Next Level Blogger » twitter

A New Book on Twitter

Christian Russell — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 14:00:30 +0000

One of the cool things about blogging is FREE STUFF. I just got an advanced copy of Twitterville from Maureen Cole at Penguin Group, and it’s really been a pleasure being able to get a copy of this book and read it. I want to thank Maureen and Penguin Group for their generosity.

As you know, I am a big advocate of reading books. It’s massively important to keep your education ongoing, especially when it comes to your business.

Here’s the deal: if you’re in business, you best be getting your social networking in gear. And that means you need to read up on Twitter. Anyone who’s ever thought they couldn’t understand the value behind Twitter and how it could possibly be valuable for their business (an all to common comment I hear) needs to read this book.

Twitterville not only puts Twitter into easy to understand terms for any business owner or marketer, it also puts it into a global perspective, so you can truly see the massive power you’re ignoring by not getting in on the conversation.

I do use affiliate links on Next Level Blogger on occasion; this is not one of them.

TWITTERVILLE officially goes on sale September 3. But you can read a free excerpt or preorder the book today at www.Twitterville.com

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Please Post Your Facebook and Twitter Profile Here

Christian Russell — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 14:00:45 +0000

All readers of Next Level Blogger, I encourage you to use this post to link up your Facebook profile or fanpage and your Twitter account. Just place the links in the comment section. I’d like to follow you and see what’s up. Also, this of course is a great way to share your profile with all other readers of Next Level and hopefully meet some great people with common interests as well. Seems like a win-win to me, so link em up!

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How to Use Twitter Professionally

Christian Russell — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 15:00:45 +0000

It’s fairly clear how Twitter can be cool for personal use, correct? Friends follow each other and communicate via 140 characters or less. It’s a slightly more social version of texting. When it comes to business, it gets more complicated, because we have sales goals. We want to sell things. We want to make money. So how can you use Twitter to make money?

Here’s the thing, if making money directly on Twitter is your goal, you will be best served to simply stay away. Twitter can absolutely be a big part of your internet presence, but direct money-making goals aren’t gonna fly in this arena. Sorry.

The Novice Approach

I understand there’s a lot of novices (some of them are just fools, but most simply don’t know what they’re doing) out there, and they’re setting up multiple Twitter profiles, blasting out direct sales messages all day long. Most of these sales messages contain affiliate links or links to sales pages they’ve created. Perhaps they’ve invested in some course that guaranteed them that by doing this they’d make $10,000 a month on Twitter. I don’t know. The point is that this is not the purpose of Twitter, and by doing this they’re only making themselves a nuisance. It’s like going to a huge party and instead of going inside to hang, these people flier everyone’s windshield and leave. It’s rude. It creates no value, only litter. And it does not create a professional impression for them or their company. Also, it’s not effective. All those fliers end up in the trash.

How the Pros Do it

So how do you conduct yourself professionally on Twitter when you’re trying to run a business? The key is to embrace the social aspect of this huge network of people. The fact is that most people on Twitter are good people. It’s a party, and you’re invited. This analogy of course has been used before, but it’s true. Don’t flier the cars, just go inside and have fun.

How can this possibly bring in more business? Since when is networking not a good way of drumming up business? It’s age old…it’s a legacy way of getting new business. It’s proven; it’s effective. It works! But you don’t walk into a networking function or a gathering of any kind and just start pinning your business card to everyone’s lapel. You talk to people. Your business is what you do all day. Trust me, it’s gonna come up! How many new people have you ever met in real life who didn’t eventually ask what you do for a living? It usually comes up in your first conversation. Twitter is the same. Don’t forget that social rules have not changed just because our modes of communication have evolved a bit.

The way you conduct yourself professionally on Twitter is the same way you’d conduct yourself at any other social event in real life. Very simple, I know. But simple is good, right? Social networking is a huge way to leverage and expand your internet presence, drive traffic to your site and get new business. Conduct yourself professionally, and you will do well.

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How to Use Twitter to Build Business

Christian Russell — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 15:00:38 +0000

I want to write this quick post about how to use twitter to build business, because almost every time I mention Twitter to my friends, I’m met with confusion. So many people don’t get it. Or so they say. I think you all actually DO get it and just don’t want to admit it!

After all, what is there to explain?

Being able to keep constant tabs on everything people say about you and your brand. Do you not see the value in that?
Being able to contact everyone in your network once, twice or even several times a day and keep in personal contact with thousands of people easily, quickly and for free. Do you not see that value in that?
Having millions of people all in one place in an easily searchable and digestible configuration. Do you not see the value in that?
Being able to not only keep in touch with your base easily and cheaply but being able to massively GROW your contact base, meeting and conversing with as many people as you like…all interested in the same things as you or prime prospects for what your business offers. Do you not see the value in that?

