Ok, so I’ve been doing a lot of reading and studying of Twitter the past couple of months and after all of the reading, I’ve come to the conclusion that the single best, “non-spammy” method for building a big, loyal, Twitter following is through the use of Twitter Giveaways, or Twiveaways as I like to call them.

What’s a Twitter Giveaway? Well, essentially, you give something away… whether it’s an eBook, software product etc. OR a physical product like an Ipod… in return for Twitter users

1. reTweeting a message that you ask them to reTweet to their Twitter account

2. Follow you on Twitter

This does a few things…

1. It builds your Twitter follower count when the initial registrant follows you on Twitter

2. It “goes viral” because when the initial registrant retweets your message, you’re now “advertising” on their Twitter profile page, to all of THEIR followers. Their followers then click on the reTweet message and sign up for your contest also… and the process just spirals

This is how many of the people with large Twitter followers are able to build a Twitter

following so large. Many Twitter experts like Deborah Micek, iJustine, and Joel Comm use and/or teach about Twitter Giveaways.

The nice thing about Twiveaways is that you’re FIRST providing value in the form of an eBook or physical product… and THEN you get something in return, in the form of a larger follower count.

Rather than all of those black hat methods of building a Twitter following that we’re all so used to seeing online lately.

Because of the power of Twitter Giveaways, we’ve actually created a tool to automatically run and track Twitter Giveaways, so that there is absolutely no manual tracking necessary on our part, and the site is 100% free.

Here’s the link to the site where you can run your own Twitter Giveaways: http://www.twiveaway.com

I STRONGLY urge you to use Twiveaways in building your Twitter follower count. I can guarantee that you’ll see growth using them.

Talk soon.

Brad

Hey guys, I sent out an email about this a couple weeks ago and have gotten some good feedback from it, so wanted to post here to quickly go over the process of what I accidentally did to build a very large email list in a short period of time.

1. I created www.ppcwebspy.com, which is a cool Firefox addon for keyword research. The overall process/flow of the software itself is very viral. (i.e. there is a big incentive for others to tell others about it, other than just because it’s good (which should always be a given if you create and sell anything)

2. I created a short demo video of me explaining how the software worked and what it does.

3. I posted a link to the video on my Twitter page (http://www.twitter.com/brad_callen). The video was nothing special. It was just me explaining the software and talking about how excited I was about releasing it to the public. It was 100% complete, but I was bored while my programmers were putting the finishing touches on it, so I had time to make a video showing how it worked. I made sure to mention that it wasn’t quite ready/complete, but would be soon.

Note:

- At this point, I’ve never mentioned the URL (web address) to where my Twitter followers could get the software… Basically because it wasn’t quite finished yet. I did, however, mention the name of the software.

- I only had about 2,000 followers at the time

4. Within the first day I noticed I was getting some traffic to the website. I checked my Google analytics to see where the traffic was coming from. It was coming from Google only. People were going to Google and typing in the name of the software… Likely because they wanted to buy it, even though they knew it probably wasn’t ready.

5. I noticed some sales start to come in. Luckily I did have the entire buying/sales process finished, and the software was working and ready enough to be sold. There were some minor tweaks left to do on the software, but nothing that would hinder its performance.

6. Each day, I noticed more and more traffic to the site. I started noticing traffic coming from other places. People were now posting the direct link to PPC Web Spy on their blogs, in their Twitter posts etc.

7. People were starting to reTweet my initial video Tweet.

8. This lead to more traffic, more optins, and more sales.

9. People then started promoting PPC Web Spy to their email lists… and I never told a sole about the product!

10. This obviously led to more traffic, optins, and sales

11. After 2 weeks was up, I had built an email list of over 55,000 people and had made quite a few sales of the product… and I hadn’t even launched the product yet to my own email list! In fact, I never really did an official launch for it at all. I was planning on it, but word spread so fast through Twitter that I didn’t have to

So, what can you take from this?

1. Create a product and create it in a way that people will want to tell others about it. The marketing process needs to be very viral

2. Post a video on Twitter of you explaining the product. You can mention the name and URL even, if you want. (You could offer an incentive for people to reTweet your tweet to help the process)

3. If the product is good and worthy to be talked about, it will be mentioned again on Twitter by others.

4. If the product is viral, it will move from Twitter to blogs, to forums, and then to people’s email lists

5. Use twitter to catalyze a viral campaign. Do it in a way that’s not spammy. Just be helpful and explain what your product does and how it can help people. Remember, Twitter is a relationship building platform first and foremost. So, go into this with that in mind.

