Stop Wasting Your Time with Facebook and Twitter

Many people think that social media will help them grow their businesses. They expect to make money by using Face book, Twitter, and LinkedIn as marketing tools.

Facebook’s 350 million users collectively spend more than 8 billion minutes on the site each day.

But the truth is that the vast majority of people is NOT making money with social media and is just wasting their time.

I have five action steps to commence making money on Face book, Twitter and LinkedIn and stop wasting time.

1.  Create a Business Model

• Identify the exact product or service you want to sell through social media networks.
• Who is your ideal customer? Define your target audience.
• Develop a system to close sales on the phone, online, or face to face.

2.  Establish a Strategy for Using Social Media

• Pinpoint your top three goals with social media (i.e., to generate leads, to find partners, to solidify current business relationships).
• Recognize time frames for accomplishing these goals.

3.  Use the Right Social Media Network for Your Business

• Become recognizable with all of the major social media networks.
• Contact your customers or prospects and ask them which one of these social networks they go to most regularly.

4.  No Social Media Abuse

• Be familiar with the rules of the particular site you are on. For example, Facebook can ban you for posting unauthorized commercial communications.
• Find out the limitations of the site you are on. For instance, Twitter limits the number of direct messages you can send to 250 a day.

5.  Measure Your Results on Social Media Networks

• Set very specific measurable goals. For example, you might want to get five new prospects a week and turn one of them into a new customer.
• Start measuring your results — and keep refining your strategy until you get it right.

Follow these action steps to begin making money with your online business.

Gain Massive Exposure and Money on Twitter

There are two impressive Twitter related sites that I use to get more retweets for my posts and make money for tweeting other people posts.

Retweet.it

Retweet.it is a website that allows you to reach an exponential number of followers on Twitter. You can earn free credits or buy credits in bulk.  Free credit is given to you once you retweet other people posts.  Your account will be credited .5 retweets. Or you can purchase 50 retweets for $5.00.   When you first sign up, you receive 5 free credits.

Naturally, I don’t like paying for things that you can get for free.  But I wouldn’t recommend  following what I did for free retweets.  I retweeted 120 retweets, just to get 60 credits, because remember you only get .5 credit for each post you retweet.  It looked like I spammed all of my twitter followers.  I got tweets like this:

Sorry dudes.

I really thought I was going to lose most of my followers, but I in reality gain 30 more followers. I am not sure how that happened, but I am pretty sure when my followers log on to their account and see all my 120 retweets I will lose a lot more.

If you decide to go the cheap way like me, I suggest retweeting only a couple at a time.  Possibly retweet up to 10 retweets every hour.  If you don’t care then go for it.

The following steps is what I use to gain the maximum exposure for my post on Retweet.it

1)      I social bookmark my post with Stumble Upon or Digg.

2)      I use the StumbleUpon or Digg URL (http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/dynastywebmarketing.com/making-money-online/do-you-want-to-dominate-craigslist) and

3)      I shorten it with bit.ly (http://bit.ly/bwlw2r) – to track how many people click on my link. This way I can saturate Twitter AND StumbleUpon/Digg with my post to gain more views.

I post a message and use my bit.ly URL (http://bit.ly/bwlw2r) and type how many credits I want to use and hit “Submit”.

I track my progress daily on bit.ly and Stumble Upon (under Favorites tab) or Digg.com (Click on Profile at the top, then “History” tab to monitor “Duggs”).

Betweeted.com

Betweeted.com is a website where advertisers compensate Twitter users for introducing a specific URL to their followers. It’s not like ad.ly or sponsored tweets. Twitterers are paid based on click-throughs, not impressions. You choose the post you want to tweet and it allows you to tweet it from their site.  They track how many people click on the URL from your twitter account and credit your account.  You can receive your money through PayPal or by check.

Today, I tweeted one post from Betweeted.com to see how it works and I earned $0.05.  That means that only one person clicked on the link and which was me (just to see if it works) because all of my twitter followers are mad at me for tweeting 120 retweets today.  I don’t blame them.  Better luck tomorrow.  Or maybe I should try again on Thursday when all is forgotten.

Try it out for yourself and let me know what you think.

Unsubscribe to EVERYTHING…Get your life back!

This is coming from a person who is subscribing to at least 25 business and personal blogs both.  I set rules for myself just so I can be more productive.  According to my rules, I am only allowed to check my email every 2 hours for 15 minutes each.  It sucks because I can stay on my email for hours, literally.  I love every single blog I am subscribed to (I subscribe to RSS Feeds by email only) and would love to read it because some of the events or advice I need to know right now.  At least that’s what I believe.

