Many online marketing experts once questioned how anyone could turn a 140-character tweet into a marketing tool.  Bu in fact, Twitter has become a successful and very useful attraction marketing tool.  However, I have to admit I was once one of the “skeptical naysayers” regarding the attraction marketing potential of Twitter, and also questioned the degree of success someone could have using Twitter to market products or services on a thriving, long-term basis.

Fortunately, I never hung up the towel on Twitter, but was determined to learn how to use Twitter successfully in the world of online marketing, and as an attraction marketing tool.

I began my quest for answers with Twitter by setting up my own personal “Twitter Research Lab” and have been testing the marketing potential of Twitter for the past 6 months.  After putting Twitter to the test, I can now pronounce that like most good Internet marketing tools, if you use Twitter wisely, it can indeed be a great attraction marketing tool.

The key phrase here is “use Twitter wisely.”  For most marketers play with Twitter a while and give up too quickly before having the opportunity to experience or see success that Twitter has to offer as a marketing tool. 

What I’ve learned over the past six months is that there are four basic types of success stories on Twitter. 

[Celebrities] Twitter Success Type No. 1:  These are the celebrity types like Ashton Kutcher (4.5 million followers) or Jessica Simpson (2.2 million followers), that are going to reap a butt load of followers simply because they are celebrities.  Granted, in some cases (like the latter) they have nothing better to do than tweet because they have more free time than the average Joe and they need to (1) keep their egos stroked daily with any kind of  “Look, I’m still popular!” feedback from the masses, or (2) or using Twitter as their personal popularity machine because their agents told them (and it’s true) that it will bring them media attention.  And as we all know, publicity, even bad publicity, is a good thing – if you’re a star or celebrity. Unless you’re a star or celebrity, you have little hope of falling into this category.

[Social Media Animals] Twitter Success Type No. 2:  This category requires a lot of hard work and many different types of people fall into it.  It covers a very wide range of highly successful Twitter users.  Essentially, it is made up of everyone from teens that are online 24/7 with the likes of Facebook, personal blogs and Twitter and have all tied together using the latest and greatest plugins and gimmicks to have their Tweets broadcast on every venue they can imagine, to celebrity types that don’t tweet for fun, but tweet for gain.  Examples of celebrity “types” that are turning the tweeting world upside down for promotional gain with a deliberate and highly organized Tweet and Tell business model are politicians and talk show hosts that want to spread their agenda.  Examples:  Sarah Palin, John McCain, Sean Hannity and Glen Beck would fit the role of politicians and talk show hosts that are tweeting like mad.

[Happenstance] Twitter Success Type No. 3: These represent the “one in a million” types that get their 15 minutes of fame on Twitter because they have (or had) a unique story that (through happenstance) the media found out about it and opted to headline or feature their story, sending a flood of online junkies to visit their Twitter page.  In other words, regardless how they achieved their 15 minutes of fame on Twitter, memory of them and their stories quick fades away and their tweets are no longer relevant to the public at large.

[Online Marketing Pros] Twitter Success Type No. 4:  These bad boys never play with the same playbook as you and I.  They develop and/or use apps created to milk Twitter for all its worth.  Have you ever wondered how you can tweet until your fingers turn blue and end up with only a small hand full of followers, while some of those people following you have 30,000 – 50,000 – a 100,000 or more followers.  You probably ask yourself questions like, “Are they “really that good?”  “Do they play by a different set of rules?” and “Do they have a tool or shortcut that allows them to achieve these results?”  The answers are, “Yes,” “Yes,” and “Yes.”  These bad boys play the game by a different set of rules than you and I.  They are armed with apps that allow them to search Twitter by keyword and then invite large numbers of followers by the masses that fit a certain profile.  Now imagine the power of having the ability to find several thousand people on Twitter that have words like “Ebay, MLM, network marketing, teaching, golf, etc.” in their profiles and then being able to tweet your special sale message to that group.

Think of that last category a minute.  Despite all the rules you’re read about not being able to do this on Twitter, I’m telling you there are online marketers that are using special tools and apps that allow them to milk Twitter for leads, and then exploit those leads (i.e., followers) by pushing a sales message (through the form of a tweet that contains a link to their website or a presentation file) to everyone that meets their selected profile, or sales criteria.

Then, by regularly tweeting to the audience they are focused on, they in essence become popular to that audience.  Never before in the history of the Internet has something been more powerful as Twitter, in this regards.

