What Do I Tweet about on Twitter to attract Clients and partners?
Twitter is simply a micro blogging service. What does that
mean? It means that you write short updates (140 characters
maximum) called “tweets” and send them out to your
followers. And it is a marketer’s dream come true – it’s an
easy way to stay in front of your target market and
showcase your authority at no charge!

According to Mashable.com, a leading authority on social
media, there are currently over 12 million users on
Twitter. Another resource called istrategylabs.com reports
that 46% of Twitter users are college grads, and another
17% have post graduate degrees. Furthermore, 47% are
between age 18 and 34, and another 31% are between 35 and
49. Males and females are evenly ranked, with women
accounting for 53% of users and men 47%. If your target
market falls within these demographics, actively
participating on Twitter is probably worth your while.

The myth around Twitter is that Twitter users (called
tweeple or tweeps) tweet about useless information such as
what kind of coffee they had with breakfast. Yes, some of
that exists and it is actually important as you’ll see
below, but once you understand the power of connecting on
Twitter, you may become a Twitter convert, just like me.

So, if you’re on Twitter or considering starting, the
question becomes, “what do I tweet about that will make
this a useful tool for me?” Here are some categories you
can consider for your tweets. There are others but these
will get you started:

Industry Tips

This is a big one. You are on Twitter to showcase your
expertise, so industry tips act as your credibility
builders. Here’s how to do it: Create a list of high value
tips (remember – no more than 140 characters long) and send
one or two out every day. If you don’t want to have to
manually do this yourself every day, consider a free tool
called TweetLater.com to set up your tweets in advance. If
your tweets are really good, others will send them out to
their lists as well. This is called a “re-tweet,” and it’s
a super way to quickly build your list of targeted followers.

Here is one of my recent tweets that had a great response:

Connect Others: Be willing to connect others even if it has
nothing to do with your business. What goes around, comes
around.

About Your Business

Use this category sparingly. In other words, if you use
Twitter as a place to advertise your products and services
too much, people will stop following you. This is not what
Twitter is about. It is really about raising awareness of
you and your business and impacting others. Use the 80/20
rule here. For every eight tweets about things other than
your business, you can post two things about your business.

Here is an example:

Hey Columbus: I’ll be on Fox tomorrow at 7:45 where you can
see me interviewed about my new book, Flourish!

Re-Tweets

When someone re-tweets you, they are giving you the highest
compliment you can get on Twitter! It means that the person
who re-tweeted you thinks that what you said is worth
sharing with their own list of followers. This is like
having someone ask you to a meeting so they can introduce
you their entire list of contacts. When you get a re-tweet,
send them a short tweet thanking them! Re-tweet others who
are tweeting things that you agree with or want your
followers to read.

If you are not familiar with Twitter, the example below
probably won’t make a lot of sense because of all of the
abbreviations, but they are necessary given that you only
have 140 characters. Abbreviations are outside the scope of
this article, but just know that it’s really not as scary
as it looks!

RT @getgreatcopy: New blog post: The Sixth Habit of Highly
Effective Communicators http://bit.ly/ 175XGS Gr8 stuff Jan,
as usual.

Quotes

Tweeps seem to love quotes. If you are also a fan of
quotes, compile a list and send one or two out every day.
Again, you can use tweetlater.com to set these up in
advance so you don’t have to manually enter them every day.
Simply set up these tweets for a month and then watch your
re-tweets happen!

Here’s an example of one that I recently posted:

“The pursuit of pleasure must be the goal of every rational
person.” Voltaire

Invitations

Invite tweeps to your free events. No-cost events like
teleseminars are great to tweet about because people love
to share high-value, low-cost information with their lists.
When you offer something without a cost – a workshop,
teleseminar or report, your tweets about it are likely to
get re-tweeted, which provides you with greater exposure to
your target market.

Here’s an example of one of my recent posts:

How 2 write your book in a weekend – free telesemimar w/
@donnakozik. http://bit.ly/ 127GtU

Personal

Include some personal things that are going on with your
life. What you choose to include is entirely up to you;
however, be sure to be relatable. You don’t have to share
your deepest inner thoughts or too much detail about your
family, but sharing something about what you did over the
weekend makes you more relatatable. Remember, Twitter is
about connecting with people. Other people on Twitter want
to connect with people – not stale businesses. People often
connect on a personal level over food, pets or hobbies.
This is why these seemingly unimportant tweets are actually
very fruitful. These are pretty safe personal topics.
General things about kids are another hot topic under this
category. Just be aware that anything you say is out there
for the world to read.

