What? You’re NOT a Twit yet? OH! You are, but just not really sure how to use it properly. That is totally understandable. Not many people really do understand the power of Twitter yet. But, if you are reading this article, you most likely have already at least heard about Twitter, at least by name. It’s a small upstart that went ballistic to the point of contagiously viral a few years back. It uses a basic platform of sharing status messages among social networking Websites and cell phone texting services.

It has evolved into a major conduit for communications of sorts. And, from the look of it, it is no more a fad than social media. Users were tweeting about 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number grew to over 300,000, and 2.5 million a day by 2009. As of last month, February 2010, there were over 50 million tweets per day – an average of 600 tweets per second. These tweet numbers are adjusted to reflect the removal of spam tweets. What this means is that life in cyberspace is coming of age and how we use it to our advantage will determine much of our success in the 21st century.

Now, about Twitter for those of you who are still learning about it, the whole platform for twitter was built around this simple question, “What’s happening?” The fun of it is that you only have 140 characters to tell the world (your world of followers) what is happening. The cool thing is that it really is convenient for people wanting to stay informed about what is going on with others to do so. Twitter is not just for business, but the business of tweeting is becoming big business. There are of course your fairly normal tweets that are the typical ‘on the fly’ day to day non-business tweets that keep our friends and family abreast of what we are doing. Here is an example of keeping friends and familiy of one Twit as an example:

‘Out of diapers. Going to pick some up.’
‘Just ran over our dog going to get diapers. The kids are going to hate me.’
‘Stopping by pet store to look for another dog that looks like our old one.’
‘Found a new Charlie at dog pound! Kid’s don’t know.’
‘All is well, except Charlie only answers to Susie!”

Yes, this was an actual flurry of tweets from someone I was following. And, then there are the really important ones like:

“The waves are great. Let’s meet at the pier in 15 minutes for a surf session!”

OK, the last one may be wishful thinking on my part right now since there are no waves right now and I am 80 miles inland at present, but you get the point that I am making here, right? Tweets are for what’s happening in your world that you want others to know about or where you want to communicate a specific message to a specific group that is important.

Where Twitter gets interesting is when you use it to build your personal or business brand. Twitter has by all accounts but by the dwindling words of the few naysayers that remain, become an important part of a comprehensive online marketing strategy for most anyone who is making or wants to make money online. Your “What’s happening?” answer is very important to you if this is your primary reason for using twitter. Do I think it’s important personally? Yes. I have five twitter accounts. I have one for personal use, and the rest for my targeted interests in business and public involvements.

If you want to positively affect your personal and/or business brand, here is an initial Twitter Must Do List that you want to be sure you use to answer the question, “What’s happening?” They the short version of my ‘Must Do List for Building Personal Brand with Twitter’ that is found in my eBook ‘How to Use Social Media to Build Your Brand and Make Tons of Money,’ but they are still a great start for you if you are just getting started.

Tweet links to your personal articles or blog posts.  I am assuming that most of you who are reading this are visiting this Website and reading this blog post to learn more about how to be successful in your online marketing efforts. If that is the case, it goes without saying that if you are using a blog format for your personal or business Website, that you take the time to see that your content is quality stuff, and original if at all possible. That is why I coach on the importance of discovering what you are most passionate about in life and what your life purpose is. It is from this sort of personal understanding that you can write about what you know and are most passionate about. See my article entitled, “Writing a Blog that Makes a Difference”

Tweet links to reputable and safe Websites.  Your goal in building personal brand is to become a good source of good information or opportunity. All of the content that you provide others does not have to be your own content. If you work within the Success Alliance Team network, you already know about promoting other blogs and other peoples’ content as well as your own. If you are not a part of a cooperative marketing affiliation, I suggest that you find a few good blogs that have good content on subjects that you feel your followers would be interested in, that are not necessarily in direct competition with you or what you have to offer. By subscribing to these Websites where content is constantly updating, you can actively promote yourself as a good source of information by tweeting links to good information to your Twitter followers. It provides you the ability to have your tweets (you name) seen regularly by your followers, and associated with quality or thought provoking content.

Retweet the tweets of others.  Make it a practice to retweet (RT) worthwhile or pertinent information that is tweeted to you from someone you are following. The best retweets of course are those that share links to quality content of the individuals whom you personally know as being reputable sources of information. The absolute BEST retweets of those you are personally affiliated with. This is explained in detail in my eBook, ‘How to Use Social Media to Build Your Brand and Make Tons of Money,’ but the gist of it is simply this. You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours. Retweeting significant or notable quotes or statements made by someone of importance in an industry or niche market that you are a part of can be equally as impressionable in building your reputation as someone that is connected to smart people and quality content.

