Home based and independent business owners have had enough to worry about when it comes to generating leads in this new economy without having to worry about Twitter and what it takes to meet, connect, prospect and SELL in 140 characters or less (including spaces).

Heck, some of us have a hard enough time meeting, connecting, prospecting and selling IN PERSON

At first glance, it might seem like other social communities like Myspace, Facebook, or even LinkedIn allow you a lot more flexibility in how you can connect and interact with friends and prospects alike.

You can say more, show more images and pictures, and display content in it’s entirety easily.

Could be a good thing, could be a bad thing.

Either way, I’m going to share with you how I use a 160 character bio and 140 character “tweets” to meet, connect, prospect and sell with ease and speed.

If you get this, you will be able to create long-term, mutually beneficial relationships with a dynamic and sharp community of people who are raving fans — not just followers. And you won’t feel like you’re shouting into a black hole when you tweet.

(At least that’s what it can feel like when no one interacts with your tweets.)

You’ll learn how to get total strangers to eagerly RT (retweet) your messages to their followers.

You’ll learn how to get quality traffic from Twitter to your content and your promotional offers.

And you’ll learn how to setup an attractive Twitter profile page.

Failure to take this information seriously will keep you from making the quality connections that lead to new sales, repeat clients, endless referrals and a constant stream of eager prospects for your business.
First, we’ll focus on the 4 factors of your Twitter presence that will influence how attractive and effective your Twitter account is at getting sales. Those are:

1. Your Main picture
2. Your bio
3. Your Twitter background
4. Your tweets

1) A picture says a thousand words:

You may not be able to add a thousand pictures on twitter like you can on other Social Sites and you don’t need to because ONE picture is worth a thousand words.

If you’ve ever been worried about the 140 character limit Twitter imposes — worry no more, because your picture should say MORE than enough to attract new followers, prospects and sales.

Just like having your picture added to your business card makes all the difference to industries like Real Estate and Insurance, YOU must have one on your Twitter profile.

Your main image (and the only one you can put on Twitter) COULD be a logo–

–If you were Coke, Nike or Disney, that would make perfect sense.

But since you’re not, let’s stick with a nice picture of you smiling or doing something you love.

One of my favorite ice breakers on Twitter is: “Hey, where’s your picture with that beautiful smile of yours?”

How do I know your smile is beautiful? Because it has been scientifically proven that the human eye is most attracted to other human faces — particularly smiling ones.

Pictures with a pet, an instrument, a loved one, or you in your favorite color are some solid options to choose from.

Avoid images that impersonate other people — especially celebrities, or something that may be considered obscene — especially celebrities!

That is, of course, if you want to be taken seriously.

Some of my favorite people to follow change their images up to fit their mood, match a site redesign or even to support a special event like a breast cancer awareness badge.

I’ve even seen some change it to celebrate holidays and festivities.

You’ll have followers who will follow you and recommend others to follow you out of the curiosity of what you’ll try next.

In the mean time, they will also be subject to reading your intriguing tweets!

Obviously there is room for creativity — so use it according to your personality.

2) Crafting a Bionic Bio:

Although your picture may draw you potential followers, it is your BIO that can make or break the deal.

Use your bio to say what to expect from your tweets in a way that is enlightening, entertaining and/or engaging.

Use short words and word phrases, instead of sentences, to say more with less.

How do you choose the right words that will inspire more of the A+ prospects to connect and interact with you?

Well, that all depends on who you’d like to meet and why.

Because of it’s length, your bio (160 characters, yes, including spaces), should serve more like a personal ad than a true “About ME” section.

For example, if I sold knives to chefs and cooks, my bio would be something like:

“Knife connoisseur, Soccer mom, loves grilling tips, best top quality culinary knives, foodie recipes, Kitchen warrior squad leader, Emeril ROCKS, Cowboys suck!”

Notice it hits the keywords like ‘Knife,’ ‘best… culinary knives,’ etc.–

–While infusing personality insights like “Emeril rocks, Cowboys suck!”, and my passion: “Kitchen warrior squad leader,” and familial status: “Soccer mom.”

That’s a hard working 160!

3) Custom “Backs” are the new Black:

Because of the limited space to share information about you and your business on Twitter, many savvy entrepreneurs have invested in a custom background.

A custom Twitter background will serve both as an accessory to spice up your default blue page background AND as a powerful extension of your brand and marketing.

You can add additional photos, contact information, mission statement, sales/specials, URLs/links to your other websites or social networks, your logo and more to areas that are visible to your Twitter page visitor.

If you have Photoshop, you can play around with it to create a background yourself, or grab your local teenager to assist, or get one made for you in as little as 24 hours for about $70.

If the colors or style is consistent with your website/blog, it makes for a more powerful statement about your professionalism and brand consistency to your potential followers and prospects.

Consider this when weighing your options to DIY or outsource — an amateur job is fine as long as it doesn’t LOOK amateur — or it can hurt, instead of help.

4) Tweeting for traffic:

So now that you have your pretty picture up along with your bionic bio and pimped out background, how do you tweet for traffic?

What do you say and how do you say it so you gain followers who RT (re-tweet), click, browse and buy?

Think about your tweets (which contain links to your, or others’ websites, articles and offers) as headlines.

It’s gotta be laser targeted to whom it’s intended to reach — and you better not think for a second that it’s meant for “everyone.”

Going back to my knife selling example:

If I had a promotion for cleavers on sale, an attractive tweet would be:

Attn personal chefs and kitchen warriors get that cool cleaver Emeril used in last nights show http://ow.ly.com/coolcleaver

If you’re tweeting to build rapport and relationships with your prospective prospects and partners in promotions (which should be 80%+ of your tweets), re-tweeting other peoples quotes, humor, informative links and just “shop-talk” will do just that.

Be sure to interact with those who reach out to you and you will attract more quality followers who will click when you are actually promoting something of your own to read, watch, listen to or buy.

Create “ice breaker” tweets to create some interaction.

Ask open-ended questions or send DM’s (direct messages) to get the conversation started.

Caveats…

Although this will lead to a lot of fun, you need to remember that you are running a business and you must TRACK EVERYTHING.

As the quality of your tweets and interactions increase, you will see your followers increase as well.

When you tweet something controversial or over-promote, you will also see your followers decrease.

This isn’t always a bad thing either, as you will lose the “riff-raff” who just pad your follower numbers in the hopes you follow them back.
Use Google Analytics to track your Twitter traffic patterns so you know who’s coming directly from reading your bionic bio.

Unfortunately, the links you may include on your Twitter background are not clickable and will count as “direct traffic,” since site visitors must type in the entire URL manually to get to your site(s).
What to do next?

Use this as a quick and dirty outline as you review your own Twitter profile and/or those of your clients.

Make adjustments, test them, get results and tweak again from there.

I’d love to hear your results, comments and questions. Also, feel free to put my advice to the test and click the “Retweet” or share buttons below

Love,