“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m looking for; someone right here!”

“No, I want a Website designer in PEI.” (or wherever you happen to be)

“I’d consider it if I had to, but I’d rather have someone closer to home.”

All legitimate answers. The reality though is that advances like SEO, social media, eCommerce, Skype, and overnight couriers have obliterated borders. Whereas all but the most ambitious small businesses were once confined to their local markets, now even a one-person home business has the ability to establish itself internationally. No matter what products or services you sell, there is a world of opportunities waiting to be explored.

Likewise, your choice of business resources, whether you want to create a marketing strategy, undertake an SEO campaign, develop a new Website, or launch some other element of your marketing, can come from anywhere on the planet.

My local market is, as the title suggests, St. John’s, NL, Canada. The “NL” is Newfoundland and Labrador by the way, not the Netherlands. I grew up in Corner Brook (in Western Newfoundland) and Clarenville (in Central Newfoundland). I have presented social media seminars and discussed marketing strategies with businesses in every part of the province. I have been in communities from St. Shott’s to St. Anthony and from Harbour Breton to Happy Valley-Goose Bay. I know and love Newfoundland and Labrador’s many communities, cultures, and colloquialisms.

Similarly, marketing consultants in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island know their markets well. The same holds true for those in Alpharetta GA just as it does for those in Arad, Romania. Consultants everywhere will generally be experts in their home markets. However, in this new global market, more and more businesses are finding not only new markets but new suppliers and resources in places that were once far beyond their reach. If you prefer to deal with someone face to face, and are able to find someone you trust nearby, then by all means go for it. But if you’re not finding the right fit locally, you are never out of options. A Website designer in St. John’s NL or Charlottetown PEI or San Jose California may prove to be an excellent partner.

One of my closest client relationships is with a client over 4,300 km (more than 2,700 miles) away from me. They’re in in Calgary, Alberta and I’m in St. John’s, but we’re constantly in touch through email, phone, Skype, and text messages. Distance is not a limiting factor between them and me. Don’t let it be one for you and the consultant you need, wherever that person may be.

Would you hire a Website designer in St. John’s? The answer no longer depends on how close you happen to be.

It depends on how far you want to go.

The post Would you hire a Website designer in St. John’s? appeared first on PikeSPeak.

Many businesspeople do, and with good reason. Money and time are always tight, so no one is ever eager to see days or weeks and a few thousand dollars being invested in the research and writing of a strategy that will, many times, just sit on a shelf.

However, far from being a waste of money, an SEO strategy can be an excellent investment when properly researched, and written in a way that makes it easy to implement.

Who are you?

• Maybe you’re a retailer in St. John’s NL, hoping SEO will help you get found by people who don’t even know you exist yet.
• Maybe you’re a small IT team in Halifax NS, wanting to grab the attention of potential partner firms in the United States. Or…
• Maybe you’re a not-for-profit in Atlanta GA, hoping kindhearted people will find you as they look for worthwhile causes to support.

As different as each of these situations may be, the initial steps in planning an SEO strategy will actually be pretty similar…

The key to an SEO strategy? Know thyself and thy stuff.

The first question that often comes up when planning SEO is whether or not to turn over the strategy and ongoing work to a consultant. There are good reasons on both sides of that debate, and we’ll cover the main ones in another blog post. But regardless of whether you handle it internally or bring in some help, the first part in planning your SEO strategy is always to make sure you have a very firm understanding of just who you are and what you plan to do. Ask yourself a few questions:

