Today, I’d like to introduce you to our guest author, Harris Fellman. Harris recently launched CoupDeTwitter – a course on how to properly get started with twitter, get lots of followers, and turn those followers into cash.

He is by no means a Social Media Purist, but still he teaches what he considers the “right way” to interact on Twitter & other Social Media platforms (hint: it ain’t by spamming people your offers). Harris has a number of years of success in the internet marketing realm and I feel very honored to have him as a guest author today.

With that … here’s Harris’ blog post entitled “How to Take Over Twitter”:

It’s everywhere. From blogs to newspapers to books at Barnes and Noble. And it’s loud. Tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet.

It’s Twitter. And whether you like it or not (yet) it’s going to be around in some form or another for a long time I suspect. Might as well get used to it, right?

A couple of months ago I was in the same boat many of you might be in right now, wondering whether all this Twitter madness was of any use to me at all or whether it was just a bunch of noise, literally. But I started to hear a lot of Twitter related stories and talked to people that I personally know who were using it in ways that I hadn’t considered before.

And the lightbulb finally went off for me. There was some serious power in Twitter! People were not only using Twitter to make connections and network with others, they were making money too. Some of them making LOTS of it as I came to find out.

The biggest thing that stood out for me is this…

From a marketing perspective, Twitter = Listbuilding. Plain and simple. Proper listbuilding is all about building a list AND building relationships with the people on that list. And in many cases the people I was talking to confided in me that their Twitter contacts were more responsive than even their e-mail lists were. As a long time email marketer, I was pretty shocked. But I started doing research and I discovered several truths that I want to share with you.

There’s a right way and a wrong way to go about using Twitter, and some rules of thumb to keep in mind along the way. But there are several crucial steps you’ll want to take note of.
Here’s how this works:

1. Get followers. Sounds simple right? But there’s a lot of stuff out there that will make you think you can just automate the process and be done with it. BEWARE, Twitter is watching. If you do it wrong, you’re sunk. Account Suspended. Tweet no more.

2. Build a relationship with your followers. Yes, that’s right, you’re going to need to start talking with your followers! You want to treat them like you would anyone you might meet at any other social gathering, stipulating that you’re not at a professional wrestling event and everyone is already yelling at one another. <G>

3. Get them Clicking & ReTweeting. Once you build that relationship with them you want to encourage (gently) them to start clicking links you provide with items of interest and most of all to get them Retweeting your posts. Why? Because the *real* power of Twitter is NOT in your own list of followers. Nope. The real power is in the power of the exponent. If you give things of value to the Twitterverse, the Twitterverse will return the favor… Tenfold.

4. Last but not least. You want to make money right? Of course you do. Once you’ve completed steps one through three, there are a ton of ways that you can start to monetize your followers…their followers and their followers followers. But also beware: Twitter spam is on the rise and people are becoming wary of anyone who just jumps into the pool and starts shouting Marco Polo at the top of their lungs. You have to be very careful to craft your Tweets so that people are still getting maximum value from you.

4 seemingly simple steps, and they’re not rocket science, but they do take some finesse and time to do properly. If you’d like to learn more about how to properly implement these 4 steps, I welcome you to join me and my Coup De Twitter system. It will teach you how to do Twitter the RIGHT way as well as 7 easy ways to make money with it plus a handful of advanced tactics as well. Please visit Coup de Twitter to watch a free 35 minute video that I have prepared for you (no opt-in required).

Thanks for reading – if you liked this article, let me know on Twitter – my ID there is @harrisfellman.

Harris Fellman
CoupDeTwitter.com

http://bit.ly/h7Cns

Why does transparency matter? You may think that people are more likely to buy from you if they don’t know about your association with a certain company. In fact, research has shown that a certain group of consumers will not buy using your link no matter how much value you provide to them. But it has also been proven that disclosing your associations on your blog is the best way to go. It’s always easy to slap a piece of content together and use cloaking services to hide your track. But that’s really insulting your audience’s intelligence. Today’s readers are more sophisticated when it comes to web technologies, and they can guess what you are doing and why you are doing it. Let’s not forget that not disclosing your associations could always leave you open to legal liability.

Many affiliate programs have also started to introduce transparency rules to cover their legal liabilities. A lot of affiliate marketers are targeting Twitter to make money online. These folks use services such as bit.ly to shorten their URLs. That hasn’t gone down well with tweeters and with affiliate program managers. A lot of companies now require their affiliates to use the full affiliate URL when possible. Considering that you get only 140 characters on Twitter, it’s going to be difficult to follow that rule. But since a lot of people are spamming Twitter with all kinds of affiliate offers, this seems to be the right decision.

So should you disclose your affiliate links? Yes. But not everyone does it the same way. You can always use “(aff)” next to your affiliate links. That’s the ultimate disclosure. You can also just have a page on your website to discuss your associations. What you don’t want to do is leave anything to chance. By explaining to your readers why you are doing what you are doing, and why you won’t let your associations with affiliate programs to skew your reviews/content. There will be a few skeptical people who won’t trust anything you’ll say. But your job is to earn the trust of your other readers. You can’t make everyone happy. But by not disclosing your links, you raise your risks considerably higher. Not good for doing business on a long-term if you ask me.

a) Windows toaster:
The windows toaster looks nice, but sometimes it just won’t make toast, it
either comes out burnt or raw, or it stops half way through. also, you
have to unplug the toaster, plug it back in again, and wait 5 minutes each
time you want to try and make some toast. For every loaf of bread you buy,
you are forced to buy a license for a new toaster to go with it, and you will
get sued if you let someone else have some of your toast.

b) MAC toaster
The MAC toaster has no settings or controls and it looks very stylish, but
will only accept proprietary size bread which can only be bought from
Apple main dealers at 10 times the price of regular bread. If it breaks
you will have to ship it to a licensed repair shop for service. The toast is
fine except that the size of the bread is so odd, you can’t actually eat
the toast it produces, although it does look good.

c) Linux toaster.
The linux toaster looks awful, it has wires crimped together hanging out
of it, and pieces grafted from other toasters. the first time you make
toast with it it burns it, the next time its raw, but after you read the
man pages and invoke the command line, toast -verbose -breadsize 50132
-eject -o z3321 > /dev/toast | more, and it makes perfect toast forever
and never breaks.