Maybe you have heard about this tiny, little social networking site called Twitter and you have come to realize that it could be a simple and easy way for you to connect with members of your audience.  If this is you and you don’t know where to begin, I’m here to help.  I’ll be walking you through everything you need to do and know in order to be ready to start tweeting immediately.

1.  Create Your Twitter Account – This is simple, just fill out your desired username, real name, password, and email address.

2.  Post a Photo or Logo – I prefer a photo here as people want to see what the person they are following looks like.  To upload your photo go to Settings, then the Picture tab.

3.  Change Background Image – Do not just select one of the default backgrounds provided by the system.  You need to have one made that is custom to your account.  This means adding a few things to the background, such as a URL, larger photo of you or your brand, and any other company information that you want to the visitor to know.  Make it look professional, and also unique so you can stand out from the crowd.  This is done by going to Settings and then the Design tab.  Check out our cool Twitter backgrounds article for sites that can help you design something specifically for you or your company.

4.  Account Settings – You want to make sure the “more info URL” points back to your site so visitors know where to find more information about you.  Also your bio needs to be short and sweet.  You don’t have a lot of space or time to engage the viewer which means you need a bio that is interesting, humorous, stands out from the crowd, etc.  This will increase your chances of the visitor clicking your follow button.  Also in the account settings section, don’t check the box that says protect updates or only your followers will be able to see your tweets.  This will inhibit some people from following you in the first place since they can’t see what you are about beforehand.

5.  Device Settings – Here you can set up your mobile phone to send tweets via text message.  I have a smartphone so I just use a Twitter app, but you can also use the web as well.  This is up to you and your own personal preference.

6.  Notice Settings – I like knowing when someone sends me a direct message so I can respond to it quickly.  If you plan on taking your Twitter marketing seriously, you’ll gain a lot of followers and getting email updates when that happens will get annoying quickly, so I recommend unchecking that box.  You should also stay on Twitter’s newsletter list so you can keep up to date with site changes.

After following these steps, you will have your Twitter profile set up to become a power user!

If you really want to make an impression and increase the number of people following you on Twitter then you need to separate yourself from the herd.  One way to do so is to make sure that you have a cool twitter background.  You do not need a lot of design experience to create something custom and unique, there are plenty of sites out there who offer services for free or for a small fee.  Let’s take a look at some of the best options.

1.  Pictures – This is the simplest and easiest.  You just upload a picture that represents you or your business.  The positive here is that it will be unique and if done right should help brand your company.  The downside is that it most likely will not look the most professional or have important text explaining what you do included.

2.  TwitterImage - Here is a source of free backgrounds that you can use, all with royalty free pictures.  You might be able to find something here that fits your niche.

3.  MyTweetSpace – You can get a free, custom Twitter background that includes some detailed information by picking a theme style and then creating a badge with your personal or company details.  They also offer a premium option for $59 if you want something more.

4.  TweetStyle - Customize your own background with prices starting at $100 and going up depending on factors like: how quick you want the background completed, number of options, how many changes will be made, and how elaborate of a design it is going to be.

The main point is that you want something different to set yourself apart.  This can only help you to increase interest in your tweets and to boost the number of followers that you have.

If you want to know what separates the sites and online businesses that make the big money from the ones who just “do ok”, a lot of times it’s the strength of their email marketing campaigns.  You would be surprised at how many blogs and ecommerce sites do not even have an email list.  These same site owners will spend hours working on getting traffic to their site via pay-per-click, social media, or search engine optimization but if the visitor isn’t converted on that first visit, a lot of times they are lost forever.  If this is you then how much money can you be losing out on?  Not having a way to stay in touch with your visitors is wasteful and if you want to increase the stickiness of your site so visitors keep coming back then you have to use email marketing.

For most of my sites, my number one goal is to capture leads.  Everyone that comes to my site is going to see the newsletter signup box in the corner and I’ll even have a pop up window that hovers over the page when they first visit.  This ensures that anyone who is interested in receiving further updates from me, will have the chance to do so.  If you have a lot of quality leads that opt in to receive offers, updates, or even just news about the niche you cover or topic you promote, then you have a potential source of constant income.  Without further delay, here are some email marketing tips that I use for each site that I create.

1.  Start Building Your List Immediately – Even if you just put up your blog or site and do not currently have any visitors, you still want to make sure you are set up to capture leads.  Before long people will start visiting your site, and when they do you want to grab their information quickly and easily or else they might leave and never return.  You won’t get a second chance, so why leave money on the table?

2.  Use a Quality Provider From the Start – A lot of sites have gone down the wrong path here.  If start your site with the idea that you can build your business without spending any money whatsoever to get your site going you simply are not going to succeed.  Trust me when I say that spending $19 per month on an account with Aweber will be one of the best returns on investment that you can make.  Aweber does a great job of delivering messages, and one reason is that they do not tolerate spam.  That means that if you start out with another company when you build your list and want to add those subscribers to Aweber down the road, they are going to have to opt-in again.  You can bet that under 25% of your current list is going to re-opt in, so why not retain all of those leads right from the start and save yourself the headache.

