The best $6 dollars I spend each month…

… is for my Hootsuite membership. And it’s not even a full $6… it’s a mere $5.99. It’s not often that a bill for anything comes in where I say to myself…

“WOW!”. “I still can’t believe how cheap this service is.”

Seriously – seldom has so much useful functionality been offered for so little.

What is Hootsuite, you ask?

It’s a tool that leverages your social media marketing.

For instance, with UltimateFatBurner.com, I have 1 FaceBook account, and 2 Twitter accounts. In Hootsuite, I can target any or all of these at once, with a single post. I can even schedule my updates or tweets to be sent out some time in the future. This allows me to craft multiple tweets at once, and have them sent out over a selected time period.

Hootsuite saves me time as well, by automating a large portion of my social media updates. Get this…

Hootsuite allows me to pull in any RSS feed I want, and format it into a tweet to be sent to my network. This is incredibly handy since most of my sites use RSS feeds in one form or another, and several subdomains of UltimateFatBurner.com are built on the WordPress platform…

So I have 6 RSS feeds being pulled into Hootsuite…

1. The main site’s RSS feed.
2. The body building subdomain’s feed.
3. The blog’s feed.
4. The blog’s comments feed.
5. Real-Customer-Comments.com’s feed.
6. Real-Customer-Comments.com’s comments feed.

Each time any of these feeds update, Hootsuite sends out a tweet reflecting it. There’s lots of flexibility too. For instance, you can edit the way your feeds are sent out, how often your feeds are checked by the tool, and so on…

There’s lots of other built-in functionality, like the detailed analytics, for example. Plus there’s the stuff that I don’t even use – like assigning tasks to multiple collaborating team members, monitoring “mentions” (how often you or your business is mentioned in the “tweet-o-sphere”), using available mobile apps to update on the go from your smart phone, and more.

In short, Hootsuite is a “must have” tool for any Internet marketer looking to build or maintain any sort of social media presence. It’s intuitive to use, and even the most budding marketers will have no problem navigating through the feature set.

The best part? The basic free version is ALL most people will ever need – check it out today and see if Hootsuite can’t help leverage your business.

Highly recommended!

I get it.

Nurturing and maintaining a social media presence continues to become more and more important for web masters, Net marketers, and anyone who wants to do any sort of business effectively online.

And Twitter, of course, is a huge part of that.

That doesn’t mean I understand the appeal of receiving 140 character messages. Nor do I appreciate the added pressure of coming up with something witty to “tweet” on a regular basis, or even – let’s face it – having to “tweet” at all.

And yet, regular, consistent “tweeting” may be key to achieving some sort of success with Twitter.

At least, that’s what the gurus say.

My own experiments with Twitter have shown it to be a mediocre performing tool regardless of what I “tweeted” and how often. Still, every little bit of traffic and goodwill helps, and it may be that it is the combination of consistent tweeting, coupled with periodic re-tweets by followers and the slow addition of new followers that is the key to success with Twitter.

Having said all that, I’d like to share with you a great tool and a great strategy that will help you leverage your online presence with a minimum of headaches and hassles.

The tool?

It’s called HootSuite, and it’s advertised as a “social media dashboard”. It allows you to update all your social media platforms from a single place. It does all the fairly cool and expected things a tool like this should do…

• Allows you to schedule tweets / updates to a single or multiple Twitter accounts as well as other social media platforms like FaceBook.
• Provides detailed analytics on all of your accounts. Offers the ability to create your own reports, even drawing from Google Analytics to provide extremely comprehensive data sets if you choose to develop them.
• Includes a built in “URL shortener” so you’re not wasting a huge chunk of your 140 characters on a posted link.
• Allows you to build and manage a “team” so your social media updates can be performed by staff members.

… and much more. Of course, all this stuff is great and time leveraging and if this was all HootSuite did it would still be worth using.

But there’s one feature that I REALLY like, and, if you are able to use it, it offers a great time-leveraging strategy that puts your tweets on auto-pilot.

Here it is…

HootSuite allows you the option to “pull” your RSS feeds (from your blogs, blog comments, etc) into the tool, where they will be re-posted as tweets to your selected social networks…

If you have a WordPress based blog, it may be that your new posts and maybe your visitor’s comments are already being “tweeted”. If not, you’ll have to install the appropriate plugin to do this of course, but you already have the opportunity to do so quite easily.

