Steve Wagenheim’s Home Business Blog

You really have to be very careful these days when you put yourself out there in front of the public, especially when you begin to build a name for yourself. There are a lot of nut cases out there who can’t wait to take pot shots at you…some of them not so nice. This article is going to deal with Twitter specifically since it is so popular today. These are just a few common sense tips that should help keep you out of trouble. Nothing is fool proof, but these will help.

At the top of the list, and this goes for any place online and not just Twitter, never give personal info about yourself such as where you live. You never know who’s going to send you a ton of junk mail to your postal address just as a joke. It won’t be a joke when you have to go through all that stuff. For some people, it’s probably not a good idea to even use your real name. I found that out the hard way. Of course I like to brand myself so I have to expect to take the bad with the good. Ultimately, it’s your choice as to how much of yourself you put out there.

Next, you want to make sure that you keep all your info, such as passwords, secure. In fact, you might want to regularly change your password. In choosing one, what I do is let Roboform do it for me. Roboform is a great little utility that remembers all your passwords for you plus, if you allow it to choose yours for you, it comes up with some pretty hard to crack ones. They’re all a minimum of 8 characters and pretty well mixed up. They’re certainly better than the ones most people come up with themselves.

But what if somebody steals your identity or makes trouble for you over at Twitter? No problem. Simply report them to Twitter and let them handle it. They have a form that you can fill out where you can choose the offense. One of them is impersonation, which is a great way to damage somebody’s reputation. In order to prove this, you do have to provide Twitter with your personal information so that they can contact you. In this case, you won’t mind it.

Sad as it is, it’s a dangerous world out there. I have learned this first hand. You can never be too careful and no, nothing is 100% fool proof. But if you take enough precautions and report any violations, you give yourself the best chance of surviving the social networking jungle that Twitter is a part of.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Want to know what the 7 Deadly Sins of Internet Marketing are? Get my free report at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/7deadlysins/7deadlysins.html and save your business from going down the tubes before it even has a chance.

Everybody loves Twitter. I get. Heck, even I spend some time on it each day. The operative word being “some.” I do not live there. I do not make it my home away from home like some of you marketers do. And the question that has to be asked is this. Even if you are getting a following on Twitter and making some cash from doing so, are your efforts worth the time spent when maybe you could be doing something else that would bring you a bigger return? This article takes a look at that issue.

I’m going to throw some hypothetical figures at you here in order to illustrate my point. These are in no way meant to reflect actual reality because the truth is, everybody is going to be different. But this should give you some idea of whether or not your time is being utilized properly.

Let’s for argument sake say that you spend two hours a day on Twitter chatting with your followers and getting new followers. Okay, great. Let’s say that those two hours a day, after a 30 day period, bring you in an additional $500 a month. That comes out to about $17 a day more or less. So you’re working two hours to make an additional $17 or at a rate of about $8.50 an hour. Now I don’t know about you, but I can make more than that working at a McDonalds.

Now, I know what you’re going to say. If you didn’t spend that two hours, you’d have $500 less at the end of the month. BUT…what if you were to spend those two hours a day writing articles and submitting them to directories instead. With the proper niche research, two hours of article writing a day could easily mean an extra $1,000 a month. That’s twice as much income as what you’re making chatting on Twitter.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t use Twitter. I use it. I use it all of about five minutes a day and that’s been good enough to increase my blog readership by four times. But I’m not going to put an exorbitant amount of time into Twitter when I know that for that same amount of time, I could be doing something that will bring me more money.

Too many people don’t value their time, and that’s the problem. They look at their time as free. It’s not. In fact, once you’ve spent your time on something, you can never get it back. Money, you can always get back from a decent return on your investment.

Think about this the next time you decide to fritter away your day on Twitter.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Want to know what the 7 Deadly Sins of Internet Marketing are? Get my free report at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/7deadlysins/7deadlysins.html and save your business from going down the tubes before it even has a chance.

