Hash tags are an integral part of Twitter. A hash tag is simply a way to associate your tweets to any given topic. This makes searching for tweets on a particular topic much easier by grouping those tweets together and keeping them all relevant to one another.

And Google loves relevancy which is why we are now seeing more search results that are coming directly from Twitter feeds. Using hash tags can assist Google bot by telling it that your content is relevant for a particular search term.

So not only will this help you in Twitter’s own search function, but also, and more importantly, it could give you a massive boost for your targeted keywords if you start using hash tags in your tweets.

There are already thousands of hash tags that have been created and you can leverage these for yourself or you could create a new tag if you don’t find anything useful that already exists. A great way to find out which hash tags are popular is TwitScoop. This service monitors trending topics on Twitter. Keep an eye on TwitScoop to discover new opportunities.

Another benefit of hash tags are the thousands of bots that monitor twitter and retweet any content that it finds using the hash tags it monitors. For example using the #SEO hash tag would likely result in your tweet being retweeted by a good number of bots.

This may not seem like much at first, but if you consider that almost all Twitter users are following at least one bot, you can effectively increase the exposure of your content by a large percentage simply by having these bots retweet your tweets. And supposing you’ve posted a link to your latest piece of content, the more retweets, the more back links to your content giving you more authority on that phrase.

Start using hash tags right away to get the most benefit from this Twitter SEO tip and combine this with my other 5 Twitter SEO Tips to ensure that your Twitter marketing and promotional efforts deliver the maximum results possible.

Do you have a different view of hash tags? How are you using hash tags right now? Let’s explore the possibilities together in the comments.

This is part 4 of the Twitter Marketing 101 series. Visit these pages to catch up on the rest of the series.

Twitter Marketing 101 – Introduction
Twitter Marketing 101 – Building Your Business
Twitter Marketing 101 – Get Followed

There are so many things you can do to stand out from the masses of Internet Marketers looking to Twitter to sell more products, grow lists and find new customers. Besides ensuring that you stay active in the Twitter community, spend some time on developing a solid reputation amongst followers.

Rather than posting a link to your blog or website only to redirect them to your landing page for your affiliate product, write some articles on current events, gossip, even controversial or comedic subjects and begin to entertain your followers. They will begin to pay more attention to your tweets.

You’ll receive far more exposure if you stay very active in the community. Be entertaining or useful with your tweets, and your followers will continue to pay attention. The most successful marketers on Twitter know that by focusing on tweets about current hot topics, more people notice them and ultimately visit their profile.

Just like any social community, you must take an indirect approach with marketing, as opposed to a direct aggressive attack. It might work with a sales page, or a list building campaign but it’s a no win situation on Twitter.

Twitter can be simple to grow a good list of responsive, targeted subscribers, regardless of your niche or your experience. Building a massive list of targeted prospects is actually easier to do on Twitter than almost every other method online.

Create a landing page exclusively for visitors from Twitter and explain exactly how they will benefit by subscribing. Just as you would design a regular landing page, you should offer an ethical bribe to entice your visitors to entering their name, and email address.

Offering a free report or product is always a great strategy. Promote the offer through your tweets and emphasize that your offer is only available to fellow tweeters.

You can  step things up further by using the free www.TweetLater.com service  to send an automatic DM (direct message) to new followers. You are now able to market your blog or website and increase opt in’s to your list by simply providing free valuable content. This works extremely well, particularly if you are focused on building your listto target a specific niche, instead of creating a broad and generic follower base.

Once you’ve created your TweetLater account, you need to connect it to your twitter account. TweetLater will allow you to add all your twitter accounts, so you can easily multiple campaigns from one interface.

Once your twitter account is connected to your Tweet Later account, click “Edit” and customize your settings. Here you can setup an automatic message that will be sent to you new followers.

Enabling this feature allows you to automate the entire process of thanking the people who chose to follow you, as well as directing them to your landing page so they can opt in to your list or download your free offer.

Your automated welcome message should be set up now as well. This message is limited to 120 characters, so be sure that you send the right message. Thank them for following you and invite them to visit your website.

It’s also important when people follow you that you reciprocate. In this way you will build better relationships with your targeted followers. There is no requirement to follow every person who follows you though.  Your goal is to grow a targeted group of followers who are likely follow your tweets and purchase your products.

When using Twitter and TweetLater to grow your list, make sure that what you are offering on your landing page is laser targeted for your niche and offers genuine of value. You should stay away from a product type that is already saturated online. Offer something original, a short report or small product. The more exclusive the offer is, the greater the likelyhood of your visitors subscribing to your list.