Here’s an example I tweeted recently:

Interesting pop culture moment: Told a story to my sister,
who lives in Vietnam & realized she doesn’t know who Sara
Jessica Parker is!

As you can see, Twitter is simply an online forum for
connecting with others in 140 characters or less. Big and
small brands are using Twitter to connect and impact their
target markets and locate joint ventures. Can you, too?

Visit KickInTheButt.com to learn more about Succeeding online

Black Hat, White Hat and Big G
By Peter Adamson (c) 2009

I read a lot of articles and postings regarding Internet
marketing, SEO and the like. One frequently recurring theme is
the distinction between black hat, grey hat and white hat
methods. Interlaced with the use and abuse of these terms is the
notion of what is “ethical” and what is not. It seems to be
generally assumed that anything black hat is somehow unethical.
More disconcerting yet, anything that Google frowns upon is
often deemed unethical as well. I would like to clear the air
about these terms which seem to mean all things to all men.

First of all, let’s put to one side for a moment the recently
coined terms which euphemistically refer to SEO techniques under
hats of various colors. These are not dictionary terms, and
anyone can make them mean whatever they want. However, the words
“ethical” and “unethical” have very strict meanings, have
had for generations and their misuse can call into question the
personal integrity of individuals. So what does ethical mean
anyway? According to dictionary.com (http://dictionary.com/):

1. pertaining to or dealing with morals or the principles of
morality; pertaining to right and wrong in conduct.

2. being in accordance with the rules or standards for right
conduct or practice, esp. the standards of a profession: It was
not considered ethical for physicians to advertise.

So doing something unethical is first and foremost immoral and
wrong. Additionally, it may be implicitly wrong because it
violates an accepted code of conduct adopted by a recognized
professional body, whose moral judgement is above reproach.
Given these definitions, when would Internet marketing cross the
line into the realm of the unethical? Well, let’s try to ring
fence the concept and limit it to what we think may be just
plain wrong by any reasonable standard of measure:

- lying to people to get them to buy your product

- offering a product that does not meet the expectations created
  by your marketing material (variation on lying)

- deliberately abusing a resource to the detriment of its owners
  or of the other users

- deliberately devising strategies to deprive affiliates of
  their fair share of profits after they have expended money
  and effort to sell your product

- fraudulently generating affiliate or other revenues

I am not suggesting that this list is exhaustive. The point I am
trying to make is that something is truly unethical if it
promotes falsehood, if it is to the detriment of someone or if
it involves fraud. So the sixty-four dollar question is: when is
SEO unethical, when is it black hat, and are the two the same
thing?

The term black hat usually refers to SEO tactics that are
designed to trick the search engines into ranking a page that
they wouldn’t otherwise rank. Let’s apply this to the present
question.

Suppose by some top secret powerful method you could trick
Google into ranking your porn site for the term “clip art”. I
think we would all agree that this would be unethical. Your
content is potentially damaging to people, especially minors. It
has absolutely nothing to do with what people are looking for
when it comes up in the SERPs. It further harms Google’s
reputation for providing relevant results, so it would be
detrimental to the owners of an online resource.

Now, suppose that by some top secret powerful method you could
trick Google into ranking your clip art site for the term “clip
art”. The method is definitely black hat, because it attempts
to circumvent the search engine’s algorithm. If Google really
knew what was up, it would not rank the site. But you did not
abuse Google’s resources, or overload their servers. You are
not acting to the detriment of people searching your term
because you have what they want. Quite to the contrary, the
SERPs for the term “clip art” are polluted with absolutely
valueless sites. You would in fact be doing everyone a big
favor, Google included. But, you have done something that Google
said not to do. You did “black hat” SEO.

Now it is increasingly clear that Google is beginning to believe
its destiny on earth is to police the Internet and tell us all
what we should and should not do. It is not the first nor will
it be the last corporation to have delusions of moral
superiority. But when I read articles that imply, if they do not
state outright, that an SEO technique is unethical because
Google said not to do it, I become concerned. This is what
totalitarianism is made of: the masses cowing to bullies who
invoke some self-serving principle to justify their moral high
ground. It may be in order to ask whether Google itself would
stoop to unethical or black hat practices. Consider just two
examples of Google’s questionable behavior:

- Anyone who has had their AdSense terminated with no
explanation whatever knows that Google keeps the unpaid balance
of funds in the AdSense account. They claim they keep it to
refund the money to the advertisers, but do they? Just try
to find an advertiser who has been victim of click fraud, and
has received a refund from Google. You may be looking a long
time…