So I was reading Viper Chill – cool blog, I must say and very helpful.  I read the blog post “The Very First Thing You Should Do in 2010″ and the article improves managing my time online through Netvibes. According to Glen, “Netvibes is a custom homepage that allows you to customize thousands of modules to have an area online that is completely how you want it. I’ve tested countless alternatives such as iGoogle and have found nothing I prefer more over Netvibes.”

He made Netvibes appear so awesome and an ultimate one stop shop, so I had to sign up.  Netvibes allow you to create separate tabs, so I create an IM RSS Feed tab (all my tips, advice and how-to blogs) and a personal RSS feed tab (for all my guilty pleasure blogs). I started to unsubscribe to every blog I was subscribed to by email and set up every single one of my RSS feeds on Netvibes.  I love it so much; I completely cleaned my email account.

I love the way Netvibes set-up the RSS feed module so when I click on a post and I can read the entire post on my Netvibes site.  I also use Netvibes for Twitter and my Face Book accounts.  I need to have peace and tranquility in my life and this made it so much easier to achieve this.

To all of the sad, “Hate to see you go” emails, I haven’t gone anywhere, I am still with you learning and cracking up at everything you post.

I am falling in love with Twitter again

As of last week, I was following over 3,000 people on Twitter. Seriously, like who can keep up. I wanted to make a clean break with my Twitter account and start over.  Not completely over, I had over 3,000 followers. I quickly created an account with Twit Cleaner.  Twit Cleaner is amazing software that analyzes your followers and place them in different categories, such as:

• Trying To sell You Crap
• Multiple @s
• Nothing but links
• Tweeting the Same Links All the time
• Tweeting Identical tweets all the time
• Not active (fewer  than 10 tweets)
• No activity in over a month
• Don’t interact with anyone

You can run a FREE report with Twit Cleaner and they will Direct Message (DM) you once the completed report.

It’s pretty cool to see your followers face to face and see what type of follower they are.  The Twit Cleaner will unfollow people for you, if you are following:

• Up to 2,000 people (i.e. most users) – Free!
• Up to 25,000 – $5 USD
• Up to 50,000 – $10 USD
• Otherwise – $20 USD

Ok.

Since I am absolutely cheap and not fond of paying for anything, I decided to unfollow everyone and start over.  First, I visited Twitter karma and now they are not allowed to do a “Bulk Unfollow” anymore.  Now that Twitter Karma was no good to me, I download Tweet Glide.  I use Tweet Glide because they do a bulk unfollow and I need to unfollow over 3,000 followers now.  I let go of everyone, I didn’t know over 99% of my followers so there was no love lost.  I started to follow back people I knew and wanted to follow.

I went into my Social Oomph account and uncheck “Auto Follow” to stop from following everyone who follows me.  Contrary to what you’ve heard, it is not “bedside manners” to follow everyone who follow you back.

I also uncheck “Unfollow those who unfollow me” because that’s just not playing nice.  I will follow any of interest to me; they don’t have to follow me back.  That’s just life…on Twitter.

In the process I lost some followers because they still had their ‘Unfollow those who unfollow me” checked. I am close to losing over half my followers. I am ok with that. I will rise again, but this time with a more targeted twitter following.

I will search for people who are tweeting about the topics of my niche and reply back solutions that will hopefully help. I will use TwitHawk.com service to find those conversations and to reply back with my key solutions.  TwitHawk.com search for keyword phrases requested by you, and reply back with responses entered by you.

Maybe they will follow me, who knows, but I feel like I have more control over my Twitter account.

I am falling in love with Twitter again.

Grow Your Site With Traffic and Friends

A fantastic group created by Daniel Scocco from Daily Blog Tips called the ReTweet Club was a remarkable idea to begin.  It unifies bloggers to spread the love through Twitter and beyond. I want to share the benefits of being with such a group.

Main Purpose of this Group

More traffic, of course!

Once a blogger retweet your blog to their followers, there is a chance some of their followers will click on the link to read your blog post. Or even better, retweet it themselves and the series continue.

On the other hand when I retweet someone else’s blog post…

First, I make sure I read the article, to see to it that it is a good article to retweet to my followers.

Second, I make a comment and give my two cents on the subject. On an MS Excel spreadsheet, I type the blog link of the post, blog title, and give a short description.  The reason I do this is to check back the next day to see if my comment was approved.  If so, I social bookmark the post using Only Wire.

I social bookmark the article because it is a great article to bookmark of course and for backlinks to my site.

Third, I retweet it.