What many people never come to realize is the power of printing your message on the page of everyone who follows you.  That’s what happens with Twitter and how it works.  Let’s say, for example, that you have 100 people following you.  You tweet a message on Twitter and it is instantly published on each of your 100 followers Twitter pages.  Now ask yourself, how many followers do each of my 100 have and how many people will visit or see the Twitter page of each of those 100 members and possibly see my message?  Think about the attraction marketing power with having such a broadcast medium.  Granted, your message may only appear for a few minutes before it rolls off the bottom of the page of each Twitter account, but you can always tweet again, right?

I can’t cover everything you need to know about Twitter and attraction marketing in this blog post, but I promise to cover more in the future.  Until next time – do something to “become attractive” to your marketing audience.

To answer this question let’s consider a couple of quotes by Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page.  Sergey is often quoted as once saying, “We believed we could build a better search.  We had a simple idea, that not all pages are created equal.  Some are more important (than others).”

On another occasion, Google co-founder Larry Page stated, “It’s quite complicated and sounds circular, but we’ve worked out a way of calculating a web site’s importance.”  The keyword here friends is “importance.”

Matt Cutts, Head of Google Web Spam Team, once advised . . . “To rank well, build a site so fantastic that it makes you an authority in your niche.” 

Having an online presence with a personal website or blog offers one of the greatest attraction marketing opportunities one can create.  However, the majority of website and blog owners don’t realize that web marketing and search engine rankings have evolved to a whole new paradigm that rewards the most authoritative websites.

Once again, “What do we mean by authority?”   Quite simply, websites that exhibit qualities of authority are as Google’s Matt Cutts pointed out, websites that can make you “an authority in your niche.”  You may or may not already be an expert in your field.  But I can assure you of one thing, if you don’t go about the business of building your website or blog “regularly, consistently and persistently,” it’s hard to sustain any authority you might achieve online. 

Sure, people who might know you to be an expert in your field might come to your website regularly, but for you to build an ever-growing presence online, made up of  a steady growing stream of new site visitors each day, you will need to achieve high search engine rankings.  To achieve, AND KEEP, high search engine rankings you must build a website that is perceived by Google’s mathematical algorithms as “authoritative in nature.”  

Why?  Because websites that exhibit authority become popular places people like to go online, and when searching on Google, Google wants you to be pleased with its search results by sending you to a website that is considered an authority or useful to others regarding the subject you searched for on Google.

So how does one build a website or blog that exhibits “authority?’  Quite simple, by adding great and useful content regularly.  For you see, Google has learned and trained its spiders (by regularly updating its algorithms) how to electronically recognize websites that exhibit authority. 

To understand how Google does this, we first must know a little about human behavior and consider ways that Google can measure human behavior via electronic means.  First, it stands to reason that if you’re publishing content people find useful and meaningful, they will begin to mention something you’ve said and/or link to you from their websites or blogs.  Google has ways of knowing how many incoming links are pointed to your website.  As this number grows you are considered more popular by Google’s search engine.  Thus, popularity is an excellent measure of authority in Google’s books.  In essence, the greater authority you become in your subject, the more people will write and talk about you online, and the more often they will link to your website. 

But Google has other ways of measuring authority (and popularity).  If you’re a user of Google’s email program Gmail, have the Google Toolbar installed on your web browser, use Google Reader, Google Analytics, Feedburner or a host of other Google owned tools, then Google has many eyes watching where you’re going online or who’s viewing our website online.  Google’s regularly recording and dissecting this information and determining just how well your website is perceived as a place of authority. 

In a nutshell, people follow and respond to people they perceive to be more important others  (i.e., people in authority).  And consequently, Google has invented ways to discover who the Internet public perceives as “important people” and ranks important web pages and websites higher than others.

Now you can see why I refer to search engine marketing as a whole new paradigm from what it used to be just a few short years ago.  And although the contents of what I’ve revealed in this blog post will discourage many, those that have come to realize what they’re up against online and will take my advice and begin creating good content regularly will ultimately become the authoritative websites in the electronic eyes of the search engine, and will begin “attracting” an ever-growing crowd of followers.  As you build more content you’ll begin to have more pages rank high in Google (and other search engines), and with an ever-growing number of high ranking pages in the search engine listings, you’ll have an ever-growing stream of traffic, followers and customers.

Isn’t that the true essence of attraction marketing after all?

Most traditional marketers focus far too much time and energy in trying to find leads and forcing their sale pitches on prospects that may have little or no interest.  If this is you, make a New Year’s resolution to implement attraction marketing into your arsenal next year and replace the time you’ve been spending combing and reseaching your marketplace for prospects,with time spent answering questions and making your presentation to people that have become attracted to you via the attraction marketing channels you create in 2010 and beyond.

