How to use keywords to my advantage?

What are keywords?

Keywords are the words, or combinations of words, that cause your website to show up on search engines (such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing). They are among the most important things for you to understand if you want to increase traffic on your website.

Click below to watch this 3-minute Youtube video

How do I use keywords to my advantage?

The best way to use keywords to your advantage is to know the words and phrases people are likely to use when searching for the content your website provides. Once you have identified the words and phrases people are likely to use, do your best to incorporate these words and phrases into the content on your site. Make sure the words and phrases are included in the content in a fluid manner, however, as search engines can mark your site as "spam" if they feel you are using keywords that are irrelevant to your content, simply to drive up your traffic.

Can I designate specific words or phrases as keywords?

Most websites allow you to use meta tags to designate certain words as your "keywords." However, this is inadvisable, as search engines no longer use meta tags in their compilation of search results, and in fact, this may even increase the likelihood of a search engine labeling your site as "spam."

I've heard search engines don't use keywords anymore; is this true?

In the 1990s, search engines relied heavily on meta tags in order to distinguish keywords, and thus, to determine site rankings in search results. However, this led to "spam" sites tagging relevant keywords en masse, but providing no content on the site to go along with the keywords. Since then, search engines have changed their approach, and in 2009, Yahoo - who had been the last search engine still giving serious weight to meta tags - switched away from meta tags altogether, meaning that meta tags are no longer a valuable way to increase visibility through search engines. However, this does not mean that keywords in general are not used by search engines - and while search engines do not make their processes public, studies have shown that using keywords effectively, in the content of a website, greatly increases the chances of the website showing up in searches!

Where should I put my keywords?

Using keywords in the title of posts on your website, and in the description of your website, will help quite a bit in giving your website search engine visibility. But in the long run, the best thing you can do is know the keywords you feel will be beneficial, and incorporate these keywords into the content you add to your site!

How do I know which keywords to use?

It can be difficult at times to know which keywords will most effectively bring readers your way, but one of the best things you can do is conduct searches for the content you are planning to write. As you use different keyword combinations, you will be able to figure out the words and word combinations people are most likely to use, and will also be able to get a feel for where your content will show up in a search as you use certain words and phrases.

What else can I do with keywords to increase my search engine visibility?

Studies have concluded that one of the best ways to increase your ranking in search engine searches is for others to link to your site - and the best way to make this happen is to provide valuable content! As you provide valuable content, others will link to you using the same keyword combinations you use in the content itself, and this will help you to keep climbing higher in those ever-important search engine rankings!

You may find that using webfire's keyword tools can help you quickly research to determine your ideal keywords. There are a wide range of keyword tools in the keyword section, and they range from broad to specific in nature. 


Related blog post: 

Tips on Using Google Keyword Tool

Social Media ROI: 11 FREE Tools for Measuring Social Media Success

One of the most challenging tasks in selling digital marketing to the C-Suite is defining the return on investment (ROI). It can be particularly challenging when justifying the budget for social media marketing (SMM).

Many SMM efforts lend themselves to brand building, community building, and customer service. Unlike "traditional" SEO, these activities aren't always transactional in nature.

Marketing ROI has traditionally been measured like this:

Return on Investment (%) = (Net profit / Marketing Costs) × 100.

Sometimes, cost per customer acquisition is the measure. As recently as 2010, the dawn of social media marketing, those in the C-Suite attempted to apply the tried and true transactional ROI model to SMM. The CMO Survey, as reported by Forbes, lists the most common metrics used to measure social media investment.

By 2013, only 9 percent of marketers were using traditional ROI metrics, down from 17 percent in the initial survey. The reason: many social media activities can't be effectively measured using a transactional formula. SMM is often best measured in terms of audience reach, engagement and sentiment.

That said, there are highly successful direct response campaigns that run on Facebook and other social networks every day. These approaches deliver an ROI that can easily be measured the old-fashioned way. Pam Dyer lists 10 here. If that isn't enough, Rob Petersen has another six examples.

Business Insider recently published a story on the death of social ROI. They claim that companies are starting to drop the idea that social media ROI can be measured.

I asked Nicole Harrison (@SocialNicole) about this and the importance of ROI in social media. She was adamant that social media done correctly will deliver results and recommended the following list of 11 free tools for measuring both ROI and social media success.

