Developing Lots of Followers on Twitter

by John Eberhard

So now you have an account on Twitter and you think it would be cool to use social media to help your business. But you have only 34 followers, so when you post a “tweet” it’s not going to have much impact.

The goal is to build up lots of followers, so when you post something, lots of people will see it.

I realize that some people just want to use Twitter as a way to communicate with personal friends, and that’s fine. This is about using Twitter as a business generation tool.

The trick with Twitter is to build up your followers to the thousands, so that when you tweet something about your business, a lot of people see it.

I used to use a service called Tweet Spinner, which was free, but now their free service has been reduced down to three actions per day and you can’t do much with it. Their paid service is $35 a month. I now use software called Tweet Adder, and I bought the 5 profile package for $74 (one time fee). So I can use it on 5 different Twitter accounts. For one account it is $55.

With Tweet Adder you can automatically follow a bunch of people that fit a certain criteria, such as:

• They posted something with certain words in it

• They have certain words in their bio

• They live in a certain area

The idea is that you follow them, and a certain percentage, not all, will follow you back.

Let me explain how each of the three points above are useful. Let’s say you want to target business owners, nationally. You find people who include the words “business owner” or “entrepreneur” in their profile bio. Then you follow a bunch each day and a certain percentage will follow you back.

Or let’s say you are a local dance school. So you target people who posted something with your keywords in it “dance,” “dance class,” etc., AND that live in a certain geographical area.

Or let’s say you have a home improvement company. You might target all people that live in a certain geographical area, with the idea that many of them are home owners.

Twitter has rules about adding too many people in a day. You should keep it down to 10% of your total of people you are following, per day. In the beginning when you don’t have many, you can probably get away with 20%.

So you start doing this for a week or so and now you have way more people you are following than are following you back. Tweet Adder will locate those curmudgeons who didn’t follow you back, and remove them. It waits three days after they were added (to give them time to see who is going to follow you back) and then displays how many there are to be removed. So you can then enter that amount in the “Unfollow” window, and press “Start” and away it goes.

So the trick is to develop a strategy for your business of locating who to follow, then following new people, up to 10% of the total people you are following, per day. Let’s say you have 500 people you are following. Follow 50 new ones per day. Then after a few days when Tweet Adder starts displaying a number of people who have not followed you back, have the software delete them. So you just jockey those two factors back and forth, following new people, then removing the ones that didn’t follow you.

Engagement

The next trick in using Twitter as a business generation tool is to start posting things about your business on Twitter. I follow a strategy of posting things several times a day, saying what I am doing at the time, such as “I am working on a new web design project,” or “I am reviewing my client pay per click advertising accounts.” I have found this strategy works for me, and I use Ping.fm and have it hooked up to my Twitter account, as well as my Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn accounts, so when I post something on Ping.fm, it goes out to all.

You have to observe what other people post and get a feel for what would be good for your business. My advice is not to post “Buy my stuff!” messages all day long because it will just annoy people and they will “un-follow” you.

So as you post things about your business, now you will get people starting to follow you. They will find you using the Twitter search feature, or they will be using Tweet Adder or some other software. They will be searching for people posting certain keywords, just like I talked about you doing, above.

So when I post things I will think about keywords and what keywords other people might be searching for, and I will try to include those. I also notice that when I link to something in my tweets, like a new video I have put up on YouTube or a new offer I have like a new white paper I have written, it tends to increase the number of people following me from that.

Follow-Backs

So now that you have people following you, you probably want to follow them back. Otherwise they will probably un-follow you in a few days (if they are following this type of strategy which many are). So Tweet Adder will show you the number to follow back, and you just press a button and will automatically follow them back.

The Email Traffic

So now as people start to follow you back because you followed them originally, or as people start to follow you because you tweeted something of interest to them, you will now get emails telling you that so and so followed you. I believe you can turn off this function but I like to get those emails as it allows me to track what’s going on. But you don’t want all that cluttering up your email inbox. So start an email rule so that everything coming from “postmaster.twitter.com” gets dumped into a folder in your email. That allows you monitor the flow but keeps your inbox free.

Good luck with Twitter.

