How To Use Twitter (Get More Followers And Customers) In 30 Minutes A Day Or Less
Introduction
Twitter is one of the oldest social media networks that is still relevant, so it has seen it’s ups and downs. However, Twitter still remains one of the most recognized platforms in the World.
Twitter has been recognized for its frequent trending topics and it’s close connections with television shows and live events. In fact, anytime there is breaking news or a controversial event of some sort, it’s usually going viral on Twitter first, then rolling out everywhere else.
Twitter has become the online-world’s headquarters for breaking news. But… it’s not just that.
There are massive communities of like-minded people who communicate daily on twitter. For instance, the esports community is HUGE on twitter. The crypto currency community is HUGE on twitter. And there are many other giant communities on Twitter that are full of your ideal customers. Whatever niche you’re in, you can find a community of possible customers/clients on Twitter.
In this guide you’re going to learn how you can leverage Twitter to reach your ideal customers, and sell your products and services, in just 1-hour a day.
Before we get started we’re going to explain why Twitter is such a great place to grow awareness for your brand.
The Twitter Opportunity
Twitter is one of the greatest social media networks in the world when it comes to selling your products or services. And the number of opportunities on this platform is endless.
Twitter is a unique social media platform because, in general, it is an open network. That means that everyone on it is easily accessible. Other social media networks like Facebook, Snapchat, Pinterest and even Instagram aren’t as open as Twitter is. Let me explain further.
Within Twitter, you can find people who are engaged in conversations on all sorts of different topics and you can immediately join the conversations without having to be friends, followers, or connected in any way. Anyone can join conversations and threads. And that means you can get your message in front of anyone immediately.
With other social media networks it can be much harder to connect and communicate with people.
Facebook has the most restrictions, for example, you need to join groups and be accepted before engaging in the group, and you must be “friends” with people before they see your content. If you send someone a message that you’re not friends with, it will even go into a different inbox, that they will have to navigate to, and then accept your message.
If you want to act as a business on Facebook, you must create a Facebook page. Then Facebook will severely limit the amount of activities you can perform with a business profile vs a personal profile. The list really goes on and on and on.
Many of the other social media networks that I have mentioned above have their own versions of restrictions as well. And restrictions always make it a bit harder to achieve your goals.
Twitter allows you to avoid a lot of hassle and quickly get connected with the people that matter to you.
You can also create a Twitter account as a business and you’ll have all the same permissions and access to the platform that an individual would have. In fact, you’ll get access to even more features such as advertising.
Where many social platforms penalize you for being a business, Twitter only rewards you.
In addition to the openness and flexibility that Twitter allows its users, you also get access to detailed analytics so that you can see how well your account is doing in terms of performance.
Twitter even has a great search feature to help you find your ideal audience. You can search out different keywords and hashtags, and even do location based searches to help find individuals and/or conversations to join.
So, once you really understand the different features of Twitter, you can use the network to find your ideal customers and interact with them, which leads to sales of your products and services. And before you know it, you’ll want to make Twitter marketing a part of your daily strategy for driving sales.
Twitter Success Story
Almost 10 years ago I was working at a recruitment firm here in Los Angeles. I had been in online marketing and sales for quite a few years and I wanted to switch things up a bit. While I was at the recruiting firm (we helped employers find employees) I used my knowledge of social media to give myself the advantage over the other recruiters on the team.
If you don’t know, being a recruiter for a recruitment agency is a lot like being a realtor. You have to find and develop your own leads, and much of your salary is based on commission. At the end of the day, whoever wants it more wins.
Since it’s so competitive, you really have to have something special that makes you stand out. For me, that something special was my ability to use social media to open up conversations that lead to meetings and closed deals.
And to add a little more perspective, my commission on a deal would be anywhere from $5000 – $15,000.
Anyways, back to the story.
At first I used LinkedIn to find new clients and that went really well. I actually developed a 7-step system for generating in-person meetings and phone calls that I ended up teaching to other recruiters just a few years later.
I got so good at marketing myself on LinkedIn that I was able to generate over 25 in-person meetings in one month. Which was more than double what other recruiters in the office were doing. Most would book one in-person meeting a week.
Once I maximized my efforts on LinkedIn, I started thinking about the other social media platforms that I could use to do business development. And I kept thinking, how can I get in front of my target audience and business-minded people outside of LinkedIn?
Suddenly it occurred to me that Twitter was a place where a ton of people were still interacting, and many CEO’s and other executive types had Twitter accounts. So I decided to jump right in and see what I could make of it.
I set up my Twitter profile and added my work information in my bio. I just made it clear that I was a recruiter and that I could help you find amazing employees for your company. I also added a link to my LinkedIn profile, so people could learn more about me.
The first observation I made was that most people don’t have a lot of followers. And it’s actually pretty hard to grow a following on Twitter, which is discouraging for many people. However, Twitter is not so much about followers as it is starting and joining conversations. So I quickly realized followers aren’t that important.
Then I discovered that there are a ton of “dead” accounts on Twitter. What I mean by dead accounts is that there are many people who have twitter profiles and they never use them. They might have set up an account in the past and they never did anything with them, or stopped using them eventually. And obviously interacting with a dead account will get you nowhere because there is no-one on the other side.
On the other hand, the people who did have active accounts were incredibly active. This was great because if you responded to one of their posts, or retweeted them, they would see it and interact with you. So I learned that the people who use their Twitter accounts use them often and they are very engaged.
The third thing I learned is that – since the vast majority of active people on Twitter don’t have many followers, it’s really easy to reach them. For example, if you respond to someone’s tweet who has 500 followers, they are going to be excited about responding to you because they get very few comments. And because most people get such little engagement on their posts, it’s really a gold mine for getting attention.
At this point, I was extremely excited to try doing business development with Twitter to see if I could really use it to help me close $15,000 deals.
I had used Twitter a lot in the past, especially when it first came out. And my first account I grew to 13,000 followers all within 6 months. In the beginning, Twitter was a lot different. It was the wild wild west. So fortunately I knew my way around the platform really well.
Ok enough background, here’s what I did.
I started by looking up my ideal prospects on LinkedIn. Then I made a list of their names and I gathered as much information on them as I could. Then I started searching Twitter to see If I could find them on Twitter.
Once I found their accounts on Twitter, I would check to see how active they were by looking up their recent Tweets. If they were active, I would follow them and add them to an active list of prospects.
Here’s the key.
Before you engage with your prospects on Twitter (especially if you’re in business development) you want to look at their Tweets and find something that they posted that you can relate to. Business development is all about developing relationships, so starting the conversation is a crucial step.
Let me outline it a bit clearer for you with an example.
I found the head of recruitment at a major clothing brand. I found that this person was pretty active on Twitter too. When I looked at his feed, I saw that he posted a lot about playing tennis.
At the time I just so happened to be playing a lot of tennis too, so I found the perfect tweet to engage with and I just asked “Top three courts in LA? I’ll go first…” and I named a few local courts near me.
