Why indeed? What is Twittering? … Isn’t it just another social networking site?

I think Twitter is a little more than that. Twittering is a way of networking with other people, that much is true, but you could also call it a phenomenon. Sharing knowledge, advice, updates and much more in just 140 characters is a challenge that thousands of new people are taking up every single day. Twitter has hit the headlines more and more in recent times, and revealing just a few of the stories that have been published should give you an idea of just how important this site can be to you. Tweeters, by the way, call their form of communication, “tweeting.” You send tweets of 140 characters or less.

When the Presidential race was on, both candidates were making good use of Twitter to garner support for their campaigns. Barack Obama is still the most followed person on the whole of Twitter… although he hasn’t been tweeting much since he started running the country. He still has well over 1,417,890 followers at the last count however.

And celebrities are using the site more and more too – to connect with their fans, promote their careers and much more besides. Some of these have been proved to be fake, but there are plenty of real celebrity Tweeters out there too.

The NBA basketball star Shaquille O’Neal or Shaq also has a huge number of followers on Twitter. Shaq has more followers than Obama at 1,259,460 He often responds to messages and takes part in conversations as well. American actress Demi Moore proved that Twitter can be much more than just another social networking site by helping to prevent an apparent suicide bid by another user. She has 1,195,969 followers.

You can see how Twitter has pervaded the lives of many different people. You can make a difference with this site, and you can also use it for many different purposes including marketing. But the main thing to remember at this stage is that you can reach a huge audience. It may not be anywhere near as big as the one the Real Shaq enjoys, but you can still end up with thousands who will read every tweet you write.

Twitter is not just for the rich and famous – although judging by the number of stories along those lines that have been hitting the headlines recently, you may wonder.

But no matter what line of business you are in; whether you are based primarily online or you have offline interests as well, you CAN benefit from having a free account on Twitter.

Watch the video and click on the link below. You will be taken to a system that you can put to work right away to start building your own Twitter following.

One of the best ways that you can generate leads is to have people fill out surveys. This gives you a good idea of what they are looking for, what their age group is, and so on. But there are a few things that should be considered when you are composing surveys.

1. Keep it short

You don’t want to ask too much information of the clients because it may scare them off instead of making them interested in your company or product.

2. Respect their privacy

Assure them that the information that you collect is going to be for your eyes only, and that it won’t be sold to another company. This is something that is important to people and when you make this promise, it shows that you
respect them and their wishes.

3. Offer them a thank you

Let them know that you appreciate the time that they took to do the survey and offer them a thank you present. It doesn’t have to be elaborate or expensive, but people like to know that they are appreciated.

When a survey is done right, and in the right manner, it can be a very useful marketing tool. The thing to remember is that in order to make them work, people have to be willing to fill them out.

Respect their time, respect their privacy, and respect their effort, and you will find that people will give you answers that will be useful and helpful to you and your company.

An easy way to conduct surveys is to do it online. Here is a good and free resource to quickly create online surveys:

http://surveymonkey.com.

The free version allows you to get 100 responses per survey. Surveymonkey is a worthwhile service.

Want a high quality back-link to your website? The proper press release format that includes anchor text achieves this.

You’ve got a website. You need to use every available forum to get your website noticed. One avenue of publicity that’s often neglected is the press release. A well written press release can work wonders in driving traffic to your site. All you need to get your website on the map is a few carefully crafted words in the correct press release format. Let’s take a look at how to format a press release that grabs the attention of the media and thus, your audience.

The press release is much like a newspaper story, in that you are conveying information about your company that’s newsworthy. So what’s newsworthy? Your press release should contain information that draws attention to your organization’s products or services, without a hard sell element. This requires finesse. Use the press release format to your advantage. The formatting requirements are simple, but must be strictly adhered to, if you want the right people to pick it up. Let’s take a step-by-step look at how to write a press release that works.

1. Begin with a simple text file. At the top left, in all caps, type: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE. Alternatively, if you want your press release to be published in future, type HOLD FOR RELEASE UNTIL (DATE).

2. On the line immediately following, type your headline. Keep it short and sweet, concisely describing the content. For example, when introducing a new product, a good headline might read as follows:

Flutter.com Announces Ground-breaking Platform That Allows ADD Users to Mini-Micro-Blog in 26 Characters

This headline is the “hook” which should spur the reader to want to know more. Keep it to one line and never use exclamation points in any portion of the press release. Also try to use your target keyword in the headline.