The most valuable benefits to being in this group for me are:

• I learn something new regarding a diversity of topics.
• It helps me gather ideas for some of my blog posts
• I  found some great blogs I subscribed through RSS feed, PrimerMagazine.com (even though it’s for guys, I still find it very funny and clever what men talk about), EverythingIsHistory.com (I am a history junkie,  I learn something new from each blog post Tamahome writes, FreeNuts.com of course, and too many others to name on this blog.
• Last, but not least, I network with some awesome people.

It’s all about unity and this is the perfect group to help you grow your site with traffic and friends.

How do I make money on Twitter with no followers?

Twitter is a great source of getting potential buyers that NEED your product.  People are tweeting their concerns and problems  in real time.

You can perform a search on twitter on its home page:

For this example I am going to sell a weight loss product.  In the twitter search box, I input the phrase “need to lose weight” for people who are tweeting about needing to lose weight.

I also added “-http” in the phrase to eliminate all of the other weight loss marketers who are promoting their weight loss product with a web address link.  You can also try “-www”.

I found a couple of people who are saying in their tweets that they need to lose weight. For example @shogoRX7 wants to lose weight in 2010.

I reply back to her the following message:

I click on the reply button after I type my message and now it’s sent directly to her so she can click on the  link.

You can dedicate a couple of hours per day and perform the same steps with your own niche.  If you have any questions about this technique, leave me a comment.

Be good to Twitter and Twitter will be good to you

I am one of those people who knows the benefit of Twitter, but yet never made the time to actual use Twitter the way it was meant to be used.  I automated my Twitter account with Twitter Feed to make tweets for me and felt that was good enough to make my twitter account look alive.  I came to realize that this was not enough to receive the real benefit of Twitter.  The biggest indicator on how influential I am on Twitter was my Klout Score.  The Klout Score is a numerical representation of the size and strength of your sphere of influence on Twitter. The scores range from 1-100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of influence.

My score was 28 and over the last 30 days:

• % of tweets containing links: 100%  (This means, ever single tweet I have has a link.)
• @messages sent: 0%  (This means I don’t tweet to anyone on Twitter).

I have over 2,000 followers and only receive 1-2% of my followers click on my links from my Tweets.  This is really sad.  The least I should have is a 5% click through rate on my links from my tweets.

Here are two great ways to start being influential on Twitter:

1. Help people find answers. Use Twitter search and search for tweets containing your niche.  People want to know how to lose weight, make money online, or anything you actually know how to do.  Reply and give them a solution to their problem or where they can find the solution.
2. Ask questions. There are many twitter experts out there that can help you with any questions you have. Ask them to check out your website or any other questions you may have.

I have definitely learn my lesson and will be implementing the 2 steps above.  If you are anything like me and have abused your Twitter powers, today is the day to correct it.  To the busy crowd – take 30 minutes to an hour to  rework your Twitter magic.  It’s time to use Twitter the way it was created and it will definitely payoff in the long run.

How will Twitter take over the world of search engines?

How will Twitter take over the world of the search engine? I believe Twitter has just made the most phenomenon deal with the biggest search engine giants of its time.  Almost as big as the deal with George Foreman and the grill .  Twitter has made a deal with Google (who dominates 70+% of the search engine) and MSN Bing (formerly known as MSN Live Search, who may now be able to compete with Yahoo Search) to have real-time results of tweets appear in the search engine results.  You know what this means...GET YOUR TWEET ON.

You have to realize that this deal can be a gift and/or a curse.  The gift is for online businesses like us to tweet more about our products or services and have it show up on the search engine. This would be a lot easier than all of the techniques we are using to be on the first couple of pages of Google now.  We are not sure yet of  how Google will determine and filter each tweet result that will show up.  Maybe the search engine will filter for the active users who retweet more or go with older Tweeterers who has been on Twitter since day one. I will definitely keep you updated on this one.  The curse of this deal will be all of the unnecessary tweets that have nothing to do with the topic that is being searched online, but has the right keywords to appear on the search engine results.  This can discourage people not to search anymore because it would be useless if you can’t find what you are looking for by searching through useless tweets.  Hopefully Google and MSN BING will put this together the right way and bring us more online business with Twitter and their search engine.

I was once a skeptic and now I believe in the word of Twitter. Some of it, of course.

Google is really excited about this new deal. “We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months,” Google vice president Marissa Meyer wrote in a blog post.

For MSN Bing search users, it is available now only in the US.

For Google, we are not sure when they will implement this feature yet.  I believe that Google is taking it’s time to filter it’s search engine to bring the best results.  Let’s cross our fingers.

