Rob Bell's Notes from a Yorkshire Internet Megalomaniac

Marketing is not Promotion People – Get that in Your Heads.

Promotion and Advertising are tools used within a Marketing programme when a product or service is ready to be launched. There’s lots of marketing needs to be done before that stage  though.

There are so many people around claiming to be marketing experts because they’ve undertaken promotional actions to some degree of success – that doesn’t make you a marketing guru that makes you a promotions guru.

Marketing is much more than just promoting products – it’s researching markets, identifying opportunities and problems, developing services and products to solve those problems in a manner a customer would like  setting up and testing Marketing campaigns, using above the line-, below the line- and digital- methods to formulate, execute and analyse the success of each actitivy, something that is particularly easy online given the availability of data, constantly testing and refining promotions as needed. And eventually, the product is ready to go, hopefuly with a well-armed knowledge of the new market that will allow him or her to dominate.

Market Research

A true Marketer knows that any product needs research prior to committing, here are just 15:

1. What’s the size of the market?
2. Who are the major players?
3. How competitive is it?
4. Have you done any Keyword Research?
5. What’s the customer profile?
6. What are people in the market desperate for?
7. Are there any problems there you can solve through your product or service?
8. Are you asking people in the market if they see a place for your product?
9. Would they buy it or try it out and give it a mark out of 100 for you??
10. Are you doing usability studies?
11. What’s the best way to reach your target consumers? It’s not always going to be online, many niches can found away from the computer.
12. What are the best factors to identify in order to do competitive analysis? Price, Features, Quality, Exclusivity – they’ll be different  for each market
13. Does your product represent what you want to sell to them, or what they want to buy from you?
14. How could you change the former into the latter?
15. Where can your potential customers be found?

Next time, I’ll look at competitive positioning and discuss how understanding a fairly simple topic to grasp can help you know more about your market than most others

This post is a direct copy of a page I just uploaded to my personal website, Rob-Bell.com – so the bit about ‘coming soon’ applies to that site, not this I thought the page worth sharing with you, my dear blog readers, so here it is, in all its’ glory including what I now consider to be quite an embarrassing video from a couple of years ago!

Beware the Newbie Trap – Watch That Wallet!

After 4 years of being disabled, I no longer had any savings and found myself living hand to mouth on incapacity and disability benefit, unable to afford to do much, rotting away quietly at home. Some days I couldn’t even afford to eat – but once I caught the internet marketing bug, I found myself forgoing meals to invest in courses I’d been recommended… as a Newbie (Complete Beginner) I didn’t know what was good or not, and I bought quite a few courses that were no use other than taking up space on my hard drive. I’m lucky that I have a degree in Business Management and Marketing, so already knew the rules, many tricks of the trade, and had a good eye for spotting what can only described as BS! I bet you’re just like me – you want to fill that knowledge gap, but you’re just not buying the right stuff…

If you’re new to making money online, it’s really easy to get sucked into spending lots of money on courses far too complex for the new or faint-hearted, which leave you frustrated, skint and feeling overwhelmed – resulting in an early exit before your new activities come to fruition.

The gurus all tell you to spend all your money on their course – which is always the best and fastest way for you to get millions, a massive house, a brand-new shiny Ferrari in your garage, and your own private jet to fly to your own private Island!

You and me both know that the only things that can really give you the lifestyle you dream of are free – Determination, Focus, and Effort.

If you’re just getting started and you’ve never done any marketing before, what you need is a way of learning the principles so you can build a long-term business that provides for you and your family for years to come. The best way of doing this generally is not to buy a thousand dollar web-based program and then convince others to buy the same program to make some money.

Some people are good at this, but most are not which is why network marketing and internet marketing have such high failure rates – I read it’s something like 97% of people who fail in these markets, probably because they find out the truth, which is:-

Even though you were told you would get rich quickly and easily by simply buying these programs, the truth is they will not make you rich on their own. Unless you are good at promotion, sales, and forming relationships with potential buyers, chances are you will struggle until you begin to understand better ways of marketing and promoting your cause. Your first sale is perhaps the hardest, especially if you don’t know how. I have a degree in marketing, but I still struggled at first, so I know and feel your pain, believe me!

