6 effective ways to use Twitter as a lead generation tool

As you may or may not now, Twiter.com is a hot social networking community right now.  According to compete.com, in November, 2008 Twitter had approximately 3,478,239 people visiting the site.  Twitter grew 640% between November 2007 and November 2008.

So how can you harness all this growth into a relationship building system for lead generation or joint venture alliances? How do you provide value, direction, and an authoritative impression in the minds of your followers?

Here are 6 effective ways that I’ve found to contribute to the Twitter community that can be beneficial to your business or consulting practice.

1.    Target your market to follow the right people

Ask yourself, “Who’s my ideal client?” Once you define your target market, finding other people who share an affinity for your products and services is much easier. Twitter may have over 3.5 million users, but that’s not your audience. More than likely your universe is much smaller than that.  Even if you’re in abroad spectrum market such as “online marketing” or “social networking specialist” you’ve got to narrow down your focus to a definable niche, industry or demographic.   Instead of being a “social networking consultant” to all companies, being more to less is a smart idea. For example, narrow your target audience or define a specific program for Graphic Designers who want to increase their sales by using social media.  Once you’ve got your target market clearly defined, you go can use Twitter based tool sites such as TwitterGroups, http://twittgroups.com/showgroups.php or the Twitter advanced search page, http://search.twitter.com/advanced to find other Twitter pages that contain specific keywords to find specific people.

2.    Offer actionable advice

Once you define your target audience and search them out, you should be focusing your tweets on solutions to issues, concerns, cares, and problems that your target audience may have. Focus your Twitter posts (tweets) on providing useful and actionable solution to problems that your ideal clients are facing. You don’t want to use blatant sales pitches here. Remember, your objectives are to offer advise, direction, and act as an authoritative source of answers to your target market. Offer them advice (not just rehashed information), case studies, software, specialized articles, etc.  Anything that may help them do their jobs better, easier, faster, more efficient or provide them a higher level of achievement, joy, and satisfaction.

3.    Use your 140 character wisely

Just because your have 500, 1,000, or 5,000 followers doesn’t mean they’re all going to read your tweets.  It’s human nature to only be interested in things, ideas, and tweets that are important, interesting, or provide value to what’s going on in your follower’s life at this moment.  So consider what your followers want to hear about. This goes back to number one on our list. Targeting your market. If we’re searching out a specific audience, your tweets are essentially your headline. The reason why someone is going to take the action to click your link in your tweet to find the benefit that you’ve promised in your headline.  Don’t just write, “marketing ideas for Graphic Designers”.  Even though you’re talking to a specific group of people, the phrase “marketing services” is vague, undefined, and abstract. Use a more defined, tangible, and clear benefit in your tweet, such as “Traffic conversion best practices for Graphic Designers”. See the difference, one is a general blanket statement, yet the other is focused to solve specific problem that your target marketing may be facing.

4.    Your offer and call to action

Obviously you can’t provide much of a solution within 140 characters. So providing a link back to your site, ideally your Blog first before directing them from Twitter to another site.  Think about your end objective here. If you’re trying to build your opt-in list, then posting your tweet with a link to another website defeats the purpose. What I like to do is write my tweet as a Blog post on my site first, then copy and paste my Blog post link into the tweet box. This way, I have the opportunity to get a new or returning visitor to my Blog where I can provide useful solutions to their problems or concerns, but I can also present them with the option of joining my opt-in list. You can see an example of this on my Blog if you click here.

5.    Frequency of your tweets

If your serious about using Twitter as a lead generation tool, you’re going to have to tweet a minimum of 3 times a day. I’d suggest once in the morning, once midday, and one at night. Reason being is that your target audience is online at different parts of the day. If your followers have  a large following of themselves, your tweet will only be seen by a small fraction of your followers.

6.    Tracking your results

One way that I’ve found to track your tweet subjects is by naming your Blog post the same as what your use for your tweet post. For example, if I create a tweet called, “8 quick tactics to find joint venture partners”, I’ll create my Blog post to be, www.christianfea.com/8-quick-tactics-to-find-joint-venture-partners. I suggest you use Google Analytics to track your website traffic. It’s very in-depth, easy to use and it’s free. All you have to do is copy and paste your Javascript code into your Blog page header and every page on your site will be tracked. If you don’t know how to do this your Webmaster can set this up for you in less then 10 minutes. By doing this you’ll know exactly how many visitors you’ve gotten to visit your site and your can test different tweet topics to see which ones generate more clicks for you.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture Marketing firm. He exemplifies how to profit from Joint Venture relationships by creating profit centers with minimal risk and maximum profitability.
Join his JV Wealth e-zine.

