How to Promote Your Business on Twitter: 5 Tips

Using Twitter to promote your business in a way that’s acceptable is kind of like treading a tightrope. The opportunity is there for you to spam the socks off people that are following you or that you find doing searches on topics important to your business. You could inundate them with tweets about your business and products – but, that’s not a smart way to go about it.

Here are some smart ways to go about using Twitter…

1. Listen a lot – listen much more than you tweet about yourself or your business.

Beginners especially should pay close attention to this rule. Being on Twitter at first is like being at a party full of strangers. The first thing to do is to find out who they are and what they’re talking about. That’s the only way you can figure out how you might fit into what’s going on and make your own contribution.

So the first step in learning how to use Twitter is to choose people to follow and read their tweets. Use Twitter Search to see what people are saying (tweeting) about particular topics that interest you.

2. With every tweet – help others. This like the golden rule of using Twitter. If the goal of every message you put across is to help other people learn something that can help them get along a little bit easier – that’s as much as you can do. People will love you for it.

Information, novel information, timely information, entertainment – all of these topics have value. Use them when you got them!

3. Your personal life probably isn’t interesting at all. Don’t tweet about what you’re watching on TV, or that you just returned from work. These kinds of tweets are useless and go to show the person has nothing going on and isn’t worth following. Do YOU want to read everytime someone goes for lunch or answers a phone? No… so, don’t let us all know either! Help people – that’s it. Step 2!

4. Respond to others. If you’re just waiting for someone to take part in your conversation you might have a lot of time on your hands. Instead, actively reply to others and get conversations going about topics that are parallel to ones you want to talk about or learn about. Ask questions to prompt responses. I get more responses to questions than anything else.

5. Don’t just tweet text… tweet photos (Twitpic.com), videos, links to other sites, links to your articles, links to entertaining things on YouTube, anything but plain old text all the time.

Twitter can be an excellent online marketing tool for your business. You can be sure that there are unlimited opportunities out there waiting for you to find them.

Spamming others on Twitter by talking too much about yourself will lead to a drop in the number of people following you. It may lead to administrative action. Twitter is trying to avoid spam in whatever form it can control. Don’t be part of the problem! By sticking to these tips you’ll create a Twitter presence that benefits your business – not harms it.

Good luck!

Looking to Sell More? Look at Pay Per Click (PPC)

In any economy, but especially in this one you’re probably looking at all the options. You, like everyone else is trying to figure out what resources to use to sell more of whatever your business is selling. There are hundreds of ways you could go, but PPC is one of the absolute best ways.

Pay per click means you pay for each time someone clicks on your ad (at some other place online). Google’s Adwords system is the one used most by businesses across the USA – and for good reason. Google boasts more advertisers and more traffic than any other site. Actually, Google has the top two sites – YouTube is the 2nd most searched site. Google also has ads showing at YouTube and is turning a profit there after a number of profitless quarters since acquiring YT.

Pay per click is something that every business owner reading this should at least test. The potential for some business niches is very high, for others – not so great because they’re inundated with advertisers bidding up the cost per click. I won’t go into explaining the whole PPC system, you can see that in one of our elearning courses we’ll have here shortly.

Today I want to talk about WHY PPC is so amazing:

1. You can bid pennies for some keywords that will put you at the top of Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs).

2. You only pay for clicks on your ad, not people reading them. You are accomplishing some level of branding even though you’re not paying anything.

3. Google is good about eliminating invalid clicks, automated bot-clicks, and other scams. In fact, if you click on your own ads – or if your friends do, you might find your Adsense accounts terminated. (Adsense allows website owners to run advertisers ads on their sites – making money from clicks that occur on their site).

4. Using tracking you can see which keywords you’re bidding on lead to actual sales, and how much you make on the sales. You can figure out which keywords are most important to bid on – and adjust the amount you bid to match the importance for your business.

5. Adwords PPC is found working not only at Google SERPs, but at many sites across the planet. All those ads you see on websites that have Google’s name listed on them are from PPC advertising campaigns.