[mlb /]

You would be far better off to join a low cost, even free, programme where you’re given the right training to get you started properly – where a community of your peers and experts come together to help each other learn the right techniques to generate a full-time income online. I joined Affiliate Funnel for those reasons, and 2 years on I’m still a member – and always recommend the program to friends and business contacts who want to learn about Internet Marketing, without spending their hard-earned money.

You can join and use Affiliate Funnel for free, or there’s a paid option which I have that costs me £4 ($6) each month -it’s easily worth every penny, although I don’t pay myself anymore – the program more than pays for itself every month.

Things don’t have to be complicated – anyone can generate income online, at whatever age. Several highly successful online business people are in their teens, and many are way past retirement age – the Internet shows no favours to any age. People of all skill levels and abilities just like you are able to find a system that’s right for them, and launch their new online career. No matter what you are doing now, you can start to earn money online – a lot of people I know never studied a day’s marketing in their lives before they took up internet marketing, and started applying it to their businesses and personal money-making ventures.

I’m teaching my Mum, who’s in her late 60s how to achieve stuff online, and have already taught a 71 year old who now writes and publishes a website with hundreds of, maybe even a thousand, pages about ancient history, numerology, and ancient wisdoms. It also features a selection of his artwork – the Sunday Times called him the ‘greatest Surrealist since Salvador Dali’.

Affiliate Funnel Will Get You Started, Quickly and Easily

My personal recommendation for this first stage of your online business career is Affiliate Funnel. It’s easy to get started, and the regular training will provide you with the essential information you need during this first stage. Affiliate Funnel helps you develop your online brand and begin to generate money from the Internet, and you don’t need to have sold or marketed or been a business whiz before.

You can ask questions of experts at the weekly saturday and monday night (and often other nights too) seminars, and they often give away industry secrets that will help you increase your income.

Give Affiliate Funnel a try-out today – it doesn’t cost you anything to join, and it could make you a lot of money.

Traffic Exchanges – The Easiest Way for You to Get People to View Your Offers

Traffic Exchanges are one of the easiest ways for newbie Internet Marketers to start to generate visitors to their websites, product pages and affiliate offers. They work on a simple basis – you earn credits by viewing other marketers pages, which you then use to get your own pages seen. So all you have to be able to do is look at a screen and click on a mouse – simples!

I still use Traffic Exchanges as one of the best sources of signups to my email lists, by providing quality materials in return for a name and email address – this is called permission-based marketing, and makes sure you’re never accused of spam, because every person on your list requested to be there, then confirmed this desire by clicking the confirmation link your autoresponder sends them when they sign up.

The reason I still use Traffic Exchanges two years later? Easy – most of my subscribers come from them.

You get laser targeted access to Internet Marketers – everyone there is one, so you know who you’re talking to, and what motivates them. They are also the simplest promotion method online – once you have a page to promote, you just click other sites to get people to view yours. Don’t tell anyone, but I often surf traffic exchanges while I’m watching TV or listening to a Webinar or watching an online video… the hours can fly by and you find yourself with thousands of credits to spend!

I use Traffic Splash, Dragon Surf, I Love Hits and SWAT as my main traffic exchanges, although I sometimes use others. SWAT in particular is good because they also provide private weekly training where big hitters teach you the things that enabled them to become big hitters in the first place.

Here’s a video I did a couple of years ago showing you how to use a traffic exchange, the link doesn’t work anymore (don’t try going to jointrafficsplash.info, it doesn’t work anymore – I didn’t keep the domain name!) To visit Traffic Splash <—- simply click on this name.

Coming Soon

I’ll be building up this section of the site over the next few months, when I get time between client jobs. I aim to provide information and resources to help individuals and businesses build successful brands and revenues online. Ironically, because I can only do it between client jobs, the more successful I become the longer this will take to build, so you really should be hoping for my failure… Although if I were to fail, why would you want to learn from me?!?!? Aaaah blessed irony!

If you want to receive my daily email series, 35 Free Websites, Applications and Tools to Help You Make Money Online, sign up here now – I’ll throw in a free copy of a book that can help you get started online when you confirm the confirmation email you’ll receive when you sign up. If it doesn’t arrive in under 2 minutes, check your spam folder – sometimes Gmail and Yahoo are overzealous in their filtering – heck the other day my Mum sent me an email and they spam foldered that!