Be attentive to breaking news, and be the first to share it.   As an information driven society, our day to day lives, and the news of our lives and those around us moves at the speed of light. Anyone with a i-phone or Internet access can immediately broadcast breaking news to the world, where only a decade or so ago, most people would not hear about something that happened early in the day, until they watched the 6 or the 11 o’clock news. Fact is that we are no long a major media dependent society, but a society of media makers. People tend to look at news as it happens via their phones or the Internet LONG before the major networks report on it. The goal for you in tweeting breaking news to your followers is to build credibility of becoming a good source for noteworthy news on the topics that interest your followers the most.

Always be quick to Tweet a thank you to someone for sharing good information.  Have you ever done something for someone and they showed their appreciation in public by giving you credit for what you did for them? I know that most people do not live for this moment, but it is a good feeling when someone validates you in front of others. It is the same on Twitter, and it builds enormous good will with the person that has shared the information or article. When you do, us the ‘@USERNAME’ function to do so, so they get notice of it being done.

Don’t over do telling people about what you have to sell.  This is a huge mistake of many twits (I say twits in the most respectful way, speaking of those who tweet) when they get moving on Twitter and are trying to drive traffic to their Website. Don’t be sucked in by the ability to blast your product or service to all of your followers all of the time, unless you want to have ZERO followers.

Post tweets about up and coming events where you live.  Twitter has some really cool features, and one of them is that you can pull up tweets from any particular location that you want to follow tweets for. When you post up and coming events, it provides a service to the world in that particular city, and the result is that you will pick up more followers who will want to benefit from your ‘in the know’ about what’s happening where they live. Be sure to include the name of the city in your tweet otherwise people in that city doing a search on twitter by locale will not find it.

If you begin using these first seven basic marketing strategies for Twitter, you will begin to see your following grown as others pick you up from your followers’ lists of followers. By using this organic method that mixes personal relationship marketing and proactive communication with those who follow you, you will begin to see your list of followers grow as the value of what you have to share with the world begins to be seen.

The Beginning of Entrepreneurial Greatness

If you are to be successful in promoting either yourself or your business you must understand what branding is.  Knowing the definition of branding and why it’s important is a good start, and this article will help you in getting a better understanding of branding.

There is nothing quite as exciting as having a business or vocational dream, idea, and/or vision, and then through the consistent personal labor that goes into planning and starting a business, a person is able to successfully launch their own company. It is one of the most fulfilling experiences someone can have in the workplace – to own their own company and to be at the helm of steering their company to its success. As with every worthwhile endeavor however, there needs to be proper planning nowadays more than ever, and a large part of that planning involves the securing of your company’s online presence. Aside from all of the fairly standardized processes that surround business administration practices that go into planning and launching a business, one of the most often overlooked but most important tasks in the business planning process is that of choosing a company name and charting out its branding strategy.

Definition of Branding in Simple Terms?

By definition, a personal or company brand is an articulate set of both internal (company staff) and external (consumer and public) perceptions, company statements, and images that represent a company, a product or a service. In many cases, the brand can be a combination of all three – the company, its products, and its service.

When is comes to a company brand, a brand encompasses the logo, the slogan (or tag line), audio jingle or video clip that causes an individual to recall in a positive way, the person, company, product or service it represents; however a brand takes in much more into account. A brand is at the very core of an individual’s or company’s public persona. It is an intangible covenant if you will, with the public of the products or services it provides and delivers to the general public. It is a mental connection with the consumer of what they will experience or what will be delivered to them if they choose to do business with that brand (person or company).

Brands are the identity of the company to the public that appeals to their intellect and/or senses. It allows a buyer to easily recall and identify the reputation and offerings of a particular company. Brands are generally developed over time through various channels like that of repetitive advertising messages, recommendations from family, friends, and peers, direct interactions with the company’s representatives, or the most important being that of first hand real life experiences in using the service or product of a company. The time it takes to fully develop a brand is dependent on the strategy that is taken to promote it. And, starting out with a name and logo that most accurately identifies who you are and what you do is among the most important steps in building your brand.