3. On the next line, insert your location and date of the release as follows:

City, State, Country - Month Day, Year

4. Now, insert a line to separate location and date from the body of your story.

Here are the important rules on your content. Your whole story should be no longer than 500 words. Write at least a few paragraphs, consisting of just 3-4 sentences. Your first paragraph should tell the whole story. As applicable, address the “five W’s”: who, what, where, when and why.

Details are contained in the subsequent paragraphs. The most effective press releases captures the reader’s interest in the opening paragraph.

Always use third-person in your press release format. For example, if you’re John Adams, write “According to CEO John Adams, Flutter.com …”, not “I’m John Adams, creator of the …”. Quotes from experts enhance the impact of your press release.

Incorrect spelling and grammar errors may well kill your chances of having your story picked up. Your content must be factual and accurate, while incorporating an angle. Your angle is where you do your promotional work, albeit subtly.

Your last paragraph should reiterate in summary your key points.

Include appropriate contact information.

Finally, don’t forget to sprinkle your target keyword phrase through-out the text. Just don’t overdo it or the search engine and/or your readers will object. If the press release site allows it, use your keyword as anchor text and hyperlink back to your website. If you can’t add links in the body, you’ll need to add your link at the end.

5. The last part of the press release format is easy. Space one line and type, END or ###.

You’re done! Now, get it out on the wires!

Here are some good press-release sites.

Paid Sites But Worth It:

* www.prweb.com
* www.prleap.com
* www.webwire.com
* www.prbuzz.com

Free Sites:

* www.24-7pressrelease.com
* www.free-press-release.com
* www.pr9.net
* www.prcompass.com

For example, if you are selling a DVD on your website, you would have a sales page, an order page, and a thank-you page. You send traffic to your sales page, a certain percentage of your visitors will click the order button and get sent to your order page, then a number will follow-through with the order and be sent to a thank-you page. Now the question is how many website visitors did you convert into an actual sale?

A common method to track conversions is to install a tracking pixel on your thank-you page. Without getting overly technical, here is what the “tracking pixel” looks like:

This example code comes from a free online tracking solution called Tracking202.

Everytime someone makes it from the top of your sales funnel to the bottom of your sales funnel, the tracking pixel will “fire.” At the end of the day or week or month, you now have an idea about your website to sales conversion rate.

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Let’s say your company sells perfumes online. You open an ecommerce store and hope that the traffic will come. Since hoping doesn’t work, you try writing articles and building links to your website. You get some traffic, but not the avalanche of visitors that you had hoped for. You then try advertising on paid search sites like Google, Yahoo, and MSN. You get visitors but the clicks are costing you a lot of money. Sometimes you break even. Eventually, you figure out what your conversion rates are and your earnings per click and cost per click. Now you have metrics.

At this point, you can scale your traffic acquisition by inserting your product offer into cost per action networks like Hydra or Affiliate.com or Neverblue Ads or many others. The “complete” list of CPA networks is available for free at http://alextran.com/cpaadvertising.

Using cost per action advertising, your offer is available for affiliate marketers to promote. If you have a landing page with high conversions, you will get plenty of “free” traffic from affiliates.

Now let’s look at CPA marketing from the affiliate point of view. Many online marketers start their business by promoting other people’s products. This makes sense because there is no product creation cycle, no customer support hassles, no inventory … just drive traffic to a converting offer and get paid a commission. It’s that easy … or is it?

I’ve been doing CPA marketing for about 2 years following the methods that I learned from Gauher Chaudhry using his Pay-Per-Click-Formula v1.0. The “formula” worked as long as I was diligent in launching and tracking my CPA campaigns. I reached $100 a day in profits within 3 months of trial and error. Yes, you still have to do trial and error in this business. The trick is to fail fast and learn from your mistakes.

Today, much of what Gauher taught in PPCF v1.0 is available for free in his 89 page report, titled, “The Insider’s Guide to CPA Marketing Profits.” Even though I have the original course, which I paid several hundred dollars for, I went through the 89 page report to see if I could pick up some new information. After reading through the report, much of it I already learned. However, there was a method that I tried again that netted me $500 in profit.