Here’s to your success,

Rob

Yes, it’s true – the Internet Police have been round and arrested me for neglecting my blog once again. They said I had been blogging with undue care and attention, leaving my blog unattended for many days, even weeks at a time.

Oh blog, what can I say? I neglect you so, yet you sit there showing the world my words 24/7/365 unaffected by my ignoring you. They say I haven’t been feeding you properly, or dressing you appropriately. It’s not that I’ve lost interest, I still care for you – but I’m sorry, I’ve been seeing other Web platforms and activities. Yes, I have been spending increasingly more time with my Web Design business, and I’ve been seen a lot around Twitter and Facebook – I have also been spending a lot time with new clients, or on courses, webinars, or my other business, Ex Ignibus.

It’s not that I don’t love you, I’m just not sure that I’m in love with you – you’re not the blog I met almost 4 years ago (actually that’s true, you’re not that blog but you look and sound just like she did). You’ve got kinda bloated with all those plugins and applications I so love to feed you with, and your dress sense is so out of date compared to my other sites, who all got updated a couple of months ago. Your style just doesn’t fit in with the rest of the pack anymore…. but I don’t want to lose you.

There’s so much we should be doing together, and I know we have a bright future together – we just need to work better as a team, show a united front, and do what we do best together – giving useful information to novices and experts alike, on how to market ethically and effectively online, all about the latest trends online, and how best to use networks like Twitter. We need to up our game, dear blog, so here’s what has to happen.

Nothing much is going to happen here over the next week, because I am absolutely busied up with client work – and no matter what you say, you’ll always come second to my beloved clients.

After that, you and me are going to be spending some quiet time together, working on cleaning you up, getting you into optimised shape, thinning down your plugins, and completely redesigning your style and layout to turn you into one cool, sexy, intelligent blog that people are going to want to hang around with once again.

So get ready, because October is going to go down in history as the month you grew up and left your chrysalid to become a beautiful butterfly, rippling waves of positive effect across the blogosphere.

I’m sorry for the way I’ve treated you – I’ll do better, I promise.

Your Naughty Owner,

Rob x

p.s. I got away with a caution from the Internet police, but they said they’d be keeping an eye on me in the future – and they’ll be back if I treat you bad ever again!

New February 28th – You can now download my Ultimate Guide to Twitter as an Ebook

1.0 February 2009

Please don’t be confused – this is definitely not a guide to making bird noises, in fact it’s not anything bird-related at all.

Twitter is the web’s fastest growing, hottest social media property right now, and you need to know about it because it has the potential to be as big as/bigger than Facebook and MySpace and even takes on Yahoo and Google for news.

You probably have friends who are tweeting right now, in the comfort of their homes or out and about in the big wide world, and you don’t even know it.

Chances are, you’ve already heard of Twitter but you may not be completely sure about what it is… Twitter seems to be everywhere at the moment – most of the Internet Marketers suggest you use it, Barack Obama famously used it to great effect, and luminaries and celebrities like Stephen Fry, Bill Gates, Shaquille O’Neal, Britney Spears, Chris Moyles and many more can be found ‘tweeting’ away to their enormous bands of followers. News stories often break, and unfold, via Tweets, and Twitter is even considered to be faster than Yahoo or Google for breaking news, as it can come from journalists and independent Twitterers at the scene.

Are you using it yet?

You can Join Twitter and follow me at http://www.Twitter.com/robbell

What is Twitter?

In layman’s terms, Twitter can be thought of as being very much like text messaging, but over the Internet – you compose messages of 140 characters or less as updates. The biggest difference is that Twitter lets you text everyone on Twitter, all at once, rather than texting to an individual!

The official description of Twitter is as follows:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent messages.  People write short updates, often called “tweets”  of 140 characters or fewer.  These messages are posted to your profile or your blog, sent to your followers, and are searchable on Twitter search.

Although you can only post text on Twitter, services are available to let you tweet links to other content – photos, music, video etc…

Twitter and sites like it are known as ‘micro-blogs’ – similar to blogs, except your character limit is rather limited, hence the micro- prefix. Micro-blogs tend to have character limits of around 140, although this differs between different services. This article provides a little help to maximise your use of the 140 characters.

