By Carol Hansen

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you have probably heard of Twitter. It is a rocking hot social networking site that seems to be to be used by almost everyone today. It’s on the news, on the radio and on the minds of thousands of people everywhere, every single day.

There are many different types of people on Twitter. But, most of these people are on Twitter for a single reason. They want people to know about them. They want to connect with people. Lots of people.

Did you know that there are Twitter Rules for marketing and business success in what you do. I am a marketer and have been for many years. In the last few years my business has been expanding by leaps and bounds, because of social media and the internet. But, there are rules that all marketers must follow if they are going to have success in the marketplace, especially online.

Here are the 7 Simple Rules to Success on Twitter:

1) The Rule of Visibility on Twitter.

You absolutely MUST be visible on Twitter if you are going to get your message out to the masses. You must spend time on Twitter and get to know people. You must put yourself together a “Twitter Blueprint” and then work that bluprint every day. How many hours a day are you going to be seen on Twitter? How many people are you going to follow this week? How many times are you going to Tweet this week? How many direct replies will you make? All of these things make you “visible” on Twitter. Be seen and be heard. Be there on a daily basis.

2) The Rule of a Powerful Twitter Profile.

Why would people want to get to know you on Twitter? One of the first things they will check out is your Twitter profile. What does it say, or better yet, what does it do? Does it make people curious and want to get to know you? Does it make them smile? Does it make them think? Does it make them see that you have value for their life and perhaps can help change it?
Powerful Twitter profiles are NOT based on what is said in your profile, but on what your profile DOES. Does it direct them to DO something? Does it tell them you are a person they really need to get to know? Put yourself OUT THERE and tell the world why they need you as a friend, and get them to take some action towards YOU.

3) The Rule of Twittering.

You MUST use Twitter to market or to share your message. Many people regard Twitter as a communication utility much like an email. It is not! Twitter is a method for you to build – MESSAGE BY MESSAGE – FOLLOW BY FOLLOW – PHOTO BY PHOTO – VIDEO BY VIDEO – your brand on Twitter. Every time something happens with you, Twitter about it. Don’t just look at Twitter, get your messages out there and be seen. Answer the messages on Twitter. Thank people for sharing their Tweet with you. This will show up on their Twitter and even more people will see you. This will set you apart from most people on Twitter. Twitter is basically a billboard of what you and your friends are doing on Twitter. So use it often and use it wisely. Don’t forget that everyone is watching what you say.

4) The Rule of Twitter Networking.

You are part of a Twitter and you have access to that huge network of people to become their friend and business partner. You can live anywhere and have access to this huge audience. There are literally thousands of people on Twitter that you could potentially meet and then get to know and connect with. You can find local Twitterers as well. You will find that Twitter is a gold mine of people to connect with and build trust with. This may lead to business down the road. So go Twitter now!

5) The Rule of Twitter Direct Messages.

This can be an overlooked and rarely talked about Twitter tool. Direct messages are part of your “Twitter System.” Go to Direct Messages in your sidebar. This is a list of people who are thinking about you, talking about you, including you and connecting with you. This is a goldmine of people that have proven that they are behind you and willing to make you a part of their Twitter experience. Pay attention to your Twitter messages. Thank them for their thoughts and let them know you appreciate it. Reply back to them whenever possible. The Direct Messages are gold and can be a prospecting Vault of valuable leads. Make sure you stay connected to them.

6) The Rule of Twitter Pictures and Videos.

Sharing photos and videos on Twitter is HOT. People love photos and videos. The Tweets with photos and videos are the most looked at and watched Tweets on Twitter. Make some videos and upload them. Upload some photographs. Not only will they be seen, but they will also be Re-Tweeted many times. This means that you can pick out Tweets you like and share them with others. Now isn’t that cool? It is called exposure! It allows you to post a photo or video that you like and then it sends it out for all of Twitter to see. It shares the image that you want and allows everyone to see a glimse into your personal life. It helps people see you as a real person and not just a website, so share some of your personal life on Twitter. Find interesting photos and videos of others and send them out as well. People love to look at pictures and watch videos. Use this to your advantage.It will build exposure for you.

