The Lockwood Letter

It seems like everyone and his brother has their own guide on how to get more followers on Twitter, so I’m going to discuss some basic things you can do to achieve that. No dark secrets here, no third-party tools, no spending hours and hours to do any of these steps. (I say “basic” because if you’ve been active on Twitter for a while, you probably know most of these.)

1. Put your picture in your profile (or a drawing or some sort of graphic): A head shot of you is usually best, but almost anything is better than the default dark red square with 2 circles that I think is supposed to look like a pair of glasses (or maybe eyes). Many people will not follow you if you have the default graphic. Also, your tweets (posts) stand out more when your picture is next to them. Don’t worry about your looks, since on the Twitter timeline the graphics are pretty small.

Don’t worry about resizing your graphic so that it is the exact size displayed on Twitter, since Twitter does that automatically. However, note that if you use a large graphic, people will be able to see it full size when they click on the graphic from your profile.

You also don’t have to supply a square photo; Twitter will trim off the bottom part if necessary to make it square.

2. Put your location in your profile. This can be anything you want, but most people put a geographic location like city, state, country, region, etc. Some people use this to find people to follow who are in their area.

3. Put a bio in your profile. Twitter limits you to 160 characters for this, so writing this should not be as intimidating as writing your whole life story. If you’re on Twitter for professional reasons, I’d list the type of business or profession you are in, as well as other things you want people to know about you such as hobbies. Remember that anyone can read this, so I wouldn’t put anything there that you want kept secret (like your membership in the local Hitler club, for example).

I’m amazed how many people leave the bio completely blank. That means when I look at their profile, I have very little to go on to figure out who they are and what they are interested in. Unless there is something cool about their most recent tweets or their Twitter background (see below), I’m unlikely to follow them since I have no idea what we might have in common. There are millions of people on Twitter, so I can’t possibly follow them all. Many people will not follow you if you leave the bio blank.

You can edit and add to your bio anytime, so don’t worry about making it perfect. Even if it just says something like “Internet marketer and hockey fan”, that’s much better than having nothing. If you remember something else, just go add it to your profile.

4. Put your real name (the “name” field) on your Twitter account (assuming you are using Twitter as an individual). If your username there is a nickname like “bravesfan” or “marketingqueen”, that’s fine, but include your real name in your profile. (It’s a separate field in your profile.) If you leave out your real name, people who know you by that name may not realize it’s you if they look at your profile. That has actually happened to me when looking at profiles of people I knew in real life who didn’t have a photo of themselves there. Some people will not follow you if you don’t include your real name.

If you use a pen name in all your business activities, I’d suggest using that for “real” name, since the main thing is that it sounds like a person’s name, rather than a brand name or nickname.

5. Put a link to your website (if you have one) in the website field. I suggest making a landing page just for people coming from Twitter which has more about you than will fit in the bio field. This is also a good place to mention your other websites if you have more than one. Some people will click to your website when deciding whether to follow you. I’m amazed when people who have website(s) don’t list one in their Twitter profile, unless there’s something secret about the site.

A big reason why these are important is because taking a few minutes to add them to your profile shows that you are more serious about using Twitter, rather than an account someone created just to post a bunch of ads rather than connect with other people.

To change any of these, go to your Twitter account and click Settings at the top. Most of these items will be on that page. To change your picture, click on the Picture tab.

All of the above can be done in half an hour or less, and it would be good to do them as soon as possible to get more of those who visit your profile to follow you.

Here are some things you can do on an ongoing basis to get more followers:

6. Participate in conversations. Many of us have no problem with you posting links to your sites on Twitter, but if that’s all you tweet, that’s another story. If it looks like you just show up at Twitter, post your stuff, and leave, that is easy to spot for those who care and won’t help you get followers, since only your followers will see that stuff.

7. Reply to people. This goes with the previous tip. If it looks like you just make statements and post links to your sites, and ignore the conversation that is going on, that’s generally not good. This does not mean reply to every tweet of everyone. It means replying to people who addressed you (tweeted with @YOURUSERNAME), especially if a reply seems warranted. I doubt anyone expects you to reply to every single one of these, especially if you have many followers, but again, when you reply, it shows you are listening to others, not just talking or making announcements. I have started following many people who I first heard about because they were mentioned in a reply.

To reply you can just press the little curved arrow icon to the right of the tweet; for me the icon doesn’t appear until I move my mouse there.

If you click @Replies on the right column of the main Twitter page, it will show you the most recent tweets with your username in them (only those with @ directly in front of them)- I usually go there first and reply to tweets from when I was away. Of course if the tweet was from a week ago, it’s probably less important to reply to it now.

If you’re using Twitter from your phone or some other device, how George Jetson of you. Different apps may have other ways of viewing @Replies.

8. Post useful, entertaining, and/or interesting information. This includes things like responding to questions people ask if you know the answer. It also means tweeting things that are unrelated to your business or profession. This is where Twitter is not like an email list; it’s OK, even encouraged, to post about “off topic” things like news items, sports, movies, TV, video games, food, etc. If I sent an email to my one of my Internet marketing lists about a movie I just watched, that would probably turn off lots of people unless it somehow related to business. But on Twitter, that’s normal. Try posting links to sites that you don’t own or have an interest in. Or mention that a certain chain store has a great sale on some popular item. Or a good movie you just saw, a book you read, a song you heard, and so on.

It’s true that most of the people who see #8 will be those already following you, but it will help you when people look at your profile and see you are sharing stuff worth reading.

I’ll post more tips on this subject later.

People have been asking me about the Twitter badge on the right side of this page, so this post will explain exactly how to put one on your site.

1. Find a graphic- there are over 100 nice Twitter-related buttons and graphics here that you are free to use. I suggest using one with the full word “Twitter”, since some people will not know what just the “T” or the bird means.