By default, Twitter shows you the updates for your friends only, but you can view all tweets via the public timeline. Twitter is not the place to be sharing secrets, as everyone can see everything you tweet, unless you send a direct message. Everyone can see your @replies – don’t make the mistake of thinking these are private too!

Twitter does not cost any money to use.

Some analysts find Twitter’s apparent lack of a revenue-model difficult to understand, but others do not see this as a problem. Last Friday, Feb 13th, investors showed Twitter some early Valentine’s Day Love by investing a further $35m of venture capital (plus another undisclosed sum from existing investors) in the service. Lots of people have ideas how Twitter can start to make money, but I doubt anyone can tell you for sure how they are going to when they do.

How can I access Twitter?

1. Over the Internet at http://www.Twitter.com
2. Via your mobile phone – you can text in updates, or access the mobile website at m.twitter.com
3. Via a Third-Party Client – Many applications have been developed that integrate with Twitter – I use Twhirl to access Twitter, but I’ll talk more about clients and applications later in this guide.

How Do I Get Started on Twitter?

1. Create an Account
2. Go to the Settings, write a short bio, and upload a picture – people don’t like to follow people who don’t have one
3. Go to ‘Find People’ and find friends who are already on Twitter via one of the provided tools:
   Invite friends who aren’t already on – automatically using the email tool if you have Yahoo, GMail, Hotmail, AOL or MSN
4. Follow the users you’re interested in on the ‘Suggested Users’ tab
5. Write and post your first Tweet

That’s it – you’re now a Twitterer, welcome to the Twitterverse! It’s sometimes peculiar, oft more exciting than you’d expect, and always interesting – you’ll like it here!

How Do I Get Followers on Twitter?

There are schools of thought that say the more followers you have, the more popular that makes you and the greater coverage you have – so get as many as you can as quick as you can. I’m not going to cover that strategy in any details, because I don’t believe that to be the best long-term approach to life in the Twitterverse. You could use the recently controversial Twittergetter from Gary McCaffrey or Tim Linden’s Twitter Me Fun (excellent targeted source of Traffic Exchange users on Twitter) to get your Follower list started.

My belief is that people will follow you on Twitter if you are interesting and offer worthwhile tweets.Many people will follow you back when you follow them (especially if they use an auto-follower!) If you contribute to the community rather than taking from it, you’ll build followers who like and trust your posts, and see you as a great source of information.

Be creative, be unique, be an expert on your chosen topic, just don’t be a spammer – nobody likes a spammer.

Mr Tweet may help you find relevant users and followers

The Language of Twitter – Tweet me This!

Twitter has given rise to a number of terms previously unknown. You’ll come across these when you enter the Twitterverse! Here’s an explanation of a few of them you may need for the rest of this guide! It should be noted that Twitter users like to ‘twitterise’ real words to make them into ‘twitterisms’ e.g. twitterrific, tweekend, politweets (political tweets). This appears to be done, for the most part, by substituting ‘tw’ for the initial letters of the word…

This makes Twitter a little bit like Yorkshire people – we use t’ instead of ‘the’ e.g. t’weekend, t’internet t’weather etc… Twittering in Yorkshire could be confusing!

Frequently Used Twitterisms

The Twitterverse, or the Twitosphere - the community of Twitter users

Tweeter, or Twitterer - a Twitter user

Tweeple - Twitter Users

Tweet - a post on Twitter. Tweets - the updates you, and everyone else, post

Followers - people who have chosen to receive updates for a particular Twitterer

Twitterati - the members of the Twitter A-list that everyone wants to follow.

Twitterstream – the public, or friend, timeline – the posts on Twitter are chronologically listed

Mistweet - an accidentally posted tweet – may have errors or be incomplete  ie a mistake

Retweet - the action of reposting another user’s post, crediting them for it

Retweeter, or Retweetist - someone who retweets

Twisticuffs - the posts when 2 or more twitterers have a disagreement

Twetiquette ( or Twitetiquette) – the right way to behave on Twitter

You can find more comprehensive lists of definitions at Twictionary, Twittonary, and Twitter Fan Wiki

Twitter Shorthand

Because each post can only contain 140 characters, shorthand is used lots when tweeting:

RT = Retweet, followed by @ then the person you’re retweeting’s username e.g. RT@robbell  indicates you are retweeting one of my posts

OH – Overheard

DM – Direct Message

@ – Send/Reply to e.g. @robbell – sends a message to me on the public timeline

BTW – By The Way

JV – Joint Venture

IRL – In Real Life

LOL – Laugh out Loud, or Lots of Laughter depending on who you ask!

