Twitter for Business Building and Lead Generation (or as I prefer to call it, relationship building) – Part 2 of 2, Communicating with Your Followers

admin    Twitter     Building, business, call, Communicating, Followers, Generation, Lead, Part, Prefer, Relationship, Twitter

Twitter for Business Building and Lead Generation (or as I prefer to call it, relationship building) – Part 2 of 2, Communicating with Your Followers

As a business building tool for your relationship based business (is there really any other kind?) Twitter can be used to introduce yourself to people with shared personal and business interests, get into a “conversation” with them and ideally build a relationship with them as any combination of client, team member and friend.

As mentioned in the first article in this series regarding building your list of whom you’re following and your followers, there are automated ways to communicate with everyone, that there are pros and cons to automated tools, and they can always be augmented with manual (i.e. real interaction).

Direct Message Box

When someone is nice enough to follow you in twitter, even if in response to you following them, basic good manners suggest you thank them.  So please do respond to them.  If you are using automated means to build your lists, you will quickly be overwhelmed with too many messages to personally respond to.  This is when automated tools are helpful.  All of the twitter tools mentioned in the first article, Tweetspinner, Twello, and Social Oomph (my favorite) as well as many others will work.  No matter the tool you choose, they will each have a tool to automate your responses to your direct messages.  Part of setting up the automation in any of these tools, is preparing a list of 140 character responses, thanking those that follow you. The set up and configuration of your list might vary from site to site, but the idea is the same for every tool. In your 140 character messages, remember that folks are following you because you’ve expressed interest in what they are up to.  Continue that interest in your responses.  Remember, you are at the very beginning of building a relationship with them.  Don’t try to sell your opportunity too soon.  That said, feel free to include shortened links to your business sites (bit.ly will help here, shortening your links so you can make the best use of your 140 characters) in a context of shared interest, rather than premature, hard selling.

As you are thanking others for following you, you will receive many thank you messages as well. This is where the relationship building continues.  Reach out to those thank you notes that most resonate with you.  Ask them how they are using Twitter to market their businesses.  Offer an introductory free consultation.  Send them a complementary bit of content.  Check in with them occasionally to see how they are.  You know, just like you would with a friend.

Yea! Your list is building nicely, you’re seeing more traffic to your website, your conversion rate from Twitter is improving nicely.  Now your inbox is swamped.  These same tools will help you quickly purge your direct message box.

Tweeting

Because the purpose of social networks in general and Tweeting in particular, this is where the relationship building really begins.  Regular tweets are the ticket.  Ideally, several times a day.  Again, the tools listed above can automate this process as well with the usual pros/cons. Automated tools have a similar spinning message feature mentioned in the Direct Message section. This spinning messages will be in a similar format of a list of 140 character messages. To be compliant with Twitter rules (and thus keeping your account open) the ratio of marketing tweets to non-marketing is about 1:4.  Marketing tweets would include those that link back to your business sites, blogs, videos, etc.  You also want to build a long list of tweets, as Twitter doesn’t take kindly to excessive repetition of messages.  I would started with a list of 20 tweets, with a 1:4 ratio of marketing to to non-marketing tweets, and build your list 20 tweets a day and reload your list into whatever tool you’re using.  Another part of automating your tweets is to set up scheduling and frequency of your tweets.

As with everything discussed so far, just because you automate a fair amount of your Twitter marketing efforts, you and your followers will be well served with manual tweets from you.  Read what other people are tweeting about.  If someone shares something interesting to you, share the love and re-tweet.  Remember, this is a social medium.  So go be social!

Next Steps

Now that you have the basics of building your list of followers by following those with similar interests as you and building relationships with that list using a combination of automated tools and good old fashioned manual effort, you can start experimenting with marketing your business on Twitter.  As you become more comfortable with the tools, you will naturally progress to fine tuning your marketing message to better coordinate with your other marketing platforms and campaigns.

So go forth, get out there and introduce yourself to people, share your information, build the relationships and build your business and have a great time doing it.

Critical Techniques to Successful Sales Lead Generation, Using Google Optimization

admin    Google     Critical, Generation, Google, Lead, Optimization, Sales, Successful, Techniques, Using

Some website owners are more frustrated about Google optimization than for other search engines. They feel it is harder to perform search engine optimization for Google.
 
Whether you are making direct sales from your website or sales lead generation (or both), optimizing for Google doesn’t need to be that hard.
 
In fact, in time you may find it easier to perform SEO for Google than for other search engines.
 
 
Remember that Google is Much Smarter than the other Search Engines
 
 
Since Google is more intelligent, you have to treat them differently.
 
If you’re trying to spam them, their intelligence is going to be a problem for you. If you’re playing by the rules and providing valuable content for searchers, then you should have no problem.  
 
What Google wants is valuable content that satisfies their users’ search queries. They want searchers to find what they’re looking for, not clicking the back button quickly, but who stay on the sites they visit.
 
There are some in the SEO community who believe time your visitors spent on your site is one of the calculations Google uses right now in their algorithm to assign organic rankings.
 
