Internet Business Toolbox» monetization

Building Business with Twitter

sugeng — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 12:40:13 +0000

Twitter is one of the fastest growing communities on the Internet today. It is also one of the easiest communities to plug into. Although you are limited to a maximum of 140 characters per message, you can do much within the limit. Although you have to keep the messages short and sweet, Twitter is a great tool for people who value their time.

The next questions are how exactly do you grow and network on Twitter? And how do you monetize that network? How do you build business with Twitter? Let’s start first with how to grow your Twitter network.

First let’s approach it in the simplest way possible. We should not make networking more complicated than it needs to be. Networking is simply a way of making contact with a lot of people who want to exchange information with each other. The main point here is the word “exchange”. It is a social process. Therefore the term “social networking” is used for services such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and so on.

On the other hand, we can think of social networking sites as places where people gather and meet each other. It is as if you were at a cafe, pub, bar, at someone’s party or at some public places. When you attend a party, normally you do not take a megaphone and shout at everybody to come and visit your shop. Instead, you get to know each other, ask questions, share information, and perhaps exchange business cards.

Doing business at the party should not be our immediate aim of attending. Your first aim should be to make a good impression on the people you meet. When people show interest, you will then explain what you do. The people may possible recommend you to someone in their network at later day due to the good impression.

What you should do at social networking like Twitter.com is very similar to what you would do at a party illustrated above. The business card equivalent of real life is your profile page. You should post some information about yourself and what you do, and include a link back to your website. Make the content as interesting as possible for people to read.

Your post is called tweet. It is both a noun and averb. When you post tweets or when you tweet (as it is commonly called), do not make a blatant advertisement for your affiliate marketing program. You will create a very bad impression. Instead, give out and share some useful tips, some interesting insights and some daily activities related to your specialty. Being helpful, generous and nice are viewed very positively. When people have good impression of you, nobody will object to your posting a promotional link in the future.

Don’t feel that you have too tweet only about your business. Please remember that when you are at social function, you don’t want to perpetually talk about business. You will also talk about other topics of interest. Internet marketing, especially social networking and social marketing, is all about building a brand around a personality. We are referring to YOU.

The best way to the branding is not to focus on yourself only all the time. It is also about other people. If you are at a party, you would do that by going around mingling with other people. It is the same on Twitter. You do it by following other people (as it is called in Twitter’s world). Following others is the key to building your network on Twitter. The more you follow, the more you will be followed. In fact, your friends in Twitter are your followers. So who do you follow and who are your followers?

1. Follow people who are entertaining, who share information and who link out to interesting websites. Even if their network is not big, it is likely to grow in the future due to the positive attributes we discussed above. You will want to be able to plug into it.

2. Follow people who follow people. At the top of every Twitter page you will find information about the number of followers and the number of people being followed. Personally I try not to follow people who have a much larger number of followers than the people they follow. These people are kind of stingy and are unlikely to reciprocate when you follow them. Of course there are exceptions to this for example the news twitters, etc.

3. Find people via Twitter search box. You can search for people by entering keywords related to your area of interest or field of expertise. You will be able to build up a solid network of people who may be interested in what you have to offer.

4. Use a service such as Twitter Grader which will generate a list of people whose profiles or areas of interest seemed to be similar to yours. See my ranking at Twitter Grader.

5. Check out the people who are following the people you are following. Then you can click and follow all the people who appeal to you on the list.

6. Check out the people who are following your followers. You can click and follow all who appeal to you.

Interestingly, you will find that many of the people you follow will be happy to reciprocate and follow you. It pays to actively follow as many people as possible. At the end of the day, you will be able to build up a large network quickly and efficiently – and most importantly have fun at the same time.

Happy Twittering!

Finding Business Ideas

sugeng — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 13:51:14 +0000

Many people aspire to have their own business, or at least this is what I encounter in this part of the world. They want to become the boss of their own company. Most of the time, the thought is just a thought with no further follow up on what needs to be done to progress further. Everything needs the first step to start. And the first step to own a business is to start a business. And the best way to start a business is to find business ideas.

