Well looks like Twitter is here to stay and continues to grow albeit a little slower now than shooting straight to the moon. One of my biggest grips with the whole Twitter community is trying to find people you actually want to follow. If I were a hotel I’d want to follow travelers and other hoteliers before I follow news accounts, ya know what I mean? You can do all of the searching you want and really all you find is a bunch of user generated lists on blogs that have links to perhaps 50 of the top whatever according to them.

Because of this hodgepodge of random lists by random people @Zedomax and I set out to bring everyone’s list into one place and created Twitli.st.

Before you start mailing me flowers and $100 bills I want you to check out the site, especially all of you Twitter users and shoot us back some feedback so we can further improve the idea.

Now onto the goodies…

If you are anyone looking for any type of Twitter list we’ll have you covered in no time.

Hotel and Travel Peeps can jump right here to our Travel Twitter List and Hotel Twitter List follow over 1100 people as quick as you can click the follow button. The more times people are listed and recommended by others the higher they’ll show on these lists. Or as the saying goes… the cream rises to the top!

Since you cant recommend individual people and only lists we have eliminated a huge spam problem and made the Twitter Lists experience more pleasant. Now people can visit for the sake of sharing other cool Twitter lists with the world or drill down in the categories to find lots of relevant Twitter users.

Starting to see the potential here…?

The more lists people recommend the bigger the categories grow and the more relevancy is added to those using. I would again encourage you to try it out and recommend the best Twitter list you know of.

Looking for target Twitter lists, look no further…

Drop your thoughts and comments below, we’d love to hear them!

In fact, we all are.

What do I mean by this?

I mean simply that each of us by default is a social media expert. We each read, write, talk, text, email, twit, Facebook and the like with each other all of the time.

Let’s compare ourselves to 100 years ago. You could count the ways of communication on one hand. In person, telephone, the wire and print publications.

Now we have devises that can do all of that by themselves.

What’s it mean to be a social media expert? Nothing, because we all are.

If you need helping learning how to be social online, simply treat everyone like they are your largest customer.

Most people view social media experts as someone who makes money helping people tap the amazing powers of the Internet like it is some magical box.

The truth is, the difference between being a social media expert and just a social media user typically involves speeches, business cards and charging lots of money.

The best social media expert is the one who just teaches you how to listen to your customers online and talk to them like normal, everyday people, because they are.

Dog and pony shows are awesome, but the truth is we all know how to be social. It’s just time to learn how to do that with new tools.

Thankfully, Twitter, Facebook, Blogs and Youtube are built with a super shallow learning curve.

If you want to pay someone to set up a Twitter account for you or a Facebook Fan page, that’s great. Do it if it saves you money by saving you time. Or you could just ask your 15-year-old son.

Done.

Now take all of that money and time I just saved you and go and do something awesome!

When I fist started blogging just about two years ago on www.joshwhitford.com I had no real idea on what I was going to talk about. I love business and I love marketing and eventually that became the theme of the posts I continued to write.

In the beginning I figured I would learn how to rank for keywords and then continue to do so. One of the first keywords I targeted was the term Unconventional Marketing. I thought the term was just what I was looking for as my starting point and target audience.

I eventually ranked for the term after trying for a couple of months and now I continue to hold the first spot in Google roughly two years later. For the record, I got most of my link love by changing the title on my site to the Unconventional Marketing Blog and then people continually linking to my site with that description. Pretty easy huh?

I recall when I showed up #1 for the first time. I wrote a post talking about being #1 for the term and how proud I was. Then a thoughtful commenter showed up and told me how my term sucked because according to all major sites, the term gets little or no traffic to speak of. Way to rain on my parade, right?

So I shuck it off and continued without much thought.

A few months later someone emailed through my site asking for me to develop a marketing plan and help them execute it for them. The deal turned out being a solid 5 figures and low and behold they found me through the term Unconventional Marketing. Crazy.

Not only was that one deal a success, but I have had 3 deals in the 5 figures result from that one search term… So much for no search traffic, huh?

What is the point of all of this rambling? Simple. Just because someone comes and rains on your parade about something you worked hard to get doesn’t mean that you should take what they say as fact or the law.

It also means keywords and search terms that get “little” or “no” traffic to speak of can result in large deals.

So many people get hung up on the numbers, how many people visit, how many page views, how many this, how many that and so on. Really the numbers are deceiving and can be manipulated pretty easily to give people what they want… more numbers. Instead, focus on what will help you reach your goal. Will 5 buyers get you closer to your goal? You bet. Can you find 5 buyers out of 10 visitors? You bet.

Before you think about keywords and how “little” traffic they get according to whatever source, realize that until you actually rank for the term, you’ll never know. I can tell you that people search and click on Unconventional Marketing about 3-4 times a day or 1,200 times a year. But out of those 1,200 visitors I’ve made a fair chunk of change. Get the point?