1. HootSuite

HootSuite is a good all around tool to use for management and metrics tracking. You can schedule posts from multiple social media channels as well as create over 30 individual reports. The free metrics are somewhat limited, but for beginners it's all you will need.

2. SocialMention

SocialMention is an aggregate tool similar to Google Alerts, but for social media, only. This will give you insight into not only what is being said, but who is saying it and what the general sentiment is.

You can set an RSS feed, email alerts, or even add a real-time widget to your website. You can also download a CSV/Excel file for further evaluation.

3. Klout

Monitoring influence isn't an exact science, but having a tool that helps you begin to gage someone's online presence can be useful. Klout is a free tool that will allow you to measure influence on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and several other channels.

4. Facebook Insights

The Facebook insights dashboard gives you all of the analytics data for your Facebook page. The insights allow you to understand your audience, what they are reacting to, and adjust your content to meet their needs.

5. Twitter Analytics

Twitter now has its own analytics dashboard. With Twitter Analytics you can track timeline activity, including tweets that were favorited, retweeted, and replied to. The tool also tracks number of mentions, new followers and newly followed. For more information, see "Twitter Analytics: A Beginner's Guide".

6. Google Analytics

With Google Analytics Campaign Tracking, you can set up links for campaigns with UTM parameters to track the campaign. Go here to create the link using Google link shortener for campaigns.

This is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to track success of a specific link within a campaign. It's also one of the most overlooked methods of tracking.

7. Custom Social Media Reports

Google Analytics does a nice job tracking the number of visitors to visit a website from different social channels. These custom reports give you additional insights as to how traffic is being driven to your website.

If you aren't blogging or creating new and useful content to draw people to your website, don't expect these numbers to be high. It requires a content strategy to really work people toward your website. These easy to install one-click reports are invaluable.

8. Bitly

This link shortener allows you track everything you share. This is a great way to see what your audience is interacting with and decide if the content you share is valuable.

Bitly also integrates into many third-party software packages, making it a great umbrella tool, as you can track within multiple platforms. For example, you may use Social Sprout, a paid management platform and Buffer both with Bitly then review data in individual platforms or as a whole through Bitly.

9. Buffer

Buffer is a great tool for scheduling content. You simply fill up your Buffer account each day and it will automatically post the content to the channels you select.

For metrics, you're able to look at a dashboard inside Buffer to see what posts are getting the most interaction, or attach it to Bitly to include in your general tracking. You can also attach UTM parameters to track traffic in Google Analytics.

10. TweetReach

TweetReach is a great tool for tracking a campaign or conversation on Twitter. Simply enter your search term or hashtag and allow TweetReach to search for the tweets to tell you reach, exposure, activity, top contributors, and more. You can look at the past 50 mentions for free.

11. Keyhole

Keyhole is similar to TweetReach except that it also tracks Facebook and Instagram as well as Twitter. This is a great way to track a hashtag or keyword for a campaign or event.

The free social tracker gives you a sample of what the tracker can do. If you signup you can get a three-day free trial, which may be adequate for an event or snapshot view of a campaign. To get a long-term view you can sign up for a monthly paid plan.

Summary

Measuring social media ROI isn't always easy. Building a brand and improving your customer service may not show up directly in your analytics, but these "soft" metrics can have a major impact on the bottom line.

Do you have any tools or measurable SMM success stories to share?

By Chuck Price.  Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2308870/Social-Media-ROI-11-FREE-Tools-for-Measuring-Social-Media-Success

Twitter's Direct Message failures driving you crazy?

Twitter’s Direct Message failures driving you crazy?

As many of you might of already noticed, Twitter is currently experiencing problems with their Direct Messages and have published the following message:

This has caused problems for Twitter users everywhere and of course our very own SocialBro users. In true Twitter style a debate has sparked and Twitter themselves have apparently dismissed speculation that these errors are their way of trying to crack down on spammers, insisting that it is just a temporary technical issuecaused by a bug. Whichever it is, it’s a huge inconvenience for business users and we understand the importance of being able to communicate with your community, which of course includes being able to direct them to your website/ blog/ event sign up page etc. In order to help you guys improve communication with your community during this period we have created this post to outline a few tips of ways that you canalter your links to allow them to be sent.

