Twitter, when originally started was basically considered as a social networking site. Twitter is very popular for its vast base of subscribers spread all across the globe. Things have changed in the recent past & people are now considering twitter as a very powerful medium of social marketing.

To begin earning with twitter you should follow step by step approach. Remember one thing twitter is not for you if you are looking for an opportunity to get rich over night.

The first step to start is to build a good number of followers. Here popular misconception is that you should have very huge number of followers to earn maximum. This is although not completely wrong but not completely true also.

The number of followers is one of the factors that determine your earning potential but the most important test your followers should pass is that they should be interested in what you are promoting. Suppose you are promoting a product which is completely unrelated to what your followers are looking for they would not bother to even click your links. To be most effective your followers should share the same interest with you or should be from the same niche which you are promoting. Having thousands of followers without any common interest would hardly pay.

Once you have built up the list of followers now you should build a solid confidence & trust in the minds of your followers. You can share useful information that is really a value addition for them. It is not always prudent to bombard your followers with offers & other useless stuff. People usually would not like to receive spam & they would simply un follow you.

You can recommend some products which you have already tried & tested. Good product recommendation would create a good impression about you in their minds & people would love to read your tweets & in fact they would wait eagerly for your tweets. Product recommendations could earn you a good amount of money if you are promoting the product as an affiliate.

Promoting your own product would also be profitable if the product is really very good & the customers see a great value for money. If you have built a good relation with your followers then you would get your sales doubled or even tripled due to the social viral nature of twitter. People tend to recommend good things to their followers & if they like your product they would recommend the same to their friends & followers. There is no limit to how much you would earn with the word of the mouth publicity.

In summary I would like to say that you should use the social networking tools like twitter very carefully & responsibly & should not directly jump to promote something. Imagine yourself in the place of your followers. Would you like to receive promotions & offers from a person whom you hardly know or whom you don’t know at all. On the other hand you would definitely give a try to a product which your one of friend recommended. You should remember that you are dealing with human beings & should respect their emotions. The main reason why social marketing is popular is the human touch to it & you should use it in a proper way.

This article from the Affiliate Marketing Guide is going to take you through the importance of keywords, and how to develop a strategy that will optimise everything you do to ensure that you are attracting as much free traffic from the search engines as possible.

Let me say first of all, that, starting out the whole concept around keywords seems like a black science – at least that is what it seemed to me! However, once you get it clear in your head then it is simply a matter of following a process!

Very simply put, keywords are those words or phrases (also known as long tail keywords) that people type into search engines on the internet to find some answers to questions they have. The challenge is to find those keywords that you are going to focus on to get yourself on the first page of the search engines, be it Google, Yahoo or Bing, which is where you want to be.

So, what are the steps to finding the right keywords, and once found, what do you do next?

1. Find keywords. One truism I am sharing with you on this – there is no substitute for continuous digging and hard work to determine your keywords. You simply have to put the time and effort into finding the right keywords for you. There are tools that can help you enormously in this exercise. For example, Google Keyword Tool is a fantastic resource and it is free! This will help you find out how many searches are made for those keywords on a monthly basis which helps you determine how big the market is for those words or phrases. But, be warned, the more popular a keyword is, the more competition you will face to get ranking on the search engines. There are other tools that can help you dig deeper and get a better understand of the competitiveness or otherwise of these keywords. Tools like Wordtracker or Market Samurai, and there are others, are really good for this type of work, but you will have to pay for them. You can get them on a free weekly trial to have a look at to see which you like best, but after that you will be paying. This is just grunt work that has to be done and there is no quick solution. However, done properly and it is giving you a great foundation for your business.
2. Select your keywords. Once you have completed this exercise then select, say, the first 10 keywords that you are going to work on. The reason I say 10 is that you want to have a number that you are working on simultaneously so that you are driving traffic to your site, or blog, from as many different places as you can. Also, 10 is a relatively comfortable number to do a really good job on before you move on to the next batch. You will end up with a long list of keywords, but tackle them in blocks of 10 to make it manageable.
3. Develop a strategy. Once you have your list you now need to have a clear strategy and plan as to how you are going to approach this part of your business. You will hear me say this time and time again in the Affiliate Marketing Guide that maximising the opportunity that using the correct keywords offers, is a critical element in the establishment and growth of your business. So, what should be included in your strategy? The first and, to me, the easiest approach to this is to ask – how am I going to communicate with my audience? If the answer is, for example, my website, my blog, articles, videos, social media, then I must have a clear strategy for each of those and they must interlink. So, how am I going to integrate all these routes to market into one clear plan? The answer to that question will give you the strategy that is right for you.

That’s it for Part 4 of the Affiliate Marketing Guide. I am writing these articles in separate parts with 3 clear action steps in each article to enable you to build your business brick by brick rather than giving it to you all in one document, that is more likely to result in overwhelm!