Try whatever you can and see the results for yourself. What if I had given up on the idea of unconventional marketing because some naysayers analyzed and determined I was wrong? What have you given up on because of others’ opinions? What do you think would be fun to try just for the sake of trying?

What is Unconventional Marketing?

Doing what the majority doesn’t and getting results…

I guess you got me on a video kick now and just can’t get enough of me. In the video below I tell a story about me and some of my past adventures.

*disclaimer: some of the information in this post could be considered illegal activity depending on your country, state or city. This is meant for entertainment purposes only and not as a guide to do anything that violates any national, state or local laws.

How’s that for a setup? I bet you’re interested now. Lets roll the tape. Also I noticed the auto gets a little fuzzy in some places. I apologize.

I’m sure by now you have figured out this post is about developing a story around your product. Doing so effectively can make a huge difference in profits and brand loyalty. Why do you think iPod does so well? Its not because iPods are the best made product on the market, actually they fail a lot. But nobody cares because of the emotion that accompanies the product. Everyone knows you are cool when you listen to an iPod.

It’s amazing how people are willing to purchase a sub-par product just because of how the story makes them feel. But I am not advocating for you to go out and develop a story around a crummy product just for the sake of selling more.

Next time you are about ready to go and launch a new product, look at the story you are about to tell and see how you can tell it a little better. Start by telling people how life was before you made your widget and how you thought there could be a better way. So you set out to find that way that could help all of humanity. In your quest to do so you developed your widget. Then out of the kindness of your heart you decided to share that widget with the rest of the world so they would not have to go through the same troubles and termoils you had to endure. Do this in about 30 seconds and you have a winner. What do we give them, Johnny? A shiny new widget for $19.95.

Now see, that wasn’t so hard.

Tell me about products you have purchased that totally sucked but came with a good story…

If you were interested in the knife I was talking about you can find it here for $36. The brand name of the knife was Min Sheng. Not all countries allow such things, so make sure to double check before ordering.

By the end of this post you will be able to make money via Twitter marketing.

First off, I am tried of people saying they can’t figure out how to make money by using Twitter. There are over 60 million people on the thing and you can’t figure out how to monetize Twitter off of that? Seriously?

I am not going to go over the wrongs or rights of the different Twitter marketing ideas presented here or how to play the Twitter game. To each their own.

I have been a part of these ideas at some point in order to bring you this list. I do not continue to use all of these Twitter marketing techniques. Some were purely for trial/error or experimentation.

Twitter is a communication tool

Twitter’s sole purpose is to help people communicate, period. If you are broadcasting on Twitter like an ad machine you’ll constantly need to add more and more Twitter followers to your list to sustain the click-thrus in order to make money. This is a waste of time and never ends.

Work on building relationships and stroking egos. A Twitter account with 200 loyal and dedicated followers will do more than an account with 100,000. I promise.

With Twitter’s open and easily accessible API there are a 1,000,001 programs enabling you to find people who would be interested in you, your product, site, business or whatever.

Gain Niche Traffic from Twitter

It used to be that you could create a Twitter account for the purpose of promoting your website and masses of people would flock to everything tweeted by everyone. This is not the case anymore.

People have begun to find a balance in the things they like to see and experience on Twitter and will drop over-promoting assholes in two seconds flat.

With that said, if you use Twitter and your account properly, you can find a goldmine of like-minded people for your niche site. As you establish relationships with these people they will in fact click-thru to your site.

Most of these click-thrus to your site will not click on ads, but they will click on affiliate links and reviews. If you are running a niche site about lawn and garden and promoting this site with Twitter, don’t expect to make any money from Adsense. If you are linking people to product review pages with some good bits of info and some Amazon affiliate links, you’ll do much better. If people click on the link in a Twitter stream, they are going there to read the content, not click on a Google ad.

Search.Twitter.com is a goldmine

The old fashioned way of searching for people on Twitter is still possible by running search queries through search.twitter.com and watch the stream. With the advent of Twitter programs, much of this can be done with many additional features allowing you to cover more ground at one time.

I use CoTweet a lot for my Twitter marketing and for managing my various Twitter accounts. Currently CoTweet is in beta and you’ll have to beg them to let you in. The best thing you can do with Twitter is find people who are like-minded for your website or community.

With websites like twellow.com/twellowhood and others you can find lists of people who have related interests. Tweepsearch.com will allow you to search people’s Twitter profiles/bios and so on. If you’re into lawn and gardening, search people’s Twitter bios for gardening and check them out. See if you have anything in common and begin a conversation.

Having your pulse on your Twitter community enables you to make decisions about topics, trending topics, possible products to review and much more. If you see some person talking about xyz widget very favorably and that widget has an affiliate program or is sold on amazon.com, imagine what you can write a review about…

Then go back to the thing you know best and rank that review in the serps for all the organic traffic for people to find and buy.

Review Products and Services

Information is key to determining what you can write about and make some money. If people who are not invested in a product or service are still interested and talking about it, that is a potentially good product to review.