FTF – Face to Face

IMHO – In My Honest Opinion

b/c – because

abt – about

Find more Twitter shorthand (Tworthand?!?) here

TheNextWeb produce a tool, called Twitterkeys, that allows you to insert graphics like ♥ and ✈ into your tweets easily, so you can be a ★ and use them instead of words or phrases that use more characters.

ReTweeting

ReTweeting is the act of posting another person’s tweet, but still giving the original poster credit. This is popular because twitterers don’t all have the same followers so, by retweeting a post, your followers can see a tweet they otherwise might not have.

Retweets may include useful links, notable information, or things you think are funny e.g. pure_ROKER RT @guykawasaki: @robbell There’s only one problem. Rich Dad, Poor Dad is Robert Kiyosaki. I’m Guy Kawasaki. (LMAO) – I have a feeling it may be some days before I live that little error down – sometimes you just want a Retweet to lay down and die!

Read a Beginner’s Guide to Retweeting at Retweetist

The Top 10 Twitterers by Number of Followers

For the majority of people, 100 might be a lot of followers, but to others 100,000 is a milestone they’ve already long passed.

Top 10, according to stats at Twitterholic on Feb 16th 2009

1. Barack Obama – 278,444 followers
2. CNN Breaking News – 195, 320 followers
3. Stephen Fry – 193,117 followers
4. Twitter - 139,466 followers
5. Kevin Rose (founder of Digg)- 134,382 followers
6. Britney Spears – 118,368 followers
7. The New York Times – 113, 658 followers
8. Lance Armstrong – 105,274 followers
9. Evan Williams (founder of Twitter, invented ‘Blogger’)- 104,810 followers
10. Al Gore – 101,641 followers

See the rest of the top 1000 Twitter Users at Twitterholic

BEWARE – there are lots of fake profiles set up by people pretending to be a celebrity or person. I suppose the name for it is probably Twijacking! AFP famously announced the arrival of the Dalai Lama on Twitter, only to retract it later when the fake was exposed.

What is Twitter Used For?

There are a myriad of people using Twitter for any number of reasons. Here are just 25:

1. Sharing links to sites of interest to your followers
2. Fun – to stay in touch with friends and make new ones
3. Group communications – the public nature of updates means you can update whole groups with one message
   
4. Networking to get new contacts
5. Communicating with your network
6. Promoting your products/services/content
7. Crowdsourcing – getting answers to your questions, about anything
8. Influencing your network
9. Customer Service – communicating with customers and sending service updates e.g. we have x back in stock, your vehicle is ready for collection.
10. Sending updates from your websites/blogs/social networks
11. Newsgathering and reporting – the BBC came under criticism recently for using unverified Tweets as sources for reports during the Mumbai terrorist attacks in India. News often breaks on Twitter due to its’ real-time nature. Twitterers and Journalists on the scene often provide near real-time news.
12. Redistributing existing content
13. Project collaboration
14. Try out new ideas, and get near-instant feedback
15. Live updates from events and conferences
    
16. Seeking new staff – Businesses may tweet their latest vacancies
17. Looking for a job – jobs are often advertised by companies and recruiters
18. Political Dissent – the US Army recently identified Twitter as a potential terrorist tool
19. Replacement for Facebook status updates
20. Flight information and updates e.g. for delays
21. Complaining – people like to complain, and Twitter gives them a platform for this (aka Twhiners!)
22. Discussing (Arguing about) Sports
23. Charm (or repel!) people with your online personality
24. Distribute a book, 140 characters at a time
25. Learn another language – by following foreign language speakers, or via a language micro-provider

This page features a list of the ten most creative uses for Twitter – ‘to water the plants’ is number one!!!

Use Twitter creatively – enhance your communications, broaden your interests and join discussions. Add value to your existing activities and bring  joy to people.

Are there any Limits on my Twittering?