The next day I had a reply with his favorite courts as well. Then I posted a GIF of a famous tennis player from the 80’s giving the thumbs up and he liked my GIF.
What happened next was unbelievable.
The next day I woke up and checked my social media accounts. I first went over to LinkedIn and I found that I had a new connection request. It was the guy! The head of recruitment at that clothing brand. He even sent me a message and said:
“Hey I found your LinkedIn from Twitter and thought we should connect. BTW I’m also looking for some employees, do you think you could help with that?”
To tell you the truth, I was shocked at first. I couldn’t believe I was about to book a phone call that could open up a deal for me worth $5000 – $15,000 or more. All because of a message that I sent him on Twitter about tennis!
Of course I said something along the lines of…
“Great to connect. Yes, I’d love to help you out. Let’s jump on a call this week and talk about specifics. What time works for you?”
Later that week we got on the phone and I had a signed contract in less than a week from my call.
Ok, as I mentioned – the way this happened was rare.
Usually you have to have way more tweets and messages back and forth, and truthfully, you as the salesperson will usually have to be the one to push for a call.
It’s unlikely that your prospect reaches out to you, but it does happen more often than you might think. In sales, timing is everything, and if you hit the right people at the right time – magic can happen.
But let me explain why it happened this way.
As the head of recruitment for a major brand, this guy is getting 100 messages a day from recruiters wanting to work with him. He is turning all of them down because many companies see recruiters as annoying salespeople.
Then one day he checks his Twitter, which has very few followers and close to no engagement, and he sees a notification. Finally someone engaged with one of his posts about tennis. He was excited to see who it was and what they had to say.
When he sees the comment he finds out it’s another person in Los Angeles who likes tennis. And that person asked a fun engaging question. He feels compelled to reply. Over the course of two days, the conversation continues, and he decides to check out my profile.
Naturally, he wants to know who I am.
He discovers that I am a recruiter, and although he doesn’t like most recruiters, he has something in common with me. And come to think of it, he does have a few positions he needs to fill at his company.
Since my LinkedIn is right there in my bio, he clicks over to check me out.
He then discovers my work history, and sees that I work for a reputable company. So, he decides to write me a message asking if I’d help him out.
Why did this happen?
Instead of being just another annoying recruiter in his LinkedIn inbox, I separated myself from the pack. I found him on another social media network, where he was not being attacked by recruiters on a daily basis.
I engaged with content that had nothing to do with work at all. I genuinely found a point of interest between us and engaged in a friendly conversation.
At this point, he clearly sees that I have shown no intention to sell him anything. But his curiosity leads him to discover more about me.
When he sees that I’m a recruiter, he’s not offended by it, because I didn’t reach out to him as a recruiter. I reached out to him as a person.
When recruiters reach out to him via LinkedIn, he only sees them for their job title. They are recruiters reaching out to him because they want something. Whereas when I reached out to him, my job title was just a small part of who I am.
To him, I was a tennis player who happened to be a recruiter too.
And all of that makes him much more likely to want to do business with me over any of the other recruiters that were messaging him.
He felt like he discovered me.
And let me tell you, nothing is better than when someone feels like they have discovered you.
When people discover something on their own – instead of being told to look at something – they are much more likely to want it.
And that’s how that happened.
From that moment on I was using Twitter like crazy for business development. It was a great way to connect with high level professionals in an unprofessional environment. It became my bread and butter for generating sales calls, which lead to meetings and deals.
That was really the secret for this particular business development strategy. Connect with them on a human level first, and then move the conversation towards sales.
How can this story help you?
The reason I wanted to share this story is in hopes to change your perspective of Twitter completely. Rather than Twitter being just another social media network that is difficult to get results with, you can now view Twitter as an untapped resource with tons of people that can’t wait to interact with you.
From CEO’s who can make large deals with you all the way down to people who are interested in buying toys for their pets. The point is, you can get in front of your ideal customer on Twitter with very little effort.
The example in my story above was about using Twitter for a tactical approach to business development (a B2B strategy) that leads to phone calls and meetings, which is typically a long sales process. But Twitter can also be used to sell products. In fact, we’ve had a lot of success helping clients sell items of all kinds by utilizing Twitter.
And when it comes to selling products that are less than $100, it’s really more about developing awareness than it is developing relationships. But consider this, the more authentic you can be in your interactions with people, the better your results will be.
Later on in this guide, we’re going to go over some very crucial things that are going to help you get set up for success, identify your ideal customer, track your ideal customer, and engage with your ideal customer, so you can generate new business.
Along the way you’ll learn some awesome secrets about Twitter, you’re going to learn what you SHOULDN’T do, and you’re going to learn a lot more about the platform in general. So let’s get started.
Profile Optimization
As with any social media network, optimizing your profile is crucial. You must think about your goals and objectives, and then create a profile that helps move people towards becoming your customer. Let’s take a look at your options.
Header image
With your header image you want to take the opportunity to display something in relation to your company, product, or service. As a beauty supplies company, you would want to display a picture of someone using your products. Over the years I’ve discovered that the more you can show people glimpses of your actual product before they go to your website, the more likely they are to buy from you.
If you are a coach or consultant your header image might be a picture of you consulting with a group of people. Or a picture of you at an event or speaking on stage somewhere.
Whatever it is that you do or sell, try and capture a great image and use it in your header. Too often I’ll see a header image that does not really communicate anything about the person’s products or services. I often see a random picture of a beach, or scenery, or a city, or random things like that.
The point is, you want to use the header image to communicate what you do, or what you are trying to sell.
Profile Image
What you choose for your profile will really depend on the nature of your business. For example, if you created a Twitter account for an online grocery store, then you might want to use the store logo as your profile image.
If you own a business where you are the brand and the main selling point for your company, like an agency or consultant or coach, you’ll want to use a picture of yourself. These days it’s very common for someone’s business to be very closely related to who they are.
For example, a hair stylist is someone that is growing their own personal brand. People are clients of the hair stylist because they like that particular person and the work that they do. So an appropriate profile image would be one of the hair stylists – styling hair. Similarly, a personal fitness coach would want to use a picture of him working out, or even better, a picture of him clearly teaching someone else in the gym.
Whatever you choose to use as your profile image on Twitter keep these things in mind:
- Your profile image should describe your product or service. It should communicate the theme of your products through the imagery. People should be able to look at your profile image and instantly know what you’re about. It doesn’t matter if you’re using a logo or picture, when people see the image they need to know what it represents.
- Your profile image will attract more people if a face or person is represented in the image. For example a woman holding her nails out in a picture (face included) will attract more people on instagram vs just a picture of a hand or a logo of a hand with painted nails.
- Be mindful of the colors you use in your profile image. Isolating one or two colors in your profile image will help it stand out.
Account handle and name
On Twitter, there are two names you must choose. You must choose the account name, which is the “@” followed by the name you choose. But you must also pick a name that is associated with the account name. For example our Houredu brand account handle is @Houredu_ and the name is Houredu.com.
For your brand the account name might be @good_nails and your associated name might be Good Nail Company as an example.
