smartmarketinghabits.com » Marketing – Written

Is Twitter for You Too?

admin — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 21:23:42 +0000

I am in a learning curve right now. It’s about twittering. – the water is warm in the world of twittering – and the benefits are visible. Finding people to serve who are in alignment with what you offer the world – seems so immediate on Twitter.

I am looking for ways to balance the time I have reading the writings of those Twitter Folks I am following and getting to see how things work.

Here are a few things I have picked up so far:

1. You need a twitter account – firstly go to Twitter.com and sign up for an account.

2. Put up your image in your twitter account – Twitter is all about authentic relationships – Put on your face.

3. Use Your creativity to design a profile that shares both Keywords (so others can find you) as well as represents who you are as an individual. If your intention is to use Twitter to aid in your relationship building around your business – keep your branding in mind as you design your background image. Twitterbacks.com has some nice templates to use to help create your back ground image – all the sizing is done for you.

You can have a look at my twitter profile – to see how I took a twitter background from Twitterbacks – and then modified to more closely fit my own personal brand.

4. Decide how you will keep up with the “tweets”. There are a number of platforms available. You can update from the web at Twitter.com, Use a downloadable platform like Tweetdeck.com or Twhirl.com. There are also Twitter applications to help you you do research or find things like what feeling words people are using today.

5. Save yourself time if you involved with other Social Media sites: If you use WordPress or Facebook there are plug ins and tools to help your Twitter messages appear in your blog or on your Facebook page.

A twitter tool for wordpress

6. Be effective with your tweets. If you have something you want to appear at a specific time – when you won’t be available to tweet it, you can use a service called TweetLater. And here is a big one – spend only an assigned amount of time per day using twitter.

7. Find out the Twitter best practices:I am noticing an every evolving list of best practices with regards to using twitter. Of course it all depends on how you intend to use this social media platform. One of the best ways to find out about best practices is to first have a look at some of the handbooks for Twitter that have been developed by some Twitter users.

Have a look at these three:

www.Twitterhandbook.com – a handbook developed via social media tweets by Deb Micek and Warren Witlock. In addition to the handbook they also have a blog where you can keep up on twitter related stuff.
A Geek’s Guide to Promoting Yourself and Your Online Business in 140 Characters or Less with Twitter is a free 48page twitter handbook from the gues at GeekPreneur.com

TwitterSecrets by Joel Comm is a 30page report that shows you how to use twitter – and how to use it for your goals.

8. Be on the look out for Twitter Traps. These are the things than get get you side-tracked from your other effective actions in the day.

Doing nothing else but reading other peoples tweets and thinking about what you can next tweet about
Spending time reading your twitter stats daily

9. Decide how YOU will use Twitter. Here are some ideas:

Share information you are learning (Others might want to learn too)
Share your own blog posts and articles
Share great posts and articles writing by other people
Follow key people in align in your target market to find out what they think is important
To follow media coverage

10. Have Fun. Aftercall – if you can do it with joy – is it really something you want to be doing?

Two really cool benefits of using Twitter for me personally:

I love the time line that twitter creates. It creates a story for me – look back on the path I took for the week. What I focused on and what was pulling my attention. I am loving the story telling effect that Twitter provides
I am also appreciating the value of having access to other tweeters who can give me research information, feedback,and access to the pattern language that people use to describe problems. I am finding it very useful as I fine-tune my own marketing messages about the services I provide.

In the end you have to decide for yourself if Twitter is something you want to use – and if you are aligned with the benefits in the effort of participating with all the souls you will come in contact with.

Trademark Search

admin — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 19:58:48 +0000

For coaches looking to trademark their product/service – one the first steps is to do some preliminary resesearch on existing trademarks. Here are links to the Trademark offices for the US and Canada

United States Patent and Trademark Office

United States

Canadian Trade-marks Database

Canada

Business Card Printing for Small Business

admin — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 19:31:28 +0000

The Marketer: VistaPrint

The Marketing Blurb: "VistaPrint is the easy design and print solution chosen by more than 11 million people worldwide."

What it Does: Anything from Business cards, Corporate Identity items, promotional pieces, return address labels and stamps etc.

The Product Link: VistaPrint

My Experience: If you have been around a while – you’ve probably seen the ads from VistaPrint for 250 free cards and that has prompted you to take a look at some of their templates – and if you are like me – you have probably wanted something more unique and creative.

Something that not many folks know is that you have the option of putting your own business card design in to the online system – and have your cards, brochures or whatever printed. You can do it all yourself if you have a good handle on good design, graphics and branding – or better still – outsource it and then when you get the file back from the designer you can upload it into vista print. Just give your designer the VistaPrint template to work from.

The process is easy to do – easy to follow and at the end you get a very professional product. For example with the business cards, great card stock, coating, cutting and colours make for a great image supported by these cards.

I like to remember that if folks are like me – the save business cards – I have a collection of them from the 80′s that I still refer too.