Build Your Brand and Grow Your eCommerce Business with Twitter

Twitter is one of the most popular social media sites, and can be immensely advantageous in helping you build your brand and promote your ecommerce business.

It’s hard to imagine that messages as short as the 140 characters you are allowed in Twitter tweets can actually do you much good, but the fact is that they can, and do, when you go about it the right way!

Here are some tips that will assist you in building your brand and developing brand loyalty:

• If you don’t already have a business logo, you should set about getting one that reflects the nature of your ecommerce business. Branding is much easier if you have a distinctive logo that people will remember over time and associate with your business. Use this logo on your Twitter profile! It gives you an easily recognizable brand, plus it lends authenticity to your presence on Twitter.

• Use some of the free tools available on the internet that will allow you to track the buzz about your brand. This is a great way to monitor your progress in building your brand, plus it furnishes an early warning if there is less than favorable talk about your business circulating on Twitter.

• Create and maintain a great profile on Twitter. Make it professional, yet friendly and approachable. Make it clear exactly what your business is all about. Be sure to have a link to your ecommerce website on your Twitter profile!

• To make your brand memorable, always be sure to post great tweets! Don’t be afraid to infuse some humor along the way. People respond favorably to things that make them smile! Also, make a giant effort to only tweet about things that are of value in some way to others. It might be something educational or entertaining, or an interesting tidbit that correlates somehow with your industry. The main thing is to not tweet just for the sake of tweeting. This is a good way to lose followers you want to keep.

With a little time and effort, you can use Twitter to build your brand and grow your online dropship business!

Start your own online dropship business today!

Top 10 Twitter Marketing Tips for eCommerce

Twitter is an exceedingly effective social media marketing tool for your ecommerce business!

Here are 10 timely Twitter tips for social media marketing:

1. Use the free tools available online to help you locate Twitter users relevant to your business. One very useful free service is Twitter Search.

2. When you are asking others to retweet, be sure to leave a minimum of 15 characters free so that other people will have room in their 140 character limit tweet for a retweet, so that your original message doesn’t require being shortened.

3. Don’t try to spend all of your Twitter time in one lump sum. In other words, instead of working for 30 minutes straight exclusively in Twitter, break the time up into small increments throughout the day.

4. Use TwitterBar, which is a tool that will allow you to tweet right from the address in your internet browser. TwitterBar is free, but the developer does appreciate a donation.

5. If you want to get retweeted, contribute something of value! Tweet something that is interesting, informative, education and/or entertaining if you want others to retweet what you have to say.

6. If you want to build relationships with people who seem to value what you have to say, follow those who retweet your Twitter messages.

7. If you have a business blog, which hopefully you do, be sure to tweet one of your blog posts every day. You do want to be sure that it is a blog post worth sharing, of course.

8. If you want your tweets to be shared, just ask! Ask others to retweet your posts simply by saying “Please RT” at the end of your tweet. Again, same as the blog posts, make sure it’s something worthy of retweeting.

9. In order to manage your time spent in social media marketing wisely, use a service such as HootSuite if you have multiple Twitter accounts.

10. You need to know who is talking about you, and where, so set up a free service that will listen and keep an ear to the ground for any and all about your business. TweetBeep is one such free service that is great for a busy entrepreneur.

Using these 10 tips for Twitter marketing can help build your online dropship sales or other ecommerce ventures.

Start your own online dropship business today!

Use Wibiya for Your eCommerce Blog

If you are like most ecommerce business people, you are always receptive to new services, tools and ideas that will help you streamline the running of your home business and accomplish more in less time, which is what Wibiya might do for you.

What is Wibiya?

Wibiya is a FREE web toolbar that has a lot of great functions!

For example, you can use Wibiya to integrate your Twitter and Facebook presence.

Or, you might use it to increase page views:

• Engage readers and raise page views with apps such as Latest Posts, Real Time Users, and More…

• Gain traffic from the social web

• Track your traffic growth through simple analytics tools

Wibiya may also be used to communicate with your readers.

• Broadcast messages, alerts and more to all your visitors in real time

• Share your latest tweets with your readers in real time

• Participate in live chat rooms with your audience

There are a lot of different Power Tools that you may use, too!