Selecting names
Selecting an account name is pretty straight forward, but there are some things to consider before you choose your name.
Search keywords
Some of the best Twitter names are things that are searchable according to the product or service you are providing. For example, Wendy’s Nail Salon would be something that might show up when people search “nail salon” so this account would get the benefit of free organic search traffic on Twitter.
However, if the account name was Wendy’s Beauty, the account will most likely not show up for any nail salon related searches simply because the word nail salon is not in the username. Not to mention Twitter is searchable through Google and other search engines as well, so having a name with popular search terms incorporated can help you gain free traffic.
It’s obviously not required that you create a name with a search friendly term. Many companies do not use this strategy. However, you will put yourself in a much better position for organic traffic if you choose a search friendly name.
Visual clarity
Another thing to consider with your Twitter handle and name, is how your name appears on Twitter. For example, if Wendy’s Nail Salon engages with your content, you’ll know exactly what the account is about immediately. That sort of recognition is important on any social network because you have a very limited amount of time to make an impression on views who are quickly consuming information in the feed and elsewhere.
Ideally your Twitter handle and name are not only representative of your brand or company, but are also common terms that people are searching for all while communicating the purpose of your company at the same time.
Biography
In the bio section of Twitter you really have the chance to shine. Here’s where you can describe your business or brand with your main selling point, and also add a link to your website so people can actually click through and make purchases or schedule a call with you. Here is something to consider in the bio section:
People love to fill their bios with distracting information. Your bio should NOT be distracting, it should be very straight forward and it should aim to get people to take ONE action.
You want people to click through to your website and that’s it!
Too many times I’ll see people over complicate the bio section by adding too much information that can distract your potential customers from getting to your website.
Here’s an example of a distracting bio section:
Violin House
Personal account @violin_lover
#violins #loveviolins
Violin lessons for elementary school students and up.
Email us at violin@google.com
www.violinlessons.com
As you can see there is way too much going on in this bio and there are multiple things to click besides the website. The last thing you want to do is send people away from your Twitter account to an area where they can not buy from you! When you add hashtags and other accounts to your bio section, you’re just directing people away from a sale.
Here is an example great bio:
Violin House
Rated the best violin lessons for elementary school kids and older.
Book a lesson today at…
www.violinlessons.com
If you notice in this bio section, there is only one possible action to take, and that’s clicking on the website to book a lesson. Everything in the bio is directing the user to go to the website to book a lesson. This is what is known as a CALL TO ACTION.
In your bio section you need to have a call to action to let people know what your product is and how they can buy it from you.
Keep in mind that bio sections are also searchable through Google, so adding good keywords in your bio is a great way to take advantage of organic search as well.
Twitter also allows you to add a location tag to your account so people can see where your account is based. This can help with search as well. People like to discover accounts nearby or in certain areas of the country. Adding a location tag in your bio also adds some character to your account.
Website
When you add a website to your Twitter bio, I highly recommend that you use the actual name of your website. A lot of people will add trackable “short links” in their bios that look really funny. Usually these links look really suspicious and reduce the CTR (click through rate). They might look something like this https://bit.ly/485jdjd85 – NOT GOOD!
To increase consumer confidence, use your real URL (ex: commandtraffic.com) and then track click throughs to your website with the Instagram analytics tool (on business accounts) as well as your Google Analytics dashboard. Many web builders like Shopify also have analytics that will provide you with traffic sources as well.
Here is an example of a great Twitter profile below.
As you can see above the handle of the account is @Houredu_ and the name of the account is the actual website name.
Having the website domain as the name of the account is great because it constantly re-enforces the easy to remember website so people later on can just type in the domain name and go directly there.
In the bio section the mission or point of the account and company is clearly stated. And the website link is the actual website domain – not a bit.ly link.
The profile image is the company logo which has bright colors that stand out in the Twitter feed. The logo arrow also points directly to the name of the account when it shows up in the feed, which is a cool feature.
Customer Profiling
Before you start the process of gaining customers, you need to know exactly who your potential customers are, what they like, how they talk, and everything you can possibly know about their buying habits.
A lack of understanding about the potential customer profile is what causes people to fail more than anything else. The reason is, they end up working really hard to get their message out to the wrong people. And the wrong people won’t buy from you.
So much of your social media marketing success will come from doing your research and understanding your customer before you start marketing. So here are some things you should know before you start using Instagram to find and sell to your potential customers.
Who are they?
After working with our client 3bar olives, who’s target customer is people who like drinking dirty martinis, we were able to help them get clarity on their ideal customer. What we found is that most dirty martini drinkers are very enthusiastic about cocktails in general, however they prefer a nice strong dirty martini.
We found that dirty martini drinkers are usually a bit older and have disposable income to spend on a variety of products that would make their martini better. Most of these customers have at home bars, they continually try new products like new olives and olive juices, and they are constantly seeking the perfect martini.
We also found martini enthusiasts typically drink more than the average person, so jokes about drinking too much and being hungover were very popular with that crowd. And since they are heavy drinkers, and they drink “dirty martinis”, jokes that played on the word “dirty” also captivated the audience.
Knowing all of this about the dirty martini lover (the target audience of 3bar olives), we were able to help them develop a strategy to get in front of their ideal customers by using terms specifically related to them.
Critical thinking
You must paint a very clear picture of your target audience. So you need to take the time to think about, even write down everything you know about your current customers, and/or your potential customers. Here are some questions you need to answer.
Who are they? What age are they? What products do they buy besides yours? What hobbies do they have? What content would they like? What do they talk about? What type of people do they hang out with? Why would they buy your products? What problem do your products solve for your audience?
Do as much research here as possible because it is so important. Ask friends, ask your family, and ask as many potential customers for their input on your product and similar products they might use. This information could be a game changer and really be the key to unlocking your success in marketing online via social media and any other outlets.
Then, finally, you need to understand what type of language your potential customers use, so that you can effectively communicate with them over social media. And that leads us to terms.
Terms
One of the most important things you need to know about your potential customers is the key terms that they use to describe the things in their lives that are related to your products or services. Let’s use my client 3bar olives as an example again.
3bar olives sells olives and olive juice for dirty martinis. Their target market is dirty martini lovers so naturally their potential customers are using the terms…
Dirty Martini, Martini, Olives, Olive Juice, Olive Brine, Vodka, Gin, etc.
But what we found after researching the target market is that many dirty martini lovers also love…
Stuffed olives of various types, like blue cheese stuffed olives, almonds stuffed olives, garlic stuffed olives, pickled stuffed olives, and anchovy stuffed olives. They also have other terms like filthy martini, salty martini, vodka martini, gin martini, and more.
Dirty martini lovers also love martini glasses, martini picks for garnishes, martini shakers, cocktail napkins and the list keeps on going.
The point is, the ideal customer for 3bar olives can be found by searching tons of different martini related terms. And when you truly know your potential customers, you know what terms they are using. When you know what terms they are using, you can easily find them online. Not only that, you can speak their language and connect with them.
A quick example.