If you do not see the value in these things…which is what Twitter is all about…you do not need to worry about Twitter. You need to get in touch with why you’re in business to begin with!

Is Twitter a funny little tool that will require you to learn some new things and think in new ways? Heck yes. But you’re an entrepreneur, right? Since when does a challenge scare you?

If you want to know how to use twitter to build your business, all you need to do is use it. It’s kind of automatic. Unless of course you just don’t see the value in interacting with people.

How do you feel about this? I know there is some discontent amongst the business community regarding using twitter to build your businesses, because I’ve come face to face with it many times. Does this touch any nerves, answer any questions or tick you off a little bit? Let me know what you think

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Quick Start to Internet Marketing

Christian Russell — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 15:00:02 +0000

Many people out there are looking for a quick start to internet marketing. I understand. Most people in my network are business people, and we are the kind of people who want to get things rolling quickly. You know being online and marketing yourself with blogging, internet marketing and social networking is essential, but you don’t know the best way to go about it, and you have a million questions.

This massive access to information causes what’s called “paralysis by analysis”. In other words, we’re so fixated on learning what we need to do, we fail to act. This is death for business. You need to act, but you don’t want to screw things up. So here is a quick start to internet marketing checklist that will give you what you need to get started. It contains a little philosophy and a few specific actions that will get you off and running. There is a lot of value in knowing you’re starting off on the right foot, so I hope this helps. If you have any questions, let me know by commenting or contact me!

Quick Start to Internet Marketing

Make the decision that your focus is going to be building a real business…or extending your existing business. Do not allow your sole focus to be making money. If your focus is on building a real business, creating a good reputation and brand and creating value for others, it’s hard to screw things up. It’s when we decide to focus solely on making money that we start doing crappy, spammy things that we will regret later…and that will not do us any good. This is the first step, and it’s easy. Just decide that your focus is going to be on creating value for your customers, not just selling stuff. With that, you have already cleared half the hurdles. Believe it or not, it really is that simple!
Start a blog. Don’t over think it. Don’t dwell on it for more than five minutes. Pick a platform, and fire it up. If you want my specific advise, I recommend using Wordpress, and I recommend having a professional set it up for you. I can do it for you, or you can have any number of other professionals do it for you. Wordpress can easily be search engine optimized, and it is highly extensible. Some of the most successful blogs on the internet use Wordpress, and for good reason. That said, it’s more important to have a blog than it is to make absolutely certain that every detail is perfect. Your blog will serve as the hub of everything you do to market yourself online. It is your home. You need a place to hang your hat. You need a blog.
Post to your blog regularly. The more you blog, the more you will learn. The most important thing is to get started. I could write for 10,000 words easily right now about how to do this. And if you want to solve any specific marketing issues sooner rather than later, I recommend using my consulting services to jump start your efforts. That said, this is not rocket science, and if you put in the effort you will learn everything you need to know simply by doing it. You get out what you put in. Again, if you’re focusing on creating value for your customers, your blog will be on target.
Get on Facebook and Twitter. Are there other social networks? Heck yes there are. Is there value in checking them out and learning about them? Heck yes. But this is a quick start to internet marketing guide, right? So let’s keep it simple. The fact is that Facebook is huge, and Twitter is massively important and an indispensable tool. You can do a lot of damage with just these two. Just as with blogging, use them regularly. An inactive profile is worthless to you. Just like if you leave your house unattended…it will deteriorate over time, this is true for your internet property as well. You have to maintain it for it to grow and remain valuable. Use your social networking profiles for being social and meeting people. Sure, link out to your blog posts and such, but keep the content you produce 99% social. Believe it or not, people know you sell widgets even if you don’t tell em. It’s linked up on your page, see? So they know already. You don’t have to tell them every five minutes. Meet people and concentrate on getting to know and learning from others with similar interests. After doing this for a while, you will start to get these mysterious messages in your inbox. They will be coming from people who have visited your site and are interested in what you’re selling, and you’ll wonder where all this magical activity is coming from. Some of it’s coming from Twitter, believe it or not. And it will have all happened without you having to hard sell anyone. This stuff works really well, if you work it. Let it take time. It’s fun anyway, so why turn it into hard work?
Let it take some time. Like I mentioned in the previous step, this stuff doesn’t happen instantly. One thing about internet marketing is that people often expect immediate results. I’m not sure why that is. It must come from a misconception about what’s happening. When you give someone a business card at a social event, do you expect them to buy something from you right there on the spot? No. You meet 28 people that night, and 9 of them call you back over the next few weeks. You build it from there. This is how it works. Social networking has become confused with being this new phenomenon, and we think it’s complicated. It’s not. Social networking is people with common interests hanging out, talking. This has been going on for ages. It’s how business is done. And building a business takes time.
Read and learn. Study what you’re doing. Read other blogs. Look at other websites, especially within the same field as you’re working. Apply the CASE principle of success I’ve described in a previous post. Never stop this. Learning and stealing ideas from your competitors is another age old business principle that is not ever going to go away. Use it to your advantage.
Don’t quit. Be consistent. As I say so many times, things take time. As the saying goes, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Of course I don’t consider this quick start to internet marketing checklist an ultra-comprehensive tool. After all, it’s a quick start checklist! However, I would love your input. Do you have anything you’d add?

