Senarai nama orang yang diarahkan supaya dibunuh oleh Rasulullah s.a.w semasa Fath al-Makkah
i. Miqyas bin Subaba
ii. Ibnu Khatal
iii. Abdullah ibn Abu Sarh
iv. al-Huwayrith bin Nufayl
v. 2 orang penyanyi
9 orang yang bersama Rasulullah s.a.w pada Hari Hunain
i. al-Abbas (kanan)
ii. al-Fadl (kiri)
iii. Abu Sufyan bin al-Harith
iv. Saidina Ali bin Abi Talib
v. Naufal bin al-Harith
vi. Rabi’ah bin al-Harith
vii. Abdullah bin az-Zubair bin Abd Mutalib
viii. Utbah bin Abu Lahab
ix. Ma’tib bin Abu Lahab
x. Ayman bin Umm Ayman (syahid)
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Friday, April 22, 2011
Khadijah binti Khuwailid : Benarkah 40 tahun umurnya
Apabila bercerita kisah Nabi Muhammad saw secara tidak langsung nama Khadijah akan disebut. Beliau seorang wanita yang banyak berjasa kepada perjuangan Islam. Seorang wanita yang bangsawan lagi dermawan. Bagaimana beliau menyerahkan dagangannya kepada Rasulullah saw untuk diniagakan ke Syam. Bagaimana kemudiannya beliau tertarik kepada Rasulullah dan meminangnya. Bagaimana beliau berkahwin dengan Rasulullah saw. Kemudiannya melahirkan anak-anak Rasulullah yang selalu disenandungkan ..anak Nabi kita ada tujuh orang, tiga lelaki empat perempuan. Qasim , Abdullah, Zainab, Ruqayyah, Ummu Kalthum dan Fatimah. Cuma Ibrahim yang berlainan ibu. Bagaimana kemudiannya beliau wafat dalam keadaan miskin dan tahun kewafatannya disebut sebagai Tahun Kesedihan (Aamul Huzn).
Dikisahkan ketika berkahwin dengan Rasulullah beliau berumur 40 tahun dan sebelumnya telah berkahwin sebanyak 2 kali. Beliau telah dua kali menjanda tetapi berkahwin dengan Rasulullah walaupun ramai lagi orang lain yang berkenan dengannya. Beliau dikatakan begitu cantik sehingga menawan ramai pembesar Mekah tetapi hanya kepada Rasulullah sahaja ia tertarik.
Apabila berkahwin beliau dikurniakan enam orang anak iaitu Qasim, Abdullah, Zainab, Ruqayyah, Ummu Kalthum dan Fatimah. Sekiranya dikatakan anak-anak itu dilahirkan seorang setahun maka umur Khadijah adalah sekitar 46 tahun. Umur yang agak lanjut untuk melahirkan anak walaupun bukan suatu yang mustahil kerana wanita Quraish mengikut Shafie masih didatangi haid sehingga 65 tahun. Bagaimana sekiranya dua tahun seorang? Berapakah beza umur antara Zainab, Ruqayyah dan Ummu Kalthum? Tentulah umurnya sekitar 52 tahun..beliau diriwayatkan wafat pada 10 Ramadhan tahun 621Masihi manakala Rasul menjalani mi’raj pada 27 Rajab tahun yang sama iaitu selepas kematian Abu Talib.
Berapakah umur Fatimah ketika kewafatan ibunya sehingga beliau digelar Ummu Abiha..Satu riwayat menyatakan beliau dilahirkan pada hari Jumaat 20 Jamadil Thani tahun ke lima bi’thah atau 615M. Fatimah berusia 5 tahun ketika Khadijah wafat. Rasulullah pula berusia 50 tahun ketika Khadijah wafat jadinya usia Khadijah ketika melahirkan Fatimah lebihkurang 60 tahun. Mengikut M.H. Shakir, Fatimah lahir di Makkah pada 20 Jamadil Thani 18 tahun sebelum hijrah.
Ada riwayat menyatakan saat kelahiran Fatimah digambarkan oleh Khadijah sendiri apabila beliau meminta pertolongan daripada tetangganya tetapi ditolak sehingga beliau didatangi empat orang yang tinggi dengan lingkaran cahaya sekitar mereka...... kenapa hanya kelahiran Fatimah yang digambarkan, bagaimana dengan kelahiran-kelahiran yang terdahulu...
Jangkamasa beliau hidup bersama dengan Rasulullah lebihkurang 25 tahun. Riwayat menyatakan Rasulullah berusia 50 tahun ketika kewafatannya. Setelah menjalani proses pengasingan selama 3 tahun , penderitaan yang berterusan beliau wafat setelah mengasuh Fatimah selama 5 tahun. Sebab itu Fatimah kemudian bertindak menggantikan ibunya terhadap bapanya sehingga Rasulullah sendiri memanggilnya sebagai Ummu Abiha.
Kenapa hanya Fatimah yang perihatin terhadap bapanya, bagaimana dengan Zainab, Ummu Kalthum atau Ruqayyah. Kenapa mereka yang telah memasuki alam remaja ini tidak mempedulikan bapa mereka? Adakah Nabi itu bukan bapa mereka? Hanya tangan kecil Fatimah sahaja digambarkan sering menyapu kepala bapanya ketika dianiaya oleh kafir Quraisy. Membuang kotoran, pasir dan sebagainya tetapi remaja-remaja itu tidak mempedulikan bapa mereka.
Kesaksian al-Quran – Rasulullah tidak pernah melanggar segala perintah Allah sebelum atau sesudah diangkat menjadi Rasul. Al-Quran secara jelas melarang perkahwinan antara wanita muslimah dengan orang kafir. Antaranya ayat 2:221 , 60:10, 2:89 ,2:98 , 6 :28.
Kesaksian Sejarah
Rasulullah hanya menyukai Fatimah dan anak-anaknya. Baginda tidak pernah menyebut tentang Zainab, Ruqayyah dan Ummu Kalthum sedangkan baginda adalah seorang yang adil dan maksum. Hanya Fatimah yang masih kecil memberi pertolongan kepada baginda.
Dalam beberapa keadaan Rasul hanya menyebut Fatimah seperti sekiranya Fatimah anakku mencuri..... Wahai Fatimah binti Muhammad semasa yaumul Inzar. Fatimah adalah daripadaku sesiapa yang menyakitinya bererti menyakitiku. Fatimah adalah bagian dari jantung hatiku.
Dikisahkan ketika berkahwin dengan Rasulullah beliau berumur 40 tahun dan sebelumnya telah berkahwin sebanyak 2 kali. Beliau telah dua kali menjanda tetapi berkahwin dengan Rasulullah walaupun ramai lagi orang lain yang berkenan dengannya. Beliau dikatakan begitu cantik sehingga menawan ramai pembesar Mekah tetapi hanya kepada Rasulullah sahaja ia tertarik.
Apabila berkahwin beliau dikurniakan enam orang anak iaitu Qasim, Abdullah, Zainab, Ruqayyah, Ummu Kalthum dan Fatimah. Sekiranya dikatakan anak-anak itu dilahirkan seorang setahun maka umur Khadijah adalah sekitar 46 tahun. Umur yang agak lanjut untuk melahirkan anak walaupun bukan suatu yang mustahil kerana wanita Quraish mengikut Shafie masih didatangi haid sehingga 65 tahun. Bagaimana sekiranya dua tahun seorang? Berapakah beza umur antara Zainab, Ruqayyah dan Ummu Kalthum? Tentulah umurnya sekitar 52 tahun..beliau diriwayatkan wafat pada 10 Ramadhan tahun 621Masihi manakala Rasul menjalani mi’raj pada 27 Rajab tahun yang sama iaitu selepas kematian Abu Talib.
Berapakah umur Fatimah ketika kewafatan ibunya sehingga beliau digelar Ummu Abiha..Satu riwayat menyatakan beliau dilahirkan pada hari Jumaat 20 Jamadil Thani tahun ke lima bi’thah atau 615M. Fatimah berusia 5 tahun ketika Khadijah wafat. Rasulullah pula berusia 50 tahun ketika Khadijah wafat jadinya usia Khadijah ketika melahirkan Fatimah lebihkurang 60 tahun. Mengikut M.H. Shakir, Fatimah lahir di Makkah pada 20 Jamadil Thani 18 tahun sebelum hijrah.
Ada riwayat menyatakan saat kelahiran Fatimah digambarkan oleh Khadijah sendiri apabila beliau meminta pertolongan daripada tetangganya tetapi ditolak sehingga beliau didatangi empat orang yang tinggi dengan lingkaran cahaya sekitar mereka...... kenapa hanya kelahiran Fatimah yang digambarkan, bagaimana dengan kelahiran-kelahiran yang terdahulu...
Jangkamasa beliau hidup bersama dengan Rasulullah lebihkurang 25 tahun. Riwayat menyatakan Rasulullah berusia 50 tahun ketika kewafatannya. Setelah menjalani proses pengasingan selama 3 tahun , penderitaan yang berterusan beliau wafat setelah mengasuh Fatimah selama 5 tahun. Sebab itu Fatimah kemudian bertindak menggantikan ibunya terhadap bapanya sehingga Rasulullah sendiri memanggilnya sebagai Ummu Abiha.
Kenapa hanya Fatimah yang perihatin terhadap bapanya, bagaimana dengan Zainab, Ummu Kalthum atau Ruqayyah. Kenapa mereka yang telah memasuki alam remaja ini tidak mempedulikan bapa mereka? Adakah Nabi itu bukan bapa mereka? Hanya tangan kecil Fatimah sahaja digambarkan sering menyapu kepala bapanya ketika dianiaya oleh kafir Quraisy. Membuang kotoran, pasir dan sebagainya tetapi remaja-remaja itu tidak mempedulikan bapa mereka.
Kesaksian al-Quran – Rasulullah tidak pernah melanggar segala perintah Allah sebelum atau sesudah diangkat menjadi Rasul. Al-Quran secara jelas melarang perkahwinan antara wanita muslimah dengan orang kafir. Antaranya ayat 2:221 , 60:10, 2:89 ,2:98 , 6 :28.
Kesaksian Sejarah
Rasulullah hanya menyukai Fatimah dan anak-anaknya. Baginda tidak pernah menyebut tentang Zainab, Ruqayyah dan Ummu Kalthum sedangkan baginda adalah seorang yang adil dan maksum. Hanya Fatimah yang masih kecil memberi pertolongan kepada baginda.
Dalam beberapa keadaan Rasul hanya menyebut Fatimah seperti sekiranya Fatimah anakku mencuri..... Wahai Fatimah binti Muhammad semasa yaumul Inzar. Fatimah adalah daripadaku sesiapa yang menyakitinya bererti menyakitiku. Fatimah adalah bagian dari jantung hatiku.
Friday, April 15, 2011
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Kleper
Hari ini kleper berada di muka surat pertama Yahoo. Mungkin kerana mozilla ingat perkataan ini lalu apabila taip maka diletaknya muka pertama. Perkembangan yang baik bagaimana dengan google. Tak tengok lagi.
apasal gambar selalu kat atas bukan ikut kursor?
Google juga memaparkan pada halaman pertama. Rasa macam tak caya pulak. Rupa-rupanya pakat letak muka pertama .Juga ada pada muka surat tiga. Agaknya orang lain tak kemaskini blog mereka jadi blog ni naik depanlah.
apasal gambar selalu kat atas bukan ikut kursor?
Google juga memaparkan pada halaman pertama. Rasa macam tak caya pulak. Rupa-rupanya pakat letak muka pertama .Juga ada pada muka surat tiga. Agaknya orang lain tak kemaskini blog mereka jadi blog ni naik depanlah.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Kleper
Buat julung kalinya Yahoo memaparkan blog ini pada muka 12. Sebelum ini tak pernah ada. Agak-agaknya Yahoo baru juppe.
Tapi apa pasal hanya muka 12. Muka depan bila pulak?
Kenapa kalau upload mesti duduk atas. Ikut oranglah nak letak kat kursor tu.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Gambar terbaru Ahmad Irsyad
Gambar Ahmad Irsyad
Cubaan untuk upload artikel gagal jadi upload gambar sahaja.
Cubaan untuk upload artikel gagal jadi upload gambar sahaja.
A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO TWITTER
CONTENTS
1 Introduction to Twitter for the Affiliate Marketer.......................................5
The hype is justified............................................................................................. 5
A basic insight ....................................................................................................... 6
2 Getting Started – The Simple Steps ...........................................................8
Signing up to an account on Twitter................................................................ 8
Your Username...................................................................................................... 8
Skip the next steps............................................................................................... 9
Make sure you turn off the notices ................................................................ 10
3 Branding Your Profile For Optimal Results.............................................11
Get it right from the outset ............................................................................... 11
Settings: Timezone............................................................................................. 11
Settings: More info URL.................................................................................... 11
Settings: Online bio............................................................................................ 12
Settings: Protect My Updates.......................................................................... 12
Settings: Avatar................................................................................................... 13
Your Background Design.................................................................................. 13
4 Building Your Following Quickly and Powerfully ...................................15
Following linked to tweeting............................................................................ 15
Build followers related to your niche ............................................................ 15
Initial steps............................................................................................................ 16
Unfollow those not following you................................................................... 17
Follow those who follow you........................................................................... 18
Find the experts................................................................................................... 18
Respond to your messages ............................................................................. 19
Use your website to complement twitter...................................................... 19
Notify your list of your twitter activity........................................................... 20
Automate the process........................................................................................ 21
Convert your followers to subscribers…and then to buyers.................. 22
Converting followers to affiliate sales........................................................... 24
5 Tweeting rules for an affiliate marketer ...................................................26
Understand this…............................................................................................... 26
Quality and quantity…....................................................................................... 26
The money-makers ............................................................................................. 28
© Tweetomatic Profiteer, 2010. All Rights Reserved.
Get your keywords in......................................................................................... 29
Language tips for tweeting............................................................................... 30
Re-tweeting........................................................................................................... 30
Picture tweets ...................................................................................................... 30
6 Pulling it All Together: Master Twitter And Fuel Your Affiliate Income32
Action Plan ................................................................................................32
© Tweetomatic Profiteer, 2010. All Rights Reserved.
Disclaimer
The contents of this manual reflect the author’s views & opinions only.
The author disclaims any personal loss or liability caused by the use of any information presented in this guide.
The author is not engaged in rendering any legal or professional advice. The services of a professional are recommended if legal advice or assistance is needd.
While the links and descriptions of third parties mentioned herein are assumed to be reliable at the time of writing, the author and his affiliates are not responsible for their activities. Sources can only be confirmed reliable at the time of original publication of this manual.
This manual is a guide only and, as such, should be considered solely for basic information. Earnings or profits derived, or not derived from reading and implementing the following information is entirely dependent on the ambitions, motivation, desires, and abilities of the individual reader.
No part of this guide may be altered, copied, or distributed without written permission from the author.
All product names, logos, and trademarks are property of their respective owners who have not necessarily endorsed, sponsored, or approved this publication.
Text and images available over the internet and used in this manual may be subject to intellectual rights and may not be copied from this manual.
PLEASE DO NOT SHARE THIS DOCUMENT OR THE IDEAS, STRATEGIES OR TACTICS OUTLINED IN THIS DOCUMENT WITHOUT WRITTEN CONSENT FROM THE AUTHOR.
© Tweetomatic Profiteer, 2010. All Rights Reserved.
1 Introduction to Twitter for the Affiliate Marketer
The hype is justified
Over the course of this year, the popularity of Twitter has sky-rocketed. In March 2009 a Nielsen.com blog reported that Twitter had an incredible monthly growth of 1,382%. As recently as August 2009, there were a reported 50 million users of Twitter.
An internal leaked document published by Techcrunch reported that Twitter is planning to add a billion users by 2013. To put that into perspective, a billion people today is one sixth the world’s population.
So you need to pay attention when I stress that, for the affiliate marketer, Twitter is absolutely an essential tool.
For those who are already on board, congratulations. In this manual I’m going to expand on the techniques and strategies you can use to fully leverage Twitter. By now you should have a method which monetizes the strength of your following on Twitter. I’m going to explain how you should develop that following so that it
© Tweetomatic Profiteer, 2010. All Rights Reserved.
continues to grow and complements your other marketing tools to ensure your affiliate income also grows.
If you’re a newcomer to Twitter, or have heard about it (who hasn’t?!) but haven’t quite got round to opening an account, not to worry. I’m going to take you through the basics so you too can reach a level of understanding that the more experienced “Twitterers” possess. From setting up an account to cashing in on affiliate sales from your following, you’ll have a far superior knowledge of how to exploit Twitter for online income.
A basic insight
Twitter is a means to send short updates (“tweets”) to people who want to receive them (your “followers”). The simplest way to do that is to log into your Twitter account on the Web and type your tweet into the text field. Any person who views your profile on Twitter can see all your outgoing tweets as they are publicly viewable. Followers can also see a list of tweets from everyone they follow when they log into their Twitter home pages.
These updates cannot be longer than 140 characters. Whilst this may seem restrictive, especially if you’re used to 400-500 word blog posts, it is the key to Twitter’s success. Limiting the number of words you can tweet makes Twitter
© Tweetomatic Profiteer, 2010. All Rights Reserved.
very easy and quick to use. It’s what is commonly known as the art of “microblogging”.
There are many ways to use this tweet “restriction” to your advantage and I’ll expand on these methods a little later in this manual.
For those who enjoy using social networking applications on this mobile phone, you can send and receive tweets equally well as on your computer.
Essentially, the point of a tweet is to make it interesting. People can follow you if they find your tweets interesting and vice versa. When you tweet, your message appears in your followers’ Twitter account. You can insert links in your tweets (more about that later) or you can simply send messages without any links.
It’s the real-time value of tweeting and Twitter that makes it such a unique social networking tool. The ability to write quick, easy to read messages, viewable in public is what differentiates Twitter.
