Twitter Marketing Questions Answered for Beginners

Are you an internet marketer?  Although you may not technically be employed as one, it is one of the many hats you will and should wear when working online.  Do you run a website or blog that sells a product, service, or generates income through affiliate links?  If so, you must double as an internet marketer.  Why?  Because marketing is vital to your success.  After all, you will not generate income if consumers do not know you exist.

If you are new to internet marketing, you will turn to the internet for research.  You will get many great ideas, including the use of article directory back links, buying advertisements on other sites, exchanging banners with other webmasters, and search engine optimization.  These are important internet marketing steps, but to maximize your results, think outside-of-the-box.  When you do, you will find Twitter.

Twitter is a social networking micro-blog.  Users can communicate with each other through updates, also known as Tweets.  Many Twitter members highlight their daily activities, but many also use updates to generate traffic to their websites or blogs and to increase sales.  Straight up advertisements are allowed, as long as they do not qualify as spam.  With that said, many find the best approach to be taking the roundabout way.  If your sell a product or service, drop hints and highlight what you do or what you sell.  Be sure to include a link.

As nice as it is to hear that you can use Twitter for internet marketing, as a newbie, you may have a few questions.  Continue reading on for answers.

Question:  Why use Twitter for internet marketing?

Answer:  The better question should be why not.  There are over 2 million members on Twitter.com.  You will not communicate will all members, but it gives you an amazing opportunity to meet and network with others.  By playing your cards right, you can find your targeted market.  For example, do you work as a freelance web designer?  If so, your target market is those who want to make money through affiliate links or business owners who want a professional website.

Question:  How much time does Twitter take?

Answer:  It all depends.  Like any form of internet marketing, the time and energy you put forth depends on you.  With Twitter, you want to take it slow and easy.  If you create too many messages directing your followers to products you sell online, your messages may be considered spam.  For that reason, send a few Tweets a day.  Since Tweets are 140 characters or less, this is easy.  The most time consuming part of Twitter is finding and adding contacts.

Question:  What can be marketed on Twitter?

Answer:  Just about anything.  As previously stated, it doesn’t matter whether you sell a product, a service, or if you generate income through affiliate links, you can market yourself on Twitter.  You can do so by sending carefully crafted updates.  @replies can be sent to members on your list or those you find on Seach.Twitter.com.  Look for members that ask questions you can answer.  Always provide a link to your website or blog.

Question:  Won’t people turn away from advertisements?

Answer:  Yes.  As previously stated, you want to carefully craft your Tweet messages and @replies.  Don’t just say “Come shop at my online store.”  Instead, send messages stating that you updated your store, got a new product in, or ask for feedback.  Always provide a link and those interested will click, but without feeling forced into doing so.

Question:  How much money can I make using Twitter?

Answer:  It varies.  Twitter is a service that is free to use.  You are not paid for using it, but there is income potential.  The first step is driving traffic to your website or blog, where you sell a product, service, or have affiliate links displayed.  It is, however, important to have something good to sell.  No matter how much traffic your generate, poor quality products and services will not sell.

As with any business, publishing your own online newsletter a.k.a. eZine has its share of drawbacks, in spite of the several benefits it offer.

The purpose of this article is not to scare you away with the disadvantages of publishing your own eZine, as the benefits are often more attractive. However, I will also show you how you can easily tackle the cons.

One challenge most beginning eZine publishers face is the creation of eZine content. Creating your own content can be tiresome, especially if you are not a gifted writer. You can also run out of ideas often while your publishing schedule is threatening you.

Create your content in advance. You can compile 30 days worth of content in one day, for example. If you are not blessed with writing skills, you can broker the writing task to capable freelance writers which you can find at places such as http://www.elance.com/ or http://www.rentacoder.com/. While you need to pay for such services, you are at liberty to take the credit for written articles.

Alternatively, you can republish articles from article directories such as http://ezinearticles.com/. This is a free method you can use in making content, provided you include the resource box of the original author and that the article has republishing rights conveyed.

In conclusion, you can easily tackle the content creation challenge using the mentioned methods that do not require writing on your part, free or paid.

Article marketing is possibly the most cost effective way to generate fresh leads for your business. In fact, article marketing can be totally free.

Marketing with articles to gather leads involves simply submitting quality, interesting articles to article directories and databases. There are many great article directories online that serve to host thousands of articles on all different topics. Ezine Articles is one of the top directories and should be a focus for you as they receive a lot of search engine traffic.

