Using Tweet Adder to Boost Your Twitter Followers

by John Eberhard

Twitter can be a very effective way of promoting your business and accomplishing social media marketing. But in order to do that, you have to have a lot of followers. And your followers can't just be anyone, as many of them as possible should be your target public for your business. So how do you do that?

A while back I was using an online service called Tweet Spinner, but they changed their system to only allow you to do a couple of actions per day with the free service. So I bought some software called Tweet Adder (for a one time fee, not monthly like Tweet Spinner), which I have been using for several months to boost the followers on my own and client Twitter accounts.

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.

Now that I’ve been doing this for two months, here’s some idea of the results. On my own Twitter account for my business, I went from 2,500 followers to 5,637. For one of my clients, I went from 1,293 followers to 1,746.

I find it works best to open the software every other day or so, then do the following:

• Add new people to follow: You can do a search for people that have posted certain keywords in their posts, or that have certain keywords in their bio, or that live in a certain geographical area. Then those get added to your list of people to follow. Depending on how many followers you have, you can follow say 10% to 15% of that number per day, though at higher numbers of followers it is less.
• Follow backs: The software shows you how many people have followed you, that you don’t follow yet. Click a button and it follows them all back.
• Un-follow: The software will show you how many people you have followed, that did not follow you back. You can set this to wait a certain number of days (3 days is the default) before putting them on the un-follow list. Click a button and the software removes these people from the list of people you're following.

A note on follow backs is that you have to be posting stuff to your Twitter accounts (tweets) regularly in order to get a flow of people following you. If you don't post anything, by and large no one will follow you without your following them first.

What I like about the Tweet Adder system is that by selecting people using the above criteria (keywords, where they live), I find that I can get mostly people who are my target audience. This is much better than some web sites that you can use to add a couple thousand random people.

Good luck with marketing your business with Twitter and social media marketing.

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Internet Marketing Definitions

by John Eberhard

I am writing this article because I’ve observed that there are some confusions out there on some terms used in website marketing, and this can lead to wrong actions being taken.

SEO: Stands for search engine optimization. This is the process of selecting the best keywords, according to high traffic and low competition, and then placing these keywords in the appropriate places on the website. SEO is a one-time action, not something one tinkers with month by month. It should be redone every 2-3 years, as keyword traffic and competition can change significantly.

Link Building: I have observed some people have glommed this activity into SEO and use the term SEO to refer to both SEO and link building. For the purposes of clarity I think it is best to keep them as separate terms. Link building is the action of creating links on other websites linking back to yours. Google states that the number of links to your site from other sites is its primary criteria for deciding the ranking of a site. So link building is a vital activity if you want your site to rank well on search engines and thus get increased traffic.

Pay Per Click Advertising: Pay per click, called PPC for short, is the putting up of paid ads on Google, Yahoo, MSN, that appear when a visitor types in keywords that you select. You get charged money when the visitor clicks on your ad and thus arrives at a pre-selected page on your site. PPC is extremely effective at driving new traffic to your website. It is not best for low ticket items, say under $100. But for lead generation for high ticket items, it works very well. In most cases, due to the amount of competition from other advertisers, I recommend working with a consultant to set up and manage an account.

Blogs and Blogging: A blog is a special type of website that is used when you have regularly updated or new information being put up on the website. When you put up new content, the older content moves down the page. So the visitor scrolls down the page to see older and older content. Blogs are given higher importance by search engines, mainly because of the regularly updated content. If you add new content to your blog regularly, say once a week, and then also notify the blog search engines each time, you will drive quite a bit of traffic to the blog. My own blogs drive more traffic to my website than Google.

CMS: Stands for Content Management System. A CMS is a system allowing a website owner to easily update or make changes to his website via an online interface, eliminating the need of using a web design program like Dreamweaver or Web Expressions. Popular CMSes are Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal. I recently started using Wordpress for this purpose for any clients who wanted to use a CMS.

Online PR: This term refers to writing press releases that prominently contain the keywords that you are targeting and for which you want your site to rank well. There are a number of online PR sites where you can post a press release, and these all rank very well with search engines. So posting to the online PR sites creates high quality links coming back to your site and is a form of link building. Also consumers go to these sites and will see your press release. It is also good to post these press releases on your blog or blogs. This drives traffic to the blog and creates more links to your main site.

Article Marketing: This means to write articles on topics of interest related to your industry (not directly pitching your products or services), and posting them to article directory sites, which are sites that contain thousands of articles on various topics. This has been and continues to be one of the most effective methods of building high quantities of links to a website.