If you search the term “blue cheese olives” on any social media network, you’ll find dirty martinis. So that’s a great example of an indirect term that helps you discover your core audience.
Finding Your Ideal Customers Intro
On Twitter there are several different ways to seek out your ideal customers, but luckily Twitter has a great search feature to help you. The search tool Twitter offers is pretty robust in terms of the specificity of the searches you can do.
You’re able to search by words, engagement, location, language, accounts, dates and more. So let’s take a look at the three major ways you can use Twitter to find and connect with your ideal customers.
Finding Your Ideal Customers Part 1
The first and best way to search Twitter for your ideal customer is to use key phrases with exact match wording. Twitter is full of interesting conversations so you want to search for words and phrases that people would use in conversation. You want to isolate those words in your search.
Let’s look at some examples. I am going to use a former client of ours – 3bar Olives to help illustrate some points. Just so you know, 3bar Olives is a company that makes olives and olive juice for dirty martinis. The company is very specific in what they do so finding the right audience is crucial. Here are some ways we’ve been able to search Twitter to find conversations to join.
In the Twitter search bar we’ve used search terms like “I love dirty martinis” which will pull up a list of anyone who has typed those exact words. But there are a few things to note. Notice how I put “I love dirty martinis” in quotes? This tells Twitter to search for people who have typed those EXACT words or phrase.
And if you notice in the image above everyone’s tweet has the exact phrase “i love dirty martinis” – if you did not put your phrase search in quotes, Twitter would look for any of the words in your search phrase and your results will be a bit different. We’ll take a look at the difference below.
The search results could still be good but they won’t be in the exact phrase you searched. Let’s take a look.
As you can see most of the keywords are included but the Tweets have the words separated. One tweet above reads ( Things I love… Bike rides, chinese food and dirty martinis in no particular order.) So you can see that the words “I love dirty martinis” are included in the tweet, but they are not in one phrase.
It’s important to explore with exact phrase searches and broad phrase searches in Twitter because exact phrases will allow you to really find people who fit your customer profile and broad searches (without parentheses) will help you find people using the words related to your search, but not all of them will be a great match. In some cases like the one above – the broad match search works out very well.
Understanding Search Tabs
Besides understanding how to use exact match phrases and broad match phrases, you’ll want to pay close attention to some other crucial aspects of Twitter search. Let’s take a look at the search for the keywords DIRTY MARTINI.
Top Tab
At first you can see right below the search bar is the tab “Top” as outlined in the image below.
The “Top” tab represents the top tweets using the words in your search. These are usually categorized as the most popular tweets related to your search terms regardless of the time they were posted. So these tweets could be from months or years ago which means they could be old conversations that aren’t relevant to you right now. Always check the date of the post before interacting with it. The more recent the conversation, the more likely it is that people will still be engaged in it.
If your search term is a pretty popular point of conversation, most likely the top tweets will be pretty recent and they could be great conversations to join. The benefit of joining a popular conversation is that you’ll get exposure to a lot more people since there will be way more people within the conversation itself. And as the conversation grows, so does the number of people that might see your content.
If you leave a reply, ask a good question, or add some value to the conversation. You can leverage the popularity of the conversation and drive a ton of traffic back to your profile and website if your comment grabs people’s interest.
With this technique you are essentially inserting your content into a high traffic thread and then getting the benefit of more viewership. It’s just like putting up your billboard on a busy freeway.
Latest Tab
The latest tab as seen below, will bring in a whole different type of post to interact with. The latest tab is exactly how it sounds, these are the most recent posts that include your keywords.
As you’ll notice most of these posts have been shared within the last few minutes. This means that you can directly like and reply to these tweets and command the attention of the person who posted – right away.
As I mentioned before, most people on Twitter who are active are very engaged, and they will see your like and reply which means you’ll be generating 1 on 1 awareness for your products and services.
Not only will you be able to generate 1 on 1 awareness, you might be able to get in early on a popular thread. Since these posts are the most recent posts, you might be the first to like and comment on a post that becomes incredibly popular. Regardless, you should go down the list of tweets and like and comment on them to raise awareness for your account, products and services.
If you consistently engage with people that are posting about the topics that are most closely related to your products and services, you’ll be one of the top people constantly showing up in that space. That’s how you win. You want to dominate the feeds that are discussing related topics so that you can capture the most traffic possible.
Another benefit of this type of search is that you’ll find tons of tweets that DO NOT have your keywords. However, if you click on the tweet, you’ll see that many of the tweets are in response to another tweet that does mention your keywords. This is a great way to discover more “threads” or discussions that relate to the nature of your business.
Quick story:
While working with the 3bar Olives team, we used this search method to discover people talking about dirty martinis. We liked and commented on all the tweets and without knowing it – we entered into a massive thread!
The thread we entered into was a group of about 50 – 100 people who discuss cocktails and drinking stories. After commenting in the thread, people in the group started to notice the account and they started replying and asking questions.
After a bunch of back and forth with tons of different people, one user suggested that we offer their group a discount on 3bar olives. We decided that would be a good idea and then replied with a discount code to be used on the site.
Within 5 minutes we sold over $250 worth of products.
People in the thread started praising us for knowing how to properly impress new customers. They started saying things like “now that’s how you create brand loyalty” and “This is a great example of how brands should be using social media.”
We ended up doing around $1000 in sales in a short time span just from some simple tweeting.
And not only that, we created a great reputation on Twitter and impressed a whole lot of people. Which made our client very happy while creating repeat customers too!
Notes: When you are very active by liking and commenting on people’s content, eventually you’ll run into people who have a chip on their shoulder. Some people will just be mean.
Do your best to turn a negative into a positive. You’d be surprised how many times we’ve been hated on and attacked – and then turned our haters into loyal customers just by genuinely handling the situation with honesty and integrity.
People Search
Another way to search Twitter for your ideal customer is to use the people tab along with your search string. With this type of search, you’ll not only find usernames with the keywords your searching for, but you’ll also find profiles based on keywords that they have in their bio. Let’s look at the search I did below. Remember, no quotes = broad match search. For this example, we are using the words Dirty Martini again.
As you can see in this broad match search, accounts with the words dirty martini in the @handle or Name appear in the results. But also verbiage from biography sections show up in search here. As I mentioned earlier in this guide, it’s great to have a Name or @handle or keywords in your Bio that people might be searching for. This way you can take advantage of FREE search traffic.
If you really want to come up with some great keywords to use, checkout the Google Keyword Planner. This is a tool Google developed to help you find out how many people are searching certain keywords. Do a little searching and try to pick words that have a high search volume, and use those in your Name, @handle and Bio if you’re starting a new account, or looking to optimize your current account.
With the people search, you’ll find great people to follow and connect with based on the keywords you searched for, but you won’t find any conversations to join. Using this search option is great for creating a list of people to follow or for creating a “Twitter list” of users to keep tabs on. We’ll talk about Twitter lists a little later on.
Here’s how we use people-search for 3bar Olives.
