Twitter Tips!

Over the last year I have developed a huge interest in the Social Media platforms and how they are shaping and influencing both the online world and daily life. Recently I read an article which informed me how many members the three biggest Social Media platforms have. The biggest by a long shot is Facebook, with over 500,000,000 members! Second is Twitter, with over 200,000,000 members, and third is LinkedIN with over 100,000,000 members (some of which pay for premium membership). Today I thought I’d focus on Twitter and how to use it. I don’t claim to be a “Twitter expert” in any way, shape or form, I just think these tips may help a few people out there.

Pros

• Over 200 million members
• You can connect freely and easily with almost anyone
• Information (tweets) are kept short and sweet
• Many users visit the site several times per day
• Great way to connect and get to know people

Cons

• Limited with 140 characters per tweet
• 99% of people have a marketing angle
• Limited User Interface compared to other social networking sites

Here are my Twelve Top Twitter tips:

1. Have a Picture - You will see very few people with a large amount of followers who don’t have a picture. A picture on your profile adds a personal element to it.

2. Have an interesting Bio - You only have 160 characters in which you can describe yourself, if your bio is interesting and says enough about you people will normally follow you if they come across your profile.

3. Stop trying to sell all the time! – 80% of your time on Twitter should be spent NOT SELLING A THING, because you lose people’s interests if you are always trying to sell them something. “Social Media” is effectively a medium through which people socialise, not a Marketplace. If you are going to sell something, do it subtly and infrequently.

4. Vary your tweets - Following on from the point above, keep your tweets varied – sometimes about business, and sometimes about pleasure. If you come across an interesting article or piece of news that you think may be of value or of interest to some of your followers, be sure to tweet about it. Mixing business with pleasure in your tweets allows your followers to get to know you better.

5. Interact with your Followers - The best and most active users on Twitter regularly mention other people and have two-way tweets. This is a good way to engage your followers and show them you actually give a damn and aren’t just trying to sell them something.

6. Follow the leading people in your Market - In terms of business, you can easily search for the “Market leaders” in your market, and follow not only them but their followers as well! This is a great way to keep your finger on the pulse of your market and attract new, targeted followers.

7. To gain followers, you must first follow! – Unless you are a celebrity or at least well known online, you won’t get thousands of followers automatically. You must follow as many people as possible to have more people following you. The people with high “organic” followings may only be following 400 people, yet 40,000 people are following them! However, for the “Average Joe”, you must follow to be followed, and don’t be offended if people don’t follow back!

8. Retweet other people’s stuff – If someone tweet’s something of interest to you, retweet it! It’s a good way to interact and share and spread valuable or intersting information, and if they link to something in their tweet make sure you check what is at the other end before retweeting!

9. Use it Regularly – As I mentioned earlier in this article, many people Tweet several times a day, so try to do this yourself, as the more regular you use it, the more followers you are likely to get, providing you follow the other steps. Tweeting early morning/late night will also mean that your followers in other countries and Time Zones will see your tweets.

10. Use Software for certain tasks – You can spoil your efforts by automating too much of your social media experience, however a great idea is to get a tool that automatically messages your new followers. I use MarketMeTweet, they have recently released version 3.0, and I truly believe the software is awesome, and use it myself. You can do more or less everything on Twitter from this application, apart from view profile’s and change your profile account settings.

11. Keep Tweets Punchy and Attention grabbing – Twitter is all about brevity and efficiency, so be sure to be brief and efficient in your tweets, a few words linking to an article or news story is usually enough so that people grasp the concept, and can click the link if they want to read more. The fewer words you need to get to the point, the better.

12. Shorten url’s to save characters – There are dozen’s of free sites that you can use to shorten your url’s to save on character space. t.co is a url shortening service for Twitter posts only, but there are many general url shortening services such as bit.ly and goo.gl andtinyurl.com .

Hope this has helped. Catch me on Twitter at twitter.com/robert_pf . Feel free to tweet me or comment underneath with your thoughts on this post. Thanks

Four key reasons to study Personal Development

In the world of the “Rat Race”, it is easy to see why many people place no importance upon Personal Development, and take no time to study it. However, I believe that if something is important enough you make it a priority. Below I provide four very significant reasons for why we should study Personal Development.

1. Awareness – It is very important to always strive to improve our awareness not only of ourselves, but also of the people around us. By improving our self-awareness we consequently become more attentive to how we are responding to a given situation, and how that response affects other people. By improving our awareness of other people we become more attentive to them and therefore strengthen the relationship between ourselves and that person. For example, something as seemingly unimportant as really listening to what people say when they are talking has made enemies become friends in the past. Many problems are caused through miscommunication alone. Imagine the power of using this every day to strengthen and create new relationships with people; and it’s not hard to do.

