Tweet Later an essential marketing tool

A lot of twitter applications these days have me baffled.
I just don't know why anyone would want some of them. But, hey ho! One mans meat and all that.

But in my trawl through the myriad of twitter applications out there, I have come across some that are actually quite useful and a few essential applications especially if you are using twitter as an Internet marketer or to boost your business

The first of these is Tweet Later.

Tweet later is a multi function application

Automation. Tweet later allows you to automate

• Automated direct message.

Thank you replies to your new followers is a great way of retaining readership of your tweets.

The thing with twitter is a lot of people are following other people solely to get them to follow them back. Sort of like reciprocal following.

So the person who has started following you on Twitter has, in all probability, ticked the follow box on a bunch of peoples profiles that day.

It is important you acknowledge them if you want them to sit up and take notice.

And the best time to try and see you as a useful 'friend' is soon after they have chosen to follow you.

If you send your automated thank you note as soon as they start following you, they are more likely to still be online and read your thank you message. Leave it a few hours or days and it becomes a blur. They probably, by then, will not remember why they were following you in the first place.

• Autofollow people who are following you.

Now I don't recommend that you automatically follow all your followers. you could soon end up with a stream of inane tweets on your twitter homepage.

You only want to follow people who share information useful to you.

Tweet later allows you vet people before following them.

Or you could just set it up to autofollow everyone following you. It really is your decision.

• Tweet scheduling

We all know that to get the most out of twitter, you need to maintain a presence there. But with other aspects of your business to run and probably a day job to boot, there just is not the time to 'post tweets every couple of hours'

Tweet later allow you to write a bunch of tweets and then schedule when they will be posted to your twitter account.

• Keyword research

Tweet later is excellent for doing keyword research or niche discovery on Twitter

For example, if you are trying to assess the demand for a certain keyword, you can set up tweet later to notify you every time this keyword is used on Twitter.

Or you are going into a new niche. Where better to find out what people are saying about the niche, what aspects of the niche are most popular, current information and even what people's problems in the niche are.

Just use tweetlater to set up a keyword alert and you can follow whatever keyword is relevant.

And the keyword you track could be any word including your niche keywords, your twitter name, a products name, use your imagination

More information on getting your free account at Tweet Later

Using Feeder Sites For Backlinks And Traffic. Caution

Using feeder sites as a source of backlinks and traffic to your website or blog is for some people a really useful tool.

But sometimes you can get burned

Before we delve into this, let me explain what I mean by feeder sites.

Feeder sites are sites that allow you to post content for free and on which you can add links back to your money making niche marketing site.

For example Squidoo. A very successful web project that allows you to post lens about whatever and in those lenses you can include links to your site. The Squidoo example is actually a well tested and, previously, really successful site to use as a feeder site. The search engines, especially Google, loved Squidoo. Your new lens was indexed pretty quickly in the search engines and if done with some minimal SEO got good rankings in the search engines. This meant a lot of visitors to your Squidoo lenses and, hopefully, some would follow the link to your site. This was two years ago. Unfortunately because of misuse of this site, a spate of poorly put together content and other factors, Squidoo does not seem to have the Google pull these days as it used to.

Anyway to get back on point, if you find a bunch of feeder sites that could get indexed pretty quickly AND do well in the search engines AND help generate some traffic to your site AND may have a do follow backlink to the site....Why CAUTION?!

Lets take a closer look.

The feeder sites like Squidoo, Hubpages, Myspace all have a lot of search engine clout and a lot of content. This means that they already tick a lot of boxes from the SEO point of view

If you build a feeder page on one of these sites that competes for the same keywords as your main money making pages, there is a risk of those feeder pages occupying the top positions in Google for your chosen keywords.

Hey? Why is this a problem?

Because it is your money making site that you want to rank in position one of Google for your chosen keyword.

The way to get around this is to optimize your feeder sites for long tail terms based on your main keyword or optimize them for other closely related keywords.