What you won’t get by using a plugin in WordPress is the detailed analytics that HootSuite provides.

And where HootSuite really shines is that it allows multiple RSS feeds to be pulled in. I love this. With my two main sites I have…

• 2 manually created RSS feeds for the most often updated subdomains.
• 1 WordPress blog RSS feed and 1 accompanying comments feed.
• 1 WordPress generated comments feed for a secondary supporting site.

That’s 5 feeds.

Import them all into HootSuite and send them out as “tweets” and you’ve got regular, hands-free tweeting with a minimum of headaches.

Oh yes; the “tweets” look and read fine and likely won’t fare any better or worse than the ones I actually took some time creating.

So do yourself a favor – get a HootSuite account and start using the tool. The basic account is free and most people will be able to manage just fine with it. I recently upgraded to the Pro account so I could import all my feeds into the tool, but even that option is dirt cheap – $6/month.

Well worth the money and highly recommended. Get HootSuite today!

Lately my inbox has been bursting with offers from Internet Marketers who are claiming that FaceBook is the new Google and THEY have found to key to making oodles of money with it. Of course, they are willing to share this opportunity with you… for a token fee.

Riiiiight.

On the face of it, it seems feasible. After all, Facebook is – depending on who you consult - one of the top 3 most visited web sites in the world. Visitors spend more time there than at the sites of any of the other big players-almost 7 hours a month, according to recent statistics.

And, when you factor in the power of social networking, where vast numbers of people are linked together in “islands of trust”, you can’t help but drool at the opportunities.

But it’s not that simple, despite the assurances of the Net Marketers who have apparently unlocked the code. Especially considering FaceBook itself hasn’t mastered the art of making their business profitable; up to as recently as a year ago, their ability to survive long-term was being questioned.

The problem-for marketers and the owners of Facebook-is the way people use the service. My girlfriend and I were sitting around the supper table the other night talking about this, and I asked her, “what’s the main difference between the ways you use Google and FaceBook?”

“Well”, she said, “when I go on FaceBook, I go there to see what Jenn or Tina or Suzanne are doing, to check out new pictures, do a little chatting, and so on.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “And have you ever noticed or clicked on an ad in FaceBook?”

“No”, she replied.

“And so when you go to Google, what are you doing?”

“I’m searching for something.”

“Uh-huh. And have you ever clicked on an ad at Google?”

“Yep. Lots of times.”

“And why is that?”

“Because I’m often investigating a possible purchase, and the advertisements are highly targeted – sometimes moreso than the listings themselves.”

EXACTLY.

And that’s the big problem for FaceBook; it is a place where people go to interact with others, stay in touch with the comings and goings of their contacts, and view videos and pictures, play games, etc, etc.

In short, it is a social media tool.

People don’t go to Facebook to buy stuff, or even to research the stuff they want to buy. For that, they go to Google. This, in a nutshell, is why Facebook has been a monetization nightmare for its owners. And that’s why you need to be extremely skeptical of offers from those who have mastered the “Facebook code.”

With its legions of visitors, Facebook does offer HUGE opportunities to the right businesses; the ones who leverage their presence by creating cool, “viral” apps which can be shared between users.

But it’s no alternative to Google, nor will it likely ever be.

However, if advertising on FaceBook sounds like something you’d like to experiment with, you can do it quite easily on your own – it’s not rocket science.

I cancelled my Twittollower account this week.

Not sure why you should care?

Then you have probably missed my introductory Test Tube article on Twittollower, the service that builds your list of Twitter followers automatically (in my test tube articles, I put various tools/software/strategies to the test on my main web sites, and report the results to you!).

This service promises to add a minimum of 2,000 niche-targeted followers to your list each and every month. This, at an introductory cost of $67 per month, rising to $99/month after the first 200 participants.

I subscribed to the service to determine several things…

1. Does the Twittollower service deliver the volume of followers that it claims?
2. Do these followers appear to be niche-targeted as advertised?
3. Do those followers respond to my “tweets”? Build my business? Deliver traffic in a cost effective means?