Six Effective Tactics To Generate Traffic For Your Website

Web traffic, as the maxim goes, is the fuel of every online enterprise.  Allow me to present to you half a dozen surefire ways that will help you achieve the traffic that your online enterprise will need:

1.    Search engine marketing (SEM.  that 80% of the number of visitors that you will be able to get for your homepage will directed by the search engines.  Therefore, it is highly essential that your pages will be formatted for easy classification by the major search engines in cyberspace.  This can be done via proper keyword research and usage.  By finding good keywords related to the subject of your enterprise, you can garner the favor of search engine spiders and strongly compete for a good position in SERPs.

2.    Article marketing.  Compose articles relevant to the topic of your website.  Include a resource box discussing yourself or your enterprise, and of course, containing a link to your website.  Publish this article and bio box to big article directories like eZinearticles.com and GoArticles.com.  Do this at least once every day and in no time you’d enjoy hundreds of back links leading to your website.

3.    Yahoo Answers.  Yahoo Answers is one of the quickest techniques that will help your website get listed in search engines in a matter of hours.  Just search for open questions related to the topic of your business, answer them to the best of your abilities, and leave your URL when asked to city your source.  Yahoo Answers will fetch direct traffic and it will build for you premium back links from what Google deems as an important resource site.

4.    Blogging.  Search engines absolutely adore blogs.  By maintaining a blog and regularly publishing posts that include your website’s URL, you will be able to garner more back links for your website and you’ll be able to make iteasy for search engines to find and present your web pages.

5.    YouTube marketing.  Change your content into a simple video and distribute the same over at YouTube to immediately get the attention of millions of internet users who frequent that popular cyber hangout.  And don’t forget, Google has a love affair with YouTube videos!

6.    Press releases.  Several online and print publishers are always looking for news items to republish.  They consult newswires where a variety of parties distribute newsworthy articles.  By writing a newsworthy item about your website and uploading the same to a big online newswire like prweb.com, you’d be able to push your online enterpriseto garner a lot of visitors.

Learn Why Internet Marketing Videos Are So Powerful

Being successful at affiliate and internet marketing is the Shangri-la of a huge number of people on the internet.

Fed up with unfulfilling jobs, interminable commutes, lifetime bill repayments - the list goes on - people see the internet as something of a Gold Rush. Huge money to be made online if they could only figure out where.

Stories about people striking it rich on the internet abound. And we’re not talking about savvy business people, but regular Joe’s and even kids who’ve followed a program and found real success. True, there are the internet entrepreneurs who come up with an original idea, run with it and create a product that everyone immediately wants - niche marketing of the highest order. But as in any line of business, those entrepreneurs are both uncommon as well as being the kind of people willing to take risks.

The majority of people don’t like taking huge risks or have that creative spark and even if they do, don’t know how to make the most of their idea. Like the prospectors of old, most people rush off to the store, buy some useless tools and go prospecting for internet riches without knowing the first thing about what they’re doing.

Is it any wonder that most people fail at making any real income online. Knowing the right tools to use and where to internet wealth can be found is a huge step in the right direction.

The provision of information products is a booming industry, and a huge portion of it deals with informing people how to earn money on the internet. But, as you’ll find out if you buy a few of these products, a lot of information is rehashed as well as being out of date in the fast-changing world of niche marketing. Besides, ebooks can be very dry reading.

Internet marketing Video tutorials, on the other hand, are easy on the eye and they provide real examples of tips and techniques in action. You are, literally, watching over the shoulder of someone who’s demonstrating a procedure as it happens. And, if you don’t get it first time, you can review the video as frequently as you like till it sinks in.

It appears that most people are visual in nature which is why they respond more to visual stimuli rather than the printed word. Why do you think store windows use animated displays to attract your attention rather than big printed banners? Moving images attract the eye engage the mind. That’s why watching internet marketing videos gives such good results. And it’s a technique you’ll learn from fast. A demonstrator’s personality comes across much more strongly through video and audio than it ever can from a book. So does enthusiasm, which can drive you on to succeed when relying on printed words tires you out.

There are now some great internet marketing video training products available to aid you in your goal of achieving online success. I’d urge you to think about these as an alternative to a simple ebook. The advantages to you are enormous.

Discover how you can gain immediate access to a goldmine of powerful Internet Marketing video tutorials, that take you by the hand and show you step-by-step how to fast-track your way to online financial success AND you’ll also get Master Resell Rights to these videos so you can sell them and keep all the profits!…