A large portion of 3bar olives business is small bars, restaurants, and boutique grocery stores. So we use “people search” to identify bars, restaurants, and grocery stores by searching out key words like “Bar” “restaurant” “martini bar” etc. This way we can directly connect with bars and restaurants and follow them – so we can stay aware of their content and interact with them.
This is a great way to build a targeted list of potential customers, especially for bulk orders. We even add them to Twitter lists so we can regularly check in on them.
Here’s an example search for “martini bar”
And now we have an endless list of bars and restaurants across the nation – that clearly specialize in Martinis!
Photos and Videos Tab
There are two more tabs that you can use for search. The Photos and Videos tabs are pretty self explanatory, but they have some major benefits. Again let’s look at 3bar Olives as an example.
When searching “vodka martini” on twitter, there are a ton of different things that can come up. And for this particular term “ vodka martini” you’re going to find martinis of all kinds. You’ll find fruity ones, and coffee ones, and literally hundreds of different combinations.
By using pictures or video search, you can clearly identify the exact type of martini that the person is drinking. If the photo or video has a martini with olives in it, then 3bar Olives knows that person is an ideal customer, and they can then engage with their content.
Here’s the thing. Not everybody elaborates with their text based posts and they might let the picture do the talking. A great example of this would be a caption like “It’s martini time!” and then there is a picture of a guy holding a dirty martini with olives.
Without the picture, we wouldn’t know if the person was a dirty martini drinker or not. And with the picture we can clearly identify them as an ideal customer. I know it sounds obvious, but you can really discover more about your prospects when they use images – and that’s why Instagram is so great too! (you should check out our other guide on Instagram if you haven’t already. Found at commandtracffic.com)
That’s about it for the major search options, but there are a few other search functions you should be aware of to help make sure you’re not wasting your time on the wrong people!
Basic Search Features
There are two more basic search features that you should know about when you are performing the types of searches that are listed above. These two search features allow you to search tweets from anyone or only people you follow AND tweets from anywhere in the world or locations that are near you.
Take a look.
The location search on Twitter used to be a lot better than it is today, but in this section I’m going to show you how you can bypass some of the Twitter location search restrictions to not only find people “near you” but how you can find people in certain cities as well.
For many people that sell online, they only sell nationally and some might prefer to sell locally. And many people can sell locally without selling online, which means targeting your ideal customer by location is incredibly important.
For example, if I can’t ship products to Europe, I don’t really want to be wasting my time interacting with potential customers located in Europe. And If I sell products only available in Los Angeles, I only want to interact with potential customers that are located in Los Angeles.
Near You VS Anywhere
The near you feature is the fastest way to find an audience that is located within 15 miles of you. However the amount of information you receive in that targeted feed might be limited depending on what keywords you’re searching for.
When you use the Anywhere search feature, I’ve found that you get a lot more results in your feed and the majority are coming from the United States which I believe is also based on your IP address. What that means is that most of the relevant content that shows up for an Anywhere search will be within the United States – if you are based here. So you don’t have to worry much about reaching people outside of the country and wasting your time on people you can’t serve.
How To Search Any Location + Twitter Hack
Ok, so Twitter used to let you search out Tweets and Profiles by specific locations like cities etc. But because of privacy issues they removed that feature, but the ability to search by location actually still exists. Here’s how you can get more targeted with your location based search results.
So here’s the thing. A whole lot of tweets have locations automatically associated with them and a whole bunch of accounts add a location tag in their bio. You search for this information by using specific search strings like the one below.
All you need to know is how to tell Twitter exactly what to search for.
Here’s an example.
“Dirty Martini” lang:en near:”Los Angeles, CA” within:15mi
Let’s break this down.
“Keywords” lang:(insert language abbreviation) near “Add City and State” within: (add radius in millage)
So you can replace any section of this search to match the criteria you require.
Let’s modify the search a few times so you can see the differences.
“Social Media Manager” lang:en near:”New York City, NY” within:25mi
“Bartender” lang:en near:”Chicago, IL” within:5mi
Now that you see how to search for specific locations, let’s take a look at the results of these searches so we can understand a bit more about how this all works.
As you can see in this search we used
“Social Media Manager” lang:en near:”New York City, NY” within:25mi
And for the search results we clicked the Latest Tab in order to get tweets that were recently posted including our keywords and location. All of these tweets were either posted with a location tag within 25 miles of New York City or they were posted from accounts that are located in New York City.
In the image above you’ll see a red arrow pointing to a tweet. When we click on that person’s profile we can see that their bio information specifies that they are located in New York, New York. Take a look below.
You can use this location search string to find people in large cities and even small towns. And this type of targeted search can be incredibly powerful for local businesses, and also for national brands trying to gain recognition in specific cities.
An additional benefit to using this type of location search is that you can really max out on your target audience nationwide. Every single day you could target new cities and towns with 100% guarantee that you are reaching people within your serviceable areas. When you do a broad search on Twitter, you might be getting results from accounts all over the world.
Now that you’re equipped with the tools for finding your ideal customers let’s talk about how you can properly engage with them and drive awareness to your products and services.
Saving Search Results
One of the best features of Twitter search is the fact that you can actually save your search queries so that you can come back and see new content from your favorite searches every single day.
What I would recommend doing is creating up to 10 or more customized searches that produce the best results and save them so you can come back to those searches everyday when it’s time to grind.
Here’s how you can save your search results.
First you’ll want to create a search and hit enter. After the new page loads you can see three dots (…) next to the search bar.
Click those three dots (…) to see the drop down menu.
From here you can just click “Save Search” and the search will automatically save in Twitter.
To pull up your list of saved searches you can just go to the home page or the #explore page and click on the search bar. When you click the search bar, your recent searches and saved searches will pop right up.
Engagement Strategy
Now that you know how to find your ideal customers through properly searching on Twitter, it’s time to develop an engagement strategy that is going to get you noticed, and help you drive more traffic to your profile and website so you can make sales.
Your engagement strategy will change slightly depending on how you utilize Twitter’s search features and what types of feeds are produced in your search results.
Let’s break down the searching into 3 basic categories.
- General Conversation Feed
- Popular Conversation Feed
- Profile Search Feed
General Conversation Feed
Before we get started with engagement in the general conversation feed, let’s define exactly what we mean by this. The general conversation feed is any feed that is produced as a result of a Twitter search, where tabs LATEST – VIDEOS – IMAGES are selected in addition to any specified search strings you are using. Searches made in this way are going to bring up relative posts and conversations for you to engage with. The general conversation feed will include popular tweets and normal tweets and threads as it is a combination of the all statement and conversational results.
How to engage
The best way to engage with this type of search feed is to scroll down the list of results looking for the best tweets that match your ideal customer profile. The simplicity of engagement is great because all that you need to do is LIKE the tweet and leave a thoughtful, witty, or informational response to the tweets. One of the easiest and best ways to respond to a tweet is with a GIF as they communicate a great response in a fun way. And if the tweet is something that really matches your brand or companies values or sentiments, then you can Retweet as well.