 

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34 Tips on Creating a Social Media Presence

by John Eberhard

1. Start an account on Facebook if you don’t already have one

1. Start an account on Twitter if you don’t already have one

1. Start an account on MySpace

1. Start an account on LinkedIn

1. Start an account on Ping.fm. Hook up all the accounts above to your Ping.fm account, so that whenever you post a status update to Ping.fm, it automatically goes out to all your accounts.

1. Work out some kind of strategy for adding lots of friends/followers on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, because if you don’t have a lot, your communications will not go out to anyone. My strategy has been to search for my personal friends first and add them, then start adding people who have at least 20 friends in common. Using this strategy I now have 3,400 Facebook friends and 3,600 Twitter followers. In order to use your social media accounts to promote a business, you should target to get thousands of friends/followers.

1. Put up a Facebook fan page if you don’t already have one. Promote this to your Facebook friends (but don’t keep asking people to become a fan of your page over and over).

1. Once you have some friends and followers, observe what other people do and what types of communication they put on Facebook, Twitter, etc. Get a feel for each site and what is acceptable.

1. Start posting some “status updates” yourself, via Ping.fm. You will need to develop a strategy of how to communicate about your business without being obnoxious. One thing I do which has worked well for me is to post status updates saying what I am working on at the time, such as “I am working on a new website for an aviation company,” or “I am setting up a new pay per click advertising account for a new client.” This establishes the fact and reminds people that I am a web designer and Internet marketing consultant. This has gotten me business.

1. You can occasionally do a status update telling people to come to your webinar or download your eBook or even buy your product. But don’t do it all the time. It gets really annoying. And I see some people do it, even some so-called “gurus” who should know better.

1. Also include status updates occasionally about personal stuff, such as your kids, your vacation, your dog. Post pictures or videos. Don’t make it all about your business.

1. Avoid one word, cryptic status updates that are basically a private joke between you and only a few other people. My theory is it’s basically trolling for people to respond “What do you mean…?” Some people specialize in this. You know who you are.

1. Start an account on Plaxo. And you can import all your Facebook friends that also have an account on Plaxo. Hook it up to Ping.fm.

1. Start an account on Plurk. Hook it up to Ping.fm.

1. Start an account on FriendFeed. Hook it up to Ping.fm.

1. Put up a Wordpress or Typepad blog. Start posting something to it once a week or more. Your posts can be articles at 300-1,000 words, or can be short messages related to the topic of your blog. You can comment on something someone else put on another website or blog. You can link to a video, or embed the HTML code so the video appears right in your blog.

1. After each blog post go to www.pingomatic.com and send out a notification called a “ping” to all the blog search engines. Takes 1-2 minutes, and really drives traffic to the blog.

1. Put up multiple links to your main website in the sidebar of your blog.

1. Put up a free blog on free blogging sites like Wordpress.com and Blogger.com.

1. Put up a free blog on Posterous.com. Then hook up all your other blogs to it so when you post something on Posterous, it goes out to all of them automatically. Saves time and increases your reach.

1. Use keywords in your blog posts, keywords that you want to rank for. Then link them in the blog posts back to your main website. A word or phrase linking to your website is what is called “anchor text,” and is considered the most valuable type of link.

1. When posting a status update on Twitter (a “tweet”), remember that people will use the search feature on Twitter to search for people who use certain words or phrases in their tweets. They will then follow those people. I notice I get a burst of people following me on Twitter whenever I include certain key phrases in tweets.

1. Take any articles you post to your blog, and also put up a page for them on Squidoo.com and HubPages.com. Squidoo lets you put multiple links to your site into the article whereas HubPages only allows one link.

1. Spend a small amount of time every day or every couple days adding new friends on Facebook and Twitter.

1. On Twitter, the strategy I use is to follow people who tweet with certain words or phrases that are related to the topic I’m working on. Then a certain number of them will follow me back. The idea behind this is that you will hopefully be following people who are possible prospects for your business.

1. Use software to follow people on Twitter who include your keywords in their tweets. TweetAdder and TweetSpinner are two possible options. Doing it manually takes too long. Also use one of these packages to remove people you’ve followed who don’t follow you back.