This is what the affiliate marketer needs to understand…and exploit.
© Tweetomatic Profiteer, 2010. All Rights Reserved.
2 Getting Started – The Simple Steps
Signing up to an account on Twitter
This is a very simple process. Simply click on the green “Sign up now” button on the homepage…
…and then enter basic details for the fields: Full name, Username, Password and Email.
Your Username
A word of caution here: unlike other sites you may join, the Username is crucial on Twitter. If you make the wrong selection you may seriously harm your ability to generate a high number of followers and so, ultimately, your affiliate income from Twitter.
In many ways it is like selecting a domain name. You must aim to keep it simple and closely related to the brand you are promoting – whether that’s yourself or a particular product or site, for example.
Under no circumstances must you use a random username. You may choose your own name or a simple variation of that name (if the account username has already been taken). This is highly recommended as it is the best way to build
© Tweetomatic Profiteer, 2010. All Rights Reserved.
your personality into your Twitter account. This will in turn have a positive effect on your ability to build followers as Twitterers are generally more reactive to your tweets if you appear more “real”.
If you don’t want to use your real name, select a username that is closely associated with your website. You should aim to use this name over a long period of time to establish your brand on Twitter. Changes to this username particularly at a stage where you have thousands of followers (as you should with the methods I’ll teach you!) can undermine that brand.
What you also want to achieve is to make it simple for someone to go into twitter and find you by simply typing in the URL.
For example, if I want to find Barack Obama’s Twitter profile, I simply type in twitter.com/barackobama.
What you want to avoid is a long or difficult-to-spell username where a small typo will misdirect a Twitterer who may want to follow you. Staying away from numbers is also recommended.
Twitter has an effective search engine which allows it’s users to find you through your username. So to make yourself accessible you need to follow these guidelines.
In fact, for the purposes of the search engine, if you’re using your real name, make sure your first name and last name are separated. Otherwise it will be difficult for people to find you when they search for your name.
Also, be aware that when you enter your full name in the field provided by Twitter’s sign-up page, this will appear on your Twitter homepage. So if you do not want to use your real name, do not enter it in this field.
Skip the next steps
Once you have entered the relevant details, Twitter will then ask you to search your online mail service e.g. Yahoo, AOL, Gmail to find anyone in your address book who has already registered with Twitter.
The idea is to start following those contacts and invite those of your contacts who haven’t got a Twitter account, to sign up.
© Tweetomatic Profiteer, 2010. All Rights Reserved.
Unless your personal email account contains scores of contacts who have an interest in the niche that you are marketing this is a step you can skip as it doesn’t provide much value.
Twitter will then recommend various popular Twitter users (individuals and organisations) to follow. Again, at this stage, this is a step to skip. The focus should be on completing your profile in the right manner and searching for followers related to your niche.
Make sure you turn off the notices
To make Twitter profitable the aim is to get thousands of followers. If you receive a notice by email each time someone follows you or sends you a direct message, this is likely to annoy you!
If you choose to register your mobile phone with Twitter, for similar reasons, I advise turning mobile updates off.
Your homepage You’ll see a status bar asking you “What are you doing?” This is where you enter your tweet (this step will come later).
On the right of your page you’ll also see an option to click on “Direct Messages” and “@[your username]”.
Direct messages are messages sent to you by your followers. You can send these messages to your followers too. Only the recipient can see the direct message.
To send a direct message, type D, then enter a space, and then type the username of the Twitterer you want to send the message to.
@ messages are used if you want to mention a Twitterer in your tweet. These can be viewed by all of your followers. To send an @ message, type @ and then enter the username of the Twitterer. Do not enter a space this time.
I’ll provide advice on how to use these functions effectively, later in this manual.
© Tweetomatic Profiteer, 2010. All Rights Reserved.
3 Branding Your Profile For Optimal Results
Get it right from the outset
Your public Twitter page is an opportunity for you to market yourself to thousands of followers, potential followers and those with a vague interest who end up clicking through to your page.
It’s therefore crucial that you make full use of this opportunity from the outset and ensure that your branding enhances your profile.
I’ve already discussed the important of choosing the right username and if you have any doubts about this, I urge you to re-read my suggestions.
A further point is that if you’re promoting or developing products in different niches, open multiple accounts for each of this niches. Trying to promote sites or products across different niches with one twitter username is highly unlikely to work.
Settings: Timezone
Although this is a minor point, remember to enter your timezone. If you’re targeting a customer base in a different timezone to your own, entering their timezone may make it easier for them to relate to your tweets.
This is because Twitter frames the tweets in the form of a timeline. When you view a Twitterer’s tweets you will see how long ago their last few tweets were submitted.
Alternatively, you can use an application to schedule your tweets (such as socialoomph.com) and you can schedule them so that they’re broadcasted to your followers at optimum times according to their timezones.
Settings: More info URL
Whilst you can promote multiple URL’s on Twitter, the main URL should be entered here. This is permanently viewable and clickable on your homepage and should be your main website. Whether it’s your blog or your product sales page you should not miss this opportunity to enter the URL.
© Tweetomatic Profiteer, 2010. All Rights Reserved.
As time passes, the focal point of your affiliate marketing may change. In which case the URL may need to be updated according to what you want your followers or potential followers to click through to ahead of other URL’s.
Make sure to leave out or get rid of the "www" (check the link prior to inserting and make sure it works). This is valuable real estate and the www eats up some of it.
Settings: Online bio
As you can see from the image above, you have fewer than 160 characters to describe to fellow Twitterers what you’re all about.
As with your username, I suggest putting some thought into this. Contrary to what you may see frequently on Twitter, I wouldn’t suggest filling this entirely with keywords describing your interests e.g. affiliate marketer.
Describe what site or product you’re currently working on or promoting. Be sure to drop in the fact that you’re a marketer, but make yourself stand out from others who use generic descriptions. As many of your followers or potential followers may read this, it’s valuable marketing space and what you want them to do is click on your main URL after they’ve read it.
That’s why I also suggest updating your main URL in the same way as your bio to focus the attention of those who view your homepage on your most recent promotion or product.
Settings: Protect My Updates
Marketers should not click this box as otherwise the number of people who can see your twitter page will be restricted.
© Tweetomatic Profiteer, 2010. All Rights Reserved.
Settings: Avatar
This is an important option based on the fact that Twitter is an opportunity to establish your brand as a marketer. If you have used your own name when selecting a username you should also upload a photograph of yourself.
Use a good photo that shows you in a personable and professional light. Also use one of high quality as the image will be displayed on your page in small dimensions. Each time you tweet and it appears on your followers’ timelines, it will be this photo that they see next to your tweet so it must be clearly viewable.
If you have selected a username for a product or a website then use a logo. This is no substitute for using a real photo of you though, as it lacks the same personable touch which is what works on Twitter.
Under no circumstances must you leave the avatar blank. This will create the strong impression that you’re not committed about Twittering.
Your Background Design
Again, failing to spend time on this, and simply selecting a background image provided by Twitter means that you miss out on valuable branding and advertising space.
The left side of Twitter page should be used to promote your product and to promote you. Since Twitter restricts the length of your bio as well as your tweets, this is valuable space which you can use effectively.
My suggestion would be to reinforce your bio and profile picture by inserting a different picture of you in a larger dimension. Or if you are not using your own picture, insert the same logo for your profile picture here, again in larger dimensions.
Also insert the link to your main website/product as well as some detail about who you are or about that website/product.
Although the user will not be able to click through on any links on this image, the idea is to attract their attention and work their curiosity. This way they are likely to enter the URL you are promoting into their browser and find out more about you. It’s another opportunity on your Twitter homepage to transfer traffic to the site of your choice – and that should be your ultimate aim when using Twitter as a marketer.
© Tweetomatic Profiteer, 2010. All Rights Reserved.
Other suggestions for this left hand side image are using quirky images of yourself (but not unprofessional images) thus increasing the intrigue of your follower.
Like your bio, you may also want to use this space to use different images over time according to which product or website you want your followers to focus on. Together the image and bio complement each other.
For those marketers who are launching new websites or promoting new websites ahead of launch, providing a launch date and a teaser sentence or two and image can work very effectively.
The idea is that new products or websites which are soon launching generate the most excitement so rather than using your bio/more info URL/left side image to promote old products, use them to promote prelaunch. Together they will increase the likelihood that any of your followers who are viewing your homepage will click through to the prelaunch page you want them to visit.
I would also suggest that you keep the right side of your Twitter homepage free of any images. You should not distract the user’s attention away from your bio and more info URL which are on this side.
If you have good design skills you may want to design the image yourself or alternatively you can use freelancing sites like elance.com or guru.com to outsource the design at relatively low cost.
Another option is to obtain free background images from sites such as twitterbackgrounds.com.
There is also an option of purchasing a custom background from that site. Other popular options for background images are twitart.com, mytweetspace.com and twitterbacks.com.
© Tweetomatic Profiteer, 2010. All Rights Reserved.
4 Building Your Following Quickly and Powerfully
Following linked to tweeting
This section is closely related to the next section (Essential Tweeting Rules For An Affiliate Marketer). The reason for this is that obtaining a large following on Twitter is actually quite simple. The number of Twitterers is increasing exponentially and finding followers relevant to your niche shouldn’t be too difficult.
However, keeping those followers engaged and converting them to traffic on the website that you want them to land to, is the tricky part. This is where the art of tweeting plays a key role.
You need to produce tweets that generate interest, that provide entertainment, and provide value to your followers. You also need to tweet frequently – every day in fact so that you are constantly putting yourself forward to your followers.
Your tweets need to contain the keywords that are relevant to your niche. So when someone searches for those keywords to follow interesting Twitterers who are tweeting on them, their search leads them to your tweets.
I will explain in more detail, in the next section, how to ensure your tweets are engaging and how to transfer your followers to the site of your choice where ultimately you can convert followers to customers.
Build followers related to your niche
Search.twitter.com is a great search engine to find people who are tweeting about your niche as well as the leading experts in that niche.
You shouldn’t follow people unrelated to your niche through a scatter gun approach. This isn’t an effective use of your time.
What you also shouldn’t do is spend time evaluating how important a certain person is to your niche and assess whether you should follow them. This is not time effective and I subscribe to the theory that even if someone is vaguely relevant to your niche you should follow them.
When you follow someone, they are then likely to follow you back and that is how you build your following. Others may find you through using sites like search.twitter.com as well as other means e.g. clicking through to your profile because you have a common follower.
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The more people that follow you, however vaguely related they are to your niche, ultimately the greater will be the traffic when you look to transfer your followers to your target site.
There will always be varying levels of interest amongst your followers in your niche and the more interested followers will read your tweets more regularly. Those with only slight interest may not be as keen, but even if you can capture their attention on a few occasions there’s still an opportunity that in the future, they will become a customer of your affiliated vendor or you yourself.
This is why numbers are important when it comes to your following and why I don’t subscribe to the theory that, for example, 300 highly targeted followers are more valuable than 1,500 followers with varying levels of interest in your niche.
Initial steps
Let’s presume you are at a starting position of no followers and you’re also not following anyone.
What you can then do is hop on to search.twitter.com or sites such as twellow.com (an online directory of Twitterers) and search for your keyword. This will then bring up a list of those who are tweeting about that keyword, or depending on your search parameters, a list of leading Twitterers for that keyword.
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Twitter allows you to follow up to 2,000 people at which point unless approximately 2,000 people aren’t following you back, you cannot follow further people.
There’s also a Twitter recommendation that you shouldn’t follow more than 500 people a day. So it’s best to stick to that initially.
You can follow 500 people initially by either manually clicking on “follow” next to each follower retrieved under you search results or automating the process through using software (more about that slightly later).
Unfollow those not following you
You should then give those people you have followed up to 72 hours to follow you back. If they haven’t followed you back by that time, you should unfollow them. It’s important to ensure that your following vs. followers is as close to a 1:1 ratio. So it’s essential that you unfollow those who aren’t following you back.
To do this effectively you should use an application like Twitter Karma.
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With one click of a mouse, you’re able to select all Twitterers who you’re following, but are not following you back. A further click ensures that you’re now unfollowing them. This will reduce the number that you’re following and allow you to then follow others with the aim that they’ll follow you back. This increases your number of followers.
You can also use Twitter Karma to find out who is following you and who you’re not following back. You can then select all of these people and follow them with just one click.
Follow those who follow you
I’d recommend using socialoomph.com to automatically follow those who are following you. This way you can avoid those who see that you’re not reciprocating the following and unfollow you. This will hinder your progress in terms of increasing your following.
Once you’ve followed 2,000 people, as mentioned, Twitter will not allow you to follow further people unless you also have approximately 2,000 people following you back.
Even when you go past 2,000 followers, you are blocked by Twitter if you try to follow too many people beyond the number that are following you.
Find the experts
It is worth investing a bit of time in identifying key players in your niche. Those who are viewed as the experts; those with the largest followings.
You can then simply start following their followers. Always follow those at the start of a key player’s list e.g. the first 100 and then look for other followers from other key players or through sites such as search.twitter.com.
This is because the followers at the start of the list are often those who have been recently active on Twitter. Dormant followers merely add numbers to your following and may not follow you back. Nor do they provide any value in the future in terms of monetizing your following.
Another benefit of following an expert is that if they send you an @message, all of their followers are able to see your name. When that key player has, for example, 30,000 followers, that’s valuable advertising!
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To induce an @message from a key player is not so straightforward however. It’s likely that they receive many @messages and if they don’t reply to all of them your chances lessen. The key is to look at their recent tweet timeline and see what they’re discussing. If they’re promoting a product, particularly their own, and are tweeting about it, there’s a greater chance they’ll reply to your @message.
Respond to your messages
Whether they’re @messages or direct messages, regularly check your account and if there are any messages specifically directed at you, make sure you respond.
When I view a Twitterer’s timeline and I don’t see any @messages, I instantly get the impression that this person isn’t interacting with their following much. So failing to respond to @messages in particular, harms your twitter relationship with the person who messaged you as well as your other followers.
Creating the impression of interaction is one way to engage your following and help to ensure that they are reactive to your tweets, particularly the more important ones where ultimately you’re looking to secure sales or transfer your followers to email leads.
Also, initiate conversations with your followers, by sending them @messages. As mentioned this tactic should definitely be used with the more influential people you are following in your niche. Look to provide answers to questions that other people ask. Providing valuable information is the key to succeeding in building your following and maximizing their responsiveness.
The more people who reply to your tweets, the more influential become your posts. Twitterank.com works out a score for each Twitter user indicating how engaged, interesting and influential they are. This is a useful tool to track your popularity as a Twitterer.
Use your website to complement twitter
A little later I’m going to talk more about what to do with your followers so that you monetize your success on Twitter. Blogging plays an important role in this.
But at this stage, if you have a blog which has even reasonable traffic, you should look to transfer your blog readers to your Twitter page with the aim of making them your followers.
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One way to do this is to place your tweets on your site. Twitter.com/badges allows you to post your tweets on you site. You can select the kind of page on which you’d like to place them – myspace, facebook, blogger and typepad are automatic options. There are additional widgets that work on almost all sites.
This way the tweets look like they are part of your site. When one of your followers clicks on a link in your tweet and is taken to your site, they’ll see the material as an extension of your tweets.
And equally importantly, those on your site who can see your latest tweets will be more likely to click through to your twitter page and follow you.
If you have a facebook account for marketing purposes, encourage your facebook followers to follow you on Twitter. And again, vice versa, encourage your Twitter followers to connect with you on Facebook.
Notify your list of your twitter activity
If you have a list of email subscribers, send them a notification that you’re Twittering and a link to your Twitter page. Also include your Twitter details in your signature.
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Give them an incentive to visit your twitter page, for example a valuable bonus report relating to the niche they’re interested in, if they sign up. In fact you can go even further by asking them to sign up and send you a direct message or @message to receive the bonus. The latter option will alert your other followers to the fact that you’re giving out bonuses. This helps to keep the interaction with your following alive.
Automate the process
I’ve already mentioned a way to unfollow those who are not following you back. Following people relevant to your niche in the first place can be tiresome if you’re manually following up to 500 people per day.
You need to find a way to automate this. There are a few software options currently on the market, but it’s really important that these comply with Twitter’s regulations otherwise your account can be suspended.
If you follow too many people in one day, using auto-follow too often, Twitter may immediately suspend your account for a week (or longer) because they deem your account to be spam.
So I’d be very careful about using automated software which hasn’t been designed meticulously to comply with Twitter’s regulations. Some of the software options I’ve seen allow you to unfollow those who don’t follow you back after an hour! This will increase the chance that your account will be suspended by Twitter and it may take you many emails with Twitter support to have it reinstated. In fact, I’ve seen some accounts with over 30,000 followers that when reinstated are back to 0 followers.
You should also be careful about the number of tweets you do per day. I strongly recommend you tweet everyday, but be aware that Twitter currently allows 50 tweets per day. They’re also stamping out tweets which are repeated so you should look to avoid this. At the very least you should tweak a tweet slightly so that it is not identical to a previous tweet.
You’re allowed to schedule tweets (twaitter.com is a useful application to schedule tweets) but if you send too many auto-tweets (i.e. above the limit) again your account is at the risk of being suspended by Twitter.
Twitter have also reduced the amount of direct messages allowed to 250 per day. Using an application such as socialoomph.com allows you to automatically send a direct message to those who follow you. I’d recommend that you do not schedule automatic messages like this. If you follow 500 people in a day and
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over 250 people follow you back, you’ll send over 250 direct messages, automatically which puts you on the wrong side of Twitter’s rules.
This is why you should proceed with caution when using any applications which seek to automate Twitter. Be certain that they have tested their software exhaustively and are keeping up-to-date with the regulations of Twitter as they evolve.
