Chris Meistre

Ok, here’s my take on how to get the best ouf of Twitter.  I might be totally wrong, so don’t take it as the gospel.

Twitter is a mini blog system.  You post updates, and people “following” you view your updates.  It’s sort of like having a blog and putting 1 sentence on it consisting of 140 characters to enlighten people with whatever you’re currently busy with.  I.e. “chrismeistre is busy uploading a new website at www.domainmonitor.co.za, check it out”.  So it’s a way of keeping in touch with your friends.

Put a business spin on it though.  Get your clients or potential clients to follow you, and they can read your updates.  Sort of like the Petesweekly that we get every week from Peter keeps him in touch with us, you can use Twitter to keep in touch with clients.

But it takes a lot of effort to get enough people be interested in what you have to say and to follow you on Twitter.  Although there is no sure way to build relationships quickly, you can speed up the process a bit by finding people that are likely to follow you.

There are loads of websites already available where you can subscribe to, and then they get people to follow you.  That’s great if you want random people that might not even want to know anything about your industry.  It’s also becoming very common for people to not like this method anymore, because a lot of people are spamming using this method.

I played around with something for a couple of weeks now.  I setup two twitter users, http://twitter.com/proxymusmaximus and http://twitter.com/stuffwhatrocks.  I merely wanted to see how many people I could get to follow me.  Read more about the Twitterbot.

So I rewrote a the initial twitterbot to search for certain terms on Twitter.  These will be terms people mention in their posts.  I.e. “joke” or “internet marketing”.  What I did was then follow these people.  I found that for every 4 people I followed, 1 person followed me back.  So in a matter of a few weeks I have about 500 followers for each of those users.  During that time I’ve read a bit more and have used Twitter a lot more myself, so I’m getting a better idea of what it’s about and how to use it.  That’s 500 people that were interested in the same things I’m interested in, so are more likely to take note of my posts.

So what makes this different to the other websites available that does the same thing?  Following people that are posting about the terms you are interested in, it’s possible to target people that might be interested in your industry.

For instance, if you’re a carpet cleaner, you’d setup a carpetcleaner Twitter user.  You’d then search for other Twits talking about “carpet cleaning”, “carpet shampoo” or “vacuum cleaner”.  You would then follow those users, and 1 in 4 would follow you back.  They would then see all the posts you make about carpet cleaning.  Then you’d get the people that are really into carpet cleaning and find a tip that you posted very interesting.  That person would then retweet your post, which basically means posting your post to other users with your details attached to it.  So if he had friends that were interested in carpet cleaning they might go and read your tip and start following you to receive more tips.  Get what I’m saying?

• I use Twitter to drive traffic to this blog, and so far it’s not going too bad for the amount of people following me.  For every post I make, I get about 45 hits out of the 98 people following me on @chrismeistre
• http://www.proxymusmaximus.com/ is not advertised anywhere and I don’t promote it besides on Twitter, and it’s grown to 18 users in a couple of weeks
• http://www.pichost.co.za/ traffic is up by 30% just by posting tweets on Twitter every time a new picture gets posted

If you’re interested in making use of a service like this to help build your Twitter user base why not contact me and we can discuss it.  I don’t want to release the software and have thousands of people doing this, because it would just become another way of spamming.  I also don’t want just anyone to use it to spam people.  I want you to use it to really make Twitter work for your online business.  I also don’t think I’m the first to create software like this, but somehow I’d like to preserve it, just in case.

One of the things in live that really piss me off is that the fact that I’ll search for a specific service that someone provides, and finally I’ll get to their website.  I type in their little contact form on the website, hit submit, and am presented with an error.

It’s really easy for you to have a working contact form on your website, why not at least make sure it’s working right?  And don’t think it’s not happening to you, rather go and check.

I’d hate to think you spend thousands of rands on building a website, you succeed in getting people there and then they have difficulty getting into contact with you!

Okay, so in actual fact, it’s not really bullshit, but it’s probably bullshit for your website.

Why would I say such a thing?  Simply because if you’re website is not optimized in the way it handles purchases, client interaction, etc. it’s pointless having your website ranked number 1 on search engines and getting 10,000 visitors a day.

Let’s say out of those 10,000 visitors, 10 wants to buy something from you, and out of those 10 only 2 understand what they must do on your site to buy the product.  If you’re working on a profit of R100 per sale, that’s R800 that you just lost because people don’t understand your site.

So, you build on your client interaction, make it easier for them to purchase, and 10 of out 10 people that want to buy, buys your product.  Great, you made your R1000.  Are you up selling though?  Are you getting those people to buy from you again?  If you had a product that people could buy, and purchase again within a few months, do you have an automated process whereby those people get reminded by you again?  It’s a lot easier to sell something to someone that has already bought from you, and that already knows you are trustworthy.

I’ve been playing with online businesses for a couple of years now, and have made a lot of mistakes…. PLENTY.    But I’m not worried about those mistakes, I have learned from them.  I actually like making mistakes, because when I do rectify them, it works so well that I can hardly believe it.

Now, back to how your website is currently doing things, and how it can do it better.

I’ve got this one website where people can do credit checks on themselves.  I’ll get into why we started this on another day.  From the get go, the website did very well, anything from 2-5 requests a day.  This was still in my early days as an internet entrepreneur, so that was a lot to me   It had basically been running for the last year and a bit without any changes to either the backend or the front.  Ok, that’s a lie, I did do a front end change a couple of months ago, which actually did increase the number of people signing up to receive their report.

The whole time though, I knew something was missing, and I knew exactly what I needed to do to implement it.  Because each time I thought of this, I didn’t really think it would make such a big impact on the business, so I never got around to it.  Until about 3 weeks ago I decided to get off my ass and just do it.  It took me a total of 6 hours to implement the changes, but I think that could potentially increase the amount of business we do by almost 100%.

What was it that I did?  Simple.  I noticed we were getting a lot of people apply for their report, and then just not paying for it.  Ok, we weren’t losing money in the process, because we only supply the report once they’ve paid, but we’re losing out on sales.  A lot of sales in fact.  A LOT.  When I ran the figures, I got upset that I never did anything about it.   In the beginning we would follow up manually to remind people to pay, but the number of requests per day increased so much that it was difficult to implement a follow up plan.  So what is the obvious thing to do, change the processes within the website to automatically remind people to pay.  And obviously, the number of non-paying clients decreased a HELL of a lot.

What is the other thing I did?  Also very simple.  Initially we’d sit every couple of months, and email everyone saying that perhaps it’s time to checkup on their credit report again.  But because this was also a manual process, and we just started running out of time to do this, it sort of faded away to the background.  Now the processes on the website emails people every 3 months to tell them to check up on their report again.  But not only is it a reminder, we’ve also build a specialised link that when they open it in their browser, their form is automatically filled in with the details we have of them in our database.  This gives them the chance just to verify everything, and click a button.  So it’s made extremely easy for them to use and request another a report, which in turn means another sale for us.

Only time will tell how much difference this will make, but logic tells me it should make a big difference.

Therefore, check if you have the following on your website:

• website simple to understand, and navigate
• make sure people know how to buy your product
• keep a database of people buying from you
• follow up with them to upsell

And no, SEO is not really bullshit, you HAVE to HAVE it, just make sure your other things are sorted out first.