As the popularity of Twitter grows more and more writers, online marketers and information publishers wonder is Twitter really worth the effort?

In other words, if you only get an hour or two each day to work on your business, should you be spending some of that valuable time on building your Twitter following or should you be spending it on something else?

Now THAT is a great question – especially since it demands that we understand what is MOST important to our online marketing businesses.  Now we market many things online, but one of the most important parts of our business is marketing information in the form of ebooks, books, teleseminars, home study courses and membership sites – so we are going to take this from the perspective of someone like you who is looking to grow an internet business based on marketing their own information products.

So, where does Twitter fall into the mix

• First, before you begin hitting the Twitter airwaves, you MUST plan your attack.  What I mean by that is you need to understand what business will you be in?  Who will you target, what challenges and desires for information will you fulfill and roughly with what types of products.  Notice, you do not yet need to have your finished products, but you do need to understand who you are targeting and what you will likely offer them in the future to get the most out of Twitter
• Second, you want to have a website – and not just any website.  What you want is a landing page that is designed to both inform your visitor, but mainly to capture their contact information in exchange for something you give away.  What could you give away?  It could be a 5-part email course, a 5-10 page report, an ebook, a 20-minute audio interview (someone may interview you or you may interview an expert) or anything else of immediate value.  This should target the positioning you decided on in Step 1.  Now you have a place to send your Twitter following and you have a reason to send them there – something of value for free
• Third, you want to send some initial traffic to that page through one or a combination of paid advertising (Adwords is a good place to start), article marketing and a blog.  You do this to get traffic flowing to your landing page and test it’s ability to change visitors into subscribers. 
• Fourth, arm yourself with at least 40-50 keyword phrases that effectively target the hungry consumers of information within your marketplace.  Inside Information Marketer’s Zone we outline different systems that will guarantee that you locate and isolate the best ROI keywords for your marketplace.  Why is this important?  Simple – you want to sprinkle these through your different Tweets on Twitter – more and more people are finding twitter activity based on search, when they search for your keyword terms, you want them to find you  and link up because these are the exact individuals that are most relevant to your Tweets and can be convinced through interaction to visit your website and hopefully become customers.  NOTE** This is the key part of twitter that nearly everyone doesn’t get!
• Fifth – now you can enter the Twittershpere, pick a username that relates to your market, setup your profile to include your important keyword phrases and a call to action (to get your free giveaway with a link back to your landing page) and start Tweeting.  What you want to do is tweet a few times each day, but also proactively seek out twitter discussions around your keywords and begin to post helpful responses, that way you can build up a very releavant following quickly.  Every 5th or 6th tweet you can include a link back to your landing page or to blog postings that are designed content around links back to your landing page. 

Using this approach to building a Twitter following makes good business sense – we have used it to build thousands of followers that do come back and read our blog, become subscribers and customers. 

If you use it properly around the system we outline above, then yes, Twitter is worth the effort for information publishers who market online. 

By the way – if you want to exchange thoughts on this or want to be kept informed of new tips, techniques and strategies on internet marketing, social networking and information publishing – follow us on Twitter by going here and hitting “Follow”