Drive significant traffic to your website through Stumble, Digg, Twitter, and other social networking sites. Please click here for more information on our Social Media Marketing Services.

What is a geekier, faster way to manage Twitter?

I found a great tool for Twitter that helps me manage my Twitter village.  It’s called Tweepi and its the geekiest way of managing all of your Twitter followers.

It helps you with four greatest functions to manage your Twitter account – Geeky Follow, Geeky Flush – unfollow people who are not following you, Geeky Reciprocate – reciprocate the twitter people that are following you and you are not following them, and Geeky Cleanup your Twitter village from inactive, creepy users.

What’s great about this particular tool is that it have stats on all of your twitter followers.  Bio, Full name, Location, # of Followers, # of Following, # of Updates, Tweets of last week, # replies sent by user, RT’s done, links tweeted, replies received, # of times retweeted by others, [replies sent] to [replies received] ratio*, [followers] to [following] ratio *,  links tweeted ratio.

This is a beta version as of now with very few bugs that I haven’t encountered, but if you so happen to, you can contact them through their feedback page.

First up - Geeky Follow people who are following one of your idols or competitors.

Since I have a blog about making money online, I wanted to see who is following one of the biggest internet followers who also have a blog about making money online.

I have the option to choose only the best twitters from John Chow with the options that Tweepi provide me.

I can choose from the following:

• Active users who have tweeted within the last 7 days
• Higher reach or influence who has RT and get RT’ed much
• Twitters who have conversations with other twitterers (this eliminate spammers who just tweet their product over and over again)
• Higher followers to following ratio – This is for people who want to follow twitter celebs
• Avoid linkless ramblings -(40% – 80% is the best combination of links and two-way conversations.  100% links might be a bots).

Once you choose your option, you can click on each individual person to follow or click on the  ”Follow?” tab at the top of the column and it will follow every one on the list.

Next is the Geeky Flush – Unfollowing Twitters who are not following you.  Tweepi gives you the exact number.

You can can unfollow everyone on your list by selecting everyone and clicking on the “Unfollow” Button at the top.

Third is Geeky Reciprocate – Reciprocate the love to your fellow twitterers that are following you, but you are not following them.

You can follow everyone back if you like by selecting who you want to follow and click the “Follow” Button at the top.

Last but one of the greatest, Geeky Cleanup – Clean up the deadbeats who opened a twitter account and wasted good space doing so by not using it.

If anyone knows me, they know  I despise clutter. This is one of my favorite tools to use to clean up my Twitter village.

Tweepi gives me the same details of as before, but this time it is giving me the strength to really look into the twitter eyes and choose whether or not they deserve to be there.

To unfollow those who creep you out, select the users and click on “Unfollow” Button.

Now, we finally have our Twitter village under control and we can sleep better at nigh.  Let me know what you think about Tweepi and how it help managed your Twitter village.

How to get quality followers on Twitter?

I think that it is important to get “Quality” versus “Quantity” twitter followers if you are marketing your business online. “Quality” twitter followers have the same interest and audience you are targeting for your product or service. “Quantity” twitters followers are any and every person that would follow you just because you are on Twitter. It’s been reported that only 3-5 % of your followers will click on any of the links you post on Twitter. People who are pro “Quantity” says that since this is the case, wouldn’t you want 3% of 1,000 twitter followers versus 3% or 500 “Quality” followers to click on your link?

In my opinion, I don’t see the point of having 3% of 1,000 twitter followers go to my website if they are not interested in my product or service I am selling. I would rather have 3% of 500 quality followers go to my website because they are most likely to purchase something or more interested in signing up for my newsletter at least.

Now, if you are with me and want “Quality” followers, there are many ways to accomplish this.  Most ways are long and tedious.  The quickest way I have found to add quality twitter followers is through TweepML.  TweepML allows people to make a list of fellow twitter users in a group of the same interest.

For example, if you have a service or product that relates to being earth friendly, then you can find a Green group on TweepML that has a list all of the followers of the Green Twitter Group. You have the option to either click on a couple of people or one-click that follow everyone in that group. Those people may follow you back or you can send @replies to them about your service or product.

In addition, you can make your own list of people that share a common interest in your group. That is what I am going to do with this article. For each person that makes a comment on this article and type at the end of their comment their twitter user name, I will add them on my list of “The Coolest Internet Business Owners to follow”. Like-minded individuals will automatically follow you since you relate to them. How cool is that! So if anyone is interested, please leave their twitter user name @_____ in your comments, you will be a part of list of the “Coolest Internet Business Owners to follow”.