Since it was launched last fall, over 1.5 million people have graded their profiles using Twitter Grader.

But what does a Twitter Grade actually mean — and how can you use it to improve how you use Twitter?

Here’s the scoop: Your Twitter Grade is a measure of how well you’re using Twitter as a marketing tool. The number is a percentile score based on how effectively you’re following best Twitter-for-business practices, compared to all the other people that have been graded.

To give you a better sense of how you can improve your use of Twitter as a marketing tool, here’s a breakdown of a few questions Twitter Grader asks when grading your profile (as well as some of the thinking behind them):

1) How many followers do you have? Reach is important, and Twitter Grader puts some weight on the number of people following you. Offering interesting content and interacting often online will get you more followers. Also, those who have a lot of followers are frequently thought-leaders in the space.

2) What is the power and influence of those people following you? Choose your friends wisely, and build a network of people who have have large networks themselves. To have influential people follow you is powerful.

3) How many people are you following? If you are following more people than are following you, it reduces your grade a bit. This “poor ratio” often (although, not always) implies that a person is following too many people at once, instead of letting organic relationships naturally develop. Remember to build your network organically, step-by-step.

4) How often do you update and interact with your network? Being an active member of the Twitter community defineitly gets you points. Remember to consistantly interact with your network. However, tweeting excessively without reason can hurt your grade.

5) How often does your network engage with you? Twitter Grader thinks very highly of people who are tweeted at, cited in the context of a tweet or retweeted. To have people interact or reference you shows authority. Give people a reason to talk about you.

What do you think? Are there other best-practices Twitter Grader should be assessing? How do you use Twitter for marketing?

Today Hendry Lee from BlogBuildingU explores the power of combining blogging with email.

Most people think email is dead, at least for marketing. A few years ago when blogging was just reaching mainstream, some aggressive marketers claimed that blog would replace email in its marketing role.

But that never happens.

I don’t know what it is about such news, but every time someone claims that an older technology is about to descend in replacement of something shinier, people flock to it as if their businesses are going no where without it.

Regarding blog versus email, obviously the dust has settled down. Now it is time to look carefully what you could do with them to get the most out of your business.

It is true that email comes with its own problems. Bounce back, phishing, spam filters, authentication and reputation are just a small list of the issues.

Still the fact that email leads all other channels by a wide margin in terms of performance is something every blogger should not overlook. Just as a comparison, 80.4 percent of more than 3,000 survey participants chose email as a strong advertising performer, compared to 56.8 percent who chose search.

How Email Can Help

Consider this scenario. First time visitor arrives at your site. Usually she knows very little about you, if at all. The current page, or perhaps the homepage, is your chance to make the first impression. It is obvious that you should make every possible entry page counts.

Once she’s done with the first page, perhaps she is going to view a few others before quitting. Unless you find a way to keep in touch with her, most likely she is not going to come back.

Just face it. How many times do you come back to a site after visiting it once? For me, it happens rarely and I know I’m not the only one. Unless, of course, the site is extremely good.

Both RSS and email are tools to help you get those readers back to you. Although RSS is reaching the mainstream, email is still “the” communication channel. All Internet users are familiar with it.

There are always subscribers who prefer RSS to email, but others would like to receive updates via email only or both.

Don’t believe that email is still effective? Just ask Darren. He had passed 100,000 subscribers for the DPS weekly newsletter.

Here’s the rule of thumb. Reach your readers whenever they want and via content distribution channels and formats they prefer. There are other channels like audio podcast, video and so on, but let’s start with email because it is the most common one.

Whether you are just getting started or have been blogging for some time, you are leaving money on the table if you don’t integrate email into your marketing mix.

From Recognition to Interaction

Email allows you to get in touch with your subscribers and build awareness of your brand. In a nutshell, here’s the process:

• Delivery of content on a regular basis promotes recognition. Each email is an opportunity to reach your subscribers with your message. Make sure the message brings an impact.
• Content creates interest. It’s not just any content. Every message has to be particularly good for the readers to stay on the list. You can’t be boring with your content, although subscribers are also forgiving if you do it occasionally.
• Interest encourages interaction. If the subscribers can relate to your content, sooner or later they will write back and start the interaction. It doesn’t matter if it is just a blog comment or email, what matters is your relationships with your audience. Email just makes it easier because this medium is designed for communication from the start.

At this stage, you may continue the nurturing process to build trust. Each of the process above moves a subscriber closer to the buying decision.