6. Adwords PPC has some tools that make it very easy to find valuable keywords for your business niche. It’s not unheard of to have 2,000 keywords you’re bidding on! Remember, the long-tail keywords are going to be the most important in terms of sales… if you’re selling baby diapers, the term “diapers” is very general and you might have one order per 100 clicks. The phrase “buy baby diapers online” is much more long-tail, but might lead to sales 1 out of every 10 clicks.

7. If you’re bidding against others for a keyword Google will optimize your bid so that the amount you’ve agree to pay, say, 10 cents per click is the maximum you’ll pay. You might pay just 6 cents if the top bid someone else used is 5 cents. Google will make your bid only one cent over the highest bid up to your maximum bid amount for each keyword.

I know some companies making a killing off the Google Adwords PPC program. One in particular is making over $2,000 per day clear from their PPC efforts. They have over 100,000 keywords in their campaign, and are dedicated to it full-time. But, it goes to show what kind of success is possible. It’s a channel worth exploring for every business – online or offline. If you’re offline you can create ads for online and have a click lead to one page with your phone number so interested customers can call you.

PPC is one of the business world’s ultimate money making tools. Get to know how to use it like an expert with our PPC elearning course.

What are Affiliates & Affiliate Programs?

If you’re just starting your business and you are trying to ramp everything up at once – we feel for you. We’ve been there. We enjoy helping new entrepreneurs get started – usually we recommend our in-depth online training courses which give you the big picture – and not assume you know parts of the puzzle you don’t know yet.

Affiliates are basically like sales people online for your business. Affiliates sign up to sell your products/services for some commission. You can create an affiliate program on your own or use an Affiliate Program.

Affiliate Programs put publishers (content producers; product producers; services producers) together with other sellers that hope to sell their products to earn a commission. These are places like E-Junkie, Clickbank, and Commission Junction.

If your business has a product or service to sell you can sign up at Clickbank or one of those mentioned above and list whatever it is you have to sell.

Website owners review what products are available to sell and sign up as affiliates to promote those products on their own websites. Clickbank takes care of all the money handling and sends you a Paypal deposit or a check when balances are high enough. It’s quite a nice system and enables you to sell your products with greater reach than you have just using your own business website, which doesn’t have the traffic of all the affiliates that sign up to sell your products.

What you could do instead is knock-out the middle man. Create your own affiliate program. It’s not as difficult as it might seem at first glance. Here’s a quick and easy solution.

1. Put a message on your website about your “Affiliate Program”. Tell visitors they can earn commissions on your business products they sell at their site(s). Make it easy for them to sign up.

2. Copy the pages for your business products and payment pages and put them in a folder on your business server with the affiliate’s name, ie: “www.yoursite.com/aarons/index.htm” will be the index page that only visitors from Aaron’s site(s) are sent to. Aaron’s gets a commission from everything that sells through this section of the site. You can give your new affiliate access to the Google Analytics that covers the aaron’s subsite. Note: You’ll need to “noindex” your affiliate folders so Google doesn’t count it as duplicate content and penalize your site.

As an alternative you could allow affiliates for your business to create their own sales pages which send the buyers to your business site for the final payment transaction. Some allow affiliates to collect the entire amount and forward it on and to collect the commission first. Problems can arise there because there will inevitably be returns and damaged products that need to be compensated. Much better for the product producer to handle the money and not to allow exceptions. (In our opinion.)

Affiliates can increase your business sales by a very large factor. One of the toughest parts of the ecommerce puzzle is bringing enough traffic to your site to be able to sell enough of your business’ products and services in order to survive and thrive. Affiliates already have traffic of their own – and, if they’re in a niche that similar to yours you’ll find that some of their traffic will convert to sales for you. Often times for sites with traffic, they’re having trouble finding products to sell to their visitors.

It can be a very productive match – each side serving the other’s needs. Affiliates can be the biggest producer for a business in many cases. If at first you’re not having good success with your affiliate program you need to stick with it and keep working at it to make it an income source for your business. Most product producers using affiliates find that only about the top 5% of them are producing 80% of the sales. Keep playing the affiliate game until you find those 5%. They’re like striking oil!