So without further ado here is a recipe for making money from twitter.

Ingredients

To run this strategy you will need a site where you can post an article that can include links directly to your products. I use my own blog site but I suspect any article site will work just as well.

You will also need a niche following on Twitter, you can 2000 followers in about two to three weeks. After 2000  twitter places some restrictions on you so growth is a little slower, but this strategy works with these numbers, but obviously the more the merrier. If you want to know how to do this read the previous articles.

The third thing you need is a spark of creativity, a smidgen of research and the ability to write tweets and blog posts quickly.

The Pure Recipe

When you see this you will be amazed at how simple this is to implement. You will be even more amazed at the results it produces. But after this I will show you how you can automate the process that is even more phenomenal. So here is the pure form of the strategy:

Look for trending topics on Twitter. There are a whole lot of tools that can help you do this, but you could just look in the right hand column of your twitter profile to see the strongest trending topics. You then write a blog post linking the topic to your product and a call to action to click through to your sales page. You then write a tweet about the trending topic and a link to your post. How simple is that?

Adding Some Spice

Want to know how to write compelling tweets? Just have a scan through all those tweets that get retweeted. Ignore the ones from the famous and influential, these are retweeted because of who they are and because they have large followings.  Look for the ones that just seem to catch a following. Look at half a dozen and you will start seeing what tweets people respond to… that is how you write your tweet.

Do some basic research by using a url shortener like bit.ly. Url shorteners record the number of people that link through from that particular link. By sending out tweets with links you are starting to find out which of your tweets people respond to the most. Again you are finding out how to write tweets that people respond to.

Finally on twitter, when done well, more is better. On twitter you need to get your message to stand out from the noise. It is easy for people to miss your tweet when there is always a huge amount going on. If you have a trending topic and you can write multiple tweets about it then releasing several tweets over the course of a day or two will stand you in good stead, especially if you can get the url in all of them and it leads to a great article.

The Automated Version

In previous articles we have discussed automated tweets. Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could operate the above strategy automatically? Well you can…here is how.

Firstly write a few compelling blog posts that are hot topics for your audience. Hot topics are those that you know are always going to come up for your subject. Make sure these lead to a compelling call to action for your book.

You don’t have to do all the posts all at once, if you are a regular blogger you will probably already know which of your posts have the best response rates. If you are just starting out blogging it might take a few weeks of blogs before you start noticing the trends. The important thing is getting really good articles that draw people in and have a call to action.

You then just look for the structure of compelling tweets, embed the url into it and watch the money come in every time the tweet is posted. On that note I would only repeat this a week at a time and if not a little longer, you don’t want your audience to get blind to your best messages.

Here is one I prepared Earlier

Just to get you started here is one of my best responding tweets.

7 Reasons you must   Learn Embedded Commands   http://bit.ly/8L0OLd Laugh out loud persuasion skills #persuasion

Laying the foundations

If you have not read the other articles in this series go and read them now. If you have you might now be seeing why you have to have all of those things in place before you properly farm for followers. If you don’t already have a great profile, background and a fist full of compelling tweets the people you are looking for will not follow you.

Once you have all the foundations down when the right people find your profile they will be compelled to follow you. By having three or four tweets a day going out that is directly applicable to your subject you are already creating some exposure and you may already be finding people are starting to follow you.

Farming for Followers

Lots of people on Twitter will auto follow you back whenever you follow them. To kick start your followers you are going to use this principle. The basic sequence is that you will start following lots of relevant people, I’ll show you how to find them in a moment.

Between two and three days later you will go back and see if they are following you. If they are then great, if they are not then you unfollow them and find more people to follow. You keep doing this keeping your ratio of followers to followees roughly to 1:1

If you do this consistently you will suddenly find that you are getting hundreds of followers and the numbers starting to increase very rapidly. This is because there is a tipping point. Remember everything you tweet is seen on the timeline of all the people that are following you. That means all their followers get to see your tweets. Remember you have already stacked the deck with three or four tweets of value every day. Very quickly you will be seen as someone worth following.

In this way you will be self selecting for relevant followers, but let me give you the other end of the strategy that will increase your results dramatically.

Finding the right people to follow

This is amazingly simple to do. Research your subject and find experts in the field, search profiles for people that mention the subject in their bios, look for hash tags (Twitter groups) on your subject.

Once you find any of these people you follow them and you follow their followers. For example if you go to http://wefollow.com/ you can find all the tweeters that have the greatest following for any subject that is tagged.