With this 2 – 3 step approach, LIKE, COMMENT, RETWEET you’ll start to drive a ton of awareness to your account and website links. And the best part is, you can track all of your activity and clicks in the Twitter analytics tab so you can see how you’re doing.
Now, you’re going to want to do a lot of these engagement activities. So you’ll need to create your search feeds and just go down the list engaging with everyone who fits your ideal customer profile.
Here’s what’s going to happen.
As we mentioned earlier in this guide, most of the people who actively use Twitter are not popular by any means. When you LIKE and COMMENT or RETWEET / engage with their content – they will get notifications and they will be excited to see who is responding to their content.
They will look at your response and check out your profile, and many will click back to your website if your product or service is something that interests them. Because engagement for 90% of Twitter users is so rare, people can’t help but to investigate the people who are engaging with them, and that’s exactly what you want.
Here’s what you SHOULDN’T do.
When you are COMMENTING or simply responding to a tweet or joining a conversation/thread, you do not want to jump into the conversation and drop your website link.
You can promote your websites sometimes if it feels appropriate to the conversation
EX: Hey all, based on what you are talking about in this thread you might want to check out my shop at www(whateveryourshopis).com
You can do this a couple times a day at the most. But if you do it too much – Twitter will ban your account for SPAMMING the same link again and again.
I would highly recommend that you rarely drop links in your engagement tweets when you are doing massive outreach – instead you should focus on authentically engaging with people.
Popular Conversation Feed
When you are entering into a Popular Conversation Feed your approach should be a little different. Before we get started, let’s define what a popular conversation feed is and how you’ll get to it.
A popular conversation will be defined as a tweet that has multiple likes and replies and or may be a giant thread with a huge amount of people involved in a growing conversation. You’ll find popular content like this by using the search and customizing your search keywords and locations while having the POPULAR tab selected.
In this feed you will see only tweets that Twitter defines as POPULAR and you’ll have immediate access to engage with these tweets and drive awareness to your business.
How to engage
When interacting with popular content, the engagement strategy is a bit different. First, you’ll want to find the tweets / conversations that seem most relevant to you and your products or services. Then you’ll want to open the thread / conversation and look at all the people who are reacting to the original tweet – and here you’ll find a ton of your ideal customers.
You should think of it as a targeted FEED within a larger FEED.
So rather than engaging with the primary tweet (or person who started the popular conversation) you have a chance to engage with the target audience that is part of the bigger conversation.
What you can do is LIKE, COMMENT and RETWEET the most relevant tweets within conversation.
And one of the major benefits to engaging with many members of a large conversation is that people who are reading the larger conversation will see your account and replies frequently within the conversation.
If you are jumping into a feed that is getting tons of views – by default you are getting tons of views so think of this strategy as a way to take advantage of a huge existing audience rather than having to build one on your own.
As a side effect of the Popular Conversation Engagement strategy – you’ll get a ton of profile visits, website clicks and even followers.
Profile Search Feed
The profile search feed is pretty self explanatory. For any targeted search that you are doing you’ll be selecting the tab “People” which brings up accounts and biography information of people who match your search criteria. At this point you’re not really seeing any actual tweets / content, you’re just seeing profiles.
How to engage
With this search you’ll be engaging with your target audience in a couple of ways. First, you can check out their profile and make sure they are really an ideal customer, then you can follow the accounts. Following is a great way to keep tabs on your ideal customers.
Let’s say you follow 5000 people who all fit your ideal customer profile, everyday when you open Twitter your home feed will be filled with content from people you follow and you can engage with that content and know that you are only engaged with potential customers.
If you follow a bunch of non-targeted people you’re messing up the quality of your feed and creating more work for yourself in the long run. So the first step is to find great accounts and follow them.
The second thing you can do is check out your ideal customers’ content. So after you click over to their profiles, you can view their tweets and media. From here you can hand select content to interact with and gain the attention of your new prospect. In other words, find their content and LIKE, COMMENT and/or RETWEET it.
Side note: When you are using the engagement techniques listed above, you can also FOLLOW people in addition to LIKING, COMMENTING, and RETWEETING.
Recommended Engagement Strategy
Using the techniques above we recommend that you engage with 50 – 100 tweets a day, which should take you around an hour or less. Of course you can do more but we’d recommend that you spread out the activity. For example: Spend an hour in the morning and an hour at night. And don’t forget you can do most of this from your phone as well. I often do a lot of this activity while watching TV or a movie.
If you stay consistent with this approach, your activity begins to compound and you’ll create a snowball of traffic to your products and services. BUT you must STAY CONSISTENT. Do this every day or at least every other day. Again, the more you do CONSISTENTLY the better this will work.
What won’t work.
Putting in an hour on Monday and then half hour on Wednesday and then 5 minutes on Saturday and then 3 hours on Sunday – is not going to produce great results. It’s better than nothing but it’s not great. If you’re going to do this, it’s better to do 10 minutes a day if you can’t do an hour a day. Again the key is consistency.
Twitter Lists
While you’re searching for your prospects and ideal customers on Twitter there is a tool called lists that will help you a lot. Lists is just like it sounds and it allows you to create a list of people/accounts that you want to keep tabs on without having to follow them. You can create tons of different lists that have different types of people in them.
When you select your list you’ll see all of the content that the people on your lists have created. It’s an amazing way to create a customized feed of target customers. You can also filter the list by most popular tweets.
Content Strategy
Some marketing professionals will claim that content is KING and that you should be producing over 100 pieces of content every single day and distributing that content across all platforms. And while this extreme amount of activity can work, it’s really not necessary. If you focused that much time on engaging with people you’d get much better results. Here’s why.
Creating tons of content is great but if nobody is seeing it, what’s the point? However, if you focus on engaging with others and driving traffic back to your account, then you’ll be generating demand for your content. And when you’re generating demand for your content, then the content you produce will be seen – no matter how much or how little you produce.
With the engagement system we’ve described above – YOU ARE IN CONTROL OF GENERATING TRAFFIC. When you just produce content and pray that people see it – you are not in control of your traffic. And that’s why this system is so powerful. It allows anyone who is hard-working and determined to generate traffic and demand for their products. That is part of the reason why we call our company Command Traffic, because we put the power in your hands.
So, we’ve explained why engaging consistently is more important than creating tons of content. But, you will want to produce some content. Here’s an easy way to stay on top…
Tweet once a day or at least 3 times a week.
In your tweets you can do product promotions, you can share helpful information, you can ask questions, or you can post relevant memes. And within your own tweets you can post links pretty darn frequently.
One thing we love to do is create a highly engaging tweet with a link back to one of our websites and we PIN that to the top of our profile.
This way when people come to visit our profile they can see our bio information etc and then the first tweet they see also links back to our website. We do this to help drive more traffic from our Twitter account back to our website.
At the end of the day we believe that content creation should be fun and simple. Don’t over think it and don’t put too much pressure on yourself to create tons of content. You’ll get much more value out of engaging with others than you will just posting content.
As you create more and more traffic to your account, you can take on a more aggressive content output strategy, but only do it if it really is helping your account drive better results.