There are many ways to find business ideas. The best is to start by brainstorming if you don’t already any idea what business you want to start. During brainstorming it is best to explore all the options without censoring anything. We will leave that to the next step in the process. Let whatever bizarre ideas you might have and just record them down. The more the merrier no matter how funny and crazy they are. We want to encourage our creativity juice to flow.

You an also go to the internet and get the search engines to help. Open up your favourite search engine and just search for “business idea”. You will be provided with many search results. When I did the search on Google, I received more than 72 millions results within a split second (0.17 seconds to be precise).

There are many sites that provide ideas for new business. Among the few that I like personally are:

1. coolbusinessideas.com
It is a blog style filled with new business idea almost everyday. The ideas are unique based on real-life experience.

2. springwise.com
The tagline said it all: One of the world’s leading sources of new business ideas. It is powered by a network of 8000 spotters around the globe that scan for smart new business ideas.

3. Business Ideas on a Budget
This article is published by entrepreneurs page at about.com. The tagline of the article is: 10 Legitimate businesses you can start for under $20. It also includes the estimate of how and where the $20 will be spent.

4. 105 Business Ideas
What made this article interesting is that all the 105 business ideas were thought of by middle and high school students within 90 minutes period on 20 July 2003. The ideas were quite unique and special.

After you have brainstormed the ideas, you should have at least a hundred of them. From the list, it is time now to categorize them. Feel free to add any other ideas as you are categorizing.

When you have all the categories in place, it is now time to do the selection. There are many ways to setup criteria: your education, your work experience, your interest, your hobby, your family background and many others. Of course you should also not forget if the ideas are applicable and easy to monetize. There are always ways to find the monetization model but it is better to focus on ideas with easiest way to monetize. You will also remember to take into consideration on the market demands. It is better to develop a business with great market demand rather than build business first and create business demand later.

If you still need help on generating ideas, here are few more sites that should be able to help you further.

1. IdeaCafe
This site has categories like start a business, business ideas, business financing and marketing & more. Just like the name, the site is like an idea cafe for all business owners.

2. MySmallBiz.com
This site is dedicated to helping people find business ideas based on certain criterias like low-cost, home-based, online, service, mom-biz, retail, pet-biz, etc. Just explore the site and you will know what I mean.

3. Business Idea Forum
This is a forum that links people with business idea, with resources and with critical information to form profitable business through beneficial partnership.

I hope this post has helped you with ways to generate business ideas. Please give suggestion if you know of better sites.

Keyword – Internet Biz Toolbox

sugeng — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 11:50:50 +0000

Two days ago I checked out Google with keyword: Internet Biz Toolbox and scroll through the search pages. I was amazed to see that this domain www.biz-toolbox.com was ranked 45. Today when I checked the same keyword again, I found www.biz-toolbox.com was ranked 24. This was really a remarkable half-way jump within two days. This is a good result although I have expected it to rank higher at Internet Business Toolbox.

I did not do anything unsual. I just followed some common sense advices from AtomicBlogging V3.0 by Alvin Phang. Some of the points are to include keywords in your post title, to include your keywords in the first paragraph of your post, to create category with your keywords and to tag the post with your keywords.

The AtomicBlogging eBook is very easy to follow with step by step instructions. Search engine optimized themes are also included so that the learning curve for people setting up a blog the first time is very much reduced.

The book started by explaining what mistakes should be avoided and what should be done instead to create powerful blog. It then continued to discuss the five steps blogging traffic blueprint. I noticed the book is focusing a lot on traffic generation for the blog along the way which is very useful for new bloggers. The book continued with tips on finding hot profitable niche to setup your blog.

Alvin then procced to outline step-by-step how to setup the blog from selecting and registering domain names, setting up domain name server, installing Atomic Blogging Wordpress and installing the theme and plugins. This is the technical part explained in layman English.

The interesting content comes in from chapter five when he touches upon optimizing your blog for peak performance with powerful SEO secrets. He also discusses on optimum method to write and compile articles for your blog. Then comes the exciting part on monetization of the blogs various advertising types.

Although I was not a newbie in blogging having started few blogs in the past and stopped half-way through, I found that AtomicBlogging is useful in providing correct methodology and basic concepts so that the blogs are optimized and ready to generate more traffic and eventually more prosperity to everyone.