StartupNation and VerticalResponse Let You Pick Top Mom-Run Businesses

We've partnered with a great company, StartupNation to launch the first annual "Leading Moms in Business" ranking, which highlights one of the fastest growing segments of entrepreneurship, Moms! According to the Center for Women�s Business Research, there are 10.6 million...

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[Source: VerticalResponse Email Marketing Blog for Small Business]

5 Tips To Optimize Your Twitter Bio

I really think that people overlook the importance of their Twitter bio. There is real opportunity to leverage the information within your bio to gain additional followers. I have provided my top five tips to optimize your Twitter bio.

1. Provide a descriptive one line bio. What I like to do is to look at some of my followers and see who they are following. When in the followers list you can hover over the user name and a pop up will come up with that particular user's bio. If your bio is not filled out or is not very descriptive, you maybe missing out on potential followers. You have 160 characters, use them all.

2. Add a profile picture. If your Twitter account is not being used for corporate branding, add a picture of yourself. One Twit recently stated that when he asked his followers why they followed him, they came back and said it was because of his smiling profile picture. People want to connect with people and not avatars. The worst thing you can do is to not add a profile picture.

3. Use your real name. This is really important on two fronts. One is for reputation management, especially if your name IS your brand. Also if you are representing a brand, having a name behind the brand will allow people to connect with the company on a more personal level.

4. Fill out your location. Just do not put "Amongst the strawberry fields". There are plenty of opportunities to connect with other local Twits for possible offline networking.

5. Place the URL to your current blog, personal site or business. If you do not currently have any one of those, then link to one of your other social network profiles (i.e. LinkedIn). This will allow people to find out more about you, your business, or your interests.

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[Source: Twitter Tools, Reviews, & News - eINFO]

Twestival - Tweetup For A Good Cause

Twestival is an organized event that will be held in over 100 cities around the world on February 12, 2009 to help raise money and awareness for charity:water. charity:water is an organization that is trying to provide clean drinking water to schools in developing nations. Twestival was conceived in September to bring together local Twitter communities, enjoy entertainment, and have a few drinks while raising money for this cause. They are still looking for additional host cities so visit their site to learn more about this worth while event.

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[Source: Twitter Tools, Reviews, & News - eINFO]

Get Your Valentine's Day Email Ready!

I posted this exactly a year ago but thought it was worth posting again (no, I'm not being lazy!). We just got through some major holidays but now it's time to start over. Your first mission? You need to send...

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[Source: VerticalResponse Email Marketing Blog for Small Business]

Business to Business Marketing � 5 Ideas for Cultivating Leads

If you�re selling to businesses it can be quite a challenge not only getting leads in the door, but what you do with those leads once they�re in. After all, many businesses have a longer lead time to getting a...

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[Source: VerticalResponse Email Marketing Blog for Small Business]

Twitter Stats by Hitwise

Hitwise released a new report, Twitter Catches Up To Digg. The report states that Twitter has surpassed Digg in market share of visits for the first time. Here are some other interesting stats on Twitter:

Age of visitors to Twitter (2009)

• Age 18-24 7.39%
• Age 25-34 44.64%
• Age 35-44 14.04%
• Age 45-54 13.90%
• Age 55+ 20.03%

Top 5 website referrals

1. Google - 9.23%
2. Facebook - 8.82%
3. MySpace - 7.56%
4. Gmail - 6.24%
5. Yahoo Mail - 6.05%

The report notes that there is a significant amount of traffic coming from Twitter Apps that are not measured in this report. You can read my previous post about the impact of Twitter Apps on your Analytics.

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[Source: Twitter Tools, Reviews, & News - eINFO]

CurseBird - Real Time Swearing on Twitter

Want to know which curse word is the most used on Twitter in the last seven days? Well CurseBird has your answer. CurseBird provides the top ten curse words being used on Twitter. You can also see the Twitter stream of the latest curse words people are using in their Tweets. I scored "Lame of 100" where I had zero swears. You can see my cursebird score .

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[Source: Twitter Tools, Reviews, & News - eINFO]

How to Use LinkedIn for Your Business

Occasionally I like to write about things other than email marketing ... shocker! This time I thought it would be great to talk about LinkedIn, and how small businesses can harness the power of this valuable business networking tool.A lot...

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[Source: VerticalResponse Email Marketing Blog for Small Business]

New URL Expand Feature in Twitter

Just noticed that it has been awhile since I last posted. Been really busy launching our new corporate site. Anyways, today I was doing some research for one of my clients by using search.twitter.com. I just notice that there is a new "expand" link next to all of the URLs within the search results. When you hit "expand" it allows you to see the full destination URL (up to a certain number of characters). Not sure when this feature will reach the Twitter account pages.

