Here are a few do’s and don’ts to get you started.

Twitter was revolutionary when it started. It’s a platform that uses short messages to communicate with others. It could be up-to-the-minute information about you or communication with clients and co-workers on projects and the like. And, you can follow others just like on other social networks.

With Twitter, there are very few established rules. Most of the advice given on how to use Twitter is about etiquette and using the service to connect with other business professionals, clients and the like.

Do’s on Twitter

So, let’s take a look at some of the positive things to do on Twitter.

* Follow others – It is not just about you; it’s also about connecting with people. Get involved in what is going on in your area of expertise. Follow people with similar interests. This gives you a higher visibility and can help establish you in that niche on Twitter. If you see something interesting, retweet it so others can follow too.

* Tweet – It’s just like posting on Facebook. Leave meaningful information for others. You can talk about yourself, but not too much. Intermingle some useful content with your conversational pieces.

* Create a compelling biography – Use your bio to its utmost. You have just a few characters so use keywords that are searchable to describe yourself and help others to search for you and find you.

* Be professional – This includes using proper grammar in your tweets. Abbreviations don’t lend themselves to professionalism.

Don’ts on Twitter

* Don’t tweet every second – You often hear about people who tweet about eating dinner, going to the bathroom and every other thing they do all day. This is not what people want to hear from you. In fact, it is one way to lose your ranking and current audience. It just clogs up the works for those following you.

* Be careful what you say – Once you have entered something on the internet, it will be there forever. Inflammatory tweets reflect negatively on you and can come back to haunt you later.

* Don’t be too negative – People who are always looking on the downside crash the party. Misery loves company but you will lose yours if you persist.

* Learn to use hashtags properly – Hashtags can help you and others to follow a conversation more easily. But, use them the right way. Don’t put a hashtag on each word in your tweet. And, don’t hashtag a run-on tweet.

Using Twitter doesn’t have to be complicated or hard. Be yourself and use the above advice to make the most of your time there.

==> Getting Customers Is a Science

In business school, people are often taught that the secret to good business is “location, location, location.”

While location is certainly important to a business’s success, it’s by no means the only factor. In fact, great marketing can easily conquer having a poor location.

Take Domino’s Pizza for example. Domino’s was first started by a college student, who had the audacity to guarantee his pizza’s delivery time. Despite not being able to afford top locations, his phenomenal marketing propelled his business to the top.

The long and short of it is this: if you want customers, you need to actively solicit them.

==> Why Local Marketing Is King

Marketing in your local community gives you one big advantage over big brands: personal relationship.

Think about it. Would you rather go to Supercuts, or the hairdresser whom you’ve known for years? By marketing and building your brand locally, you have the ability to build a personal relationship with your audience.

Big brands simply can’t go into every major city and establish relationships with people. On the other hand, with strong local marketing, you can do just that.

==> What Does Local Marketing Look Like?

Local marketing can be anything from advertising on billboards and radio stations, to using locally targeted online marketing.

The idea is to get people into your business using as little capital as possible. Test different advertising methods to see what works and what doesn’t.

Once you find a marketing method that’s generating results, try to scale it up as much as you can.

For example, let’s say you try radio advertising, online advertising and newspaper advertising. Radio and internet don’t bring you any results, but newspaper ads seem to perform really well.

If that’s the case, start buying ads in as many newspapers as you can. Buy bigger ads. Keep increasing your ad spend until the ROI begins to drop off.

==> Making Things Happen versus Hoping for Business

If you want to build a successful business, you need to take your marketing into your own hands. Hoping for more business is not a good strategy for success.

Map out at least ten different local marketing strategies you can try. Include review sites like Citysearch and Yelp, traditional media like billboards and radio, as well as off-the-wall ideas like pizza box marketing or throwing special interest parties.

You never know what will work. Some methods work phenomenally well for particular businesses and not at all for others. The trick is to find the one(s) that work for you.

Here’s how to get a high ranking in Google Places.

==> PageRank and Backlinks Matter

One factor that still plays a strong role in Google Places rankings are your backlinks. In standard SEO, backlinks are the backbone of any SEO campaign. In Google Places optimization, backlinks play a lesser role, but are still critically important.

According to SEOMoz’s Google Places reverse engineering study, PageRank has a very measurable impact on how well you rank.

In addition to getting links back to your site, you should also focus on getting links from local sites. For example, if you own a pizza shop in Chicago, try to get as many links as possible from other Chicago businesses and websites.

==> Work on Your Citations

Your citations are other web sources that cite your business.

These include websites like the Yellow Pages, Superpages, Yahoo!, Yelp, Citysearch and more.

These websites will list your address, phone number and possibly your web address as well.

Google uses these citations to verify that you are who you say you are. They want to make sure your business actually exists before putting it live on Google Places.

The number and quality of your citations affects your rankings. If any of your citations are inaccurate, make sure you contact the website to change them. If you’re not listed on any major offline business directory, make sure you submit your business.

==> Get Reviews

Reviews play another big role in ranking. The more reviews you have and the better the reviews, the higher your rankings.

Try to get as many people to review your business as possible. You can ask personal friends, family members and employees to leave honest reviews. You can also incentivize customers to do reviews.

Do whatever you can to get as many reviews as possible. However, never fake a review and never review your own business.

==> Listing Tips

There are a few important things to pay attention to in your listing.

First, categories are extremely important. They help Google figure out exactly what kind of business you run, because keywords aren’t always a good gauge when it comes to business names.

Make sure you’re in the right category. Do a search for your business type, see what category your competitors are using and do the same.