Twitter do impose some basic limits, and say they may introduce others in time. Here’s their official statement on limits:

Twitter currently applies limits to any person who reaches:

• 1,000 total updates per day, on any and all devices (web, mobile web, phone, API, etc. )
  
• 1,000 total direct messages per day, on any and all devices
  
• 100 API requests per hour
  

We’ve also placed limits on the number of people you can follow. The number is different for everyone, and is based on a ratio that changes as the account changes. If you hit a follow limit, you must balance your follower/following ratio in order to follow more people- basically, you can’t follow 50,000 people if only 23 people follow you. Based on current behavior in the Twitter community, we’ve concluded that this is both fair and reasonable.

Fairly self-explanatory I think.

What the Devil is a Hashtag?!?!?

Hashtags, where a ‘#‘ precedes a keyword or phrase, e.g. #valentines-day, #JV, #marketing, help to organise content on Twitter into groups that share the same tag.

Services like hashtags can bring together all the posts with the same tag allowing you to read tweets related to the keyword that share the same hashtag.

Find out more about Hashtags here

Twitter Applications and Resources

The Twitter community has taken advantage of Twitter’s open API to come up with an ever-increasing selection of tools, clients and sites that use Twitter data to do something interesting, useful, ground-breaking, or just plain odd! None of the applications below actually belong to Twitter – they’re all developed by third parties.

My Favourite 5 Twitter Apps
(as at today Feb 17 – I reserve the right to change my mind at any point in the near future!)

1. Twhirl – the client I mostly access Twitter through. It makes Twitter more like an IM client, and changed my use of the service completely – I feel much more a part of the Twitterverse because of it.

2.Twitterhawk -monitors the Twitterverse for terms you provide then can add people who use them and/or  send them a message from a selection of 5 you pre-write. The business possibilities for this application are immense – it’s highly targeted messaging. I use it to follow people who talk about certain terms.

3. Is.gd – URL shortening service. Pronounced “eees gooood”, like Manuel from Fawlty Towers! Reduces urls to a reasonable number of characters.

4. Twitter Grader – grades your twitter account giving you a % score. More usefully, suggests good follows for you and lets you find the ‘Twitter Elite’ in your area (I’m in the top 3 for West Yorkshire, exciting…)

5. Twitscoop – find out what’s hot on Twitter right now, track conversations, topics or conferences using the search function.

Special Award for being Mightily Useful, but potentially dangerous

Tweetlater provides a number of tools – track keywords, schedule tweets, automatically follow people who follow you and send them an automated  thank you note, even publish your own personal ‘tweetstream’.

Unfortunately some people’s thank you notes can be a bit spammy – which never goes down well, and can even lose you followers. Some also think it’s good to publish a list of their latest followers via an automated message, I find this particularly impersonal – I’m an individual to communicate with, not just part of a list!

Use this application with care, and it will enhance your Twitter experience. Misuse it at your own peril.

Twitter Clients

Clients provide you with an interface through which to use Twitter – the basic Twitter web page feels somewhat limited, mainly because it doesn’t refresh automatically – you have to do it manually to refresh your timelines and get the latest tweets.

According to Twitstat (via Mashable), after Twitter’s built-in web posting tool, the five most popular Twitter clients are:

1. Tweetdeck
2. Twitterfeed
3. Twhirl
4. Twitterrific
5. Tweetie

Updates from text messages are the next most popular way to send tweets.

I use Twhirl, mainly because I like the way it displays tweets in an opaque sidebar – it’s relatively unobtrusive, and means I don’t need a separate browser tab always open for Twitter, that I have to manually refresh to see the latest Tweets. It also has built-in url shorteners, and notifies me with a sound on arrival of DMs and @s. I don’t have an opinion on the other clients because I haven’t tried any of them for very long. Mashable has a great article on Twhirl vs Tweetdeck you may like to read.

I also have TwitterBerry installed on my Blackberry, but I am rarely mobile for long in the cold months, so haven’t used it much.

Short URL Services

The 140 character limit makes urls that link to pages other than a site’s homepage undesirable because they can easily eat up a quarter or more of your character limit. Short url services allow you to use a far shorter url to save you precious characters.

e.g. the very character-rich link http://www.robbellblog.com/personal/theres-snow-way-of-stopping-a-committed-entrepreneur-even-an-idiot-like-rob-bell shortens to the much-briefer http://is.gd/jLA3 allowing me to include the link in a relevant tweet without wasting all my characters.

