"Hey, It's a Bird, It's a Plane - No, It's Twitter"

So what is Twitter and why should you care? It's very similar to instant messaging. You set up a profile, people can choose to "follow you", and you can choose to follow others. You send short text messages to your "followers", called "tweets". The messages are short, no longer then 140 characters and are centered around the theme, "What are you doing now?" With such a small space you'll have to learn to be very creative.

So what's the benefit of having people "follow" you around? Well, you can use Twitter to keep in touch with your customers, use it for branding purposes, send out links to your latest blog posts, tell folks about anything that may be new with your company or website, or offer special discounts or sales on your products/services. You can even tap into your follower's mind by asking them questions, or sending them links to on-line surveys. The possibilities are really endless. Think of it as a two-way communication channel between you and your customers (followers).

When it comes to your posts, you want to keep the tone friendly and informal. Don't annoy people by sending out too many messages too often. Make sure whatever you send is useful or informative. Don't send too many self-serving messages or your followers will unsubscribe as quickly as they subscribed.

When you register at Twitter and start to follow people, you can elect to receive messages via your cell phone as a text message, through your instant messaging account, or you can just log into Twitter to view all your messages. You can also receive notifications via email. You can set individual notification preferences for each person you choose to follow. If you choose to receive text messages on your cell phone, remember you'll be charged per your cell phone plan for each incoming message.

Be careful when choosing a username, as it will become part of your url, which looks like this "http://twitter.com/username" If you're a company, you may want to use your business name to help in your branding efforts. You can also upload your company logo, or a picture of yourself and write a one line bio with your url. Again, it's a small space so be creative.

So with Twitter being all the rage these days, plenty of add on applications have sprung up to extend Twitter's usefulness. Let's review some of your options:

1) www.twitter.com/downloads

Numerous tools to download for other ways to send and receive Twitter updates.

2) www.TwitterFeed.com

Takes your blog posts and sends them to your "followers" automatically.

3) www.TwitThis.com

Add to your webpage or blog to allow others to send your url to their Twitter followers.

4) www.VisualTwitter.com

A place to share your cell phone photos.

5) www.TweetGift.com

Send gifts to your friends.

6) www.LoudTwitter.com

Archive your "tweets" on your Blog.

7) www.Twitteroo.com

Send Twitter tweets from your PC.

8) www.TwitPic.com

Share photos on Twitter. Post with your cell phone or through the site itself.

9) www.TweetCube.com

Share files on Twitter, including images, videos, music and more.

Taking this all into consideration, I'm sure you can see how Twitter could be very useful when it comes to marketing your Internet business. If not, at the very least it's a lot of fun. So what are you waiting for? Get out there and start "tweeting".

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Merle "The Tricks to Paying for Clicks" Learn everything you need to know about pay-per-click search engines at.... www.PayPerClickResearch.com