Retweet Power

Unless you have been living under a stone for the past year you should need no introduction to the internet phenomenon that is Twitter (if you do please click here). As well as its original remit of letting the world know ‘what you are doing’ Twitter can be a great marketing tool for your online business if used correctly and responsibly. Retweets or RTs as they are known are when someone takes one of your Tweets and broadcasts it to all of their own followers. The power and potential of RTs should not be underestimated and getting people with a huge following themselves to RT your content can have a massive impact on your own reader numbers. The larger the number of followers a person has, the more likely someone amongst them will RT your Tweet again, so on and so forth until hopefully your content goes truly viral amongst Twitters vast network.

In this short article I shall try and show you how to maximise the potential of RTs and encourage others to RT your own content.

Supply quality content

It might seem a bit of a no-brainer this one, but if your content isn’t of a good enough quality no-one will RT it. When you RT you are putting your reputation behind someone elses work, no-one is going to RT something that is rubbish. If it is a great quality article it will sell itself and will be something that others will want to share within their Twitter network.

Be interactive

Keep people interested in Retweeting your content by offering an incentive. Many top sites have offered a chance to win a prize in return for the RT of a particular message. You can also make it easy for people to tweet straight from your blog or website by including some extra Twitter code in the link as follows:

http://twitter.com/?status=

Clicking that particular link will open the Twitter homepage with the “What are you doing?” field prefilled with whatever you put after the equals(=) symbol. Please remember to use %20 instead of any spaces:

i.e. http://twitter.com/?status=my%20message

If you are not willing or able to mess with code there are several plugins that will automatically place buttons that allow visitors to tweet your content.

Increase your following

It follows that the more you tweet and the more followers you have, the bigger the audience and the greater the chance of you getting a RT. If you want more followers try using a course such as Twitter Rocket which is a 5 day plan which if used correctly could increase your followers by as much as 1000 per week. Click here for more details.

Build a rapport

By talking to fellow bloggers and others that are experts in your field you have a greater chance of forming mutual RT ‘partnerships’ whereby you agree to RT each others content. You could go further and build an RT ‘syndicate’ whereby a whole group of you agree to RT each others content a certain amount of times per week. These can be very efficient ways of spreading your knowledge especially if all the members of your syndicate are experts in the same or similar fields.

Always tweet your latest blog post

Make sure you tweet each and every addition to your blog. The simple truth is that if it hasnt been tweeted it can’t be retweeted so by following this simple rule you are pressing the start button on the whole process. I use a plugin called Twitter Tools which automatically tweets each post I write as they are published.

Use Twitter? Want more people to follow you but don’t know how to entice them?

Twitter is evolving into one of the biggest marketing tools on the internet. Soon, those without followers may well find themselves at a disadvantage and their competitors getting sales from the massive Twitter audience.

I wont bore you with too many details but if you want to jump on this particular marketing bandwagon and get instant followers just click the link below and sign up for free.

Yes please, I want more Twitter Followers for FREE!

Do I know about my niche product or service?

Think about what you are good at. What skills do you have? Have you got any hobbies that you could turn into a product or business? If you don’t have any skills or hobbies that you could use, what would you like to try? Then consider whether this could be turned into a business venture and put aside some time to research the topic thoroughly, eventually leading you to the knowledge to build your own marketing niche in that subject.
By knowing your niche product and service you will ensure that you have the edge over competitors that don’t.

Am I passionate about my niche product or service?

Sometimes knowledge alone is not enough and enjoying what you are doing in your business venture will ensure that you devote the time and attention needed to make things happen. When the chips are down (and profits) you will be more likely to keep going with something you enjoy doing. Anyway, who doesn’t want work to be enjoyable?

Will enough people want my niche product or service?

If you choose a niche market that is too broad in its scope it may be difficult to make your business stand out against all the others in its field. Choose a narrow, highly targeted product and the lack of competitition will mean that anyone searching for that product will find you. Do research into your chosen product or niche and make sure that people are searching for your product by using an online tool such as those listed below.

Google Trends – http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends
Amazon Bestsellers - http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers
Magazines.com - http://www.magazines.com/
Shopping.com Top Searches – http://www.shopping.com/top_searches
AOL Hot Searches – http://hotsearches.aol.com/

What is a niche market and why do I need to find one?

With recession looming and predicted to last at least the next 2 years, more and more individuals and businesses are quite rightly deciding that now is the time to diversify. I have done it myself, blogging is only a hobby for me and my day-job is running my own Website Design and Development company, but realising that times are going to be tough and bills will still need to be paid, I also run an online store selling videogaming equipment and sell photographic services alongside my Website Design. The choices I made when deciding how to diversify were easy for me, both of these other businesses closely relate to my hobbies (being a keen videogamer and photographer in my spare time) and my Website Design skills enabled me to get them online with considerable ease.

It may not be as simple as that if you decide to start up a new business in your own spare time though and finding a market for a business that is going to be profitable is a tricky thing to do. Many markets are already saturated and getting a foothold and exposure in these markets can be a time consuming and cost-ineffective endeavour.

“Why find a niche market?” I hear you say. “Doesn’t that just limit the people I can sell to?”
Not at all. In fact, finding a niche market and marketing specifically to that niche is one of the most important things to get right in any Internet Marketing Strategy. Once you know who it is you are marketing to it is easy to spend your energy and money on the right things.

