SEO

With over 100,000 followers on Twitter and a pretty engaged audience, I often get asked by new people what they should tweet about.

Let me begin by saying I don’t have all the answers and there are many different approaches to tweeting.

Now that we have that out of the way, here’s my opinion.

Regardless what persona you decide to go with, you should do a good mix of tweets, but keep the personal tweets to under 1 in 100.

Here’s the mix, in no particular order…
Industry News
Twitter’s main strength over its competition is that “news breaks first on Twitter”. Both news and ideas spread quickly there, so it’s easy to become a thought leader.

My workflow for staying on top of this is:

Subscribe to the main industry blogs through Google Feed Reader.
Skim through the articles on my ipad using the MobileRSS app or iphone using the Reeder app.
When an article catches my eye, read through it.
If I think it’ll be interesting to my Twitter followers, I email it to Twitter using Buffer (so it goes out on a schedule), segmenting it with @p username if appropriate.
Go on to the next article, rinse & repeat.

Of course because of Buffer, I can post scheduled tweets from anywhere just by sending an email with the right email address.
Quotes
I use quotes to keep my tweets ticking over. Over the years I’ve built up a pretty good list of great quotes, ranging from inspiring, to comedy, to clangers (love Yogi Berra!).

About 10 per day go out, spaced over random periods throughout the day. This is great for keeping “front of

Find out more at What For You To Position To Twitter

For some inexplicable reason, “blogging” seems to be a taboo word to a lot of business owners. I’ll often suggest it as part of an ongoing business building strategy and the business owner will jump like I just zapped him or her with 1,000 volts of electricity!

People say things like:

“But I’m a businessman, not a writer”.
“Everyone knows you can’t make money running a blog”.
“Only hippies blog”.
“I don’t have time for that nonsense”.

It baffles me how people can still think this way. But I guess a lot of business people are still to get on “this internet thing”, so I shouldn’t be too surprised.

Let me put it to you this way:
If you’re not running a blog as part of your overall online business strategy, you should probably close your business now and get a job.
Bold statement? Yep

Care to prove me wrong? Didn’t think so

To paraphrase Blaise Pascal’s Wager:

If I’m wrong and it doesn’t make a difference to your business long term, what have you got to lose? A few hours that you would have spent watching TV or on Facebook.
If I’m right, what do you have to gain? Prosperity in a grand new world.
Come to your own conclusion.

As I’ve said before, both social and search marketing are transforming into a single entity. The pinnacle of that combined entity is blogging. It builds your home base, provides ample content to build your authority on Facebook and Twitter and generally builds the “I’ve Seen You Out There” factor.

Blogging, no matter your business, should be the focal point of all your marketing. It’s one of the easiest and best ways of distinguishing yourself from your competition and building your market dominance.

You might say “but I don’t have anything to write”. Yes you do. You’re an expert in your field aren’t you? Or at least pretty damn good at what you do? If you aren’t, you better get good at it or again, go get a job.

The way the world is going, the people who are really good at what they do will be successful, while everyone else will work for them.

My sister had really bad warts that no skin specialists could cure her of. After years of painful treatments she finally went to a great doctor who was

Read more about this at Blog Or Even Into Receivership

I’ve been on Twitter for a while. Almost 4 years now. For some reason over 100,000 people choose to follow me. I’ve still got heaps to learn about how to use it, but hopefully I’ve picked up a few things you might find useful.

I’d love to hear your top 3 twitter tips in the comments below. Share And Enjoy!
Don’t Use Twitter.com
Did I throw you with that one first up? Hehe

You’ll get the best use out of twitter by using it through a third party application. My favourite at the moment is Hootsuite, but I’ve used pretty much all of the others as well.

I don’t have anything against the web interface, but it’s kind of like driving your shiny new Lamborghini around the CBD. It’s ok, but you really should be taking it to the racetrack to get maximum enjoyment.

With Hootsuite, you can:

Schedule posts.
Run multiple accounts from one place (like your personal and business accounts).
Shorten links on the fly with their inbuilt shortener.
See pretty detailed link analytics.
Integrate with Ping.fm.
Put your website’s RSS feed into it, so it automatically posts to the different social services when you write a new post.
Save searches as a column so you can keep an eye on who’s mentioning your website or business.
And do all the other things Twitter.com allows you to do.

I’ve heard Echofon is also pretty awesome, but because they only serve Mac users and I’m cross platform it’s no good for me. Also check that out if you’re only on Mac.

Go, get onto the racing track & enjoy that Lambo.
Engage In The Conversation
If people talk to you, respond. Seems kind of obvious, but so many people fail to do it. You don’t need to go overboard and thank everyone for a straight retweet. But if that’s your character, then go for it.

Remember I said “engage”. Don’t just do a straight retweet unless there isn’t enough characters

Read more at Top 3 Twitter Ideas

If you are just starting to market your product or services online, I highly recommend you focus first on building these properties:
Build a Blog
Running a blog properly can build your authority and promote your brand like nothing ever. I recommend posting as often as you can, as long as the quality doesn’t suffer. Regular, quality posts give people a reason to keep coming back to the site. A blog can also be thought of as an eNewsletter that people actually read because they can subscribe to the feed and receive the new posts when they are published… you know what, just head over to the Friday Traffic Report for this great article on why you should run a blog. Jack explains it better than I could, maybe because he’s one of the recognized blogging leaders.

As you can see from my archives, I’m a huge fan of WordPress and recommend you get a self hosted wordpress blog. I use Godaddy for hosting (get good discounts here). I also highly recommend you spend the money to get the Thesis Theme. I’ve tried using the free templates and customizing them to suit and even though I’m fairly good at CSS, Html and Php, I’ve wasted so much time that is worth a lot more than the $80 or so that Thesis costs. I’ll be changing this blog over to Thesis in the next few days and I wish I’d done it ages ago when I first heard of Thesis.
Twitter
If you don’t have a twitter account, go and sign up now for free at twitter.com. It’s ok, I’ll wait … Now you’re back, we’ll go through why you just did that…

Twitter is a powerful social communication medium. People can follow you and receive your status updates (140 characters per update). It is the best tool available now to easily keep people up to date with what you are doing, your take on the world and resources you think people can use as well as interact with your audience, find new resources and get ideas for new

Full article at Primary 3 Places To Kickstart Your Online Presence