Using Hashtags
As you produce content you’ll want to think about the relevant hashtags that your potential customer will be searching and engaging with. You should have a list of at least 10 – 30 hashtags that you can use in your tweets, but you should only use one or two hashtags per tweet and your hashtags should help communicate something more about your post.
Ex: Drinking my favorite vodka with some good friends. #dirtymartini
Hashtags are not that big of a deal. They can help you get discovered but again – your engagement activity is going to drive the majority of your discovery, so don’t worry about it too much.
On the other hand – clicking a hashtag will pull up the feed of everyone who is using that exact same hashtag – which is nice when you are looking for your ideal customers.
Taking Advantage Of Trends
We’ve talked alot about searching out certain keywords and search phrases to find your ideal audience, but we haven’t talked much about leveraging Twitter TRENDING topics. Unfortunately it’s not likely that you’ll be able to relate your products or services to top trending topics, but every once in a while you will be able to capitalize on a trend. And for some of you, your products and services may be applicable to a wide range of people and it may be easier to tie yourself into a trend.
On the home page or explore page the trending topics usually show up to on the right hand side. Click the show more button to reveal all of the trending topics and hashtags.
Once you hit “show more” you’ll see a whole new set of tabs at the top with different categories. The trending tab is the one we’re talking about, but you can explore the other topics as well and depending on your product or service, you might find more relevant information in other tabs.
Here are the best ways to leverage trends.
#1 Jump into giant conversations. There will be hundreds of thousands or millions of people all discussing the same topic and you can find these gigantic conversations and join them. Much like we suggested earlier – you can engage with the individuals within the conversation.
The more individuals you interact with, the more exposure you’ll get – not only from the individuals – but also from the thousands of people reading through the threads. Inserting yourself into trends can be a great way to generate awareness for your products and services.
#2 Most trends will have a hashtag associated with them. Sometimes just making a tweet and using that hashtag can make one of your posts go viral. Whenever we see a good trend and hashtag that works for one of our brands, we’ll make multiple tweets using the hashtag. We might do 10 – 20 tweets and usually one of them gets a lot of attention (likes, comments, re-tweets).
Bonus: If you’re consistently engaging with other accounts everyday like we have suggested, you’ll be driving a lot of attention to your feed. And if you tweet about a current trend, many of the people who are visiting your profile will like, comment, or re-tweet your posts.
When this happens, it signals to Twitter that your post is getting engagement and it starts to show your tweet to more people, and then things start to snowball. Pretty much all social media networks work the same way. The more engagement you get, the more people your post will be shown to.
As you become more active on Twitter you’ll begin to develop friends and you can help eachother out by liking, commenting and re-tweeting each other’s posts. All of this activity will help you gain way more exposure.
Analytics
Twitter’s analytics are pretty great because you can really get a good idea of the results that your activity is producing. You can see what content is reaching the most people, and you can start to paint a good picture of what is contributing the most to your success.
All you have to do to find your analytics is to click the “MORE” tab and then the “ANALYTICS” tab, and you can see a bunch of different trackable metrics.
But here’s what you should NOT do!
Don’t get obsessed with your analytics. It’s fun to see progress, but you need to generate a ton of activity before you can really make any good decisions based on your analytics. So don’t obsessively check your analytics all the time. I would recommend checking your analytics once a week so you can understand what a week’s worth of work is doing for you. Then you can adjust your strategy week by week.
Analytics can cause a form of ANALYSIS PARALYSIS. This is when you spend more time analyzing thighs than taking action, and it’s one of the worst things an entrepreneur can do. Always take action over analysis. Action first, analysis second.
Major Key
The key to success with anything is to become obsessed. And if you’re going to use Twitter to market your products and services, I highly encourage you to spend time every single day trying to discover new features, strategies or “loopholes” that can help you make more progress.
By paying close attention, you can discover something that other people aren’t seeing, and it can be just the advantage you need. And by virtue of spending more time on the platform, you will discover more and more, which will lead you to high success rates.
With every social media network that I’ve used – I have always tested the limits. I have always discovered every feature possible and analyzed how it can be used (the way it was intended to be used in addition to other ways) and I have to tell you…
Every single social media network has some features the 99.99% of people aren’t aware of and do not use – and those features are usually what can give you the competitive edge.
And in this guide I showed you a loophole with Twitter already.
Twitter removed the ability (the buttons) to search keywords by location radius.
And I showed you how that type of search still works but you just need to know how to search it. So just because Twitter publicly removed the feature, it doesn’t mean that the feature doesn’t still work. But 99.99% of Twitter users have no idea about this.
LinkedIn and Facebook are also full of old school features and functions that almost nobody knows about or uses – and they are incredibly powerful.
Conclusion
After reading this guide here are some of the major takes-aways.
- Twitter is an amazing platform for reaching your ideal customers
- People who are active on Twitter pay very close attention.
- There are highly effective ways to find and engage with your ideal customers.
- Engaging with you ideal customers is the best way to get attention and generate sales.
- Following people and creating lists allows you to consistently market to your target audience.
- Followers are nice but do NOT really matter.
- These strategies give you the ability to COMMAND TRAFFIC and not hope for it.
- Posting your own content is necessary, but it’s not as effective as engaging with other people’s content.
- Consistency is the key to success.
- Become obsessed.
BONUS: Grow Your Business With These Recommended Tools
Having the right tools to run your business helps tremendously, but most people try hundreds of different tools and waste tons of money in the discovery process. At the end of the day, you must find the right tools that are ideal for your particular business. But, these are some stellar recommendations that will help you save some time and money.
Below is a list of tools that you should consider when starting a business online. All the blue text is CLICKABLE so you can instantly research the tools that interest you the most. We have given some description to each tool below but you should also do your own research, and select the tools that are right for your business.
If you are selling products (even digital products) online and you need a great low cost way to manage and sell your products on a website, Shopify is what you need to be using.
Not only is it incredibly easy to use, you can get your store up and running in less than 1 hour. Once you have uploaded your products, SHOPIFY makes it incredibly easy for customers to buy from you.
However, the greatest benefit of all is it’s integration with Facebook & Instagram advertising platforms. Shopify allows you to easily connect to Facebook business manager which automatically tracks all the activity on your site with the Facebook Pixel.
There is no need to hire an expensive coder to implement the codes on your site.
Shopify also integrates with Snapchat Ads, Google Ads, and many more. So if you’re going to eventually use advertising to drive traffic to your Shopify site, you’ll be able to get up and running with no technical expertise. All the codes can instantly be added though the shopify apps store.
Another huge benefit is that Shopify has an app store that allows you to choose from 1000’s of free and paid apps that will help you add the specific customizations your store needs.
I am NOT a technical personal at all but Shopify makes everything incredibly easy. It’s a total win for the low cost of $29.99/month with a 14-day free trial.
ClickFunnels is an extraordinary tool built to help entrepreneurs achieve their goals whether it be in e-commerce, customer service, business development, lead generation, client acquisition, and much much more. ClickFunnels is a very versatile tool that spans across any industry whereas Shopify is designed specifically for e-commerce.