Here’s a simplified example:

I am asked by a garden building manufacturer and retailer in Manchester to come up with an Internet Marketing Strategy. They are not selling enough Summer Houses. The first thing I ask them is “Who do you market to?” They tell me “Anyone who wants a Summer House.” Now the chances of someone coming from Birmingham to purchase a garden building in Manchester is slim. So instead of wasting money and time marketing to ‘anyone who wants a Summer House’ I tell them they would be better marketing to “anyone interested in buying a Summer House within 50 miles of Manchester”. By narrowing their niche market down they now know where to spend their time and marketing money and are now at an advantage over the other garden building retailers in the Manchester area who are still selling to ‘anyone who wants a Summer House’.

Finding and defining a niche market before you start any Internet Marketing Strategy is important for the following reasons:

1. By targeting a clearly defined niche market you will know exactly where to advertise and where to look to find related sites that cater for your market therefore maximising your marketing budget.
2. You can build a website that caters specifically for your niche market. This makes Search Engine Optimisation easier and enables you to target your niche market effectively via the search engines.
3. By knowing your niche market, it will be easier to develop new products and services to cater for that market.
4. With time and effort you can become a market leader in your chosen niche.

Coming in Part 2 – Finding your own niche market

There is much more to branding your business than picking a name and choosing a logo and getting it right is probably one of the most important choices you will make.

A strong brand is a marketer’s dream and makes promotion exponentially easier. In fact, a brand is often just as important as the product itself. For example, what’s the difference between Pepsi cola and generic cola? They’re almost identical in content and yet one does billions of dollars in sales and the other is ignored on store shelves.

Read the full article over at: http://www.winningtheweb.com/build-brand-future-business-depends.php

Social bookmarking is just like bookmarking or “adding to favorites” in your browser. Except it’s not.

When Johnny adds your site to his browser bookmarks, it’s because he values your content and wants to refer back to it later. Hopefully, Johnny will use the same computer and the same browser, because that’s where that information lives.

But if Johnny decides to add your site to a social bookmarking website, a few things happen. Johnny can access your site from any browser and any computer. He can describe why he bookmarked the site, using a title, description and tags. (Interesting fact: the social bookmarking site delicious.com (formerly http://del.icio.us) actually developed the notion of “tagging”.) This can make it easier for him to refer back to later.

So that’s the bookmarking, where does the social come in? Well in addition to being able to access his own bookmarks from anywhere, Johnny can also see what other people are bookmarking, and they can see his bookmarks. Johnny can search by ‘tags’ to find content related to his interests, and see how popular sites are based on how many people have bookmarked them.

Johnny is able to access his own preferred content easily, and discover new content that others have found valuable– social bookmarking is great for individuals’ productivity.

It’s similarily valuable for businesses, for a few reasons.

From a promotional standpoint, Johnny bookmarking a site means others may access it more easily. Social bookmarking sites often have the concept of “friends” or “networks” within which links are more frequently shared.

From a reputation management standpoint, businesses may monitor what is being said about their site, or their competitors. As individuals add their own tags to content, a business may be able to get a better sense of how they are being perceived externally.

Related to social bookmarking sites are social news sites like digg and sphinn. These sites are also driven by individual submission. However, whereas social bookmarking sites were originally intended to provide an individual with a personal space to store information for later retrieval, social news sites are more focused towards promoting timely information to the community.

A subtle difference is that on social news sites, articles may be “demoted” the same way they are “promoted” – the sites assign value based on individual rankings. This is not the case with social bookmarking sites, where each individual has the opportunity to define his own organization of resources.

Getting listed on the front page of digg can drive tremendous traffic to a site, which has resulted in abuse. Some services where people can pay for their stories to be dugg have cropped up, but this is NOT a recommended practice. Digg is intended to be a community, and therefore it is also considered poor etiquette to create a profile solely to submit your own content. If you want support from others, you must support them as well. Indeed, so important is this notion of trust and reputation, there is some sense that only through endorsement by a digg power user will you hit the front page. These power users have built up a following who trust their judgment in what is worthy to be dugg. Spend the time to work within the community or befriend a power user, and you may be amazed at the results.

Sold on the benefits of being bookmarked or dugg? Ready for the wealth of riches that awaits? Here’s some quick tips:

1. Write good content. The number one way to achieve social success is to write content that is worthy of people wanting to share and save for later.
2. Make it easy to promote. Many blogs or sites use services like “Add this” or “Share this” to encourage visitors to bookmark or promote the site.
3. Understand the value of social sharing, and buy into it. if you expect others to bookmark or share your content, you should also be engaging in the same activity. This will help you understand what’s worthy content, and also help create that sense of community.

About the Author

Andrea Hill is the Director of Social Media and Interactive Technology at Worldways Social Marketing. She got her start online nearly a decade ago as a web designer/developer, and has worked with such prolific clients as Procter and Gamble, Limited Brands, ScottsMiracleGro and LexisNexis. She has retired her coding gloves, but continues to contribute to online conversations and blog about web development, Internet marketing and social media at http://www.afhill.com/blog

Finding a niche market to aim a new business at can be a confusing and difficult thing to do. This post I found recently explains how you can use Google Insights to help find your own niche market.

This post will show you how to find a niche market using Google Insights. Niche marketing can be difficult, especially if you don’t have a niche market to start with. This free tool will allow you to get the behind the scenes look at Google’s keyword search history.

Full article here: http://www.nichefree.com/finding-niche-markets-with-google-insights/