Twitter Ally Blog

Welcome back to the Twitter Ally blog...

If you have an online ezine, newsletter, or blog, Twitter is a very effective way to get new subscribers. It’s as simple as setting your profile link and welcome message to point to your optin or squeeze page. Then sit back and let Twitter Ally do all the work of finding new subscribers for you!

As you may already know – “The money is in the list!” – following up with prospective customers via email or Twitter is an excellent way to increase sales. And the added advantage of having a Twitter account with a large follower base is that it’s like having a second list you can send your newsletters or recommendations to!

For comparison’s sake you could say that an email list is more responsive to a single message (simply due to the amount of chatter in the Twitstream) and yet, building a large Twitter account is a lot easier and more cost effective, and allows you to send content in a more direct way and more frequently.

But of course there’s no reason why you can’t have both, and even use one to build the other – getting your email subscribers to follow you on Twitter can also provide a more personal touch that leads to greater trust and more customers.

In any case it’s pretty easy to see how by using Twitter:
More followers = more visitors = more subscribers = more sales.

Seriously, you can promote anything with Twitter! Even a cursory glance at Twitter or Twellow will show you that people on Twitter are there to talk about every subject imaginable, and with Twitter Ally you can track down and contact directly users interested in any niche you can think of.

That’s the kind of promotion power to rival even the most targeted of marketing methods like Pay Per Click and Ezine Solo Ads! In fact, it far surpasses them because you only pay once rather than over and over again. Imagine the difference it would make to your bottom line if you cut your overheads to nothing!

And with affiliate programs for just about anything these days, you can promote whatever you like and simply match your target audience to your target product and get paid for it.

Here are just some ideas and examples you could promote…
Your Own Product or Book
Your Own Blog or Website
A Recommendation Site
Network Marketing Programs
Membership Site or Service
Cost Per Action Offers
Affiliate Product or Program

Apart from the huge benefit of getting a continual flow of free website traffic, the other major advantage is the time freed to actually develop these sites rather than spending time on marketing.

With endless promotion and account possibilities,
forgive the cliché if I say: “The sky’s the limit!”

It’s simple really. When you start following people, a high percentage of them will follow you back (I find about 25-50% depending on your username, profile and niche.) But before you do, you just set up a welcome message using a free service like SocialOomph (or SocialToo.) Twitter users who follow you back will be sent a direct message which can be anything you like!

Simply include a link in your welcome message and statistically a certain percentage of your new followers will click on your link and go to your website. Of course it depends on your actual message and niche how many do, but this unobtrusive little strategy means you can get targeted visitors to any website in a short period of time with virtually no effort.

While it’s impossible for me to predict exactly what results you’ll get, I fully guarantee you will get targeted site visitors using Twitter Ally or your money back. That’s no joke in world of internet marketing!

The way to get targeted followers is to find and follow targeted users.

Twitter users that you follow are usually sent an email notifying them they have a new follower, and most people will reciprocate your following of them.

Many also have their accounts setup so that they will automatically follow you back using a third party service such as SocialOomph.Com (as I suggest you do too.) And the more users that follow you back, the more users you can follow. This sets up an ongoing process where you can increase the number of your followers.

It does however mean you need an effective way to search for and follow targeted users of similar interests that relate to your account. You can of course do this manually and there are a number of different ways of doing this too (the Twitter conversation search being the most obvious.)

But if you really want to do this effectively on a scale that will actually produce real results, then you need to employ some automation. And that’s where Twitter Ally comes in, doing all this tedious and time-consuming work on your behalf – finding, following and unfollowing users as required for the search terms you specify.

Let’s take a step back to internet marketing 101… In a nutshell, if you can get targeted site visitors to a website (preferably a sales letter) then you can earn something for it. And it doesn’t have to be your own website by any means.

But that’s not as easy as anyone makes it sound. I’ve personally tested a wide variety of marketing options for getting targeted website traffic, and to be honest, the majority don’t work, and the ones that do are either expensive or time-consuming.

On the other hand, using Twitter is completely free, if you know what you’re doing (and you soon will) then you can targeted site visitors for nothing and convert minimal time on Twitter into cold hard cash that you can take to the bank. Why?

The way I see it, Twitter has three main advantages:
The ability to find targeted interested fresh contacts freely and easily.
The ability to build rapport and comfort with people, also freely and easily.
The ability to contact people directly without being intrusive or needing to ’sell’.

And it really boils down to that. If you can do these three things, you will find it difficult to fail on Twitter. And the rest is just knowing how best to do them…

Using Twitter is easy. Simply signup for an account at Twitter.Com and you can start sending messages and finding people to follow straight away.

Messages (also called ’statuses’ for their similarity to Facebook and Myspace statuses) are limited to 140 characters and are of three types.

A ‘normal’ message. eg. “how is everyone?”
A ‘At’ or ‘Reply’ messages, started with or including an @ symbol, sent to another user, eg. “@tony_hayes how are you?”
A ‘direct message’ which is private and only seen by the user it is sent to. eg. “D tony_hayes how are you?”

