Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Twitter Your Way to Online Profits

By Dominic D. Johnstone

With just 140 keystrokes, people send a brief message to friends and followers to answer the question, what are you doing right now?

Who could have imagined that a social network like Twitter.com would become so prolific with the online community?

Pretty well everyone we know knows about Facebook. The reason it is interesting is because we can see into the daily lives of our friends in a way never before seen. People post photos, websites, interesting news, and even their status at the moment. Who would have imagined that a site dedicated to nothing but status updates would become so universal?

As you know, Twitter is a very future minded website. It is becoming the rage with people young and old, and has captured the eye of online marketers around the world.

Regardless if your sophisticated mindset deems the concept at first glance, it is a very powerful tool. Just a few years ago not many people would have thought anyone would care if say for example - I am going for a venti valencia cappaccino at Starbucks with Bill. Nowadays, people are very interested in the minutia of each others day to day lives. Well add that to the exponential growth rate of memberships on these viral networking sites, and it introduces a very powerful Internet marketing tool.

You see at Twitter.com you can post as many updates as you can and want to in as short a time as you feel like. Most people dont want to be viewed as annoying or spammy with their posts, but many people do add multiple status updates per week.

Additionally, Twitter allows you to post links to your website via hyperlink on your update. The benefit is double. First, you have people following you and thus subscribing to your updates on Twitter. They may click your link and follow the lead to your site. Second, Twitter is gaining a great reputation in the Internet. And you may find that Google regards links from highly prolific and respected pages as being from a good Internet neighbor.

For example, take the Twitter profile page of EZineArticles.com editor Chris Knight. http://twitter.com/ChrisKnight . He has thousands of people following him and he is following thousands of people. As of time of writing his Twitter profile page has a Google page ranking of 5. That is fairly impressive for just another profile page on a social network website.

The advantage of being linked to from a high ranking Twitter profile page is that your inbound links will be numerous over time, and Google will regard your site higher.

In summary, Twitter.com is a new and fairly rudimentary website at first glance. Yet under the surface it is clearly a very effective viral marketing tool. When you consider the considerable growth experienced by sites like YouTube.com and Bankrate.com due to the introduction of viral growth mechanisms such as inviting friends and following people, you can understand the importance of using new and burgeoning sites like Twitter.com.

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