The Golden Hat

I’ve read a lot of conflicting views regarding the usefulness of Twitter. As much as I thought the chatter would die down and users would quickly gravitate in a communal direction declaring Twitter as either a waste or a goldmine, I still haven’t seen that happen.

The polarity continues!

Despite all of that I’ve found one such situation where Twitter can be a powerful monetizing tool, especially for e-commerce sites. How you ask?

Image you run a kick-ass e-commerce site at www.moneymaker.com. You have a lot of traffic…. something like 1-3 million visitors per month. Organic revenue is in the hundreds of thousands to the few millions. Business is good! But you’re also trying to figure out alternative ways to continue driving revenue. Twitter is one such alternative. Here’s what you should do:

1. Create a Twitter account and have it fully branded for your e-commerce site. Upload your website logo as the Twitter account icon. Make sure that your Twitter account name is also branded for your site (www.twitter.com/moneymaker). Basically, if you have a strong brand then utilize it in your Twitter account.

2. Perform a search for branded keyword phrases (e.g. moneymaker, moneymaker.com, etc) at http://search.twitter.com and then review the results. You’ll be given a list of all recent tweets that contain the branded keyword phrase that you searched for. You’re essentially finding “buzz” on Twitter about your brand in the form of a search results page.

3. Send targeted messages to Twitter users that mentioned your brand using the @username + message function inviting them to follow you on Twitter to receive periodic discounts exclusively available on Twitter.

4. Drop a Twitter logo on your homepage, global sidebar navigation, e-newsletter, or any other widely visible location on your site along with a custom message inviting users to follow your companies’ account on Twitter to receive frequent, exclusive discounts and product specials.

5. Continue to interact with Twitter users and monitor branded keyword buzz using the search tool to build an extensive list of followers on Twitter for your e-commerce site and brand.

6. Send frequent specials to users with a tweet containing a URL to a product special page or discount code. Don’t worry about having a long URL. Twitter will condense it to a short URL to ensure it fits within the 140 character limit that they impose on a per message basis. Although having a short, branded URL that doesn’t need condensing is most optimal.

7. Monitor your analytics referral traffic to the special Twitter landing pages you created to deliver product specials to Twitter users. Calibrate your Twitter activity and types of specials offered based on the analytics data. For example, if a promo for product A delivers twice as much referral traffic to your site from Twitter as the promo for product B did, then you know that future tweets for product A will probably be more successful.

8. Send tweets to your users asking them what type of specials they would like to see next to try and deliver targeted results in future rounds of communication with them.

9. Ensure that your messages and interaction with users on Twitter are genuine. Ingenuous social marketing is a sure way of having your online community involvement backfire on you and create a negative brand reputation.

10. Continue to evangelize users and bring them on as viral brand advocates for your e-commerce site. Give them great product specials via Twitter and let them tell their friends about it. They will already be equipped with the best viral tool on the Web today so give them a great experience and let them leverage Twitter to tell everyone else about it.

I’ve seen several other suggestions on how to utilize Twitter for SEO and business goals however I really like this one. Not only does it give your business a direct point of contact with your customers, but it’s a free communication channel and instant. You’ll know immediately if your messages and research are working or not.

Don’t forget to also use this exact process for brand reputation management. If you find tweets with negative reviews of your product and/or services, attempt to resolve the users issue. With direct, genuine communication on Twitter you can easily turn a poor user experience into a positive one, especially if you throw that user a 50% discount code

Have you had similar experience with Twitter? Do you have any better recommendations for utilizing it?

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Below are 5 quick and dirty SEO tips for any individual or company with an e-commerce or retail website.

1. Take advantage of UGC - or User Generated Content - to add lot’s of fresh content to product level pages. For example, if you have a category for “shoes”, a sub-category for “running shoes”, and then a product level page for “Nike Air Moires”, don’t let the page solely consist of images and flash demos and some basic product specs. Instead take user comments and plug them in as body copy to provide fresh, unique content that any Web Crawler is sure to appreciate. Check out this user content for a great example.

2. Like most retailers or e-commerce sites you probably have a bunch of dynamic products, or items that you need to post on the site for sale and shortly remove thereafter. A great way to get those new product pages indexed quickly is to submit those pages via Yahoo! Search Submit Pro aka Yahoo! Paid Inclusion. Yes, you read that right. Unfortunately you have to pay for it. However, you may find your new product pages indexed in the top search spots in just a matter of days instead of waiting for a Crawl of your site. Keep in mind though that there is no guarantee you’ll find your site in any of the top spots. Paying guarantees indexing, not top ranking!

3. Whether your site is hosted on an internal platform or with an external vendor like Endeca you must find a way to create static, keyword-centric URLs. I cannot stress enough how important it is to do away with dynamic URLs with several random strings of characters, and replace them with pretty permanent links. Check out this post on writing spider-friendly URLs for a quick tutorial.

4. Submit your site (including various sub-domains or sub-directories, not just the top level page or domain) to common directories like Yahoo! Directories, DMOZ, Business.com and other niche or industry vertical directories you see fit. You likely won’t be gaining any external link value from any of these directories, however you could capture significant traffic from these submissions - and traffic means revenue.

5. Lastly, if your e-commerce or retail website has dozens or even hundreds of pages you should utilize a keyword-centric sub-domain strategy to compliment a keyword-centric sub-directory strategy. If you have several product categories and multiple product types within each category, first identify the top level product categories and those will become your sub-domain categories. For example check out BuildDirect’s website and you’ll notice that if you click on any of the categories in the top navigation bar it takes you to the sub-domain URL for that category. If you then click on any of the sub-categories the page URL follows the format of http://sub-domain.domain.com/sub-directory.

There ya have it. 5 quick tips for an e-commerce/retail website that are sure to give you formidable results in terms of engine rankings, traffic, and userability. Let me know if you have any suggestions to add!

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