NOTE: At the end of this manual I’ll tell you more about a way which automates the follow and un-follow process, schedules tweets and crucially incorporates your affiliate activity on a platform like Clickbank. More on this later…
Convert your followers to subscribers…and then to buyers
Having a large and interactive following is irrelevant, from a marketer’s point of view, if you’re not monetizing the strength of your following.
This step is closely related to the value of your tweets, which will be dealt with in more detail in the next section. At this stage it’s simply important to stress that your tweets need to be informative, entertain and have significant value.
There are several strategies to optimise the strength of your following. My advice would be to concentrate on creating your brand on Twitter. For the first month or so I would not recommend tweeting any affiliate links or links to sales pages. I’d concentrate on establishing your presence on Twitter by providing valuable and informative tweets, as well as personal tweets which have more of your individual personality in them. This will all become clearer after the next section.
During that first month you need to focus on one of your relevant sites which you should use to complement your Twitter page.
The idea is to tweet in a way that captures the reader’s attention and compels him to click on the link in that tweet.
That link will then take him to the landing page i.e. your site. There you are free from any restrictions imposed by Twitter, i.e. a 140 character limit on your tweet. You can write longer blog posts which provide significantly more value to your follower.
As I mention, for the first month concentrate on writing blog posts which provide value and don’t redirect the follower to a sales page. The posts should be a natural extension of your tweet i.e. they need to be closely connected.
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You should be monitoring the number of your followers that click on the links in your tweets and reach your landing page.
Bit.ly is a great application for this. You can sign in to this through your Twitter username and password. Enter your links into the application so that it will shorten them and insert analytical code into them. So, when you re-visit bit.ly you can see statistics of how many of your followers clicked on the different links you inserted into your tweets.
As your followers increases so should the statistics for the numbers who click on your links and are taken to your landing page.
Try and take them to different pages as well where they can find information of value. This will promote variety but should not detract from the aim of updating your blog, regularly (daily if you can) and tweeting regularly (daily if you can) to direct your followers to new informative posts.
During the first month, you will then build the trust and gain the confidence of your follower who will recognise your tweets as high value messages.
After that first month it’s now time to think more closely about monetising your followers. The first objective, as with email marketing, should be to capture their email addresses.
So when they reach your landing page, offer them bonuses occasionally which are of value and for which they will need to enter their email address to obtain.
Run your Google Adsense campaign on your blog so that you can expand your reach to your Twitter followers.
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Converting followers to affiliate sales
After a month, start integrating your affiliate links into your tweets so that your followers are taken to sales pages. This where the substantial percentage of your income will be made. DO NOT continually tweet your affiliate link; I’d recommend that one in four of your tweets leads to a sales page.
And do not lead your followers to the same sales page, even if that sales page is highly converting. I’d suggest focusing on the top three sales pages in your niche at a time using the Clickbank marketplace rankings. The key is recency: the latest sales pages generate more excitement than older sales pages.
But you don’t want to waste your efforts on a sales page which is not converting. So I’d recommend waiting for a week or so before searching in, for example the Clickbank marketplace, to find the top recent converters. This way you satisfy both of the criteria: linking to a recent product which is also highly converting.
Again, continually analysing your results is essential, as with many other aspects of affiliate marketing. So use a separate affiliate account to generate your hoplink and regularly review how many hops your tweets are generating as your following increases. Also monitor how many of those hops are translating into affiliate sales. This will give you an indication of how reactive your followers are to buying. Converting them to subscribers to your mailing list can often be the easy part, but converting them to buyers is often the more difficult task. So analyse, analyse and analyse.
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What you should see is that your following is increasing at a regular rate, certainly beyond the initial 2,000 and this in turn is leading to a steady increase in clicks through to the links in your tweets (from your bit.ly results). This in turn should lead to a proportional increase in your sales provided that you do not use Twitter to oversell and you promote good products with sales pages which are high converters.
Try and boost your sales by offering bonuses with purchases through Twitter. Tweeting about your bonus offerings will capture the attention of your followers and promote interactivity. Ask them to direct message you with details of their purchase and an email address. Then follow that up by providing them with their bonus.
The important thing to remember is that your tweeting needs to be at the right balance and optimised to produce the results that are achievable. This is what I’ll now describe in more detail.
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5 Essential tweeting rules for an affiliate marketer
Understand this…
No matter what you do and how you do it, if you don’t get this crucial stage right, you won’t fulfill your potential on Twitter.
Tweeting the right way is your opportunity to tap into this real-time marketing hotbed.
So what is the “right way”?
Quality and quantity…
In terms of quantity, there is no hard and fast answer to the question, how many tweets? I’ve experimented a great deal to find the optimum frequency. Twitter allows up to 50 tweets a day but I think if you’re tweeting so frequently, you’re overdoing it.
I suggest 10 tweets a day evenly spaced out with an hour between each tweet. The best way to do this is to use an application which allows you to schedule your tweets (twaitter.com, for example).
There are applications which allow you to tweet automatically using a feed from Google or your blog. I would advise against using a feed from Google – you can’t control the tweets and often they lack quality or pick up articles about a product with another affiliate’s link.
What you can do to simplify tweeting is to automatically generate a feed from your blog. This way you kill two birds with one stone and you double the affiliate effect of your blog and twitter profile. As I mentioned you should use your blog posts as a natural extension of your tweets. And in the other direction you should alert members of your blog to your tweets with an application like twitterbadges.com.
Twitterfeed.com is the application I recommend to generate an automatic feed from your blog to your Twitter account.
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Set up the feed in a way which repeats the headline of your latest blog post as a tweet – this will be more appropriate due to the character restriction for a tweet. So when you write new posts remember that your headline is also acting as a tweet. So, integrate the key aspect of the post into the headline so that it acts as a teaser when read as both a blog post headline AND as a tweet. The automatic feed will then create a short link (use bit.ly as this also has analytic value) with your tweet to your blog post.
If you update your blog once a day this will also count as one automatic tweet a day. This leaves you nine further tweets to prepare per day. I suggest that at least two of those tweets should be something personal to you. Whether it’s what you’re eating, what you’re doing, or what you’re planning on doing, these simple and easy tweets should relate to you. This helps to strengthen your individual personality as a genuine Twitterer rather than an obvious affiliate marketer.
You can send out these tweets in realtime, or as I prefer to do, schedule them beforehand. This means if I can’t update my Twitter status, I don’t need to worry about them.
Of the remaining seven tweets, I’d suggest that two of those are news-related tweets. Ideally they should be related to the hot topics in the niche although even tweets relating to the general world events are relevant. The purpose of these tweets is purely to provide value and distract your follower from the fact that you’re using Twitter to make affiliate sales. They also reinforce the impression that you’re a real person offering tweets of value to your follower.
An easy way to keep track of the hot topics is to do a search on Google News for articles of topical interest. Using the same method as for your blog posts, create an intriguing headline which encourages the reader to click on the link that accompanies the tweet.
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Creating a feed from Google is the easy way out as it automates the process. Whilst many Twitterers are doing this, I’d recommend against it. You don’t have control over the tweet and I’ve often seen Twitterers automatically posting links to product reviews written by other affiliates with their respective affiliate links to the product.
This is a great way to make money if others are automatically Twittering your review article and your affiliate link!
The headlines of news articles are usually tweeted with these automatic feeds. But the click-through rate is not as high as when you begin a tweet with “Just read an interesting article on …..”
Personalising the tweet is what engages our followers on Twitter. Expressing your own opinions and emotions and wrapping them around tweets with links of interest are far more powerful than headlines of articles.
One tweet should be used to interact with your followers, whether in reply or initiating a conversation. As I mentioned earlier try and engage the more influential Twitterers in your niche by sending them an @message.
A further tweet can be used for entertainment, especially humour. Try and find funny or entertaining lines that are related to the niche you’re promoting products in. Quotations and proverbs are also useful for this genre of tweet.
The money-makers
This leaves three remaining tweets – the money-makers. They should lead to the sales pages of the three most recent highly converting products in your niche. A search in the Clickbank marketplace under the relevant category, defined by popularity, will bring up these products. Extract your affiliate links, shorten them using bit.ly and wrap your tweet around them.
These tweets need to be carefully worded. Rather than using highly emotive words like “shocking”, “crazy” and “amazing”, you need to use more toned-down and subtle language. The kind of language that you might use in a conversation with another person rather than the kind of language you’d see in the subject line of an email. Words like “interesting”, “useful” and “great” generate more curiosity from the typical Twitterer than the highly emotive words you might otherwise use. They need to be combined with a statement that is individual to you; whether it’s a description of what you’re doing, feeling or an opinion – personalise your money-maker tweets.
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Also boost their effectiveness by including details of a special offer in the tweet. Some marketers go as far to say that never tweet a link to a sales page without a special offer. Personally I’d sprinkle them in to offer variety.
Don’t forget that the prelaunch before a product is released is often an effective time to make an affiliate sale. Where there is stimulating prelaunch content, especially videos and blog discussions, it’s easier to direct your follower to these pages without appearing that you’re simply an affiliate looking for a sale.
If your follower then subscribes to the prelaunch mailing list, there’s a strong chance that if they then continue to buy your affiliate cookie will take effect and that will be your sale.
Where you are leading them to a page with a video, mention “video” in your tweet, as people are more receptive to clicking through and watching videos.
Time-sensitive tweets
These are tweets with special offers, discounts etc which will soon expire. You can exploit Twitter’s real-time value by tweeting in this way to get an instant reaction from your followers. Provided it’s used sparingly it can be an effective way of securing affiliate sales. Try to be as accurate as possible, as when your followers click on your affiliate link, your tweet will put them in the frame of mind that the offer is time-sensitive. If they then arrive at the landing site and find this is not the case they may lose confidence in your tweeting.
If someone is reviewing your tweet timeline and sees that they’ve missed a time-sensitive offer which appeals to them, it creates the impression that they should be paying more attention to your tweets.
Get your keywords in
Remember that when Twitterers are searching for real-time tweets on applications like search.twitter.com they’ll enter keywords for the niche that they’re interested in. Make sure as many of your tweets as possible are keyword-efficient.
To ensure you’re entering the right keywords, use the keyword analysis tool on Google (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal). This is useful for many forms of affiliate marketing, not just Twittering.
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Language tips for tweeting
Avoid using SMS language in your tweets. This doesn’t conform with the tweeting etiquette. It is acceptable though to use symbols like @ and to skip grammar, which helps to restrict the number of characters in your tweet.
Avoid using slang or words that are too regional as your followers may be based across a range of countries and regions. You want to connect with them all to maximize the success of your techniques.
Re-tweeting
When someone spots a good tweet, they can pass that message on to their own followers. This is when the potential for a tweet to go viral is at its highest.
The etiquette for retweeting is that you should give credit to the original twitterer. You do this by typing RT @[username]: original tweet. Any comments you want to add to the retweet can go at the beginning or in brackets at the end.
If your tweets are interesting enough, they will be shared and it’s when they’re retweeted that you have the opportunity to get your name in front of thousands and thousands of Twitterers. If that tweet has your affiliate link to a product, the potential for sales multiplies!
Generally however the kind of tweets that get re-tweeted are funny tweets, cool articles and quotes. What can have a great effect on your results is by asking for a retweet – “Please RT” – what’s known as the classic call to action.
Picture tweets
An interesting variation on the classic form of tweeting is picture tweeting. Twitpic.com is a useful application for this – it allows you to choose an image to upload, describe it and tag it, then add a message on the same form that will be tweeted. The tweet then appears in your timeline with a link to the image on twitpic.
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Apart from posting general pictures of interest to engage your followers you can also use this application directly for affiliate marketing. You can link tweets to images such as ecovers or banners of products that you’re promoting. These can complement your other tweets promoting the products and taking the followers directly to the sales pages. Visualising a product always helps to assist conversions which is why the use of ecovers is so widespread for many digital products.
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6 Pulling it All Together: Master Twitter And Fuel Your Affiliate Income
If you’re new to Twitter, I’d recommend concentrating on one niche to begin with. If you’re active on Clickbank, focus on one category initially, in the marketplace, that you can target through your Twitter following.
Action Plan
=> Sign up to Twitter if not already done so
=> Brand your twitter profile, including name, avatar, background image, bio, more info URL according to the recommendations made => Start tweeting (no affiliate links in first month, link to blog posts, follow recommended variations and tweet 10 times a day) => Start following those Twitterers relevant to your niche (search using the recommended applications and stick to limits imposed by Twitter)
=> Continue following each day and unfollow those who don’t follow you back (using applications such as Twitter Karma and allowing up to 3 days to let them follow you back)
=> Identify one profitable niche initially (you can open different twitter accounts for different niches later) using Clickbank marketplace and Google Adwords analysis tool
=> Identify 3 of the highest converting products in that niche listed in the Clickbank marketplace and promote them via personalized tweets to your followers (no more than 3 tweets per day)
=> Continue building your following and open additional twitter accounts for other profitable niches => Continually focus on the quality and variety of your tweets, using appropriate tools to schedule tweets regularly – ENGAGE WITH YOUR FOLLOWING ON DIFFERENT LEVELS.
1 Introduction to Twitter for the Affiliate Marketer.......................................5
The hype is justified............................................................................................. 5
A basic insight ....................................................................................................... 6
2 Getting Started – The Simple Steps ...........................................................8
Signing up to an account on Twitter................................................................ 8
Your Username...................................................................................................... 8
Skip the next steps............................................................................................... 9
Make sure you turn off the notices ................................................................ 10
3 Branding Your Profile For Optimal Results.............................................11
Get it right from the outset ............................................................................... 11
Settings: Timezone............................................................................................. 11
Settings: More info URL.................................................................................... 11
Settings: Online bio............................................................................................ 12
Settings: Protect My Updates.......................................................................... 12
Settings: Avatar................................................................................................... 13
Your Background Design.................................................................................. 13
4 Building Your Following Quickly and Powerfully ...................................15
Following linked to tweeting............................................................................ 15
Build followers related to your niche ............................................................ 15
Initial steps............................................................................................................ 16
Unfollow those not following you................................................................... 17
Follow those who follow you........................................................................... 18
Find the experts................................................................................................... 18
Respond to your messages ............................................................................. 19
Use your website to complement twitter...................................................... 19
Notify your list of your twitter activity........................................................... 20
Automate the process........................................................................................ 21
Convert your followers to subscribers…and then to buyers.................. 22
Converting followers to affiliate sales........................................................... 24
5 Tweeting rules for an affiliate marketer ...................................................26
Understand this…............................................................................................... 26
Quality and quantity…....................................................................................... 26
The money-makers ............................................................................................. 28
© Tweetomatic Profiteer, 2010. All Rights Reserved.
Get your keywords in......................................................................................... 29
Language tips for tweeting............................................................................... 30
Re-tweeting........................................................................................................... 30
Picture tweets ...................................................................................................... 30
6 Pulling it All Together: Master Twitter And Fuel Your Affiliate Income32
Action Plan ................................................................................................32
© Tweetomatic Profiteer, 2010. All Rights Reserved.
Disclaimer
The contents of this manual reflect the author’s views & opinions only.
The author disclaims any personal loss or liability caused by the use of any information presented in this guide.
The author is not engaged in rendering any legal or professional advice. The services of a professional are recommended if legal advice or assistance is needd.
While the links and descriptions of third parties mentioned herein are assumed to be reliable at the time of writing, the author and his affiliates are not responsible for their activities. Sources can only be confirmed reliable at the time of original publication of this manual.
This manual is a guide only and, as such, should be considered solely for basic information. Earnings or profits derived, or not derived from reading and implementing the following information is entirely dependent on the ambitions, motivation, desires, and abilities of the individual reader.
No part of this guide may be altered, copied, or distributed without written permission from the author.
All product names, logos, and trademarks are property of their respective owners who have not necessarily endorsed, sponsored, or approved this publication.
Text and images available over the internet and used in this manual may be subject to intellectual rights and may not be copied from this manual.
PLEASE DO NOT SHARE THIS DOCUMENT OR THE IDEAS, STRATEGIES OR TACTICS OUTLINED IN THIS DOCUMENT WITHOUT WRITTEN CONSENT FROM THE AUTHOR.
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1 Introduction to Twitter for the Affiliate Marketer
The hype is justified
Over the course of this year, the popularity of Twitter has sky-rocketed. In March 2009 a Nielsen.com blog reported that Twitter had an incredible monthly growth of 1,382%. As recently as August 2009, there were a reported 50 million users of Twitter.
An internal leaked document published by Techcrunch reported that Twitter is planning to add a billion users by 2013. To put that into perspective, a billion people today is one sixth the world’s population.
So you need to pay attention when I stress that, for the affiliate marketer, Twitter is absolutely an essential tool.
For those who are already on board, congratulations. In this manual I’m going to expand on the techniques and strategies you can use to fully leverage Twitter. By now you should have a method which monetizes the strength of your following on Twitter. I’m going to explain how you should develop that following so that it
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continues to grow and complements your other marketing tools to ensure your affiliate income also grows.
If you’re a newcomer to Twitter, or have heard about it (who hasn’t?!) but haven’t quite got round to opening an account, not to worry. I’m going to take you through the basics so you too can reach a level of understanding that the more experienced “Twitterers” possess. From setting up an account to cashing in on affiliate sales from your following, you’ll have a far superior knowledge of how to exploit Twitter for online income.
A basic insight
Twitter is a means to send short updates (“tweets”) to people who want to receive them (your “followers”). The simplest way to do that is to log into your Twitter account on the Web and type your tweet into the text field. Any person who views your profile on Twitter can see all your outgoing tweets as they are publicly viewable. Followers can also see a list of tweets from everyone they follow when they log into their Twitter home pages.
These updates cannot be longer than 140 characters. Whilst this may seem restrictive, especially if you’re used to 400-500 word blog posts, it is the key to Twitter’s success. Limiting the number of words you can tweet makes Twitter
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very easy and quick to use. It’s what is commonly known as the art of “microblogging”.
There are many ways to use this tweet “restriction” to your advantage and I’ll expand on these methods a little later in this manual.
