If you’ve been a subscriber to this blog, you know I’m a big advocate of the power of Twitter.  Even Google is getting nervous that Twitter’s ability to report real-time news is surpassing the search behemoth.  Twitter is all about conversation, and if you’re in business to make a profit, you will benefit from directing as much of that conversation as possible.  But how do you direct the conversation on Twitter?  Isn’t that like controlling the tiger by grabbing its tail…? 

Let’s first review the basic Twitterquette — don’t spam “sales” messages to your followers, but do mix up your posts between relevant, interesting posts on a variety of topics with your sales tweets tossed in sporadically.  Also, be generous with retweets and participating in conversations.

After you have mastered that, you may want to find conversations on topics that are relevant to your business.  You can see the hot topics by looking at the right side of your page in Twitter.  If you don’t find something there that is relevant to your business or interests, simply go to  http://search.twitter.com and search for #yourtopic.

The # is called a hashtag.  You can find more about Twitter hashtags here  – http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Hashtags

If a topic doesn’t exist, create it by tweating #yourtopic.  It’s that simple. To create a conversation or buzz, you may have to tweet several times or even ask your followers to retweet… The best topics are somewhat viral — be realistic in that not everyone will care about your #VALVESALE topic.  If you can tie your business into a current event, you really have a #WinningTopic that will attract many other users to your tweets. 

Twitter accounts are supposed to express the multifaceted nature of you — in other words, your personality.  Resist the trend to open a separate Twitter account for every topic you’re interested in, unless you plan to actively tweet about those topics and develop them into something specific (like their own website or business).  Doing otherwise is actually “spammy.”  

It’s best to tweet to your followers about all the things you find interesting.  As with any “list,” your Twitter follower list is only as valuable as your relationship to it.  If your only Tweets are a cloaked link to a spam affiliate page, not only will people not get to know you, they will probably block you.  Come on — not every Twitter user earns $3,462 per day from Twitter!  LOL

Instead of directing the #conversation, you will find yourself with no one to tweet to — no matter what #yourtopic.

And of course, follow me @marketyoursite

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One of the simplest and most overlooked aspects of online marketing is that it’s not complicated. Or more to the point, there are a lot of “experts” who try to make it complicated. Aside from whatever motivation they might have to do that <COUGH: SELL THEIR STUFF>, online profits happen as the results of one simple equation –

Traffic + Conversion = Sales

– performed over & over & over again

There are MANY ways to get traffic (visitors) to your site and get them to take some action (convert) which will either result in more leads or (less frequently) result directly in more sales to your business.

So here’s the other simple rule — you only need to master 1 or 2 traffic methods and 1 or 2 conversion methods, and you will make money. You don’t need to master the entire kitchen to make a grilled cheese sandwich, and you don’t need to know EVERYTHING about internet marketing in order to add revenue to your business.

With that in mind, there are a few basic traffic techniques I’ve implemented in some of my sites and client sites that have universally and consistently WORKED. Here are a few of those methods — but remember, you only need to pick one or two:

Traffic Generation

1) Twitter is a highly effective means of targeting your niche and developing the conversation with your customers and prospects. There really is nothing like it. However, most businesses don’t know how to use it effectively. They spam with “sales tweets” — “Look at the cool new thing I’m selling.” The 80/20 rule is highly effective — 80% of your tweets should be about something interesting, funny or otherwise engaging… a question of the day (“What’s for lunch?”)… anything to get people talking, laughing, thinking… Also, keep it consistent and be generous with re-tweets. A few tweets a day go a long way toward establishing a rabid list of followers. The wrong thing to do is to Tweet like a madman for a day or two and then disappear for a month. Or worse, don’t reply when someone direct messages you or @messages you. That’s like ignoring someone at a dinner party when they ask you to pass the gravy. You WON’T get any dessert.

2) Video marketing. This is still a very fast way to rank your site and get lots of inbound traffic. Keep your videos consistent — don’t show up one day in a baseball cap and dark lighting, talking about the rain, and another day bouncing in a jungle gym screaming about business leads. Consistent message, consistent tone, consistent look & feel. Also, be sure to put a call to action in your video’s description, as well as the full URL of your website’s landing page, and use appropriate keywords.

3) Article marketing. This is an evergreen method for outstanding traffic generation, with one HUGE caveat — mix it up! Putting the same article on 400 article directories will get you nowhere fast. You will get a bump in traffic from all the inbound links until Google figures out they’re all the same article and basically count it as one link. There are content spinners out there that alter the content of your articles automatically, but you have to be very careful here as well. Most content spinners change a word or two to replace it with a synonym, or they mash up the article randomly to the output is basically junk that cannot be read. It has to pass human review. So if you’re looking for a quality content spinner, ideally you want to be able to change the entire sentence, do that with many sentences in the article, and then have it spin those into hundreds of different articles. That’s the professional way to do it. At the bottom of your article, have a call to action in the information field; a blurb about you (the author) and a link to a free guide the reader can pick up at your website.

Conversion

1) Keep it simple. The landing page has to do ONE thing — get people to ACT. For this reason, it’s been called a SINGLE ACTION PAGE. Pear it down to the bare essence of what you need the visitor to do. Consider placing a video on the page with a very simple message, “Hey thanks for stopping by for my free whizbang. Just type in your first name and e-mail address and I will rush it right over to you. In just a moment after you send your information, you’ll get an e-mail with a confirmation link. Click that link and I will instantly send your free whizbang.”

2) Direct, direct, direct. Notice the video script in #1 above — see how we instructed the user on exactly what they need to do? And then we told them what to expect next, and what they would then need to do. And we closed with a reminder of the benefit — the free whizbang.

If you have trademarked the term “whizbang,” then I apologize in advance.

3) Test, test, test. ALWAYS have two versions of your landing page operating at one time. You can optimize your landing page using freely available Google tools in the Web Optimizer toolbox. You really can’t go on “gut” here — the data will be you every single time. Even on PPC ads, we have literally seen the addition of a question mark in the ad increase conversion by 16.8% So test, test, test.

Conclusion

These methods work on any business in any industry. Here is some social proof –

• Local landscape designer increased her traffic by 7,342% (yes seven thousand percent)
• Local artist went from three visitors a day to an average of 41 visitors a day
• International digital publisher had zero e-commerce and started converting 16% of all traffic to revenue within 72 hours of implementing one traffic strategy and one conversion strategy
• Changing a landing page to a simple design on an e-book site turned conversion from an anemic two sales per week to eight sales a day — on the same traffic.

I hope this helps your business. The average business fails to do what it takes to drive traffic or achieve conversions to their website. While they exercise 20-30 traffic methods on average, they don’t do a single one effectively.

I have written a definitive guide listing 750 traffic generation methods that’s available here. Choose one or two and do them effectively.

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