Twitter’s attempt to crack down on spammers?

One of the main ways spammers make use of Twitter is to send users links to websites either by public tweet or a direct message. In a past blog post by Twitter they stated: 

“At Twitter, we see spamming as a variety of different behaviours that range from insidious to annoying.Posting harmful links to phishing or malware sites, repeatedly posting duplicate tweets, and aggressively following and un-following accounts to attract attention are just a few examples of spam on Twitter.”

Previously users could only send DMs to their followers but recently Twitter changed their rules and allowed users to opt in to being able to receive DMs from any user. The DM problems kicked in after this change which has lead to some believing that Twitter is trying to prevent spammers from taking advantage of this new opportunity, however it could well just be a bug as a result of the new roll out.

SocialBro’s tips to send your links

We have found that Twitter is still allowing users to send links to certain websites that Twitter deems as “safe” for example Youtube, Instagram, Twitter etc which backs up theories that this is part of Twitter’s plan to prevent spam. If this is the case, while we appreciate Twitter going to such great lengths to improve their user experience for everyone, the inability to send potential customers and clients links to your own pages is a huge inconvenience and something that could greatly hinder engagement, relationship building and as a result sales etc.

We’ve been busy here at SocialBro HQ investigating ways that you can manoeuvre around this issue both by experimenting with different types of DMs and by doing some research on the web. Here’s a couple of ideas for how you to avoid failed error messages and failed DMs.

1) Add an extra slash in your URL

Using three slashes in your URL (e.g. https:///www.socialbro.com) will mean that it is not recognised by Twitter as a link and your message will be sent. The downside however is that the link can not be clicked from the DM, the user will have to copy and paste it into their browser which will then eliminate the extra slash and send them to your destination.

2) Send users to your destination via a whitelisted web page

As mentioned above, URLs from some major websites have been whitelisted meaning you can still send users DMs containing links to their webpages. Youtube is one of these websites which just so happens to have a redirect service meaning your link will appear to Twitter as though it will take the user to Youtube, which it does but it gives the user the link that you are actually trying to direct them to which they then have to click. To use Youtube’s redirect service change your URL as shown below:

e.g. From:

https://www.socialbro.com

To:

http://www.youtube.com/redirect?q=socialbro.com 

3) Use a link to a tweet in your DM

Twitter is allowing users to send DMs with links to Twitter itself. As a result of this, users have managed to bypass this problem by sending a public tweet containing a message and a link to their website/ blog etc and include a link to this tweet in a direct message to desired recipients. Please be aware however that spammers are currently using this method and we advise using our best practices (such as personalising the message and making sure you only send DMs to those users who will value them) to make sure your tweets are successful and your community do not think you are trying to spam them. 

4) Avoid URL shorteners

There have always been pros and cons of using URL shorteners in your direct messages. URL shorteners such as Bitly make it easy for you to track the number of clicks your link has received and therefore allows you to judge the successfulness of your campaign. On the downside however, some users will view these links as suspicious and will avoid clicking on them as the destination is unknown. While Twitter is experiencing these DM problems, we advise against using URL shorteners in your direct messages.

Although these methods are not ideal, neither is a bunch of failed DMs. We’ve tried these ideas and they worked for us and we recommend using point one or two and not using a link shortener (these points are also detailed in our user guide). if you have any other tried and tested methods we would love to hear them!

By SocialBro.  Article Source: http://blog.socialbro.com/2013/11/twitters-direct-message-failures.html

4 ONLINE MARKETING TRENDS FOR 2014

Every good Internet marketer knows there is only one valid rule for online marketing, and it’s this: Tomorrow, the rules will change. The digital world is constantly evolving, with new technologies arriving to kick the old ones into the gutter, and consumer behavior shifts as the choices expand.

Your website may be working … but is it working hard enough? Online marketers not only have to keep up with the current landscape, but also look ahead to anticipate what the future might bring.

Here’s what’s likely to happen in 2014 as the Internet continues to change.

1. Content marketing still reigns supreme

Providing consistently valuable content has always been a staple of online marketing, and it’s going to become more important than ever. Two recent changes to Google are driving factors in the rise of content marketing.