2. Put the graphic file here (create the directory if it doesn’t exist):
http://YOURSITE/images/

YOURSITE is where WordPress is installed, such as yoursite.com.

Note: Put the file in that directory rather than one for the WordPress theme so the graphic will show up on other pages, such as the ones for individual posts.

3. Figure out where to put the HTML code for the graphic. In a 3-column blog like this, the left column is in a file called l_sidebar.php and the right one is in r_sidebar.php. If your theme has 2 columns, the sidebar may be in just sidebar.php. If you want the graphic to be at the top (above all the posts and sidebars), the file is header.php. Make a copy of the file before you edit it.

The path to the file in your hosting account should be
http://YOURBLOGURL/wp-content/themes/YOURTHEME/

YOURBLOGURL is the address of your blog’s home page, such as yoursite.com or yoursite.com/blog - wherever WordPress is installed.

Note: If you have a standard HTML website rather than a blog, just put the code in index.html or wherever your home page is, or the page where you want the graphic to appear.

4. Below is the HTML code in blue. Change the php file from above, either by FTPing it to your hard drive, editing, and FTPing back up, or use an HTML editor in your control panel if there is one.

<center><a href=”http://twitter.com/YOURTWITTERID” target=”_blank”>
<img src=”/images/GRAPHICFILE” border=”0″ alt=”follow me on Twitter”></a></center>

YOURTWITTERID is your Twitter username that shows next to your tweets.
GRAPHICFILE is the name of the graphic file you chose, probably ending in jpg, gif, or png.

It’s a good idea to add height and width attributes if you know how to do that. If not, no big deal.

This code will center the image within the column (sidebar). When the graphic is clicked on, your Twitter profile will open in a new browser.

Note: If you do a View Source on this page and search for “twitter”, you’ll notice the HTML code is right above a </li> tag. The theme already had those tags; the code I added needed to be put between <li> and </li> so it would display properly.

5. You can use the same method to add clickable buttons to your other profiles (like Facebook or MySpace), your ebay auctions, or whatever. Make sure you have permission to use whatever graphics you find. Put the address of the other site after href and change the message for alt to make sense.

6. This method is for sites in your hosting account. If your blog is hosted somewhere else, check the help system to see where to put the code, if you are even allowed to edit that. (Don’t paste the code in the box where you would type a blog post.)

7. If this sounds “too technical”, sorry, but it’s actually basic stuff. Do yourself a favor and learn some basic HTML and FTP skills if you’re going to have a website. Once you have a graphic chosen, it shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes to do all of this.

Now that 2008 is over, I’ve been looking at my business results (numbers like sales and expenses) to get ready to do tax returns. One thing that really surprised me was which products did better in 2008 relative to 2007, and which ones did worse.

With all the talk of recession, bailouts, and economic gloom and doom, conventional wisdom is that consumers are cutting back on purchases, so unless your product is related to making or saving money, sales should be down.

Just the opposite was true for me: the marketing and business-related products that people are supposedly looking for did not do nearly as well as the niche products that people “aren’t buying” right now.

And my best month of the year was December, when it was clear that the election being over did not mean the economy was instantly improved, the U.S. was officially declared to be in a recession, and the extended holiday season was supposed to keep people from buying online (except for gifts and the latest gadgets, nothing like the downloadable products I sell).

I have no idea how to explain this, but I do have a lesson learned from it. I had a general idea throughout the year of roughly how much I was making, because I see the money coming into my Clickbank and PayPal and other accounts, and I figured some products must be doing better than others (since it’s rare for them all to trend the same way at the same time)… but until I looked at the numbers, I had no idea of the big performance gap between the niche products and the business-related products. The fact that it came as a surprise after the year was over is really bad.

Imagine if a large retail chain had no idea until the end of the year that sales at some of its stores were down, just a general idea of how all the stores as a group did. That would not happen, because chains like that almost always treat each store like a separate business that should be profitable on its own (partly so they know which stores to close or expand). Additionally, each department in the store would be treated much like a separate business, at least for keeping track. You can be sure that the electronics department at your local Walmart has goals and targets set for it, as does the hardware department, the automotive department, housewares, and so on. Within departments, I’m sure they track by categories and individual products, so they know which ones deserve valuable shelf space and which don’t.

That got me thinking, why not treat my business like a chain would? Treat each product or service as its own profit center, a mini-business with its own sales targets, and monitor these throughout the year, not just at year end out of curiosity.

Although the main thing is the total sales of the entire business, wouldn’t it make sense to work on each of the pieces which make up that total, rather than treat it all as one big pile of money?

I’ve already calculated the totals for the whole business, so my next step will be to go through my records and see how many units each product sold throughout 2008, not just for the year, but on a month-by-month basis, if not more frequently. That will show me the trend for each product, whether it has been rising or falling or holding steady in sales. I guess I haven’t done this before since nobody made me do it- I have to figure the totals for tax purposes, but nothing there is measured for individual products.

Once I know how a product has done throughout 2008, I’ll be able to set realistic goals for it for 2009 (monthly, weekly, or daily sales targets).

When you have a sales target for an online product, as John Taylor points out in this blog post, you can calculate how many visitors you need to get to that site per day or week to hit your sales target, if you know the conversion rate.

Then it becomes a matter of “How do I get 700 visitors to this site tomorrow?” rather than “I hope tomorrow brings lots of sales.”

That reminds me that traffic is another thing I haven’t paid as much attention to as I should have. I tend to pay much more attention to the orders coming in.

There are other improvements I’ll be making in 2009, but for now, try implementing what I’ve suggested. Measure your sales for each product and then set individual goals for it, and I’ll bet you’ll find that 2009 is more profitable than 2008 was.