The following is a Guest post by Onna Holland. Onna is a freebie trader, blogger and Stay at home mom.  She writes fot the blog www.makingmoneyquick.net/blog and www.toddlercraft.net and is an active trader on www.calistyle.com

Twitter is a social media utility that is used by people to keep in touch, meet new people interested in the same topics, and attract readers to your blog, website, or topic of choice.  Twitter is part IM, Part facebook in concept. If you know facebook and how it allows updates to all your friends, then you will have a general idea of how it works.  On twitter instead of friends, they are called followers.  When somebody has a Twitter Account, they can use 140 characters to send a message either directly to someone or to broadcast it to all those who are following them.

There are many ways to gain followers, one way is to search for keywords that are related to your area of interest.  For example in twitter you can search for freebie trading, making money online, affiliate marketing etc.  Then you can follow those individuals and most of the time those you follow will follow you back.  As you respond to others in twitter and send your own messages your list of followers will grow.

For Freebie Trading, Twitter can be utilized in many ways.  One way is to broadcast to your followers the earnings you are making. I have personally had some luck with getting referrals this way.  People see the profit you are making and will naturally ask you how you made it.  It's a great way to get new referrals that want to make money online.  Another way to utilize it is to drive traffic to your blog or website that you use to train your referrals.  You can share links to your updates on your blog and get new referrals that way.

I have also found twitter a great way to learn about things I am interested in like affiliate marketingblogging, search engine optimization and more.

Twitter is free to sign up and use.  It is also very easy.  Just go to Twitter.com and pick a user name.

When picking your user name think about what you are going to be using twitter for.  Are you going to want to brand yourself, your name or do you want your username to reflect your niche-or interest.  For me I used @freebietrader, because I use it a lot for my freebie trading business.  Take some time to think about it before you sign up as it will be how people start to recognize you on twitter.  The way twitter works, once you pick a user name, and get signed up you are ready to start tweeting  (tweeting is what messages are called on twitter.  When you send someone a message you send them a tweet)!  I would  suggest filling out your profile on twitter and adding any blog or website you have.

The first thing I would suggest doing once you sign up, is to go to the search box on your twitter page and search a term that you would be interested in tweeting about.  This will show you various tweets from different people.

Click on one that looks interesting and their profile will come up (click their user name in the tweet).  You can then click follow and you will now see their tweets on your twitter home page as they send them out.  Many people will follow you back if you follow them.  If you find someone interesting you are following, you can also click on their profile page and then click under the number of followers and following and you can see those people who follow them or they follow.  You might like to follow some of those people. Make sure not to follow more then 100 people a day- twitter doesn't like that.

To broadcast a message just click in your What are you doing box and type your message (must be under 140 characters) and click update. When sending messages make sure you are not just posting about your website or niche.  Respond to other's tweets and add to the conversation.  To send a message to someone specific, publicly (so that others can see the message) you put an @ in front of their user name, for example @freebietrader.  To send a private message (direct message) you put a d in front of the user's name, for example d freebietrader.

If you have questions leave them in the comments below and I will try to address them in a future post.

Coming soon – a review of some different clients to use with twitter.

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About the Author Leslie Samuel


Leslie Samuel a business coach for high-performing entrepreneurs. As the host of the Leslie Samuel Show, he teaches how to build an online business. "Changing the world one post at a time” is the mission he strives towards. As a former university professor, he has a passion for education. He's the founder of Interactive Biology, a blog and YouTube channel dedicated to making biology fun for students and teachers. As the head of training for the Social Media Marketing Society, he helps social media marketers get the training they need to stay on the leading edge of social media.

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