3.  Only Send Relevant, Quality Information - Do not bombard your list with stuff they are not going to want.  If you are running a blog or a site designed around training dogs, then only send them updates when you find a quality ebook or product that you personally use with your own pet and can recommend.  This way you are going to be making money off your list via an affiliate deal (earning a commission off the sale of the ebook when your leads make a purchase) yet you will also maintain your relationshp and build trust with your readers.  If you send them a daily update on everything under the sun, they are going to see that you are just trying to exploit them and will quickly opt out.

The number one tip I can offer anyone with a website is to start using email marketing.  With the next post I’ll cover best practices for capturing email marketing leads.

Each team I create a new site that uses Wordpress, I use plenty of different plugins depending on the needs of the individual site. However, there are six that I use every single time, and I think you should too. These are the must have plugins for running any Wordpress site:

1. Akismet – You need to check your spam comments and if you run a popular site, you can’t manage it all yourself. This plugin will check your comments with the Akismet web service to see if they are spam or not.

2. All in One SEO Pack – The must have if you want to rank highly in google. This allows you to customize your titles, descriptions, and tags in posts. Plus you can noindex categories, tags, and archives and customize your title and description for your homepage, plus titles on other automatically generated pages.

3. Google XML Sitemaps – Automatically generates a sitemap of all your posts and pages that is supported by the major search engines.

4. SEO Slugs - This shortens up your URLs by removing common words like “a”, “the”, and in” from the permalink.

5. WordPress Database Backup – You don’t want to lose all of the posts you worked so hard to create do you?

6. WP Super Cache – Saves your server resources in case your site gets hit hard with a ton of traffic.

For those of you who do not know what a robots.txt file does, it basically tells the robots which pages on your site they can and can not crawl.  This is important because there are certain things you do not want to show up in the index, like if a folder contains duplicate content, or it’s a private membership site then you don’t want google giving away information for free that you are charging people for.  Here is the current edition of the robots.txt file I use for all of my sites, both to give the search engine robots access to my sitemap and also to block them from directories I don’t want them having access to:

Sitemap: http://www.jamiefaidley.com/sitemap.xml
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin

Disallow: */trackback
Disallow: */comments
Disallow: /*?*
Disallow: /*?
Sitemap: http://www.jamiefaidley.com/sitemap.xml
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /wp-admin
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /wp-content/cache
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins
Disallow: /wp-content/themes
Disallow: */trackback
Disallow: */comments
Disallow: /*?*
Disallow: /*?

The goal of everyone who starts a blog is to find a niche market that they are really interested in, provide quality content that people enjoy, create a huge following of these people, and then make money via advertising and sales conversions.  Of course, this takes quite a bit of time and you might not have hours every single day to spend working on content.  If you don’t provide a constant stream of quality updates to your blog though, people will stop coming back to see if you have published something new.  Well have no fear because I’ve done a little work to see what tools and options are out there to help you keep your readers interested without putting in as much work and effort.

Embedded RSS Feeds

If you want automatically updated blog content without having to write it yourself, then set up an embedded RSS feed from someone else’s site.  The easiest way I have found to do this is to rely on Google’s AJAX Feed API.   It’s simple to set up as you can enter a keyword or name of a site that you want and hit generate code.  I should note that you do not want to rely entirely on embedded RSS feeds for your information, because why wouldn’t the reader just head over to that site to check the new content instead?

News Related Content

Not only does Google do RSS feeds, but you can also add news-related content to your site that covers your niche.   Head over to the News bar wizard to cover the expressions that your site deals with.  This allows you to cover a lot of different websites with the topic that you are intersted in, rather than just a single website and listing everything they put up like with the RSS feeds.

Free Article Directories

If you are struggling to think up a topic to write about and want to just use something that someone else has already published then check out the free article directories on the web.  I like using EzineArticles since it has quite a few different topics.  Not all of the articles are of a high quality, so you have to search through them a little bit before you find something that is worth posting and you have to remember to keep the authors byline included so they get a little link love.  Articlesbase is another free article directory that I use, and there are countless others out there if you want to do your homework.

Finally it seems that even the big boys are starting to understand that when it comes to making money on the the Internet, content is king.  Just a few days ago I wrote an article about why people go online and it came as no surprise to me that “to learn” was the number one reason to surf the web.  Well now that large businesses like Time Warner, Yahoo, and AOL are finally catching on.

Of course ad spending is supposed to go down 7.6% this year and since we are still in the midst of a recession, that number isn’t likely to make a large jump any time soon.  The reason for optimism you ask?  Ad spending on newspapers, magazines, radio, and television is going down, but online advertising revenues are projected to grow by nearly double digit figures!

Most companies are considering content to be valuable because they want consumers to pay for high-quality products, but instead they should realize that higher quality content builds links, which increases your search engine presense, which builds traffic, of which more are going to keep coming back if you give them something that they are interested in.  That’s a nice little cycle to have, a constant flow of new traffic coupled with readers who keep coming back for more.

So, even if you run a blog or small-business, produce quality stuff that people want to keep coming back for and you’ll grow your business.  You don’t have to charge people to read your content to make money, you can benefit from the increase in ad spending and still cash in while keeping your information FREE!