For those who enjoy using social networking applications on this mobile phone, you can send and receive tweets equally well as on your computer.
Essentially, the point of a tweet is to make it interesting. People can follow you if they find your tweets interesting and vice versa. When you tweet, your message appears in your followers’ Twitter account. You can insert links in your tweets (more about that later) or you can simply send messages without any links.
It’s the real-time value of tweeting and Twitter that makes it such a unique social networking tool. The ability to write quick, easy to read messages, viewable in public is what differentiates Twitter.
This is what the affiliate marketer needs to understand…and exploit.
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2 Getting Started – The Simple Steps
Signing up to an account on Twitter
This is a very simple process. Simply click on the green “Sign up now” button on the homepage…
…and then enter basic details for the fields: Full name, Username, Password and Email.
Your Username
A word of caution here: unlike other sites you may join, the Username is crucial on Twitter. If you make the wrong selection you may seriously harm your ability to generate a high number of followers and so, ultimately, your affiliate income from Twitter.
In many ways it is like selecting a domain name. You must aim to keep it simple and closely related to the brand you are promoting – whether that’s yourself or a particular product or site, for example.
Under no circumstances must you use a random username. You may choose your own name or a simple variation of that name (if the account username has already been taken). This is highly recommended as it is the best way to build
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your personality into your Twitter account. This will in turn have a positive effect on your ability to build followers as Twitterers are generally more reactive to your tweets if you appear more “real”.
If you don’t want to use your real name, select a username that is closely associated with your website. You should aim to use this name over a long period of time to establish your brand on Twitter. Changes to this username particularly at a stage where you have thousands of followers (as you should with the methods I’ll teach you!) can undermine that brand.
What you also want to achieve is to make it simple for someone to go into twitter and find you by simply typing in the URL.
For example, if I want to find Barack Obama’s Twitter profile, I simply type in twitter.com/barackobama.
What you want to avoid is a long or difficult-to-spell username where a small typo will misdirect a Twitterer who may want to follow you. Staying away from numbers is also recommended.
Twitter has an effective search engine which allows it’s users to find you through your username. So to make yourself accessible you need to follow these guidelines.
In fact, for the purposes of the search engine, if you’re using your real name, make sure your first name and last name are separated. Otherwise it will be difficult for people to find you when they search for your name.
Also, be aware that when you enter your full name in the field provided by Twitter’s sign-up page, this will appear on your Twitter homepage. So if you do not want to use your real name, do not enter it in this field.
Skip the next steps
Once you have entered the relevant details, Twitter will then ask you to search your online mail service e.g. Yahoo, AOL, Gmail to find anyone in your address book who has already registered with Twitter.
The idea is to start following those contacts and invite those of your contacts who haven’t got a Twitter account, to sign up.
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Unless your personal email account contains scores of contacts who have an interest in the niche that you are marketing this is a step you can skip as it doesn’t provide much value.
Twitter will then recommend various popular Twitter users (individuals and organisations) to follow. Again, at this stage, this is a step to skip. The focus should be on completing your profile in the right manner and searching for followers related to your niche.
Make sure you turn off the notices
To make Twitter profitable the aim is to get thousands of followers. If you receive a notice by email each time someone follows you or sends you a direct message, this is likely to annoy you!
If you choose to register your mobile phone with Twitter, for similar reasons, I advise turning mobile updates off.
Your homepage You’ll see a status bar asking you “What are you doing?” This is where you enter your tweet (this step will come later).
On the right of your page you’ll also see an option to click on “Direct Messages” and “@[your username]”.
Direct messages are messages sent to you by your followers. You can send these messages to your followers too. Only the recipient can see the direct message.
To send a direct message, type D, then enter a space, and then type the username of the Twitterer you want to send the message to.
@ messages are used if you want to mention a Twitterer in your tweet. These can be viewed by all of your followers. To send an @ message, type @ and then enter the username of the Twitterer. Do not enter a space this time.
I’ll provide advice on how to use these functions effectively, later in this manual.
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3 Branding Your Profile For Optimal Results
Get it right from the outset
Your public Twitter page is an opportunity for you to market yourself to thousands of followers, potential followers and those with a vague interest who end up clicking through to your page.
It’s therefore crucial that you make full use of this opportunity from the outset and ensure that your branding enhances your profile.
I’ve already discussed the important of choosing the right username and if you have any doubts about this, I urge you to re-read my suggestions.
A further point is that if you’re promoting or developing products in different niches, open multiple accounts for each of this niches. Trying to promote sites or products across different niches with one twitter username is highly unlikely to work.
Settings: Timezone
Although this is a minor point, remember to enter your timezone. If you’re targeting a customer base in a different timezone to your own, entering their timezone may make it easier for them to relate to your tweets.
This is because Twitter frames the tweets in the form of a timeline. When you view a Twitterer’s tweets you will see how long ago their last few tweets were submitted.
Alternatively, you can use an application to schedule your tweets (such as socialoomph.com) and you can schedule them so that they’re broadcasted to your followers at optimum times according to their timezones.
Settings: More info URL
Whilst you can promote multiple URL’s on Twitter, the main URL should be entered here. This is permanently viewable and clickable on your homepage and should be your main website. Whether it’s your blog or your product sales page you should not miss this opportunity to enter the URL.
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As time passes, the focal point of your affiliate marketing may change. In which case the URL may need to be updated according to what you want your followers or potential followers to click through to ahead of other URL’s.
Make sure to leave out or get rid of the "www" (check the link prior to inserting and make sure it works). This is valuable real estate and the www eats up some of it.
Settings: Online bio
As you can see from the image above, you have fewer than 160 characters to describe to fellow Twitterers what you’re all about.
As with your username, I suggest putting some thought into this. Contrary to what you may see frequently on Twitter, I wouldn’t suggest filling this entirely with keywords describing your interests e.g. affiliate marketer.
Describe what site or product you’re currently working on or promoting. Be sure to drop in the fact that you’re a marketer, but make yourself stand out from others who use generic descriptions. As many of your followers or potential followers may read this, it’s valuable marketing space and what you want them to do is click on your main URL after they’ve read it.
That’s why I also suggest updating your main URL in the same way as your bio to focus the attention of those who view your homepage on your most recent promotion or product.
Settings: Protect My Updates
Marketers should not click this box as otherwise the number of people who can see your twitter page will be restricted.
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Settings: Avatar
This is an important option based on the fact that Twitter is an opportunity to establish your brand as a marketer. If you have used your own name when selecting a username you should also upload a photograph of yourself.
Use a good photo that shows you in a personable and professional light. Also use one of high quality as the image will be displayed on your page in small dimensions. Each time you tweet and it appears on your followers’ timelines, it will be this photo that they see next to your tweet so it must be clearly viewable.
If you have selected a username for a product or a website then use a logo. This is no substitute for using a real photo of you though, as it lacks the same personable touch which is what works on Twitter.
Under no circumstances must you leave the avatar blank. This will create the strong impression that you’re not committed about Twittering.
Your Background Design
Again, failing to spend time on this, and simply selecting a background image provided by Twitter means that you miss out on valuable branding and advertising space.
The left side of Twitter page should be used to promote your product and to promote you. Since Twitter restricts the length of your bio as well as your tweets, this is valuable space which you can use effectively.
My suggestion would be to reinforce your bio and profile picture by inserting a different picture of you in a larger dimension. Or if you are not using your own picture, insert the same logo for your profile picture here, again in larger dimensions.
Also insert the link to your main website/product as well as some detail about who you are or about that website/product.
Although the user will not be able to click through on any links on this image, the idea is to attract their attention and work their curiosity. This way they are likely to enter the URL you are promoting into their browser and find out more about you. It’s another opportunity on your Twitter homepage to transfer traffic to the site of your choice – and that should be your ultimate aim when using Twitter as a marketer.
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Other suggestions for this left hand side image are using quirky images of yourself (but not unprofessional images) thus increasing the intrigue of your follower.
Like your bio, you may also want to use this space to use different images over time according to which product or website you want your followers to focus on. Together the image and bio complement each other.
For those marketers who are launching new websites or promoting new websites ahead of launch, providing a launch date and a teaser sentence or two and image can work very effectively.
The idea is that new products or websites which are soon launching generate the most excitement so rather than using your bio/more info URL/left side image to promote old products, use them to promote prelaunch. Together they will increase the likelihood that any of your followers who are viewing your homepage will click through to the prelaunch page you want them to visit.
I would also suggest that you keep the right side of your Twitter homepage free of any images. You should not distract the user’s attention away from your bio and more info URL which are on this side.
If you have good design skills you may want to design the image yourself or alternatively you can use freelancing sites like elance.com or guru.com to outsource the design at relatively low cost.
Another option is to obtain free background images from sites such as twitterbackgrounds.com.
There is also an option of purchasing a custom background from that site. Other popular options for background images are twitart.com, mytweetspace.com and twitterbacks.com.
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4 Building Your Following Quickly and Powerfully
Following linked to tweeting
This section is closely related to the next section (Essential Tweeting Rules For An Affiliate Marketer). The reason for this is that obtaining a large following on Twitter is actually quite simple. The number of Twitterers is increasing exponentially and finding followers relevant to your niche shouldn’t be too difficult.
However, keeping those followers engaged and converting them to traffic on the website that you want them to land to, is the tricky part. This is where the art of tweeting plays a key role.
You need to produce tweets that generate interest, that provide entertainment, and provide value to your followers. You also need to tweet frequently – every day in fact so that you are constantly putting yourself forward to your followers.
Your tweets need to contain the keywords that are relevant to your niche. So when someone searches for those keywords to follow interesting Twitterers who are tweeting on them, their search leads them to your tweets.
I will explain in more detail, in the next section, how to ensure your tweets are engaging and how to transfer your followers to the site of your choice where ultimately you can convert followers to customers.
Build followers related to your niche
Search.twitter.com is a great search engine to find people who are tweeting about your niche as well as the leading experts in that niche.
You shouldn’t follow people unrelated to your niche through a scatter gun approach. This isn’t an effective use of your time.
What you also shouldn’t do is spend time evaluating how important a certain person is to your niche and assess whether you should follow them. This is not time effective and I subscribe to the theory that even if someone is vaguely relevant to your niche you should follow them.
When you follow someone, they are then likely to follow you back and that is how you build your following. Others may find you through using sites like search.twitter.com as well as other means e.g. clicking through to your profile because you have a common follower.
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The more people that follow you, however vaguely related they are to your niche, ultimately the greater will be the traffic when you look to transfer your followers to your target site.
There will always be varying levels of interest amongst your followers in your niche and the more interested followers will read your tweets more regularly. Those with only slight interest may not be as keen, but even if you can capture their attention on a few occasions there’s still an opportunity that in the future, they will become a customer of your affiliated vendor or you yourself.
This is why numbers are important when it comes to your following and why I don’t subscribe to the theory that, for example, 300 highly targeted followers are more valuable than 1,500 followers with varying levels of interest in your niche.
Initial steps
Let’s presume you are at a starting position of no followers and you’re also not following anyone.
What you can then do is hop on to search.twitter.com or sites such as twellow.com (an online directory of Twitterers) and search for your keyword. This will then bring up a list of those who are tweeting about that keyword, or depending on your search parameters, a list of leading Twitterers for that keyword.
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Twitter allows you to follow up to 2,000 people at which point unless approximately 2,000 people aren’t following you back, you cannot follow further people.
There’s also a Twitter recommendation that you shouldn’t follow more than 500 people a day. So it’s best to stick to that initially.
You can follow 500 people initially by either manually clicking on “follow” next to each follower retrieved under you search results or automating the process through using software (more about that slightly later).
Unfollow those not following you
You should then give those people you have followed up to 72 hours to follow you back. If they haven’t followed you back by that time, you should unfollow them. It’s important to ensure that your following vs. followers is as close to a 1:1 ratio. So it’s essential that you unfollow those who aren’t following you back.
To do this effectively you should use an application like Twitter Karma.
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With one click of a mouse, you’re able to select all Twitterers who you’re following, but are not following you back. A further click ensures that you’re now unfollowing them. This will reduce the number that you’re following and allow you to then follow others with the aim that they’ll follow you back. This increases your number of followers.
You can also use Twitter Karma to find out who is following you and who you’re not following back. You can then select all of these people and follow them with just one click.
Follow those who follow you
I’d recommend using socialoomph.com to automatically follow those who are following you. This way you can avoid those who see that you’re not reciprocating the following and unfollow you. This will hinder your progress in terms of increasing your following.
Once you’ve followed 2,000 people, as mentioned, Twitter will not allow you to follow further people unless you also have approximately 2,000 people following you back.
Even when you go past 2,000 followers, you are blocked by Twitter if you try to follow too many people beyond the number that are following you.
Find the experts
It is worth investing a bit of time in identifying key players in your niche. Those who are viewed as the experts; those with the largest followings.
You can then simply start following their followers. Always follow those at the start of a key player’s list e.g. the first 100 and then look for other followers from other key players or through sites such as search.twitter.com.
This is because the followers at the start of the list are often those who have been recently active on Twitter. Dormant followers merely add numbers to your following and may not follow you back. Nor do they provide any value in the future in terms of monetizing your following.
Another benefit of following an expert is that if they send you an @message, all of their followers are able to see your name. When that key player has, for example, 30,000 followers, that’s valuable advertising!
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To induce an @message from a key player is not so straightforward however. It’s likely that they receive many @messages and if they don’t reply to all of them your chances lessen. The key is to look at their recent tweet timeline and see what they’re discussing. If they’re promoting a product, particularly their own, and are tweeting about it, there’s a greater chance they’ll reply to your @message.
Respond to your messages
Whether they’re @messages or direct messages, regularly check your account and if there are any messages specifically directed at you, make sure you respond.
When I view a Twitterer’s timeline and I don’t see any @messages, I instantly get the impression that this person isn’t interacting with their following much. So failing to respond to @messages in particular, harms your twitter relationship with the person who messaged you as well as your other followers.
Creating the impression of interaction is one way to engage your following and help to ensure that they are reactive to your tweets, particularly the more important ones where ultimately you’re looking to secure sales or transfer your followers to email leads.
Also, initiate conversations with your followers, by sending them @messages. As mentioned this tactic should definitely be used with the more influential people you are following in your niche. Look to provide answers to questions that other people ask. Providing valuable information is the key to succeeding in building your following and maximizing their responsiveness.
The more people who reply to your tweets, the more influential become your posts. Twitterank.com works out a score for each Twitter user indicating how engaged, interesting and influential they are. This is a useful tool to track your popularity as a Twitterer.
Use your website to complement twitter
A little later I’m going to talk more about what to do with your followers so that you monetize your success on Twitter. Blogging plays an important role in this.
But at this stage, if you have a blog which has even reasonable traffic, you should look to transfer your blog readers to your Twitter page with the aim of making them your followers.
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One way to do this is to place your tweets on your site. Twitter.com/badges allows you to post your tweets on you site. You can select the kind of page on which you’d like to place them – myspace, facebook, blogger and typepad are automatic options. There are additional widgets that work on almost all sites.
This way the tweets look like they are part of your site. When one of your followers clicks on a link in your tweet and is taken to your site, they’ll see the material as an extension of your tweets.
And equally importantly, those on your site who can see your latest tweets will be more likely to click through to your twitter page and follow you.
If you have a facebook account for marketing purposes, encourage your facebook followers to follow you on Twitter. And again, vice versa, encourage your Twitter followers to connect with you on Facebook.
Notify your list of your twitter activity
If you have a list of email subscribers, send them a notification that you’re Twittering and a link to your Twitter page. Also include your Twitter details in your signature.
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Give them an incentive to visit your twitter page, for example a valuable bonus report relating to the niche they’re interested in, if they sign up. In fact you can go even further by asking them to sign up and send you a direct message or @message to receive the bonus. The latter option will alert your other followers to the fact that you’re giving out bonuses. This helps to keep the interaction with your following alive.
Automate the process
I’ve already mentioned a way to unfollow those who are not following you back. Following people relevant to your niche in the first place can be tiresome if you’re manually following up to 500 people per day.
You need to find a way to automate this. There are a few software options currently on the market, but it’s really important that these comply with Twitter’s regulations otherwise your account can be suspended.
If you follow too many people in one day, using auto-follow too often, Twitter may immediately suspend your account for a week (or longer) because they deem your account to be spam.
So I’d be very careful about using automated software which hasn’t been designed meticulously to comply with Twitter’s regulations. Some of the software options I’ve seen allow you to unfollow those who don’t follow you back after an hour! This will increase the chance that your account will be suspended by Twitter and it may take you many emails with Twitter support to have it reinstated. In fact, I’ve seen some accounts with over 30,000 followers that when reinstated are back to 0 followers.
You should also be careful about the number of tweets you do per day. I strongly recommend you tweet everyday, but be aware that Twitter currently allows 50 tweets per day. They’re also stamping out tweets which are repeated so you should look to avoid this. At the very least you should tweak a tweet slightly so that it is not identical to a previous tweet.
You’re allowed to schedule tweets (twaitter.com is a useful application to schedule tweets) but if you send too many auto-tweets (i.e. above the limit) again your account is at the risk of being suspended by Twitter.
Twitter have also reduced the amount of direct messages allowed to 250 per day. Using an application such as socialoomph.com allows you to automatically send a direct message to those who follow you. I’d recommend that you do not schedule automatic messages like this. If you follow 500 people in a day and
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over 250 people follow you back, you’ll send over 250 direct messages, automatically which puts you on the wrong side of Twitter’s rules.
This is why you should proceed with caution when using any applications which seek to automate Twitter. Be certain that they have tested their software exhaustively and are keeping up-to-date with the regulations of Twitter as they evolve.
NOTE: At the end of this manual I’ll tell you more about a way which automates the follow and un-follow process, schedules tweets and crucially incorporates your affiliate activity on a platform like Clickbank. More on this later…
Convert your followers to subscribers…and then to buyers
Having a large and interactive following is irrelevant, from a marketer’s point of view, if you’re not monetizing the strength of your following.