Now I’m not going to write an encyclopedia and list 1,000 ways to attract prospects to you like a magnet.  But the point I want to make is the ways that one can successfully build a reputation through an attraction marketing plan are practically endless.  Still, many marketers lack creativity, so I will list several key attraction marketing methods that I use successfully in my own network marketing business.

Blogging

AttractionMarketing.com is a perfect example of an attraction marketing tool that brings me new leads and prospects.  But I actually run several blogs, covering not only my network marketing businesses, but other online enterprises I’m involved with.  A perfect example of how I use blogs to attract new prospects to my network marketing business can be found at www.watpros.com

eBooks

Personally written ebooks, like blogs, give people great insight into you and your business opportunity.  A perfect example of how I use ebooks to attract new prospects for my network marketing business can be found at www.workfromhomegoldmine.com

Free Offers

I’ve created a free business evaluation kit for my network marketing business.  I get leads through this offer that have been attracted to my blog at www.watpros.com or my free offer website at www.workathomedealer.com , and from classified ads I run occassionally that point to my free offer website.

Classified Ads

Point ads to information websites that peak people’s interest and attract them further to you and your business opportunity.   Many people would question me for listing classified ads in an article about attraction marketing, but they, just like search engines, represent just another search tool that people who are looking for an opportunity will use.  I don’t use classifieds regularly because my other free forms of marketing online bring me more leads than I can handle sometimes.  But when I do use them in my attraction marketing campaign, I always use them as a front-end lead development device that will push the lead to one of my information websites.  Once they arrive at my website and click for my free ebook or my free business evaluation kit, they’ve reached the halfway mark on their road to discovering the facts about me and my opportunity that will attract them to me and cause them to contact me via email or phone, without me having to initiate contact with them.  Through the information materials they’ll get for free by responding to my classifieds, they’ll learn everything they’ll need to know about me and my network marketing business opportunity.  And from what they learn, they’ll either be attracted to me or not.  Those that are, generally approach me on a first-name basis, for after reading my book and materials they feel as they know.  And frankly they do, for I’m brutally honest in my book and don’t sugar-coat the opportunity.  If you have the right business opportunity, you shouldn’t have to sugar coat it to draw interest.

Social Media

This is a form of attraction marketing that does get sugar-coated by almost everyone.  Does it work?  Yes.  Is it easy?  Yes.  Is it demanding and time-consuming?  Yes.  And that’s the one fact most social media marketers won’t tell you.  Sure, you can purchase scripts and software for ramping up your number of followers and weeding out prospects on forums like Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, but don’t let anyone fool you, you can spend a lot of time on social media marketing before the results start pouring in.  My point is simple, it (like all roads to success), does take an effort.  In the beginning, you may quickly find that the reward doesn’t measure up to the effort.  Twitter is a perfect example of what I’m talking about.  If you want to turn Twitter into an attraction marketing machine you can, but it implies you need to tweet a lot and you need lots of followers.  I view Twitter and Facebook as just another arrow in my attraction marketing quiver.  I suggest you do the same and don’t put all your eggs in one basket. 

Branding

Yes, branding.  Butbranding as an attraction marketing tool?  That’s right!  If you want to develop an attraction marketig tidal wave to your business, you need to establish a brand so that there is one cohesive thread that ties everything you do together.  For example, my main marketing blog is at www.watpros.com.  I have since created a Twitter account under watpros, a You-Tube account under watpros and more recently a Facebook page for watpros.  The more people that come to see the watpros brand, the greater the likelihood that my brand will become impressionable and they’ll become attracted to me.

Traditional Websites

This one’s a no-brainer. Obviously, if you plan to implement an attaction marketing plan online, you will need a website.  I own and operate many that attract people to me and my business opportunity.   A perfect example of a highly optimized SEO-friendly website I built as part of my attraction marketing plan can be found here.

This has turned into a pretty long article.  But for more great tips on how to launch and build an attraction marketing machine for your business, and learn about the remaining ways to attract new leads that make up my list of 1,000 — keep reading my Attraction Marketing blog.

Simply having a magnetic, self-confident personality isn’t enough to guarantee success at selling your products and/or services.  You need to have your game face on at all times.  Keep in mind that with attraction marketing you’re wanting to create a brand for yourself.  You want people to be attracted to your opportunities and/or products.  Thus, you need to maintain positive, motivated, magnetic energy at all times.

Despite the necessity to regularly maintain a positive, self-confident personality, successful attraction marketers always work with a game plan and specific goals in mind (of what they’re trying to accomplish).  In other words, for you to be successful in attraction marketing it is important not to waste your time in frivolous, non-productive areas.  Instead, you need to channel your thoughts, energy and focus on people that will be attracted to, and are most suitable for, the opportunities you offer.