Working on the basis that the followers of a subject expert must be interested in that subject…they are likely to be interested in you because you have a great profile and some tremendous tweets. You just follow the expert’s followers to give them the opportunity to follow you back. In a very short while you will have hundreds of followers.

With some of the biggest experts in my field I have also followed the people they are following. The way I look at it if a personal hero of mine is following someone there will be a reason for it and perhaps I might be bumping into the teacher of my teacher and they must be worth listening to.

Do you reall want to sell your book?

Now some people might think this is a huge amount of effort and is it worth bothering with. The reality is that there is a fair bit of work setting this up. But the beauty of it is once it is set up 90% of it you can automate. You can automate your tweets, and there is software you can use to search, follow and unfollow people automatically.

It would take another series of articles to discuss the ins and outs of the various software packages. So just search around on the internet and make your own decisions. All the software I use I found through Google searches and asking twitter users.

Once you have done all the automated sequences you will never have to do them again. All you are left with is the spontaneous, fun and creative things that you can do with Twitter.

A Final Caveat

As I have stated several times Twitter is a social media platform. This strategy really creates a strong platform but it won’t get you the best from your legion of followers. To really get best advantage you need to interact with your audience not just talk at them.

In future articles we will look at getting marketing information, drawing your audience closer and being perceived as an expert through a few choice questions.

For the moment consider a few simple things such as thanking people when they retweet you, asking and responding to questions and generally having conversations over Twitter. All of this will expand your Twitter empire.

A Final Note

At the time of writing (early November 2009) I have around 2000 followers. I got them in the space of three weeks. But those 2000 followers rocketed me up the USA Amazon bestseller chart. The initial hit I got when I started the Twitter campaign I went from being about 20 000 to suddenly up to 1500 within that two week period. Since then I have been in the top 1000 in the general bestseller chart and regularly number one for sales techniques. In the same period sales for all my other products, views of my blog and hits on my website have also increased dramatically.

So for those people that might thing this is a lot of effort might want to consider how much they could get from developing a Twitter following.

The right time to tweet

People are most active on Twitter roughly between 9 and 12 in the morning and the same time again in the evening. Because Twitter works so fast you need to have your tweets going out within these times to have maximum exposure.

Unlike other social media platforms tweets seem to be there for a moment and then they are gone. This leads us to two important points. If you have a message you want seen then you will need to tweet it several times. Lots of your tweets are reusable because they won’t have been seen and even if they were they are likely to be forgotten quickly.

Automating your Tweets

I would not automate my humanity tweets. These are the ones that I would leave for real time events, spontaneous thoughts and feelings.

All my specialist tips, quotes and links could be easily automated through any number of pieces of software that are out there. If you worked on, for example three automated tweets a day over a repeating ninety day cycle you will need to create 270 tweets. Sound a tall order until you realise that, at maximum these are 140 characters long and for most of them you are actually just surfing the internet for relevant things.

Once you have, in this example 270 tweets you can put them on a repeating 90 cycle leaving you to add a humanity tweet and your marketing messages as you require.

Adding your marketing message

Now to add your all important marketing message. I work on once every five tweets or two days, whichever is the longer.  I send out tweets to announce new blog posts, upcoming workshops, special offers, and even  sending people direct to my sales pages. All of this most Tweeters will happily accept because you are giving out a huge amount of good content along with your marketing messages.

Twitter Domination

Let’s now look at some clever nips and tucks we can add to this before we look at farming for those followers that will be desperate to buy your book.

As a rule of thumb keep your tweets to less than 120 characters. This is so that they can be retweeted by others easily. Retweeting is where other people send your message on to their followers. They will only do this if they like the message and they can do it easily. This means keeping to less than 120 characters if you can.

Open loops, ask questions create obvious sequences where people will want the rest of the story. By doing this you are drawing people in. Often I would ask a provocative question and then link to a blog post with an answer. I will create an outrageous headline for a link. We have already discussed numbering your tips and why that works. When I am field testing I will run a series of tweets over perhaps an afternoon just updating the sequence of play.

One that I am considering running for my specialist area is persuasion and poker tweet series. The intention is to take a few persuasion techniques that I intend to use in a poker game and then run a series of real time tweets as the game progresses. I can see this, if run properly gaining me a huge following for my target market.

Anything that provokes curiosity will make your profile sticky and will get people to follow you.

Retweet anything you find of value. When you retweet other people the Cialdini Principle of reciprocation is in play and you are more likely to be retweeted back or at least thanked by the person who you retweeted. Either way it puts you in front of more potential followers. Also if you found it of value then others might and they may retweet your retweet. Again you are in front of more potential followers.