Is.gd

TinyURL

Bit.ly

Snurl /Sn.im

Twurl/Tweetburner

Search Apps

These applications wade through Twitter data to find you information on the people, topics, discussions and subjects you want to know about. There are those that state that Twitter has the edge over Google when it comes to real-time searching, and the real value of Twitter might even lie in its’ search results. Twitter themselves acquired Summize, a Twitter search engine, last year. You can use their search engine here

Twellow – Twellow analyses all posts on the public timeline to categorise Twitter users into a number of categories. This makes it easier for you to find people talking about the subjects that interest you.

TwitterSearch – simple interface for searching keywords in Tweets

TwitStat – real-time Twitter analytics

TwitterTroll – real time search, shows most popular search terms

Measure Your Influence on Twitter

There are a number of apps that analyse Twitter data, your tweets, and your followers and followees, to provide you with information about your coverage, influence and performance on Twitter.

Twitter Grader – Provides you with a % grade of your reach and authority (my grade)

Twinfluence – Measure your influence on Twitter (my influence)

Mr Tweet – follow Mr Tweet and he’ll suggest relevant people and provide several usage stats via DM when he updates your data

Tweet Stats – Graphs and Charts from your Twitter usage stats (my graphs and charts)

Great Twitter Resources

I couldn’t hope to provide a comprehensive list of all the Twitter resources and applications available – the number of apps grows at a fair pace, and others have the ability to devote more time and resources to tracking new Twitter apps – they are listed below, along with some other notable applications.

I’ve started bookmarking all the Twitter apps I come across, and like, here (this site is still in private beta, so a bit of a secret, except to you – it’s my favourite social bookmarking site by far!)

Magpie – ‘convert your Tweets to bling-bling’ – Magpie is an advertising provider offering to pay you to allow promotional tweets on occasion with your other tweets. If you visit their site, they provide you with an estimated monthly income to give you an indication of what you might earn from the service. The feature that convinced me to use this was the one that lets you select how often Magpie Tweets are sent e.g. once every 5,10 or 20 tweets. You control the frequency – nice option.

The official Twitter applications page

Mashable has to be my favourite spot for all things Twitter

Twittervision – shows Tweets on a world map, indicating a specified location or where their Twitterer is located

Twitter Applications Database (Twitdom) is an ever-growing list of Twitapps (is that a new tword?!?)

Twitter Apps

Twitter Fan Wiki – Extensive list of apps for Windows, Mac, Linux and Multi-platforms

31 Power Tools for Twitter Lovers – from SmashingApps

140+ More Twitter Tools – more from Mashable

101 Twitter Resources – Traffikd.com

60+ Useful Twitter Resources – Webgeek

Twitter Resources – Wiredpen

Tools, Apps and Bots to Improve your Twitter Experience – MakeUseOf.com

About this Guide

This is v1.0 of my Ultimate Guide to Twitter, which will doubtlessly grow and grow and grow some more over the coming weeks and months. Suggestions, criticisms, contributions and comments are always welcomed. If you’ve enjoyed the guide and found it useful, please leave me a comment and share it on your favourite bookmarking sites using one of the tools below.

All images are either my own, or believed to be in the public domain as they were sourced there. Please contact me in the unlikely event you find an image of yours which is not meant to be in the public domain.

You can subscribe to my ‘ Top 40 Applications to Build Your List Online Faster than Ever’ at Rob-Bell.com

Your friend,

Rob

Rob Bell, Marketing Boffin

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p.s. if you’ve enjoyed this guide, please bookmark it at your favourite sites using the icons below(Digg, Mixx, Del.icio.us, Reddit etc) and tweet this message (select the message, copy it, then paste it into Twitter and submit – you have 55 chars left in the message for your own comments):

I just read @robbell’s Ultimate Guide to Twitter at http://bit.ly/12JLvD – brilliant!

Cheers, Rob

Since November last year, my natural sleep pattern – always a source of great annoyance, because I don’t appear to have one – has gone downhill again. The current time zone I’m living in has the following characteristics:

Wake up mid afternoon, and go back to sleep until dark. Wake at 6pm noticed it’s dark and 6 so it must be morning time – too early to get up…. then spot the 24 hour clock and realise you’ve actually slept all the way through daylight, except for that bit you saw streaming through your window just before you went to bed.