Do your homework. Write a review of whatever and rank that for people to find. When you publish the article/review, it is natural to Tweet that out to your followers, and if you have the right followers, they will do the same to help promote you. This isn’t where the money is made, but it helps so don’t count it out.

The sure money is using the info gleamed from Twitter to determine what people want and have an appetite for.

Selling Ads on Twitter

There are dozens of ad companies that are jumping into the sponsored tweets game such as ad.ly, Sponsored Tweets and Twittad.  These companies are trying to help you make money from Twitter by tweeting ads to your followers. I prefer Sponsored Tweets and ad.ly as they seem the most legit and expanding their services super quickly in this new game. They also offer referral programs so as people below you make money, so do you without having to blast your own community with ads. It’s a wicked little circle.

Selling ads will make you money, but unless you have a high CTR from your followers your rates will drop fast. You might only make a few hundred before your good karma runs dry with your followers. So unless thousands of people can name you from Adam online this will be short lived. If you and your Twitter account are the go-to place online for a niche, you’d probably have better success selling ads.

Twitter Referral Programs

Most programs online made for making money have affiliate programs attached to them to help spread the word and love around. You can find tons of these programs made just for Twitter that help you find and follow masses of people closely related to your interests. Buy the program, use the program, write a review, rank, make money and rinse/repeat.

Just about every day a new program comes out, so opportunities are plentiful for making money with referral programs. Just take a look at the program/software and see if it looks useful and well put together, then give it a try. Not all are good, but you should be at least be able to break even from the crappy ones so you don’t really lose anything while trying.

I have made great residual income from this, and for the time invested it is a no brainer.

Buy Ads

If you’d like to find targeted Twitter users for your website or product you can do so using the same companies listed above for selling ads on Twitter. But another overlooked idea is buying ads for product reviews.

If there is interest in a product you see on Twitter, quickly write a review of that product. Then you can post some Google Adword search ads pointing to your review and scrap a lot of affiliate commissions way before you rank for the product. Then, as you rank you can determine whether or not to discontinue the ads.

A lot of the software being offered online has high payouts, even $60 per lead. If the ad costs $.10 per click to run because it is you and two other people doing it, then how many clicks can you afford per one sale? Following me here… There is money for the taking just need to keep your eyes open to the opportunities.

Make Money Managing Others’ Twitter accounts

This is where things change in approach big time for users, branding, interactions and so forth. Most companies that would want you to manage their Twitter account will want results that help their brand. This is a no nonsense, person to person interaction for the purpose of getting more people through the door.

This is not simply setting up a Twitter account and then proceeding to blast anyone following you with specials and ad-like tweets. You’ll quickly lose their interest and they will begin to ignore anything you do.

This becomes about building relationships and reinforcing why this particular brand/company is worth spending money at. I have had great success with this form of interaction including a steady 60 clicks per tweet out of 2,000 followers. This does not seem high, but for Twitter and the number of followers this is good given that maybe 300 people out of that 2,000 probably see one tweet at any given time.

With services like bit.ly you are able to easily track clicks, find the best time of day to tweet different specials or promotions and much more. Simply take any bit.ly url you see and add a + to the end of it to see the stats of that tweet. I love when my tweet and 2,000 followers gets twice the clicks of our trust agent Chris Borgan, LMAO.

Unless you know some businesses that need this service, it is a tough sell. In fact, if they cringe at the sound of social media or Twitter, just move on and save yourself the time. The best way to get in the door is to prove yourself online with Twitter and talk to local/regional business owners at any kind of public setting. Offer up a challenge to them and if they bite, you just might have a new client.

Know what your demographic is and hunt them down on Twitter. Use Twitter search, use Twellowhood for people in specific areas, Tweapsearch for interests, look at patrons’ websites and followers and approach them as well. Finding people is the easy part, taking time to interact with them is a different story.

The most important thing with this type of promotion is to be real, honest and interact with everyone, even if it has nothing to do with your product/service. We all love when people remember us and make us laugh. Use their name, create experiences people will remember and have a good time. This will work.

Making Money With Twitter Conclusion

Like everything in the world, there are a 1,000 ways to skin a cat (no offense, Beamer.. ) and the same holds true for Twitter. Find what you know best and use Twitter as a tool to assist you on that path. Not all people are into Internet Marketing, so they could manage a Twitter account vs. writing reviews and ranking webpages and visa versa.

Here’s a good rule of thumb to follow: If you don’t like seeing it on Twitter, don’t do it and you’ll be safe. If you love getting auto Direct Messages, then feel free to do that. If you don’t, then DON’T. If you wonder how people will react to what you do on Twitter, just look at how you reacted to the same thing a few days before (honestly).

If you treat your followers like gold and worth $100 each, you’ll have high CTR, referral purchases, interactions, people through the door and so on. If you treat them like a penny on the ground, you attract the same, which won’t help you a bit. Use your head and you’ll do great.