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Twitter: The Tweet Path to Marketing Success

by Curtis Abbott on May 4, 2011

In the past, you may have brushed Twitter off as just another social platform. If you know what’s good for you, you shouldn’t, not anymore.

Twitter hasn’t been in business for over five years for nothing: anyone who’s serious about marketing their business know it’s one seriously important platform to use. In fact, more and more people are discovering Twitter’s value as a marketing tool. Users have found that Twitter can help boost business by an average of over 30% over a relatively short time.

Twitter’s a great way for you to manage your brand: you get to control—real time—how your brand is perceived by both existing and potential customers. Twitter can help you keep abreast of what your customers are talking about and opens up a wealth of opportunities to jump in to offer the goods and services that they need. Managed well, Twitter can help you build advocates and referral business.

How? Twitter is widely used by business experts who often blog about their areas of their expertise. These professionals are known attach their blog URL to their Twitter stream where it is read by both their followers and their followers’ followers, who might then retweet the message and attach the blog. If they find it an interesting read, you can bet they’ll want to learn more about the writer’s (your) business, and you’ll have gained yourself a new follower! Twitter’s platform boasts a community of 200+ million with another 450,000 new people a day joining the community, so the possibilities are simply endless! You can generate leads without resorting to cold calling or other similar presumptive marketing methods.

But while Twitter is a powerful tool to market you business, keep in mind that it’s just one of the cogs in your marketing wheel and should be used together with other platforms to make up your overall marketing strategy. Its real value lies in its search engine which allows you to search and hook up with people who need just the thing that your business can offer. You can join conversations and offer your expertise, and pick up new advocates and customers in the process.

Use Twitter together with other social platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn to maximize your business exposure and reach.

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Idiot’s Guide to Blogging: How To Write FOR Your Readers

by Curtis Abbott on February 23, 2011

Many people fail at blogging for one reason: they write only for themselves. Unless you’re a celebrity or a world-famous critic, random musings and misguided rants aren’t going to get you anywhere.

People want to read something that will make them smile or laugh. They want to read articles that get them thinking. They want reasons to come back to your blog each day. They want entertainment. No, they want EXPERIENCE.

But first things first…

Do You Know Who Your Readers Are?

Do you know who they are? Do you know what they want? Those are the questions you need to ask yourself first. After all, if you don’t know what they want, how else would you be able to give it to them?

Getting to know your readers takes time. First you need to be certain of what your blog is about. You want to be as specific as you can get. It’s easy to write about a big topic such as dogs, healthy living or cooking. But what if you were to write about taking care of your pet pekapoo, living a minimalist lifestyle or healthy cooking for picky kids? You’d have a better chance of attracting the right visitors and perhaps loyal customers.

Next step you need to take is to visualize who your readers are. Create an archetype or a persona profile of your typical reader. If you were writing about healthy cooking for kids, who do you want to attract with your blog? Single dads? Working moms? First-time parents?

Finding the Right Voice

You have to find your ideal writing voice.

I know it’s a little too abstract for your tastes. Of course, no one can literally hear you talking on your blog (I’m not talking about videos here). They can “hear” you through your words and your writing style.

The easiest way to find your writing voice is to write the way you talk. Many bloggers and writers end up sounding pretentious in their posts. Because they lack the ability to project their own voice into their words.

My advice is, don’t try too hard. Just let your ideas and words flow. Doing so will let you come up with something natural, authentic and perhaps quirky. Avoid passive sentences because they make you sound inappropriately verbose. Talk simple, as if you were chatting with someone over a cup of java.

Don’t Wait For Them To Turn Your Way. Steal Their Attention!

I’m not talking about a temporary fixation similar to what a picture of a naked woman would cause. I’m talking about literally stealing their attention and making them spend time reading your post. This is how you engage your readers.

Write something fresh. Start with a short story that’s related to the subject of your post. Use kick-ass titles! If you’re concerned about SEO, you can split your title: one part to get your reader’s attention, the other to optimize your search engine rankings.

Blogging isn’t a one-way street

Don’t take your comments section lightly. Make sure your Contact page is easy to see and use. Why? Because in your blog, you do most of the the talking! What better way to get to know your customers is there than to communicate directly with them.

Give your readers an opportunity to share and react. Of course, you have to make sure you are responding to them too. It’s how you build rapport with them.

As you can see, blogging is serious business. Creating blog posts that will gain you some traction online isn’t exactly a walk in the park. You need to do your part and create wholesome topics and content. That is, if you plan on taking your blog seriously.