That certainly sounds pretty much like a blog or other marketing channels, because there is indeed a pattern. After all, the end goal is to turn strangers to prospects and prospects to customers.

This applies as well to bloggers who only generate revenue from selling ad spaces. You need to build relationships to get more traffic and convert visitors to advertisers. Repeat readers also mean more pageviews. Best of all, this interaction may lead you to more opportunities.

Again when it comes to a reader’s favorite content consumption channel, you just can’t shove one thing or another down anyone’s throat.

Either you also communicate via email or you miss a segment of your audience.

Email Marketing for Bloggers

Without a doubt, the most obvious application of email marketing for bloggers is an e-newsletter.

With an email newsletter, not only you can drive traffic back to your blog, but also generate more advertising revenue through pageviews, increase sales and do virtually anything that is possible with communication. The latter means almost every marketing activity, right?

If you are interested about starting an email newsletter, Darren has written a few interesting articles in the past. You can also find a few tips for bloggers here.

Email newsletter is just one example though. The following are a few other ideas. With emails, you can do the following in additional to the benefits you get through your blog:

• Create a series of lessons for an e-course. Queue those lessons in a sequence autoresponder. It will follows up with your subscribers on your behalf. You can create content-laden articles and deliver them one at a time at a predetermined interval. It is like relationship building on autopilot.
• Use email as customer retention tool. Reduce chargeback by reminding customers about their purchase. Offer additional bonuses. Suggest a few ways to use your product. This is where email is still the most appropriate communication tool.
• Recover abandoned shopping carts. It is possible to follow up 24 hours after someone abandons your shopping cart to recover sales. Such emails have higher open and click-through rate and may reclaim back your otherwise lost revenue.
• Generate sales and extras. This is not just for e-commerce sites. Email can help close deals for a consulting work, among others.
• Build buzz. You can see this example in most product launch emails. Using email and blog, the product owners build buzz around the product so even before launch date, the subscribers are already anticipating it.

Especially for service professionals, a lead can potentially worth a few thousand dollars. Using email to follow up with them, even if it is to a few people at a time, is a strategy worth considering.

Email follow up and broadcast technology is now very affordable. At $20 or less per month, there’s no reason you can’t start today. Have fun reclaiming the otherwise lost traffic and revenues back.

Hendry Lee helps people overcome strategic and technological challenges in starting and growing their web businesses.

Visit Blog Building University if you need more ideas for blog promotion. While you are there, download your free blogging eBook and subscribe to his blogging e-course where he reveals his secrets about blogging and content writing!

By Rochelle Paul

A couple weeks ago, I spoke with San Francisco area Social Marketing expert, Rick Rochon. Rick and I talked about the various ways to use Social and New Media/Marketing opportunities.

Rick’s expertise is to use nearly or totally free marketing options. Twitter is one such method. Providing a small business owner with another avenue (Facebook & LinkedIn being other options) to build relationships with customers and clients via a platform that allows you to target them, for them to chose to let you into their lives, and doing so in a free manner. Indeed, the biggest investment faced by the small business owner is time.

Let’s quickly cover the basics of Twitter.

Twitter is what is considered a microblog. A microblog platform provides the writer with the chance to write whatever they want, within 140 characters. That is characters. Characters include punctuation, spaces, letters, everything. A very short amount of space. About three sentences.

Twitter has grown by leaps and bounds since its beginning in 2006.

Rick calls it “the conversation”. If you post something on Twitter, it’s a “tweet”. The people following you, “tweeple”. The world you move through, the “twitishpere.”

Twitter is open to everyone, and every age, demographic, group can be found tweeting around. Unlike Facebrook and LinkedIn, where the participants have been traditionally one group (college students growing into everyone, or business people) Twitter seems to have, from conception, been targeted to and attracts, nearly everyone across the board.

Read article…

Written by Sarah Perez / March 26, 2009

Gartner released a report today that highlights the different ways that companies are adopting Twitter for business use. Although Twitter was originally intended for communication among individuals, a number of organizations have begun to actively participate on the platform. However, not all companies are using Twitter in the same way. Some are tweeting, some are just listening, and some really savvy companies are doing both.

Before any company employees start tweeting, it would be a good idea to remind them that the same rules that apply to other web participation (like blogging, for example) also apply to Twitter. “As Twitter is a public forum, employees should understand the limits of what is acceptable and desirable,” says Jeffrey Mann, research vice president at Gartner. “If organizations have not defined a public Web participation policy, they should do so as quickly as possible.”

