But if you can outsource some of the work to others – or better yet, automate it through the use of software, you can build your business to work without your direct involvement.  You can be the captain of your ship rather than a member of the crew.  This allows you to steer your business toward the goals you’ve set for yourself, and it allows you to create real wealth – and to help others do the same.

Social media sites allow you to interact with others and get the word out about your products and services.  It’s important to engage your visitors and to provide quality information that will help to position you as an expert on your chosen topic.  But you don’t want to spend all of your time at the keyboard interacting with visitors.  After all, you have a business to run.

Where it makes sense, you can automate a lot of the mundane aspects of social media interaction.  A perfect example of where automation makes sense is the Twitter follow process.  If someone follows you, and you want to reciprocate, you would normally send them a message to thank them for following.  And you’d click their follow link to add them to your list.  But that takes a lot of time when you’re usually going to respond with the same information for each follow.

To automate this process, there’s a great tool at TweetLater.com that is perfect for the task.  You can set up an automatic message to be sent to your followers, and you can automatically follow those that follow you.  You can also un-follow those that drop you.  This helps to keep your follow ratios in balance to stay within the Twitter terms of service. 

Your follow message should be something that sounds somewhat personal.  I get responses from a lot of users that include a link to one of their products.  That’s okay if you have lots of followers or already have an established reputation.  But if you’re just getting started and trying to build a following, you’ll probably do better to keep it to a simple “Thanks for the follow” type message.  This sounds more personal, so you’re less likely to have them drop you when receiving your reply. 

People are smarter than you think.  If they think you’re simply after their money, they’ll find someone else to provide the information they’re seeking.  But if you genuinely care to provide quality information while also getting compensated for the effort, you’ll be much more successful.

But the talk about Twitter has been increasing in recent weeks, so I suppose I can’t resist any longer.  I have to join the “in” crowd and become a twittering fool.  Actually, I do see the tremendous benefits of Twitter clearly now.  Email marketing still has its place, but spam has really but a damper on it.  Blogs are great, too, but Twitter adds something a little more personal to the concept.  I can see that, with the right approach, Twitter could be used to make mountains of money online.

Just how could you make money with Twitter?  Maybe I’ll write a few posts to detail methods for using Twitter to make money online.  I certainly see the potential for it.  Once I put things in place myself to test my theories, I’ll report back to let you know how it all works.  For now, I can see that pulling together an audience of like-minded individuals with varying interests and ideas has more potential for profits than anything I’ve seen recently.  If you can build a solid following by providing good ideas and content, you’ll quickly establish a reputation in your niche.  You can then leverage this to sell your products or services, and your pool of potential customers is following you each step of the way.

It’s time to start Twittering…