the results that these strategies might have on your business, you need to ask yourself, how can you put a price on the fact that people may actually start talking about your website or your product in both the online and offline world? Creating, interest, buzz, and chatter for a business’s product or service is kind of the “holy grail” when it comes to advertising campaigns. Advertising and marketing companies work very hard to come up with advertising campaigns that are effective at getting people to talk about their product.

I’m not saying that you’re going to create the next pop culture phenomenon by using Twitter. What I am saying is that Twitter can be used to get people to start talking about your website, product, or service – if you’re creative with how you use it.

If you can get people saying positive things about your website as a result of your tweets, there’s really no way to measure how valuable this can be to you. You should never underestimate the power that word of mouth endorsements can have on a business.

I imagine that plenty of Internet Marketers have tried promoting their websites with Twitter and since they didn’t see much traffic from Twitter reported in Google Analytics, they assumed that their efforts were wasted. The thing that many people don’t realize is that people access Twitter in several different ways.

They may access it with a smartphone application, with a tablet computer app, or a service that uses Twitter’s API to deliver tweets to users. Because Twitter can be accessed in so many different ways, Google Analytics doesn’t do a good job of reporting that the traffic actually originated from Twitter.

If you’re dead set on tracking the traffic that you get from Twitter, you can use the stat tracking feature in the URL shortening service that you use to determine if the links that you use in your tweets are actually being clicked on. When I was initially developing the strategies that I use to promote my websites on Twitter, I would create a unique tracking URL so that I could determine if my tweets were actually interesting enough to convince people to click on the links and visit my websites.

In the beginning, I noticed mixed results in terms of the traffic that my sites were getting from Twitter. Polishing my skills amounted to nothing more than trial and error. Eventually I started seeing patterns in the types of tweets that resulted in the most clicks. I was then able to use what I learned from this data to come up with new interesting things to say that would also tend to result in clicks on my links. If you say something boring in your tweet and think that people will click on your link just because you included a link in it, you’ll be disappointed.

The reasons I initially started tracking the clicks that I received from Twitter were twofold. The first was to validate to myself that people in Twitter will in fact click on links. The second was to learn the best types of things to say in my tweets to get the best CTR from Twitter.

Does Twitter Work For All Niches?

Some of you may be wondering if Twitter can be used to effectively promote all websites and I’m afraid that I believe that the answer is probably no. I think that some niches are much easier to promote via Twitter than others.

Most of us probably have websites in our portfolio’s with domains like “cheapblackcoffeetables.com” or “bestmetaltowelracks.com”. There’s nothing wrong with owning domains like this but if you think about it, there probably aren’t many conversations that come up in social situations about cheap black coffee tables. Sure, there might be the occasional conversation where someone says, “Hey, where did you get that coffee table?” but the chances of someone running out and telling all of their friends where you bought your cheap black coffee table are probably pretty slim.

If, on the other hand, your site shares some really helpful tricks for getting a car loan with bad credit and you find people in Twitter who need a new car but they can’t get one because they have bad credit, you might do much better promoting your site with Twitter.

If someone tweets that they aren’t able to buy a car because of their bad credit and all of a sudden, you swoop in and follow them and reply to their tweet, they might just decide to follow you and visit your website.

The bottom line for me is that I have some sites that do quite well with Twitter because they are built around keywords that people enjoy talking about. These keywords are the same keywords that might naturally come up around the water cooler at work or in conversations at parties.

The keywords for the websites that are seeing increased traffic and revenue are the types of keywords that are associated with topics that get people emotionally charged up. The fact that my keywords incite emotionally charged conversations in the offline world easily translates into the same types of conversations in the online world on social platforms like Twitter.

What Kind Of Results Have I Had With Twitter?

On my sites that are doing well with Twitter promotion, I’ve seen some crazy swings in income. While my experience has proven to me time and time again that seeing fluctuations in earnings is completely normal, I’ve noticed that when I’m tweeting regularly about my sites, I’ll have some big spikes in earnings and these spikes are larger than they were before I started promoting my websites with Twitter.
This chart shows the fluctuations in my daily earnings before I started using Twitter to promote my sites.

The chart below shows the kinds of fluctuations I’m seeing in my daily earnings after I started really heavily promoting my sites with twitter.

There are a several factors that I can attribute this to. Someone may have followed me on Twitter who has a large and loyal Twitter following. When this happens, people may be inclined to check my profile page out just to see why the person they were following started following me.

Another thing that happens is that I’ve noticed that a lot of people on Twitter read something that they like and “retweet” it. Anytime someone retweets one of your tweets, this results in more exposure for you and your website. Just like some Youtube videos can go viral and be shared with people all around the world, a similar thing can happen when a lot of people start retweeting your tweet.

Is Promoting Your Website on Twitter For You?

I’m sure many of you loathe the very idea of even signing up for a Twitter account, let alone tweeting and engaging in conversations on it. It’s important to remember that the foundation of creating a respectable online income is based in ranking keywords that people can find your sites with through Google.

Twitter is simply another tool that Internet Marketers can use if they choose to do so. I enjoy using it and the fact that I’ve had some success with it encourages me to continue using it and experimenting with new and different strategies that might help grow my business.

If the things I’ve written in this chapter seem appealing to you, I encourage you to give them a try!

Philia is a successful Internet Marketer who has been a member of The Keyword Academy since September 2009. She is an active participant in the TKA forum and enjoys helping others in their journey towards creating a sustainable online income. She is especially interested in using social media marketing strategies to improve the popularity of
her websites.

If you’d would like learn more about promoting your websites via social media websites, visit socialmediaspringboard.com, where you’ll find tips from Philia on implementing social media marketing strategies. You’ll also find free tools such as free buttons, clip art, and stock photos. Philia also offers websites that are pre-made in WordPress that are available to purchase for those of you who are eager to get started making money online but don’t currently have the time or skills to build a website.

(Editor’s Note: TKA Contributing Authors are exempt from our “no self-promotion” policy.)