Now you have a way of creating a great profile and background, how to create large sequences of tweets of value both automated and real time, you also know how you can integrate your marketing messages into the whole thing. The only thing you now want is how to farm for your followers. So that is what we will cover in the next article.

Over the next two articles I will show you how to farm thousands of relevant followers and direct them to your book, but before we can do that we have to create even more inducement for people to follow you.

Tweets of Value

Stop and think for a moment, why do you follow anyone on Twitter, or if you don’t tweet yet, why would you follow anyone? You may pitch this in many different ways but what the answer boils down to is you are interested in what they have to say. So this makes getting followers easy, just have something to say that will interest them.

Now let’s add some more detail to this. Tweeters tend to send several tweets a day and tend to expect you to do the same. Many are tweeting between four and eight times a day. Certainly if you don’t tweet daily you will not look like you are taking Twitter seriously and you will find it harder to get followers. I am currently working on a minimum of three tweets a day with an average of five.

Normally when I suggest this to people the reaction I get is something along the lines of, “But it will take over my life. When will I get a chance to do any work…” and this sort of thing. I would agree and this is why automation is a key essential. I am working on three automated tweets per day plus most days one or two specials that I tweet in real time. Incidentally I have various reasons for looking at this three to five number that is only based on my personal preferences. I suggest you play and experiment to find the best number for you against the number of followers you get.

Again this is a strategic article not an operational one. There are lots of different pieces of software that you can use to automate your tweets, some are free, some are paid for. I am not going to discuss the ins and outs of the various pieces of software out there, just spend a little bit of time on Google and Twitter and you will find several and then make your choice. I am more interested in making sure you have a formula for creating tweets that are going to have people desperate to follow you.

Tweets that people want to read

The primary aim is to get people to your book, but if all of your tweets were a link to the book saying “Buy my book” you would very rapidly lose all your followers. Hence you need to create 140 character content that people want to read. There are many different types of tweets that are valuable but below I am going to go through my favourite categories of tweets, why they work and how you can use them.

Tips – If you look at my profile you will find Persuasion tips, if you look at Joe’s profile you will find Marketing Provocations. Take you specialist area and create tips, thoughts, ideas as tweets. Give the whole thing a name and number them.

Why name and number? If someone finds number 18 and likes it they will hunt out your profile to find the other 17 and follow you to make sure they don’t miss number 19.

Links – Find articles, blogs and websites of interest around your specialist area, add a provocative, interesting or just outrageous (depending on your target market) headline then tweet the link. If you are sending people links to great articles, websites and blogs they will want to stay in contact with you.

I am really talking about links to people other than yourself here, but if you have a blog with specific interesting articles it would be okay to link to a few of those as well. People on the internet like list based, how to, and funny / provocative articles. So if you can find some of these for your specialist area you have hit gold.

Quotes – People on Twitter really like quotes and this is good because quotes are easy to find on the internet and you should be able to find some for your specialist area.

Being Human – Remember Twitter is a social media platform and therefore showing your humanity is vital to the success of your Twitter Marketing Strategy.

But this is not giving you free reign to send out tweets about what you are having for tea or picking the kids up from school. What I am talking about here is displaying some of your passion, your identity and your vulnerability.

Let me explain by way of example. Let’s take a couple of the blandest tweets I can think of and see if we can change them to reflect the author of a persuasion skills book. Here are two bland tweets:

• I am having sausages for tea tonight
• Just off to pick my little Jonny up from school

Here is how I might change them to reflect more of me:

• I wonder if I can persuade myself to have a healthy tea for a change. Sausages are healthy aren’t they?
• Picking up Johnny from school, wonder if I can talk him into walking the ten miles home?

Okay, they still aren’t great tweets (particularly when I don’t like sausages and don’t have any children) but I hope I am making the point. These humanity tweets need to display more than just what you are doing and if you can link them to your specialist area then even better.

Real Time Tweets

I made a huge amount of product sales twice through using humanity tweets. Each time I sent out a series of tweets over a period of three or four days. They were  real time field reports on a persuasion skills product I was testing.

I tweeted warts and all about my successes, failures and learning points. All of this I eventually pointed at my blog which expanded the themes and linked to the products. I can’t be specific about the exact increases in sales Twitter is a little difficult to track in this way. But in both cases I certainly sold far more than I expected and would have sold with my blog alone.

Coming Soon

Now you have four different types of tweets, you have a rough and ready idea of the number of times a day you need to tweet and are probably considering some sort of automation for this. In the next article we will look at putting all this together as a coherent strategy and then we will go farming for those followers that are likely to buy your books and products.