1. What geographic target market do we serve?
   Search engine results will often be completely different from one country or state or province or city to the next. Even people in the same house will usually see different results on Google, depending upon searches they’ve conducted in the past. Knowing the precise areas you’ll target will help isolate how exactly to prepare your SEO activities. National or international campaigns will often best be broken into several regional campaigns, each with their own targets and keywords.
2. What range of audiences are we targeting?
   Just as you should break your effort down into separate campaigns for each geographic area, you should also create separate campaigns for different types of audiences. Big companies vs. small. Corporate buyers vs. families or individuals. Buyers who will hunt for the best quality vs. those who just need something in a hurry. They should each be planned and optimized on their own to help you achieve the highest possible rankings for each. Yes, combining them all into one would be cheaper and easier, but that would also be less effective, which in the long run will cost more rather than less, since it will take away the extra sales that more targeted campaigns would have generated.
3. How competitive is each of our markets?
   If you are pursuing markets that are highly competitive and have lots of other companies already fighting to be seen, any significant move into the top of the search engine result pages will be a lot more challenging than for relatively quiet markets. More work and cost will therefore be needed to develop a concise strategy.
4. What are the authoritative Websites in your target markets?
   Search engines and potential customers will all see you as more credible if the sites they know and trust are saying good things about you and linking to your Website. Building links from respected Websites is an essential part of any legitimate SEO strategy and campaign. Unfortunately, this vital activity is often the territory of black-hat SEO “consultants” and tricksters whose shortcuts and bought links from shady sites will hurt rather than help your search engine rankings. It is therefore vital for your linkbuilding efforts to be guided with a clear understanding of which sites are relevant to your markets, and why they would want to link to you. If you’re planning to buy links or blast Website managers asking them to link to your site, it’s time for a new plan.

Once you have considered the above points for your particular situation, you’re already well on your way to creating an effective SEO strategy. The more targeted and localized your campaign will be, the easier it will generally be for you to tackle any aspect of your SEO planning and activities.

Don’t sell yourself short.

Maybe you’ve always been local or have only appealed to one type of buyer. If so, it’s easy to keep thinking that way. However, the right SEO strategy may open you up, literally, to a whole new world of opportunities. Even better, that world will be accessible for far less money than would ever be possible through traditional marketing efforts. So stop for a moment to ask yourself what you really want to accomplish. Consider the possibilities. They are quite possibly as unlimited as your imagination.

It’s time.

If your company is exploring search engine optimization as a marketing investment, a concise SEO strategy will help you generate a higher return on that investment. Follow the initial steps outlined above to help you narrow your focus on the markets and keywords that will create the best results. You will then be able to optimize your site’s content and architecture and your online network to better fit your intended markets, and meet your specific SEO objectives.

The post First steps to your SEO strategy. appeared first on PikeSPeak.

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Search Engine Optimization is basically how you’re going to get most of your traffic. Without any efficient or proper search engine optimization, then your website will just collect virtual dust and no one will ever see your company or services. While the dream of just making a website and the money flowing in is fun to think about, this isn’t anywhere close to reality. The reality is if you want your website to make it on the web and you want your website to get a ton of visitors without spending a ton of money, you’re going to have to apply proper search engine optimization techniques.

Tools are the best way to do this. Why work hard when you can work smart and achieve the same results? There are tools out there to help automate keyword research, link building and site improvements overall.

#1 – WordPress

WordPress is a blogging platform used by millions of people and has greatly improved over the years. Back in the days when SEO was still kind of new to most people, everyone preferred to use Blogger, which is Google’s own blogging platform. However today WordPress has spiked a ton of interest and that’s because of its powerful SEO features.

• It will automatically ping any blogging update services that you choose to once you post some new content.
• It can be made into a blog or an actual webpage. There are plenty of people who provide services for changing dynamic pages into WordPress.
• Most of the themes will automatically add H1, H2 tags into the post and page. These tags are helpful to your on-page SEO efforts but not as important as they once was.

#2 – Google Keyword Tool

The Google keyword tool cuts out most of the annoying work which is finding a niche and keywords. You can see exactly how much people are spending on a given keyword to give you an idea of how profitable it is. While there are varying opinions on which keyword tool is best, I prefer to use Google Keywords which is completely free.

#3 – Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics

What most people don’t realize is, you can get tracking information and information from your webpages for absolutely free. Google will tell you if there are any pages that can’t be crawled, if there are any errors on your page, give you suggestions, tell you how many backlinks are coming to your page, where those backlinks are coming from and even tell you where your traffic is coming from.

#4 – Traffic Travis

Traffic Travis is a free program (even though there is a paid version) that allows people to see how well they did on their on-site search engine optimization. There are even nodes that will allow you to see who’s top ranking for a certain keyword or in a certain niche.

#5 – Market Samurai

If you don’t mind spending some money, you can dig deep into the market and analyze your competition with Market Samurai. This will give you the market value of a keyword, how many people you’re competing with and tell you just about anything else you could possibly want to know about a certain keyword or market.

