Getting Started

Visit the Twitter website and click “Join for free” to create your account. Consider using your real name as your user name to help your friends find you more easily.

Once your account is created, login and click “Settings.” From here, you can setup your account details, manage your password, register your mobile phone and IM account, configure how you receive Notices, upload your photo and customize your account’s design.

Your Twitter page is located at twitter.com/your-username

Sending Messages

You can “tweet” from your Twitter page, your mobile phone, IM account, or via a third-party Twitter client.

• From your Twitter page: Simply enter a message in the text field at the top of the page and click “Update.”
• From your mobile phone: Send an SMS message to 40404.
• From your IM account: Send a message to either twitter@twitter.com (Jabber/GTalk) or TwitterIM (AOL).

Your tweet will be displayed to your followers, either on their Twitter page, mobile phone, or any other way they are setup to receive Twitter updates.

Following Other Twitter Users

Finding and adding friends to your “Twitterverse” is easy.

• From the Twitter website: Login to your account, visit your friends’ Twitter pages and click “Follow” underneath their photo. If your friend’s account is public, you will immediately start seeing their tweets on your page, otherwise your friend will need to approve you before you can see their updates.
• From your mobile phone or IM account: Send the command follow username.

See the Twitter website for a complete reference of Twitter Commands.

@Replies and Direct Messages

When you send a message with @username at the beginning, it’s understood that your message is intended for that specific user, but all your followers can still see the tweet. Note that for the intended recipient to see your message on their home page, they must be following you, otherwise they will only see your message on the Replies tab.

To send a friend a private tweet, use the Direct command: d username message.

Reference: www.twitternet.com

Unless you’ve had your head under a rock lately you’ve probably heard a bit about Twitter but you’re not sure how to get started. Perhaps your Mentor/business coach/Virtual Assistant has mentioned it to you and your still not sure of its benefits. But what is Twitter exactly? This definition is from www.twitternet.com

Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that allows you answer the question, “What are you doing?” by sending short text messages 140 characters in length, called “tweets”, to your friends, or “followers.”

The short format of the tweet is a defining characteristic of the service, allowing informal collaboration and quick information sharing that provides relief from rising email and IM fatigue. Twittering is also a less gated method of communication: you can share information with people that you wouldn’t normally exchange email or IM messages with, opening up your circle of contacts to an ever-growing community of like-minded people.

You can send your messages using the Twitter website directly, as a single SMS alert, or via a third-party application such as Twirl, Snitter, or the Twitterfox add-on for Firefox.

Your tweets are displayed on your profile page, on the home page of each of your followers, and in the Twitter public timeline (unless you disable this in your account settings.)

You can receive tweets by visiting the Twitter website, IM, SMS, RSS, email or via a third-party application.

Thank you twitternet.com but how do we use it?

It depends on what your goals are. Do you want to have a virtual watercooler? Do you want to connect more personally with your target market? Do you want to find information quickly and simply? Do you just want to keep up with the latest ‘fad’ online? Do you want to sell your product or service?

Fact is that humans are social beings. We need contact with others to stimulate ideas and make us feel connected to a community. Twitter is perfect for this very reason. Regardless of which goal you choose, Twitter can help you to achieve it. You just need to be clear in what it is you want to do, be authentic and be yourself.

I was only commenting the other day to a mentor that when I chose my business name, logo and colour for my logo I didn’t really go through the whole “let’s brand my business properly” exercise. I decided to hire a graphic designer to do my logo and I relied a lot on her advice as I truely had no idea what the heck I was doing. Didn’t know who my target market was, what services I would specialise in or even what I wanted my brand to say.

Since then a few things have come to light. Firstly, using pink was a good decision. Now pink isn’t for everyone but it has become part of my brand and it helps to make my Virtual Assistance website stand out. Secondly, I like my business name. I might not have thought about it too much but changing it now will affect the brand I have managed to create in the last 3 years. It also means changing my trademark and that in itself would be traumatic.

I found an interesting blog post today over at Freelance switch which used the author’s personal experience as a freelancer to demonstrate their view about personal versus business branding. Personally, I don’t have a personal brand happening but my business brand is very closely aligned with my values, beliefs and mission for my business. So it’s a mishmash of the two. Separating my brands would be an interesting exercise and something that I just might undertake in the near future.

