How to Use Twitter to Promote Your Business

Your first step to use Twitter effectively to promote your business is to register and create an appropriate profile. That will include potentially creating a custom Twitter background and learning about all of the tools, applications and gadgets you can use to optimize Twitter as a marketing tool.

Creating Your Twitter Background

Because your Twitter Profile is something that will help brand and differentiate you, it’s important to spend some time making it represent you and your company. Twitter offers templates you can customize, you can utilize secondary software to create your Twitter background, and you can outsource the task to a graphic designer. Many graphic designers who specialize in web content are now offering custom Twitter backgrounds.

Custom Twitter backgrounds give you the power to present a strong first impression. It sets you apart from your competition, gives people a good idea of who you are and what you’re about and if you provide links to your website(s) it’ll send you traffic.

Once your profile has been created, it’s time to find your audience. Rest assured once you begin posting relevant, valuable and beneficial information and are interacting with Twitter users, you will get more followers. However, in the beginning, you may want to connect with key influencers. How do you find these key influencers?  Search!

Finding Friends and Followers – Twitter Search

Once your profile has been created, it’s time to find friends and followers, people to connect with. Twitter search is a great way to get started, however you can also download your email contacts and search for friends that way.

The Twitter search tools provide essentially two ways to find information and potential followers.

Basic Search – Is a keyword driven tool. Enter your keywords, click the search icon and your results show up on the left hand side. Take a look at the various people posting frequently on this topic to determine if they’re a key influencer. For example, if you own a crafting website, you may want to follow Martha Stewart on Twitter because her followers are most certainly interested in crafting too.

Advanced Twitter Search – Click the Advanced Twitter search button at the bottom of the page where you can search by multiple words, person, or hashtag #. (The # is a tool to create groups, which people can search by. Using the crafting example from earlier, you could post something about crafting and then end it with the #crafting hashtag.)

Interacting on Twitter and Promoting Your Business

Your next step is to begin interacting with your fellow Twitterers. Twitter asks one question, “What are you doing?”  The trick is to make it relevant to your business and interesting and you have 140 characters to get it done.

Your tweets or posts are designed to accomplish two things, promote your business and connect with users. Sometimes you can accomplish both however other times you’ll want to focus on just connecting or just promoting. Yesterday, we mentioned several ways you can promote your business using social networking. We mentioned posting attention grabbing headlines and linking to your site, we also mentioned announcing promotions. You can even give away free content on Twitter. Here are a few tools to help you use Twitter to promote your business.

• Twitter Groups gives you the ability to join and create groups to motivate a following. It’s a great tool for creating sub-niches within your audience.

• Social Too is a site that automates following those who follow you.  It also filters spammers and has a survey function. Additionally, you can automate a custom message to thank all those who follow you along with a link to your website or a giveaway.

• Magpie is an advertising tool, which helps identify key influencers for your product or service, and then use them to spread the word about what it is you have to offer. You create your own ad campaign with your choice of message and keywords.

•  Twitter mobile. There are also a large number of widgets and plug-ins, which make Twitter accessible from just about anywhere including your Blackberry, iPhone, Gmail, post them on your blog for cross promotion and so on. You can find a number of these applications by clicking on the apps button at the bottom of each page.

Twitter can also be linked to Facebook so all of your Tweets show up as Facebook posts, thus helping you optimize your efforts.

How to Add Video to Your WordPress Blog

Video is popular and getting more so this year,  and I hear many asking how to include video in their blogs.

Let’s add the Google’s Love Story Super bowl Ad here, since it’s fresh on everyone’s mind:

Now let’s see how I did that. On the right side of the screen, when you are on the video page, you’ll see this little wheel looking button, as seen below:

Click on that button, and the space below it will  an expand with more options. Make sure you unclick the related videos if you don’t want more videos to pop at the end of the video. Also, if you’d like to add a border around the video, you can pick any of the color combinations you see there. You can also choose the size of the video.

Once you are done, it’s time to copy the code and paste it into your blog. Click anywhere on the field next to “Embed”, and it will be highlighted.

Then, click CTRL to copy the code, and go to your HTML view on the dashboard:

Point to where you’d like the video to show, and paste the code. You are done. And it was really easy, wasn’t it? If you still have questions, feel free to leave a comment below.

What Is a Blacklist and How to Avoid Being Blacklisted

You may have heard the term “blacklist” and wondered what this meant. If you’re blacklisted it means you’ve been labeled as a Spammer by the internet service providers and the penalties can be stiff.

Now you’re scratching your head and thinking, “well I don’t send unsolicited emails or bulk email messages so I’m safe, right?”

Not really. There’s still more to worry about. There are actually several types of blacklists or reasons for blacklisting. It’s important to understand the difference.

Spam Blacklists are lists of mail servers or open relays known to be used by spammers to deliver unwanted email. An open relay is an SMTP server configured so that anyone on the internet can send email through it, including Spammers.

IP Blacklist blocks specific IP addresses, message senders or message recipients as determined in the blacklists. They can be temporary or permanent.

Email Blacklists include known mail servers and addresses used by spammers. With these lists in place, access to the server can be denied and unwanted email messages are discarded. Additionally your legitimate emails may also be blocked.

DNS Blacklists are usually maintained by anti-spam organizations. They include a list of IP addresses that send unsolicited emails.

Staying Off the Blacklists

To stay off the blacklists there are a few things you can do:

- The most obvious is to not send unsolicited emails or bulk e-mails – don’t SPAM.