Make sure you verify your ownership of the business. Doing so will also give you a measurable bump.

Finally, make sure you fill out the information as accurately and completely as possible. Use your real phone number and not a call tracking number. Use your main website and not a website designed specifically for Google Pages.

If you aren’t already familiar with social media, you might want to get started. In the next few years everyone in the civilized world will know something about Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube – to name a few. You can find everyone there, even those who are within your target audience.

Search engine optimization is necessary if you want to achieve any useful ranking that can impact your business in a positive way. It can take months and even as long as a year or more for websites to gain a garnered spot on the first page. To speed up that process, you can take a look at social media to increase your visibility.

Google is now considering social media stats in their overall algorithm for website rankings. The good news is that many of us use social media anyway, so turning it for business won’t be a stretch. You can use your knowledge and the keywords from your website to help you attract other social media members who are in your target market.

Using Social Media

Here are a few tips to help you utilize social media to improve your SEO efforts.

* Join the social networks that matter – There are several social media sites but the ones most used are Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Establish personal (if you haven’t already) and business profiles on each of these sites. Within your profiles, incorporate the target keywords that you use on your site to attract visitors.

* Utilize every area of these sites – Link updates on your website to posts that you make on these sites. Uploading a video to YouTube? Use keywords in the description and add a link to your site. “Like” pages that are similar to your niche market.

* Join sites relevant to your target audience – This is an old one but a good one. For instance, when you sign up for community forums, become an active member. Two-word comments, or posting to promote your site, can be viewed as spamming. You will gain more traffic from other members and influence in the community if you genuinely participate.

* Follow other relevant blogs – Make comments, offer to guest blog for influential bloggers in your niche and offer useful information.

The more engaging that you are on social media sites, the more you will rise to the top on the lists of others who also patronize those sites. This can elevate your status and increase traffic to your website. Also, communicating with your target market here can offer valuable insight towards profitable changes to your website business.

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing gives you the ability to reach a large group of people very quickly. Videos commonly go viral. They’re easy to share and they’re easy to consume. It generally takes less than five minutes to watch a video and you can send them to friends from your phone. Written content and photos can become viral, too.

Consider your topic and how you might capitalize on the branding ability of viral content. Can you give away a free report that offers significant value to your audience? Can you create a compelling video that people will want to watch and share?

Partnerships with Other Visible Brands

Another way you can build your own brand visibility is to partner with other visible brands. For example, if you have an etsy store and make wedding jewelry,  you might pursue a partnership with a wedding invitation designer, florist, or event planner. Now you can have a direct partnership, an affiliate partnership, or an implied partnership. A direct partnership is the fastest way to build brand visibility because you’re able to tap into your partner’s audience and build recognition quickly.

With an implied partnership you might focus on the keywords “bridal jewelry” and build your search engine ranking for those keywords. You could also become an affiliate and publish advertisements on your site for Wedding Paper Divas, a leading invitation supplier. The two efforts combined may improve your brand visibility amongst your target audience. You can also become active on the partner’s website by blogging, commenting, and participating in forums.

Content

Content is ultimately the beginning, middle, and end of any brand visibility campaign. Publish more content – publish it on more sites, blogs, and in more publications – and you’ll build visibility.

Social Networking

If you don’t have a social networking strategy and profile, consider building one. It’s a wonderful way to improve your visibility and you can use it to promote all of your business, marketing, and branding efforts.

Events

Finally, consider hosting or participating in notable events. For example, if you have a blog about soapmaking, consider giving away fifty bars of soap and toiletries to families in need. Create a campaign to raise money to buy and give away your handmade soap. Events attract attention. Think about how you can make a difference, make some noise, and attract attention of your prospects and audience.

Sometimes it may feel like you’re just rehashing old topics over and over again. When this happens you lose interest in your blog and your readers do, too.

Here are five proven ways to find exciting blogging ideas:

#1 Get Your Readers Involved

Ask your readers questions, publish a survey, or ask for feedback. Often one of the most exciting blogging ideas come from being able to offer real value to your readers and audience. So ask them what they want, and need to know.

#2 Ponder and Contemplate

Ask yourself what lessons you’ve learned. Make a list of things you’ve learned about your topic along the way. This list of lessons learned is a great blog idea list. Keep it handy and use it when you’re feeling stumped for topic ideas.

#3 Trend Analyses

Many social media and networking sites are valuable blogging tools. You can use them to track topic trends. For example, on Twitter you can do a hashtag search. A hashtag, #, is a keyword identifier. The trending tools use hashtags to sort topics and identify what’s popular right now.

#4 Use Google Alerts

Google has this marvelous tool that lets you automatically receive daily or weekly notifications on keywords. For example, if you have a blog about ghost hunting and you’re running out of topic ideas, you can set up an alert for the keyword “Ghost hunting.” Google will send you a list of blogs, websites, and news feeds with that keyword in the content.

It’s a fantastic tool to keep up on industry news and it’s a very effective tool for generating exciting blogging ideas.

#5 Subscribe and Read

Subscribe to leading industry magazines and newsletters and read them. If you don’t use “reader” technology, consider installing it on your computer or mobile device. Then you can sit down once a week and catch up on all the industry news and headlines. You can also create folders in your email and send all of your subscriptions to that folder.

Once a week sit down, peruse the newsletters, and create your blog topic list for the week or for the month. You’ll be surprised how many exiting ideas are generated by reading.

Best advice; keep a notebook full of ideas as they come to you. Embrace these five tips and use them to create a lengthy list of blog topics. Write on the ones that excite you right now and save the others for another day.