Just like any other social community, marketing campaigns must be tweaked and delivered in a very different way that appeals to your followers desire to network with other like-minded individuals. This simply means that you should make sure that your automated message, including every tweet you post appears to be written for the ultimate benefit of the reader, as opposed to direct advertisements.

You should remember that the twitter community is a social community and an information network. That means people don’t generally join the community intending to buy products nor will they want to see constant marketing messages coming at them.  You need to establish balance in your tweets so that you can offer some value to your followers, and continue to consistently build your brand.

If you’re not sure how that’s done, take the time to evaluate how a seasoned twitter marketer has built their system.  They can show how to effectively use twitter to maximize their exposure. They have established new business and they keep their brand in the face of a captive audience. Importantly though they focus on giving, instead of taking by offering valuable tweets along with helpful advice.

By doing this these people stand out from the crowd and more people want to follow them. They are re-tweeted more often, people are more willing to opt into their lists and will often buy products they recommend.

People join and use social networks in order to make new friends and reconnect with old ones. They do not join to be marketed to. You must remember that so you are able to approach it from another, less aggressive angle.  Focus on warming your followers up just as you would with an email marketing campaign.

Twitter should be handled the same way you would handle your mailing list. Focus on establishing a twitter presence, building a targeted follower base and develop relationships with your followers.  Keep a balance of helpful tweets and promotional tweets and actively remain involved in discussions. Show your followers that you want to get to know them, what their interests are, and what they are searching for.

Twitter is an amazingly valuable resource when it comes to developing your online business and brand, but only if you use it properly. Building a huge list of targeted followers takes time, but when your focus is on quality rather than quantity, the exposure you receive is certain to pay off.

Twitter Marketing 101 – Introduction
Twitter Marketing 101 – Building Your Business

Twitter revolves around following people. People who interest you. Twitter also revolves around encouraging other people who choose to follow you back by offering value with your tweets.

A message that is considered to be of value could mean being helpful in some way, entertaining, funny, or otherwise useful.

You really don’t want to have to monitor your tweets to stay tuned into who is asking you questions or if there are ongoing discussions in your niche that you should be involved in. So always focus your efforts on building a targeted group of followers within the twitter community.

It’s pretty easy to build up a massive following. Simply add everyone you see. But that’s very time consuming, and worse still is that you just end up filling up your twitter page with pointless tweets, that will destroy your twitter experience. This makes it virtually impossible to market yourself effectively and your business will likely suffer for it.

No doubt, you’ll want a large following but your followers should be people who are actively involved or interested in your market. After all, you’re using twitter to market yourself and your business. Use twitter to communicate with potential buyers, or network with other marketers within your own market.

If your followers are not interested in your market, it doesn’t matter how much effort you put into writing quality tweets or how involved you are within the twitter community, no one will care and even less will pay attention to your tweets.

However if done right, you can easily find targeted people to follow and encourage those people to follow you back.

Here’s how to start:

Mailing Lists
If you already have a mailing list, you could email them with some information about Twitter, ecourage them to join and ask them to follow you, providing your twitter url.

Even though Twitter is growing rapidly, there are still tons of people who know nothing about it. So a little information about how easy it is to use Twitter could be enough to get your subscribers to join.

Twitter Search
If you don’t yet have a list, using the Twitter search tool, you can easily find people that are worth following. Once you log into your account you’ll see a search box at the top of the page. Enter a name or location to find the people you’re looking for. Although if you don’t know what username the person uses on Twitter (since not everyone uses their real name), you can visit websites that serve as a Twitter directory, of sorts. Because there are so many of them I’m not going to list them here.

Blogs
You can also find blogs that will allow people to post their Twitter profile URL. This can make it quite easy to find people in your niche. The Marketing Pilgrim blog has a post that allows people to leave comments with their Twitter account URL.

The Marketing Pilgrim post includes hundreds of Twitter users in the Internet Marketing niche:

http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2008/01/internet-marketing-experts-twitter.html

Following people who are already active in your market is the key to developing a Twitter network that is profitable. Once you have even just a few people in your list of followers, you can easily find even more to follow by looking at all those people that follow them.

Websites
There are also many websites that make it very easy to find people to follow and follow you back. I’ll list just a few of the better ones.

http://www.TwitDir.com
http://www.twitterholic.com
http://www.wefollow.com

As I’ve already mentioned, once you have that first handful of followers, or those you follow, it’s pretty easy to grow a network just by browsing their followers and adding the people you’re interested in, or those who are in the same niche you are targeting.

It’s a faily labor intenive way to follow a ton of people and will take quite a bit of time to achieve big results. It’s for this reason that automation tools are so popular right now

Like anything to do with Internet Marketing or making money online though, there are a lot of really shitty products out there.