Once I got to playing around with the Twittollower service, Twitter, and “tweeting”, I quickly realized that it would be very difficult to assess the true value of the Twittollower service and make general, wide sweeping statements about its effectiveness/ineffectiveness based on my experiences.

In the lingo of my science-based supplement review site UltimateFatBurner.com, this is a “n=1″ experiment. These results may not be applicable to you – no more than the guru who is preselling the Twittollower service based on his/her own positive experiences. In other words, this is my UNIQUE experience and yours may be different – depending on your audience, its demographics, your offers, the effectiveness of your “call to actions”, your tweets, your niche, etc, etc.

Keep this in mind as you follow along with my experiences…

1) Does the Twittollower service deliver the volume of followers that it claims?

Absolutely. In the month I remained subscribed to the service, my brand new Twitter account obtained 2953 subscribers, and as you can see here, it has generated another 600 followers or so, in the few days since my cancellation…

2) Do these followers appear to be niche-targeted as advertised?

It’s almost impossible to tell.

Sometimes, the “twitter” handle is indicative that your new follower is targeted to your niche, but most of the time, it is not. For example some of my recent followers are “bitchogram”, “metroscreen” “hotelsreviewed”, “onlinesalsa”, “redhottips4u”, “janetjackson5″ and “beabillionaire”. Certainly nothing here to indicate these new followers are the slightest bit targeted to my niche.

At the same time, just because their Twitter handles are not indicative of that, doesn’t mean they do not have such an interest.

I can, however, attest that the Twittollower algorithym does have a glitch or two. I was none too pleased to find for instance, that I was “following” “yourdailyporn.”

Not only do I highly doubt that this “tweeter” is interested in what I have to offer, but who you follow is readily available for perusal by your audience on Twitter. Having porn related material in the list of people you follow is hardly what I would describe as a positive “brand building” exercise.  It undermines your credibility and calls your integrity into question. I was lucky to catch this one, but since Twittollower generates so many leads, if you’re not actually checking each and every one of newly generated followers, some will slip by.

Not good.

3) Do those followers respond to my “tweets”? Build my business? Deliver traffic in a cost effective means?

This is probably a better measure of whether Twittollower delivers the targeted followers it promises. And since it was recommended to start a brand new Twitter account for use with the service, I was able to compare its performance against the already-established but rather pathetic account (28 followers as of today’s date) set up for UltimateFatBurner.com.

And the results? These two charts from Hootsuite tell the tale. First, the chart for the original UltimateFat account (click here to view full size image in a new window)…

And next, the chart for the brand new “dietpillguru” account (click here to view full size image in a new window)…

As you can see, over the same 30-day period, Tweets to the existing account received 65 clicks, while those sent to the new one generated a mere 84 clicks. Considering that the new account had 20 times the number of subscribers of the established one within a week of its inception (now a whopping 150 times as many!), this is hardly a rousing endorsement. It’s pretty pathetic, but it confirms what I suspected – real targeted followers are the ones who are “wowed” by your great content, products, services and so on, and sign up to receive your updates from your web site.

As you can see, this is neither an efficient nor a cost-effective way (about $0.80 per visitor to date) of driving traffic or building a business – at least, it certainly isn’t for me.

So why did the service fail so dismally for me?

From what I can tell, it could be any number of reasons…

My “tweets” weren’t compelling enough: At the beginning of this experiment, I read a lot of tweets to get a feel of what sort of material was flying around the “tweetosphere.”

In the end I settled on a blend of material that inspired curiosity (i.e. “It’s a bit hard to believe that Microsoft hates fat people…” “Are millions really wasting their time jogging?”, “Cheat your way thin? Really?”) or a deliberate “call to action” (i.e., “You HAVE to check out “The Ab System” if you’re looking to get lean, mean, and save big too!”, Download our newest publication “Dirty, Rotten Tricks; Supplement Company Lies That Cost You $$$” FREE:”).

Neither worked particularly well in generating interest with my followers.In most cases, I made a deliberate attempt to avoid making tweets that appeared as crass marketing messages, since many Twitter users find such things offensive.

