» Social Media

Maybe I Should Shut Up: How to Be Heard in Twitter

Andi Putra — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 14:11:00 +0000

I’m really not a big fan of social media stuffs. But, I do still use, analyse, and study how Twitter and Facebook can be used to generate buzz and drive traffic to websites.

And that’s why I’m really upset to discover that Twitter, once the symbol of social media innovation and power, is now filled with noises, junks, and spam. If you’ve used Twitter for quite a good while, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Link spamming, automatic followings, sponsored tweets, and many others. [I’m not totally innocent in this regard, because I do tweet my own stuffs. Sometimes, even when the quality is sub-par.]

The implication of these behaviours is HUGE. It becomes very hard to get your tweet above all the noises and be heard.

So, what can you do?

Selective Tweeting

Choose carefully what you’re broadcasting through your account. Because, by tweeting selectively, you’ll reduce the amount of clutters and noises in Twitter. And thus, increasing your chance to be heard.

So, ask yourself these 2 questions before you decide to tweet. If you can answer any one of these two with a YES, then tweet you go. But, if you can’t, please, stop yourself from doing so.

1. Is This Really Cool?

This is the question that you should ask yourself before tweeting about an article, video, or any other stuffs, even your own one. Really cool contents are extremely helpful or useful to other people. It’s the kind of contents that you’ll regret for the rest of your life, if you happen to miss them. They are the cream of the crop. Crème de la crème. Best of the best.

Just a note though, really cool contents don’t have to be serious or complex. So, feel free to tweet about a good and funny YouTube video, if you want to, as this is helpful, in some way, to others (helpful in relieving their stress, for instance).

2. Is This Me? Human?

Social media is a place to gather and converse with your peers. So, talk. Don’t just hand out clickable links in your tweets like candies. Tweet about what you think, feel, and experience. Your followers want to hear them. That’s why they’re following you, right?

If you want to make money with Twitter in the long run, you’ll need loyal followers who listen to you. So, stop sending automated messages about your product or service (using those automatic Twitter tools). Because, sooner or later, your followers will stop listening.

What you need to do, instead, is building a good relationship with your followers. And to do that, you’ve to make sure that you’re tweeting about ‘you’.

So, Maybe I should Shut Up

Wouldn’t it be great if we can live in a quiet Twittersphere? Where all tweets are important, useful, entertaining, or simply, enlightening. Where everyone tweet only when they really need to.

This post is written to encourage and teach you how to tweet responsibly and profitably (in the long run), just like what a true marketer supposed to do. Hopefully, you’ve read it with an open mind and ready to make Twittersphere a better place for you, me, and other Twitter users.

Feel free to tweet if you find this useful, I mean it ^-^.

6 Biggest Problems in Internet Marketing & How to Solve Them

Andi Putra — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 01:24:57 +0000

Internet marketing can be a tough nut to crack. With so much to learn and do, it’s easy for us to get overwhelmed. Not to mention, making money online is not something you can do overnight, which make it harder for us not to get distracted by something else along the way. And even if you get the self-motivation part right, you are still faced with a whole bunch of technical and knowledge barriers, like SEO, PPC, copywriting, and many others. These are the 6 biggest problems face by many internet marketers, including me, and how to solve them.

1. Distractions & Procrastinations

You’re busy. You have these funny and awesome Youtube videos that you need to check out, interesting tweets by your favorite celebrity that you need to read, extremely addictive games in your Facebook account that you need to play, and that super cool gadget blog that you need to check every half an hour or so for updates. Surely, this making money online stuff can wait for tonight, right?

Solution: You and I know we won’t do ‘it’ tonight. We’ll just leave it for tomorrow that night. And even then, we still might not do it. The only way to solve this procrastination is to have a plan and a schedule. Create a diagram of smaller tasks that you need to do everyday. Then, timed yourself with a stopwatch when doing them. Be sure to reward yourself when you successfully do all your daily tasks to keep your motivation up.

2. Getting Backlinks

It’s just so hard to rank high in Google. You’ve tried these social bookmarking things everyone’s talking about. You’ve tried some article marketing. Hell, you’ve even tried some link exchanges. But, you’re still not listed in first page of Google. What happen?!

Solution: Getting backlinks is a long and repetitive task. You can’t expect an instant result from all of your efforts. Try some of these link building tactics. And try not to do these SEO keyword research mistakes that I find myself, and I believe a lot of others, do when optimizing their sites.

3. Information Overload

You bought a $2,000 internet marketing course. You watched all of the tutorial videos and say to yourself, “Well, these are some awesome information. But I need to know more.” So, you bought another similar course. Then, another one to complement the one before. And, you joined the seminars created for those courses. Six months past and you realize that you haven’t do anything with the courses you’ve bought. And worse of all, you don’t know where to start.