• Discover a growing range of applications to enrich your readers experience

• Full tracking and management system for each application and effectiveness to your website

• Add and remove applications in just one click

Wibiya has tons of apps that do all sorts of handy things:

• Live Notifications

• Photo Gallery

• Twitter Dashboard

• Facebook Fan Page

• Random Post

• Real Time Users

• Navigation Links

• iTranslation

• Smart Share

• Content Timeline

• YouTube Video Gallery

• Facebook Recommendations

• Facebook Activity Feed

• Facebook Like Button

• Twitter Anywhere

• Google Buzz

Adding Wibiya will let you choose from a wide variety of tools and features, and it’s absolutely FREE.

Wibiya was started in 2008 in Israel, and is growing fast.

They welcome web developers and new apps!

In this hectic age, we all seem to have more to do every day than we have time to get done. So, having a free service such as Wibiya to help as a time saver makes running a home dropship business a little bit easier.

Start your own online dropship business today!

Do You Want to Dominate Your Niche?

Do you want to be number one and dominate the competition within your niche?

Frankly, unless you are in a pretty obscure niche, this is very hard to do, especially for a one man/woman show with a home business.

That being said, here are some tips to help you hold your own, if not actually lead the pack, within your niche:

• Create and build a community. This is one of the smartest things you can do to get an edge on the competition, and you can do it without spending a dime in most cases. People love the sense of belonging that goes along with being part of an online community. Give them that, and you have taken a giant stride toward niche domination. In a community, members can discuss your products or anything that correlates with your industry, besides share personal topics, etc. A community is also an excellent way to keep your ear to the ground for problems that may occur, and addressing them before they have time to grow.

• Drill down to a sub-niche. If your main niche is basically sewn up by giant competitors, then try to drill down to find and develop a niche within a niche. For example, if you sell camping equipment, maybe you could focus on one area of this niche such as camp chairs or air mattresses. It’s easier to be a big fish in a little pond!

• Give your customers a reason to be loyal instead of giving their business to one of your competitors. Being proactive and having a good customer loyalty program in place is critical to the ongoing success of your online business, for many reasons. This is something that you absolutely must do in order to get and keep repeat customers. Offer loyalty rewards and incentives to repeat customers to keep them true blue and coming back to you.

• Keep an eye on your competition. There are several good reasons for this, but one is that you can’t prevent your customers from being lured away unless you know what lures there are.

These tips will help you to maintain a competitive edge within your niche!

Start your own online dropship business today!

Twitter Made Easy: A Social Media Marketing Guide for Newbies

Do you want to try social media marketing with Twitter but are unsure where and how to start?

Here are some basic steps to getting started that may help you get on in there and at least get your feet wet in the Twitter stream:

• First, create a Twitter account. Heads up: Choose a username that incorporates the name of your ecommerce business if at all possible. For example, if your website is named happycamper.com, then try to get “happy camper” as your Twitter user name. This is using good SEO and also helps to build your brand!

• Spend some time writing a killer profile bio. You are limited to 160 characters, so you’ll have to choose your words wisely! Again, use good SEO practices and work in as many of your major keywords as you possibly can.

• Get a free Twitter custom background. Choose one that reflects your business; add your business logo, name, and everything else you can. This also works to build your brand even though the search engines won’t pick up content on backgrounds. Other Twitter users will see your custom background so it helps to make it memorable.

• Do upload a photo. Remember, this isn’t about who is the fairest in the land, it’s about making yourself more personable and humanizing yourself. You may consider yourself so ugly you could hire out to haunt houses, but never mind. Post a photo of yourself anyway!

• Now that you’ve gotten registered, composed your profile bio, gotten a great background and posted a photo—start getting a feel for Twitter. Basically, you should just lurk for a few days until you have a pretty good idea of how things are done. Observe the social niceties and mind your manners!

• Start participating. You can do a Twitter search to find others whose interests correlate with your industry. Once you find them, follow them & when there is a good opening for you to comment—go ahead. Don’t follow every Tom, Dick & Harriet on Twitter or try to amass thousands of followers yourself just to have them. Twitter isn’t a numbers game. It’s better to have 500 qualified followers whose interests correspond to your business than 5,000 of any and everybody.