Reciprocal Linking: This is the activity of contacting website owners and asking them to link to you and offering to add a link to them on your website. Reciprocal link building used to be the primary method of building links, but Google discounted its value several years ago and so it is not of high value today.

Social Media Marketing: This is the activity of using social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn and others, to market a product or service. Social media marketing is very effective and does work. I have closed a large amount of business through social media. The key is to build up a large number of friends or followers, then communicate regularly with the type of communications that are considered appropriate for the social media sites.

Email Marketing: Ten years ago you could make serious hay by renting email lists and sending out HTML emails to them. I myself did this and made millions for a software company. However, due to the cast increase in commercial email, my opinion is this is no longer very effective. But it is effective to build up a list of customers and prospects who have contacted you (this is called a “house list”), and send regular email to them. For one thing, once you build up this list, communicating to them is free.

Best of luck in your Internet marketing efforts.

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Blogging Options

by John Eberhard

I have been doing blogging for almost two years, and have found it to be a great way to get messages out, promote my business, and drive traffic to my site. I have also designed and set up over 30 blogs for my clients, and I continue to manage the content on some of them. So I thought I would write an article laying out the different options for blogging systems and sites.

Wordpress.com

Wordpress.com is a free blogging site, and you can set up a free blog there. They offer a fair number of themes you can use to customize the site, but you are somewhat limited in how the blog will look. You are also limited in how much you can customize the graphics of the theme with your logo and branding.

The URL of the blog would be something like http://nameofyourblog.wordpress.com.

You can see a couple blogs I’ve set up on Wordpress.com here:
http://realwebmarketingnet.wordpress.com/
http://maloneeditorial.wordpress.com/
http://julianconstruction.wordpress.com/

Typepad

Typepad is a paid blogging site that costs $8 or $15 per month (depending on level of service) and offers quite a bit more design options and features. You can have your blog URL be something like http://nameofyourblog.typepad.com or you can put it on a separate URL like http://www.nameofyourblog.com.

You can see some Typepad blogs I’ve designed here:
http://www.novelloblog.com/
http://aeromarinetaxpros.typepad.com/
http://caldancearts.typepad.com/
http://cartandkiosksuccess.typepad.com/
http://www.realwebmarketingblog.com/

Typepad allows you plenty of design themes, and plenty of options in terms of using your own custom made graphics header, and customizing the content of the sidebar or sidebars.

Wordpress.org

Wordpress.org is also a system for creating a blog on your own site. The blog address would then be http://www.yourwebsite.com/blog. You could also set up a blog as the main thing on some web address that you would select, such as http://www.nameofyourblog.com.

Wordpress.org, as opposed to the free blog site www.wordpress.com, is the gold standard of blogging design, and offers the biggest selection of design templates and features. You can pick a theme and then customize the graphics that come along with it to add your logo and branding. You can also have a customized Wordpress theme made to your specifications.

Wordpress also gives you many options to add what they call plugins, which give you lots of functionality options, including such things as fancy photo galleries, music, search, statistics, polls, or events lists. (Typepad has many plugins too.)

Here are a couple blogs I have designed recently using Wordpress:
http://www.samsonmotorworks.com/newsletter-blog/
http://www.samsonmotorworks.com/press-blog/

There is no monthly fee with Wordpress.org. It will usually cost more to have someone design you a blog using Wordpress.org as it is more involved.

Other Free Blogging Sites

One technique that I have followed in the last year is to set up a main blog for a client using either Typepad or Wordpress.org, then set up additional blogs for them on the free blogging sites. There are six free blogging sites I have used including Wordpress.com.

The purpose of doing this is to get the client’s message out more broadly. Also each blog post contains keywords that we want the client to rank well for on the search engines, and we make each of those keywords into a link to pages on his main site. So each time you post an article or press release on your blog, and it goes out to six or seven blogs, you are multiplying the new links to your site by that number.

I have had some people ask me about duplicative content and a “duplicative content penalty.” While I have seen some prominent people worry about this, I have checked it out thoroughly and there is no duplicative content penalty, which Google even says on its web site. This, apparently, is an urban legend. There is no problem with taking one article and putting it on seven blogs or on a couple hundred article directory sites.

The free blogging sites are:
www.wordpress.com
www.blogger.com
www.posterous.com
www.tumblr.com
www.livejournal.com
www.blog.com

Posterous.com has an added benefit, which is that once you start accounts on all these blogs, you can hook up all your other blogs to it so that when you post something on Posterous.com, it goes out automatically to all the other blogs. This fits nicely with my overall marketing strategy, which is always to take one item or action and have it go out as far and wide and hit as many people as possible.