Solution: If the above happen to you, you’re infected by what scientists called information paralysis. You’ve the knowledge, but they’re in pieces and you don’t know how to put them together. So, take all of the things you’ve learned and treat them like a jigsaw puzzle that you need to solve. Create a mind map of the actions that you need to take from each chapter of the courses. And start doing them.

4. Impatience

You’re starting to ask yourself, is this whole internet marketing industry’s a scam? Clickbank doesn’t work for you. Blogging doesn’t make you a cent. CPA marketing makes you lose money. And, that product creation and launch just makes you less than a hundred dollars a month. Surely, something is wrong with the industry, right?

Solution: Researchers said multi-tasking makes you dumb. So, concentrate on one single thing at any one time. For example, if you choose blogging as your make money online platform, do it for a couple of months before making a decision if it’s working for you or not. Put all your effort and sweat in those couple of months, though. So, you can at least experience how far can blogging actually takes you.

5. Driving Traffic

You’re wondering what’s the social media for driving traffic fuss is all about? You’ve tried to tweet about the latest post in your blog. But no traffic. You’ve tried some SEO, but your site never ranked in the first page of Google. And, you’ve tried some video marketing, but your video only obtained approximately ten views. Now, you’re desperate, what else can you do to drive traffic to your site?

Solution: If you want to drive a continuous stream of traffic to your site, focus on building your authority. According to Chris Garret, authority is a combination of personality, expertise, and visibility. So, for example to succeed in networking you need to have a friendly personality, be interesting to talk to (expertise?) and it always helps if people have heard of you. And, of course, always make sure you are up on the news and techniques of your niche.

6. Conversion

You’ve got the traffic. You’ve got quite a bit of email and RSS subscribers. Now’s the time for you to shine and make the big money online. So, you write a post in your site, promoting the latest launch of an affiliate product. But to your surprise, there’s only one, out of maybe hundreds of your subscribers, who buy from you. What’s wrong?

Solution: My only advice is, learn copywriting. Whether you like it or not, copywriting is one of those skills that you need in order to sell something, be it antique books or the latest gadgets. Having a knowledge in copywriting allows you to create an attention grabbing headlines, a powerful call to action, and other awesome copywriting tricks.

These are the 6 biggest problems when doing internet marketing and actions you can take to solve them. Feel free to leave comments below or tweet it if you like it.

What’s Your KPIs?

Andi Putra — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 23:46:48 +0000

Yesterday, I watched the whole Daniel Turner’s outsource method webinar conducted by Mark Ling once more and I’m amazed by how much I can learn from my second viewings of the webinar. In that video, Daniel Turner, an expert in outsourcing, talked about the importance of delegating your tasks through outsourcing and some of the best ways to do it. He then finished with the juiciest part of the webinar, his SEO outsourcing method. You can watch the whole webinar here. Before you watched it though, I need to warn you that this is the longest webinar I’ve ever been in, clocking in at 3.5 hours. So, if you only have half an hour to spare, you better do other things. Like, maybe, reading this post ^-^.

One part of the webinar that really caught my fullest attention is when Daniel talked about KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). KPIs are measurement tool that you use to analyze how effective your outsourcing efforts are. Say, if you’re doing SEO. This can mean how many back links your employee have generated for that month, how many blog comments he have posted, how many articles he have written, etc. If your employee performance is below the acceptable standard, then he should be fired.

This gets me thinking of how I can measure myself using the KPIs that Daniel talked about, to see if I’ve done a good job with this blog. As Daniel said, what gets measured, gets done. So I’ve come out with this list of possible things I can measured my efforts upon.

1. SEO (per month)

Number of social bookmark bookmarking you’ve posted

Number of directory submissions you’ve posted

Number of RSS submissions you’ve posted

Number of article submissions you’ve posted

Number of forum links you’ve posted

Number of DoFollow comments you’ve posted

Number of videos you’ve posted

2. Content Creation (per month)

Number of posts you’ve written

Number of articles you’ve written for article directories and tutorial sites

Number of videos you’ve created

Number of HubPages or Squidoo Lens you’ve created

Number of eBooks You’ve Created

3. Social Media (per month)

Number of tweets you’ve written

Number of followers you’ve gotten

Number of RSS subscribers you’ve gotten

Number of Email Subscribers you’ve gotten

Number of Youtube subscribers you’ve gotten

I’ll start measuring myself starting today, so the first result will probably come out next month. Anyone want to join me? Feel free to leave comments below or tweet it if you like it.