Whether this is the case or not is really irrelevant: we should all want to deliver quality content that meets our searchers query, keeps them on our sites and that leads to a conversion, a sale or sales lead generation.
 
 
Are You Optimizing for Yahoo! Search and Live Search, too? 
 
 
With Yahoo! Search and Live Search (formerly MSN) you need to have the keyword phrase you optimize for on the page. There may be some exceptions, but this is a solid rule to follow.
 
The order of the keywords makes a difference with them, too.
 
As an example, with Google, Blue Widget and Widget Blue are treated the same way. Not so with Yahoo! and Live, they are treated as completely different search phrases.
 
Given the very high market share that Google has, you may want to just optimize for Google and not Yahoo! or Live. After all, depending on whose numbers you’re looking at, Google’s market share is basically 60% to 70% of all U.S. searches!
 
(And there are hundreds of other much smaller search engines, with such small market shares that they aren’t normally worth worrying about.)
 
But if you decide to also optimize for Yahoo! Search and for Live Search, then you will likely have to create more pages, to cover all your keyword phrases.
 
So, as you create more pages for your keywords, you clutter up the Internet, unless those pages are really unique, valuable content.
 
And then there is that duplicate content filter that Google has…you don’t want to run afoul of that.
 
If you do optimize for the other engines, unless the additional content is very unique, you might be advised to keep Google out of those pages (using your robots.txt file).
 
 
Knowing that Google is More Intelligent, How do We Optimize Differently for Google?
 
 
With Google’s use of LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing), your pages do NOT actually have to contain the keyword phrase(s) you’re optimizing for. But your pages had better contain words strongly related to your chosen keyword phrases. 
 
In fact, it is common to see high ranking pages where the keyword phrase isn’t in any of the HTML tags and where it also isn’t in the page text, either. Common keyword density numbers for top ranking pages in Google range from 30% all the way down to 0% keyword density.
 
Why is this and how do we benefit performing Google optimization? 
 
Google is smart enough to understand similar words and phrases (now is when we get to use that word Synonym from English class). Thus, the actual keyword phrase doesn’t have to be on the page. But words related to the same theme as your keyword phrases need to be on the page.
 
But if our keywords don’t actually have to be on the page for Google to understand the page is about our subject (our keyword phrases), how does Google make that determination?
 
 
Off-Page SEO is the Key to Your Google Optimization and to Your Sales Lead Generation 
 
 
The links from other websites to your Web pages and what these links say about your pages is the KEY to optimizing for Google. Remember, links need to be pointed towards your interior pages, not just to your home page.
 
And those links need anchor text.
 
Anchor text is the wording that people click on to go to your Web page, when the actual link doesn’t show your website url (and file name, if going to an interior page).
 
Anchor text tells Google (and to a lesser degree, other search engines) what your Web page is about.
 
Even if the actual keyword phrases aren’t used on your page, the theme of the page text should match the anchor text pointed to that page. You want the wording to be compatible and complimentary.
 
You don’t want to confuse Google as to your pages’ themes. That can cause real problems.
 
 
Quantity Versus Quality
 
 
When considering links to your Web pages, quantity is important. You will have to research your competition to give you an idea as to the number of links you may need.
 
Two tools you can look into are SEO Elite and OptiLink. You can Google both. 
 
But MUCH more important is the quality of your links. The better quality your links, the fewer you will need versus your competition.
 
Part of how you can evaluate quality of potential links to your site is that site’s home page Google Page Rank.
 
Now, Google Page Rank is on a page-basis, not a site-wide basis. But the home page Page Rank can tell you if Google considers that site to be an “authority site”.
 
You can install the free Google toolbar if you haven’t already and activate the Page Rank feature. While the information is literally months old, it’s the easiest way to view a page’s Page Rank.
 
You want some links to your site from websites with a home page Google Page Rank of at least 5.
 
One thing you do want to watch: Don’t have to high a percentage of your links containing the same anchor text. Aim for no more than 50% of your anchor text to any page being the same exact anchor text.  
 
 
Wrapping it Up
 
 
For effective Google optimization, start by pointing enough quality links to your Web pages. One-way links are much more effective than reciprocal links, where you link back to the site that has linked to you.
 
Stay away from triangulated or 3-way links schemes. This is where site A links to site B which in turn links to site C. This is a “no-no” which Google can catch and will penalize for.
 
Use your keywords as anchor text for your links. Hold down the percentage…don’t have 70% of your links to one page using the same exact anchor text!
 
Even if you don’t have the keyword phrases on your page, you can still have top rankings, as long as your links’ theme matches your Web page content those links are aimed at.
 
Following this strategy, you can also optimize your pages for more than one keyword phrase. And without creating dozens and dozens of junk pages, just to cover all your keywords.
 
You’ll be able to increase your online sales and your sales lead generation, more easily. 
 
I’ll be following up shortly with another article, with a specific checklist sharing how I structure my link campaigns for maximum results.