Kathy Smith’s Blog and Your Gateway to Success

What is Twitter

Twitter has two purposes. It can be used just to keep in touch with friends or families or it can be used to help your business.

Basically, Twitter is like micro blogging or even think of it as sending a quick IM, (instant messaging) but you’re able to see all the updates (known as tweets) which are text based and have up to 140 characters in length.

For those of you who are asking what is twitter, you may not take it seriously at first. That would be a big mistake for many reasons. First, you may be surprised at the number of high profile people you have access to and can keep up to date on the latest news. Someone who I admire greatly in the network marketing field sent me an update welcoming me and yet he’s never answered any of my emails and I’ve had access to him and some great information.

According to the State of the Twittersphere report, each day 5 to 10 thousand new people join Twitter. Current estimates of total users top out around 5 million. That’s a lot of opportunity.

Second, for those of you who are seeing this as just another social networking tool and continue to ask, ok, I get it, but what is twitter? Twitter allows you to post updates as often as you want (again – limited to 140 characters). You can follow people and people can follow you. When they follow you, they see your updates (otherwise know in the twitter world as “tweets”).

Basically, it’s a constant flow of communication. Now for those of you who are overwhelmed as it is with the contact access and flow of communication available with our current technology, you’ll be happy to know that you can turn it on and off as often as you like. And you can also search through Twitter because they keep a public record of all updates so you’re not going to miss anything.

So what is twitter and how can it be used if I have a business? (Because for the social aspect, it’s very clear that it’s a great tool to keep everyone updated on what you’re doing). Duct Tape Marketing founder John Jantsch identified 3 big advantages of Twitter. From getting insight to the questions asked to traffic and people can spread your thoughts to new places.

Your tweets can become viral and more people can find out about you.

Let’s say you have a product and you want to find out what others think about it. You can search Twitter and see the responses. Bestselling author David Meerman Scott said, “I have personally connected with hundreds of people I otherwise wouldn’t have, and I booked an interview on NPR and a big daily newspaper using Twitter.”

When you tweet, if you are trying to build a business, 90 percent of the time, you should be providing valuable information. This will have more people following you to see what you say. You can use tweets also for surveys and questions.

There are a few tools to help better your Twitter Experience and I hope the information I have provided will have you stop scratching your head as you were asking, and what is twitter?

Here are some of the tools you may find useful:

TwitterFox: This Firefox web browser plugin allows you to view Tweets within your web browser so you don’t have to go to the twitter site.

TweetLater: With this service, you can schedule tweets and you can receive email digests of keyword activity in the Tweetosphere so you can join a conversation or track trends.

Ping.fm: If you have accounts with many services, such as LinkedIn and Facebook, you can post updates across ALL of your social media in one single step.

Twitter for Facebook: If you are on Facebook, this application forwards your Twitter updates directly to Facebook as status updates.

If you have a website, you can install a widget and everytime you update your twitter, the information is there. Google loves fresh content and you’re adding fresh content everytime you twitter.

Let me know how twitter has helped you.

Have a great day!

Kathy

It doesn’t matter where you want to start marketing on the internet, whether it’s your first blog; a lens; facebook; building a website, the first SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tip is understanding keywords.

What is a keyword? Every time you search on the internet and enter in words describing what you’re searching for — that’s a keyword. Ideally, you will want to identify the keywords that your prospects and potential customers are actually typing into the search engines, and create content on your website based on those keywords. There are many more SEO tips I will be blogging about, but if you learn this first, you will be successful in whatever you choose to do.

Keywords are the foundation to your building a successful presence on the internet. The keywords or phrases (long tail keywords) you choose will determine how your posts (pages, blogs, etc) rank in the search engines. This is the most important SEO tip I can give to you.