This step is closely related to the value of your tweets, which will be dealt with in more detail in the next section. At this stage it’s simply important to stress that your tweets need to be informative, entertain and have significant value.
There are several strategies to optimise the strength of your following. My advice would be to concentrate on creating your brand on Twitter. For the first month or so I would not recommend tweeting any affiliate links or links to sales pages. I’d concentrate on establishing your presence on Twitter by providing valuable and informative tweets, as well as personal tweets which have more of your individual personality in them. This will all become clearer after the next section.
During that first month you need to focus on one of your relevant sites which you should use to complement your Twitter page.
The idea is to tweet in a way that captures the reader’s attention and compels him to click on the link in that tweet.
That link will then take him to the landing page i.e. your site. There you are free from any restrictions imposed by Twitter, i.e. a 140 character limit on your tweet. You can write longer blog posts which provide significantly more value to your follower.
As I mention, for the first month concentrate on writing blog posts which provide value and don’t redirect the follower to a sales page. The posts should be a natural extension of your tweet i.e. they need to be closely connected.
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You should be monitoring the number of your followers that click on the links in your tweets and reach your landing page.
Bit.ly is a great application for this. You can sign in to this through your Twitter username and password. Enter your links into the application so that it will shorten them and insert analytical code into them. So, when you re-visit bit.ly you can see statistics of how many of your followers clicked on the different links you inserted into your tweets.
As your followers increases so should the statistics for the numbers who click on your links and are taken to your landing page.
Try and take them to different pages as well where they can find information of value. This will promote variety but should not detract from the aim of updating your blog, regularly (daily if you can) and tweeting regularly (daily if you can) to direct your followers to new informative posts.
During the first month, you will then build the trust and gain the confidence of your follower who will recognise your tweets as high value messages.
After that first month it’s now time to think more closely about monetising your followers. The first objective, as with email marketing, should be to capture their email addresses.
So when they reach your landing page, offer them bonuses occasionally which are of value and for which they will need to enter their email address to obtain.
Run your Google Adsense campaign on your blog so that you can expand your reach to your Twitter followers.
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Converting followers to affiliate sales
After a month, start integrating your affiliate links into your tweets so that your followers are taken to sales pages. This where the substantial percentage of your income will be made. DO NOT continually tweet your affiliate link; I’d recommend that one in four of your tweets leads to a sales page.
And do not lead your followers to the same sales page, even if that sales page is highly converting. I’d suggest focusing on the top three sales pages in your niche at a time using the Clickbank marketplace rankings. The key is recency: the latest sales pages generate more excitement than older sales pages.
But you don’t want to waste your efforts on a sales page which is not converting. So I’d recommend waiting for a week or so before searching in, for example the Clickbank marketplace, to find the top recent converters. This way you satisfy both of the criteria: linking to a recent product which is also highly converting.
Again, continually analysing your results is essential, as with many other aspects of affiliate marketing. So use a separate affiliate account to generate your hoplink and regularly review how many hops your tweets are generating as your following increases. Also monitor how many of those hops are translating into affiliate sales. This will give you an indication of how reactive your followers are to buying. Converting them to subscribers to your mailing list can often be the easy part, but converting them to buyers is often the more difficult task. So analyse, analyse and analyse.
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What you should see is that your following is increasing at a regular rate, certainly beyond the initial 2,000 and this in turn is leading to a steady increase in clicks through to the links in your tweets (from your bit.ly results). This in turn should lead to a proportional increase in your sales provided that you do not use Twitter to oversell and you promote good products with sales pages which are high converters.
Try and boost your sales by offering bonuses with purchases through Twitter. Tweeting about your bonus offerings will capture the attention of your followers and promote interactivity. Ask them to direct message you with details of their purchase and an email address. Then follow that up by providing them with their bonus.
The important thing to remember is that your tweeting needs to be at the right balance and optimised to produce the results that are achievable. This is what I’ll now describe in more detail.
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5 Essential tweeting rules for an affiliate marketer
Understand this…
No matter what you do and how you do it, if you don’t get this crucial stage right, you won’t fulfill your potential on Twitter.
Tweeting the right way is your opportunity to tap into this real-time marketing hotbed.
So what is the “right way”?
Quality and quantity…
In terms of quantity, there is no hard and fast answer to the question, how many tweets? I’ve experimented a great deal to find the optimum frequency. Twitter allows up to 50 tweets a day but I think if you’re tweeting so frequently, you’re overdoing it.
I suggest 10 tweets a day evenly spaced out with an hour between each tweet. The best way to do this is to use an application which allows you to schedule your tweets (twaitter.com, for example).
There are applications which allow you to tweet automatically using a feed from Google or your blog. I would advise against using a feed from Google – you can’t control the tweets and often they lack quality or pick up articles about a product with another affiliate’s link.
What you can do to simplify tweeting is to automatically generate a feed from your blog. This way you kill two birds with one stone and you double the affiliate effect of your blog and twitter profile. As I mentioned you should use your blog posts as a natural extension of your tweets. And in the other direction you should alert members of your blog to your tweets with an application like twitterbadges.com.
Twitterfeed.com is the application I recommend to generate an automatic feed from your blog to your Twitter account.
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Set up the feed in a way which repeats the headline of your latest blog post as a tweet – this will be more appropriate due to the character restriction for a tweet. So when you write new posts remember that your headline is also acting as a tweet. So, integrate the key aspect of the post into the headline so that it acts as a teaser when read as both a blog post headline AND as a tweet. The automatic feed will then create a short link (use bit.ly as this also has analytic value) with your tweet to your blog post.
If you update your blog once a day this will also count as one automatic tweet a day. This leaves you nine further tweets to prepare per day. I suggest that at least two of those tweets should be something personal to you. Whether it’s what you’re eating, what you’re doing, or what you’re planning on doing, these simple and easy tweets should relate to you. This helps to strengthen your individual personality as a genuine Twitterer rather than an obvious affiliate marketer.
You can send out these tweets in realtime, or as I prefer to do, schedule them beforehand. This means if I can’t update my Twitter status, I don’t need to worry about them.
Of the remaining seven tweets, I’d suggest that two of those are news-related tweets. Ideally they should be related to the hot topics in the niche although even tweets relating to the general world events are relevant. The purpose of these tweets is purely to provide value and distract your follower from the fact that you’re using Twitter to make affiliate sales. They also reinforce the impression that you’re a real person offering tweets of value to your follower.
An easy way to keep track of the hot topics is to do a search on Google News for articles of topical interest. Using the same method as for your blog posts, create an intriguing headline which encourages the reader to click on the link that accompanies the tweet.
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Creating a feed from Google is the easy way out as it automates the process. Whilst many Twitterers are doing this, I’d recommend against it. You don’t have control over the tweet and I’ve often seen Twitterers automatically posting links to product reviews written by other affiliates with their respective affiliate links to the product.
This is a great way to make money if others are automatically Twittering your review article and your affiliate link!
The headlines of news articles are usually tweeted with these automatic feeds. But the click-through rate is not as high as when you begin a tweet with “Just read an interesting article on …..”
Personalising the tweet is what engages our followers on Twitter. Expressing your own opinions and emotions and wrapping them around tweets with links of interest are far more powerful than headlines of articles.
One tweet should be used to interact with your followers, whether in reply or initiating a conversation. As I mentioned earlier try and engage the more influential Twitterers in your niche by sending them an @message.
A further tweet can be used for entertainment, especially humour. Try and find funny or entertaining lines that are related to the niche you’re promoting products in. Quotations and proverbs are also useful for this genre of tweet.
The money-makers
This leaves three remaining tweets – the money-makers. They should lead to the sales pages of the three most recent highly converting products in your niche. A search in the Clickbank marketplace under the relevant category, defined by popularity, will bring up these products. Extract your affiliate links, shorten them using bit.ly and wrap your tweet around them.
These tweets need to be carefully worded. Rather than using highly emotive words like “shocking”, “crazy” and “amazing”, you need to use more toned-down and subtle language. The kind of language that you might use in a conversation with another person rather than the kind of language you’d see in the subject line of an email. Words like “interesting”, “useful” and “great” generate more curiosity from the typical Twitterer than the highly emotive words you might otherwise use. They need to be combined with a statement that is individual to you; whether it’s a description of what you’re doing, feeling or an opinion – personalise your money-maker tweets.
© Tweetomatic Profiteer, 2010. All Rights Reserved.
Also boost their effectiveness by including details of a special offer in the tweet. Some marketers go as far to say that never tweet a link to a sales page without a special offer. Personally I’d sprinkle them in to offer variety.
Don’t forget that the prelaunch before a product is released is often an effective time to make an affiliate sale. Where there is stimulating prelaunch content, especially videos and blog discussions, it’s easier to direct your follower to these pages without appearing that you’re simply an affiliate looking for a sale.
If your follower then subscribes to the prelaunch mailing list, there’s a strong chance that if they then continue to buy your affiliate cookie will take effect and that will be your sale.
Where you are leading them to a page with a video, mention “video” in your tweet, as people are more receptive to clicking through and watching videos.
Time-sensitive tweets
These are tweets with special offers, discounts etc which will soon expire. You can exploit Twitter’s real-time value by tweeting in this way to get an instant reaction from your followers. Provided it’s used sparingly it can be an effective way of securing affiliate sales. Try to be as accurate as possible, as when your followers click on your affiliate link, your tweet will put them in the frame of mind that the offer is time-sensitive. If they then arrive at the landing site and find this is not the case they may lose confidence in your tweeting.
If someone is reviewing your tweet timeline and sees that they’ve missed a time-sensitive offer which appeals to them, it creates the impression that they should be paying more attention to your tweets.
Get your keywords in
Remember that when Twitterers are searching for real-time tweets on applications like search.twitter.com they’ll enter keywords for the niche that they’re interested in. Make sure as many of your tweets as possible are keyword-efficient.
To ensure you’re entering the right keywords, use the keyword analysis tool on Google (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal). This is useful for many forms of affiliate marketing, not just Twittering.
© Tweetomatic Profiteer, 2010. All Rights Reserved.
Language tips for tweeting
Avoid using SMS language in your tweets. This doesn’t conform with the tweeting etiquette. It is acceptable though to use symbols like @ and to skip grammar, which helps to restrict the number of characters in your tweet.
Avoid using slang or words that are too regional as your followers may be based across a range of countries and regions. You want to connect with them all to maximize the success of your techniques.
Re-tweeting
When someone spots a good tweet, they can pass that message on to their own followers. This is when the potential for a tweet to go viral is at its highest.
The etiquette for retweeting is that you should give credit to the original twitterer. You do this by typing RT @[username]: original tweet. Any comments you want to add to the retweet can go at the beginning or in brackets at the end.
If your tweets are interesting enough, they will be shared and it’s when they’re retweeted that you have the opportunity to get your name in front of thousands and thousands of Twitterers. If that tweet has your affiliate link to a product, the potential for sales multiplies!
Generally however the kind of tweets that get re-tweeted are funny tweets, cool articles and quotes. What can have a great effect on your results is by asking for a retweet – “Please RT” – what’s known as the classic call to action.
Picture tweets
An interesting variation on the classic form of tweeting is picture tweeting. Twitpic.com is a useful application for this – it allows you to choose an image to upload, describe it and tag it, then add a message on the same form that will be tweeted. The tweet then appears in your timeline with a link to the image on twitpic.
© Tweetomatic Profiteer, 2010. All Rights Reserved.
Apart from posting general pictures of interest to engage your followers you can also use this application directly for affiliate marketing. You can link tweets to images such as ecovers or banners of products that you’re promoting. These can complement your other tweets promoting the products and taking the followers directly to the sales pages. Visualising a product always helps to assist conversions which is why the use of ecovers is so widespread for many digital products.
© Tweetomatic Profiteer, 2010. All Rights Reserved.
6 Pulling it All Together: Master Twitter And Fuel Your Affiliate Income
If you’re new to Twitter, I’d recommend concentrating on one niche to begin with. If you’re active on Clickbank, focus on one category initially, in the marketplace, that you can target through your Twitter following.
Action Plan
=> Sign up to Twitter if not already done so
=> Brand your twitter profile, including name, avatar, background image, bio, more info URL according to the recommendations made => Start tweeting (no affiliate links in first month, link to blog posts, follow recommended variations and tweet 10 times a day) => Start following those Twitterers relevant to your niche (search using the recommended applications and stick to limits imposed by Twitter)
=> Continue following each day and unfollow those who don’t follow you back (using applications such as Twitter Karma and allowing up to 3 days to let them follow you back)
=> Identify one profitable niche initially (you can open different twitter accounts for different niches later) using Clickbank marketplace and Google Adwords analysis tool
=> Identify 3 of the highest converting products in that niche listed in the Clickbank marketplace and promote them via personalized tweets to your followers (no more than 3 tweets per day)
=> Continue building your following and open additional twitter accounts for other profitable niches => Continually focus on the quality and variety of your tweets, using appropriate tools to schedule tweets regularly – ENGAGE WITH YOUR FOLLOWING ON DIFFERENT LEVELS.
Quick Cash Cheat Sheet!
The Quick Steps You Need To Take To Make Quick Cash!
Ok let me get straight into it.
I am going to give you the exact steps that you need to take
right now with the Get Fb Ads Free program, so start making
money as soon as possible.
But from now on I am going to address the name of this
course, GFAF!.
Its much easier !
Ok, so first let me just congratulate you on taking the first
steps to changing your life.
Like seriously, I know people say that same line all the time…
But the journey to success has to start somewhere.
And why not let it start here…don’t you think ?
What I will lay out in this Quick Cash Cheat Sheet and
through out this course should give you the belief and
confidence that you really can make money online.
You just need to take massive action and not give up.
So with that said lets get started.
Here Is How You Get Free FB Ads
Although you will still need to initially pay for your ads up
front, with the way this system works, you will be able to
offset the cost of ALL your ads, meaning you get them for
FREE.
Below will detail what you need to do, in order to get
your FB ads for free.
1. Use the software to generate your special fan page
2. Person comes to your fan page and hits the ‘Like’
button.
3. Link a email submit CPA offer to your fan page
4. Make between $1 - $3 every time someone fills out
your CPA offer
5. You have now offset the cost of your FB Ads!
6. You will then be able to send a broadcast message to
everyone who came to your fan page and hit the ‘LIKE’
button
7. Broadcast Clickbank affiliate offers to the database you
build through your fan page.
8. Make Money
9. Repeat!
Steps To Take First – Get The Following Tools!
Before you set up your first campaign, there are a few things
you will need to do.
This cheat sheet has been designed to show you these steps.
Step 1 – Register at our recommended CPA Affiliate network
( you get guaranteed acceptance ) Click Here
Step 2 – Register for an Aweber account, so build your email
list. – Click Here
Step 3 – Register at Clickbank.com – Click Here
Step 4 – Get your free website here – Click Here
Once you have the tools above, here is exactly what to do, to
get started fast!
Setting Up Your First Money Making Campaign.
Ok so you have the tools, you have the understanding of how
to get fb ads for free, now you just need to use the software
we have created for you, to legally exploit facebook, and get
all of your ads for free…
…meaning you can get unlimited traffic to any website or
affiliate link.
First decide what you want to promote.
Remember, the way you make money online is by sending
traffic to a offer that they are interested in buying.
But how do you know what to promote?
Well follow the steps below to find a high converting affiliate
offer, so you can make the maximum amount of money
possible.
Finding a High Converting Affiliate Offer to Promote
If you already have your own website, then you can just
promote your own website or product and make money that
way.
But im guessing most people will not have their own
product.
And to be honest I prefer to promote affiliate offers because
all I do is send traffic to my affiliate link and make money.
Two Stages to finding a high converting affiliate offer
There are 2 types of affiliate offers you will need to use to
make money with this system and also get FB ads for free…
Stage 1 – Email submit offer to offset the cost of your FB ads
Stage 2 – High paying CPA offer or Clickbank offer to
promote to your Fan Base
The reason we need to first find a specific email submit offer
is because this is what the visitor will fill out for us to make
$1 - $3, and allow us to offset the cost of the FB ads.
This can be any offer, as long as it will pay you out just for
someone filling out a short form such as their name and
email.
But what ever the email submit off that you promote is…You
will need to make sure that if you want to make money, then
for the second stage when you promote affiliate offers to
your fan base…It will need to be related to the email submit
offer which they filled out at first!.
You can find an email submit offer easily by going to the back
office of your CPA affiliate network and clicking on ‘Find
Offers’ or ‘Campaigns’
In this example lets chose a heath offer that has to do
with Diabetes.
And this offer pays out $1.85 per lead!
So we will get paid $1.85 each time someone fills out the
form on this website.
This means that we will offset our advertising costs from
facebook and also make a profit.
After you have chosen your CPA email submit offer, then next
thing to do is find your stage 2 affiliate offer.
This will need to be a higher paying affiliates CPA offer or a
Clickbank affiliate offer.
But you will need to make sure that this offer is related to
the CPA email submit offer that the person first cam to your
ad for.
This is because this person will have a strong interest in the
affiliate offer you promote, if it’s the same topic or related to
what they first clicked your ad for.
In this example we chose a diabetes email submit offer for
the stage 1 offer to offset our FB Ads cost.
So we would then go to www.clickbank.com and find a offer
that is selling something about diabetes.
So lets click on ‘marketplace’
Then simply enter a word associated with what the first
offer was.
In this example I am going to input ‘Diabetes’ in the search
field.
Clickbank will then show us all the affiliate offers related to
this.
Look:
Next, just click the ‘Promote’ button, and then save your
affiliate link.
You will need to use this link when you set up the software.
Oh, and don’t forget to save the first affiliate link for your
email submit offer too!.
Ok so there you have it.