It is incomplete because these are strategies I have found that work but I have not refined them completely. These article are about an overall strategy rather than the operational mechanics of getting things done. I am also assuming that you already have a twitter account and know the basics of tweeting. If this is not the case a quick search on Google will give you a number of free and paid for books and courses that will get you up and running.

Foundations of a Twitter Strategy

The overall aim of this strategy is to gather lots of RELEVANT followers and then direct them to your book. I capitalised relevant because it is easy to get lots of followers on twitter but unless they are interested in what you have to offer they are no use to you.

The backbone of gaining relevant followers is having something to say that is of interest to them, I call these tweets of value. We will cover them in depth on the next article.

In addition you will need to have a twitter profile and background that clearly states your message and sends people to your book. Finally you will need to go farming for those relevant followers. There is no point in farming for followers until you have a good profile and a decent background image so we will deal with those first.

Twitter Account Name

Before we get to your profile specifically spend a little time thinking about your twitter name. This is something that needs some consideration. When I first started tweeting I had (still have) an account under @NLPtraining. At the time as my company and my focus was on delivering NLP Training Programmes.

Currently my main twitter account is @PersuasionTips. I made the change because I am using Twitter to promote the Persuasion Skills Black Book. It seems to make sense to me that you might want an account that relates specifically to your book or whatever you are marketing.

The alternative to this is to use your name. I went against this because I wanted the book to be the focus not me. When I have several books covering a range of themes and have wider exposure I will probably make an account with my name my primary twitter account. For the purpose of this article just carefully consider the name for your twitter account as it does have a bearing on what you are trying to achieve.

Profiles

You profile consists of your Photo, Name, Location, Web address and Bio. Lets just briefly go through them all with some ideas.

Photo: Twitter is a social media platform and is personal way of reaching your prospects. Therefore a photo is going to work better for you than a logo, pictue or design. Worst case, nothing at all, this sets up an impression that you don’t care or are not bothered.

Name: Again this should be your name for all the reasons set out above.

Location: Give some thought to this. Stephen Fry as an example of the Uber Twitterer changes this regularly to reflect where he is at the moment. If you are offering services that are tied geographically then maybe having a specific location helps. If you don’t want to be tied to a location then something perhaps something that reflects that is the answer.

Web address: Should be easy…your home page. But wait, give it a little more thought. You might want to think about directing people to a sales page for your book ; or maybe an opt in page for your online course. Lots of people will be seeing this web address and many people will click through it so make it an address that counts. That said for many people their home page will be right for them but don’t just assume that is the right thing without giving it some thought.

Bio: This is worth saying a little more about because of it’s importance. This is the thing people will read when they click through to your profile. It is one of the biggest factors in whether people will follow you or not. So what should it contain?

In 160 characters I think you should have something about you and your product offering, your character or personality and a call to action.

Below we are going to talk about the background image. My background image shows a lot about my primary product, my book, so I don’t need to mention it in my bio. Therefore I have settled for telling people what I do. This builds authority and credibility. I then mention a hobby and great passion of mine. Remember this is a social media platform, I am building rapport and appearing human. Finally I have a call to action to follow me. This is a tall order for 160 characters but trust me, get it right and it will pay you back many times over.

Background Image

Now you have a profile worth reading the next thing you need to sort out is a background image. Your background image to work effectively for you needs the following:

• An image of you
• A picture of your book, product of service
• Your contact details, website, facebook page etc

It also needs to look interesting, work on many different browsers and at different resolutions. You can get various different templates and designs that all work. Or you can browse around twitter, find one that works for you and replace all the elements with your images and designs. Here is Joe’s twitter page because I think he has an excellent design. http://twitter.com/bookshaker and here is mine http://twitter.com/PersuasionTips .  Can you tell where I got mine from? A few minutes surfing on Twitter will find you many more that work well.

When you find a twitter page that has all the right elements for you in the right places just right click on the image, save it to your hard drive then work on changing the elements to create your own design. The reason you are using another Tweeter’s design as a template is because you then don’t have to work on getting all dimensions and sizes right for it to fit on different screen sizes and resolutions.

Now you have the foundations done we need to discuss Tweets of vlaue. In the next article we will look at the key reason people will follow you.

Most people would recognise that it’s important to pick yourself up and move on to the next round of contacts. The issue is not moving on but finding a way of doing this effectively and getting the most you can from the experience. This article is about how you can do that.

Understanding the meaning of rejection

For most people rejection is not a nice thing. It is easy to take it personally and let emotions come to the fore. The reality though is that in the context of publishing, rejection is just a business decision and is not a personal thing.

