Figuring out what to tweet about on Twitter requires considering your overall Internet marketing plan.

For example, if you are trying to increase the traffic to your blog about books, you may decide to focus on tweeting links to news items related to book publishing and book marketing along with the links to your own blog posts. In this way you are establishing yourself as an expert in the book field by both the links you share and the original content you write.

Now let’s take this example a little further. You may decide to sell an ebook on publishing off your website on which your blog also resides. You may begin to add into your tweet mix occasional announcements about this ebook.

There’s a range of opinions as to how many of your tweets should be what’s called “self-serving” – promoting your own products or services – and how many should be informational or conversational or whatever.

Let’s say, though, that you do not yet have a blog or a website or a business of any kind that you want to promote.

What to tweet about in this case? Do you have any hobbies or interests?

Perhaps you are a green environment advocate. Then you could tweet information that you want to share about going green, such as links to books, news articles, and blog posts. You can add your opinions about the articles you are linking to in order to personalize your tweets.

You are establishing a brand for yourself even though you made never use that brand in connection with business. Still, you have a starting point from which to morph into a new brand if that’s what you decide to do.

Even before you get on Twitter you should decide what to tweet about. Will you be emphasizing your business views or your gardening interests?

Once you have made this decision, you can use Twitter’s own search capabilities or a third-party application such as tweetbeep.com to alert you when there are tweets connected to the topics on which you tweet. Then you can jump into the conversation and reply to people who are tweeting about these topics.

You can also follow Twitter lists that are on subjects of interest to you in order to easily track tweets connected to your topics.

As you participate more and more on Twitter, you will begin to follow people whose tweets you find especially valuable. You can study their tweets in order to decide which tweets you think are most effective in attracting followers. Then you can emulate the patterns you uncover.

Warning: Whatever you do, do NOT tweet in anger or use swear words or viciously attack someone. This is not proper etiquette and can quickly lose many of the followers you worked so hard to get – if not getting you kicked off Twitter.

Learn Here More About Twitter And How To Make Money With Twitter

Getting started on social media can often be deceptively simple – What’s the big deal? You sign up. – or intimidating – Why am I being asked for my date of birth? – or overwhelming – How do I find people to friend or follow?

In actuality there are official and unofficial rules. It is easier if you start out knowing what’s what, and this is probably especially important if you’re more of an introvert.

Let’s imagine you already use email, search for information on Google, and read blog posts. But you’ve never joined any social media sites. How do you start?

1. Decide how comfortable you are sharing information about yourself. And the corollary to this – how wide a sharing of this information are you willing to do.

If you’re a book author and want people to buy your book, it’s a good idea to decide that you will share personal (although not private) information to as wide an audience as possible. If you only want to connect online with former high school friends, your target audience is much smaller.

If sharing information makes you somewhat nervous, think about what it means to be personal as opposed to private. Personal is a good marketing book you just read that you can recommend to help others; private is a fight you had with your business partner over implementing the marketing steps recommended in the book.

2. Ask online savvy friends that, based on your goal, which popular site they would recommend you first join. (And do start with just one while getting your feet wet in this brave new world.)

• If your goal, for example, is to have a wide audience, then Twitter may be the best choice because of its “open to everyone” format. – If you only want to search for high school friends, then Facebook may be the best choice as you can confine your information to a very small circle and can search by name for those long-lost friends.
• If you want to make connections to help with a future job search, then LinkedIn, whose format is set up for such a process, may be the best choice for you.

3. Once you have chosen the site you’ll start on, do a Google search for information on effectively using that site. That’s right, before you ever sign up, read some blog posts that provide guidance on effectively using the site.

Now this isn’t a research project that serves as an excuse for postponing actually joining the site. Just learn a few of the basic “rules.” And if you do this step, you’ll be way ahead of most other people who start on social media without first doing any research.

And why not learn this on the site itself? Because most of these sites have inadequate information for newcomers or an abundance of information that overwhelms newcomers.

Plus, to encourage you to sign up, the site’s home page says something like: To join now just do this. And it’s only after you’ve provided your name, email, password, etc. that you’re left wondering “What do I do next?”

4. If you’re starting on a site that doesn’t require your real name, choose a username carefully. You want to think about seeing this name used all across cyberspace as lots of social media sites pull information from other social media sites (with your permission, of course).

You may initially think, for example, of choosing the name of your first book. But what happens when you write a second book? Or perhaps using the name of the book won’t work well for a site that is focused on a non-book arena.

Keep in mind that whatever you do on the Internet can live forever. So this choice of a username should be considered carefully and for continued use in the long-run. (Once you’ve established a good online reputation with one username you don’t want to start at square one again with a new username.)

5. Immediately post a photo of yourself – a headshot in which sunglasses and a baseball cap are not blocking people from totally seeing your eyes. (This does not have to be professional-photographer quality but should not be blurry.)

This photo should be one that will also work on social media sites you will join in the future because you want consistency across these sites. You want consistency to help people recognize and connect with you on more than one site. (The same for your username).

Keep in mind that the photos for Twitter are quite small. And even if you’re starting on Facebook, only include a headshot of yourself. Do not include other people and preferably not animals and other props.

By posting a good headshot of yourself you’re signaling that you’re interested in connecting with people – real people such as yourself – and you’ll be off to a good start on your first social media site.

Now that you’ve read these five tips for starting on your first social media site, what are you waiting for? Join the cyberspace social media community today.

Give a comment to this post and receive 5 Free eBooks about Twitter instantly to your mail box! You can get them also here.

Almost every book author wants to know: When is a good time to start marketing a book? While still writing the book, while looking for an agent or publisher, while going through the self-publishing process? When the book is available on Amazon?