#6 – Aherfs

This is a featured-packed tool that offers both a free and paid version. Aherfs allows you to find backlinks of your competitors as well as provide competitive research for your keywords. Finding your competitors’ backlinks can be helpful to see where they are getting their quality links from. This can provide a great starting point for your link building campaigns.

#7 – You

While all of this automation is great, there’s only one person who can make sure their website is up to Google standards and has the proper parameters set in place to rank high, and that’s you.

The post 7 Of the Best SEO Tools [Guest post] appeared first on PikeSPeak.

Just click on a Twitter name below to go directly to that Member’s page on Twitter.

See an error or omission? Please let me know! Twitter accounts may be added or changed by their owners at any time; I appreciate your help in keeping this directory current.

* The Twitter account for @KathyDunderdale was removed in April 2013. While Premier Dunderdale said at the time that she was not planning to reactivate it, it is left here for ongoing reference.

Again, things can change pretty quickly on “the Twitter,” so if you know of an MHA whose account is not given here, please let me know. Maybe even better, if you know of an MHA who is not yet on Twitter, encourage him or her to sign up today. Here’s a guide to get anyone started on Twitter quickly and easily!

The post Newfoundland & Labrador MHAs on Twitter appeared first on PikeSPeak.

Earn fast dollars at home!

Grab money by selling your neighbor’s pets!

Yeah, Twitter can be a really uplifting place some days. But it gets even worse when you realize those spammy tweets are coming from you.

That really sucks.

Sadly, changing your password will almost never fix the problem. That’s where spam gets completely frustrating for a lot of people; they keep changing their passwords, but somehow the spam keeps on happening. What they don’t realize is that the culprits are already inside the gate.

Don’t give up on Twitter though, or even on your account. You can get things safely back under your own control in just three and a half clicks. Those unwanted tweets are almost always caused by a rogue app that you actually allowed in by clicking okay on something that looked a whole lot safer than it actually was. So all you need to do is just revoke that permission, and you’ll have your Twitter account back under your own control again.

Here’s how…

Click 1: Go to your Twitter account settings

When you’re signed into Twitter, look up in the upper right corner. Click on the silhouette and pull down to Settings. Easy so far, huh?

Click 2: Go to your Twitter Apps

Look in the column at the left, and click on Apps at the bottom of the choices shown. So far so good. Now the third step might get just a tiny bit harder…

Click 3: Revoke the bad app’s access

You might have to give some thought to figure out which app is the bad one, but unless it’s been going on for a long time, chances are very good that it will be the one at or near the top of the list. If there’s anything there that looks suspicious, just click on the Revoke button and you’re pretty much done.

Sometimes it’s tempting to just go down through the list and revoke them all. While you can certainly do that, it may affect some settings that have allowed you to integrate Twitter with other sites you like. So I recommend you not revoke too many at once; one click will usually fix things up just fine. But it’s your account, and those are your choices to make.

Click 3.5: Get out of there!

Technically, you’re already cured, so if you feel great, why hang around the doctor’s office? Click on Home, Connect, or Discover up at the top of the screen to get back where the Twitter action is.

Enjoy your new freedom, and remember to be careful about which apps you accept in the future.

And hey, if this has been of any help to you, please share the cure by clicking on the buttons on the left. Then get out there and have fun!

The post Twitter account hacked? Get it back in 3.5 clicks! appeared first on PikeSPeak.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwX0KZYm9Fs

While it focuses on one concept in particular, it actually touches on two possible presentations:

“Not Your Father’s Adversity”

and the main presentation:

“Adrift on the Ice… Grenfell and You”

Looking at the Grenfell concept, there are three main points:

1.  You will make mistakes, but you can still survive.
Grenfell made a couple of mistakes that could have been fatal — traveling alone even when urged to travel with a guide, and then taking a shortcut across the bay even when it was April and ice would be getting soft.

2.  Be prepared to make sacrificial sacrifices.
Grenfell cut away his sled, abandoned the first ice floe he was on and swam in the icy water to a better one, and killed three of his dogs.

3.  Build a network around you by caring for them first.
Grenfell was alone on the ice, but he was never truly alone at all. He had people on the shore who were desperately looking for them and even willing to risk their lives to save him, because he had done the same for them. Without their help, he never would have made it back to shore.