If you consider all the SEO tips you will learn, it will always go back to what is your target and you identify your target by your keywords. Think about reading an article in the newspaper. The reporter’s keyword is their title and their article expands on it. That’s the same way with Internet Marketing. Another SEO tip is to consider your competition. You can find many keywords when seeking your target, but you also want to make sure there’s not too much competition. An easy way to see if there is a lot of competition is to go to Google and start typing in the keyword and you will see results next to the word. For example, if you typed in weight loss, you would find 84,500,000 results for weight loss and if you put quotes around it, it brings it down to about 8,000,000 but that’s still a lot. Do you think it will be easy to get to the top of the search engine where people can find out about you with that type of competition?

Of course, there are ways you can narrow this down from searching on title; looking at what your competition is doing, etc. but that’s for another blog. Right now I want to focus on the first SEO tip which is keywords. Let’s take this a step further. What if you had a great plan for weight loss and instead of choosing a keyword weight loss, you chose weight loss plans. When I check to see how many people are searching for it, I find 479 actual visitors in Google per day and there’s 2,250,000 results in Google and if I put it in quotes (meaning people are looking for it in that order) there is only about 518,000 in Google Competition. If you just type in weight loss plans, you’ll notice you’ll find results like weight loss diet plans or meal replacement plan, etc. By typing it in without the quotes, Google finds all or part of the words. When you include quotes, Google only returns the exact match.

Another SEO tip is to know your search engine. There are tools on the internet that will help you in finding competition and keywords but they may be pulling from different search engines. Google is the standard that you should use. There are many other search engines and when you want to get involved with PPC and other internet marketing, I’ll talk about the other search engines but Google is, hands down, the most popular one.

Finding keywords or phrases that people are currently searching for and with low competition will help you to be listed organically in the search engine. You can write a blog or lens or whatever vehicle you choose on weight loss plans. The next SEO tips is you want Weight Loss Plans in your title and within the body you want to have the keywords’ weight to be around 3%, which is every 100 words, the keyword (phrase) should be repeated 3 times. You don’t want to repeat it too much because Google will consider that keyword stuffing and you could be banned or tagged as using black hat SEO techniques and you don’t want that. Black Hat search engine optimization is customarily defined as techniques that are used to get higher search rankings in an unethical manner. What’s funny is it will work at first, but then you’ll end up getting penalized and that’s not fun.

I’ll go into creating blogs; best services and how to optimize your blog in another post, as well as talk about getting traffic.

Another reason not to choose single word keywords is it won’t get you targeted traffic. For example if someone was searching for tourism and you were a travel agent for destinations in Australia that may or may not be the customer for you. But if someone was searching for “tourist destinations in Australia”, he/she is your potential customer.

Also, the latter is called “long tail keywords”. “Long Tail Keywords” is another important SEO tip. When writing information for the internet, you want to have content and bring something of value to your readers, but you also want to be smart about it and optimize it for a keyword or preferably a long tail keyword. A long tail keyword is someone who could be your potential customer. There are two types of people browsing the internet – the curious and the serious. You want the serious because they will opt in to your website or even better, purchase your products or join you in your business. Just because you have a long phrase does not make it a long tail keywords. It means having the right combination of words reflecting someone who is getting ready to make a decision.

When starting to learn about SEO and reading tips and information on the internet, I want you to realize that Keywords and SEO is not rocket science. It’s just being aware of it and knowing the tools to use to help you to get the information you need.

To find out more about what keywords to use, you can use a free version of WordTracker. They have a new one where you can look at the trends.
It’s: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/gtrends/

You may notice that the results that WordTracker displays is different that what you would see with Google. WordTracker assumes the “quotes”.

If you detail down on the results, you can check the search volume. If you have hardly any competition but there’s no one searching for those keywords, it doesn’t matter if you are in the top of the search engine because no one will be looking. Kind of like having a McDonalds in the middle of the Sahara Desert. I am sure there may be some lost soul who will be grateful to come upon a McDonalds but the bottom line for that McDonald’s store would be terrible!

So to summarize, before starting to write anything for the internet, you want to know the keyword(s) you will be focusing on and you want to make sure those keyword(s) are reflective of what someone is searching for and that there isn’t too much competition. You’ll also preferably be using long tail keywords instead of single words.

More information to come on this and if you’d like to get a jumpstart on Internet Marketing, enter in your name and email and take my course.