I didn’t send enough tweets: Since I’m not an active Twitter user, I’m not really sure of the accepted protocol of tweeting. In other words, how many times will my followers tolerate a message for me in a day?

I experimented with 1-3 tweets per day; once in the morning, once at lunchtime, and once in the evening. As far as I could tell, the frequency of my tweets or the time of day they were sent made no difference at all.

I didn’t spend long enough establishing my credibility: At first I thought this might be an issue but then it dawned on me…”… how can I establish my credibility if people don’t take the time to follow up on the links included in my tweets?” I have yet to be convinced that one can build huge amounts of credibility 140 characters at a time. People need to go the extra step if they are to assess the value of your offerings. And if they don’t do that… you’re done.

The demographic of my followers is not ideal: Are the people using Twitter who are interested in my niche the same demographic as the visitors to my web site? I know that for the section on fat burners, the largest majority of visitors is middle-aged women.

Are my followers comprised mostly of middle-aged women? Somehow, I doubt it. Still, it hardly accounts for the fact that virtually none of my tweets received much of a response – even ones that elicit a natural curiousity (i.e., “It’s a bit hard to believe that Microsoft hates fat people…”)

My followers just weren’t all that interested in what I had to say: Ultimately, it occasionally comes down to this – sometimes, the people you are trying to reach really could care less. Perhaps I haven’t been doing anything wrong, and it’s a simple matter of the fact that my followers are not targeted, and therefore not interested.

By now, you’re beginning to see the problem; there are a LOT of variables which can be factored into the equation to account for the failure (or even its success for that matter) of both Twittollower and the use of Twitter as a marketing medium. While Twittollower certainly delivered on the number of followers it promised, how targeted they really are is difficult to assess with any real degree of accuracy. In my case, I have a hard time believing they were extremely targeted – my results give no indication of that at all. But I need to be fair.

Do I have other concerns about marketing with Twitter, and services like Twittollower in general?

You bet.

As services like Twittollower grow in popularity and marketing with Twitter becomes more prominent, the tweet “signal to noise ratio” is going to increase substantially. Even in this experiment, about a quarter to a third of the people I received Tweets from (usually as a result of being added to their follower list) sent some sort of marketing message. In other words, they were using Twitter to promote their own interests – just like I was – and were unlikely to be responsive to mine.

As this percentage grows, expect Twitter users to become less and less responsive to any marketing message of any sort. In other words, “tweets” originating from people outside an established network of friends, family and colleagues are likely to be viewed with great suspicion. My gut feeling therefore, is that there’s a very limited time line for effective Twitter marketing, even if your business seems perfectly positioned to benefit from it.

Secondly, isn’t Twitter largely something enjoyed with cell phones? How many people are able to browse a large text-based web site easily and effectively on a cell phone or PDA? Seems to me that if that’s the case, my business is definitely not ideally suited for a Twitter marketing strategy.

I had several goals as I embarked upon this quest. First, I wanted to continue to build the UltimateFatBurner.com brand, by driving new visitors to its high quality, researched content. Second, I wanted to increase revenue by sending visitors to reviews of affiliate products I recommend.

I was unsuccessful in both counts. However…

I suspect using Twitter as a marketing medium could be very effective, but I also suspect it depends on your offers, and more importantly, your demographic. If your business appeals to a young, hip, “permanently-attached-to-their-cellphones” audience, then using Twitter and (even Twittollower), might make sense to you.

At least for the time being.

If you’ve been following along for the last little while, you’re probably aware my last few posts have been about building a huge Twitter following using the Twittollower service. I haven’t got enough data yet to report whether or not the service delivers the sort of followers who respond to my “tweets”, although it is certainly building a list of followers quickly enough.

Anyhow, I just wanted to follow up on this discussion and say that thanks to some tips from Kevin Riley’s new Twitter Vending Machine publication, the whole “Twitter-Tweeting-Tracking” thing is going much more smoothly.

The key to making the process a whole lot easier (thank you, Kevin!) is the effective use of the HootSuite service. Hootsuite is a free online service that allows you to…

• Compress your URLs – this allows the performance of your tweets to be tracked, as well as providing you with more “room” (i.e. characters) to get your message across.
• Manage multiple Twitter accounts from one interface.
• Schedule “tweets” – this is an awesome feature which allows you to schedule for all your tweets in advance, freeing you up from having to access multiple Twitter accounts numerous times a day to post tweets.