2. Options – Personal development helps us to increase our options on both day-to-day decisions and major decisions. Increasing our options allows us to look at a given situation from several perspectives instead of one or two. There is a big difference between making a split-second decision and making an informed decision. The more we practice looking at the options and deciding which one is the best, the faster we can do it. This is a part of the process which cannot be left out. This is not necessarily the easiest skill to develop, but it comes with practice, and taking those extra few seconds to make a decision has the potential to improve your life immensely.

3. Habits – As Aristotle said over two thousand years ago “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” We are never too old to change our habits. Habits define who we are; and contrary to the belief of many, we can change them whenever we want to, as long as we believe that we can. By studying Personal Development and emulating what the most successful, enriched and fulfilled people have done, we will achieve our own successes. If the desire is strong enough, change will take place. Change, improvement and success very rarely comes from doing something once, it must be done many times. You may have to repeat the same action several, seventy or several hundred times in order for it to become a habit.

4. Effectiveness – By improving the three aspects of ourselves mentioned above, we therefore increase our effectiveness. We improve our effectiveness to deal with ourselves, any adversity we face, any situations that arise and also other people. Increasing our effectiveness to deal with all of these things is an invaluable skill that we can only develop ourselves over time. The more effective and efficient we are at dealing with both ourselves and others, the easier our lives will become. Things that may have stressed us in the past will no longer stress us as we have created a more effective way to deal with that situation. Much of our increases in effectiveness come from dealing with adversity and our past experiences, both good and bad.

Outlined above are my four reasons to study personal development. Please feel free to add comments or other reasons why we should study Personal Development. This is by no means a closed list, I know that there are many more reasons why we should study personal development, but I believe these are four very important reasons.

Young Entrepreneurs "to watch" 2011

1. Michael Dunlop - Michael has built his online presence mainly through his two blogsRetireat21.com and Incomediary.com, he has also recently created Fiked.com. Michael started marketing at 16 years of age, and now, at the ripe old age of only 20, he is currently making six figures per year from his blog(s), receiving over one million visits per year! Michael has done a great deal of networking and has met some of the biggest names in the IM Industry. His first product launch, Popup Domination, was very successful, Michael also wrote a great article on how he did his product launch. Popup Domination is used on multiple blogs across the internet. He has recently released Site Profit Domination, another solid product, and I’m sure he’ll be releasing more great content and products in 2011.

2. Aaron Darko - Partly inspired by Michael, 21 year old Aaron started his online journey in 2009, and is best know for his site Millionaireat24.com and his Internet Marketing product PushButton Money. Aaron is very passionate about Personal Development, and has helped inspire many people through his website and his free video course. In Summer 2010 he began working with IM “legend” Greg Jacobs, and Greg helped him to success with his PushButton Money product, released late 2010. We’ll certainly be seeing more from Aaron this year.

3. Adam Horwitz – Adam is only 18 years of age, and by the age of 17 was turning over sox figures per year with his business. In mid 2010 he released Mobile Monopoly, to say it was a HUGE success would be an understatement! This product is based on the idea of marketing through Mobile Internet and made Adam over $1 million and brought him to the attention of most if not all of the people in the IM Industry in 2010. I’m sure we can be expecting more great products from him this year. Click here for Adam’s blog.

4. George Brown - George is now 21, and one of the youngest online multi-millionaire’s on the IM scene, as well as three-time number 1 Clickbank Bestseller. George came into the limelight with his affiliate marketing product Google Sniper, and following on from this extremely successful product. Last March he released Traffic Ultimatum, another hugely popular product. George’s brand new product Google Sniper 2.0 is bound to kill it as well! George has only been marketing online for about three years, and already has a business turning over several figures per year! You can check George’s blog out here.

5. Alex Shelton – Perhaps a little less well know than the four guys above, I just keep seeing 20 year old Alex pop up all over the place! I saw him give a testimonial on the Mobile Monopoly Sales Page, I have seen him in pictures with George, and more recently Michael Dunlop did an interview with him! It is fair to say Alex is good at networking, particularly with the other young entrepreneurs on the IM scene. Alex started out as an affiliate marketer back in 2006, and his business is currently turning over a very healthy six figures per year, he has worked alongside many reputable Internet Marketers. His latest IM coaching product, Six Figure Renegade, is due to be released soon, and will no doubt be a huge success. Looking forward to Alex’s products in 2011!

For your information...

