One thing I’m really aware of however – and have become even more so recently – is just how reliant I (and many others) seem to have become on Twitter as a primary communication channel and promotional tool for our projects….

Side note: Almost anyone who says they’re on Twitter purely for the social aspect and not for promotional purposes is lying…I can think of only a handful of people I’m connected with, who truly & genuinely don’t seem to have anything to promote and are there purely for the conversation – and even then you could say, it is still all about personal branding.

As those of you who are on Twitter know, when there are down times you might find yourself feeling a bit lost, disconnected and perhaps even at a loss for what to do with yourself online. If you’re lucky, you’re one of those people who actually finds they’re way more productive. Or you may be so obsessed about checking whether Twitter is back up yet or not, you get nothing else done at all.

But like many social media and social networking platforms, the return on investment, when it comes to the value it brings to your business, is difficult to measure. That new client you recently signed may not have found you directly on Twitter but being able to follow you on Twitter sure helped convince them you know what you’re doing. And sales of that new ebook you released 6 months ago may not have increased directly because you tweeted about it but it sure helped spread the word and drove more eyeballs to your site and possibly therefore your sales page.

Twitter has become such a crucial connection and communication tool for many micro-businesses and solopreneurs that I suspect many would notice a significant (and very likely negative) impact on their business, if Twitter went down and never came back up. Yup…never came back up, as unlikely as that may sound.

So the question is this: What are you doing to ensure your business has a contingency plan, if Twitter ever goes down and never comes back up?

You can’t and shouldn’t ever rely on just one form of advertising, promotion and communication to market your business – and the same is true for Twitter. If you’ve noticed you are relying mostly on Twitter and your promotional activities have slackened off in other areas, then here’s what we’re doing and what I suggest you might want to do too:

• Be very clear about what Twitter does for you/your business and the way you use it – this is an important first step so you know how to replace/replicate it with tools which perform the same/similar function.
• Create other channels to give contacts, customers, clients & prospects multiple ways to connect and communicate with you.
• Build a presence on the other (relevant) platforms for branding purposes and again, to give people another way to connect with you.
• Connect with your Twitter friends in other ways – on the phone, in person etc. – and solidify and strengthen your relationships.

People keep trying to predict the longevity and death of Twitter; I have no idea when it will die a death and no longer be the channel of choice for so many of us – but when it does, I don’t intend to be caught short and stuck for ways to connect with people. Do you?

There’s no doubt they still work – and that’s why people still use them but thankfully the internet and online marketing industry is maturing and the long copy sales letter is no longer thought of as the only effective way to sell something online (phew)…

As those of us who have been using the internet as a marketing tool for a few years now, we can relate to this – we’ve all been there and done it – stuck up one of those pages, written the long copy using the oh-so-obvious trigger words & phrases and felt just a little bit sleazy about doing so.

And it’s a lifecyle you can see still being repeated by other industries who are late to the party.

Take the fitness industry for example – at long last personal trainers and fitness coaches everywhere are catching on to the fact that the internet can be a hugely powerful sales and marketing tool for their location-specific business (despite my banging on about it for the past 2 years or so!).

You can tell because many of their websites and blogs are littered with those phrases and headlines we’ve all used before. You know the ones I mean…things like:

• Who else wants to…?
• At last a proven way to…
• Revealed…Secrets of
• Now you can finally…

I’m sure some of them are having success too – but I wonder how many of them (of you) feel a little bit uneasy – perhaps a tad inauthentic at using such tactics?

If you do, then here’s my advice…stop learning from the people you’re currently learning from and start looking around at how other people are doing it. The industry is maturing and is now full of people marketing themselves with integrity and authenticity – and being highly successful too.

Today is an important event for Twitterers everywhere – it’s Twestival day.

Over 150 cities around the world are hosting their own Twestivals – a face-to-face gathering of Twitterers – in order to raise money for Charity: Water (did you know that right now, 1.1 billion people on the planet don’t have access to safe, clean drinking water? That’s one in six of us). You can donate here.

Otherwise, this post is largely written for my Dad – a recent joiner to Twitter. I am convinced he joined just so that he could cyberstalk me some more, after numerous reminders over the past few months that I hadn’t been updating my blogs enough (something to do with constant nausea and morning sickness – but what does that matter?!?).