Normal and @ messages appear in the Twitter ‘public timeline’ which means anyone can search for them and read them, while direct messages can only be seen by the user they are sent to.
The other thing to know is that you can only send direct messages to users who are following you. Later this will become more important when it comes to your marketing strategy.

Certainly there is more to learn about Twitter as you go, so you might want to take a minute to check out Twitter’s Getting Started Guide.

Twitter is basically an open channel chat program with people talking about every subject imaginable, making it excellent resource for targeted marketing.

It is also the fastest growing social network on the planet, which means you will never run out of new contact possibilities no matter how hard you try.

Unlike social networks like Facebook and Myspace where profiles, pictures and videos take precedence, Twitter is all about messaging, making it a far more direct platform for getting your message across.

Since you can have as many Twitter accounts as you like regarding anything you like, and each with minimal setup time, the potential for promotion possibilities are literally endless.
There are numerous ways to find Twitter users with interest in your chosen niche or topic of interest, and whether you learn to do this manually or setup a way to do this automatically, Twitter is one of the easiest systems to learn.

Twitter is a basically a chat-based social network. You create a user account and then you can send messages to other users and have a conversation regarding anything you like.

It is as simple as that… But what makes it complex is, who gets to see which messages?

Unlike Myspace and Facebook which work on reciprocal friendships only (ie. you send a friend request and it is accepted or denied) – Twitter works on an independent two-way system where two people can listen to or ‘follow’ each other’s conversations.

In other words, I might be following your chat-stream but you might not be following mine, or vice versa, or we could be following each others. Messages from users that you are following appear in your personal ‘timeline’ when you’re logged into Twitter. (Read all that again if it doesn’t make sense.)

Okay, so this could mean you end up spending a lot of time reading nonsense which doesn’t concern you, and I’m sure plenty of people do just that… but it’s not really the point.
The real point is to focus on conversations on subjects that interest you. Otherwise you’ll probably get bored with Twitter, when instead you can be leveraging it for marketing and enjoying it at the same time.

Here’s a little step-by-step guide to follow for creating new Twitter accounts fast…

I think the most important part of this process is in setting up your profile. Your account pic and background will make a difference to the impression you give new followers, so it’s worth spending at least a little time on this. A friendly personal pic is preferable.

Another important tip is to use relevent keywords in your Twitter bio. While Twitter doesn’t use these for searches, there are a number of 3rd party applications which do search bios, so including keywords rather than focussing on sentence structure will help people find you.

As far as setting up a welcome message goes, it is arguably more important to have a message that creates curiousity and entices people to click rather than focuses on selling anything specific.

Important Note: Twitter limits the number of accounts you can have by IP address. If you are creating more than 3 Twitter accounts, it is necessary that you access Twitter using a proxy server when you do so to prevent them from being deleted.

Step 1. Change your Proxy Server

1. Follow these instructions to change your browser settings.
(remember to disable the proxy later or you may experience slower browsing!)

Step 2. Create an Email Account

2a. Get a free email account at hotmail.com or gmail.com or wherever. OR
2b. Create an email account via your free web hosting’s Cpanel.

Step 3. Create a Twitter Account

3.1. Go to http://twitter.com/signup
3.2. Enter a name, username, password. email.
3.3. Choose your Twitter username carefully!
3.4. Create account. Enter the Captcha code.
3.5. Skip the find friend and contact steps.

Step 3. Change your Settings:

4.1. Click ‘Settings’
Change your timezone and save if you like.
Click ‘Profile’ in the settings menu.
Enter your desired link under ‘Web’.
Enter something for your bio and location.
4.2. ‘Upload’ a relevent or profile picture.
(search Google images or Myspace to find one.
and optionally crop with FastStone first.)
Don’t forget to click ‘Save’
4.3. (optional) Click ‘Notices’ in the settings menu.
Uncheck the boxes to turn off notifications. ‘Save’.
4.4. (optional) Click ‘Design’ in the settings menu.
Choose a Theme or Change background image.
‘Save changes’

Step 5. Setup Direct Welcome Message

5.1. Go to SocialOomph.com (previously tweetlater.com)
5.2. Register or login to your account.
5.3. Under ‘Social Accounts’ click ‘Add a New Twitter Account’
5.4. Click ‘Allow’ when redirected to Twitter.
5.5. Tick ‘Auto Welcome’ and enter your welcome message(s).
5.6. Highly recommended: Tick ‘Auto Follow’ and ‘Auto Unfollow’ too.
5.7. ‘Save’ this. And you’re all done for now…!

For users of Twitter Ally you can follow these simple steps to get thousands of targeted followers on autopilot…!

Step 6. Add this account to your Twitter Ally!

6.1. Login to your Twitter Ally at yourdomain.com/twitterally/
6.2. Enter your new Twitter account’s username and password.
6.3. Click ‘Add New Account’.
6.4. Click on the Searches button for the account.
6.5. Add your desired mix of search types!
I recommend something like the following:
Main keyword Twitter search: 200 users per day
Main keyword Google search: 50 users per day
Main keyword Twellow search: 50 users per day
Twellow category search: 50 users per day
Followers of 3 related users: 50 users each per day
(Related users can be found using FindOnTwitter)
6.6. Click the ‘Msgs’ button.
6.7. Enter your extra followup welcome message.