Swear lots because that’s another day you’ve missed and most things that involve people have to be done between 9am & 5.30pm – the traditional time for work, yet not the one used by this dojo!

After an evening meal as breakfast, sit at the computer and start the day’s business… continue until 2.30am then contemplate going to bed to start getting bodyclock back to normal times. Then sit back down at PC, end up really getting into something that could wait until morning, and end up staying up until 9-10am (it was 9.23 this morning!) before going to bed and struggling to sleep before mask is applied that keeps light from your eyes. Sleep very heavily, with phone unable to wake me up – doorbell has a better chance, but it’s still not guaranteed!

Wake up at 3, but feel it’s cold so sleep again until 6 – go through exactly the same as yesterday!

That routine is fine when you don’t need to be to do anything, but this week I’m attending 5 lectures and an employment discussion – all starting at 9.30 in the morning – which has been my bedtime for some weeks… It’s really snowy so that could be a great excuse if I miss it, but it’s only 1/2 mile on foot, which may take some time and be a little painful thanks to my cripple’s hip, but at least I’d be there…

If I get off the computer now and go to bed I could get 7 and be up at 8…. although lets face it I have only been up for 5-7 hours today so I’m not exactly tired. Solution – popped a sleeping tablet, and will be sleeping after all!

So I have to attend lots of daytime events this week for which I must become a daywalker once again! This means I won’t be around as late on the US conferences and seminars I tend to follow – most don’t even start until 1 or 2 am here.

Working online can be great fun, but once you adjust to the later nights (due to our being 5 hours ahead of
Easstern Time) it’s hard to get back without pulling at least one all-nighter-and-next-day-too, where you stay up until 10 pm then go catch up on 2 days of sleep. Unfortunately, that night’s sleep oftens lasts 14-16 hours so you lose the next day and are still on nightwalker duty!!!

Last week was increasingly frantic as we finished all the server moves to their new all-singing, all dancing and full-featured new home at RobBellHosting

Just a few problems with transferring the .co.uk domains away fron Lycos and onto 123-reg – Lycos have promised me twice to update the data that’s stopping the transfer, and they STILL haven’t done it having had over a month and 9 letters requesting they get a move on. Lycos have ruined their relationship with me over this – they were always a good company, with an, albeit limited, grip on customer service. Now I won’t use any of their products henceforth – the profitable ones they haven’t closed down, that is.

At least the data’s all moved though – and everyone’s running off the new ips. Yay, glad that’s over – too many all-nighters pulled in 1 week, IMO!

Can’t believe the snow outside – good few inches on the ground everywhere, it looks great – might take my camera out in it if I get the chance tomorrow… between the 2 courses I’m taking. I’ll show you some of the sights in Wintery Wakefield, many of which are truly beautiful – the city always looks lots better with snow covering it!!!

I’ve been using a lot of Traffic Exchanges this week to build subscribers up for my mailing list – go to Rob-Bell.com’s About Rob page to subscribe if you’d like to get my fifty favourite free sites and tools for making money online too. I don’t generally finding TE work to be the most exciting, but it’s fine if there’s something on TV – yes I do both at once! Seen considerable increase to the subscriber numbers – it’s doubled, then that doubled, now we have a nice number!

My first Traffic Exchange recommendations are:
Traffic Splash
Royal Surf
Dragon Surf
I Love Hits
Start XChange and
Advertising KnowHow

I use all these regular and see great results. They’re all free to join, but you can upgrade to increase the rate you generate credits and the number of sites you advertise. I’m going to write more on Traffic Exchanges in the near future, but those 6 are great to get you started. 5 of them offer what is called “SuperSurfing” – if you surf all 5 exchanges at once (using a tabbed internet browser) you get extra credits for each site you view.

I an upgraded member in all of the above exchanges – over a year 1/2 in some of them.

Traffic Exchanges are a very cheap(free) alternative to expensive advertising yet the targeted users on there make them perfect when your product needs the Internet Marketer marketplace. Find out the things they need, and offer them – use sales to pay for exchange monthly upgrades so you get more credits to spend getting your site seen.

Eeek it’s 2.15 am, I haven’t actually had an early night after all – bugger!

To Your Success,

Rob Bell

Tomorrow I’ll be telling you all about the 2 Business Link courses I’m going on – exciting stuff eh?!?!