How to use HootSuite properly was just one of the things I learned from Kevin Riley’s Twitter Vending Machine. Like all of Kevin’s products, it’s competitively priced (under $20) and delivers great value. If you want to learn how to build and manage a huge list of Twitter followers to leverage your business, you’ll love this publication. Highly recommended.

Here’s where you can learn more!

If you were intrigued by my recent post about building a massive Twitter following with the Twittollower service, I thought I’d follow up with a quick update of data. Now, barely a week into the experiment, I have just over 1,000 followers.

Check it out…

And…

It all seems pretty impressive, no? I’m curious to see if these followers actually impact my business. Stay tuned for updates…

If you’ve spent any time reading this blog, you know I haven’t exactly been jumping on the Twitter bandwagon. Especially not for building my online business. However, it’s always important to keep an open mind. No matter how I feel about Twitter, there are numerous credible and respected online marketers who – if they are to be believed – are using it to successfully grow their businesses.

That’ one of the reasons I let my WordPress developer talk me into setting up a Twitter account for UltimateFatBurner.com and integrate Twitter on the blog.

If you visit the blog, you’ll see how visitors can “retweet” posts to their own followers (new blog posts are automatically sent out as tweets) and are even encouraged to “follow us” with a slick Twitter “badge” that slides up and down the right-hand side of the page.

Cool, huh?

Yes, and practically useless for getting my site in front of more eyeballs. As you can see from the stats, we’ve accumulated 11 “followers” in the 8 or so weeks since we’ve made the implementation.

I can’t say this surprises me; Twitter is a social media tool, a tool for interacting. If I want to build a large list of followers, I need to follow other people, so that I can gain access to their followers and so on. Twitter is a not a medium to which you can sit back and broadcast your message. Nope, in order for you to use it effectively you need to use it the way it was meant to be used. And quite frankly, I have neither the time or the inclination for such an experiment.

That’s why I was intrigued to hear about a service called Twittollower. It was recommended to me by a Kevin Riley, a marketer I have found to be credible, so I decided to take a closer look at the service.

In essence, Twittollower builds your list of Twitter followers automatically – mostly by “following” credible Twitter authorities within your chosen niche or theme. Many of these people will “follow you back” to return the favor, and in turn, your exposure grows.

The bottom line simply is this; Twittollower guarantees you a minimum 2,000 new followers in your chosen niche each and every month for a cost of $99/month ($67/month for the first 200 participants). And they promise you’ll grow your follower list quickly – right from day 1.

I decided, “what the heck” and locked in at the $67 per month rate (depending on when you read this, there may still be spots open at this price). As I plunked down my credit card, I said to myself..

“At the very least, it will make an interesting Test Tube experiment for No BS Marketing.”

Getting set up is easy; it takes about 5 minutes, and that includes setting up a brand new Twitter account (unfortunately, it was not recommended to use any existing accounts, which is a drag considering I just had one set up a few months ago).

I completed the set up on January 22 (2010), and as you can see from the chart at TwitterCounter I have accumulated nearly 500 followers in just a couple of days…

Of course, this appears to be very impressive. It does, however, remind me a little bit of purchasing newsletter subscribers (from services like Glen Hopkins’ ListOpt) back in the early 2000′s. It’s all great to have zillions of newsletter subscribers, but it doesn’t do you any good if none of them are interested in your message, or even read your newsletter.

In other words, $67 or $99 is a great deal for 2,000 (or more) Twitter followers per month, but only if they are responsive to your message, your offerings, your content, and your theme. Although it’s early days indeed, Twittollower‘s service certainly appears to deliver exactly what it promises. Whether or not these followers are targeted and responsive to my messages and actually help build my business is what I intend to determine with this Test Tube experiment.

Stay tuned.

Unless you’ve spent the last 6 months in a vacuum, you’ve probably heard something about Twitter and micro-blogging – the “apparent” newest trend in social media / networking.

