The Selling Lounge

I don’t pay for any twitter tools and I recommend you do not as well. There are plenty of free ones out there. I don’t claim to be a Twitter expert, but I wanted to write this after seeing that many of you don’t have a lot of Twitter followers. I consider that to be less than 200 for many and less than 50 for even more. If the only reason you use Twitter is to keep up with friends and fellow sellers that’s fine, but if you want to market yourself on Twitter that won’t work. My purpose in using Twitter is to get sales and market to people that might be interested in my products. To use Twitter as a marketing tool you MUST get MANY followers that are interested in your product line. As of right now I have 1,100+ followers. I’ve been with Twitter only about a month and I do not pay to get that many followers. A lot of people will ask if you want thousands of followers and they’ll want you to pay for a tool, but who knows if you’re targeting your niche market with those techniques.

How have I gotten 1,100+ followers? Twellow.com (and Search.twitter.com sometimes) and Tweetlater.com. Allow me to illustrate. I did post these two tools in another post but I wanted to post them here to encourage everyone to take full advantage of their tweets.

Twellow:
*People fill out profiles on Twitter. Find the people that are interested in what you sell and start following them. If you’re lucky they will start following you. If they don’t follow after a few days or weeks (whatever time limit you set) UNFOLLOW. You don’t have space for that. I’ll revisit this topic further down. The interest I look for is pretty easy. I sell Dog Supplies so I just have to find people that are interested in dogs. If you have troubles figuring out what your customers may be interested in or who to direct, post here and I or someone else may be able to give you suggestions. If you sell antiques I bet there is an interest for antiques. If you sell rummage sale items you can probably find people interested in rummaging. Rummaging interest could probably also be for antique sellers. If you sell kids clothes look for moms.
*Twellow.com is where I found most of my followers of late.

I use twellow in conjunction with Tweetlater.com. Some points about tweetlater.com:
1. Unless you are really interest in what someone has to say (like for me it’s celebrity dish) don’t follow the person unless they follow you. Some people start following you just so you follow them then un-follow you once you are following them. You don’t have space on your account to follow people that aren’t following you. You have a max of 2,000 people you can follow before Twitter starts looking at the ratio of followers to following on your account. I don’t know what the ratio is but I hit 2,000 the other day and they wouldn’t let me follow anyone new so I knew it was time to clean out a bunch of people that were following me. I give people a few days to follow me before I will un-follow them. I try to keep the follow to followers ratio pretty close.
2. I don’t recommend un-following people that are following you just because you think

you got ‘em. If you do that to someone like me I will un-follow you automatically.
3. Tweetlater has sooooo many functions. One being to un-follow anyone that un-follows you AND to automatically follow anyone that follows you. This is such a time saver.
4. You can also keep your multiple twitter accounts here so you can tweet from one central location.
5. You can set it up to receive emails when people tweet about keywords like your store name, something you sell or whatever you think

you need to watch out for. I should note this tool

hasn’t worked for me as I only received one email from it.
6. Tweetlater also allows you to set up tweets when you’re away from your computer. If you want people to constantly get messages from you set it up here. Remember that MANY people that will be following you will be following 1,000 others. So you want to make sure they read something from you everyday. If you only tweet once or twice a day you are going to get lost in the shuffle.

Don’t just post about your store on twitter. For me, that gets boring

. If someone is following you that is only following 50 people they are going to get frustrated if all you put up all day is visit my store with a link. Frustration leads to an un-follow. Tell everyone about your day so you are seen as a real person. See what everyone else is tweeting about. It can be dumb stuff like “I just got the laundry

out …. I hate laundry

.” You might start a conversation with someone else that hates laundry

. It makes you more personable.

I hope this helps everyone! I want to see higher numbers out there from everyone… if you want to use Twitter as a marketing tool

.

Since my 5 year old daughter was born I have had a strong desire to become a stay-at-home mom. My husband doesn’t have the greatest work history or skills to get a high paying job to support my desire so I had to take it upon myself to try and make it work. I have a 3 year old son as well... I shouldn't leave him out of the mix.

I thought working for myself would be the best option. I needed it to be not time consuming because I wanted to be a mom while I was at home not a working mom. There are soooo many sites out there that claim to get you rich quick. One wanted me to market them and I don’t even think they had a product. It was just marketing this “idea.” I think you would call that a pyramid scheme. Luckily I didn’t pay for too many endeavors.

I signed up for a dropshipping company in the process of trying to find a stay-at-home mom carrier. I was given a website with little flexibility to optimize it for search engines and NO flexibility in adding to their week descriptions so I lost interest in that after a while. After a certain point I committed myself to no more investing in the idea of stay-at-home mom. There are plenty of internet ventures that are free. Or close to it anyway. Once I reached this point I decided to give my account with buyitsellit.com more attention. I still have the site with the dropshipped products so I thought I’d start a buyitsellit.com site. This way could start my own website at no cost (back when it was free) and there wasn’t much risk involved. People do have their qualms about dropshipping but I like it so we won’t address that here. So with the Buy It Sell It site I was able to optimize my website for search engines and add to the description to make items more enticing. I like writing as well so it allows me to practice those skills as well. I have quite a few pet items with the dropship company so I decided to start a dog store. There are a TON of ceramic dog dishes so I started with that and got suggestions from the buyitsellit forums to add more items so now it’s more of a dog supply store. It’s called Dog Dish Store. About this time I also committed to making this business a success. Before this I had the attitude of “I’ll give it a shot.” This time I’m doing this UNTIL it works. Buy It Sell It did start charging a monthly fee for having more than 10 items in your store so I’m paying that now but my sales cover the fee. It’s only $9.95 per month which is very reasonable when compared to other hosting sites. Right now I’m selling an item a week and I’m hoping to increase to an item a day and only increase from there. I have high goals and high expectations. I like how it’s going so far. Even if I can’t be a stay at home mom now I’d still like to be home when the kids get off of school so a part time stay at home mom would be ok too. I just started Cat Dish Store as well.

To further try and promote my store I started a blog. I wasn't sure what to write about so I thought I would do a blog on starting my own business. This helps me stay on track. It's my to-do list and I hope it helps others that are trying to start their own business. I call the blog Diary of a Working Mom.

All of this has me extremely busy, but I enjoy doing it and maybe it will allow me to become a stay-at-home mom someday... I can only pray it will.