Aside from the importance of developing a strong brand that will provide an umbrella under which a wide range of products and services can be offered, good branding strategy provides leverage in producing awareness for a company’s products or services. A strong brand also provides a strategic advantage over competition in things as simple as sight recognition of a brand and positive trigger response mechanisms that lead potential customers away from the competition and to a buying decision for the company that has a stronger  brand recognition.

Action Point: Always strive to have a strong, easy to remember, and oftentimes catchy name for your products, services, and company. If you use your personal name, always see that it is only associated with the very best of associations, and that your public persona will always complement the level of integrity you desire to be known for. If you plan right and take the time to think things through, your personal or company brand will be your secret weapon against potential competitors that may seek to move into your chosen market and attempt to take market share from you.

One of the things I always hear about the Internet is that there are hundreds of different ways to make money online.  The Internet is a virtual gold rush town that is particularly suited to entrepreneurs and people who have the ability to recognize a consumer or business need and quickly move in to fill that need.  It’s pretty easy to see how people like that could make boatloads of money, but I never thought I fit that particular profile.  I have always had to ‘work hard’ for my money, unlike a lot of my friends.

In all honesty, the real truth is that I don’t have that “killer instinct” any more. I would much rather work in my garden or go surfing. BUT, I used have that killer instinct when I trained and fought in full contact karate in my younger years, but after five years of professional kickboxing and 2 broken jaws, 3 broken noses, mulitple dislocated elbows and shoulders, broken fingers, toes, and lots of ribs later, I don’t have that ‘killer instinct’ prowling around in me any longer. And, from the sound of all my injuries, it doesn’t appear that I had it in the first place.

Anyway, I was always on the lookout for ’money making opportunities’ and didn’t think that eBooks were a creative enough venue for me, and, I really didn’t see myself as a writer either. Then, BAM! I heard a friend talking about how to market ebooks with resale rights. What a cool thing, I thought. I think I finally discovered my niche for online marketing, and I didn’t have to write my own book to do it!

I can tell you that if you want to make money on the information highway (the Internet), you need to set up a toll booth on it by starting to sell eBooks. People are constantly in need of information.  They want to learn how to do things, but they don’t want to spend a lot of time on research and fact checking.  Instead, they are more than willing to pay for good information, especially if it can be provided instantly and reliably.  Enter the eBook.

An electronic book that the buyer simply downloads from your site or the site of a retail store front that you have your book placed on.  There will always be a healthy demand for accurate information, and that’s precisely why ebooks with resale rights are such attractive products to marketers.  These types of books will always have an audience, and you can sell them over and over again without ever running out of products of having to pay additional fees.

By definition, an electronic book is usually short manual or guide that tells people how to do something. In fact, a significant number of these manuals contain the words “how to” in the title:  How to Build and Customize a WordPress Blog in less than One Hour, How to Plan and Start an Organic Garden, How to Make Serious Money Just from Blogging, etc. The text is very straight forward and doesn’t contain the usual fluff that can be found in traditional books produced by large publishing houses. For me anyway, I could immediately see how that kind of information would be valuable to people, so I figured that purchasing and marketing ebooks with resale rights could prove to be a lucrative venture.

You might be asking yourself why I would buy and sell other people’s books instead of marketing my own.  Well, I do actually now write my own, BUT  there are several reasons for selling others.  For many, it’s an easy decision. They don’t have any expertise in a marketable subject matter other than a few subjects.  Second, they really don’t have the time or the know how on how compose an entire book on their own.  Third, a lot of electronic book authors are known and trusted in their fields, which makes a great selling point.  Overall, it’s just far more convenient to purchase ebooks with resale rights than to come up with something on my own.

If a non-creative person like me can achieve financial success primarily through marketing ebooks with resale rights, then so can you.  If you own a website, you already have an excellent marketing tool at your disposal.  All you have to do is purchase some ebooks with resale rights and then make an order page on your site.  Then you can deliver the books to customers via a download on your website, through e-mail, or on a CD-ROM sent through the postal service.  Even if you don’t have a website, you can still profit from ebooks with resale rights.  You’ll just have to find other ways to market your books, such as auctions or online bookstores.

Whenever I am asked how I can make the money I do on the Internet, I really say the same thing over and over. “It’s easy and everyone can make money on the Internet, IF they have a real desire to.”  All you have to do is find a product that people want and that you can gain access to.  Ebooks with resale rights might be just the thing you’re looking for in order to break into online marketing, so check out some titles today.