Being inherently curious of any online tool that has certain authoritative figures in the Internet Marketing field buzzing with excitement, I decided to spend a little time looking into Twitter lately.

I’ve read authoritative articles on the subject, J.B. Allen’s “The Tweet Virus”, the gushing of numerous gurus, and I am currently in the middle of Joel Comm’s new book on the subject, “Twitter Power: How To Dominate Your Market One Tweet At A Time.”

And I don’t get it.

Twitter might be fun, but it is one heck of an inefficient business building tool. That’s how it looks to me – at least for my business. So far.

Am I missing something?

Well, here’s how I see it…

Any strategies I implement on my main sites (UltimateFatBurner.com and Real-Customer-Comments.com) have to leverage my time effectively, delivering the best possible return for my investment. While I’ll admit Twitter appears to offer benefits for SOME marketers, I can think of much better uses of my time than establishing the sort of Twitter following it would take to make any difference to my current traffic levels and/or revenue.

Here’s the gist of Twitter for marketers…

Twitter can be used to build a number of followers, who can be gently exposed to your business over time, and may eventually become customers.

The problem with Twitter is that if you want to use it effectively and have it work for you, you have to adhere to an established protocol of etiquette (for instance, you cannot bombard followers with your sales message; this is not acceptable. You will brand yourself as a pariah and lose your followers if you do). Twitter is not a “pure” marketing medium, and those who Twitter do not consider themselves “targets” for marketing.

To build a large group of followers, you need to either…

• Establish yourself as an authority within your niche.
• Develop relationships with the authorities within your niche, and capitalize on that by having their followers become yours.
• Follow a large number of people, many of whom will “follow you back”, if only out of a sense of obligation.

The fastest way to build a large list of followers is to do the latter; follow a ton of people. The problem with this is twofold; first, the majority of these people are completely un-targeted to your marketing message, and two, you’ll be receiving regular updates from a large number of people you have no interest in “hearing” from. Then of course, you’ll need to provide regular, witty, credibility-boosting, informative “tweets”…

… all limited to 140 characters of text.

Obviously then, building a large list of un-targeted followers is of little value. Your smartest option is to build a list of extremely targeted prospects.

And that takes time.

To me, it makes much more sense to create new product reviews. (To put things into proper context: I’m investigating Twitter as an option to further leverage my UltimateFatBurner.com domain, which reviews weight loss products, body building supplements and functional foods). Every review is inherently “keyword focused” and constructed to rank well. Additionally, UltimateFatBurner.com has a lot of credibility with the SEs (Search Engines), so new content is usually listed and driving highly targeted traffic within a few days. And it will continue to do so, day in and day out, forever.

I don’t need to spend hours messing around with Twitter searching for folks who are interested in my message.

Why would I, when the SEs will send qualified visitors right to me?

That said, I can see where it might make sense to utilize Twitter to establish new contacts and build a following.

If you are a software designer, a copywriter – heck, if you provide any service or sell any product where a new customer is worth hundreds, even thousands of dollars, it makes sense to cultivate a large following on Twitter. In other words, the potential payoff is worth the investment of your time. There are other possibilities as well; if you sell a moderately priced digital product, you might be further able to leverage your Twitter efforts to recruit affiliates. These will generate additional sales and exposure for you.

But for me, it’s a different story. UltimateFatBurner.com is monetized by advertising and affiliate programs, and the value of every visitor is measured in pennies – not nickels or dimes, and certainly not dollars. So I don’t see Twitter as being a good investment, time-wise.

Will that change?

Possibly. Maybe I’ll finish Joel’s book and realize I’ve made a huge mistake (but I doubt it). More than likely, Twitter will only make sense for me when the value of a single visitor to my sites increases dramatically. And, since I’m not changing my monetization model, that’s unlikely to happen.

Bottom line?

The beauty of having an Internet business is that it really allows you to work smarter, not harder. At the same time, it’s SOOOOO easy to get sidetracked by things that can get in the way of building your business. Any time something new comes up (like Twitter) it’s important not to get caught up in the hype. Instead, carefully analyze the benefits as it pertains to your business. And if it doesn’t make sense to you, don’t get caught up in it, just because “everyone else is doing it.”

Chances are, you’ll only be wasting your time.