I like how brief and to the point people have to be with their tweets.  I don’t know about you, but I’m on quite a few make money online mailing lists and I hate reading long e-mails. 

It is a pet peeve of mine and I simply won’t do it.  Whenever I did take the time to read them, I was usually let down.  I’m not a very patient person.  I want people to get to the point.  I really value my time and I don’t want to waste a bunch of it reading something that I won’t learn from or being pitched something that I don’t need.

Again, these big long sales pages.  I don’t think that I’ve ever read one start to finish, unless it was my own and I don’t let them drag out too long.  With twitter you get the straight to the point information.

I don’t have to read more than a really short post at a time and if I want to click on the link and check it out further, I can.  This can also be effective when you make tweets.

Get right to the point and give them the link.  Give them some intrigue to help get your link clicked on.   People are curious, they love to get their questions answered.

There are other twitter limits.  With Facebook, one of the most annoying limits is how many friends you can have.  The limit is 5,000.  I’ve been at this limit for I don’t know how long now and I’ve had to turn down so many friends requests, because of this limit.

With twitter, I don’t know of any limit on the amount of friends that you can have.  There are people with tens of thousands of friends, if not a lot more.  There are other limits in place.

There are 1,000 total updates a day, 1,000 direct messages per day and 100 API requests per hour.  You would have to be a really busy beaver to top those limits.

Twitter doesn’t really explain how many people you can follow in a given time.  They say that you can’t follow a few amount of people and get followed by thousands, but I don’t really know.  They say that it varies, just don’t go too nuts.

The first thing that you need is a user name or screen name.  Some people use their business name, but I suggest you use your real name.  People are more likely to follow a person than a business, in my opinion.  Something like Firstname_Lastname or something similar to that.

The second thing that you need is a picture of yourself.  It will really help yourself get to know more people.  People like to know what each other look like, I admit that I like to know what the people that I talk to online look like.
It is a way of connecting with that person.

You should also fill out all of your profile information.  Give them your full name, your location and of course web sites.  You should also write a short bio about yourself and your business.

After that it is time to get a theme for your profile that you like.  You can choose something that looks professional or something that is fun.  There are a ton of different themes to choose from.

You obviously don’t want it to be ugly.  You also want it to look interesting and draw people in.  People want to be entertained by the people that they follow on twitter.

This is a really good resource that I’ve found to help you customize your twitter background:

http://mytweetspace.com/

It allows you to do some really interesting things with your twitter theme and twitter background.  At the end of the day, make sure that you love your theme because, after all, you’ll have to be looking at it day after day.

At the end of the day, you can always change it, but remember that you want to get people familiar with you.  You want them to get familiar with your background and get them used to seeing your tweets.

You can also test what works best for you and your profile and business.  There is no substitute for doing your own testing.  There is no way for me to tell you with absolute certainty, what is going to work best for you.  I do suggest that you do what I say in the article because the vast majority of people who are successful with twitter do these steps.

There are two main secrets to this.  The first is to having a converting offer and squeeze page and the second is to follow up correctly.  The first thing that you need is something to offer.

Simply a short informative report is always good.  You can also have a free newsletter, but always focus on the benefits of signing up.  It is free information, so it shouldn’t be a hard sell.

You can have a link on your profile to go to the sign up page and even explain what you’re giving away in  your bio box.  This way everyone that views your twitter profile will have an opportunity to sign up for your list.

You can also always tweet about your free report, you don’t want to over do it, but you should hopefully be getting more and more followers over time, so you can keep introducing new people to it, over time.  Like I said, just don’t over do and post about it all of the time, people are going to stop following you.

There is a courteous ratio on self promoting and using affiliate links.  People probably aren’t just following you to buy stuff you promote, so there needs to be a courteous ratio where you aren’t tweeting about that.

The ratio really varies, I think, depending on what niche market the people following you are interested in.  Some top people on twitter tell me that they are somewhere around 80% to 90% of their tweets are not about promotion.  The other 10% to 20% are promotion.  I also think that it depends on how often you tweet, also.

If you’re tweeting all day, almost everyday, you better have a very huge percentage that isn’t promotion or people will get sick of you and unfollow you.  No one wants to be just bombarded with offers.  Kind of like being on a mailing list, don’t over promote.

Some other things that you can do is twitter when you release a new newsletter and give them a link to sign up for your list.  Twitter about a blog that you might have when you make a new blog post and you have a place for them to sign up for your list, on your blog.  An indirect promotion of your mailing list.