The overall tone of the presentation is fast-paced, but mixed with periods where we step back and say, “What just happened? How does that relate to us?”

In one sentence, the overall message is that you do have what it takes to overcome adversity, but the better you prepare yourself before you need to, the better you’ll be able to survive anything.

The post TEDx St. John’s: Pitch by Lorne Pike appeared first on PikeSPeak.

Ummm… you do know what your Website’s primary objective is, right?

Here are 40 questions to help you create a Website that will indeed be effective, no matter what your ultimate goals may be. And remember that it can be easy to pop out quick answers, but that won’t always give you the insights and direction you really need. So the more time you take to really think through your answers as you ask yourself these questions, the more effective your Website will be.

A. Focusing the Website

1. Who are our Website’s target audiences?
2. What precisely is the one most important thing we want our Website to accomplish? Second and third most important?
3. What precisely is the one most important thing our target audiences would want to get from visiting our Website? Second and third most important?
4. How do we best align what we want to what our target audiences want?
5. How obvious is our Call to Action and how clearly does it direct users?

B. Guiding the Way

1. Does our menu system make it easy for users to find what they want, as well as the pathway toward our main call to action?
2. Do we have a logical site plan and breadcrumbs to help users easily keep track of where they are and how to get back to the Home page?
3. Can a user search our content for what they want?
4. Is our menu system easy to understand and use?
5. Are our pages and sections named to be helpful to the user rather than just clever or easy for our own team to use?
6. Do our landing pages easily follow a logical progression from the individual ads, offers, or links that will bring our visitors in?
7. Is our contact info easy to find — preferably in the upper right corner — on every page?
8. If we have forms to be filled out, are they as short and easy to use as possible? On the other hand, if we want to reduce the numbers so we get only qualified leads, do we have questions that help filter out everyone else?

C. Providing Great Content

1. What content would be truly great according to our target audiences? It’s probably not a whole Website that just talks about us and our products! Do we offer helpful content that answers their questions or provides tips related to our product and related activities?
2. Do we answer the questions our users most want to have answered? Do we even know what they are?
3. Do we use graphics that make each page more appealing, pulling readers in without overpowering or distracting them?
4. Do we avoid Flash or heavy graphics or widgets that slow down the Website or complicate its use?
5. Do we use fonts, colors, background colors, and sizes that are easy to read on a variety of devices?
6. Is our text broken down into short, easy-to-read paragraphs?
7. Do we use subheadings and bullets to make content easier to read or browse quickly?
8. Do we avoid industry terminology that might confuse or frustrate readers?
9. Do we feature testimonials or quotes from clients?
10. Do we use video or audio strategically on our Website to appeal to different people’s preferences or build a more personal connection?
11. Do we have a prominent place for our latest news and media clips, and do we keep it current?
12. Are we adding new content at least once a week? (Read, “Do we have an active blog?”)

D. Getting Found

1. Have we identified the keywords that our target audiences are most likely to use when searching for us?
2. Have we optimized specific pages for each of the main keywords, so that the text, headings, and page urls of those pages include the terms our target audiences are most likely to use when searching for us?
3. Is our Website easily viewable on tablets or mobile platforms? Should we offer a mobile version?

E. Being Socially Connected

1. Do we have logos linking to our social media pages to help users easily connect with us, wherever we have an active presence?
2. Would a Facebook widget on our Home page encourage visitors to “Like” us there? Does our Facebook activity help build a community, or have we left it untended?
3. Would a widget showing our most recent tweets help establish a bond, or are we not focused enough on Twitter for that to be helpful?
4. Do we have social media buttons on our blog posts to encourage easy sharing of our content?
5. Do we want to also include social media buttons on our Website pages to encourage easy sharing of that content?
6. Do we encourage, monitor, and quickly respond to comments on our blog posts, and possibly our Website pages as well?
7. Should we encourage guest blogging?

F. Providing Customer Service

1. If users would need to contact us related to questions or problems they have with our products or service — and keeping in mind that they will usually be frustrated at that point — do we provide an incredibly easy way for them to do so?
2. Do we minimize the amount of info users need to give in order to submit an inquiry or support request?
3. If users run into difficulty using our Website or finding what they want, do we offer an easy way for them to get help or call us instead?
4. Would an interactive map, such as a Google map that allows people to get detailed driving directions from any location, be of value to us or our customers?
5. Once users submit a request for service or information, do we respond quickly with an acknowledgement and a realistic estimate of when they can expect a more detailed reply?