Based on Garnter’s research, they have narrowed down the four different ways that companies are using Twitter today: direct, indirect, internal, and signaling. Here’s what those mean:

Read article…

Earlier this week a woman at an event I participated in asked a great question: How do you optimize your site for all the queries that are relevant to your business?

Typical search engine optimization focuses on high-traffic, high-relevance keywords. This is important, but as the woman’s question hints, it can’t be the only thing your business is focused on.

In addition to high-traffic, high-relevance keywords, most businesses have a long tail of relevant searches that get less traffic.

For example, if you’re a Boston-based web design agency, you might focus on a high-traffic keyword phrase like “Boston Web Design.” But there are hundreds of other lower-traffic queries that you also want to rank for: “Boston area web design”, “Boston area web site design”, “Massachusetts web site design” and on and on.

Few of a business’ hundreds of variant queries get much traffic on their own, yet in aggregate, they account for an enormous amount of potential search traffic.

How much? At HubSpot, over 95% of our search traffic in the last month came from keywords that are not one of our top-10 referring keywords. In other words, without the long-tail search results, we would be receiving a fraction of the search traffic we’re currently getting.

So, back to the woman’s question: How do you optimize for low-frequency queries? Even the smallest businesses have thousands of relevant low-traffic search queries, so how can you possibly optimize for them all?

The answer is simple: Create lots of keyword-rich content.

Why? Think of search as a lottery with lots of drawings. If you buy one ticket, you have one chance to win. If you buy lots of tickets, you have lots of chances to win.

In the SEO lottery, content is you ticket.

If you have a site with five pages and no blog, you have five chances to rank in search engines. If you have a site with 100 and pages and a blog with hundreds of posts, you have hundreds of chances to rank. Many of the keywords you’ll rank for will get you one or two visits a month, but in the aggregate — as we’ve seen at HubSpot — those long tail search querries will account for far more traffic than the high-traffic queries.

What do you think? How much of your search traffic comes from long-tail keywords? Could you increase this number with more content?

Looking to improve your blog writing? Today Shannon Paul ( @shannonpaul) from Very Official Blog gives her very official tips on the topic.

I love blogs. Before I started blogging seriously, I read a lot of other blogs and was very engaged as a reader. I commented a lot and began honing my ability to craft a statement quickly in response the ideas presented in the post. I’m still very engaged with other blogs in this way. However, if I’m being totally honest, most blogs I encounter are downright unreadable.

Now, I’m not going to run down the usual list of rules and grammar, but rather a list of things I think make me a decent writer.

1. Stop Trying to Sound Intelligent

You already are smart so stop trying to sound smart. So many people craft elaborate sentences with bigger words than they would ever use in conversation. If you have to use a lot of flower language, jargon or adjectives, you’re trying too hard. Choose your big words wisely. Blogs are not publications, they are conversations. Good writing is simple, but it’s hardly simple to write simply. Unlike speech and other forms of non-verbal communication, writing is a wholly unnatural activity unnecessary to human development or evolution. Give yourself a break and know that good writing is a process that must be practiced to be mastered.

2. Give yourself permission to write garbage

Do what you need to do to get your thoughts out — lead with some insipid quote from Albert Einstein, use a definition or some other tired cliche to get the words flowing and then take great pleasure in hitting delete or crossing it out when the time is right. Learn to let go…

3. Be a Ruthless Editor

Even the best ideas don’t always serve the overarching goal of the piece — get it out of there and save it for later if it’s really that good. Nine times out of ten, words like that and which can be crossed out without altering the meaning of the sentence one bit. By hacking away the extra, you’re making it much easier on the reader. Stop thinking of writing as putting words down on a page… writing is editing.

4. Use MIGHTY verbs

My journalism teacher would scream and writhe in agony in the classroom when we used what he called, “plankton verbs”, also known as “bottom-of-the-food-chain verbs”. Plankton verbs include: is, was, are and were. He would go so far as to restrict us from ever using these in an article and I don’t recommend you take such drastic measures when you’re writing, but it’s definitely something to keep in mind. Writing that lacks strong verbs gets boring fast.

5. Read aloud before posting

Another easy trick is to read what you write out loud. Things may seem self-explanatory in our head, but these are your words. If you find yourself stumbling over the words you just wrote, chances are you’re demanding too much work from your readers. Pare your sentences down.

6. Do what works for you

Everyone has his or her own process. I know a lot has been written about writing killer headlines and choosing keywords, but good content is at the soul of any great blog. Killer headlines may get the click, but good content will get people to stay awhile and maybe even choose to come back without the assistance of future keyword shenanigans.