He’s a little bit of a newbie and in light of that, I thought I’d post some tips for you, Daddy, on how to get the best out of Twitter…

1 – If you want specific people to see a Tweet you write, start the tweet with @ plus their username. For example, if you’d like to send a tweet to me specifically, you’d type: “@leawoodward …”. That way, if I go to the “Replies” tab on my profile, I can see any tweets directed specifically at me. This makes it much easier for people who follow and are followed by hundreds of people. Our Twitter stream (the messages we see on screen) can get very full at peak times, so it’s easy to miss a message if there’s no @ attached to it.

2 – Similarly to #1, if you want to reply directly to something that someone else has tweeted, the best way to do it (so that they’ll see it), is to click on the “reply to…” arrow that appears on the screen when you hover next to a tweet. This will then automatically include the @username in your tweet and make it easy for the person to see you’ve replied to them.

3 – Beware of SPAM bots and out-and-out marketers who follow you. They can’t necessarily do anything to you/your account but I’d rather have people following me who are real, live people looking to interact/connect. That’s one reason I protected my updates – the other was to protect from friends and family “spying” on me!! I think it’s a bit like eavesdropping on my conversations if you’re going to sit silently and watch me interact and tweet with my Twitter buddies, and not join in.

4 – If you see “RT…” and you’re wondering what that means, it means “Retweet” and is a way of passing on a tweet that someone else has tweeted that you like and want to give a hat tip to the original tweeter and pass the message on.

5 – Due to the 140 character restriction on Twitter, you might like to use a service like TinyURL to automatically shorten long URLs for you so they fit. If you download a Firefox/Flock extension, you can do this very easily with right-click of the mouse.

If you’re a relative novice to this weird and wonderful world of online communities, then lifestreaming might seem an unnecessary, frivolous and utterly stupid waste of time.

Who is really interested in reading what you’re doing every day? Does it matter? Who cares?

Me? I love lifestreaming. I have multiple blogs, I’m a daily Twitterer, I use Facebook, FriendFeed and now I even have a totally separate lifestream using the cool new tool, Posterous (more on that later). My dedicated lifestream is like a mini blog – updates on what I’m doing throughout the day, pics to prove it and sometimes random thoughts and feeling that pop into my head.

Why? Ultimately because I want to and I enjoy it – which is also why I blog. I have so many things to say – a constant stream of thoughts, comments and observations – running through my head that if I didn’t express them somewhere they would very likely drive me mad inside my own head. Now I have multiple means to express them and drive others mad too.

However there are other, more pragmatic reasons for lifestreaming which include:

• As we live overseas and often thousands of miles from most of our friends and family, it’s an easy way to share what we’re up to in our lives. Facebook, in particular, is also a great way to keep up to date with what they’re doing too.
• Whilst our location independent, work from anywhere lifestyle isn’t all that exciting on a day-to-day basis, many people are curious about what we do, how we earn money and what this lifestyle entails. I’m happy to share all of it, however mundane, if it’s useful to even just one person.
• Lifestreaming is really just an online diary/journal; it’s a nice, personal recollection of your own life which you can choose to share with others or keep private if you wish.
• If you do run a business like ours, which relies on people trusting you enough to work with you without ever having met you, then lifestreaming provides them with an excellent window into your world.

Lifestreaming isn’t for everyone – and I know some people react in horror to suggestion that they share their life with ‘virtual strangers’. That’s the best bit though…lifestreaming helps you to turn those strangers into friends.

I was watching someone the other day try and find a file on their computer – my hands itched to snatch the mouse away from them and just do it for them. Didn’t they know you just right-click over the start button (on a PC) and select “Explore” to instantly get your File Explorer window up?

As a business owner and entrepreneur, you’re often caught up wearing so many hats that you simply don’t have the time to struggle through the most basic computer tasks which take you an hour when they should take you a minute.

Want to save yourself hours and hours of time and improve your productivity and ability to GTD (get things done) ten-fold? Then get well acquainted with your computer and learn how to do the basics and then some…things like:

• Creating, deleting and organising folders and files.
• Searching your computer for files using the in-built search functionality in Windows Explorer (PC) or Spotlight (Mac) or by installing and using Google Desktop.
• If you’re using a PC, download and install something like CCleaner so you can keep your PC tidy and running smoothly.
• The basics of MS Office (or equivalent) and the main tips and tricks in each major program (Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc.).
• How to deal with and troubleshoot your own email accounts on whichever program you use to manage them.
• Installing a browser like Firefox or Flock (instead of the default IE or Safari) which gives you so much more functionality and more powerful tools at with just the click of your mouse.

Whilst it may take some time and effort to learn about the above, I promise you that it’s well worth it. And if you need some help learning, our tech coaching is ideal for the job!