That’s not as hard as you think. Short sharp and to the point messages are usually the best anyway.

But, as often as not, we as IMers want to include a link in our tweets back to our sites, blogs or even the merchant (although I wouldn’t recommend you include affiliate links – just too ‘hard sell’ for Twitter).

Dave tweets breaking news stories back to the relevant page on our blog, for example and we get a fair bit of traffic from there.

The problem is any link you include uses up some of your 140 character limit. So you need to shorten it and you can use TinyURL for that.

But I’ve found a really neat tool called Tweetburner that allows you to not only shorten and share your links but TRACK them as well!

It’s a free service and is a little clunky just now but it works great.

Over time it should give you an idea of what style of Tweet and link works best.

Check it out here.

I’ve got over 3 million ‘second order’ followers with a high social influence but a fragile centralization. I’m sure this is gonna make me $millions. I don’t like centralization so I don’t care about that one.

Check out your influenza score now! Smoking hot or have you caught a cold?

(LOL! If anyone can tell me what the numbers actually mean, please do so…)

Check out who’s top of the Twitter Elite tree in your location.

Who’s the Tops where I am? I’ll give you three guesses…

Twitter Elite – Middlesbrough

LOL!

(And I didn’t cheat, honest!)

Even if you haven’t, don’t sweat it, and there are no real major changes at all… more changes in the way we as marketers should be using it.

In a nutshell most people (and there are 175,000,000 of them) use Facebook to communicate with their friends, family, work friends, etc. And that’s what you should do… on your personal account.

If you want to use it for marketing set up a seperate page or group for that. But which one…

Well a group is more like a forum, so Thad and I could set up one for Affiliate Marketing but we’re not gonna do that.

Instead we are gonna set up a page (in fact Thad set it up month’s ago) for the AffiliateNicheClub.

We’re then gonna invite you to become ‘fans’. LOL! I know I hate the terminology but that’s what they use.

I’ll post up the link to our new Fan Club as soon as Thad reminds me of the log-in details.

I’ll apologise here and now for using my personal account for marketing to my Facebook friends in the past.

AND I’ll apologise here and now because I’m gonna be deleting many of you as friends from my personal account unless I really do know you personally. I hope you understand why…

No wonder my boys would never go near my Facebook account… it was full of ANC stuff… they know what I do and think it’s cool but they are only interested in my personal stuff. Get it!?

On top of Des’ great Squidoo guides I’ve just pointed you at on the post below, I now have the pleasure of telling you about a great FREE Squidoo guide from the one and only PotPieGirl of OneWeekMarketing fame.

Not only is PPG (Jennifer) an ANC member, she’s also a great friend and superb teacher.

This guide will get you started ‘step-by-step’ on how to create a great Squidoo lenses!

(Errrr… like our very own Niche Marketing Reaper lens. )

So, don’t delay…

Grab Your FREE Copy of PotPieGirl’s Squidoo 101 Here!

If you haven’t checked it out yet, head on over here and do so now because I’ve added some really cool additions.

First, I’ve added a genuine pucker Opt-in form right there on the lens. You can’t do that, right? Well you can if you’ve got friends like mine…

A Wealthy Affilate buddy of ours and ANC Member called Des showed me the ropes and, even better than that, he’s produced a great FREE guide on how to do it!

Download a copy of Des’ ‘Add an Opt-in’ Guide here!

And if you scan Niche Marketing Reaper closely you’ll also spot that I’ve added some of those Clickbank HopAds to the lens. (The ones I told you about a couple of posts back.)

Again, Des had a guide on how to do that and it’s available NOW for AffiliateNicheClub members in the members area.

But it would be a bit churlish not to let our blog readers have access to it as well. So for a limited time only you can grab this guide from Des himself…

Grab a copy of Des’ ‘Add HopAds’ Guide here!

These are both great additions to your lenses so get cracking and enjoy!

Check out Niche Marketing Reaper here!

It’s all just for fun (and donates to ‘Big Cat Rescue’… what else? LOL!)

It’s an ‘Affiliate Marketing’ fun lens and you can vote for your favourite (or least favourite) AM video or ‘Guru’ or even add your own faves. Fancy a flame war? Fire away.

And there is a (semi) serious side to it. There’s an option on there that you can vote for and ask us to do a lens on a specific aspect of Affiliate Marketing.

If you’re especially nice, we might just do one! Well, I do have to go to the pub now and again you know.

Check the lens out here and give us your feedback and votes!

OK… maybe not. Bare with me…

You will have noticed that we’ve added a ‘Business News‘ page on the blog. From there you can access the major breaking news stories from around the world as they happen. Pretty cool, right? It’s more important than ever now to keep up to date as the big ‘D‘ approaches. OK, but get this…

I’ve also been Tweeting about some of the more interesting headlines as they appear and linking the Tweet back to the relevant ANC Blog page containing the headline (rather than the newspaper article itself).

If you’re already on Twitter and following me you may have noticed this. Here’s my Twit bit link:-

https://twitter.com/davidrbrown

And my Tweets automatically feed though to my Facebook thing here:-

http://www.facebook.com/people/David-Brown

Dead clever, right? Dead easy!!

The result… more traffic (a lot more)… more sign ups to our list…

MORE NEW MEMBERS!!

Now, Thad’s given me a bit of a slap on this… he thinks it comes across a bit ‘showy’ a bit brash. OK… big headed!! (See, I also sent this out as mail to our list… so you may have seen it already.)

Well, that was not the point of the mail or this post at all…

It’s all about engaging with your audience, whether that be on Twitter or Facebook, in a forum of wherever. Get involved with people… show them you are a real person… that you care about what’s going on out there…

So, get on Twitter and get Tweeting and start engaging with your audience.

PS. Chuck in some links to rock vids from YouTube as well… they always go down a storm. LOL!

This one is particularly appropriate at the moment:-