However, ClickFunnels is great for creating sales funnels that focus on selling a singular product or service through a landing page or series of landing pages aka a FUNNEL.
You can certainly sell multiple products and services with ClickFunnels as well, but you would build separate funnels for each product or service. Many entrepreneurs use ClickFunnels for e-commerce to focus their marketing efforts on each individual product vs Shopify that focuses more on your store and a variety of products.
ClickFunnels offers a wide variety of tools and applications within it’s system, not only for building customized web pages but for collecting leads, selling products and services, email marketing, affiliate onboarding, pixel tracking, upsell flows, and much more!
ClickFunnels is a great price for the amount of value you get and you can even get a 14-day free trial. After your 14-day free trial the cost is $99/month for the basis plan.
Proof is an amazing tool that helps increase conversions on your website on average of 5% – 15% which is amazing. Proof is a website plugin that shows notifications of recent website visitors or website purchasers.
It’s meant to show social proof of other people taking action on your website to help encourage new visitors to make purchases or take action as well.
You can create customized settings for Proof alerts, but the default shows new notifications of purchases every 7 seconds. It’s non-obtrusive and it adds a lot of value and social proof to your website.
You can try Proof free for 14-days and then the starting plan is $29/month.
Hellobar is another amazing tool that allows you to create different pop-up notifications on your website. The great thing about Hellobar is that the popup notifications can be customized to different sizes and shapes and they can be customized for different actions.
- You can collect emails
- You can create links
- You can make announcements
On one of our projects we were able to increase CTR (click through rates) by 50% creating a website link pop-up.
We were running Facebook ads to a landing page where people needed to click one of three buttons to continue down our funnel. We added a non-intrusive pop-up bar at the bottom of the page that asked users to click and “Get Started” and we were able to reduce our ad click costs from $0.50 to less than $0.25 per click through.
What we found was that the bottom of the page pop-up grabs people’s attention really well, so offering a weblink, email signup, or discount announcement will help improve your website performance tremendously.
To learn more about Hellobar click here.
There is a free plan and a paid subscription when you need to increase your usage, but the free plan is really good and most people won’t ever need to upgrade. The paid version starts at $29/month.
Lemlist is a unique service that allows you to individually email a ton of people at once, and create follow-up emails and sequences to people based on actions they take. Essentially you can automate INDIVIDUAL outreach.
Lemlist connects to your email account and automatically sends out emails 1 by 1 so you can save time reaching out to people individually. If people don’t respond to your first email, Lemlist will send out a follow-up email and keep sending as many follow-up emails as you can schedule – until you get a response.
Once you get a response from your prospect, you’ll get a notification, then you can handle the email conversation from there.
This is one of the greatest tools for cold outreach because it automates all the hard work of individual email outreach and allows you to spend more time on the people who are actually interested and engaged with you.
Lemlist has a 14-day free trial and a starting price of $29/month!
GetResponse is our go-to email marketing service. Unlike Lemlist, GetResponse is designed for email marketing to your customer list or your list of potential customers in bulk. GetResponse has too many amazing features to list them all but here are some of our favorites.
Automation flows allow you to categorize certain subscribers and send them specific email sequences based on who they are or actions they have taken on your website or within your email list.
GetResponse allows integration with tons of web builders including Shopify. The Shopify integrations allows you to easily categorize people and manage them based on actions they took on your site. Our favorite feature is the abandon cart list we can create which allows us to create email follow-ups with people who were about to purchase our products and then decided not to.
GetResponse also has some amazing prebuilt templates, and it’s pricing is structured for email list growth. The pricing is very competitive compared to many other email service providers, especially as your list grows bigger and bigger.
This is our preferred email marketing tool and we have tried them all!
Sign up for a 30-day free trial or a starting price of just $15/month
Streak is a tool designed to work with gmail that helps you track and organize your email communications. It’s known for being a CRM that allows you to properly track the status of your email communications with clients or prospects, BUT our favorite feature is the READ feature.
With Streak you can see if and when someone has READ your email. This way you know when to follow-up. We’ve used this tool to send emails to people we know have just read our previous emails and it’s helped increase our email response rate tremendously.
It’s also cool to be able to know when someone has read your email or not.
This is a free tool until you maximize your usage and then plans start at $15/month.
It’s one of the most immediately impactful tools we use.
Outgrow is an amazing company that allows you to create quizzes, calculators, chatbots and more, all to help you collect more data on your users and increase sales.
We have used quizzes to get tons of traffic and help turn cold traffic into hot traffic that converts. Quizzes are incredibly powerful because they are usually fun to take and they can easily go viral.
One of our most successful quizzes was “find out which college you can get into” went viral among the high school community and it allowed us to generate a huge email list which we were then able to monetize by selling college related products and services.
Outgrow can help you set up these lead generation mechanisms through things like quizzes, calculators and chatbots. It’s really an amazingly powerful tool!
Outgrow has a free trial and the starting price after that is $14/month
PixelMe is an incredible tool that allows you to add your Pixels from various advertising platforms like Facebook to a shortened link. Anyone who clicks on your link will be tracked by your pixel and you can add your links to any website so you can gather data on users everywhere.
For example, you might sell products on a partner site like Amazon or a business partners website and you can use your Pixel to track performance and gather data. PixelMe is incredibly powerful especially if you write blogs or post content on other websites.
Example: We work with clients who have massive websites, if we wanted to we could ask our clients if we could add our tracking links to their sites to collect all their data, and then we could use that data to improve our advertisements.
PixelMe is free up to 5000 clicks a month and then the starting plan after that is $24/month
If you aren’t already using QuickBooks this will be an incredibly helpful tool for you to keep track of your business revenue and accounting. Using QuickBooks makes your bookkeeping, general accounting, and taxes a heck of alot easier.
The QuickBooks program takes some getting used to, but once you understand how to use it well, it will make your life a lot easier.
Teachable is one of the leading course platforms for people interested in selling their knowledge. We’ve found Teachable to be the most user friendly solution, however, it’s not the most flexible or technical solution.
As you grow on the Teachable platform, you’ll want more features and abilities which will most likely cause you to only use Teachable for hosting your actual course, and you’ll keep your website and marketing material completely separate. You’ll want to use a tool like ClickFunnels or SamCart to drive sales and signups, and then auto-create the users on the backend to access your courses.
That being said, Teachable makes it really easy to start selling your course and to start building an audience of loyal customers.
SamCart is very similar to ClickFunnels in the sense that it allows you to build simple high converting pages and funnels – and easily collect money through payment processors like paypal, stripe and more. Where SamCart differs is in the features. SamCart keeps things very simple and straightforward and for that we really like the tool. It’s really good for creating simple, high-converting sales pages.
Most people use SamCart as a one-page lander to collect payments for e-commerce products or services. And SamCart is a great secure way to charge a client for customer work as well because you can simply create a sales page and send your client the URL and they can pay right on that page.
SamCart also has integrations with top technologies on the market so you can connect SamCart to just about anything.