Here is what I did. I read page 65 in the report and tried it on a new government regulation regarding analog to digital TV broadcasting conversion. I found a CPA offer that paid $7 per lead from the network on page 86 in the free guide. Then I ran a PPC campaign using a 3rd tier network called Looksmart. I also ran the ad on Ask.com.

I bid around 7 cents per click. Try bidding that low of an amount on Google these days and your ad won’t be shown. I got traffic almost instantly. I ran the ad for 10 days and made about $100 a day gross or about $50 a day net. After 10 days, the cost per action advertiser decided to pull the offer. This was too bad because I was making around $50 a day on autopilot. But these things do happen when you play in the PPC to CPA game.

PPCF v1.0 has been off the market for many, many months. On March 31st, Gauher will launch PPCF v2.0. I suspect that the new course will have many updated and new techniques. It will also not be cheap. However, you can grab his 89 page free CPA guide and get started today. That way you can find out for yourself if this method of making money online suits your fancy.

Here is where you can grab your guide:

http://alextran.com/cpaadvertising

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Why do you need to do this extra research on web host review sites? Once you start looking for a hosting service on your own, your head will soon be spinning with all the different offerings. Some require a substantial time commitment. Others offer space on the server in such varying amounts, you have no idea what’s right for your enterprise. Do you want a blog? How about shopping carts and secure servers for financial transactions. Before you know it, you’ll be so confused you won’t know how to make a decision that serves your business objectives. You’ll be afraid to commit to one or another for fear of your first six months of profit going towards getting out of a hosting service and finding another! This is no way to do business.

As hosting service options have grown more sophisticated, there are more and more considerations to take into account before signing up. Web host review sites started popping up all over the net, providing an array of services to help you to assess your needs before you plunk down your cash.

While there are many reputable web host reviewers, for your own peace of mind, take a sampling and put in a few hours of research time. You’ll find plenty of information which is consistent across the board. Then again, one review site may have an article which highlights concerns specific to your type of business. Most web host review sites offer a free e-newsletter. Subscribe to a few and read feature pieces in their archives for additional useful tidbits.

Check the blog directories for web hosting review blogs. Check out hosting message boards, chat rooms and forums for unbiased user reviews. Pay particular attention to articles and message board remarks that deal with hosting awards and e-Commerce hosting plans.

Peruse several web host review sites for web host comparison ratings and links to web hosting directories. If you’ve now determined what your business requires in a hosting service, search each review site for those handy tables which compare features of various web hosting services. If you see that ABC hosting service fulfills your business needs, gets rave reviews from users and pro web host reviewers and consistently receives respected awards, well, you may be on to something.

You’ll need to make a decision at some point. Don’t make a career out of your research, but be thorough enough to have confidence in your choice. Questions? Contact each of the hosting services for answers. A prompt, to-the-point response may make up your mind.

Now after all that, you still can’t decide, I recommend using

http://premierewebhost.com

For $6.95 per month that includes a Free Domain for life, you just can’t beat the value. Recently, they started offering unlimited hosting space and unlimited file transfers. This is great for storing large files like videos and photos.

From the standpoint of GDP, people are comfortable shopping online. However, if we look at the e-commerce sales number from last year, we see that it is down from $133.6 billion or 0.4%. Keep in mind that we are in a severe recession. Given the down economy, a drop of only 0.4% in e-commerce sales is simply amazing.

What can we expect in the next 4 years? According to eMarketer, we can expect to see double digit increases in online sales until 2012 where this sales channel will mature. Until then, though, people will continue to buy online. “Follow the hungry crowd,” as the late Gary Halbert would say.

My advice is to think creatively about how you can use online marketing to show your target customer your value. Consider forming alliances with complementary businesses and create a bigger offer. This may negate the pricing pressure that you may face because you will offer more value for your customer’s dollar.

Also think about working with your competitors to recycle customers. What I mean is to make a deal with your competitor to place your banner on their exit survey pages. Many times, customers simply want to try something new. If you give your business a chance to be seen as they are leaving one paid site, you will increase your traffic.

Remember that the seeds of great fortunes are planted during economic downturns. The key is to market smarter and to test everything.

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