You signed up for Twitter, added a short bio, uploaded an avatar and are Tweeting regularly, but still nobody’s following you.

Now what?

The way most Twitter users (especially new ones) build a base of Twitter followers is by following people themselves. Lots of people follow-back people who follow them, so by going out and following people you should be able to accumulate a lot of followers.

I recently spent some time using data from Twitter Grader to test this assumption. I broke up the database into “buckets” of users based on how many users they’re following. If you’re following around 100 users, you’re in the 100-user bucket, if you’re following close to 1000 users, you’re in that bucket.

The graph below shows the number of users in each bucket (the red line) and the average number of followers the users in each bucket have (the blue line).

The red line indicates that most users aren’t following a ton of people, which is expected given that most users aren’t Twitter-addicts. The blue line, however, tells a more interesting story: People who follow lots of people tend to have lots of followers themselves.

Let’s look at little closer at the follow-back assumption. The graph below shows the distribution of Twitter users at each following to follower ratio.

We see that most users have close to a 1:1 ratio of following to followers, meaning that many users follow-back those that follow them.

So does that mean you should go nuts and follow tons and tons of people? To answer that question, let’s look at how your following/follower ratio is related to the number of people that follow you.

The graph below shows the average number of followers of users based on their ratio. A ratio of 0.5 means that you follow half the number of people that are following you, and a ratio of 2 means you follow twice as many people as are following you.

This shows that users with a low following to follower ratio tend to have a high number of followers. That means that if your goal is to build a Twitter account with lots of followers, and we assume these factors have some sort of causal relationship, you should try to keep your ratio near or under 1 (following the same number of people as follow you or less).

Conclusion

The data shows that the best way to build a robust Twitter account is via a stepped approach. Follow a few people (a few of them will follow you back), then follow a few more. Don’t go crazy following thousands of people. Do it slowly and build up your followers gradually.

By Jules Rosen

In the tough times of increasing competition and plummeting profits, it is very important to choose your business’ promotional strategy - it should be unique, attractive, low budgeted and high on returns. It seems to be a difficult task to carry out but a little bit of planning and research can help you take the right marketing decision. Let us consider promotional products which can be given away over the internet. These can be created to suit your marketing budgets and goals at a low cost and yet carry an exceptional value for your prospective client. Simple ways can be used creatively to your benefit; you just need to be innovative and outstanding.

Promote the company’s website - while you are trying to use promo products for marketing your business, make sure you include your company’s contact details including the website address on the product.

Identify promotional items which fit into your niche - The promo products that your choose to offer your customers should be associated to the business your are into. For an example, if you are selling sunglasses, you can offer cases with your company logo and relevant address details on it. If you are into selling medicines online, an ideal giveaway could be pill organizer with your company name and website address on it.

Read article…

By now you’ve most likely joined Twitter (and if you haven’t, you need to, pronto!). Twitter is not only a great place for businesses and marketers, but it’s also a great place to spruce up your writing skills.

Yes. You read that correctly.

Twitter can make you a better writer. Here’s how.

Twitter forces you to be concise

If you’ve ever used Twitter, you know that you have 140 characters to say whatever you want to say. Now keep in mind, I didn’t say 140 words—or even 140 letters—I said 140 characters.

That’s not a lot of room. Letters, numbers, symbols, punctuation and spaces all count as characters on Twitter.

What all of this means is, you have to be concise. You have to know exactly what you want to say, and say it in as few words as possible.

Many writers, however, are “wordy” and often have long, drawn out descriptions and sentences, so it can be pretty difficult to create a message that’s only 140 characters.

Here’s where Twitter comes in again.

Twitter forces you to exercise your vocabulary

Since you only have 140 characters to get your message across, you’re forced to dust off your dictionary and thesaurus and find new words to use—Words that are shorter, words that are more descriptive, and words that get the job done in 140 characters or less.

Crafting a message for Twitter requires you to “pump up” your verbs (replacing adverbs and adjectives with them), and discover a better, clearer and more concise way to say what you want to say.

Now most people won’t hit 140 characters right away. No, they’ll end up with 160 or 148 characters to start out with (Twitter tells you how many characters you need to remove to make your message fit).

This is the final way that Twitter makes you a better writer.

Twitter forces you to improve your editing skills

Every writer needs to be able to edit their work. And by using Twitter, you can really hone your editing skills and make them top-notch.

It’s almost like playing a game; trying to write a 140-character message and still get your point across in a way that inspires your followers to take action, to click on your link or to “retweet” your post.

