Make Money Online with Twitter - Advanced Tweeting Techniques

Twitter is everywhere, but how can you use the power of twitter to build your online business? In this article I show you how to tweet for profit, and how to turn other people's tweets to your advantage.

I'm assuming here that you're familiar with the basics of twitter. If you haven't already got started and would like to know how to optimize your twitter account for Internet Marketing, read my article entitled " Making Money Online with Twitter - The Wise Person's Start Up Guide".

Tweeting (sending out updates)

If your tweets invite responses, people will be more likely to answer! Just as you would at a party, ask questions and try to appear more interested in the other person than you are in yourself. Find out about them and look for ways to help them.

Interesting tweets often include links to other things available on the net: articles, pictures, videos, websites, blogs... Use these kinds of tweets in addition to your sensible advice to establish your reputation as an expert in your field - the kind of person who can help others.

When you read a really interesting tweet that you want to share with others, you should retweet it. People love having their stuff retweeted; it's flattering.

If you don't see anything to retweet and can't think of anything yourself, use sites such as "stuff to tweet" or digg, where you are bound to find something interesting, but (unless it's really brilliant) try to keep it relevant!

Don't use tweets to plug your own stuff more than once in a while, or people will feel you're too pushy. When you do promote your own site, be subtle, but make sure you mention some kind of must-have free offer - perhaps a pdf report. Ideally this free gift or report holds the answer to someone's problem, so you have a legitimate reason for suggesting they check it out.

Getting into discussions

This is the important part: use "search twitter" to listen in on other people's conversations. Type in a keyword that's important to your business and find out who is discussing it already.

If you use the advanced search facility you can specify strings of words, and maybe a question mark as well - so you can find who is asking a question about your area of expertise. Results come up not just of people (anywhere in the world) who are asking right now, but also an hour ago or last night or a week ago.

Remembering that you're helpfully offering expertise (and not trying to puff yourself up or hard-sell your product), you can join in these conversations and suggest solutions to the problems that people are discussing.

At the same time, other wise twitter users will be doing the same thing and searching for what you're discussing. They may well decide to follow you, or send you a direct message asking for your opinion.

Links

Needless to say, your site and your blog will invite people to join you on twitter, and your twitter profile (and many of your direct messages) (each of which is a URL in its own right) will link to your other stuff. This is all good for Search Engine Optimization.

Use what you learn

You will inevitably gain valuable insights from listening in on conversations and finding out what people are tweeting about. These insights will help you add focus to your business and they will provide you with material for new tweets, blogs and articles!