That’s it in a nutshell. It all seems very obvious/simple, but sometimes, it’s the obvious/simple things that can make the biggest difference in your marketing.

Good luck!

Brad

Update: Before posting a comment with a question, please read the FAQ, as we’ve answered many of the questions that have been asked here, already. You can read the FAQ by clicking the link below:

http://www.ppcwebspy.com/FAQ.php

Hey gang, we’ve made some major changes and improvements to PPC Web Spy, based on recommendations from you all.

Here are the things we’ve been working on over the past week, amongst the craziness.

To update your copy, simply click the “view keywords” button you would normally click to view keywords. Up will pop a screen telling you to update. Follow the onscreen instructions to update your version.

1. Completely changes the look of www.ppcwebspy.com to a much more upbeat, happy, and uplifting design. I feel this better represents the software than the dark, gloomy looking site from before.

2. Changed the entire focus of the site so that the small viral/affiliate link feature is barely mentioned… and is mentioned as only a side benefit, which is what it should be. The focus is now on what the tool actually does and the purpose of why I created the tool to begin with: To unccover your Adwords competition’s keywords.

3. Changed the GUI of the product itself to match the new site design.

4. Changed the “view keywords” button to not look so bright and “in your face”. It blends much better with Google now.

5. Added an option where free users may turn off the 2 affiliate links that appear at the top of Google. Some were complaining about the links bothering them, so naturally… they wouldn’t click them to begin with. So, we added an option that allows you to turn them off and not be bothered by them.

6. Added a FAQ page with the most frequently asked questions to help with some of the confusion: http://www.ppcwebspy.com/FAQ.php

7. Added 60,000 more keywords to our already enormous, 2 billion keyword database. The more keywords that are added, the better results you’ll get. We’ll be adding 60,000 more keywords every few weeks and the resuls will only get better and better.

8. We added the “view keywords” button the “more sponsored ads” pages on Google, like this: http://www.google.com/sponsoredlinks?q=weight+loss&hl=en&um=1&ie=UTF-8

… and we’re currently working on many more features and functionality to come.

Please post your comments below. I’d love to hear what you think about the new additions.

If you have any support questions, please submit a ticket so that our support team can quickly assist you. You may do so here: http://www.bryxensoftware.com/support/

Thanks!

Brad

P.S. I’m updating this post real quick to answer a few of the questions left in the comments below:

1. You can re-download PPC Web Spy anytime here: http://www.ppcwebspy.com/download.php

2. To view number of referrals you have, go here and login: http://www.ppcwebspy.com/referrals.php

3. To turn off the 2 affiliate links, follow these steps:

- Click the tools menu option in Firefox.

- Click the add-ons menu option

- Click the PPC Web Spy row and click the option button

- Uncheck the “show affiliate links” checkbox

4. PPC Web Spy currently works for google.com and google.co.uk. It ‘might’ work for other locations in the future, but it will be quite awhile, as that is a major major feature addition that involves doubling the size of our expenses and involves an extensive amount of resources.

Ok, this has been a pet peeve of mine for quite some time. I’ve noticed this getting worse over the past 2 years and I predict that it will be a major major problem in the coming years…

Here’s the process. So and so creates a product. The product gets downloaded by thousands of people. 99% of those people have success of some sort with the product, and are completely satisfied. 1% of the people are not.

The 1% of people that are not satisfied tend to be those people that would spend time posting in forums or blogging about it, while the satisfied people are out actually using and benefitting from whatever service/product that was provided.

This is even more prevalent in the internet marketing community than any other community and it’s getting worse and worse by the minute.

What’s even worse is that in the days of the almighty Google, it takes only 1 “bad apple” to dramatically hurt one’s reputation. Especially with the tendency of web 2.0 and blogs. Complainers ALWAYS spawn more complaining. Unfortunately that’s the way the web works.

We’ve seen very popular and successful forums like Michel Fortin’s copywriterboard completely shut down due to an overwhelming amount of negativity. It makes me sick to think what the web will be in 2020 and just how important it will be to protect your own brand from the few “bad apples” in the world.

What do you guys think? Have you seen similar things?

Brad