In upcoming posts, I will be posting some of my top resources. Articles and tools I’ve used to learn this business. It’s only fair for me to share all my secrets with you, seeing as how everything I’ve learned about internet marketing is online…imagine that

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Get High Quality Traffic to Your Site

Christian Russell — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:13:23 +0000

Use this ultra-simple technique to get high quality traffic to your site every day. It works. No, it doesn’t send HUGE traffic to your site. It sends high quality traffic. There is a big difference of course. Huge traffic is great and necessary if you want to make a lot of money from advertising. But as I talk about a lot here, high traffic is only one of many ways to make money online.

My personal experience comes from getting really good conversions from high profit products and services. Some of the sites I run now only get a few thousand visitors a month, but they are highly profitable, because when I get traffic I convert it. And when I convert, I don’t make fifty cents…if you know what I mean. So if you’re offering a truly valuable product or service through your website, you don’t need a lot of traffic. You need GOOD traffic…highly targeted to what you offer.

And the best quality traffic you can get is traffic resulting from personal referrals. Twitter makes this possible, and it is a beautiful thing.

Use Twitter to Get High Quality Traffic

Use this list and let me know how it works for you:

Build a quality network - Yeah, I know. This takes time! It’s OK. It’s worth it. Add people who have interests in line with what you’re offering. They will often follow you back. Also, put your Twitter profile up on all your social profiles, websites, etc. This is how you build your follower count. Use http://search.twitter.com to keep tabs on who’s talking about you or your brand. If someone is talking about how much they love (or even how much they hate) your product, do you think they’re a good person to follow on Twitter? The answer of course is yes.
Install Tweetdeck. Seriously, just do it. It’s the best Twitter client ever, and it will save you a lot of time and help you make better sense of your twitter feed.
Use Tweetdeck to set up ongoing searches for search terms relevant to whatever you’re selling. In other words, if you’re selling “brand xyz widgets”, then “brand xyz widgets” should be one of the searches you have saved in Tweetdeck, bare minimum. When people use the search terms you have saved, they will show up in Tweetdeck automatically. Can you see where this is going?
Talk to them. Thank them for loving you. Thank them for hating on you. Check out their profile, and if you think they’re a good potential buyer for what you sell, follow them.
When appropriate, send them a link to a specific article or other page on their site. **Keep it authentic and conversational. I want to stress that this is not an excuse for spamming people on Twitter. I’ve received my fair share of replies on Twitter when some spammer just responds to something I said with an affiliate link or with a link to a landing page. This is crap, and it’s not what I’m talking about. But if someone is following you and they tweet out something about how they’re really loving a certain band right now, for example…and you happen to have just written a post on how you love that band too…it’s more than appropriate for you to tweet out a link to it.

This takes time, and it takes work. And it is one of the best ways to get great, targeted traffic to your site. Let me know what you think!

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How to Really Screw up Your Business With Social Networking

Christian Russell — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 16:41:08 +0000

As spamming continues to grow on Twitter and other social networks (I’ve been noticing it a lot this past few weeks more than ever), I’m compelled to mention again how easy it is to do more damage to your brand than good when using social networking tools.

Twitter and Facebook are great networking tools, but they’re being treated more and more like get rich quick platforms…as if such a thing really existed. I’m seeing a lot of ads for programs on “How to Use Twitter to Make $10k a month Starting NOW”…and other B.S. like this.

Does anyone actually subscribe to this mentality? I’m taking care not to mention any users or companies specifically. You’re not going to catch me bad mouthing anyone, but you and I both have seen this activity. Here’s the thing:

I think most of these users are more concerned with making money than anything else. They’re not worried about damaging their brand, because they’re not even trying to build a brand. They’re not even TRYING to build a business. They just want to make a few bucks.

I think this kind of shortsightedness is a shame. But the more I see this kind of activity, the more I think this is true. I hope the readers of this blog can see further down the road. Building a real business is NOT that big a deal! Anyone can do it. I hope you can see the truth…spamming out affiliate links and offering no value to your contacts is not a way to build a business. And ironically, it’s also not a good way to even make a few bucks!

When was the last time YOU clicked on a blind link in a piece of spam email you received? When was the last time YOU bought a product through an affiliate link that someone blasted out through an auto-DM on Twitter?