First is the new Hummingbird algorithm, which changes the rules for mobile searches and makes all of them more intelligent by using a “conversation-based” engine that finds information based on the way people talk.

Then there’s across-the-board secure search. Previously employed only when a searcher was logged into a Google account, the search engine giant has now implemented SSL for every search — and at the same time pulled the Google Keyword Tool. Now, paid searches through AdWords are the only ones being tracked by keywords.

These changes mean that online marketers will have to rely on organic SEO generated by strong content to boost search engine rankings.

2. Social media gets wrapped up in SEO

Traditional inbound links still carry more weight than social media mentions, but that dynamic is shifting. With search engines seeking to return the most relevant content with the highest quality, social shares are becoming a valuable component for search engine rankings — because the more people choose to share a piece of content, the higher its perceived quality.

For this reason, diversity in social media will also be important. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are still the Big 3 of social networks, but rising stars like Pinterest, Google+, Instagram, and Tumblr look like they’re here to stay — and they’ll add weight to your social signals. Currently, only a third of CEOs have any presence on social media sites, meaning that we have a long way to go before social reaches its saturation point within the business executive community.

In 2014, blending social strategies with SEO will help businesses enrich their content marketing efforts and drive organic search results.

3. Images are essential for success

As online consumers have become desensitized to banners and frame ads, the sheer number of advertisements has increased in a bid to gain attention. The emphasis today is on content that’s easily digestible; and great images help your content stand out.

Attesting to this is the rise of sites like Pinterest and Buzzfeed, the immediate popularity of infographics, and the fact that the most popular articles and blog posts with the most social shares contain clear, well-placed images. The visual nature of the Internet means that incorporating images can only help your marketing efforts.

Properly labeling images with relevant file names and ALT tags will also strengthen your SEO and improve the accessibility of your content.

4. Mobile matters more than ever

The shift toward mobile is undeniable. There are now more active mobile devices than adults in the US, and consumers are using their smartphones and tablets to research products and services, find businesses, shop directly, and more. Forbes reports that by 2017, 87 percent of connected devices sales — a category that includes desktop and laptop PCs — will be smartphones and tablets.

Next year’s Internet marketing battlefield will play out largely on mobile devices, as a growing number of users expects to access products, services, apps, and information on smartphones and tablets. Your business needs to have responsive design in place, and online features that cater to a mobile audience, in order to remain competitive.

By Drew Hendricks.  Article source: http://tech.co/4-online-marketing-trends-2014-2013-11

Related posts:

5 Online Marketing Trends Affecting Small Businesses Beyond 2013

The 16 Most Important Social Media Updates of 2012 by Rachel Sprung

Mapping World Social Media Trends

5 Social Media Etiquette Tips to Follow this Holiday Party Season

• • 
  REUTERS

The world got a dose of social media etiquette from Mark Zuckerberg’s older sister, Randi, this week with the release of her new book Dot Complicated: Untangling Our Complicated Lives.

And despite being related to the Facebook (FB) founder, that doesn’t mean she’s  immune to social media gaffes. After posting a picture of her family last year at Christmas on Facebook she got upset when it was later re-posted on Twitter (TWTR).  To show her frustration, she tweeted:  “Digital etiquette: always ask permission before posting a friend’s photo publicly. It’s not about privacy settings, it’s about human decency.”

Social media has blurred the lines to what is appropriate when it comes to sharing, over-sharing and interacting with friends, family and coworkers online, but etiquette experts warn it’s user’s beware.

“We have to assume, even among our closest family, that anything we post on social media can be reposted,” says Diane Gottsman, owner of the Protocol School of Texas. “Not because [the re-poster] is doing it in a contrarian way, but they may want to share it with a friend, who then shares that with their whole network. Anything that is within a private domain may be retweeted or reposted.”

Ahead of the holiday season, which is peppered with work, social and family gatherings, here are a few dos and don’ts for your social media account:

DO: Connect with friends and family online. Social media can help to update and re-connect with friends and family during the holiday season you may not have had time to chat with throughout the year, Gottsman says. “It’s a great way to share family photos and greetings with people you wouldn’t normally share holiday greetings with [via mail].”