7) The Rule of Twitter Search.

When you do a Twitter search, it is going to bring you a list of people who have a lot in common with you. Just go to search.Twitter.com and type in what you are searching for. You’ll find a lot of other Twitterers who are Tweeting about what interests you. You can build a list in your own area of expertise and then you can send Twitter direct messages to them. Make sure they are messages of value and interest. Show them that you are an expert in this field. This gives you huge exposure. Whatever you do, like posting a message, uploading a video or photo, writing and publishing an article, or just commenting on another person’s message on the Twitter, it will show up on Twitter. Be seen, and be seen often if you are trying to brand yourself on Twitter.

You need to establish relationships and build a community to market to. But, if you are going to market on Twitter, then you need to at least get a blueprint of how and when to do it. The 7 Rules of Twitter hopefully gave you some ideas in your social media marketing. Please let me know what you think and what ideas you have.

To learn more about how to create traffic with Twitter, Social Marketing and Affiliates, you can check out
Carol at http://FromMyKitchenTable.com

You’ll learn all about Marketing Tips That Work, Social Marketing – Traffic Generation – List Building – Affiliate Marketing – Product Creation.

From Carol Hansen – From My Kitchen Table – Bizness Wizard.

Different opinions about Twitter, even before considering using twitter for marketing, range from hating it to loving it, from believing its stupid and childish to recognizing it as a valuable marketing tool. If used the right way Twitter can serve as a promotional tool while building credibility and influence with your followers.

Twitter, as a “micro-blogging” platform, is a great social media-marketing tool that can be a good source of free online traffic for any marketing endeavor, supporting the main marketing and advertising campaign, as it is easy to post links on twitter. It is also a source of infinite information for a marketer to feel out the market, learn about people’s concerns, wants and desires and find out what they are thinking and what they are interested in.

It takes some time to build a good following audience, but there are many ways to accomplish that. There are many tips and guides out there detailing writer’s opinion and methods to successfully use Twitter for marketing, and I have complied a list of these tips, including some of my own, to help you understand the efforts you need to make to succeed with Twitter as a marketing tool.

Getting Followers and Keeping Them

1. Follow others. Not just any others, but people who are marketing the same kind of products you want to market, people who have influence in the field, well accomplished experts in your niche, and just people who are talking about products or services similar to what you are promoting or selling. If people are talking about your company or service or a similar product or service they will be more inclined to hear from you as well.

Twitter as a Marketing Tool

How to do that? Go to blog sites, check out people’s profiles and look for a Twitter box and start following them. Most of the people will follow you back. You can try looking for people who indirectly might be interested in your product, when they even do not understand it yet. Look for people who are interested in adjacent and relating niches supporting your niche.

2. You can monitor what people are saying about any person, company or brand. Twitter has a search engine that lets you do just this. You can set up Google Alerts to notify you when a new Twitter account is created with the keywords related to your marketing plan. You can set up a search for twitted phrases, which can suggest that a certain person might be interested in what you are promoting. Say you have a moneymaking product, search for people who tweet phrases like “I wish I were rich” or “I just lost a lot of money”. Of course this is a joke but you get the idea.

3. Build a relationship with your followers over time. Interact with your followers. Fist of all you need to share things with added value. Reply quickly to people and retweet tweets that are interesting and useful. Your bio is important, helping you establish your self as an expert in your niche. People like listening to experts.

Marketing Tips Using Twitter

1. Use a predetermined set of keywords, frequently in your tweets, so that even as your page gets updated and tweets get moved down the list, there is always a high probability that some of your keywords will be on your Twitter page.
2. You can decide on a certain time frame, only in which, you will promote a product or service, so people will not get annoyed at constant attempts to sell them stuff, only I that specific time frame, and also this can generate interest, while followers will remember that, for instance, every week, at a certain day and time for a period of a few hours, you will offer them great stuff to buy, while outside this time frame you will only interact with them on a consult basis, answering questions and posting valuable useful information.