- Google uses a black hat technique known as cross-domain
cookies. First let me say that cross-domain cookies are legit
when needed to run a tightly integrated set of domains. For
example, if your secure online store is on a domain owned by
your hosting provider, you would be justified in using
cross-domain cookies to carry user preferences from one domain
to the other during checkout. But this is not the case when you
visit any Google owned site (Blogger, YouTube…) and Google
tracks you. If you log into your blogger.com
(http://blogger.com/) account, then your AdSense account,
Google’s all-watching eye knows you are one and the same person.
Yet the two sites are entirely unrelated. This is violation of
privacy.

The point I am making is that of all the companies out there,
Google is not particularly qualified to lecture on right and
wrong. Just how badly we have run amok on this point can be seen
in this extract from an article posted on about.com
(http://about.com/):

“Black Hat search engine optimization is customarily defined as
techniques that are used to get higher search rankings in an
unethical manner. These black hat SEO techniques usually include
one or more of the following characteristics:

    * breaks search engine rules and regulations
    * creates a poor user experience directly because of the
      black hat SEO techniques utilized on the Web site
    * unethically presents content in a different visual or
      non-visual way to search engine spiders and search engine
      users.”

If you do not find this appalling, then we need to have a talk.
According to this piece, it is unethical (morally wrong) to
break search engine rules and regulations! Since when does any
search engine have any right whatsoever over what I do with my
web site, my shoes, my car, whatever? Creating a poor user
experience is unethical? Hello??? As for their third point, we
have already dealt with it. Cloaking is not unethical in itself.
It is what you do with it that may be unethical. You may have to
cloak because some crawler is so clueless that cloaking is the
only way you can get people to find your site when they are
looking for what you’ve got.

Here is another of my favorites, taken from Google’s Webmaster
Guidelines:

“If you believe that another site is abusing Google’s quality
guidelines, please report that site…”

Abusing? It would be fine to refer to sites as not adhering to
their guidelines, because adhering is something we do
voluntarily. Anyone is free to adhere or to not adhere to
Google’s quality guidelines. But to refer to non-adhesion as
abusing? If I tell everyone to wear a red shirt, and someone
wears a blue one, are they abusing my guidelines? We are on a
very slippery slope here. The underlying assumption is that if
you disobey Google, you are doing something wrong. For Google to
take this stance is bad enough. That it is widely accepted by
webmasters everywhere is serious cause for alarm.

OK, we have attempted to defined ethical and unethical. Now
let’s try to answer the key question as to whether black hat is
unethical. I suggest that SEO is black hat when it uses specific
techniques in order to get a search engine to behave in a way
that is not what its owners/designers intended. In other words,
it tricks the search engines. So when is it unethical? It is
unethical when it is detrimental to the owners of a resource it
uses/abuses (in general, spam), or when it promotes falsehood. I
would include fraud in the list if I could think of a way to use
SEO fraudulently, but I can’t. (Cookie stuffing and CPA
cloaking are both black hat and fraud, but unrelated to SEO).

You may argue that if I intentionally trick a search engine I am
acting to its detriment by definition, and therefore to the
detriment of its owners. I would respectfully disagree, and
refer to the previous discussion on cloaking.

Black Hat SEO is clearly unethical when it abuses resources.
It is common to automate the creation of social media accounts,
create hundreds or thousands of sites and spam them with links.
To camouflage the operation additional thousands upon thousands
of bogus entries are scraped from RSS feeds. First, this usually
violates the terms of service which would prohibit opening large
numbers of accounts. Further, it pollutes the sites with
rubbish. Finally it is detrimental to the owners of the site by
wasting storage space and bandwidth. Does this mean that
automating posting to social sites is unethical? Only if it
abuses resources, violates terms of service or is harmful to
people. A user agent is a user agent, whether it is called
Firefox, googlebot or libwww. It’s what you do with the
automation that may be unethical.

All of our SEO efforts should be done in good conscience to the
benefit of our clients and to the larger community, not to
appease a bully. Google’s hegemony is cause for serious concern
among many informed people. Black hatting, or resisting tyranny?
You decide.
================================================================
Peter Adamson is a marketing geek, and creator of The Link
Juicer, an online tool that is used to ‘get backlinks’
(http://www.thelinkjuicer.com/) and designed to produce long-term
results through natural organic search traffic.
===============================================

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Black Hat SEO, White Hat SEO

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