DON’T: Be overly political or religious online. No one wants to be inundated with political or religious postings during the holidays--or anytime, for that matter, Gottsman says. “We don’t need a step-by-step account of your holiday,” she says. “Share holiday updates without getting too political or religious.”

Jacqueline Whitmore, founder of EtiquetteExpert.com, also recommends avoiding rants during the holiday season. “That is a fast way to get deleted,” she says.

DO: Be cautious of leaving people out. The holiday season is full of parties and social gatherings, and posting photos and status updates of the festivities could leave some of your followers with bruised egos, warns Gottsman.

“People may ask, ‘why wasn’t I invited?’” she says. “There is always the chance of offending people.”

DON’T: Post photos of your boss or coworkers without permission.  Be sure you ask colleagues, and especially your higher-ups, before sharing photos of them on the web, says Gottsman.

“You always need to ask permission, especially at the office party,” she says. “And be sure not to post pictures of your boss in what may appear to be a compromising position.”

DO: Be mindful of security settings. Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites are often updating their privacy settings, says Whitmore, so be aware of any changes made as you share.

“These things change rapidly and you may not be sure if your posts are secure, so regularly check your settings,” she says.

By Kate Rogers. Article source: 

http://www.foxbusiness.com/personal-finance/2013/11/08/5-social-media-etiquette-tips-to-follow-this-holiday-party-season/

Social Media ROI: Three Ways Digital Marketers Can Show its Worth

If you’re not showing C-suite executives exactly what you make off your social media marketing program, show them how much money they’re saving.

ROI: Beyond the Dollar Bills

That’s one of the messages from social media metrics analyst Cappy Popp of Thought Labs. To make the most of social media marketing, digital marketers, Popp said, can define social media metrics in three ways: activity, engagement and acquisition — and do a lot of it with free tools.

“ROI no longer just means money to a lot of C-Suite executives,” said Popp, who caught up with his us after his presentation last month at the Kentico Connection conference in Burlington, MA. “They also see it as a cost-savings measure and also see it as a brand-mention or personality play. It can also be for crisis management and crisis aversion.”

Digital marketers should be tracking the type of content they post, and the frequency it’s posted.

Activity: Tracking Content

“It will allow you to easily determine what content actually resonates with your community,” Popp said. “And therefore, you can also optimize when you post your content to save money. Basically, you’re saving dollars for doing less work, which affects your bottom line.”

Free tools also affect bottom lines.

Facebook, Popp said, provides new tools in its free Page Insights app that shows when a page's fans are online and most likely to engage with its content. Free tools like Buffer make it incredibly easy to optimally publish posts on all major networks based on algorithms that determine when your posts get the most engagement on a specific network, Popp added.

“It makes the most sense to do some manual work up front to determine — through experimentation using the data each platform provides — when your posts get the highest engagement and then test posting at different times to validate this,” Popp said. “Automated tools like Buffer analyze a discrete time period so it's important that they get the most accurate data possible before you depend upon them too heavily.”

Image courtesy of nopporn (Shutterstock)

Engagement: How Does Your Audience Evolve?

You’ve grown your fan base. That’s all good. But what is the value of those fans? What kind of engagement do you have?

“We hear a lot of people talking about the number of fans they have,” Popp said, “and these tend to be value metrics that don’t work as well anymore because they don’t really mean that much by themselves.”

However, see how your audience has changed over time and compare that to historical data and your competition. Are you behind? In which areas has your audience grown on a demographic scale?

Traditionally, organizations have been taking their total number of fans on their social media sites and dividing that by the total number of likes, shares, comments and all types of interaction.

But for better engagement measures, organizations can use total engagement as it relates to total reach. How? For Facebook, add the likes, comments and shares and divide that by the total number of fans to get an engagement rate.

Question the Data

Take this data, however, for what it’s worth. It includes data from non-fans and relates them to fans. Users don't have to be fans to like, comment or share a page's content.

“If you divide all engagement by total fans you are inflating the engagement rate because non-fan interactions are included,” Popp said.

And remember — traditional calculations don't necessarily include other important activities such as clicks on a post, views of a video or views past a call to action within a video.

Further, this approach can interpret one person’s likes as dozens of unique users, not a single one.