• Establish yourself as a trustworthy, interesting Twitter user who shares entertaining, informative or other valuable info with others, and you will soon garner plenty of good followers!

• Be consistent and plan to spend a certain amount of time on Twitter every day.

Think of social media marketing as a garden—you prepare the ground, sow the seeds, cultivate and tend the crop, and ultimately enjoy a rich harvest.

Start your own online dropship business today!

How to Write Effectively for Twitter

Since you are limited to 140 characters, it is imperative that you write effectively for Twitter.

Here are some tips to help you make the most of every tweet:

• Write with a clear purpose. Make every tweet count by writing your Twitter messages succinctly and straight to the point. There should be a reason for every tweet! While you don’t want to blatantly hawk your ecommerce wares, you do need to tweet about things that are relevant to your industry, at least most of the time. It is always best if you can tweet about things that are important to you…something that you believe in. Keep it real! Be honest, because other users can spot a phony!

• Write consistently and often. You cannot join a social site such as Twitter; throw out a couple of tweets and then sit back to wait for the benefits to come rolling in. It doesn’t work like that. To enjoy success in social media marketing, you should send messages on a regular, consistent basis. You don’t have to tweet every hour on the hour. In fact, you would undoubtedly end up blocked by many or most users if you did that. But do find out when the most optimal times are to tweet, and make it a part of your daily routine to post messages during those times.

• Make good friends and good enemies, as well. While it’s important to cultivate high quality, relevant friends on Twitter, the fact is that we humans find conflict exciting, and having a couple of good enemies can be quite helpful. This is not the same as becoming that annoying pest of the internet—the troll. You should choose a subject other than politics or religion, hopefully something relevant to your industry, and have a spirited debate about it with another member who has conflicting views. For example, if your online store sells inflatable boats, you might argue the advantages over regular boats made of wood, fiberglass or aluminum. Keep it civil! Don’t let the controversy go on and on, have a stopping point clearly in mind from the get-go.

Effective writing for Twitter can help you maximize the time you spend on social media marketing!

Start your own online dropship business today!

10 FREE Tools to Boost Your Social Media Productivity with Twitter

Social media marketing is definitely the wave of the future for ecommerce entrepreneurs, and you can boost your productivity with free tools that will help maximize your efforts!

Here are some fantastic FREE tools that are available to you with SocialOomph:

1. Schedule Your Tweets: This tool enables you to schedule Tweets at your discretion. For example, if you live in Australia and want to send Tweets during business hours in the US when you would normally be in bed asleep—just use this tool to keep those Tweets flowing.

2. Track Your Keywords: You can use this tool to set up alerts for specified keywords, then be notified periodically through emails which Tweets contained those keywords. You may also put this handy tool to use tracking your @replies.

3. Save and Reuse Your Drafts: You can save a LOT of time with this tool! Save your draft Tweets, frequently used URLs & text to avoid hours of repetitive typing.

4. Send Automated Direct Messages to New Followers: This can make a huge difference in your rise to social media greatness! Send these automatic “Thank You” messages to all new followers!

5. Shorten Your Links: This tool will let you track clicks on your Tweets! Simply add your bit.ly URL shortening account info to your SocialOomph profile and your links will be shortened and trackable.

6. Follow Your Followers: This great little tool lets you automatically follow the people who follow you and will be a big time saver!

7. Unfollow Those Who Stop Following You: Same as above. No use in wasting time following people who have dumped you. This tool automatically takes care of it for you.

8. Screen New Followers: Even if you choose automatic following of those who are following you, this tool allows you to vet followers and decide who to keep, who to ignore and who to block. Just gives a bit more flexibility to automatic following.

9. View Your Retweets and Mentions: This tool will vastly improve your efficiency as it lets you keep up at a glance with your @mentions and Retweets.

10. Your Personal Tweet Engine: This very useful tool provides you with your own personal status feeds, which means that you can schedule and then publish Tweets that don’t go to Twitter, but to your own personal Tweet stream via RSS, XML or Javascript.

All of these great FREE tools and many more are available here:

Click Here to go to SocialOomph for FREE Twitter Tools

Using tools such as these in your social media marketing can give you a competitive edge for your ecommerce business!

Start your own online dropship business today!

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