If you work in internet marketing or run any kind of ecommerce site than you are probably working from home so you already know about the benefits and problems that can arise from the situation.  My biggest problem is that working from home seems like a license for some people to bother me at any time they want.  I’ll be working away when someone will drop by to chat for a few minutes, something they definitely wouldn’t be doing if I was working in an office.  During the summer if someone has the day off they’ll call me up to go golfing, so I have to keep a pretty strike schedule of silencing the phone during my working hours and keeping the door shut to the room in my house I use as the office.

At least the stigma of working from home seems to be going away.  Back in 2002 when I started my online business it seemed that everyone thought I was just goofing off all day, and some even asked if I was ever going to get a real job.  Of course I thought I was working a real job, I just happened to love sleeping in, staying up late, and taking an afternoon nap.  I wasn’t working any less than any of my 9-to-5 friends, in fact I was probably putting in close to double the hours they were, but just at different times of the day.

Here are a few tips I have for those of you who either work at home or are thinking abou it:

1.  Know Your Style – If you have problems staying motivated on your own, then why do you think it’s a good idea to work from home?  You have to be self-motivated since nobody will be monitoring you.

2.  Create a Work Space – Don’t work in your bedroom or at the kitchen table.  You need to have a room set aside in your home that you use specifically for work, one in which you can close the door to the outside world as a signal to everyone else that you can’t be bothered.

3.  Find Your Daily Schedule – I rarely get up before 7 AM and I like to get in a morning workout and shower before starting my day.  This means you’ll frequently find me on the computer around 8:30.  I’ll work for about three hours and then take a lunch at 11:30, come back and work for an hour or two before taking a short nap.  Then I’ll get after it again for a few hours before dinner and some social time with the wife.  Most nights I’ll log a few extra hours in late at night before hitting the sack after midnight.  This is what works for me and I don’t think I could function in an 8-to-5 environment (I tried, it didn’t go so well).

4.  Interact – One problem I have with working at home is the lack of human interaction some days.  I’m just working away at home with nobody else around and it can get kind of lonely and boring.  I tend to go out to eat more than I probably should and go out with friends for quite awhile on the weekends.  You should probably try to find people to go to lunch with or do activities with to fill up your evenings, otherwise you’ll turn into a hermit.

Focus recently put together a list of the top entrepreneurs of the last 100 years with some interesting figures.  It starts out with Andrew Carnegie, who built his Steel empire into US Steel and then turned his attention to philanthropy.  Carnegie gave away a ton of money to libraries, schools and universities and is the widely regarded as the second richest man in history, behind John D. Rockefeller (who was 10th on the list).

I think one important thing to note about the computer-related entrepreneurs on the list is that they were all born from 1955-1967.  Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were both born in 1955 and both got started early working with computers.  It’s no surprise then that they built two mammoth companies in the emergine market.  The internet guys came a few years later as Peirre Omidyar of Ebay was born in 1967, Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com in 1964 and Michael Dell in 1965.  I know Dell builds computers, but his business model was centered on getting his product direct to the consumer, which the internet was his main tool.

I did feel like the list missed out on some of the more recent guys who started mega-businesses.  Where is the love for guys like Mark Zuckerberg, who founded facebook, or Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin?  Do you think anyone else is missing off the list?

Here is the complete list:

1. Andrew Carnegie
2. Oprah Winfrey
3. Thomas Edison
4. Estee Lauder
5. Ray Kroc
6. Bill Gates
7. Conrad Hilton
8. Steve Jobs
9. Henry Ford
10. John D. Rockefeller
11. Michael Dell
12. Sam Walton
13. Richard Branson
14. Jeff Bezos
15. Walt Disney
16. Pierre Omidyar
17. Ralph Lauren
18. William S. Harley & Arthur Davidson
19. Phil Knight
20. Milton Hershey

Adweek just ran a story where ad agencies and people at client companies who make advertising decisions were asked about Twitter.  There was plenty of disagreement over the value of advertising on Twitter as 45% thought it was in it’s infancy and it’s use will grow exponentially in the coming years, 17% think Twitter is a thing of the past and are waiting on the next best thing, 21% think it’s for young people and media but won’t be used by the masses and 17% didn’t have an opinion.

The general public on the other hand had quite a bit different view of the platform with 12% viewing it as something that will grow exponentially, 8% thinking Twitter has peaked out, 12% thought it will be mainly something for young people, and 69% said they didn’t know enough about it to form an opinion.

I think there has been an over-hyping of Twitter from a marketing perspective since it’s fairly obvious that people don’t even know enough about it to form an opinion.  It seemed like Facebook took a few years to become mainstream like it is today, but then again maybe people think that updating their facebook status is enough for letting friends know what they are doing now.

Another interesting poll taken was how effect Twitter was in promoting products and ideas where only 8% of both the public and ad people said it was very effective, 50% of ad people said somewhat effective and 24$ not that effect with 8% saying not at all.  Bottom line is, don’t make Twitter the only source of traffic and lead generation for your products.