When I analyze the business models of successful attraction marketers, I always try to determine whether they’re highly efficient and operating within their market channel at all times, or if they waste too much time and energy trying to be all things to all people.  

Too often I see highly intelligent and gifted marketers end up falling far short of their potential because they keep getting sidetracked by the “next big deal.” If you fall in this boat, ask yourself this quetion, “Am I focused on my goals and my marketplace, or am I only diluting productive time with non-productive time?”

A common fault of most Internet marketers is lack of focus, getting caught up in chasing (or offering) too many opportunities at one time.  Thus, they end up becoming a knowledgeable at everything, a master of nothing.  My advice:  If you want to become a successful attraction marketer, develop a plan to attract qualified prospects to your opportunity and stick with it through the end.

Not just a few people, but if you write with a master game plan and forethought, you can attract large audiences to you online and amass a fortune in the process.  Your first question is likely, “What do you mean by the phrase ‘Master Plan’ Craig?  I’m glad you asked. )

To create your master plan for what I call a “Write to Attract” business model you need to carefully consider who your intended audience is, what are they interests and why would they be attracted to you.  You also need to determine how you will process these leads that will evolve from your writing activity, what will be your vehicle for processing the leads, where you want to steer this audience and lastly, what will be the ultimate outcome you hope to achieve if they move from a person of interest to a person of action.

Did I lose you there?   If so, allow me to explain more.

First, to attract the right audience of leads you need to be able to push the right buttons in their brain that will draw them to you.  I’m not talking about saying anything they want to hear.  Instead, I’m talking about “focused writing.”  Focus on subjects of interest that align with both your intended audience and the products or services you wish to market to them. 

This is where knowing your audience is important, but so many people know their audience and don’t have a clue what they’re looking for online.  Believe me, if you don’t write the right content on your blog or website, you have no hope of attracting your best possible  leads.   So you need to find out what they’re searching for online.  Just do a simple search on Google for the keyword search phrase “Google Adwords External Keyword Search Tool” and you’ll discover what your audience is searching for online. 

Let’s say, for example, that you’re trying to market kites online.  Using Google’s keyword search tool, simply search on the single keyword kites and then look at all the various keyword search phrases people use when they search for kites.  Sort this list on Google based on the total number of monthly searches, then print out the list.  You now have a list of subjects you want to write about in the future that will start attracting people to you.  But you have to reveal who you are through your writings.  What is it about you that makes you an expert in the area of kites, for example.  Since you’re audience’s only way of knowing you is through your writings, you need to write in a style that will reveal your personality and make them feel like they’re sitting in your living room having a fireside chat with you.

The more people come to know and appreciate you online, the higher the probability of them stepping forward to communicate, or take actions on your offers.  In other words, you’re “writing good content” has “attracted” them to you.  Did it cost you anything?  Not really, other than a few bucks per month for web hosting and the time it took to write your content.

Make yourself famous online and you’ll earn more money than you ever dreamed of in your life.  But becoming famous online becomes slightly more difficult each day because of the number of people trying to do the same thing. 

Converting your audience or processing your leads is an extremely important part of the writing to attract business model.  At the end of the day if you don’t have a name or email address to communicate with those you are attracting, it’s like trying to drive an automobile without gas.  You’ve got to have gasoline to get from Point A to Point B.  Thus, you need to have a landing page you’re sending people to or have a ezine (newsletter) subscription form on your website to begin capturing some of the leads you attract.  A perfect example of a good landing page can be found at my Work From Home Goldmine website. 

If you opt to download my free ebook, you’ll find every quickly that I’ve written the entire book in a style and format you’re not accustomed to reading if you’ve every purchased moneymaking opportunity books online before.  Because 99.9% of the business opportunity info you buy online is either a scam or riddled with overhyped statements, I wanted my readers, whether they joined my business opportunity or not, to be able to read my book and come away with the thought that, “this guy is an honest, down-to-earth, tell it like it is, sort of guy.  Not once in my book do I make “get rich quick” claims.  Instead, I do my best to illustrate to the reader why I feel like my network marketing company the best home-based business opportunity in America, providing point-by-point reasons why I feel that is the case, but explain it is a “get rich slow” opportunity, or a “get rich forever” opportunity, and not a get rich quick opportunity.