Something that I stumbled upon recently which is proving to be worth every cent is TwitterFriendFollower. It’s a fairly lightweight PC application, that even comes with a no bull free trial, that can automate the entire process of finding followers using the same techniques that I’ve described throughout this post.

One of the most annoying parts about Twitter are those people who follow you, wait for you to follow back then stop following you a few days later.

TwitterFriendFollower handles that by simply starting one of the automation processes that scans through your account and unfollows anyone who is not following you.

It includes a white list so that if you follow say, Oprah for instance, (she won’t follow you back) you can add her account so that it will not be unfollowed during the process.

Another great feature is the search tool. Rather than using the manual process from inside Twitter, which can take a lot of time to get through TwitterFriendFollower can search on specific keywords or phrases making it effortless for you to find targeted people to follow, and hopefully get followed back. If not, you can use the unfollow feature to remove them.

Most Twitter automation tools use the API that Twitter provides which is limited to 100 API calls per hour. The TwitterFriendFollower however actually connects to your Twitter profile page thereby not using API calls and allowing far more request than API will allow.

About the only thing I don’t like about the software is that the interface is a little clunky, but for the price I think I can live with it.

A final word on automation.
These automation tools are important if you intend on not wasting years of your life building a following. But like any list building efforts, and lets face it this is still list building, make sure you don’t abuse it.

TwitterFriendFollower, like all automation software and websites allow you to automate the sending of tweets and direct messages at intervals. Abuse this or continuously send out tweets that look spammy and all your work will have been in vain.

I liked the application enough to become an affiliate of the product. If you decide to try out TwitterFriendFollower and use my link, send me an email with your Clickbank receipt number and I’ll send you some great bonuses to go along with it.

I hope you’ve learned some of the basics of Twitter Marketing and how to get the most out of your Twitter experience. In the next couple of entries I’m going to cover some traffic strategies and some of the tools that I use and you might want to use as well.

The more I develop my own Twitter presence, the more I’ll be posting about what I’m learning. If you would like to know anything specific about Twitter Marketing let me know in the comments and I’ll make certain to follow up with a post on it just for you.

For any new twitter user, the first thing to do  is creating your profile. People visiting your profile page can then see that you’re in fact active in the twitter community and are more likely to follow you.

The first mistake that a new twitter marketer will make is to immediately start building their following list, before first having sent out tweets, created their profile or included a photo in thier profile.

It might make sense if you have already built your online presence and you’re just importing your existing contacts from an address book or your mailing  list. However if you are still working on creating your brand or attempting to grow your business, then it’s vital that you establish your twitter presence before you begin following or finding new followers.

It all starts with your profile. That’s the place every potential follower will check out before they decide to follow you.  You should make certain that you completely update your profile. Provide information about yourself that is useful so people can identify you and find out what you have to offer, what you’re involved in, or your interests are.

Some fields in your profile which should not be overlooked, include your full name and website URL. Because your username is used to form your twitter profile URL, make certain that you choose a username that’s relevant to your target market, your niche or one that can represent your business.

You can use your own name (if it’s available), your website, your business name or keywords that are relevant to the  market you targeted. I’d personally recommend, if possible, to use your full name for your twitter username. Your  profile URL would be structured like:

http://twitter.com/John-Citizen  or http://twitter.com/JohnCitizen

Something that many people are not aware of, the keywords used in your twitter profile URL are tied directly to twitters own built in search facility. This means that when someone searches for specific keywords, twitter will search profiles and usernames to find relevant results.

This simply means that where possible you should include the primary keywords you’re targeting in your profile fields. This includes your bio area. This way you’re more likely to be found in search results when someone searches a keyword related to your market.

Separate your keywords with comma’s, that way each keyword will be individually placed.

Example:
Social marketer, entrepreneur, online business, motivational speaker

It’s also very important to determine the brand you want to create on twitter. If you’re running multiple websites, blogs or even businesses, try using different names ie: pen  names, or even business names. You need to consider what is the best approach for you to take.

For example, you might want to open a single twitter account to serve as your all-in-one point of contact for your various markets, or you might decide that it’s better to use multiple twitter accounts, where each one focuses on your various businesses or markets?

Using multiple twitter accounts allows you to send multiple tweets to each of your markets, as opposed to confusing  potential buyers when using just one account that might randomly send out tweets covering multiple niches.

Twitter doesn’t have an issue with people having multiple accounts, but you need to actively use those accounts if you want to keep them.

Even with twitter’s simple interface, and the many tools that have been created to help automate your tweets and build your following, you still have to spend some time actively participating with your twitter community. That is if you expect to build your business as well as maximize your exposure.

This can become exceptionally difficult if you run and manage multiple twitter accounts. You’ll need to consider that when you begin developing your twitter account.