The next issue of our Techno Update Newsletter about to be sent out next week so if you haven’t subscribed yet but would like to learn more about the technology that is behind the scenes, then I recommend you subscribe today.

You’ll even receive a free audio on how to outsource effectively and we all know how cool free stuff is.

Go on, sign up! I’ll still be here when you get back.

Since starting my business nearly 3 years ago (how time has flown!!) I have pretty much stuck to networking and marketing my business online or virtually. The main reason being my beautiful children, my new born baby at the time and the fact that there wasn’t a lot of opportunities for me to network in my home town. To network I had to travel to Sydney which was 3 hours away.

So it’s always been important to me to present myself online as I would in real life. That’s just my opinion. I don’t hide behind my monitor, I don’t pretend to be someone I’m not (besides the fact that it would be too much work to keep up) and I don’t hold back.

So imagine my surprise and delight when I received a voice mail on my mobile from Quicken. They’d read my post about the virtues of QuickBooks over MYOB and wanted to thank me for my support. They decided to send me a free book for my reference library and then asked me to become an Accredited Professional Partner – Bookkeeper.

How… totally…. awesome!

So the moral to today’s story boy’s and girl’s is be who you are in real life, online, and you can’t go wrong.

Thank you Quicken for my book and the fantastic offer! I’ll definitely be taking you up on it.

When shopping around for a system there are a few things you need to consider.

You need to think about the goals you have for your newsletter AND your business. Are you likely to add a shopping cart to your website if you don’t have one already? Will you be promoting an Affiliate program so others can sell your products/services for you? Do you need to use autoresponders?

You may be tempted to think “I don’t need to think about that now, I’ll think about it when the time comes..” but I’m going to burst that bubble of yours. You need to think about it now because if you don’t, you may have issues that could have easily been avoided. If you don’t ever intend to integrate a shopping cart into your website then this too changes what system you should/could/possibly use.

The basics of any system is that you have your subscribers who sign up through your website or some other means, this information is sent to the e-newsletter system, the user is sent the “please click here to confirm” email and then the user is added. Simple right?

Well what happens when you have 100, 1000, or 10,000 users and you would like to integrate your cart with your e-newsletter? How are you going to move those users without losing a great deal of them? What if you want to set up an Affiliate program? How can you email all these people without doubling up or missing groups of subscribers. When you move your database your subscribers will need to re-opt in. This is where you’ll lose subscribers that have been previously happy to receive your newsletters. Selecting a service based on your current and future needs is imperative to maintaining your e-newsletter database and your return on the investment.

You will also need to think about your budget and what you’d like to pay for a service. There are some services out there that will allow you to upgrade your account as you need to or to only pay for the contacts you have. Either way it needs to be affordable and provide a return on the investment.

What about a template? We all know that your e-newsletter falls under your branding identity but not all systems allow you to import your own template or make it difficult to add your content, edit and format.

Still have that coffee? Good because here is the good news. There ARE e-newsletter systems out there that can do all this and more. You just need to take into account your own situation and how the potential system will assist you. The goal is to automate the e-newsletter as much as possible and if a potential system can do this, then good for you! If you don’t need all the bells and whistles, then good for you too!

As a Virtual Assistant who works with a variety of businesses and industries I often don’t get a choice and must use what the client tells me to use and that’s ok. That’s their choice. But YOUR choice needs to be informed and growth enabled.

Some services you should take a look at:

• 1Shoppingcart.com (This is my affiliate link!)
• Campaign Monitor
• Aweber
• Constant Contact

While each of these (and there are many many more out there – do a google!) have pros and cons to their use, only 1ShoppingCart.com allows you to manage your shopping cart, e-newsletters, autoresponders and affiliate program within the one system. It’s also the system we use here at Tilda Virtual Services and the one majority of my clients use too.

If you’d like assistance in selecting a system that is right for you, contact me.

Once you do find your perfect e-newsletter system, dive in, learn how to use it and remember to have fun! Code is only scary if you don’t play with it

If you’re selling information products, physical products, downloads or audios, chances are you need a reliable shopping cart system to handle the entire process for you.

While I’ve used a few now, the shopping cart system that stands out in my mind is 1ShoppingCart.com

This shopping cart system allows you to sign up for a fully functioning trial and as your business grows, it grows with you. All you do is upgrade your package as you need to.

It truely is a state of the art fully functional online marketing system.

Check it out today!