These 40 questions will give your new Website a great headstart. Of course, some of the answers could easily include a lot more detail than we offer here, but these should at least get things moving in a very positive direction for you.

Have more questions you think should be included? Please share them in the comments below. And if you need help getting the very most from your Website, let us know. We can help!

The post Top 40 questions to help optimize your Website design appeared first on PikeSPeak.

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I have been asked to speak at a local high school tomorrow for their Career Day. My topic… being an entrepreneur. Looking forward to it; I always enjoy giving a presentation, and the realities of being an entrepreneur definitely hit home for me, since I’ve been one since 1989.

As I’ve been getting ready, the following just kind of fell into place. This is obviously not meant to be all-inclusive; I’m just trying to give them a more rounded understanding of things to consider about being an entrepreneur.

Knowing me, I’ll change this 300 times between now and tomorrow morning, but here’s my first second draft, spelling crimes and all. I’d love your thoughts on this, especially if you’ve been down the entrepreneurial path…

Four important truths of being an entrepreneur

1. Your product is important.

• What exactly will you sell or do as a business? What will people pay to get from you?
• Your product is not just the item you sell or service you provide. It’s the feeling it gives to your customers, and the solution it gives to their problems. If you can’t give people peace of mind that you’ve solved a problem for them, you won’t keep them as customers.

2. Your customer service is importanter.

• Companies with mediocre products but great service are a lot more likely to survive than companies with great products but mediocre service.
• Yes, there will always be some companies that somehow do well or even thrive despite terrible service, just like there will also always be a 110 year old woman somewhere who says she stayed alive by smoking a cigar a day. But the healthy way for any of the other 99.9% of us to stay alive as a business is to take very good care of our customers.

3. Knowing your customers and what they truly want? Even more importanter.

• This is where your marketing can make you or break you. You may be the best dooflickly maker in the world and have absolutely amazing service, but if no one wants a dooflicky, or doesn’t see the value in paying for yours at the price you want — or even if someone does really want one but doesn’t know you exist — you’ve got a serious problem.
• You’ve got to not only be seen, but be seen favorably. People are not looking to buy your product. They are looking for whatever best meets their most pressing need. The better you can show how you can do that, the more successful your business will be.
• Your customers include people you’ve never thought of. They are the people who need your care and attention at any given time. Yes, they include your actual customers, but sometimes will also include such people as your suppliers, your family, whatever association or government agency sets the regulations in your industry, and the Canada Revenue Agency (or IRS or whatever your local tax agency is called). You need to keep all these customers satisfied, so it’s important to understand who your customers truly are!

4. Your attitude and passions are importantest of all.

• Are you doing this because you truly love making dooflickies, or because you figure it’s a way to make money? The more you truly love your business, the more likely you are to truly succeed at it.
• Are you willing to work long and hard, but also recognize that it’s going to take time? That ability to give it all you’ve got day after day is an essential element of any entrepreneur, and one that not amount of talent or money can replace. It’s the reason why you have to be sure you love what you do, because you’ll be doing it a lot.
• Are you comfortable with failure? Thomas Edison once said that he failed his way to success. It’s a great way for us all to view our failures. They’re not actually failures at all; just lessons learned. And the more comfortable we are with recognizing and maybe even embracing failures along our way as valuable learning experiences, the more likely we are to taste success in the near future.
• Be prepared to deal with the unknown, and with change. A lot of it. There are few safety nets when you’re an entrepreneur, or few paths that you can follow with certainty. You will need to be comfortable with constant change if you really plan to live the entrepreneurial life. Your ability to make solid decisions with as much knowledge as you can gather — but never as much as you’d really like to have — will be a huge factor in your efforts to grow your business.
• Don’t compromise the ones you love. Being an entrepreneur is a wonderfully rewarding but also long, hard road in many spots. You’ll need love and support way more than you think you will.
• Don’t sell your soul. Successful entrepreneurs often talk of how they look back at times when they walked away from what seemed like a great deal, simply because that “deal” didn’t feel like the right thing to do. They often see such decisions as the best ones they ever made.Know what your standards of right and wrong are, and don’t compromise on them.