- You’ll also want to make sure your server is correctly configured and secure, and not an open relay mail server. This is why it’s important to make sure your website is being hosted by a legitimate provider who doesn’t host to Spammers because if you’re sharing a server, then you can be labeled as SPAM too because you’re coming from the same server. My preferred host is MomWebs

- You’ll also want to make sure your subject lines and email body doesn’t trigger SPAM filters. Occasionally run your content through a SPAM checker site to make sure you’re not triggering any filters.

- And check to make sure you’re not already blacklisted: it can happen quite unintentionally. You can check if you’re listed by visiting:

- http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx
- http://www.dnsstuff.com/

If you are blacklisted, de-listing isn’t easy but it’s necessary if you want to use email marketing to build and grow your business. The first step is to find out why you were listed and who listed you. Each agency has their own delisting procedure. Follow it, get back in their good graces and then follow the suggestions above to stay off the blacklists.

Getting blacklisted isn’t the end of the world but it can put a huge kink in your email marketing strategy. Best advice: stay off the blacklists by making sure everyone who receives an email from you wants it, don’t SPAM, and make sure your mail server is secure. You can also recommend whitelisting you to people who request email messages from you. This will help ensure they receive your email messages on time.

How to Write a Marketing Plan

Starting your own business is an exciting but also very stressful endeavor. In order to ensure the success of your business, you are going to want to conduct a lot of research and do a lot of preparation. An important aspect of your research and preparatory work includes creating an effective marketing plan because behind every successful product or service you will find a well-crafted marketing plan. If you have recently created your own business or are thinking of doing so in the near future, you’ll find useful information concerning the process of writing a marketing plan.

A marketing plan is a written manuscript that specifies what the necessary actions are in order to realize one or more marketing goals. Marketing plans can be crafted for a product, a service, a brand, or a product line and the objectives that they cover typically span between one and five years. In order to have an effective marketing plan, however, you also need to have a well thought out business plan and marketing strategy, which both serve as the foundation for the marketing plan. The business plan details your business’s financial and operational goals and policies and the marketing strategy is the overall direction a business plans to take in the hopes of focusing its finite resources on the best available opportunities so as to boost sales and gain a competitive advantage.

One of the key components of a marketing plan is the mission statement. In it, you are going to want to write a few sentences stating who your chief market is, what it is that you are selling (contribution), and what your unique selling proposition is (distinction).

There are several topics that a marketing plan should address. These topics include:

- market analysis details, sales advertising

- public relations campaigns

- as well both traditional and new media programs and strategies.

In order to conduct a thorough market analysis, you are going to want to collect and organize as much data as you can about the current market that will be purchasing and using your products or services. When doing this, some important aspects to consider include paying attention to market dynamics and patterns like seasonality, assessing the offerings of your competition, and keeping in mind who your targeted market is and what their demographics are.

A marketing plan should also offer descriptions of both your products and services and your competition. You want to detail how your products and services relate to the needs of the market and how they rise above what the marketing is currently offering. As far as your competition goes, you are going to want to detail what makes your product or service distinct and stand apart from your competitors.

Additional components to include in a marketing plan are product pricing details, where your product is going to be positioned in the market, and what your monthly budget is going to be.

After detailing all of the aforementioned information, you should be able to create quantifiable marketing goals for your business whose effectiveness should be closely monitored and revised as needed.

There are so many facets to evaluate and take into consideration when starting your own business, but if you take the time to first create a well thought out marketing plan, then you will be providing yourself with a great guide to keep you on the path towards success.

Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing : Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers is a great resource for those in the planning stages of their business.

How to Create and Upload a Simple Twitter Background

Today I decided to update my Twitter background and logged my steps so I can share.

I used Photoshop Elements to create my background, but you can use another program you have and/or like better.

1. First, I had to decide what size to create my background. I did a little bit of research on the web, and learned that most internet searchers use a resolution equal or greater than 1024×768, so i used that as my guide.

2. I created a new image with those dimensions, and made it look like the background of my site, which is a light gray checkered image. Here is what my images looked like at this point:

3. Next, I created another image sized at 550×125 pixels where I added the URL of my site. I used the same blue background my website header has, and white letters, since I want my Twitter background to have the same theme as my site. I needed to try several sizes for this step, and eventually came up with the above sizes (some were too wide, some were too long, etc.).

Here is this image:

4. My next step was to add this smaller image to my initial image. I selected the image, copied and pasted it into my first image. I then had to rotate it 90 degrees to the left, so that instead of horizontal, my image now was vertical. I dragged the image to the left of the original image, and here is how my final twitter background image looks:

5. Next, I needed to upload my new twitter background image to Twitter: Click on the “Settings” link at the top of your twitter page.

6. Then, click on the “Design” link:

7. Scroll all the way down, and you’ll see this:

To upload your image, click on the “Change background image”, and you’ll see this:

8. Click on Browse, locate your image, and then click on “Save Changes”

You are all done with your twitter background. But you still need to change the look of your links, so that the colors match. Here is how you do that: Go back to step 7, but instead of clicking on “Change background image” click on “Change design colors”, and you’ll see this:

Click on each one of those squares, and modify the color, so that it matches your background image and/or your site. For example, I used yellow for my sidebar and red for my sidebar border, so that it ties in with the newsletter sign up on my blog.

Wasn’t that easy? Let me know if you have any questions.