Tweet Yourself To Success With Twitter

As a small business owner, it's easy to envision Twitter's marketing power. It is a realtime hotbed of potential contacts, people who are reaching out to interact with the rest of the world. Twitter has swiftly become a significant communication channel for marketing my business and networking with contacts around the globe.

Here are a few pointers that will jump-start your Twitter experience.

1. Get started. It's easy and it's free. Just click on www.twitter.com where you can use the quick and painless set-up form to create your Twitter profile and be playing within minutes.

2. Start tweeting. The Twitter home page offers a tiny entry form that allows users to enter tweets, which are messages of a maximum of 140 characters. Tweets can be about what you're doing, what you're thinking, or links to interesting things.

3. Follow Twitter etiquette. Get involved in conversations. Contribute. Don't spam. A relentless advertising campaign alone won't win you a lot of followers. John Kremer's webpage at http://www.bookmarket.com/50WaystoTweet.htm will give you lots of creative and fun ways to get involved with the Twitter community.

4. Follow others. This is the easiest way to begin building your list of followers. Those you follow will mostly follow you back. Simply go to the home page of anyone you wish to follow (such as mine at https://twitter.com/riskbuster) and click on the 'follow' button just below the picture. Twitter notifies me whenever anyone follows, and once I see you're following me I'll follow you back-and your list will begin to grow.

5. Find friends. You can do keyword searches on Twitter using a website at http://search.twitter.com. A search on any topic of interest will pull up the messages and Twitter links to the profiles of those making the comments. Clicking on any of the addresses will take you to that person's Twitter home page, where you can follow and join in the conversations that interest you.

If you're looking for more guidance than what's offered on the web, I recommend Joel Comm's book, Twitter Power, to fast-track your entry into the world of Twitter.

Any savvy Internet marketer will know that a healthy flow of traffic and a growing opt-in list are two of the cornerstones to a successful internet business. Each time I tweet, my list of followers grows on Twitter, and more visitors show up at my website and subscribe to the RiskBuster Newsletter.

At the outset I wondered if Twitter would use up too much of my time. The return on my time investment of less than 10 minutes a day is increased traffic, more exposure, an expanding contact list, and some new-found friends. That's a lot of value for a fairly minor effort.

Dan Boudreau is author of Business Plan or BUST! and hosts the RiskBuster Blog at www.riskbuster.com/blog.