There you go… my first second draft of what it takes to be an entrepreneur. What points did I miss, or which ones of these seem off to you? What entrepreneurial advice would you want to share with a class of eager high school students?

The post Do you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur? appeared first on PikeSPeak.

Every country has its own unique challenges, yet it is striking how similar our struggles can be from community to community, country to country, and even continent to continent. The more we recognize those similarities, the better we can apply solutions that worked in one area to others. What’s happening in Romania right now is a prime example.

Paul-Andre Baran is Romania’s new Director of Biblionet, a five-year program to facilitate free access to information for Romanian citizens by fostering the development of a modern public library system in Romania. He was recently interviewed by Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Commission, about recent programs that have improved life for families — and women in particular — in rural Romania. Poverty is rampant in these areas, with Internet access — or even computers — simply not being available in many homes. In fact, only 50% of Romania’s population is online. To combat these challenges, local libraries were set up to be the digital hubs of their communities, and the program has been changing lives and altering centuries-old perceptions:

• Farmers previously had to travel to their county capital to apply for subsidies they needed to survive and to operate their farms. A new program now allows them to apply online from a local library. The result? Some 17,000 farmers have saved over 50,000 man-days and 300,000 euros by being able to apply online locally for their subsidies.
• Some two million Romanians have migrated to Italy, Spain and other countries to find work. In many cases these were parents and even both parents of children who were left in the care of grandparents or other family or friends. These families were left with no means of communicating, and the result was a rise in school dropout and suicide rates among the affected children. Biblionet partnered with agencies in Italy and Spain to arrange times when children could go to their local library to Skype with their parents. These times have been rebuilding family ties and even allowing parents to reconnect in meaningful ways, such as doing homework together.
• Local librarians were taught how to help others learn basic skills such as writing and uploading a proper resume, and handling job interviews.  The librarians then trained 400 people, and 32 of those trainees then  got jobs within three months of the program’s start. It was estimated that, even if they all only received minimum wage, the program generated — in just those first three months — at least eight times as much money as it cost to implement.
• The librarians — who are mostly women — have increasingly become known as gatekeepers and knowledge leaders in their communities, a far cry from the times when information and power were often kept from women. The fact that they now had these elements of power and were even willingly sharing them has been changing the status and respect levels in these communities for not only the librarians, but all women.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EARIEH0e4MY

As I watched, I kept remembering how a program with some similarities was implemented where I live, on Canada’s east coast in Newfoundland and Labrador. Back in 1995, in the earliest days of the Internet when few homes had access or even computers, community libraries were promoted through Industry Canada‘s Community Access Program as places for people to connect online. That increased access gave people new ways to communicate and improve their lives.

Newfoundland and Labrador has also seem a situation similar to Romania’s, where many parents have had to go looking for work in other places. The ability for those families to stay in touch through Skype, Facebook, and other platforms is helping keep family connections stronger than would ever be possible otherwise.

Perhaps most noteworthy of all, one new program, SmartForceNL, now gives every resident of Newfoundland and Labrador access to:

• Thousands of free online courses on the most important workplace topics to improve their skills and career prospects;
• A CoursePark Lifelong Learning Profile to share with colleagues and employers;
• Career development tips and various online communities for professionals;
• The ability to build their own courses and sell them to the world; and
• For every business and not-for-profit, the ability to have a training solution for their staff at no cost.

SmartForceNL is a partnership between Bluedrop Performance Learning, the Newfoundland and Labrador Association of Technology Industries (NATI), and Newfoundland and Labrador’s Department of Advanced Education and Skills.

How about where you live? How are the Internet and social media in particular solving problems and improving lives?

The post How social media and the Internet improve life in Romania and here. appeared first on PikeSPeak.

We’ve grown up, but many of us ask that question over and over again today in places like Twitter, not to mention Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and lots of other strange new places. And sadly, like in much of the adult world, we may not be finding anywhere near as many friends as we want.