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[Source: Twitter Tools, Reviews, & News - eINFO]

TwitterHat - Alternative Twitter Advertising

Have you been trying to figure out how to advertise on Twitter or make a few bucks off of Twitter ads? Well TwitterHat provides an alternative advertising avenue for the Twitter user. In short, TwitterHat is a short URL service. The twist is that they overlay the landing page with an advertising banner across it. You can see an example here.

TwitterHat allows bloggers to join their advertising network for a flat monthly fee. They will provide impressions and click data in their monthly service. There are no fees posted, but I imagine that there is a low entry cost. Probably worth testing out.

For the Twitter user, you can earn reward points for sending people to one of your Twittered links. As a Twitter users you will not become rich overnight. It takes 1000 visits to get a $10 gift card.

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[Source: Twitter Tools, Reviews, & News - eINFO]

2 Great Restaurant Marketing Ideas

Idea #1: This list building idea comes from Jessica Greene-Pierson, a Marketing Programs Manager here at VerticalResponse. She went out to dinner with her husband at a local Indian restaurant and in the bill holder there was a survey. Nothing...

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[Source: VerticalResponse Email Marketing Blog for Small Business]

TwitterHat - Alternative Twitter Advertising

Have you been trying to figure out how to advertise on Twitter or make a few bucks off of Twitter ads? Well TwitterHat provides an alternative advertising avenue for the Twitter user. In short, TwitterHat is a short URL service. The twist is that they overlay the landing page with an advertising banner across it. You can see an example here.

TwitterHat allows bloggers to join their advertising network for a flat monthly fee. They will provide impressions and click data in their monthly service. There are no fees posted, but I imagine that there is a low entry cost. Probably worth testing out.

For the Twitter user, you can earn reward points for sending people to one of your Twittered links. As a Twitter users you will not become rich overnight. It takes 1000 visits to get a $10 gift card.

Read More...

[Source: Twitter Tools, Reviews, & News - eINFO]

How To Value a Twitter Account

Are you considering selling your Twitter account? Well I have not seen one on eBay just yet. But an interesting question was posed by @BrentCsutoras, an Internet Marketing consultant. He asked, "If you could... What would you pay for a Top 100 Twitter account with over 14,000 followers?".

This posed an interesting dilemma. There has not been any precedence set on this that I am aware of. I know a while back someone sold the rights to advertise on their Twitter background on eBay.

How should one determine the value of a Twitter account? Using Twitterholic as your gauge as to whether or not the account is deemed "authoritative" could be a good start. But I see flaws in Twitterholic, no offense to @gavin and @alexrudoff. Take the number one spot for example, @barackobama. Now Barack has over 165K followers and he is following 170K, but has not posted a Tweet in over 60 days. Should we still consider Barack an active influential user of Twitter?

Should we just go by the shear number of Followers? Probably not. I think that the ratio of Followers to Following should be a benchmark. You would even have to weigh the Followers as well. Somewhat similar to authoritative back links. Some Followers have more credibility then others.

Should the number of ReTweets a person receives be a factor as well. Retweetrank and Most ReTweeted could be incorporated into the mix.

Finally, is there really a market for reselling your Twitter account? What are your thoughts?

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[Source: Twitter Tools, Reviews, & News - eINFO]

Retweetrank - See How Many Times You Have Been Retweeted

Retweetrank allows you to find who is producing the most interesting content that is being retweeted on Twitter. Retweetrank provides a list of the top 50 Twitter accounts that are being retweeted. This site also allows you to search on your own Twitter user name to see who is retweeting your content. Retweetrank rankings are based on the number of retweets (including RT of RT), but there is no given time frame provide.

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[Source: Twitter Tools, Reviews, & News - eINFO]

Your 2009 Marketing Checklist

New year resolutions lists are running rampant, so we decided to call this one the 2009 Marketing Checklist. You can tack this one up next to the list where you vow to "lose 5lbs.", "volunteer more" and "get a dog"...

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[Source: VerticalResponse Email Marketing Blog for Small Business]

Twitter Phishing Scam Alert

There is a current phishing scam going on targeting Twitter users. Be aware of direct messages or direct message email notifications with links to the redirected URL. Read more on the official Twitter blog about it and what happens if you have been duped and are now locked out of your Twitter account.

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[Source: Twitter Tools, Reviews, & News - eINFO]