Pinging

One important action to do whenever you post something to a blog is to send out a notification called a “ping” to the blog search engines, of which there are over 20. This is not needed with any Wordpress blog or Blog.com (built on Wordpress architecture) as Wordpress has a feature to do pinging automatically.

I prefer to do it manually with a website called www.Pingomatic.com, as it gives me more control and it sends out a ping to all the blog search engines. Whether you do it on an automated basis or manually, it is vital to ping after every single blog post, as this puts your new content into all those search engines and drives good traffic to your blog.

Good luck with your blogging efforts.

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Online Email Services 2010

by John Eberhard

I wrote an article about a year ago about online email services. This is an update with new and more detailed information about these services.

I think that everyone who wants to develop an email mailing list and send out email to that list should subscribe to one of these services. For years I used a desktop based program to send out HTML email (you can’t do it through Outlook) and I think the online services make it much easier.

There are several main online email services, where you can do these things:

• Sign up and put a form on your site offering an email newsletter
• People sign up and they are dumped into a database that is stored online
• An email goes out to anyone who signs up asking them to confirm that they wanted to subscribe. This is called “double opt in.”
• You can now send an HTML email out to your subscribers any time, with the service providing nice looking templates for you to use. You can also create a template yourself using Dreamweaver or some similar program.
• You can set up a series of automated emails that go out to everyone who signs up, on a timer, i.e. one immediately, one 4 days later, 7 days later, 11 days later, etc. Whatever schedule you choose. This is called an autoresponder.
• People can then opt in and opt out without you having to manually add them or subtract them from a list
• As you build up your list, you don’t have any daily limits from your ISP on sending out to your list, which you often do with sending out from your own desktop computer

The major services are Aweber, Mailchimp, Constant Contact, and iContact.

Cost Grid

Service	1-500 names	501-1000	1001-2500	2501-5000	5001-10,000	10,000-25,000
Aweber	$19	$29	$29	$49	$69	$149
Mailchimp	Free	$15	$30	$50	$75	$150
Constant Contact	$15	$30	$30	$50	$75	$150
iContact	No prices listed on website

Features Grid

	Aweber	Mailchimp	Constant Contact	iContact
Has HTML email templates
Can import email lists
Easy creation of signup forms to put on website
Double opt-in feature
Tracking tools
Free support
Autoresponder
Sends email to you once person signs up, with their name and other info
Requires sending out a re-opt-in message to any list you import

Comments

As you can see most of the providers offer pretty much the same features. But a couple of them bear comment because they are important.

All of the providers allow you to upload a list that you have into their system. However, most of them require that a “re-opt-in” email is sent out to those people, saying, in essence, “Hey, you opted in before but are you really sure you want to be on this list?” And only the people who respond newly will be kept on the list.

I understand why these providers require this. They are trying to protect themselves against the shadow world of the spam Nazis, those self appointed police of spamming who proclaim certain people as being spammers. And this practice of requiring that a re-opt-in email be sent out to any list you upload, pretty much stops you from uploading a purchased list, which you’re not supposed to do.

The problem with this is for someone who has built up a valid opt-in list elsewhere, either with another email service or on their own desktop. You upload your list, they send out the re-opt-in email, and only the people who respond again will be included on the list in the future. The problem with this is that with the amount of email that people receive today, probably only 20-30% of those people will respond and opt in again to be on the list (I’m guessing as I haven’t done this). So if you have a valid opt in list from another source, you will in all likelihood lose 70-80% of your names.

I bring this all up because Mailchimp currently does not require this re-opt-in email to be sent, and I have recently opened an account for a client and uploaded a list they had built previously and mailed to it. So that is a big plus in my opinion.

Another interesting feature, which you wouldn’t know until you got in there and started using the service, is that Constant Contact will send you an email when someone has signed up, but it basically just says “someone signed up.”

So if you wanted to use the service to collect people who respond to your lead generation campaign, it won’t work very well with Constant Contact. Because instead of receiving an email every time someone fills out the form, with that person’s name and phone and other information in the email, you just receive an email saying “someone signed up.” And you’d have to log into your account online and find that record to get that person’s information.

On the other hand, with all the other services the system will send you an email when someone signs up, but it will include all the information in the email that the person typed into the form. So those emails can be sent or forwarded to your salesmen and they can get right onto selling the prospects. I only found out that Constant Contact’s system does not do this when I tried to set it up that way for a client recently. I confirmed it by contacting them.

That means that with Aweber, Mailchimp and iContact, you can use the system to get people to sign up for your newsletter, but you can also use it for people to respond to your lead generation program and request more info or your free offer. With Constant Contact, their system makes it not very convenient for a lead gen campaign, so basically the only thing they’re good for is for newsletter signups. I know some people think they’re the best but that hasn’t been my experience.