Social networking is a great way to make yourself known if you’re an Internet marketer. And Twitter is one of the best social networking sites to get involved in. And the best part about Twitter is the snowball effect. Not familiar with it? Well, then you really need to read this article because it’s going to fill you in on one of the best ways to build a following that will ultimately increase your bottom line as a marketer.

Okay, so what IS the Twitter snowball effect? Well, the best way to explain it is like this. When you first join Twitter, you’re essentially an unknown. You have no followers at all and you haven’t followed anyone yourself. So the first thing you do is start following some people. Well, if you want to see the snowball effect in action and fairly quick, what you need to do is follow somebody in your particular niche who has a lot of followers. When I say a lot, I’m talking about thousands. Maybe choose two or three people who fit this criteria.

Now, here is what’s going to happen over time and you won’t have to do a blessed thing to make it happen from this point on. As other people begin to follow the people who YOU have followed, they’re going to notice YOUR name and follow you as well. The reason they will do this is because of all the books that now teach to follow as many people of the big names that you can. Well, what ultimately happens is that as these numbers increase, the number of people who find you increase. Suddenly you’re finding that you’re getting 20 followers a day, then 30, 40, 50 and so on. It’s pretty close to a geometrical progression but not quite.

The key to making the most of this is using Twitter the way it was meant to be used. That’s how you get your followers really interested in what you have to say. How do you do this? Simple. Let’s say you have a blog with articles. You might let your followers know about the articles you’ve written. Followers are always interested in content if it’s useful and relevant. If you’re articles are good, they’ll make sure they keep up with all your blog updates regularly.

And that’s just one way to keep the attention of your followers. You could also give them some tips directly through the Twitter interface. The more free content you give them, the more they’ll hang on your every word and the more followers you’ll get. Trust me, word spreads fast.

The Twitter snowball effect is quite real. Follow the above tips and you’ll discover it for yourself.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Want to make money TODAY without spending a DIME? Check out my site at http://www.hottrendsdaily.com/ and find out how.

From an Internet marketing standpoint, the question is…Twitter, is it a waste of time? Well, the answer you are going to get in this article is coming from my own personal experience. Your own experience may vary as well as your mileage. So test it out and see for yourself. Okay, time to answer the question the best way that I know how.

When I first heard about Twitter, I thought to myself, “Great, more nonsense to waste some time with.” I couldn’t see how chatting with a bunch of people telling them what you had for breakfast was going to do anything at all for your bottom line as a marketer. Still, I was curious. So, I did what any good marketer would do. I investigated and tried it for myself. Now granted, I don’t spend a lot of time there. Some people seem to live at Twitter. But I do make use of it. Here are a couple of examples.

I maintain a personal blog with articles on Internet marketing, and other related topics. You may very well find this article popping up on it one day. Anyway, I go to Twitter and tell the folks there that I’ve just updated my blog with some more articles. I even give them an idea of what the latest ones are about. Well, I was surprised to see that I got quite a following from the folks at Twitter. Lots of them go to see what I’ve written about. But here’s the curious thing. Some of them not only go to read my articles but they also join my lists and buy my products. Wow…who would have ever thought?

I started another blog related to a new product I’m going to be launching soon if I ever get my lazy butt off the couch and finish it. Guess what? Now that I’ve put the darn thing on hold, I get people from Twitter actually asking me when the next update on it is going to be. They’re anxious for this thing to actually come out. This really surprised me big time. I used to think that most folks were sick and tired of product launches. But not these guys. They’re still bugging me to this day. Looks like I’m going to have to get the darn thing finished.

The point is, if you socialize at Twitter and give people a reason to listen to you, you’ll do very well. Who doesn’t want to read articles on how to make more money if that’s what you’re into? I know I read as much as I can to get new insights into things.

Like I said, your experience with Twitter is going to be what YOU make of it. So give it a shot and see if it does anything for you.

I know it’s made a difference in MY Internet marketing life.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim
Want to make money TODAY without spending a DIME? Check out my site at http://www.hottrendsdaily.com/ and find out how.