There are few certain replies to this question except for one: It’s rather late to start marketing your book when it is already out on Amazon.

So what’s the answer as to when is the best time to start marketing a book? It depends.

And what it depends on is a great number of variables, including is this your first book, do you already have an online reputation, are you a renown newspaper journalist who is about to write a first novel, and any other variable that you care to name. (Such as, do you have a famous last name, such as Mary Higgins Clark’s daughter had when she started writing mysteries?)

If we can agree that we can’t pinpoint an exact right time that applies to everyone, are there general guidelines that can help all authors?

Yes, I believe there are. First, if you’re interested in promoting online, the earlier you start establishing yourself online the better. And the first step is to decide on your brand as a book author.

What do I mean by brand? I mean how you plan to position yourself in your marketing and promotion. What is it that will make you stand out from other writers of non-fiction or similar fiction? What will make people interested in you (and hopefully want to buy your book)?

The strategizing of your brand definitely takes place as early as possible in the publication quest for your book. And as part of this brand strategy, it’s very important to consider the proposed title of your book. This is even more relevant if you’re going to self-publish. You should check out your title with others even if you love the title.

Does your book title “read” the way you think it does? Or does your proposed tile have a different meaning to some people? For example, today I saw someone’s proposed book title that will be very hard to remember, let along spell on Amazon or for a URL. This is probably not the best name for a book.

And does the title stand out? Does it create an image in a potential reader’s mind so he/she can remember the title? A generic title such as “A Good Trip” doesn’t create a specific image, whereas “Six Sunny Days in Paris” creates a strong sense memory.

Once you are clear about your brand and have a good “working” book title (it still may change), you can begin to add elements to your brand positioning.

You can, for example, have someone create short videos (less than three minutes) of you talking about the stages you’re going through in researching and writing your book. Then you can use software such as Sony Vegas Movie Studio to edit the video and to put text such as your name and, if you have a website, your website’s URL on the video.

And you can upload these short videos to YouTube and other video-sharing sites. Remember, it’s important to tag these videos with good keywords that relate to you and your brand so that people will have an easier time finding your videos.

You can start a blog, detailing the stages of your book’s process and sharing sample chapters with your blog readers. Getting feedback early on can help you refine your book. And you can offer to write guest posts for other people’s blogs, again staying true to your brand in what you offer to write about.

And then you’re ready for a website – a site that you can control yourself without waiting days for your web master to make one little change. That’s why I recommend having someone build you a website using WordPress.org. Once all the backend steps are done, you will have a website (and blog if you want) that is hosted on your own site and can be completely controlled (read “changed”) by you.

Finally, it’s time to establish a sincere presence on social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn as well as various book sites and other social media sites. Gradually build up your presence on these sites by engaging in conversations with others, offering advice when you can, and establishing relationships that will come in handy when your book is published.

Having a website or at least a blog hosted on another site such as blogger.com provides you with your own arena of visibility when you set up your profiles on social media sites. By using your website URL or blog URL as part of who you are on the internet, you’re more firmly establishing an online foundation for your book’s publication and marketing.

Next, Discover Here More Tips On How To Promote eBooks and Websites… And Then Watch This FREE 26 Step-By-Step VIDEO Course

Do you do sponsored post or sponsored reviews? If you do (or plan to), this review of Blog Paycheck by Gobala Krishnan will shed some light on the topic. Even if you have never heard of such stuff, you should read this to add more options to your blogging income. After all, as Gobala says you can make anywhere between $5 – $200 for each blog post you write.

So lets get on with the review of Blog Paycheck.

Gobala is one of the more “unorthodox” bloggers you can find, and from his site at ProfitBlogger.com he has already released several e-book guides on making money from Google AdSense and affiliate marketing. However, Blog Paycheck talks about something completely different.

When the blogosphere exploded in 2006/07, thousands of blogs were being created every single day, with overworked individuals hoping to cash in on the trend and be a “work-at-home blogger”. The hype was high, but the problem was that most bloggers wanted to get paid immediately.

The blogosphere responded to these needs, with companies like PayPerPost.com leading the paid-to-blog industry. Early on, blogging for the purposes of making money received a lot of criticism from big-name bloggers, but eventually people started accepting paid blogging as a viable, honest way to make a living online.

Blog Paycheck is well-written and is suitable for both newbies and non-newbies (is there such a word?). Of course you can just go to PayPerPost.com right now and sign-up with them without ever having to read it, but I found that there are tons of great information in here that will help you make more money with less time and effort.

How much can you realistically expect to make from paid blogging?

Normally, you can earn a few hundred dollars a month by writing 1-2 blog posts a day. Since these blog posts aren’t too long and all the information is already provided, it’s pretty easy to do that. Once your blog picks up more traffic, it gets re-evaluated and you can start charging more for writing the exact same content.

The leaders in the paid blogging industry make a few thousands dollars a month, enough to make a comfortable full-time income on the Internet. Plus, they are free to work whenever they want, wherever they want. This is why paid blogging is so appealing – with not much skills or technical knowledge, any ordinary person can make money from blogs right from the start.

The guide explains how paid blogging works, the do’s and dont’s, and gives you more than 20 different paid blogging sites you can sign-up with. It also explains the different type of content and model each site uses – for example some of those sites only do “reviews” or “buzz” type of articles. It’s important to understand that if you want to make a great income from paid blogging, you’ll need to sign-up with more than just one site.

The guide also comes with some pretty decent WordPress themes that you can use with your blog to manage your content.

Overall, at the low price, I think Blog Paycheck is a great investment for anyone who wants to add more flexibility to their online income. You can go here to get more information on Blog Paycheck by Gobala Krishnan (a.k.a The Profit Blogger).

Blog Paycheck – Get Paid to Blog

- Albert