Final thoughts you should consider:

• Twitter is must more simple and easy to use, even for people who don’t master even the basics of web than other social media tools like Facebook.
• Don’t be a spammer and try to promote many adverts in your tweets, with the hope of catching some. After a few irrelevant and annoying messages, people will no longer follow you and leave you.
• Be consistent with your tweeting. Do not use Twitter only two or three times a week, It will prove to be a waste of your time. For Twitter to work as a marketing tool, you must tweet often and be consistent with this.
• It is said that Marketers who use Twitter for marketing increased exposure, get higher targeted traffic, better search engine ranking and acknowledgment and increase their conversion rate.

If you’ve been around the Internet long enough like all of us, then you probably know how Twitter has been single-handedly changing making its mark among billions of web users.

Gone are the days when people turned to blogging whenever they feel like narrating their day’s events.

Instead, they would use status updates to gladly share to their followers what they’ve been up to – all in 140 words. But are you remotely aware that Internet marketing is also beginning to penetrate this microblogging platform? There are two words for this: sponsored tweets.

Let’s take a look at why sponsored tweets are trending.

Trending – that’s one word you know all too well if you’ve been using Twitter on a regular basis. That’s also one word you should keep in mind as you fully take this crasher course on sponsored tweets and niche marketing.

Sponsored tweets are trending among niche marketers for a reason. Most marketers traditionally use article submission sites and sponsored ads to earn income with niche marketing. While there’s nothing wrong with this, sponsored tweets provide a refreshing – not to mention profitable – alternative to marketing niche products.

So how do you market your niche product in 140 characters?

The conventional business model for niche marketing usually involves the creation of a search-engine optimized website or by generating articles and submitting them to article directories. I’ve even explained in detail how you can create an AdSense website with increased page rank to be successful in your niche marketing efforts.

You see, sponsored tweets are not much different. Instead of having a website or tons of articles, you can instead build your credibility around a Twitter account on a niche topic.

Using this Twitter account, you will then send sponsored tweets that your followers will necessarily view in their feed. These sponsored tweets usually have a link that will direct them to the product you are trying to sell.

In order to get them to click the link, you will have to provide them with two things: quality content and compelling copy.

• Quality content involves short but relevant posts that are of relevance to your followers. These tweets must be related to your niche category. By providing valuable information or helpful tips to your followers, they just might consider buying the product you’re marketing.
• Simply giving out facts and advice isn’t enough, you must also give them in such a way that your followers will be impressed at your wit! That’s why a compelling copy is just as important.

With these two in mind, you can easily start earning money online with sponsored tweets:

1. Pick Your Sponsor

There are many companies that specialize in allowing Twitter users to market different products through Twitter. Consider the following companies: Magpie, Tweetbucks, Sponsored Tweets, and Adjix.

Probably the most popular right now is Magpie, with a reach of more than 17,000,000 users. However, there are other companies slowly catching up. Tweetbucks is also excellent for beginners.

You don’t have a Twitter account at the moment, so hold that thought and don’t register just yet! Reserve this step for confirming that you can actually earn money with sponsored tweets.

2. Choose a Niche

After finding a company where you can choose a variety of products to market, it’s time for you to choose a niche category that you feel most comfortable about. Base your decision on your interest and existing knowledge on the topic.

There’s no point tweeting (and marketing) something that you’re not interested in, and it’s even more difficult for you to sell something that you know nothing about!

You don’t have to be an expert in the niche you’ve chosen; just make sure you know enough to actually tweet about it.

3. Create a Twitter Account

After you’ve chosen a niche, it’s time for you to create you account in really easy steps. I’m sure you’ve registered an account in any site before, so this shouldn’t be hard.

What’s hard, however, is creating a username that is catchy and representative of your niche category. If you’re going to tweet about vacation packages, maybe you can settle for a username such as BackPacker Extraordinaire or something. Whatever it is, make Twitter users want to follow you!

4. Start Tweeting!

Now, what you have to do is to create a base of 200 followers before you can start sending out sponsored tweets. 200 followers aren’t difficult at all, if you keep in mind what I’ve been stressing all along: quality content and compelling copy!

Before you know it, your account is ready for niche marketing products from Tweetbucks. However, be careful not to bog your followers down with sponsored tweets all the time. Place it discreetly in between of your personal tweets.