It is possible to generate thousands of leads per month if you can successfully submit articles that rank high in the search engines and also lead people to click through to your website and then submit their email address through your opt in form.

So where do these articles come from, you ask?

There are several options:

- You can write them yourself – You can outsource the article writing

If you are a decent writer, then you can get away with writing quality articles yourself. They only need to be between 300 and 400 words, but should contain no fluff and only quality information that will lead people to become curious about your business (without being self promoting as that is not allowed), as well as determining that you are an expert on the topic.

Or you can pay someone else to write your articles. In some cases this works perfectly, but in others only you have expert knowledge on your business and what you want to convey within the articles. But if you can brief your writer on this, a good quality writer will be able to write from your perspective. Expect to pay $10 and upwards for a quality 400 word article. The top article writers will charge up to $50 per article, but this is generally not necessary just for submitting to directories. Save those higher quality articles for your own website.

The important part of the article is your resource box at the end. This is where you can link to your website, say a bit about yourself, and provide incentive for readers to click through. Often mentioning a free report or invoking curiosity by asking a question is a good tactic.

The beauty of article marketing for generating fresh leads is that it’s totally free, it keeps working long after your article is first published, and there is no limit on how far reaching your articles will go. Thousands of websites could potentially publish your articles and link back to your site, thus bringing you more fresh leads.

There are more than 100 millions of blogs in the blogosphere. If you own a blog, you definitely want to drive as much traffic to it as possible to make it visible in that huge list.

The following are effective blog marketing methods to capture more visitors and traffic to your blog:

1. Optimized your blog posts, title tags, headings, metatags and many other parts of a blog with popular keywords to maximize your search engine rankings. The higher your blog ranking in the search engines, the better you can gain traffic relatively quickly.

2. Pinging your blog, whenever you post new content, is an efficient technique to improve its popularity and helps search engines to crawl and index your blog properly. Pinging notifies all the major blog directories of your updated content to make it available for a larger audience.

3. By adding a Google sitemap to your blog, you can more easily submit your site to the Google search engine spider. You get better coverage by the spider, than by simply submitting your blog to the Google search engine.

4. Contributing valuable comments on relevant blogs can also draw visitors to your own blog. As long as you post well-written and informative comments, chances are, people would want to know further about your expertise and be clicking on your link.

5. Search for link partners and build quality, relevant links to your blog. Quality of relevant links are far more important than quantity. Having other sites linking to your content is a sure fire way to get readers from that blog

6. To increase your blog’s “clickability”, place Adsense units in strategical places within your blog. Cluttering your blog with Google AdSense units will leave a bad impression on your readers and drive them away.

7. Post quality, original content to your blog often. The more quality content you provide for your readers, the higher the chances that your audience will link to you and share the information you are presenting to others. Great content is what makes readers stay and keep coming back for more.

Whew! The hard work is done right? You’ve put blood, sweat, tears and cash into the creation of your video content and now it’s up on the web. If you publish it, they will come right? Wrong! You’ve got some more work that needs to be done before the masses come rushing to watch your videos and the first thing you need to do is to get the search engines indexing your videos. So here are a handful of tips so get reading already because time is a wasting.

Keywords “If you don’t have good keywords then you might as well quit now. These are vital pieces of information that will help categorize your videos and make them findable in search engines. When people search for video what do they do? They put words into a text box on a webpage and that’s how they search. So make sure you choose specific words that correctly describe your video and then use those words in the title, description and the keyword areas when you post the video up on the web.

Video Sharing Sites “You will not be surprised to learn that YouTube gets more traffic than your website does. So why not put your video where the most people can find it? YouTube is one of the most popular sites on the web and one of the great things about it is that you won’t get hit for duplicate content in Google’s index when you post your videos up there. A pretty cool advantage for a small amount of work really. Making a channel to group all of your videos together will also help to strengthen brand awareness as they will be easier to find.

RSS and MRSS “These two protocols allow you to tell the search engines when your site updates and when you post something new on the web, specifically for MRSS a media file. There are very specific formats required for these files but they’re easy enough to research. Many CMS software packages even make them automatically so you don’t even really need to worry about making it, just submitting it. This will really help the search engines find you content when you tell them where these files are and soon your videos will be shooting up the search engine results charts.

Three simple things you can do to help get your videos noticed by the search engines. No they’re not the only things you can do but are more like the tip of the iceberg. These are probably three things that you will most often see suggested by SEO people. They are not the only things you can do and others include good content that’s interesting and easy to share with others.