We’ve all heard about Twitter, but as business owners who haven’t adopted this tool for increasing traffic to their website here is some good news.

Twitter is one of the fastest growing websites in the world. As of November 2009 Twitter is now one of the top 50 sites on the internet.

One of the hottest use cases for Twitter, as you well know, is businesses communicating with their customers or potential customers. CNET News

So what’s my point? Twitter is a great way to drive traffic to your website. Without going into the specifics of how to accomplish this, I would like to introduce those Twitter users to a new service that helps them get more followers. This service is TweetLarge. TweetLarge is a Twitter service that will send you 1000 follower’s for free. With more followers, your company’s reputation increases thereby helping to gain your company additional notoriety.

And the best part, it will take less than 10 minutes to implement.

Go to TweetLarge.com and follow the 3 easy steps, and you too can have 1000 new followers for FREE.

And for those of you wondering why I haven’t been posting fresh ideas for your business marketing, my time over the past month has been helping a group of contractors network together to gain new business for the New Year. That is the bad news, the good news is my goal is to post 60 new articles over the next 60 days. So check back often to see how I’m doing and feel free to leave comments on the information I provide to help your business survive in these tough economic times.

The Lists feature of Twitter is an excellent way of organizing your friends and followers, and we have integrated the building and maintenance of lists into SocialOomph to give you even more power and convenience.
For Free and Professional Users

When you vet your new followers, you can also select the Twitter list to which a follower must be added for each follower that you approve. This functionality is only available if you’ve turned on new follower vetting on your Twitter account entry.

For Professional Users Only

As you probably know, with Friend Finder you can find potential new friends who tweet about keywords of your choice.

With our Twitter Lists integration, you can instruct the system to add new friends (after they’ve been approved) to a list of your choice.

You can connect a Twitter list to one specific keyword, or to several keywords.

For example, you could define a keyword of “@yourusername” (which will find people who mention you) and create a private list called “Mentioned Me”, which you connect to that keyword. Friend Finder will then add (after approval) the people who mention you to your Mentioned Me list.

We will maintain the list for you and automatically rotate the oldest entries out when the list reaches its maximum size of 500 Twitter users. In other words, your list will always contain the latest 500 (or less) friends that were found and approved by Friend Finder.

Nothing prevents you from manually adding Twitter users to the same lists in your Twitter web interface. Our system will not touch those entries in the list when the list reaches its maximum size. We rotate out only entries that were added to the list by Friend Finder.

As always, this Professional feature is included in the low monthly subscription fee.

Thank You For Using SocialOomph

Best Regards,

Dewald Pretorius
http://www.socialoomph.com

There are many articles online that will explain how to setup an account and the importance of Twitter for generating business for your company. Many are hesitant to join in the conversation because they feel Twitter is spammy or takes too much time.

Here’s a tool that can help build a following for your Twitter account, automatically. How, by automatically following people with the same interests or occupations. The tool is called…

Twittgeek -” Automatically Follow Geeks Like You”

By simply creating a search based on a term specific to your industry or location, Twittgeek will search Twitter and automatically follow those people or companies that it found for you.

The importance of a tool like Twittgeek for anyone just starting out with Twitter, is you can have targeted followers for your company. Similar to back links with websites, you wouldn’t want to have a Shoe store linked to your website if your main business was home remodeling. So too with Twitter, you will get the most out of Twitter when you target your audience. Note: The very nature of Twitter allows anyone to follow anyone, will not preclude having anyone from following you.

Having a target audience will improve your authority within your industry.

I hope this helps in getting your company noticed online. It’s one of the many free resources available to leverage technology to promote your company.

Whether you have a website or not. You are on the internet! Homeowners are increasingly turning to the internet for advice and reviews. Websites like Yelp, Angie’s List, Merchant Circle, Facebook and Twitter have become rich sources of information.

I don’t know about you, but when was the last time you flipped open the yellow pages? For me, unless I have seen of, or heard of, a particular company in my area, it is rare for me to get a number from the book.

Most consumers these days without the advice of family and friends, turn towards the internet as their primary source for research.

Which brings me back to the websites like Yelp and the others. These websites have one thing in common, they provide consumer reviews for restaurants, companies and service providers.

The chances are your construction company has a listing and you may have reviews.

Without getting into a lot of techie mumbo jumbo, you need to take the following 5 Simple Steps. In future articles, I will explain for you the merits of each service and how best to position your company.

1. Get a Gmail Account
   Gmail is a web based email service that you can sign up for free! With a Gmail account you will have access to
   • Google’s Local Business Center – Local Directory and Map functions for local searches
   • Analytics – Provides valuable information on your website’s traffic
   • and more
2. Take Charge of Your Company’s Listing on YelpYelp is rapidly becoming the premier source for user reviews and business listings on the internet.With a Yelp Business Owner’s Account, you can upload photos and logos, highlight featured services that your company provides and other useful information for your clients.A powerful feature for you, the business owner, is you can see how many times potential customers are viewing your listing.
3. MerchantCircle Provides a free listing for business owners. Here you can edit your business listing to show hours of operation, highlight services and offer coupon specials.
4. InsiderPages Simply put, another business directory with user reviews. But what I really like about this service is you can solicit, even bribe your customers into giving you a review. Unlike most review/directory sites like Yelp, who frowns on solicited reviews. InsiderPages encourages it!
5. Capture Your Twitter Username Twitter has had explosive growth even to the point that advertisers poke fun at the cliche type messages people post (called Tweets.) Well I’m not going to tell you to start Tweeting your diet. I will tell you, Twitter has an important business aspect which I will delve into in a future post. Realize too, companies like Milwaukee Tool, Porter Cable, Greenlee and others all have Twitter accounts. The important thing right now is to at least capture your username before you lose it forever.

So there you have it. 5 Simple Steps to promote your business on the internet.

Be sure to sign up for our updates in the top right hand corner of our website. We will be actively posting similar articles to help you gain more customers. In addition to the articles, we are in the process of creating step by step videos to walk you through the steps we recommend.

The last thing I want to do is overwhelm you in the techie mumbo jumbo. You will be able to accomplish these steps and many more without the need to spend the Big Bucks to have someone else do it for you. In the end, for a little bit of time and effort, you to can be well on your way to having more customers and money in your pocket.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Vogel, founder of HomeBuildR, helps Residential Contractors and Small Business Owners attract more clients. Be sure to sign up for email updates and lots of free tools for your business.

NOTE: Are you looking for fresh content for your ezine or website? Feel free to reprint this article as long as it’s kept intact and unaltered (including the “about the author” info at the end), and you send a copy of your reprint or link to david@homebuildr.net