1. Spend a few minutes a day on Facebook reviewing the status updates of people on your friends list, and comment on things other people are saying. Not just business but personal stuff too.

1. Once you make a comment or click the “Like” button on someone else’s post on Facebook, you will now get emailed every time someone else comments on it or whatever. I set up a mail rule in my email software and dump all those emails into a folder, so they don’t clutter up my inbox, and I can review them when I have time (or not).

1. I also set up an email rule so that all emails from Twitter get dumped into a folder and don’t clutter up my inbox.

1. When you set up an account on MySpace, don’t put some bizarre, busy background behind your page so it is impossible to read what’s on the page. I think this is what killed MySpace, because it became too difficult to read people’s pages. Originality is great but don’t sacrifice readability.

1. When you get leads for your business, track where they come from so you know if your social media efforts are bearing fruit.

1. Once you have a Facebook fan page, hook your main blog up to it so every time you post something to the blog, it shows up on the fan page. That will make your Facebook page more active and appealing for fans.

1. There are two purposes of starting an account on social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Digg and StumbleUpon. One is to create an account and put in bookmarks to all your favorite sites, making it easy to find your favorite stuff. Another is to bookmark your own site and various pages on your site, your blog, your social media pages and so on, and each of those bookmarks will count as a link to those pages. This helps with search engine ranking and it can help people to find those pages as well.

1. Stay engaged. Once you start these accounts, you have to spend a little time regularly, communicating what you’re doing and responding to the communications of others. And adding more friends or followers. And reaping the rewards. I get regular business from my social media presence. You can too.

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34 Tips on Building Links to Your Website

by John Eberhard

1. Submit articles to article directories, including a “bio box” at the end with your website address. I see article directories getting zero comment from other so-called SEO experts and yet I have been doing them for 5 years and have seen them consistently get results in terms of building high quantity links in a short time.

1. Write optimized press releases with your targeted keywords in them and submit them to online PR sites.

1. When you submit a press release to online PR sites, submit it to several because they each have arbitrary rules about what press releases they will accept.

1. Put up a Facebook fan page, with links to all your websites and blogs. These rank highly on search engines.

1. Put up a blog and write regular articles and posts that include links back to your main website.

1. Include sidebars on your blog with links back to your main site, including links to any offers you have, books you sell, eBooks you’re giving away, etc.

1. Put up a free blog on free blogging site Wordpress.com. Write regular articles that include links back to your main website.

1. Put up a free blog on free blogging site Blogger.com. Write regular articles that include links back to your main website.

1. Put up a free blog on free blogging site Posterous.com. Write regular articles that include links back to your main website.

1. Put up a free blog on free blogging site Tumblr.com. Write regular articles that include links back to your main website.

1. Put up a free blog on free blogging site LiveJournal.com. Write regular articles that include links back to your main website.

1. Use Posterous.com and hook up all your blogs to it, then post your content to Posterous.com and it will go out to all your blogs.

1. Don’t worry about “duplicate content” penalties. This is a myth. Check what Google says if you don’t believe me.

1. Every time you post something on your blog or blogs, go to www.pingomatic.com and send a notification, called a “ping,” to all the blog search engines. If you use multiple blogs, ping for each one except Wordpress.com.

1. When you put out a press release on the online PR sites, also post it on your blog.

1. Post status updates on Facebook and Twitter that include links to interesting stuff on your website.

1. Set up accounts on social media business directories like Hotfrog.com and About.org, including a blurb on your company and links back to your website. I’ve identified 21 sites like this that are effective.

1. Start an account on LinkedIn. List your website address.

1. Start an account on MySpace. List your website address.

1. Produce a video about your company and post it on YouTube and other video sharing sites. Be sure to include your website address.

1. Ignore Google’s advice to simply put up great content on your site and wait for others to link to you. You will become old and gray before you get rich this way. You need to be more proactive than that.

1. If you have multiple websites for different businesses, figure out a logical way to have them all link to each other.

1. Take your articles and put each one up as a “lens” (basically just a page) on Squidoo.com. Include links to your website and blogs.

1. Take your articles and put each one up as a page on HubPages.com. Include one link to your website (HubPages is not as friendly to marketing as Squidoo).