Sensible people don’t buy things this way. It’s just not how it works. If you’re building a real business that you want to be profitable and sustainable, this is the absolute last type of activity you should be involved with.

If people would stop looking for fast money and start actually getting to work, there would be a lot less crap out there. That’s for sure. And they would also learn that making REAL money is not all that difficult.

Have you seen this spamming activity or is it just me?

Do you subscribe to the idea that simply blasting out affiliate links is a way to make money?

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How to Use Social Networking Sites for Business

Christian Russell — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 01:48:09 +0000

I like to keep it simple. Simple is good. Know why? Because it works. Social networking for business is not rocket science, but for some strange reason, many of us WANT it to be! Perhaps it’s human nature. Perhaps if we think it’s complicated, then we will be able to figure it out…and after we figure it out, it will be easy. And our lives will then be easy. And money will fall into our laps without us ever having to lift a finger, because we’ve figured it out. We know the secret!

Perhaps that’s just too much of me running my mouth about this issue! But there’s something real here…something that most of us do not want to admit. We WANT there to be a secret to success in most cases. We WANT there to be some hidden key buried somewhere, and if only we could find it, dig it up, or somehow otherwise discover the key…then all our troubles would be over. We would finally get it, and financial freedom would then be ours. We would arrive. We would be successful.

Here’s the TRUTH:

Success is hard work. Social networking for business is not a get rich quick tool. Social networking has many powerful tools that can greatly enhance your business, but they are not magic. You have to work them if you want results.

Isn’t it just so refreshing when someone takes the time to NOT B.S. you about this stuff? Anyway, you absolutely can make huge gains in your business and sales through using social networking, but you can also waste a lot of time if you do it wrong. So in the name of keeping it simple, here are a few pointers on how to use social networking sites for business.

How to Use Social Networking Sites for Business

Be social. Duh?
Don’t force your growth. It takes time to build a quality network. Do you really want thousands of “friends” who literally don’t know who you are? It just takes time. If you have ONE real, quality, targeted and engaged contact on Facebook, that’s WAY better than 10,000 who are not even cognizant of who you are. Let it take time. Quality, not quantity.
Don’t expect immediate results. When you meet someone at a party, do you expect them to sign a contract with you, hire you or in any other way buy something from you that very night? No, not unless you’re a real sleaze. That’s not the way it works in real life, and it’s not the way it works in social networking.
Don’t hard sell. This is killer. You can do more damage to your brand than anything else. If you’re on Facebook solely to market yourself, shut your account down now. It’s a social site. Branding and selling happens all day long there, but it’s a byproduct, not the primary concern. Allow it to remain a byproduct of you being there, and you will do fine. Once selling and promotion becomes your priority, you will start losing ground immediately.
If you’re using auto-DM on Twitter, turn it off. Seriously. If you think you’re using it tactfully, you’re wrong. If you don’t know what this is, don’t even look into it. You’re better off not even worrying your pretty little head over it. Again, seriously.
Linking out to your site is cool, but don’t do it constantly, and it shouldn’t be the ONLY thing you’re doing. C’mon, who likes a guy or girl who just constantly talks about themselves all day?

Short list, I know. Like I said…it’s simple. If you want to know how to use social networking sites for business, this is as far as you need to take it. Sure, you can get way more complex than this, but why? You don’t over think it when you go to a networking function in real life…guess what, in social networking you ARE networking with real people. It is real life.

You can reach massive numbers of people this way, and social networking is free. What more could you ask for? Let it be simple, let it take time, and go out and rock it!

Do you have any to add to this list? Let me know what you think!

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Why Automated Businesses are B.S.

Christian Russell — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 18:39:16 +0000

This is something I’ve been seeing so much lately, I just wanted to comment on it. Automated businesses. Are you buying into this? I hope you’re not. I’ve been on Twitter a lot, and that’s where I’m seeing it mostly. It seems that Twitter has a growing number of spammers, and I fear it’s only going to get worse.

It’s human nature I suppose. We always want to find the path of least resistance. I believe in using tools to help you streamline your work and save you time, but if you believe any of these are a good idea, you’ve got your head in the wrong place: “Make $250k a Year Working 2 Hours a Day”, “Get 10,000 Twitter Followers in the Next 30 Days…Automatically!”, “100,000 Visitors to Your Website for $39″. Just a few examples.

You will do yourself and your customers a great service by simply putting your head down and getting to work. Instead of looking for a shortcut that can be had for $39 (of which none exist of course), create your OWN success, one piece at a time. And guess what…THAT kind of success is REAL and FREE! But the more time you spend on this automated business B.S. the further you’re pushing back the day that you’ll ACTUALLY be successful! Hard work won’t kill you, but it WILL make you successful! It’s just not fair, I know