5. Expand Your Base of Followers

After earning a little from your first few sponsored tweets, there’s no way to go but up. And up means creating more followers and tweeting more interesting tweets about your niche.

Within three to five months, you should be able to sign up for sponsored tweets from Magpie, Sponsored Tweets, and other companies that have yet to leverage Twitter for niche marketing.

So you want to create your own website or blog, but don’t know where to start?

It may seem like all it takes is following what you’re interested in, but in reality the success of your online marketing business also lies in knowing what the most lucrative niche is.

Affiliate marketers want to come up with a website that has something unique to offer to customers, yet also most rewarding for them as business owners.

The key is in knowing which niche is best to focus on to ensure high profits, and so it should be exceedingly popular, has products that customers continue to clamor for, and with just a few competitors.

If you want to succeed with an online business, never start a website without doing your homework…

Which Tools Should You Use?

Among the pitfalls of internet marketing is not doing enough researching before putting up a website.  Studying modern trends and carefully dissecting data based on spikes in searches can help you determine which niche to concentrate on. Knowing what the consumers want and need is essential to a successful website. Here are some tools recommended for your use:

1. Clickbank

How do you know whether a product or service sells well? Start with the online marketplace.

Clickbank showcases electronic goods including software, gadgets, and even data such as video or audio that’s ready to download plus eBooks. Clickbank allows other merchants to link directly to various product pages, then tracks user visits to let merchants earn their commission.

Go through the most popular products presented in Clickbank to help you narrow down your options in choosing a niche.

If mp3 players appear within the top 5 searches, investigate what made it popular (it could be a particular brand, new product releases or cheaper prices). Knowing this can help you isolate your options until you’re able to choose a specific niche.

2. eBay

Similar to Clickbank, eBay is also a good place to do some research. Check out which items are selling like pancakes.

eBay has a huge market share in online shopping, and finding out how people spend their money on eBay can be advantageous.

View the most popular items list, which products appear the most in searches plus actual conversions. These are great indicators of what people are interested in and most likely to buy .

3. Twitter

Hard to believe, but yes! Twitter has the ability to share and spread information quickly, so online business owners have started to realize its potential as a marketing tool. It’s not just how many followers you have, but also which searches top the list.

What’s assuring is that this information is certain to be accurate because Twitter folks tend to crowd over a common interest.

Although Twitter is just starting out with having a mechanism for marketers similar to statistical analysis, it’s still a good way to find reliable information about which products and services are generally preferred in the market.

4. Wordtracker Tools

Now that you have a product or service in mind, do keyword research. Keyword suggestions based on frequency of use, visibility in search results, and sometimes even visitors are available through wordtracker tools.

Build a Niche Website

It allows you to check the popularity as well as value of your keywords and keyword phrases by comparing what you want to use against existing data.

These tools monitor keyword appearances across search engines and provide you with a report on recommended keywords to use in order to generate traffic.

Wordtracker tools are pretty nifty considering there are a lot of possible keyword combinations for a particular niche, and you want to make sure you’re using the most plausible.

The report includes data such as number of times the keyword or keyword phrase has been used, how many websites appeared in the search results while using the said keyword or keyword phrase, and suggest a list of around a hundred keywords you can use based on this data.

5. Google AdWords and/or AdSense

Both are used by internet marketers globally, Google being the most heavily used search engine worldwide.

With Google Adwords tool you can see the cost per click in every keyword used to gauge its significance and worth. Remember that data comes from both ordinary searches and clicks prompted by Google Adsense, so don’t rely on data from here alone.

6. Google Search Based Keyword tool

Another tool from Google, this is also standard among internet marketers. Though Google is replacing this with something new (called the updated keyword tool), it works much like AdWords except these are all valid searches from users – not prompted by Adsense at all – so data is much more reliable.

What’s great about this tool is its flexibility, giving you detailed information on keywords or products by category and filtering only the related items from your phrases.

7. Search engines

Hands down the most fundamental tool in internet marketing, search engines offer you a wide range of data, in this case finding a niche trustworthy enough to invest in.