If we take the idea a little further the action of being rejected is just information or feedback for you and can lead to improving your results if you use it as such.

Good sales people recognise and expect a certain amount of rejection. They use what they call “objections” to hone their pitch. Great business people, athletes and entrepreneurs all recognise failure and rejection as a vital step in the process of getting great results.

How does being rejected help?

Every rejection gives you important information about your pitch. If you were rejected without your outline or manuscript being looked at then you know that you selected the wrong agent or publisher for your book. If it was read, hopefully they gave you some feedback. If there is no “useful” feedback coming but you know it was considered then you know they were not seeing the value in your book. So either your pitch or your product has flaws. By looking systemically around the circumstances of the rejection you can get valuable information that you can use to improve your approach and as a result move on to the next round.

How do I put this into place?

The first thing to do when a rejection slip comes through is to let go of the emotion so you can think clearly. The only time to take on this process is when you have let go of enough emotion to be able to think clearly. Remember rejection and failure is a vital step in getting results.

The next step is to look though the information that you have, the copies of what you sent, the research you did on the publisher or agent and any information they sent you back. Familiarise yourself with all the information you have to hand.

This step is the hardest, but can give you some great results. Imagine yourself as the publisher or agent you sent your material to. Look over everything you have from their eyes. Ask yourself whilst acting in the persona of the publisher good questions. Here is my most favourite question as the publisher, “What would have to change about this pitch for me to accept it?” I am sure you can think of some more and if you can’t, this is a great question to start you of.

Looking at information in this fashion can lead to lots of good learning. The learning of which lets you let go of the emotion of rejection and sets you up for the next round better prepared and one step closer to getting the result.

To succeed means you have to do something. Doing something courts the possibility of failure and rejection. Being rejected gives you information on how to succeed. The issue is not how to deal with rejection but how can you possibly succeed without a few rejections.

Individually each of these ideas produces results but used in combination you can create some very powerful results. By the end of this article you will have the opportunity to see how you can use these ideas singly and together in an article.

Making Benefit Statements

If you tell your readers what they can expect to gain by reading your article, chapter, book, web page etc. then they are more likely to follow through. Obviously this needs to be modified slightly for each situation. A 500 word article may only need a paragraph or three bullet points. Whilst a book might have the whole of the first chapter, the front and back cover and the whole contents pages set up to sell the benefits of your book. Then each chapter might also start with benefit statements for that particular section.

Telling the Story

We are all socialised to listening to stories. Think about early childhood and having your parents reading to you in bed. How about your favourite TV programme, films and book? Stories intrigue, fascinate and most importantly for us keep your readers interested. Any anecdote, case study or example livens up the sometimes dry world of instructional text.

The other real benefit of stories is that they “make real” the points you are trying to get across. When used skilfully you can use a story to pre-teach your process or idea before outlining it in full. The result this creates in your reader’s mind is familiarity and therefore they are likely to take the point home more readily.

Opening the Loop

Imagine what would happen to a reader if you told them of three huge benefits they will receive from reading a particular chapter. You then in quick succession outline the first two and then explain each in depth. My guess is that you will keep reading through this to find out about the third, particularly if the third is the biggest and most powerful benefit statement. This is the basic idea of opening a loop.

Here is another way of opening a loop. Perhaps the start of a chapter might be an example of a big result you got from using the techniques you will explain in the chapter. You could build the drama of the story, perhaps the stakes were high and the results were critical with you only just finding the solution to the problem in the very last seconds.

You might even add in some pre-teaching or even how much better your life has become because of you taking on board the lessons you will share in the chapter.

All of a sudden what could have been a lifeless chapter on a specific technique can take on a life of its open and draw your reader into really wanting the information you have to give.

Putting it all together

When I first came across these ideas I was overwhelmed about how I would be able to use them and put them together in a meaningful way. This was because I had not yet really seen how easily these ideas can be put together and used.

What I needed were a couple of examples that I could analyse and work out how the concepts fitted together. So to that end I deliberately wrote two articles specifically packed full of these ideas so you can see how easily these ideas are to put together.

The first is the article you are reading now. Feel free to go back through this article and notice the techniques that I have used. The second is a case study I wrote on my own blog about finding markets. You can find the article here in the NLP Techniques Section.

Final Thoughts

In an upcoming article we will talk about techniques you can use to get your readers to backtrack and re-read sections that are important as well as anticipate what is coming up in new chapters. I will see you in a future article where we will explore these concepts more fully.