“Most importantly, traditional approaches don't take reach into account,” Popp said. “Facebook severely limits the number of people that see a page's content organically. Traditional methods relate engagement to total fans; however, a vanishingly small percentage of these fans may have ever had the opportunity to interact with the content in the first place because they never saw it.”

Better Method: Engagement Divided by Reach

Using total engagement divided by total reach is much more accurate: 

• Total engagement: includes all activity taken on a piece of content, not just likes, comments and shares.
• Total reach: includes fans and non-fans and also takes into account the number of user that actually saw the content.

Further, target your campaign messages specifically with demographic data.

“You can see where your data is being used and seen,” Popp said. “If you’re targeting the wrong people, and your messaging doesn’t reach the people you’re targeting, you’re wasting your money. We see a lot of that being a problem.”

Acquisition Metrics: Finding Your Top Fans

Acquiring your top fans can be done via a number of different platforms, whether it’s manually or with social analytics tools.

Ultimately you’re looking to see if your social media presence has an impact on your web traffic. Tools like Google Analytics' free social acquisition reports make it “easier than ever to track conversions through social media channels online,” Popp said.

You can track which social networks sent you the most traffic, which users saved your social content, which landing pages users hit on your site when coming from social networks, activity from social plugins like the Google+ +1 button or the Facebook social plugins.

“Tools like these were very expensive and difficult to use until recently and now Google is giving them away free of charge,” Popp said. “There's no reason not to use them.”

Remember Organization Vision

Definitely not. However, be sure when trying to “sell” your social media marketing program that while these formulas and tools may produce sharp charts and bar graphs for the execs, you must reflect on your organization’s mission through its social media platform.

What were the original goals? And does your program produce tangible results that adhere to those goals?

We’re thinking the answers to these questions on a couple of slides for the executives meeting will be even more impressive.

Image in opening paragraph courtesy of Sarawut Aiemsinsuk (Shutterstock).

By Dom Nicastro.  Article Source: http://www.cmswire.com/cms/customer-experience/social-media-roi-three-ways-digital-marketers-can-show-its-worth-022772.php

7 ways Twitter could make money (beyond cozying up to TV networks)

Twitter’s IPO filing reveals that despite its glossy brand, it is a money-losing machine. Despite revenues tripling last year to $317 million, it lost $79 million, and the bleeding is only getting worse, as ad rates fell 46 percent last quarter. It’s likely to lose even more money this year. In the first six months alone it racked up $69 million in losses. Meanwhile, its user base has been growing more slowly. In the US last quarter, Twitter registered a scant 2 percent growth in Twitterati.

The micro-blogging-conversation platform-social network-short-form messaging service-personalized news wire-mental masturbation machine (or insert your favorite description here) needs to make money if it’s to succeed long term. As with cable TV, where you can have thousands of channels but can’t find anything worth watching, Twitter has amassed hundreds of millions of users and still not be able to wring a dime in profit.

What can it do?

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo told Jeff Bercovici in a revealing hot-off-the-presses Forbes magazine cover story that “the characteristics that make up Twitter — public, real-time and conversational — make it a perfect complement to television.” What’s more, ”TV has always been social and conversation-driven. It’s just that in the past, the reach of that conversation was limited by the number of people in a room or who you could talk to on the phone or the next day at the water cooler. Broadcasters have come to understand that Twitter is a force multiplier for the media they’ve created.”

If you doubt Costolo’s interest in TV, he even retweeted an AllThingsD story by Peter Kafka, reporting that “Twitter Gets Its Strongest TV Tie-Up So Far, With an Ambitious Comcast Deal.”

With its eye on television, Twitter wants to build on its role as TV companion, to be, as Bercovici put it, the “second screen experience that transforms TV into a participatory activity, allowing Twitter users to broadcast wisecracks, critiques and theories in real time.” In a nut shell, tweets of shows become marketing and, the theory goes, induce more people who see these tweets to tune in, boosting ratings, pushing up ad rates, and achieving singularity in the universe.

There are, I think, other ways Twitter could generate revenue, and without messing up the user experience. The search of a new ad unit beyond the oft-ridiculed banner and keyword advertisement — one that Facebook and others also seek — remains elusive.