What’s the Best Ways to Get Lots of Traffic to Your Brand New Site?

Andi Putra — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 01:08:49 +0000

Hey, we’ve all been there. We’re excited when we finished building our site. If we’re making a blog, we have spent weeks or even months to design our logo and sidebars to perfection, now it’s time to sit back and relax, right? Right? Oh wait, we still need to write articles for it, preferably good ones. Maybe some podcasts and videos as well. And we need to drive traffic for it…We know how to do search engine optimization and link building so we thought it shouldn’t be a problem. Until we actually do it. Those two methods work but they are just too slow at driving enough traffic to motivate us in the beginning of our internet venture. So, what could we do? First, calm down. Second, read this post for the best ways to get lots of traffic to your brand new site.

1. Pay Per Click Advertising

You might be disappointed that the first one on this list is not free or new. You might’ve heard it hundreds of times before from other bloggers or internet marketing gurus. But, whether you like it or not, paid advertising is by far the best way to drive traffic to your brand new site fast. And if you do it properly, you’ll earn more (much more in the long term) than you spend. The key is to calculate the lifetime value of your visitors. This is easier to do if you have a blog with thousands of visitors a week as you can based it on the past conversions and sales. If you’re just starting up, however, using $1 value per visitors seems reasonable. I calculated this based on 1% conversion rate on a $100 product or two $50 products and so on. So, as long as the money you spend on pay per click campaigns to acquire the visitors is less than the the lifetime value of your visitors, you’ll make a profit.

There are lots of venues that you can spend your hard-earned money on when you do PPC ^-^. The six-hundred pounds gorilla, Google, with its Adwords, is the weapon of choice for many internet marketers. But the recent Quality Score issue, has caused many of them looking for other options. Yahoo! and Bing paid advertisings, the social media advertising (Facebook and MySpace), and media buying are all there for you to choose. The choice is yours.

2. Twitter Promotion

When people say you can use Twitter to earn money, I don’t believe them. I mean, Twitter is good for building relationship with your readers or subscribers, but it’s not an effective selling tool. But, Richard, one of my internet marketing friends, tell me that I totally misunderstood the selling tool part of Twitter. You have to treat Twitter as an indirect selling tool, rather than direct one. First, you build your Twitter followers with the help of Social Omph. Social Omph allows you to schedule your tweets and have an automated direct message to your new followers. Give something to your new followers for free by sending them into your squeeze page. Now you have a list that you can direct anytime to your site or blog.

Additionally, use Twitter Poster plugin if you’re using WordPress as it automatically tweets the latest post in your blog. Depending on your niche, how you phrase your post titles and when you make your posts, it can help you get 100-300 unique visitors a day. You can do it manually as well. Go for heavy traffic times like lunch, late afternoon and early evening US time. Always use tinyurl’s for you links and make your titles compelling. Don’t spam. Good rule of thumb is one ref post for every 4-5 normal posts.

3. Guest Posting

Guest posting is not the easiest one to do, but it’s free and is proven to work. Find the authority sites in your niche with Google Search by typing in the broadest keyword that define your niche, for example “blogging”. Be an active commentators on the blogs for maybe a week or two, then contact the owners and ask if they’re interested in accepting your guest post that contains link back to your site. If they agree, you are now set to receive tons of traffic. To get even more traffic using this trick, promote your guest post by doing some social bookmarking and article marketing so that it ranks higher in search engine. It’s easy for an authority blogs to rank high for any terms, so might as well use it to your advantage.

4. CPM Mail Drop

This is the method that Frank Kern mentioned in his List Building video before he launched Mass Control last time. What’s CPM Mail Drop? CPM Mail Drop refers to email list brokers. They can rent you a list at a cost per thousands views. You can find these brokers by going to the SRDS site. You have a choice between opt-in lists and compiled lists, which are less targeted. The thing to remember is not to send the visitors to your blog. Instead, send them to your squeeze page and offer them something for free in exchange for their opt-ins to your list. Now you have your own list that you can use to drive traffic to your site or sell products to. The broker will usually provide you with a report regarding the number and % delivered, the number and %opened, the number and %read, and other data.

These are the best ways to drive traffic to your brand new site. Start applying them to have traffic pouring in to your blog(s) fast. Feel free to leave comments or tweet it if you like it.

