Twitter is quite new in Malaysia and basically not many companies are using it except those huge ones like Digi and Air Asia.

I believe this is simply because companies do not have the manpower to learn about all these social media and they do not see the benefits or understand how to use Twitter Effectively.

However in this article, here are some tips for Malaysians small business to use twitter.

1. Having a big twitter followers don’t meant anything. Some people spam to get followers. This is like showing you have big balls under your pants and serve no purpose whatsoever. To judge how successful your Twitter campaign; It is based on response, results and communication between you and your followers.

2. The right way to use Twitter is to follow targeted individuals in your business category. For example if you are in the cosmetic business, you can search for Malaysian girls. Better still search for groups in Malaysia that uses cosmetics or talk about other brands. This is the difficult part; in overseas especially in Usa, it is very easy to follow groups of a certain topic and market and promote to them smartly but here it is difficult as we are very new.

3. Create your own brand awareness, ask you clients if they use twitter, and if they do, ask them to add you or vice versa and offer special gifts, promotions certain time of the day and always add value to your customers instead of spamming them asking to buy your products. If you are spamming your products, not only you annoy people, you might face the wrath of them talking bad and how desperate you are online. Learn some manners please!

4. Twitter will be used in Malaysia - period. You can either start now or start later playing catching up to your competitors. If you need help in this area, you can certainly contact me or get a 14 year old to help you get started. However you do need a branding and marketing purpose online with Twitter if you are in business and that I can help you.

5. Start slow, build an excellent relationship with your business and profit. Like everything else on the Internet, it is not spamming and wanting fast results. Build your brand nicely and you will have a wonderful list of followers who will not only be loyal but also spread good things about your company.

5a. Twitter can use for collecting feedbacks, surveys, promotion, building relationship with your customers and creating awareness.

6. Set up google alert for your brand. So if someone talking good or bad about your brand, you can reply by thanking them or doing some damage control.

7. Now I am going to share with you a wonderful software created by my friend. Use it wisely and like any other automated software, it is to help you and not for you to abuse it. If you are interested in the software, please visit http://www.pyrogenicmedia.com/phoenix-twitter-desktop/

Just in the mood of sharing some news for you if you are interested in starting an online business.

You really don’t need a lot of money to be successful in internet business, although it is not realistic to expect to do it for free. Even small, home-based internet businesses that can fill a niche can operate successfully and profitably. The number one mistake someone thinking of starting an online business can make is to think too broadly, and/or to try immediately to sell products to other people that teach them how to start an internet business. Ironically, many people with no knowledge whatsoever seem to think that they can teach others how to do what they, themselves, have not accomplished.

The Internet , e-marketing, and e-commerce can make a handsome profit for you. You need to have a niche to fill, then design, buy, or represent as an affiliate a product or products to fill that niche.

That said, how does one go about starting a business online?

There are five general types of internet businesses that you can start.

* A portal site or a portal that sells digital products.

* A content web site that is monetized with advertising.

* An e-commerce business that sells a digital product.

* An e-commerce business that ships tangibles to people.

* A business to business and/or service-selling web site.

In addition to the above, you can also start either an affiliate marketing business, or can do network marketing online. In both cases, you can start and run these types of online businesses with or without a website.

For a jump start of Internet business, do give me a call or email me because this is what I do best, I help you get started quickly and profitable. You certainly do not want to try and wonder what is the best way for you. Getting an experience online consultant like me will make your life so much easier.

Seriously … understanding affiliate marketing can be the key to your entire online business success. You’ll learn how to promote a product or service, and when you have your own product to sell, you’ll know how to train your own affiliates.

One other type of internet business or web site is called BrochureWare. This is a site that acts as an online catalog for your company or organization, but from which people can’t purchase online. These sites do serve a purpose but have very little to do with running an online business for profit, so we won’t be discussing them.

OK, let’s dive in and see some types of successful online businesses.

Portal sites which sell digital products

This a very exciting model that requires mostly knowledge and time. A portal site is a site that provides information to people for free, or for a fixed price, and sells digital products to site visitors. You might be asking yourself, how do I create a portal, or do I have what it takes to build a portal site? To build a successful portal you need the following:

* A lot of information to share on a particular subject that people are interested in. If you have this, then creating a portal site can just be just plain fun and sometimes\ very profitable.

* You need to learn how to build and edit your own web site.

* A product of your own creation, or products you advertise as an affiliate, so that you can “monetize” (i.e., earn income from) your web site.

The truth is you don’t need a lot of money to build and launch a web site! You can start your first Internet business with an investment as small as a few hundred dollars. Where else in the world can you open a business with world wide exposure for so little? Only on the Internet! Let’s look at an example of a very successful portal site that sells and promotes digital products, while providing a great deal of free information.