What I’ve discovered is that by being honest and straightforward, I’m attracting the right kind of people to my business.  Over 50% of the people that join my network marketing company and sign up under me, do so after having first read my Work From Home Goldmine ebook.  By the time they’ve completed my ebook they feel they know and respect me as a person.  Thus, there first phone call or email to me is ususally on a first name basis, and I can always sense in our conversations that they already trust and respect me listen to what I have to say with an open mind, and not a guarded mind. 

This, in essence, is the true beauty of attraction marketing.  Using the power of the Internet and the written word to make yourself known to scores of people, people that come to you already desiring your products, services or your opportunity. 

Read this article, then read all or part of my ebook (go to www.workfromhomegoldmine.com ) and you’ll see the writing style it takes to attract people to you in scores.

If you’ve never heard of Twitter before, it might suggest you’ve been sleeping under a rock or you’re just not Internet savvy.  Twitter is one of the simplest social media tools you’ll find online, yet don’t let it’s simplicity fool you, for this social media tool has legs far longer that will appear on your first investiagation of Twitter. 

What is Twitter?

Quite simply, Twitter is an online community where people write text-based, miniature-scale blog posts about events and moments in their life.  Each post is limited to a maximum length of 140 characters. 

Millions of people use the tool to express what’s going on in their lives one 140-characters snippet at a time.  They talk about what time they get up,what they had for breakfast and how many times they let the dog out last night.  It is easy to  develop a cavalier, “Who really cares?“ attitude after reading several hundred “Tweets” do nothing more than document some people’s life in minute-by-minute fashion. 

And it is this same attitude tht prevents one from seeing how such a simple little tool can be used for big payoffs.  But trust me, follow my recommendation below to reseach how large corporations are using Twitter to glean how you can use it too (in a postive lead-generation mode). 

In fact, I can tell you now there will be many more articles about Twitter on AttractionMarketing.com in the future, because there are so many ways to use Twitter as an attraction marketing tool.  Yet most people have to be led by the hand on how to use Twitter in attraction marketing because it’s simplicity will mask how many ways one can use Twitter to attract and generate new leads for your business.

I actually scoffed at the thought of using Twitter as an attraction marketing tool when I first found it, and commented aloud to my marketing friends that Twitter was highly over-hyped and many of the marketing claims the Internet public was touting about Twitter was false. 

Granted, not everyone in the network marketing or Internet marketing industries is on the up-and-up, so it’s only natural to have people willing to say anything to make a buck.   But I found myself continuing to come back to Twitter over and over to see if I could separate the wheat from the chaff, and find positive ways to use this simple little tool that had the Internet world abuzz.

What I eventually discovered was that some people (and companies) were using various tricks and methods, which I will refer to as highly innovative and insightful, to use Twitter very effective to capture and redirect leads to their business.  I will provide a sampling of what I’m talking about, but since this subject cannot be covered in a single post effectively, I’ll write about Twitter’s use in attaction marketing often to share ideas, ways and methods for you to put Twitter to good use in your own business (as a lead generation tool).

Ways to Use Twitter as an Attraction Marketing Tool

• For sending Press Releases
• For announcing events
• For generating traffic to your website or blog
• For promotion of daily deals and special offers
• As a “special interest” chat and dialogue tool
• As a conversation tool with your clients or following
• For building relationships with prospects and clients
• As a tool for providing commentary on events as they unfold
• As a way to open dialogue with people interested in your business

Famous Companies That Use Twitter for Attraction Marketing

When reviewing the list of companies below, I encourage you to do something no true attraction marketer would want or encourage you to do; namely, click on the link to each company so you can research and investigage how they are using Twitter.  I don’t normally send people away from my websites, but I think of this topic as a special case and one where your personal investigation is needed to open your eyes to the marketing powers of Twitter.

So what do you think?  Has this article been an eye-opener for you?  If so, register as an AttractionMarketing.com user and write your comments.  To see how I’ve been able to use Twitter after discovering how effective the tool can be, feel free to visit one of my Twitter accounts now.

The purpose of this blogs is to explore and share various means and ways one can practice and excel at attraction marketing. Thus, whether you use a personal website, SEO content, article writing, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, blogs or other Web 2.0 strategies for building an online reputation for yourself, we want to hear from you. Information exchange and service is, after all, another form of attraction marketing that will work for you, for anytime you can provide others with info, advise or helpful service, you’re creating a positive image for yourself that will build trust and confidence in you, which in turn develops a following.

Whatever you prefer to call the art of recruiting through attraction, it’s not only real — but it’s the most successful, most economical and most time efficient means of  lead generation and sponsoring you’ll ever experience.  So regardless whether you’re a network marketing building your business through retailing, recruiting or both, you owe it to yourself to discover methods and practices professional “attraction marketers” use to build their networking marketing businesses.