10 Worst Kept Secrets to Get Cheap Web Site Traffic

Andi Putra — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 05:11:21 +0000

If there’s one thing that you need online more than anything else, it’s traffic. The amount of traffic you could drive to your site determines how well you succeed online, as the more traffic you have, the more subscribers and sales you’ll get. The method of driving traffic to your site that I’m about to tell you is nothing new or original, they have been used and taught by gurus and bloggers for quite some time now. It is called the 10X method because it relies heavily on re-purposing your original article or post until it multiplies by ten in value. The first time I heard about this method was from Kim Roach, Buzz Blogger. And since then, I have tried it on a couple of my affiliate sites and I am still amazed by the result sometimes. So, without further introduction, here are the 10 worst kept secrets to get cheap web site traffic.

1. Upgrade your Articles for Web 2.0

Social bookmarking, as I’ve mentioned in my previous articles, is one of easiest traffic driving method that you could use. I don’t believe in using social bookmarking services or software. I’m also not a fan of bookmarking my articles on every web 2.0 sites that currently in existence. You only do this if your bookmarking purpose is to build back links, not necessarily for traffic. I usually focused my bookmarking effort on Digg and Stumble Upon. Also HubPages and Squidoo whenever I entered a new niche market or when promoting new products. Focus your effort on a handful of Web 2.0 sites and start building relationship with the members of those sites and you’ll be building your online business for the long-term.

2. Submit to Article Directories

Submitting articles to article directories is troublesome and annoying because you have to rewrite your articles, before submitting them, to avoid Google penalty. They are also not as cool as Web 2.0 stuff so some people prefer to focus their effort somewhere else. But, I could assure you that article marketing is alive and well. And by ignoring it, you’re missing a huge chunk of possible traffic source. Article marketing is still a highly effective way to drive traffic to your site and most of the time, the traffic is even more targeted than web 2.0 traffic. Some of the best article directories are: EZine Articles, Go Articles, Articles Base, Article Alley, Article City, Article Base, and Article Snatch.

3. Submit to Podcast Directories

Now you have to convert your articles into audio files. How? You could record your own voice reading the article. But, if you don’t feel like listening to your own voice, try Odiogo. Submit your blog’s URL and Odiogo would read the articles in your blog for you. Remember that it’s a computer reading your text, so it might not sound all that natural. Submit your audio files (or your blog’s feed) to podcast directories, like Podcast Directory or Podcast Alley.

4. Create a Press Release

Convert your every post to a press release. If you posted a Google Caffeine news, convert it to a press release (ex.“Announcing Google Caffeine Beta”). If you posted ways to drive traffic to your site, convert it into a press release (ex.”New Ways To Get Cheap Web Site Traffic Found”). Press release is not only useful to drive traffic to your site, but also for building back links. Some free press release sites: Free Press Release and PRLog.

5. Submit to Tutorial Sites

Tutorial sites are another very good source of traffic because they are relatively targeted (meaning if someone finished reading your tutorial then clicked on your link, they should have enjoyed your writings and are interested in what you have to say regarding other related topics). You need to convert your article into a step-by-step tutorial first. Then, submit these tutorials to tutorial sites like eHow or Tutorialized.

6. Submit to PowerPoint Sites

Most internet marketers ignore this method of getting cheap web site traffic because they believed it is not that effective. But it sure have worked pretty good to me so far. The most important key of using power point marketing is your presentation file should already be interesting and informative. Make your readers excited for the possibility of learning more about that topic and you’re on the right track. I usually have a link back to a squeeze page at the beginning and at the end of my PowerPoint presentation files. After you create your presentation file, submit them to: SlideShare, SlideBoom, AuthorStream, and Empressr.

7. Convert & Syndicate to all Video Sites

Video marketing is made famous by Frank Kern and Traffic Geyser founder, Mike Koenigs. It needs a little bit more work compared to other types of marketing, but it doesn’t have to be hard. You could start by using only Camtasia Studio to do screen recording and a microphone to record your voice. To syndicate your videos, you could either do it manually or you could use video syndicating service like Tube Mogul (FREE) or Traffic Geyser (PAID).

8. Submit to PDF Sites

As I’ve mentioned before, PDF marketing is one of the easiest traffic generating method that you could do. Just download the Primo PDF, and convert your articles into PDF format. Remember to add your call to action at the end of your PDF eBooks (“Get more Cheap Web Site Traffic Strategies Here”). Then, submit them to PDF directories like Scribd, eSnips, DocStoc, or Yudu.

9. Convert & Submit to Widget Directories

Create a widget for your blog or site using Widget Box. They have a Widget Creation wizard that guides you step-by-step when creating your own widget. Don’t worry, it’s not hard at all. After you create your widget(s), submit them to widget directories like Google Widget and Yahoo Widget.