This is the only thing you need to do, and then just simply
use the Get FB Ads FREE software application to get lots of
targeted traffic to your affiliate links and make money.
Here is an example of how much money you can make
ove the next 24 – 48 hours and on..
Just imagine if you got only 500 people to click your ad in the
next 24 hours.
And out of those 500 people, 400 click the like button, and
just 300 fill out the CPA offer.
That means you would have made $555 !
And you would have probably not even spent that much on
the FB ads to get them there!.
So now you had 400 people who clicked the LIKE button,
meaning that’s 400 people that you can promote a related
affiliate offer to.
And what if you send a message to those 400 people on your
fan base ( using the broadcast feature in facebook )…
And then only 2% of those people bought the affiliate offer
you are promoting.
That’s 8 people.
And for each sale you get for example $30 per sale.
That’s $240 you could make today by using this simple
system.
You got your facebook ads for free because of the email
submit offer that offsets your advertising costs, plus you
made a profit on that.
So on average today you could make around $300 and every
day PROFIT.
$300 a day is $9,000 per month.
Can you see how simple this is ?
Are you starting to see the power of how the Get FB Ads Free
system works ?
Here’s a screenshot of my girlfriends account who used this
system over the past few weeks, and she’s making some
good money: (screenshot on next page )
What To Do Next
Now you know the basics and have a clear understanding of
how much money you can make and how to make this work
for you, you can begin by watching the step by step training
videos ( if you upgraded )
If you did not yet upgrade, then we would like to give you
one more chance to upgrade your order to get access to the
step by step training videos and also the 10 Copy & Paste
Proven Campaigns!
Click Here To Upgrade Your Order
Ok let me get straight into it.
I am going to give you the exact steps that you need to take
right now with the Get Fb Ads Free program, so start making
money as soon as possible.
But from now on I am going to address the name of this
course, GFAF!.
Its much easier !
Ok, so first let me just congratulate you on taking the first
steps to changing your life.
Like seriously, I know people say that same line all the time…
But the journey to success has to start somewhere.
And why not let it start here…don’t you think ?
What I will lay out in this Quick Cash Cheat Sheet and
through out this course should give you the belief and
confidence that you really can make money online.
You just need to take massive action and not give up.
So with that said lets get started.
Here Is How You Get Free FB Ads
Although you will still need to initially pay for your ads up
front, with the way this system works, you will be able to
offset the cost of ALL your ads, meaning you get them for
FREE.
Below will detail what you need to do, in order to get
your FB ads for free.
1. Use the software to generate your special fan page
2. Person comes to your fan page and hits the ‘Like’
button.
3. Link a email submit CPA offer to your fan page
4. Make between $1 - $3 every time someone fills out
your CPA offer
5. You have now offset the cost of your FB Ads!
6. You will then be able to send a broadcast message to
everyone who came to your fan page and hit the ‘LIKE’
button
7. Broadcast Clickbank affiliate offers to the database you
build through your fan page.
8. Make Money
9. Repeat!
Steps To Take First – Get The Following Tools!
Before you set up your first campaign, there are a few things
you will need to do.
This cheat sheet has been designed to show you these steps.
Step 1 – Register at our recommended CPA Affiliate network
( you get guaranteed acceptance ) Click Here
Step 2 – Register for an Aweber account, so build your email
list. – Click Here
Step 3 – Register at Clickbank.com – Click Here
Step 4 – Get your free website here – Click Here
Once you have the tools above, here is exactly what to do, to
get started fast!
Setting Up Your First Money Making Campaign.
Ok so you have the tools, you have the understanding of how
to get fb ads for free, now you just need to use the software
we have created for you, to legally exploit facebook, and get
all of your ads for free…
…meaning you can get unlimited traffic to any website or
affiliate link.
First decide what you want to promote.
Remember, the way you make money online is by sending
traffic to a offer that they are interested in buying.
But how do you know what to promote?
Well follow the steps below to find a high converting affiliate
offer, so you can make the maximum amount of money
possible.
Finding a High Converting Affiliate Offer to Promote
If you already have your own website, then you can just
promote your own website or product and make money that
way.
But im guessing most people will not have their own
product.
And to be honest I prefer to promote affiliate offers because
all I do is send traffic to my affiliate link and make money.
Two Stages to finding a high converting affiliate offer
There are 2 types of affiliate offers you will need to use to
make money with this system and also get FB ads for free…
Stage 1 – Email submit offer to offset the cost of your FB ads
Stage 2 – High paying CPA offer or Clickbank offer to
promote to your Fan Base
The reason we need to first find a specific email submit offer
is because this is what the visitor will fill out for us to make
$1 - $3, and allow us to offset the cost of the FB ads.
This can be any offer, as long as it will pay you out just for
someone filling out a short form such as their name and
email.
But what ever the email submit off that you promote is…You
will need to make sure that if you want to make money, then
for the second stage when you promote affiliate offers to
your fan base…It will need to be related to the email submit
offer which they filled out at first!.
You can find an email submit offer easily by going to the back
office of your CPA affiliate network and clicking on ‘Find
Offers’ or ‘Campaigns’
In this example lets chose a heath offer that has to do
with Diabetes.
And this offer pays out $1.85 per lead!
So we will get paid $1.85 each time someone fills out the
form on this website.
This means that we will offset our advertising costs from
facebook and also make a profit.
After you have chosen your CPA email submit offer, then next
thing to do is find your stage 2 affiliate offer.
This will need to be a higher paying affiliates CPA offer or a
Clickbank affiliate offer.
But you will need to make sure that this offer is related to
the CPA email submit offer that the person first cam to your
ad for.
This is because this person will have a strong interest in the
affiliate offer you promote, if it’s the same topic or related to
what they first clicked your ad for.
In this example we chose a diabetes email submit offer for
the stage 1 offer to offset our FB Ads cost.
So we would then go to www.clickbank.com and find a offer
that is selling something about diabetes.
So lets click on ‘marketplace’
Then simply enter a word associated with what the first
offer was.
In this example I am going to input ‘Diabetes’ in the search
field.
Clickbank will then show us all the affiliate offers related to
this.
Look:
Next, just click the ‘Promote’ button, and then save your
affiliate link.
You will need to use this link when you set up the software.
Oh, and don’t forget to save the first affiliate link for your
email submit offer too!.
Ok so there you have it.
This is the only thing you need to do, and then just simply
use the Get FB Ads FREE software application to get lots of
targeted traffic to your affiliate links and make money.
Here is an example of how much money you can make
ove the next 24 – 48 hours and on..
Just imagine if you got only 500 people to click your ad in the
next 24 hours.
And out of those 500 people, 400 click the like button, and
just 300 fill out the CPA offer.
That means you would have made $555 !
And you would have probably not even spent that much on
the FB ads to get them there!.
So now you had 400 people who clicked the LIKE button,
meaning that’s 400 people that you can promote a related
affiliate offer to.
And what if you send a message to those 400 people on your
fan base ( using the broadcast feature in facebook )…
And then only 2% of those people bought the affiliate offer
you are promoting.
That’s 8 people.
And for each sale you get for example $30 per sale.
That’s $240 you could make today by using this simple
system.
You got your facebook ads for free because of the email
submit offer that offsets your advertising costs, plus you
made a profit on that.
So on average today you could make around $300 and every
day PROFIT.
$300 a day is $9,000 per month.
Can you see how simple this is ?
Are you starting to see the power of how the Get FB Ads Free
system works ?
Here’s a screenshot of my girlfriends account who used this
system over the past few weeks, and she’s making some
good money: (screenshot on next page )
What To Do Next
Now you know the basics and have a clear understanding of
how much money you can make and how to make this work
for you, you can begin by watching the step by step training
videos ( if you upgraded )
If you did not yet upgrade, then we would like to give you
one more chance to upgrade your order to get access to the
step by step training videos and also the 10 Copy & Paste
Proven Campaigns!
Click Here To Upgrade Your Order
101 Ways to Get More Leads and Build Your List Build an Email Marketing Empire with These Simple Tactics By Tellman Knudson
101 Ways to Get More Leads and Build Your List
This is Tellman. And I am here today to teach you 101 ways to get more leads and
build your list. Many of the things that I'm going to mention are Internet related;
however, all of these can be used whether you're an Internet business or a local
business. And if you follow the principles behind these, you're going to find that you can
use them with really any type of business and in any type of situation, in order to grow
your revenue and grow the number of prospects that you have, in order to make this
work.
Now, you probably are familiar with me from ListBuilding.com. And that's a site that
we have that teaches all sorts of cool stuff about list building. But the major thing that I
want to point out here is that list builders frequently don't pay attention to leads, and
people that are focused on lead generation, more often than not, are leaving their single
biggest asset on the table to make more money, which is utilizing their list to sell it things
other than whatever opportunity they're trying to sell right now. And that's something we
can talk more about later.
But I'd like to jump into 101 Ways to Get More Leads and Build Your List. First of all,
we brainstormed this list with myself and several people in the Overcome Everything
team. "Overcome Everything" is the name of my company. And I just wanted to thank
Pat and Mike and Kyle and Josh and Jodi for contributing so many great, great ideas to
this list. And so we're going to go ahead and roll through these.
Number 1
YouTube is a great way to build your list and get more leads. If you focus on doing
YouTube videos and giving one little nugget of information, one little nugget of
interesting information or wisdom about your market or to your prospects every single
day, and then give out a link where people can go and opt in to your squeeze page, in
order to give you their name and e-mail address, it's a great way. Also, of course, you
can tell people to subscribe to your YouTube channel. And that's pretty good, but it's not
as good as having an e-mail address. So I like to focus, with my YouTube videos, on
getting everybody subscribed to my channel onto my email marketing list.
Number 2
So number two is social networks. Now, we all know there are lots of types of social
networks out there. There's YouTube; there's Facebook; there's Twitter; there's
MySpace. And there are just more general social networks like that popping up every
single day; however, you can also create personal social networks. And that's
something that we've been playing around a lot with lately. You can also create social
networks around your topic.
101 Ways to Get More Leads and Build Your List Page 3 of 17
The key that I've found to creating social networks is to create a social network that
is based on a group that already likes to get together and hang out with each other.
That's a much better way than trying to force a bunch of people to spend time together
based on the topic that you think that they want to discuss, when they never actually get
together to discuss it.
Number 3
Twitter is a social network. This is number three. Twitter is a great way to build a
following. And of course then you can turn around and drive from Twitter back into your
e-mail list. So Twitter's a phenomenal way to build leads and build your list. Facebook,
again – twitter.com – facebook.com is a social network. It's a great place to meet people
who have similar interests. And it's a great place to connect with people who want to
buy the types of products and services that you have to sell.
Again, in the case of Twitter, again in the case of Facebook, and in the case of all the
social media – and, really, with any type of lead generation or list building – you want to
focus all your attention on actually helping people. If you focus on helping people in your
marketplace first, they'll be much more responsive when you ask them to give their
name and e-mail address in exchange for helping them.
So – Facebook… MySpace – same basic premise. Set up a profile on MySpace;
connect it to people who are interested in the same stuff. And some people say,
"MySpace is dying." And MySpace is still insanely large. And so don't abandon ship on
MySpace. If it's dying, all that means is that there's less competition for you to go in
there and get traffic and leads from MySpace. So if you're not using myspace.com,
definitely go it.
Number 4
Next is blog posting. So starting your own blog is one way of doing this – starting
your own blog and doing blog posts on a regular basis. WordPress is my favorite
blogging tool. So blog posts are a great way to build your list. You write a blog post that
has to do with your topic. You maybe have an opt-in box right there; maybe put a popup
on your blog; maybe you just link to your squeeze page. One way or the other, do a
blog post a day, and you'll get leads every day.
101 Ways to Get More Leads and Build Your List Page 4 of 17
Number 5
Article marketing is next, and a lot like a blog post, except it's usually informational
and about the topic that would attract your lead or someone that would be interested in
being on your list. Writing articles and submitting them throughout the Web is a great
way to make all that happen.
Number 6
Forums is number six. Forums are really great, because you can comment in forums
that already exist or you can start up a forum on your own topic. And there are
thousands of different ways to start up forums. All you have to do is look for forum
software and – BOOM! Forums are a great way to find people. And many social
networks now have forums as part of them. So that's another way of participating n
forums.
Number 7
Joint ventures is something used all the time in the Internet marketing world;
something used very rarely in the lead generation world – which is a extreme waste of
money for the lead gen guys. If you're an Internet marketing person, you probably
already know about doing cross-promotions to your list of leads or your list of
subscribers, as we like to call them.
But if you're in the lead gen world and you have a list of 100,000 people that haven't
bought from you, but you're e-mailing those people, say, once a week, twice a week,
three times a week to build a relationship with them – even if they've never bought
anything from you – you can now promote someone else's product or service to those
folks and have that person promote your products or service to their folks. And you both
generate a lot more sales. It's an incredibly powerful and virtually free way for you to
make that happen.
Number 8
Pay-per-click advertising (or PPC) is another way to build your list. Google Pay-Per-
Click, Bing, Excite, and even Facebook now has PPC advertising. Pay-per-click
advertising is really powerful. It's a way of paying to get traffic to your squeeze page, to
your opt-in page, to get people to join your list – which means you get people to selfqualify
and say, "I want to be a lead. I want more information from you on X, Y, Z topic."
101 Ways to Get More Leads and Build Your List Page 5 of 17
Numbers 9 & 10
CPA and CPL: CPA is Cost per Action. CPL is Cost per Lead. They're different.
Cost per Action is through a CPA network like Offeratti, for example, where you actually
pay out a certain dollar amount for every sale that you're generating. It's an incredibly,
incredibly powerful way to make things really work. Again, it's CPA – Cost per Action.
You can do a search for "CPA network," "CPA advertising." Great way.
If you know how much money you're going to make when you – you know, on the
back end, when you make a front-end sale and you know the exact value per customer,
you can pay a little bit less than that in your CPA deal. So if someone's buying
something from you for $19.95, well, you might have to pay $35.00 or $45.00 for that
action, for that sale. But you know on the back end, you're going to make a lot more
money. If you don't have a back end, CPA's not for you.
CPL is Cost per Lead. And Cost per Lead is paid advertising. You pay when you
generate a lead. And again, these are usually through CPA networks that you can do
CPL advertising. So that's something to look into.
Offeratti.com is a cool resource and Offeratti.com is run by a friend of mine. So –
very, very cool.
Number 11
Integration marketing is a tremendously powerful way to generate leads. It's a term
that was coined by Mark Joyner, and has to do with putting your offer on the back end of
someone else's offer.
So, for example, if you successfully make a sale, what if you had someone else's
offer for a similar product (for a related product) on the thank-you page, after someone
purchased?
Or this could even happen on the phone. You successfully close a deal, and then
you make an offer for a competitor's product. Well, you then get paid a commission,
based on that. And so your competitor gets a sale; you've made free money. And
everybody's happy.
Number 12
Now, we talked about social networks a little bit earlier. It's a site called Ning.com.
Ning is one of many social network sites where you can go and start a social network
today about any topic you want. It could be about you, if you want. You could start a
social network about monkeys or cheese. Ning is incredibly powerful. They have
millions and millions and millions and millions of users. And it's just a great way to start
101 Ways to Get More Leads and Build Your List Page 6 of 17
a social network up on a topic, to get people talking if they're passionate about
something.
Numbers 13 and 14
SocialGO is a competitor to Ning. It's also very, very good. And then more recently,
something called BuddyPress – BuddyPress is a plug-in for WordPress. And
BuddyPress allows you to start up a social network right on your WordPress blog. And
so if you have hosting already for your blog, you can plug BuddyPress in, and POW! –
now you have a really great option going on for your social network with BuddyPress.
So that's really, really, really nice.
Number 15
Next is Traffic Geyser. Traffic Geyser. And Traffic Geyser is actually a product. And
the reason I wanted to tell you about Traffic Geyser is: it's a product created by my
friend Mike Koenigs. And it's incredibly powerful, because we've already talked about
video; we've talked a little bit about social networks; we've talked a little bit about
YouTube. Traffic Geyser essentially takes your YouTube videos or your recorded
videos that you can record from a webcam or a flip video and it helps to distribute them
all across the Internet to a whole slew of different video sites. It helps you distribute your
videos and articles and press releases and all sorts of other stuff, all over the Internet,
very quickly and with little or no work.
So it'd kind of like an aggregator. So if you have a good message you're putting out
there – I often record a video first; convert that video into an article; post that to a blog;
distribute the article through a bunch of different article sites; go ahead – and so on and
so forth. And it's an incredibly, incredibly powerful way to get your word out there. And
so I recommend trafficgeyser.com as a service you definitely should use.
Number 16
Press releases. Most people are a little bit hesitant to actually use press releases
when they're putting out an article. But the reality is: it works like crazy and helps –
gives you tons of back links. I recommend putting out a press release a day. There are
a bunch of different options that are out there, and there are always more. But
converting your article into a press release and putting it out there with a link back to
your opt-in page or your squeeze page is just an incredibly, incredibly, incredibly
powerful way to make all this happen.
Number 17
Classified ads are another option. And if you want to stay within their terms of
service (and you always do), you can use something like Craig's List. But there are
101 Ways to Get More Leads and Build Your List Page 7 of 17
other classified ads – sites that are out there, as well. Just type in "classified ads" or
"Internet classified ads" and you'll find a slew of places that you can put classified ads
online.
The equivalent of classified ads is – number one, I generated leads from my
hypnosis business, back in the day, with newspaper classified ads where I placed
classified ads for, say, how to quit smoking. And people would call an 800 number for a
free special report that I would mail them about how to quit smoking. And the free
special report would offer them a free session, a free hypnosis session with me if they
called back and signed up within such-and-such a date. And that worked like crazy to
generate weight loss leads, smoking leads.
And the big thing is: these aren't leads; they're human beings. They're people who
need your help. And that's the biggest, biggest differentiator when you're thinking about
all this – is: think about people who need your help, rather than leads. And if you focus
on people who need your help, you're going to find that you're going to want to help
people. And you're going to be in a much better situation if you do.
