• By Connie Ragen Green
• Published 10/18/2008
• Writing

Using Twitter to build my list was the furthest thing from my mind when I first signed up for this service back in 2007. Considered to be the hottest new social media site, I have to admit I was among those who thought it was useless, pointless, and just plain stupid. Yet here I am a year later to tell you that Twitter has become one of the fastest and easiest ways for me to connect with people and promote my products and services on the internet. Twitter is considered to be a micro blogging platform, which means that you only have 140 characters total, including spaces and punctuation, to get your message out to the world. This has resulted in many abbreviations being used, and also links being shortened by various sites, for example, tinyurl and bitly. This makes it much easier to tweet a link to a blog post or website that you want to share with others.

Many people only use Twitter to promote and market their products and services, but it seems to be more acceptable if you share at least a little about your personal life. I tweet about activities I am involved in within my community, like the Rotary Club

, and if I am traveling I will tweet about what is happening while I am traveling as well as when I am at the event. This makes it all more interesting. If you are just starting out on Twitter you will want to find people you know to follow. Other people will do the same with you, so you end up with both followers and those you are following. You can search for people by keywords, so if you are trying to find someone in your niche you can easily locate them if they have used those keywords in their website or blog address, or in their bio. I have found that by following a variety of people and tweeting at least twice each day it is easy to build up a following fairly quickly. And, by tweeting about my niche, as well as my products and courses, many more people are able to find me and end up joining my list. This is how I have tripled my list of prospects over the past three months.

Sites like Ezine Articles now have a feature that enables you to send a tweet automatically each time you publish an article. I write an article just about every day, so other people on Twitter have a chance to read my most recent articles. This is how I have been able to build my list quickly using Twitter.

Connie Ragen Green teaches you how to write articles and eBooks to build an online business, as well as how to use the technology needed. Visit http://www.EbookWritingandMarketingSecrets.com to find out more.

by Connie Ragen Green