10. Combine all into one RSS Feed and Syndicate

This last traffic getting secret would gather all of your previous marketing efforts and double it. How cool is that? It achieved this by combining all of your RSS feeds, from Twitter, blog, video accounts, web 2.0 sites, etc into one single RSS feed. So, whenever you update any one of your accounts, your RSS feed would be updated as well. After that, syndicate your RSS feeds into RSS directories, like FeedFury, Feedage, or Feedagg. You could get more traffic and tons of back links using this strategy. For combining different RSS feeds, use XFruits.

These are the 10 worst kept secrets that allow you to get cheap web site traffic. If you have heard all of them before and are furious at me for repeating them again, let me just ask you this, Have you implement them in your blog marketing strategies? Anthony Robbins said that repetition is the key to mastery. If you haven’t implement any of the above methods, now’s the time. Feel free to leave comments below and tweet it if you like it.

How to be the Furious Five of Twitter Marketing

Andi Putra — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 01:24:54 +0000

Twitter have proved itself to be one of the most powerful social media sites around. It was used by the people in Iran, who was banned from accessing any other media channels, to tell the world about the recent election and chaos in their country. Then there was Dell who used Twitter marketing so effectively to promote their bargains that they earned an extra $2million from it. Other companies, like Starbucks, also use Twitter for branding purposes.

Ok, that’s all good and all, but what’s that gotta do with me? you asked. We could use their tweeting methods and marketing strategies to help us with our own. So, here are the 6 moves that you need to master in order to become one of the Furious Five of Twitter marketers in your niche.

1. Have a Purpose

Not trying to sound deep or anything, but you need to know your purpose of doing something in order to achieve whatever it is you wished for. Are you using Twitter to promote your good quality products that were now offered at a lower prices, like Dell did? Are you trying to build your brands? Or maybe you’re just trying to be outrageous and famous?

After you decide on your purpose, write them down. This could act as a reminder and a source of inspirations when you’re not sure what to tweet.

2. Set Goals

Having a purpose is not enough. You need to set goals. Make a timeline on how many followers you want and by when. You could also set goals on how much traffic you could get from Twitter to your blog every time you tweet about it. Or maybe how much re-tweets you could get from your tweets and blog posts.

Always remember to have deadlines for every one of your goals so you don’t get caught up on being lazy.

3. Socialize with Big Players (with Caution)

There are 2 ways to go about building your Twitter followers. One is by following targeted group of people until you reached the 2,000 followers limit , and unfollow those who don’t follow you back. Then, follow another group of targeted random people again. You could, of course, simplify this whole process with some Twitter apps, like Tweetadder, etc. I have no problems of people using this method, hey I’ve used it too when I just started. But I do find it just a little bit spammy in nature.

Another way to gain more followers is by communicating with the big players in your industry that are active in Twitter. Send them direct messages, for example @chrisgarrett, @ProBlogger, etc, when you have interesting reply to their tweets. You could even challenge them if you want to, which is exactly what Ashton Kutcher did to CNN to get his first 1 million followers. You’ll get all the publicity you’ll ever need when you are actively engaging the big players. But remember to use this in moderation or it’ll lose its effects.

4. Provide value and insights

Getting new followers is great but you also need to retain the attention of your current followers. Your current followers could be the source of traffic and re-tweets when you need them, whether now or in the future. Retaining your followers through your interesting and informative tweets is one way to do it. Just remember to design your tweets to fit your audience. Dell tweet about their bargains because their user base are used to Dell’s cheap prices. Darren Rowse tweets about blogging and twitter because his followers expect him to do so, as the guy who founded ProBlogger.

But, sometimes you could tweet about some random personal or fun things as well, just to break the pattern. So your audience would wait excitedly for your next tweets.

5. Be Authentic

Don’t try to be someone else. If you are outrageous and adventurous in real life, don’t trim it down for Twitter. Act outrageous and adventurous. Reply with anger if you are angry, don’t try to soften it with less vulgar words. They’ll lose their effects. And if you are building brands, let your brand speak for itself. Let it communicate its personality. Is it dry and to the point, like Dell? Or maybe it’s fun and engaging, like Guy Kawasaki’s?

In Twitter universe, it’s easy to get lost when you could have thousands of Tweets everyday. So be bold and let your personality shines through your tweets.

6. Monitor Your Reputation

Always monitor Twitter for mention of your personal, or corporate, brand as it can save you a lot of future reputation headaches. Usually the complaints would appear on Twitter first before it was brought into a more widespread media, like a blog. Don’t worry, I won’t ask you to monitor Twitter manually for 24/7, except you want to. You could use apps like TweetBeep and Search Twitter to help you with this.

These are some of the ways that you could use Twitter more efficiently and effectively, whether to grow your personal reputations or corporate brands. Leave your tips in the comments or tweet this article.