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Putting A Lens On Your Business: Great Reasons To Squidoo

by Curtis Abbott on November 17, 2010

Don’t be misled by Squidoo’s frivolous-sounding name: This tool can truly help you rake in serious business for yourself! If you are involved in affiliate marketing or marketing online, then it’s possible that you’re bummed out by how long it seems to be taking to get any leverage to move your products or services along. If your struggling with technical stuff and it seems like your best efforts are getting you nowhere, Squidoo could be the answer. Check out how:

Easy Does It. Squidoo lets you build a simple webpage of your own and get it on the web for free–you don’t need to have any experience in design, all you do is pick a topic related to your industry or business and lay your thoughts, opinions, and conversation out there for others to see. Squidoo is a place where you can promote yourself, your products, your affiliate products or share your expertise on subjects other people want to know more about.

Promoting for free. You want to sell products but aren’t visible enough for people who want them to find you? Well Squidoo helps you get your product in front your target market, and it does it for free–isn’t that great? Your products need visibility in the search engines for people to find them, but you need real expertise or be willing to spend a lot to be noticed by big search engines like Google and Yahoo. Squidoo gives you that traffic for free.

No SEO expertise required. Squidoo’s already done the SEO work for you–it enjoys a high page rank from Google which it filters down to the pages or lenses you create. Google loves squidoo, and writing a lens on squidoo enables you to catch Google’s eye and get a great ranking in searches. On your own, you’d have to pay Google to get listed for the words that people are searching for, or work terribly hard at finding and using the right keywords to come up in the searches. With squidoo, you can get listed in the search results faster than a website can. You don’t need to wait to be indexed, Squidoo’s main site is already indexed and your article can get picked up at any time.

Dominate Search Engines. If you learn how to incorporate Squidoo with other marketing tactics such as article marketing and creating backlinks, you could earn a ton of money for yourself. The better you get at writing and researching your content and using Squidoo to complement your other marketing efforts, the better your chances of dominating search results.

Generate Residual Income. Squidoo generates money for you residually. Aside from the fact that squidoo allows you to gain visibility on its site for free, Squidoo advertises on each lens with Google Adwords and shares its revenue with its lensmasters (that’s you)! Just write a lens, put it up, and then sit back while your lens earns you some money. The more lenses you put up, the more you can earn. You can also explore some modules (like Amazon and eBay) that Squidoo offers to create additional income; or direct your visitors to merchant sites as an affiliate to earn a percentage from their sales.

It’s Like Real Estate. You can think of squidoo as being like valuable real-estate. You set it up in a location, and get paid for your one-time effort on a continuing basis. While you’re out working on your other marketing strategies, your squidoo lens keeps generating leads for you on an ongoing basis.

If you’ve been doing things the hard way, Squidoo could be the pivotal point to your business that you’ve been waiting for.

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Taking Your Articles A Step Further Through eZine

November 16, 2010

One way to capitalize on your writing skills and help your business grow is to submit high-quality short articles on specific topics to EzineArticles.com. Nope, I don’t own any stock in the company (I wish I did!), but I do appreciate its value in helping internet-based businesses grow. The site is a great free resource [...]

Things You Need To Know To Build Yourself A Valuable Outsourcing Team

November 11, 2010

When you find your online business running you instead of you running it, then it’s time for you to stop and take a good look at the possibility of outsourcing. You may be exceptionally gifted and terribly hard-working, but juggling multiple tasks may be more trouble than they’re worth. Running the show by yourself can [...]

Marketing For Bums? Apparently Not

November 10, 2010

When I first stumbled upon BUM Marketing, I didn’t have a clue what it was, how to use it, or even WHY to use it. I used to think bum marketing was just article marketing in a different guise, only to find that while article writing is a core component of bum marketing, it isn’t [...]

Internet Marketing Strategy Simplified

November 9, 2010

There are loads of internet marketing options available to anyone who wants to bring their business online. I’ve touched on several of these options, including Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Affiliate Marketing, Blog Marketing, and even briefly, on Email and Paid Search Marketing. The question is, which of them will get you the most bang for [...]

How to Reinvigorate Stale Business Relationships

November 8, 2010

Not everything may have worked well for you in the past. For one reason or another, some of the business relationships that you took time to build may have fallen by the wayside, and you feel awkward about reconnecting and re-building those connections. But what’s to stop you except yourself and your own fear of [...]

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Who would want to listen to the "Boring Marketing Guy?"