If that sounds like you, don’t walk away with your tail between your legs, but don’t keep doing the same thing over and over either. If you’re having trouble, it’s no doubt for a reason. Here are seven steps to getting new followers on Twitter. Even better, here are seven steps to making new friends…

1. Know who you are.

Why are you on Twitter? What do you want to accomplish there? Meet new business contacts? Keep track of the latest news about a hobby of yours? Have a few laughs? Just see what all the fuss is about? All great answers, and Twitter should be able to help you fulfill those wishes and more. But the better you understand what you want to do, the better you’ll be able to identify the types of people you want to follow, and who are more likely to follow you back.

2. Complete your Twitter profile.

Every new profile has a picture of the Twitter egg. Your first act on Twitter should be to replace it with the picture that will come to signify you. Nothing makes you look more like a spammer than leaving this undone. Your next act should be to tell us a little something about the part of your life that best fits your reasons for being on Twitter. Just a sentence or two is all you need, but you do need them. Because you can’t really expect us to follow you when you won’t even tell us who you are.

3. Deliver some value. And be nice!

A lot of interesting things are happening on Twitter, but we’re all constantly searching for more. If you generate interesting comments or even if you just sound like a nice person, chances are good that we’ll follow you back if you follow us. If your tweets are especially interesting, there’s a good chance that others will soon be retweeting you. However, tweets like “Please follow” are virtually never welcome, and give a very poor first impression. Generate some real content and be nice to the tweeps you meet, and you’ll have trouble getting people to not follow you.

4. Use Twitter Search to find people who interest you.

This is where it’s easy to lose heart on Twitter.You’ve heard it’s a fun place with lots of things happening, but here you are staring at a blank screen with nothing happening whatsoever. Or you may be following a few people who were suggested to you, but they’re not saying much to win you over. It’s time to find the people that you want, and that’s actually quite easy to do on Twitter.

Up at the top of the Twitter screen you’ll see a search bar. Type in some words that interest you and hit Enter. You’ll see a number of recent tweets that contain the word you entered. Click on the photo or name of any of the people shown, and you’ll see more tweets from that person. If he or she seems interesting, click “Follow” and you will then see that person’s tweets whenever you are on Twitter.

For a more advanced search, just click on the cogged wheel to the right of the search field. You can then search for specific people, phrases, or hashtags, or tweets from whatever location you choose. Within just a few clicks, you should find yourself following exactly the types of conversation or people you’ve been dreaming of.

Don’t stop there though. Hold your cursor over the tweets you find interesting and click on Reply to send them a tweet of your own. Not everyone will reply back, but if you are polite and conversational, most will, and you are now well on your way to being hooked on Twitter!

5. Don’t run up your follows.

This may be the easiest mistake for beginners to make. There are lots of interesting people to follow on Twitter, and if you’re just starting out it’s tempting to start following them all. That can create problems though. Someone who is following 800 people but is only being followed back by 80 is clearly not generating enough interesting content to attract followers. The rest of us would feel it’s not likely you’ll be interesting enough for us either. So don’t rush things. Grow slowly. Build some relationships. It generates better results, and is a lot more fun for you… and the rest of us too.

6. Don’t auto-tweet and don’t auto-DM!

I know you’ll find lots of people telling you you can “turbocharge” your time on Twitter by using programs that automatically send tweets or Direct Messages to people on Twitter. It may even sound tempting and logical. In reality though, it’s a huge turnoff for lots of us, and many people will unfollow you as soon as you send them a DM, especially if you have a link tucked in there. And don’t try to make it sound all wonderful by calling your link a gift or special way of saying thanks. Talk to us in the Twitter stream; that’s more than enough thanks for us to keep following you and helping you feel right at home here on Twitter.

7. Share and reshare.

Once you’ve made a few friends on Twitter, start offering your own thoughts or links to articles that you like. If you’re a blogger or business owner, avoid the temptation to continually promote yourself. Twitter is a social event, and people are there to share and learn, not to have people push things at them. If more than one in every five of your tweets can be seen as a sales message from you, chances are good you’ll be losing followers before you know it. Just tweet and retweet things of genuine interest, and you won’t have to look hard to find new friends on Twitter.

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The best news is that you can apply these principles in virtually any social media platform — and in real life too! —  and start seeing some real results pretty quickly. So take heart, and take action. And hey, if you want at least one more friend on Twitter, you’ll find me right here.

The post Getting started on Twitter: 7 steps for following & being followed back. appeared first on PikeSPeak.