Try searching using your keywords and keyword phrases, then see what comes up on the search results. List down all those that appear on the first few pages, and imagine your website appearing within those rankings.

How would you want your website to appear when a user searches using your keywords? Too many results may mean heavy competition, and it may be best to disregard this in favor of other keywords that may have less competition but more specific searches.

8. Domain.com

Once you’re done with both product research and keyword research, it’s time to check out hosting plan and domain names for your website. Using your keywords which were based on your choice of product, try checking which websites appear in the topmost ranks.

Enter the URLs of the websites from the topmost search results and see how these would fare in terms of the number of times it was linked back from other sites (this way you can identify specific searches based on keywords and keyword phrases).

Like in the case of the terms “cheap mp3 players” you might discover only a few sites match the entire phrase yet comes up with a load of results on the search page.

Putting Up Your Website

What you sell can spell either disaster or success for your online business. Identifying your areas of focus is crucial to getting a favorable outcome for your website.

Remember, not all ideas can be developed into a profitable business, and it takes diligence and foresight to come up with fantastic niches for your online business.

It all starts with careful planning and detailed execution, so it’s important that you lay out the groundwork for your internet website. Use these 8 powerful tools to discover the most profitable niche for your website today.

Twitter was specifically created to help people update and communicate with friends, family and co-workers by answering one simple question: what you are doing?

These updates called “tweets” are limited to 140 characters. For internet marketers, the biggest question ever asked is that: how can you “effectively” market your products with a 140-word post?

Market Your Products on Twitter

Like all Web 2.0 sites, Twitter – when used to promote products – is inbound marketing. In other words, you are accessing users with their permission if you are to market a product.

Though Twitter updates are limited to 140 characters per tweet, yet these updates are viewable to more users.

In fact, many people regard Twitter as a combination of micro-blogging and instant messaging platforms.

In a report released in April 2010, Twitter reveals that it has over 100 million registered users in the United States and it has a whopping 180 million unique visitors every month, not to mention that users send out 55 million tweets every day.

There may be a limited space to talk about your business, but Twitter is undeniably a strong market for your products.

The following are effective techniques to market your products on Twitter:

1. Create an announcement

This is the easiest and yet effective way to let people know about your new offering. In fact, you can instantly convert your followers into customers.

The first important thing to do is to create a brief product description which is accessible by all people who are following you. This way they are properly informed as to what product you are marketing and promoting.

It is also wise to include a link that will take them directly to the product page on your Web site. By doing a direct marketing technique, you are now slowly building your business through Twitter.

2. Announce discounts

People just love discounts. The most important strategy is to offer discounts on products or services of your business, and then create a quick and captivating announcement about these offers via Twitter.

In a few minutes, you will see people spreading the news like a wildfire. Before you realize it, you have already established a strong clients’ following. The disadvantage, however, is that Twitter’s micro-blogging format remains limited with respect to advertising discounts.

But the greatest benefit is that you can actually include a link (back to your products’ web page) to every post. In making discount announcements, you will be able to see the full potentials of viral marketing.

3. Plant new seeds

Micro-blogging does not allow you to publish a full-length article about a new business offer. The best technique remains that you need to plant new seeds in the minds of your readers.

By mentioning tidbits of information about your products or services, you are slowly creating awareness in the minds of the people who are following you.  In fact, you can post regular messages regarding your sales, personnel or events.

These tweets may not be relevant at the moment, but when your readers encounter a need, the will be reminded of your updates.

4. Get a chance to know potential suppliers

In using Twitter to promote and market your business, you are not targeting prospective customers alone. In fact, Twitter is also a good place to establish relationships with potential suppliers, vendors and other people who may be interested in forming partnership with you.

The greatest advantage of microblogging is that you can create a network of people with the same mind and trade. This is where you can tap and identify potential suppliers. So it is important to widen your search to include not only prospects, but also business partners.

Finally, Twitter can also provide you with business solutions that may never be available elsewhere. If you have business concerns that require brilliant solutions, Twitter is the perfect place to request people for brainstorming. In the end, the responses are brief, to the point and free of extravagance. By using Twitter to update people about your business, you are consistently earning the trust of your followers.