Number 18 and 19
Okay. So eBay is actually a really great way to generate leads. You can sell
something really inexpensive; free or a 99-cent special report, whether it's print or digital,
on ebay.com. As well – amazon.com. You can create a white paper; you can create a
short book. You can create an audio program. You can sell it on amazon.com. And, of
course, an extension of amazon.com is the Kindle – and sell e-books on the Kindle.
Very, very powerful.
Number 20
Now, this one's a little funny. This came from John Morgan. He actually did
something with cork boards at Starbucks. He went around and put posters up on cork
boards in Starbucks in order to generate leads for his business. So something to
remember is: you can – with good copy that's appropriately placed -- you can generate
leads almost anywhere.
Now, all of these are assuming you have some idea of what you're generating a lead
for. Right? If you have no idea what you're generating a lead for, then definitely go to
ListBuilding.com and get that straightened out. So – because if you're not dead clear on
why it is that you're generating a lead and what it is you're going to be selling – you have
to start there, so that you don't waste a whole bunch of time, effort, energy, and money
advertising without having any idea who it is you're trying to attract to your business.
101 Ways to Get More Leads and Build Your List Page 8 of 17
Number 21
Number 23 is SEO or Search Engine Optimization. Search Engine Optimization you
could easily study for the rest of your life and you'd never stay ahead of it, but you'd
probably be really successful. Search Engine Optimization is an extraordinarily powerful
way to get people to your website, to put in their name and e-mail address so that you
can follow up with them.
Number 22
RSS means “Really Simple Syndication.” RSS is another way of getting your
content out there. And fortunately, it's very free, which – again, you can use RSS in
combination with SEO. You can do a search on Google for any of these terms, and you
can buy products that teach you how to do all of these things in detail. But RSS is a
really great option.
Number 23
Podcasting actually utilizes RSS, and that's number 25. Podcasting uses RSS in
order to get things out there – in particular, audio and video. So you can use
podcasting. And again, there are lots of podcast directories that you could submit to.
Traffic Geyser utilizes podcasting and RSS as two of the major tools that it uses to push
things out there.
Number 24
Video responding is number 26. Video responses on a site like YouTube, and many
of the other video sites that are out there now, you can go and actually do video
responses to other people's videos. And in doing video responses to other people's
videos, you're able to just get traffic, 'cause people watching a highly popular videos
watch your video responses and then go and check out your stuff.
Number 25
Direct mail – you've probably heard of it: sending mail to generate leads. You could
do this all day long; it could be the one thing that you do. And it could generate millions
and millions and millions of leads for you a year, easily, if you decide you wanted to get
good at direct mail. Postcards are a form of direct mail. You can utilize postcards in
order to generate leads, as well.
Number 26
E-zine advertising – doing paid advertising in e-zines – just type in "e-zine
advertising," and you'll find lots of stuff. Specifically, you can look for e-zines on your
101 Ways to Get More Leads and Build Your List Page 9 of 17
topic and advertise in them and direct people to your website, have them opt in, and now
you can follow up with them.
Number 27
Okay. So the next thing is banner advertising. You can advertise with banners on
websites. I'm going to go ahead and name a lot of these off really quickly now, 'cause I
only have a few minutes left to do this recording and I want to make sure you've got
everything you need.
Number 28
You can use radio advertising; you can do things on the radio or radio on the
Internet.
Number 29
You can do text messaging or SMS advertising on mobile phones.
Number 30
You can – I just mentioned offline radio; online radio is another great option.
Number 31
Facebook ads. You can build an entire multi-million-dollar business on Facebook
ads alone.
Numbers 32 & 33
Hubpages.com is a great way to get stuff out there. HubPages is a lot like Squidoo.
Go check it out. You can put your content there and really start building a following.
Number 34
Giveaways: Do a big giveaway or join one. Get a bunch of people in the same
marketplace together to give a whole bunch of stuff away. You generate leads on the
front end; they generate the leads on the back end; everybody's happy.
Number 35
LinkedIn is a way of getting business contacts. Squidoo, many people are already
familiar with. It's a great way of getting things rolling. These are courtesy of Pat, by the
way, Pat Marcello. Absolutely brilliant.
101 Ways to Get More Leads and Build Your List Page 10 of 17
Number 36
USA - or USFreeAds is a classified solution, so check that out – USFreeAds.
Number 37, 38, 39, 40, and 41
There's another very cool thing called MyBlogLog. It's like social blogging, a little bit.
And BlogCatalog. Go check out BlogCatalog. There's a site called Technorati; it's the
oldest blog directory out there. And it's incredibly, incredibly cool. There's another place
where you can submit your content; articles and so on: Zemanta. Then, of course,
there's Gather.
Number 42
And then you can also start a wiki. And one great way to start a wiki up is called
PBworks. It's – wiki is kind of like social blogging.
Number 43
You of course can use business cards. It's an old-school method, but you can still
use it.
Number 44
And then there's the SRDS, the Standard Rate and Data Service. Thank you, Mike
Purvis. SRDS.com. Check it out; it's a great way to buy – or to rent lists and then send
out to those lists and then drive those lists back to your offer.
Number 45
You can do things like sponsoring bands or race cars or other publicly attended
events with your business, in order to generate leads.
Number 46
You can use tell-a-friend forms online, where you have something cool that you give
away, and then you have people tell a friend with a tell-a-friend form.
Number 47
You can use face-to-face contact, lo and behold – something like BNI, for example.
Seminars are a great place to meet people and find leads. The Chamber of Commerce
and, of course, public speaking gigs is a really, really cool way of doing this.
101 Ways to Get More Leads and Build Your List Page 11 of 17
Number 48
You can use list builder sites, which are really lead generation sites, such as
thelistauction.com or listhero.com.
Number 49
You can use traffic exchanges, which are very, very similar – just type in "traffic
exchanges" into Google, and you'll find a plethora of opportunities in order to get more
leads.
Number 50
You can use SpicyPage.com in order to submit your website.
Number 51
Or you can do blog commenting, where you comment on other people's blogs.
Number 52
Seesmic is a social a video tool. It works very, very, very well.
Number 53
Or you can use Gmail ads, which is a form of paid advertising through Google, kind
of like Google Pay-Per-Click.
Number 54
Google Buzz – you can make friends with people and talk about topics that you're all
interested in and then drive people back to your opt-in form.
Number 55
Plaxo is a social network where you can make business friends.
Number 56
There's a bunch of cool stuff that we teach, but one of the things is called a golden
rule auto-responder trade, where you take your e-mail auto-responder and you just pop
in a couple messages at the end of your existing sequence, promoting somebody else's
stuff, and they do the same thing for you. And lo and behold, you both get more leads.
It works out great.
101 Ways to Get More Leads and Build Your List Page 12 of 17
Number 57
You can do ad swaps, which are, like, one-time cross-promotions, with people who
already have lists.
Number 58
You can do exit pops – exit pop-ups on other people's websites. Or you can do exit
pop-ups on your websites and sell leads that you normally would lose.
Numbers 59 and 60
You can just put a pop-up on the front end of your website or a slide-up opt-in box,
like you'll see on listbuildingblog.com. There's a really cool new thing going on right now
called "single sign-on," or SSO. You can look into that.
Number 61
And then there's also straight-to-desktops software. So you can look into desktop
software options.
Number 62
You can do a – what's called a "customer squeeze," after a purchase, where, when
someone purchases something, they opt in – and bam, now they're a lead for something
else.
Number 63 and 64
You can do a book launch. You can do an Amazon-style book launch. Check out
riseoftheauthor.com. Or you can do book inserts, where you can actually do something
like that through amazon.com, where they'll – they will insert your advertising into books
that they're sending out.
Number 65
You can do bulky mail, which is mail that you send; it's like direct mail with a big
honking thing in the – you know, like, imagine a tennis ball inside of a envelope that you
got in the mail. Well, that would be bulky mail. It would definitely get opened.
101 Ways to Get More Leads and Build Your List Page 13 of 17
Number 66 and 67
Viddler – Viddler is one of the many video sites that are out there. And it is a great
way to get your video out there. Another one is Vimeo, V-I-M-E-O. Then, of course, you
can do word-of-mouth marketing.
Number 68
Word-of-mouth marketing. And – incredibly, incredibly powerful.
Number 69
Now, Google TV ads is actually an option. You can do advertising on TV through
Google. So check that out.
Number 70
You can also do a viral PDF, which is a – maybe an article or a how-to directory of
some sort – viral PDF – that goes viral. And there are lots of ways to set it up. There's
actually a product out there called "Viral PDF" that you can look at in order to get your
PDF files spread all over the place.
Number 71
Then there's something called BitTorrent, where you can give stuff away on
BitTorrent. And whether you have people opt in before they get access to your PDF file
that you put on BitTorrent, or maybe you have people opt in afterward – but because you
make something really cool. So that's an option.
Number 72
You can do forwarded e-mails. If you make a really, really great e-mail with a link to
some of your stuff and then you forward it on and model after existing forwarded e-mails,
it's a great way of doing it.
Number 73
You can build a perpetual marketing machine. A perpetual marketing machine – it's
a great way of generating thousands of leads all at once. You can do a search with
Google on that.
101 Ways to Get More Leads and Build Your List Page 14 of 17
Number 74
ButterflyMarketing. ButterflyMarketing is a great site that you can use; it's by Mike
Filsaime. And it's a kind of a viral tell-a-friend affiliate program kind of a thing. It's very
cool.
Number 75
There's IRL ads – In Real Life ads: halls, walls, and toilet stalls. Okay? You can put
physical print ads up wherever you want.
Number 76
There's Google Knol, which is an article directory. There's Live Journal. And these
are Josh's – Josh Burns – some of these ideas. These are great.
Number 77
LiveJournal is a blogging option.
Numbers 78, 79, 80, and 81
Digg, StumbleUpon, Yahoo! Buzz – and then there's something else called Reddit.
It's very similar to Digg. There's del.icio.us or Delicious.com. Check that out. Social
bookmarking.
Number 82
Yahoo! Answers – very cool. We've been playing around with that lately.
Number 83 and 84
Google Video, which is another video option; Revver, which is another video option.
Number 85
Crowdfunding – totally cool. We don't have time to talk about it here. Crowdfunding
is probably the newest and most amazing way of generating leads on the Internet.
Number 86
TubeMogul – TubeMogul – another video syndication service.
101 Ways to Get More Leads and Build Your List Page 15 of 17
Numbers 87 and 88
ShareThis or AddThis is blog plug-ins for social networks. And that's another way
you can do it.
Number 89
Guest writing for blogs – so you can write for other blogs. Very cool. If you have
something good to say, then you're good to go. So you can also write tutorials, and then
you can submit those tutorials all throughout the Internet.
Number 90
You can do bonus traffic. And bonus traffic is where you create a bonus that you –
where you actually create a cool bonus that someone else includes in their product that
drives people into a lead for you. Okay, so that's very cool.
Number 91
You can hold a contest.
Number 92
And you can also do something called – with Amazon Mechanical Turk. I know it's
going to sound crazy, but you can pay people insanely small amounts of money to go do
whatever you want, including opt in to your site.
Number 93
You can buy somebody else's website.
Number 94
You can use instructional articles. Instructional articles we talked about; instructional
videos we talked about.
This instructional stuff – specifically, you can do teleseminars in order to generate
leads; you can interview other people and put those out there in order to generate leads.
If you interview famous people and people find the thing over on your website, then
you're good to go.
101 Ways to Get More Leads and Build Your List Page 16 of 17
Numbers 95, 96, and 97
You can submit your site to directory sites like DMOZ, Joe Ant, and Yahoo Directory.
Number 98
And you can do two-for-one friend invites. So it's a two-for-one kind of a deal, with a
tell-a-friend.
Number 99
Do an involvement survey – where you can do a survey, like, on instantaddtest.com.
Number 100, 101, and 102
Add content to social content networks like Scribd, Wikihow, or 9Rules
Number 103
Expired domain traffic. Sites sell traffic on domains that have expired that already
have some traffic.
Number 104
Give interviews to other people in your niche about your area of expertise.
Number 105
Put a logo on your car that drives to your squeeze page.
Number 106
Join a webring in your niche.
Number 107
Create a newsletter. Give people lots of good information via autoresponder. Have
them sign up for your list to get it.
Number 108
Join your local chamber of commerce and educate business owners about online
business. Have them send their customers to your site, when appropriate.
Number 109
Exchange blog links with other bloggers in your niche.
101 Ways to Get More Leads and Build Your List Page 17 of 17
So that's 101 very cool ways that you can build your list and get more leads. I hope
you found this helpful. And if you want more information like this – you want to know
how to get more leads and how to build your list and how to make more money from it –
please go check us out at ListBuilding.com. I'm sure you'll like what you find. We'll talk
to you soon.
This is Tellman Knudson saying, "Over and out."
This is Tellman. And I am here today to teach you 101 ways to get more leads and
build your list. Many of the things that I'm going to mention are Internet related;
however, all of these can be used whether you're an Internet business or a local
business. And if you follow the principles behind these, you're going to find that you can
use them with really any type of business and in any type of situation, in order to grow
your revenue and grow the number of prospects that you have, in order to make this
work.
Now, you probably are familiar with me from ListBuilding.com. And that's a site that
we have that teaches all sorts of cool stuff about list building. But the major thing that I
want to point out here is that list builders frequently don't pay attention to leads, and
people that are focused on lead generation, more often than not, are leaving their single
biggest asset on the table to make more money, which is utilizing their list to sell it things
other than whatever opportunity they're trying to sell right now. And that's something we
can talk more about later.
But I'd like to jump into 101 Ways to Get More Leads and Build Your List. First of all,
we brainstormed this list with myself and several people in the Overcome Everything
team. "Overcome Everything" is the name of my company. And I just wanted to thank
Pat and Mike and Kyle and Josh and Jodi for contributing so many great, great ideas to
this list. And so we're going to go ahead and roll through these.
Number 1
YouTube is a great way to build your list and get more leads. If you focus on doing
YouTube videos and giving one little nugget of information, one little nugget of
interesting information or wisdom about your market or to your prospects every single
day, and then give out a link where people can go and opt in to your squeeze page, in
order to give you their name and e-mail address, it's a great way. Also, of course, you
can tell people to subscribe to your YouTube channel. And that's pretty good, but it's not
as good as having an e-mail address. So I like to focus, with my YouTube videos, on
getting everybody subscribed to my channel onto my email marketing list.
Number 2
So number two is social networks. Now, we all know there are lots of types of social
networks out there. There's YouTube; there's Facebook; there's Twitter; there's
MySpace. And there are just more general social networks like that popping up every
single day; however, you can also create personal social networks. And that's
something that we've been playing around a lot with lately. You can also create social
networks around your topic.
101 Ways to Get More Leads and Build Your List Page 3 of 17
The key that I've found to creating social networks is to create a social network that
is based on a group that already likes to get together and hang out with each other.
That's a much better way than trying to force a bunch of people to spend time together
based on the topic that you think that they want to discuss, when they never actually get
together to discuss it.
Number 3
Twitter is a social network. This is number three. Twitter is a great way to build a
following. And of course then you can turn around and drive from Twitter back into your
e-mail list. So Twitter's a phenomenal way to build leads and build your list. Facebook,
again – twitter.com – facebook.com is a social network. It's a great place to meet people
who have similar interests. And it's a great place to connect with people who want to
buy the types of products and services that you have to sell.
Again, in the case of Twitter, again in the case of Facebook, and in the case of all the
social media – and, really, with any type of lead generation or list building – you want to
focus all your attention on actually helping people. If you focus on helping people in your
marketplace first, they'll be much more responsive when you ask them to give their
name and e-mail address in exchange for helping them.
So – Facebook… MySpace – same basic premise. Set up a profile on MySpace;
connect it to people who are interested in the same stuff. And some people say,
"MySpace is dying." And MySpace is still insanely large. And so don't abandon ship on
MySpace. If it's dying, all that means is that there's less competition for you to go in
there and get traffic and leads from MySpace. So if you're not using myspace.com,
definitely go it.
Number 4
Next is blog posting. So starting your own blog is one way of doing this – starting
your own blog and doing blog posts on a regular basis. WordPress is my favorite
blogging tool. So blog posts are a great way to build your list. You write a blog post that
has to do with your topic. You maybe have an opt-in box right there; maybe put a popup
on your blog; maybe you just link to your squeeze page. One way or the other, do a
blog post a day, and you'll get leads every day.
101 Ways to Get More Leads and Build Your List Page 4 of 17
Number 5
Article marketing is next, and a lot like a blog post, except it's usually informational
and about the topic that would attract your lead or someone that would be interested in
being on your list. Writing articles and submitting them throughout the Web is a great
way to make all that happen.
Number 6
Forums is number six. Forums are really great, because you can comment in forums
that already exist or you can start up a forum on your own topic. And there are
thousands of different ways to start up forums. All you have to do is look for forum
software and – BOOM! Forums are a great way to find people. And many social
networks now have forums as part of them. So that's another way of participating n
forums.
Number 7
Joint ventures is something used all the time in the Internet marketing world;
something used very rarely in the lead generation world – which is a extreme waste of
money for the lead gen guys. If you're an Internet marketing person, you probably
already know about doing cross-promotions to your list of leads or your list of
subscribers, as we like to call them.
But if you're in the lead gen world and you have a list of 100,000 people that haven't
bought from you, but you're e-mailing those people, say, once a week, twice a week,
three times a week to build a relationship with them – even if they've never bought
anything from you – you can now promote someone else's product or service to those
folks and have that person promote your products or service to their folks. And you both
generate a lot more sales. It's an incredibly powerful and virtually free way for you to
make that happen.