I didn’t mention this in the grid, but I have used Aweber a lot and know their system integrates really well with a Google AdWords campaign. I know Constant Contact does not. Not sure about the others.

So my picks for the best service has to be either Aweber or Mailchimp. And if you have a list you’ve built up elsewhere that you want to import, Mailchimp is the way to go.

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Website Marketing Made Easy, Part 3

by John Eberhard

As I covered in the last 2 weeks, most people who have a website for marketing their business have one of three problems with it.

1. The website is producing no leads or sales and they have no idea what to do, or whether anyone is even coming to the site

1. The website is producing a few leads or sales, but the owner doesn’t know how to increase it

1. The website is producing a decent flow of leads or sales, and the website owner wants to increase that, but doesn’t know how

Website Marketing Made Easy

There are essentially four methods of driving people to a web site:

1. Pay per click advertising (PPC)
2. Non-paid, or “organic” traffic from search engines
3. Driving traffic to a blog, then referring visitors over to the main website
4. Social media marketing

In the last two weeks I covered PPC, organic traffic and blogs. In this article I’ll cover social media.

Driving Traffic with a Social Media

The trick with social media marketing is to set up accounts with the various sites, get lots of “friends” or “followers,” then communicate regularly on those sites, and include links to your web site.

The top four social media sites are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace. What I call the second tier sites are Plaxo, Plurk, FriendFeed, and Vox. If you have limited time to devote to this, just start accounts on Facebook and Twitter.

The next thing to do after you start accounts and fill out info on your profile (and include links to your web site or sites on the profiles), is to start connecting with people and add friends.

Some people like to use these sites just as a way to connect with personal friends, and if so that’s fine. But if you want to use social media as a way to promote your business and your web site, you should think in terms of getting thousands of friends or followers. Facebook allows you a maximum of 5,000 friends, and Twitter has a sort of ceiling at 2,000 but you can break through that if you work at it. I currently have 3,500 friends on Facebook, and 4,400 followers on Twitter. I wrote an earlier article on developing lots of followers on Twitter.

I have had a policy on Facebook for a long time, that I will propose being a Facebook friend to people that have at least 20 friends in common with me.

Once you start developing some friends/followers, then you have to post what are called “status updates” regularly saying what you are doing. It’s best to do this several times a day if possible. This is a bit of an art form, because you do not want to post “Buy my stuff” messages all day long as you will really turn people off and they will “un-friend” you or at least block you so they can’t see your updates.

I see even some web marketing “gurus” who should know better, who post stuff about their products all day long.

Here is my status update posting advice:

1. Post updates throughout the day, talking about what you are doing with your business. This reinforces the fact and reminds people of what you do and what your business is, but not in an obnoxious way. For instance, if you a real estate agent, post that you just had a sale go through escrow, or that you have a new listing (with a link to it), or a comment on the current market.
2. Occasionally include links to any new things you have done online, such as a link to a new blog post or article, a link to a free white paper offering, or a book you are selling.
3. Post links to interesting articles by others that you have found, or articles about interesting things in your industry. However, don’t let this be the only thing you ever post. I see some people who do this and my thought is “Do you ever have an original thought yourself?”
4. Post things about personal stuff in your life occasionally, like your kids, your vacation, your personal interests, etc. You may think this is dumb, but it personalizes you, and tends to avoid people shutting you off because you’re always just hyping your business.

Handling Outflow and Inflow

This is tricky because if you don’t watch it social media sites can just soak up hours of your time, and you end up wondering “What did I do all day?”

For outflow, meaning your outgoing communications to these sites, I recommend starting an account on www.Ping.fm, then hooking up all your social media accounts to it. That way you can post a status update on Ping.fm and it automatically goes out on Facebook, Twitter, etc. Ping.fm has a 140 character limit to your status update, which is the same as Twitter. So by using that site you don’t have to log into each account and post things separately, which saves you time and gets your message out to more people.

Both Facebook and Twitter will send you an email every time someone interacts with you, so it is good to set up mail rules and have those emails dumped into a sub-folder automatically rather than cluttering up your inbox.

I think it is best to set aside a certain time each day to look at these emails and to browse through what your friends are posting, and possibly limit how much time you spend on it.

With that said, however, I believe it is important to spend some time reviewing what other people are saying and to respond to it, comment on it, etc. This keeps you engaged and real to people on your friends list.

Social media marketing can be a good source of traffic and business. I have closed a number of sales from it, including the biggest web design project I have done so far.

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