The Newbie Club is an example of a great portal site dedicated to helping people who are new to running a business on the Internet. Their web site is not only a portal but they also sell their own digital products to club members and nonmembers. This type of web site, a portal that sells digital products, is becoming more and more common. Most of the products available at the Newbie Club are related to how to use computers and how to use the Internet effectively. Examine the site layout and content. Their design is very deliberate and straight forward. This is a classic, high quality portal site.

Portal sites monetized with advertising. (My personal favourite)

This type of site is becoming known as a “Virtual Real Estate” site. They come in a variety of formats, but the basic premise is to provide a good deal of content, and links to other sites, so as to attract both search engine spiders and human visitors. You can monetize your website with a variety of contextual text and graphic ads, utilizing Google AdSense, ads from the Yahoo Publisher Network and affiliate links to products at places like Amazon.com and Clickbank. You can also monetize a website with CPA offers (”cost per action” offers).

“Virtual Real Estate” is increasingly popular as people realize the value in diversifying their internet businesses and holdings. I now have more than 20 such sites myself, covering a variety of topics that have nothing to do with internet marketing, and I monetize them with a combination of Adsense and CPA offers, as well as using them for other types of lead generation. By the way, in case you don’t know it, lead generation through CPA is one of the most lucrative and least known mechanisms for making money online. I made the mistake of overlooking it for several years. You owe it to yourself to learn the various ways there are to monetize your website

The concept is very simple. You build a site that gives free information on a niche topic that people are interested in, draw traffic by publishing a related blog, and by publishing articles in the major article directories, and your money is made from the contextual advertising on the site.

If you run CPA ads, you can earn anywhere from a few dollars on up simply for having your site visitors fill out a form to request free information from your various advertisers. Some offers will pay you if your site visitors submit nothing more than their email address or their zip code. This type of marketing is known as lead generation, since you are, in effect, helping the CPA advertiser to collect leads. The main drawback to this, of course, is that you are giving away your site visitor to the advertiser, although you can overcome this to a great degree by offering some sort of free report or newsletter on your site, so that visitors will become part of your mailing list, too.

Unlike traditional affiliate marketing, you don’t need to “pitch” the product to your site visitors, nor do they need to buy anything, for you to make money. You earn simply by referring them to another site where they fill out a form voluntarily, and become a “lead” for that advertiser. This is one of the simplest ways of monetizing a website.

E-commerce site that sells digital products

This is becoming a very common approach to selling on the internet. Imagine having a downloadable digital product, like an e-book or software program, that can be sold online. All you have to do is find the market that needs this product, create the product, set up your web site and start raking in the money. Yeah, right! This isn’t all that difficult, but neither is it as simple as some people make it sound.

Commission-Based Affiliate

A business to business web site

In a nutshell, a “B2B” web site offers a product or service that other online business owners need and use. It could be an ezine directory, traffic generation, accounting services, autoresponders, or countless other things. In a sense, this is a very shrewd business move, since your target market is not the general public, but other business owners. You know they have money to spend, and you know they need your product, and you know where to find them. By doing internet business “B2B”, you’ve solved many of the dilemmas faced by people trying to start an internet business.

Let’s take a quick look at several of these business to business web sites.

If you’re going to sell anything from your website, you need some way to take payments. You can go to a lot of trouble getting a merchant account, and doing all of your own fulfillment, or you can “hire” this software to do it for you. Check out this business to business web site to see how a well-known internet marketing guru capitalized on this need.

Another service that many internet business owners need, especially if they intend to do any aggressive e-marketing using permission e-mail, is an autoresponder. This particular one is a product developed for and marketed by another well-known online businessman. See how he capitalizes on the needs of other online entrepeneurs and sells this needed e-marketing tool.

The Internet continues to spawn more and more services geared to helping other Internet business owners succeed. If you want your web site to be seen by web surfers, you need to understand what key words or phrases people are using on the search engines to find your type of product or service. Wordtracker has created an affordable service that allows you to research the optimum key words and key word phrases to use for your page title and your key phrases. This is another great example of an internet business selling services.

I don’t have a product but, I want to start an Internet business!

Commission-Based Affiliate

Affiliate Marketing can also provide a great second income stream, if you already have a web site and can pick up some products to represent as an Affiliate. Your goal, of course, is to find products that complement rather than compete with or contradict the theme of your existing web site.

Regardless of whether you’re an internet business “newbie” or a web site owner looking for additional income, you can find tons of products to represent at two of the biggest affiliate marketing portals, Clickbank and also Commission Junction

A more lucrative way to start internet business is to develop and sell your own info-products. In the long run, this is a better approach to starting an online business, because you own and control the product, and instead of competing with hundreds or even thousands of other affiliates, you are only competing against other similar products.

If you’re going to create your own products, though, you really need to do some research, and find an internet business niche. It’s been said that “the riches are in the niches”, and it’s absolutely true.