I like to think of it as a brainteaser, forcing me to think hard and dig deep down into my vocabulary to find a way to shorten my message.

I’ve been using Twitter since January, and my writing skills have not only improved, but I’ve been writing better copy as well.

Yet another reason you should be using Twitter. Not that you needed one.

About the Author: Jennifer Blanchard is a creative and effective copywriter. Her blog, Procrastinating Writers, offers writing advice, motivation and inspiration for writers who procrastinate.

The unique selling proposition (USP) is one of the cornerstones of marketing. There has to be a reason people do business with you and not someone else – a winning difference that sets you apart and makes you the only real choice.

Traditional marketing advice will have you lock yourself in a cave for weeks listing all of the features of your business, translating them into benefits, then somehow finding that one compelling point that will differentiate you from everyone else you could possibly compete with.

There’s nothing wrong with this approach if it works for you. But if it doesn’t, try throwing it out the window and doing it the cheap and easy way instead.

If you’re not trying to launch FedEx, you don’t need a USP as robust as FedEx’s. Try each of these five-minute exercises and see if it doesn’t shake loose a USP that will work for your site.

Remember that information consumers don’t go to just one blog, subscribe to just one site, or buy just one product. They want anything and everything about the topic they love.

That means your USP doesn’t have to beat everyone else out. It just has to play nicely with the other offerings in your group.

The Crossroads USP

To create a crossroads USP, take two seemingly unrelated ideas and bring them together.

The hit movie Speed was famously pitched as “Die Hard on a bus.” Clueless is Jane Austen’s Emma set in 1995 Beverly Hills.

You can create a crossroads USP by taking something well-known and presenting it to a new audience. Maybe you’ll offer Yoga for Stockbrokers, or Business Blogging for Veterinarians.

Copyblogger is a crossroads blog, showing how to use direct response techniques to create better, more compelling blog content. And as the site and the world around us evolve, we’re finding ourselves at a new crossroads, between internet marketing and social media.

You’re looking for two roads that are different enough that you create some energy, but not so different that you can’t realistically bring the roads together. The Complete Guide to Flower Arrangement for NFL Players probably won’t find the audience you’re hoping for.

The Metaphor USP

Sometimes you can find an overarching metaphor that will snap everything into place.

For example, Duct Tape Marketing offers something you can find in lots of places—marketing advice for small businesses.

But that “duct tape” metaphor tells you a lot. It tells you the approach is practical, effective, and not terribly fancy. It probably skews slightly toward men, but not exclusively. It can be used in lots of different ways. And it doesn’t take itself too seriously.

No one’s ever going to confuse Duct Tape Marketing with a site called Green Planet Marketing or Mama Bear Marketing. Each creates its own USP just by using a metaphor to define the market, the approach, and the angle.

The Persona-Driven USP

If all else fails and you can manage to be reasonably interesting, your USP can simply be . . . you.

As Scott Stratten recently posted on Twitter, “If you are your authentic self in your business, you have no competition.”

Seth Godin, Donald Trump, Martha Stewart, Tony Robbins, Cal Worthington (and his dog Spot), Frank Kern and Gary Vaynerchuk have all created persona-driven brands. They started with something fairly ordinary (business advice, housekeeping tips) and made it extraordinary through the force of their personality, their passion and their individual expression.

To some degree, this is limiting. The business can’t ever get any bigger than you are. But each of those people has learned to partner and delegate in order to create companies that go far beyond a single individual. (You don’t really think Martha Stewart plants all those tulips herself, do you?)

If you’re going to create a persona-driven USP, you’ll need to keep showing up. It’s your job to stand front and center and say something interesting. You’ll provide the voice and the flavor for the site.

But don’t think you have to have a “shock jock” personality for the persona-driven USP to work for you. Chris Garrett and Darren Rowse are both soft-spoken, helpful gentlemen who have created wonderfully successful businesses by focusing on what they cared most about and how they could help others. They used their own experience as a filter for their audiences, with powerful results.

Why you?

At the end of the day, the only reason you need a USP at all is to answer that question. Why you?

Why should anyone read your blog? Why should anyone buy your product or retain your services? What do you have to offer that makes it worth anyone’s time and/or money?

It can be a painful question, but it doesn’t have to be one that ties you in knots for weeks on end. Keep it simple, and keep moving forward. The strongest USP on earth won’t help you if you don’t back it up with all the other actions that create a successful business.

About the Author: Sonia Simone is Senior Editor of Copyblogger and the founder of Remarkable Communication.