Catch all these blog posts and more at http://beliefandaction.com

Internet Marketers “to watch” in 2011

1. Robert Grant - Robert Grant has had a very quick rise to fame in the Internet Marketing community, within a year he has become known as the “Authority” on Facebook Marketing. His Crowd Conversion group currently has over 250,000 members. He and his partner Ian David Chapman put two and a half years research into their famous $497 Crowd ConversionSoftware. Robert’s statistics on Facebook led me to realise that it was a vital platform for marketing, but that there was an art to it. Facebook cannot be ignored as a means of marketing by anyone serious about promoting any sort of business online. Robert has worked with many famous people and some of the top people in the Personal Development industry, such as Brian Tracy, to help them explode their facebook fan pages.

2. Lewis Howes & Sean Malarkey – Much like Robert Grant, Lewis and Sean are regarded as Social Media Experts and exploded onto the scene in 2010. Lewis is an expert on LinkedIN, and Sean an expert on Twitter. However, their newest product 500MillionStrong, which costs $997, contains modules on Facebook, Dailybooth and many other social media platforms. When in a webinar with Lewis, Sean and Michael Dunlop, Lewis’s statistics on LinkedIN really took me by surprise, I didn’t know what an important business resource it was until I heard the statistics. Just to name a few, the average salary of a LinkedIN member is $109,000, and 45% of users are business decision makers. Something tells me its only the beginning for these two guys. I suggest that you use both Twitter and LinkedIN to market and increase your online presence. Lewis and Sean, just like Robert Grant, give away loads of great high quality content for free.

3. Mark Ling – Mark Ling is creator of the famous Affilorama, it was founded in 2006 as a “training and affiliate site for aspiring affiliate marketers.” Mark Ling is a super affiliate with a business turning over 7 figures per year. All of Mark’s webinars are full of great content, and it seems that many relatively low-level affiliate marketers who have used his products have a very high opinion of Mark and the large team he now has to help him manage Affilorama.

4. Anik Singal – Anik Singal’s company is currently worth $32 million. Anik has been making money online for the past six years or so. Anik is well known for his products Affiliate Classroom and the more recent Empire Formula. Anik also founded Lurn, “an e-learning company with a mission to change the world by creating information entrepreneurs worldwide.” His company has been in the Inc. 500 business list for two years running.

5. Ed Dale – Ed Dale is an Internet Marketing Veteran, and has been on the scene since the early days of Internet Marketing. Ed is most famous for his Thirty Day Challenge, a course which over 150,000 people have taken since its inception in 2005. Thirty Day Challenge is famous as it is completely FREE, and many people who have taken action on the course have achieved success online. If you are new to Internet Marketing I highly recommend checking out his course – every year Ed and his team update 30DC and it jsut gets better and better! Ed Dale’s 30DC Inc is now a U.S. publicly traded OTC stock.

6. Frank Kern - The highest paid Internet Marketer…ever. Frank is known for selling $18 million of someone else’s product in only 24 hours! Those figures are still unheard of today! Frank has been off the IM scene for a little while but is coming back with a vengeance. To be honest I didn’t know too much about Frank until I recently attended one of his webinars…and realised how good his content was and why he is the highest paid Internet Marketer! Frank also works with many offline businesses.

7. Eben Pagan – This guy is like a spy! I don’t know his real name, I know that he is also known as Dating Guru “David DeAngelo”. Eben has several extremely successful niche websites such as Doubleyourdating.com. He has recently brought out the product Self-Made Wealth, which is currently closed. In this quite unique product, Eben talks about “Moneys dirty secrets” and other wealth ideologies. I don’t know much about this product but it reminds me of Robert Kiyosaki’s “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” book series. Pagan is definitely a guy to look out for in 2011; to be honest, I don’t know where he is going to pop up next!

8. Greg Jacobs - Greg Jacobs has quickly rose up the ranks and become a well known and high earning Internet Marketer within the last year or so. Greg brought out WPMAGE about a year ago, and has had great success with this $1000 software which allows you to create sites with content in a few clicks of a button. I think we may be seeing something ground-breaking from Greg again this year.

9. Alex Goad – Alex is a very successful Internet Marketer from Canada, who has recently come into the Internet Marketing limelight with his newest software Tubefool. Tubefool basically leverages the unknown “social network” behind Youtube, e.g. uploading videos and auto adding friends and subscribers to get views on your video channel. This $497 software is very different from what anyone else has ever offered, and Alex could well bring out a different trend-setting software or product once again this year.

10. Steve Clayton - Steve and his partners currently own an online business turning over 8 figures per year. Steve is also well know for bringing out solid products that people can actually make money with. Steve has released several products which have done very well in the Internet Marketing field, such as Niche Blueprint 2.0 . Steve and his team recently released the “Blueprint Project Black Edition”,, $997 software & training which Steve and his team used to build a $1 million business in just 8 months! Pretty Impressive!