1. Forget about “reciprocal linking,” where you email someone and ask them to link to you and you link to them. This used to be the primary method of link building but Google devalued this about two years ago and you get little benefit from it anymore. (Some “experts” still recommend it though).

1. Despite the fact that Google’s advice to “just put up great content and people will link to you” is pretty anti-marketing, you should still come up with great content and put it up on your site as well as plastering it far and wide.

1. Find bloggers that write about your topic and pitch them on writing something about you. Or offer to guest-write something for their blog.

1. Submit your site to directories that allow free submissions.

1. Set up accounts on bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious, and StumbleUpon, and bookmark various pages from your site.

1. Put up a free listing on Yelp.com.

1. Avoid link farms, defined as a group of websites that all link to every other site in the group. Most of these are created with some automated setup. Link farms are considered a form of spamming by search engines. You might notice that the word “spam” has evolved to not just mean unsolicited email but anything any techie now considers bad.

1. Put up free ads on Craigslist.com.

1. In your own blog posts mention other people in your field occasionally who have stuff of interest and link to them. What goes around comes around.

1. Hire a brilliant website marketing consultant to do all or most of this website marketing stuff for you, allowing you time to get out more of your own product or service.

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What You Can Tell With Google Analytics

by John Eberhard 

Google Analytics is a free web statistics service offered by Google. Just sign up with an account or you can do it easily from your existing Google AdWords or Gmail account. Then you get some HTML code that needs to be put on every single page of your website. If you have multiple websites, create a profile for each site.

OK, now you’ve got Google Analytics set up. What kind of information does it tell you?    

The first thing it tells you is how many visitors you are getting to the site each week. I graph this for my own site. For many of our clients we do a monthly report that shows how many visitors they got to their site for the last month.

If you are doing any kind of website marketing program, this number of website visitors should be going up month to month. That tells you that your program is working.

Some people insist that the real statistic you want to look at is not web visitors, but unique visitors, which counts a person only once even if he came to your site multiple times. I disagree with this, because ideally you want people to come to your site multiple times, don’t you?

The next thing to look at is Page Views. This is the total number of pages that were viewed in the given time frame that you’re looking at. This will always be at least as many as the web visitors, but will almost always be more. You want this to be as much higher than the web visits as possible, because it shows that people are moving through your site to multiple pages. You want your ratio of page views to visits to be as high as possible, because the more pages they look at, the better your chances are to sell them your product or service. It also means they are not bailing after just one page.

The next thing to look at is the top pages and how many visits they are getting in your given time frame. This shows you what your most popular pages are, it shows you how effective your navigation system is in getting people to the pages that are most important for you, and you can see how much traffic any new or special pages are getting. You can also create special landing pages for an email or pay per click campaign and this shows how many people actually arrived there. You can also look at specific form pages or buy pages on your site and see how many people went there versus how many people filled out the form or bought the item. If the ratio of visitors to conversions for those pages is poor, that tells you that you need to work on improving those pages.

The next thing to look at is the referring websites. These are sites that have a link to your site, and it shows what the site is and how many people came to your site from there. The biggest numbers here are usually from search engines, but you will also see some other sites that have links to yours. This tells you which of your link building or social media marketing actions are bringing people to your site.

For instance, you might see referrals from Facebook or Twitter. Or you might find out Wikipedia or some similar site has a link to you. For instance, on my political site I have written several articles about a historian named Alexander Tytler and his cycle of democracy, and Wikipedia has linked to my articles and I get a lot of traffic from that.

The next thing to look at are the keywords that people entered in search engines on their way to arriving at your site. This gives you an indication of what keywords are important for you, and can be an indication of which keywords your site is ranking well for. It also shows which keywords people are entering to arrive at your site via the pay per click systems like Google AdWords.

Having Google Analytics on your site, you can really tell what is going on with your visitors, and you can see how well each new thing you do is working. Anyone who has a website who is serious about getting good results from that website should put Google Analytics or some other type of web statistics system up on that site. I like Analytics because it is free and has some great features. Without it, you are flying blind. With it, you can make more intelligent decisions and improve your results.

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