So here are seven other revenue-generating possibilities that wouldn’t muck with the user experience.

1. Charge companies to use Twitter.

Advertisers, brands, and corporations, the ABC of American capitalism, are on Twitter, because they can market themselves to us. For this privilege, why shouldn’t they pay Twitter? Charge subscriptions of $10,000 a year to JetBlue, McDonalds, Victoria’s Secret, the Gap, and all of these other corporations (Small- to mid-sized businesses could pay far less.) Either they pay up or vacate the premises. Would any of us miss these businesses if they were blocked from promoting low air fares, Big Macs, and lingerie on Twitter?

2. Make users with more than, say, 500,000 followers pay.

It doesn’t have to be 500,000 users. It could be 1 million or 100,000. But once you get beyond a certain threshold of users, you become a brand, and, as I said above, brands should pay. So Ashton Kutcher (15 million followers), Miley Cyrus (14.6 million), and President Barack Obama (almost 38 million) get out your checkbooks, whip out your credit cards or ready your bitcoins, because you should pony up if you want to communicate over Twitter with your legions of admirers. In essence, Twitter would be adopting a freemium model, and premium users should pay premium prices.

3. Create a premium app.

I don’t know about you, but I find Twitter a hot mess to navigate and would pay for an app that would combine advanced metrics with artificial intelligence engines to curate tweets and content based on my interests. The longer I’m on Twitter, the more people I follow, the more I miss. Subscribing to the 80-20 rule (thank you Pareto Principle) even if two out of 10 tweets is actually useful, a lot of juicy stuff speeds through my tweetstream unread. I’d like an app to pick out the relevant bits and line up all those good links to content I might like in a tasty interface. While Twitter is at it, it could allow me entree to some useful metrics. Help me tailor my tweets to generate more impact and point me to other conversation threads I might enjoy.

That’s something for which I’d pay a monthly subscription. I dole out about $10 a month to music streaming companies like MOG. I’d do the same for an app that opened up a whole new world of Twitter absorption. If 1 million people joined me, that’d be $120 per user x a million, or $120 million a year in revenue. That alone would more than offset the company’s losses.

4. Sell premium tweets longer than 140 characters.

Have you ever gotten into a Twitter hullabaloo with someone or someone and found that 140 characters wasn’t sufficient for expressing yourself? Of course you have. So maybe Twitter could let you pay extra for tweets fatter than 140 characters. Say, charge $5 for them so they’re expensive enough that users would only pay up if they really needed to. With 200 million plus users, $5 a pop could really add up.

5. Charge third party app developers.

Twitter hasn’t exactly been friendly to third party developers over the years. It’s also not been very interested in unifying the user experience. I use YoruFukurou on my laptop to access Twitter and Twitter’s own mobile app on my iPhone. Sometimes, if I want to check out someone else’s stream, I find it easier to go to Twitter.com. Not a seamless experience.

Third party developers worry that they could create something, only to have Twitter create the same product and drive them off the platform. So why not make third party apps pay, which would give them peace of mind while also bringing in some cold cash to the company?

6. Sell personalized Twitter portals modeled roughly on Flipboard.

You tweet and months later it’s gone or unfindable. Wouldn’t it be great if there were a place that collected all your tweets a la RebelMouse, curated and categorized them based on their content, glitzed them up with Pinterest-y photos and made your entire Twitter history searchable? I’d pay, say, $25 a year for this like I do with Apple’s iCloud. If 1 million users joined me that would be another $25 million in annual revenue for Twitter.

7. Allow high voltage users to create premium communities.

Let’s face it. Some Twitter-ers have more influence than you or I do. Every word they utter is an intellectual elixir that can fix everything that ails you. So why not let them charge followers for these nuggets of wisdom? Twitter could take a cut of these transactions and make enough money to cover snacks and soft drinks at corporate HQ.

Done right, these seven strategies could turn Twitter’s balance sheet from red to black, and ensure repeatable revenue for years to come. Not sexy as with Hollywood and TV, but, I think, definitely hashtag worthwhile.

BY ADAM L. PENENBERG.  Article source: http://pandodaily.com/2013/10/09/7-ways-twitter-could-make-money-beyond-cozying-up-to-tv-networks/