How to Use Twitter to Make Money Online
If you have recently started a blog, or are just now starting to get people to visit your exiting blog, then Twitter can be a great tool for you to use in order to get traffic to your site. I've created this post as a general overview of the platform so even if you currently don't have a Twitter account, you can become a marketing pro with the service in no time by following these few simple steps.
Establish Your Goal
The first thing that you need to do when integrating Twitter into your marketing plan is to establish your goal. Do you want to become a superstar who has thousands of followers? Do you want to become the authority in your niche? Do you want to keep your community small but then have close relationships with your followers? Decided which path you want to follow is important in establishing your plan because if you want to be a superstar with thousands of followers you will need a different plan than if you want more meaningful relationships with a small set of followers. Whatever your goal is though, you'll want to have a solid set Twitter tools to use.
Best Twitter Tools
In my post on the best tools to use for Twitter I talk about each of these in detail, but to summarize I recommend signing up at Social Too for automating your following and unfollowing and using a client to manage your Twitter account: Twhirl for desktops and TwitterFox for your FireFox browser. You should also stay in touch with what's going on in the Twitter world with sites like twitt(url)y and twittURLs. If you are using your blog to promote your twitter account, then use a button from TwitButtons and display your follower count with Twitter Count to drive interest. You also need a URL-shortening service, for which I recommend Zi.ma. If you want a complete resource to tools to use on Twitter, there aren't a lot of compilations that are better than the Ultimate Twitter Guide by New Media Bytes.
Get Followed
The only way you are going to make money using Twitter is if you have people following you, or better yet listening to you. Your strategy on how to get people to follow you on Twitter is going to be different depending on your goals, but you can still use these general guidelines no matter what, just be more selective on who you are following if you want closer relationships. It all boils down to following relevant people, sprucing your profile up to maximize the chances people will want to follow you, actually tweeting about interesting topics, and promoting yourself the right way. By the way are you following me on Twitter yet? How about the top 20 entrepreneurs to follow on Twitter as ranked by SMM Guru?
How to Use Twitter for Marketing
Once you have the right tools to use and you have built up a following, it's time for Twitter marketing. Since it's a lot easier to make money on your blog via advertisements, affiliate programs, or selling a product than it is with tweets, I feel the best way to use Twitter for money making purposes is to drive people to your blog. Now how do you do that? The best ways are to ask questions with a link to a post of yours discussing the topic, tweeting about breaking news in your niche, posting valuable resources people can use, and giving away something for free on your site to people following you. If you do those four things, you'll drive traffic to your site and have people wanting to hear more about what you have to say. I would also recommend this article from Mike Smith, who talks about how to benefit from Twitter marketing where others fail. In particular I liked his landing page and background image ideas. Twitip also has a nice read on how to market a niche website using Twitter.
Do you have any other helpful tips to help people make money online using Twitter? I'd love to hear about them in the comments.
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