If your account remains dormant for a period of time, twitter may terminate the account. This opens up the  possibility that someone else may register that username. If you intend on maintaining multiple twitter accounts, be sure to log in regularly and keep each of  them active.

If you’re satisfied with the setup of your account, then it’s finally time to send your first tweet. This might make some people anxious, particularly because once you send a tweet, anyone who views your profile or follows you will see it.

If you decide that you want to delete a tweet that you have sent out, all you need to do is go to you own page, click the tweet in question, find the trash icon then click it. This will delete that message from your time line.

You can also mark a specific tweet as a favorite. This makes it easy to find that tweet later. When you have  loads messages in your time line, this feature can be very useful.

When writing tweets, don’t be too worried about being creative, witty, or interesting.  Once you are an active part of the twitter community, it will become easier to come up with entertaining or useful tweets, and you’ll be able to get involved in discussions with your followers and those who you follow.

For now, just post whatever is on your mind. If you’re working on a website,  tweet it. Maybe you’ve found an great website or news story,  tweet about it. The idea is simply to post enough that you get comfortable with twitter, and more importantly, that yourtime line shows some activity before you begin inviting others to follow you.

Now that you’ve sent your first tweet, the time has come to begin following other people. You want to build your twitter presence. You also want to encourage others to follow you as well. Just don’t sign up, start shooting out ads every 10 seconds and expect to achieve anything. All you’ll do is annoy your followers and wind up a very lonely tweeter.

Take time to talk to people by directing messages specifically to them. Post some useful information or send links to a free product or  resource that the people in your niche might appreciate. Just like in the real world, you need to build a reputation on Twitter by being a person who is interesting, and interested in helping others. You can do this while you develop your Twitter presence.

Another great feature of Twitter is the ability to easily find others that are active in your market, or industry.  For instance,  if you’re looking for people to interview who might be experienced in specific area, you will find numerous people who are available and experienced in almost every topic or subject.

Twitter is like the rolodex for the online business industry. As Twitter continues its growth, far more people are climbing on board. Expect to see Twitter evolving and changing to improve the system and to add more feature that enhance interaction and productivity, making it even easier to reach out to others.

Posting subtle updates about your projects, your websites, blogs or products is a simple way to keep people informed about what you are doing. Particularly people who might otherwise not even know who you are, let alone what you do.

The way that you present yourself through your tweets , as well as  the frequency with which you do it, is vital in staying current, building a brand that becomes memorable, and being noticed by the entire community.

You can follow me on Twitter by clicking that little blue bird at the top of the page.

The most common question I’ve seen from people considering building a marketing campaign with twitter is, “what’s so different about twitter?”. Honestly, at first glance, twitter does appear to be very basic when compared to most other microblogging platforms.

The simplistic interface of twitter can in fact give an impression that its features are somewhat limiting. The truth is that Twitter is the most popular of all microblogging communities, and  it also carries with it the buzz that very  few other social networks can compete with. In fact, because of twitters popularity and massive growth, many other communities have recently appeared, looking to stake their claim in the social marketing arena.

Few have been able to establish themselves as a viable alternative. Even fewer have generated enough interest to remain online. No one really knows the reason, but  twitter remains the most powerful, active and established microblogging platform available today. If you’re not exploiting twitters popularity to build or grow your business, then you are certainly missing the boat.

By simply focusing on growing a relevant and targeted base of followers, and remaining consistently active in the twitter community, you could easily build up email lists, launch your products, promote an affiliate product or even conduct  your market research much simpler than any other online method.

What Twitter offers is an incredibly simple way of directly connecting with your prospects.  You’re able to direct traffic to any website you like, but even if you’re brand new internet marketing and are yet to establish your online presence, twitter can prove to be an exceptional tool to assist you in developing credibility in the market, and in developing your own brand.

Twitter has proven itself to be solid network and it continues to grow on a daily basis. It’s also proven to be an amazing tool to tap into niche markets. Twitter allows you to see what people are actively looking to purchase. It also allows you to keep an eye on what your competition is doing.

During this series of post I’ll be demonstrating some of the strategies that the successful marketers are using to send fresh traffic to their websites, build their email lists and tap into new markets, simply by interacting with the twitter community.

As someone that has failed to see any value in spending time marketing with other social networks, twitter has enabled me to broaden my view, providing me with new opportunities to expand my reach while not wasting precious time.

I’ve been able to connect with buyers, I’ve built great relationships with customers and even connected with JV partners. It’s a superbly powerful tool that, even with limited time, can enhance and expand your business.

Over the course of this series it’s my intention to show you exactly how to harness the power of twitter for you own online success.

Be sure to check back each day for the next chapter in the twitter marketing series.