Number 8
Pay-per-click advertising (or PPC) is another way to build your list. Google Pay-Per-
Click, Bing, Excite, and even Facebook now has PPC advertising. Pay-per-click
advertising is really powerful. It's a way of paying to get traffic to your squeeze page, to
your opt-in page, to get people to join your list – which means you get people to selfqualify
and say, "I want to be a lead. I want more information from you on X, Y, Z topic."
101 Ways to Get More Leads and Build Your List Page 5 of 17
Numbers 9 & 10
CPA and CPL: CPA is Cost per Action. CPL is Cost per Lead. They're different.
Cost per Action is through a CPA network like Offeratti, for example, where you actually
pay out a certain dollar amount for every sale that you're generating. It's an incredibly,
incredibly powerful way to make things really work. Again, it's CPA – Cost per Action.
You can do a search for "CPA network," "CPA advertising." Great way.
If you know how much money you're going to make when you – you know, on the
back end, when you make a front-end sale and you know the exact value per customer,
you can pay a little bit less than that in your CPA deal. So if someone's buying
something from you for $19.95, well, you might have to pay $35.00 or $45.00 for that
action, for that sale. But you know on the back end, you're going to make a lot more
money. If you don't have a back end, CPA's not for you.
CPL is Cost per Lead. And Cost per Lead is paid advertising. You pay when you
generate a lead. And again, these are usually through CPA networks that you can do
CPL advertising. So that's something to look into.
Offeratti.com is a cool resource and Offeratti.com is run by a friend of mine. So –
very, very cool.
Number 11
Integration marketing is a tremendously powerful way to generate leads. It's a term
that was coined by Mark Joyner, and has to do with putting your offer on the back end of
someone else's offer.
So, for example, if you successfully make a sale, what if you had someone else's
offer for a similar product (for a related product) on the thank-you page, after someone
purchased?
Or this could even happen on the phone. You successfully close a deal, and then
you make an offer for a competitor's product. Well, you then get paid a commission,
based on that. And so your competitor gets a sale; you've made free money. And
everybody's happy.
Number 12
Now, we talked about social networks a little bit earlier. It's a site called Ning.com.
Ning is one of many social network sites where you can go and start a social network
today about any topic you want. It could be about you, if you want. You could start a
social network about monkeys or cheese. Ning is incredibly powerful. They have
millions and millions and millions and millions of users. And it's just a great way to start
101 Ways to Get More Leads and Build Your List Page 6 of 17
a social network up on a topic, to get people talking if they're passionate about
something.
Numbers 13 and 14
SocialGO is a competitor to Ning. It's also very, very good. And then more recently,
something called BuddyPress – BuddyPress is a plug-in for WordPress. And
BuddyPress allows you to start up a social network right on your WordPress blog. And
so if you have hosting already for your blog, you can plug BuddyPress in, and POW! –
now you have a really great option going on for your social network with BuddyPress.
So that's really, really, really nice.
Number 15
Next is Traffic Geyser. Traffic Geyser. And Traffic Geyser is actually a product. And
the reason I wanted to tell you about Traffic Geyser is: it's a product created by my
friend Mike Koenigs. And it's incredibly powerful, because we've already talked about
video; we've talked a little bit about social networks; we've talked a little bit about
YouTube. Traffic Geyser essentially takes your YouTube videos or your recorded
videos that you can record from a webcam or a flip video and it helps to distribute them
all across the Internet to a whole slew of different video sites. It helps you distribute your
videos and articles and press releases and all sorts of other stuff, all over the Internet,
very quickly and with little or no work.
So it'd kind of like an aggregator. So if you have a good message you're putting out
there – I often record a video first; convert that video into an article; post that to a blog;
distribute the article through a bunch of different article sites; go ahead – and so on and
so forth. And it's an incredibly, incredibly powerful way to get your word out there. And
so I recommend trafficgeyser.com as a service you definitely should use.
Number 16
Press releases. Most people are a little bit hesitant to actually use press releases
when they're putting out an article. But the reality is: it works like crazy and helps –
gives you tons of back links. I recommend putting out a press release a day. There are
a bunch of different options that are out there, and there are always more. But
converting your article into a press release and putting it out there with a link back to
your opt-in page or your squeeze page is just an incredibly, incredibly, incredibly
powerful way to make all this happen.
Number 17
Classified ads are another option. And if you want to stay within their terms of
service (and you always do), you can use something like Craig's List. But there are
101 Ways to Get More Leads and Build Your List Page 7 of 17
other classified ads – sites that are out there, as well. Just type in "classified ads" or
"Internet classified ads" and you'll find a slew of places that you can put classified ads
online.
The equivalent of classified ads is – number one, I generated leads from my
hypnosis business, back in the day, with newspaper classified ads where I placed
classified ads for, say, how to quit smoking. And people would call an 800 number for a
free special report that I would mail them about how to quit smoking. And the free
special report would offer them a free session, a free hypnosis session with me if they
called back and signed up within such-and-such a date. And that worked like crazy to
generate weight loss leads, smoking leads.
And the big thing is: these aren't leads; they're human beings. They're people who
need your help. And that's the biggest, biggest differentiator when you're thinking about
all this – is: think about people who need your help, rather than leads. And if you focus
on people who need your help, you're going to find that you're going to want to help
people. And you're going to be in a much better situation if you do.
Number 18 and 19
Okay. So eBay is actually a really great way to generate leads. You can sell
something really inexpensive; free or a 99-cent special report, whether it's print or digital,
on ebay.com. As well – amazon.com. You can create a white paper; you can create a
short book. You can create an audio program. You can sell it on amazon.com. And, of
course, an extension of amazon.com is the Kindle – and sell e-books on the Kindle.
Very, very powerful.
Number 20
Now, this one's a little funny. This came from John Morgan. He actually did
something with cork boards at Starbucks. He went around and put posters up on cork
boards in Starbucks in order to generate leads for his business. So something to
remember is: you can – with good copy that's appropriately placed -- you can generate
leads almost anywhere.
Now, all of these are assuming you have some idea of what you're generating a lead
for. Right? If you have no idea what you're generating a lead for, then definitely go to
ListBuilding.com and get that straightened out. So – because if you're not dead clear on
why it is that you're generating a lead and what it is you're going to be selling – you have
to start there, so that you don't waste a whole bunch of time, effort, energy, and money
advertising without having any idea who it is you're trying to attract to your business.
101 Ways to Get More Leads and Build Your List Page 8 of 17
Number 21
Number 23 is SEO or Search Engine Optimization. Search Engine Optimization you
could easily study for the rest of your life and you'd never stay ahead of it, but you'd
probably be really successful. Search Engine Optimization is an extraordinarily powerful
way to get people to your website, to put in their name and e-mail address so that you
can follow up with them.
Number 22
RSS means “Really Simple Syndication.” RSS is another way of getting your
content out there. And fortunately, it's very free, which – again, you can use RSS in
combination with SEO. You can do a search on Google for any of these terms, and you
can buy products that teach you how to do all of these things in detail. But RSS is a
really great option.
Number 23
Podcasting actually utilizes RSS, and that's number 25. Podcasting uses RSS in
order to get things out there – in particular, audio and video. So you can use
podcasting. And again, there are lots of podcast directories that you could submit to.
Traffic Geyser utilizes podcasting and RSS as two of the major tools that it uses to push
things out there.
Number 24
Video responding is number 26. Video responses on a site like YouTube, and many
of the other video sites that are out there now, you can go and actually do video
responses to other people's videos. And in doing video responses to other people's
videos, you're able to just get traffic, 'cause people watching a highly popular videos
watch your video responses and then go and check out your stuff.
Number 25
Direct mail – you've probably heard of it: sending mail to generate leads. You could
do this all day long; it could be the one thing that you do. And it could generate millions
and millions and millions of leads for you a year, easily, if you decide you wanted to get
good at direct mail. Postcards are a form of direct mail. You can utilize postcards in
order to generate leads, as well.
Number 26
E-zine advertising – doing paid advertising in e-zines – just type in "e-zine
advertising," and you'll find lots of stuff. Specifically, you can look for e-zines on your
101 Ways to Get More Leads and Build Your List Page 9 of 17
topic and advertise in them and direct people to your website, have them opt in, and now
you can follow up with them.
Number 27
Okay. So the next thing is banner advertising. You can advertise with banners on
websites. I'm going to go ahead and name a lot of these off really quickly now, 'cause I
only have a few minutes left to do this recording and I want to make sure you've got
everything you need.
Number 28
You can use radio advertising; you can do things on the radio or radio on the
Internet.
Number 29
You can do text messaging or SMS advertising on mobile phones.
Number 30
You can – I just mentioned offline radio; online radio is another great option.
Number 31
Facebook ads. You can build an entire multi-million-dollar business on Facebook
ads alone.
Numbers 32 & 33
Hubpages.com is a great way to get stuff out there. HubPages is a lot like Squidoo.
Go check it out. You can put your content there and really start building a following.
Number 34
Giveaways: Do a big giveaway or join one. Get a bunch of people in the same
marketplace together to give a whole bunch of stuff away. You generate leads on the
front end; they generate the leads on the back end; everybody's happy.
Number 35
LinkedIn is a way of getting business contacts. Squidoo, many people are already
familiar with. It's a great way of getting things rolling. These are courtesy of Pat, by the
way, Pat Marcello. Absolutely brilliant.
101 Ways to Get More Leads and Build Your List Page 10 of 17
Number 36
USA - or USFreeAds is a classified solution, so check that out – USFreeAds.
Number 37, 38, 39, 40, and 41
There's another very cool thing called MyBlogLog. It's like social blogging, a little bit.
And BlogCatalog. Go check out BlogCatalog. There's a site called Technorati; it's the
oldest blog directory out there. And it's incredibly, incredibly cool. There's another place
where you can submit your content; articles and so on: Zemanta. Then, of course,
there's Gather.
Number 42
And then you can also start a wiki. And one great way to start a wiki up is called
PBworks. It's – wiki is kind of like social blogging.
Number 43
You of course can use business cards. It's an old-school method, but you can still
use it.
Number 44
And then there's the SRDS, the Standard Rate and Data Service. Thank you, Mike
Purvis. SRDS.com. Check it out; it's a great way to buy – or to rent lists and then send
out to those lists and then drive those lists back to your offer.
Number 45
You can do things like sponsoring bands or race cars or other publicly attended
events with your business, in order to generate leads.
Number 46
You can use tell-a-friend forms online, where you have something cool that you give
away, and then you have people tell a friend with a tell-a-friend form.
Number 47
You can use face-to-face contact, lo and behold – something like BNI, for example.
Seminars are a great place to meet people and find leads. The Chamber of Commerce
and, of course, public speaking gigs is a really, really cool way of doing this.
101 Ways to Get More Leads and Build Your List Page 11 of 17
Number 48
You can use list builder sites, which are really lead generation sites, such as
thelistauction.com or listhero.com.
Number 49
You can use traffic exchanges, which are very, very similar – just type in "traffic
exchanges" into Google, and you'll find a plethora of opportunities in order to get more
leads.
Number 50
You can use SpicyPage.com in order to submit your website.
Number 51
Or you can do blog commenting, where you comment on other people's blogs.
Number 52
Seesmic is a social a video tool. It works very, very, very well.
Number 53
Or you can use Gmail ads, which is a form of paid advertising through Google, kind
of like Google Pay-Per-Click.
Number 54
Google Buzz – you can make friends with people and talk about topics that you're all
interested in and then drive people back to your opt-in form.
Number 55
Plaxo is a social network where you can make business friends.
Number 56
There's a bunch of cool stuff that we teach, but one of the things is called a golden
rule auto-responder trade, where you take your e-mail auto-responder and you just pop
in a couple messages at the end of your existing sequence, promoting somebody else's
stuff, and they do the same thing for you. And lo and behold, you both get more leads.
It works out great.
101 Ways to Get More Leads and Build Your List Page 12 of 17
Number 57
You can do ad swaps, which are, like, one-time cross-promotions, with people who
already have lists.
Number 58
You can do exit pops – exit pop-ups on other people's websites. Or you can do exit
pop-ups on your websites and sell leads that you normally would lose.
Numbers 59 and 60
You can just put a pop-up on the front end of your website or a slide-up opt-in box,
like you'll see on listbuildingblog.com. There's a really cool new thing going on right now
called "single sign-on," or SSO. You can look into that.
Number 61
And then there's also straight-to-desktops software. So you can look into desktop
software options.
Number 62
You can do a – what's called a "customer squeeze," after a purchase, where, when
someone purchases something, they opt in – and bam, now they're a lead for something
else.
Number 63 and 64
You can do a book launch. You can do an Amazon-style book launch. Check out
riseoftheauthor.com. Or you can do book inserts, where you can actually do something
like that through amazon.com, where they'll – they will insert your advertising into books
that they're sending out.
Number 65
You can do bulky mail, which is mail that you send; it's like direct mail with a big
honking thing in the – you know, like, imagine a tennis ball inside of a envelope that you
got in the mail. Well, that would be bulky mail. It would definitely get opened.
101 Ways to Get More Leads and Build Your List Page 13 of 17
Number 66 and 67
Viddler – Viddler is one of the many video sites that are out there. And it is a great
way to get your video out there. Another one is Vimeo, V-I-M-E-O. Then, of course, you
can do word-of-mouth marketing.
Number 68
Word-of-mouth marketing. And – incredibly, incredibly powerful.
Number 69
Now, Google TV ads is actually an option. You can do advertising on TV through
Google. So check that out.
Number 70
You can also do a viral PDF, which is a – maybe an article or a how-to directory of
some sort – viral PDF – that goes viral. And there are lots of ways to set it up. There's
actually a product out there called "Viral PDF" that you can look at in order to get your
PDF files spread all over the place.
Number 71
Then there's something called BitTorrent, where you can give stuff away on
BitTorrent. And whether you have people opt in before they get access to your PDF file
that you put on BitTorrent, or maybe you have people opt in afterward – but because you
make something really cool. So that's an option.
Number 72
You can do forwarded e-mails. If you make a really, really great e-mail with a link to
some of your stuff and then you forward it on and model after existing forwarded e-mails,
it's a great way of doing it.
Number 73
You can build a perpetual marketing machine. A perpetual marketing machine – it's
a great way of generating thousands of leads all at once. You can do a search with
Google on that.
101 Ways to Get More Leads and Build Your List Page 14 of 17
Number 74
ButterflyMarketing. ButterflyMarketing is a great site that you can use; it's by Mike
Filsaime. And it's a kind of a viral tell-a-friend affiliate program kind of a thing. It's very
cool.
Number 75
There's IRL ads – In Real Life ads: halls, walls, and toilet stalls. Okay? You can put
physical print ads up wherever you want.
Number 76
There's Google Knol, which is an article directory. There's Live Journal. And these
are Josh's – Josh Burns – some of these ideas. These are great.
Number 77
LiveJournal is a blogging option.
Numbers 78, 79, 80, and 81
Digg, StumbleUpon, Yahoo! Buzz – and then there's something else called Reddit.
It's very similar to Digg. There's del.icio.us or Delicious.com. Check that out. Social
bookmarking.
Number 82
Yahoo! Answers – very cool. We've been playing around with that lately.
Number 83 and 84
Google Video, which is another video option; Revver, which is another video option.
Number 85
Crowdfunding – totally cool. We don't have time to talk about it here. Crowdfunding
is probably the newest and most amazing way of generating leads on the Internet.
Number 86
TubeMogul – TubeMogul – another video syndication service.
101 Ways to Get More Leads and Build Your List Page 15 of 17
Numbers 87 and 88
ShareThis or AddThis is blog plug-ins for social networks. And that's another way
you can do it.
Number 89
Guest writing for blogs – so you can write for other blogs. Very cool. If you have
something good to say, then you're good to go. So you can also write tutorials, and then
you can submit those tutorials all throughout the Internet.
Number 90
You can do bonus traffic. And bonus traffic is where you create a bonus that you –
where you actually create a cool bonus that someone else includes in their product that
drives people into a lead for you. Okay, so that's very cool.
Number 91
You can hold a contest.
Number 92
And you can also do something called – with Amazon Mechanical Turk. I know it's
going to sound crazy, but you can pay people insanely small amounts of money to go do
whatever you want, including opt in to your site.
Number 93
You can buy somebody else's website.
Number 94
You can use instructional articles. Instructional articles we talked about; instructional
videos we talked about.
This instructional stuff – specifically, you can do teleseminars in order to generate
leads; you can interview other people and put those out there in order to generate leads.
If you interview famous people and people find the thing over on your website, then
you're good to go.
101 Ways to Get More Leads and Build Your List Page 16 of 17
Numbers 95, 96, and 97
You can submit your site to directory sites like DMOZ, Joe Ant, and Yahoo Directory.
Number 98
And you can do two-for-one friend invites. So it's a two-for-one kind of a deal, with a
tell-a-friend.
Number 99
Do an involvement survey – where you can do a survey, like, on instantaddtest.com.
Number 100, 101, and 102
Add content to social content networks like Scribd, Wikihow, or 9Rules
Number 103
Expired domain traffic. Sites sell traffic on domains that have expired that already
have some traffic.
Number 104
Give interviews to other people in your niche about your area of expertise.
Number 105
Put a logo on your car that drives to your squeeze page.
Number 106
Join a webring in your niche.
Number 107
Create a newsletter. Give people lots of good information via autoresponder. Have
them sign up for your list to get it.
Number 108
Join your local chamber of commerce and educate business owners about online
business. Have them send their customers to your site, when appropriate.
Number 109
Exchange blog links with other bloggers in your niche.
101 Ways to Get More Leads and Build Your List Page 17 of 17
So that's 101 very cool ways that you can build your list and get more leads. I hope
you found this helpful. And if you want more information like this – you want to know
how to get more leads and how to build your list and how to make more money from it –
please go check us out at ListBuilding.com. I'm sure you'll like what you find. We'll talk
to you soon.
This is Tellman Knudson saying, "Over and out."
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