A few months ago, people were starting to talk about Twitter. Now, Twitter is no secret; it’s THE marketing tool everyone is talking about. If you are not using Twitter to promote your business, you are out of your mind.

If there’s something that gets me more excited than Twitter is the ability to increase Twitter’s potential by using tools. But let me give you a word of caution: once you try these Twitter tools, there’s no way back. You’ll become a Twitter genius and get more exposure for your business than you’ve ever thought possible. If you are OK with that, read on.

TweeFind
This tool allows you to search Twitter users and sorts the results by user rank. This is a great way to find tweets about a specific topic.

Twi.bz
As you probably know, tweets can be as long as 140 characters. This URL-shortening service is perfect to keep the URLs short and have more space to write your tweets.

Twellow
They call themselves “The Twitter Yellow Pages”. Pretty self-explanatory, isn’t it?

Friend or Follow
This is a great tool to find out who you are following that is not following you back and who is following you that you are not following.

TwitterCounter
This tool allows you to see in a graphic how your Twitter followers increase or decrease over time. TweetStats is another cool tool that performs the same task.

Twitter for WordPress
Twitter for WordPress displays yours latest tweets in your WordPress blog.

Twitter Widget for WordPress
This widget is placed in the sidebar of your WordPress blog and shows your latest Twitter updates.

TwitBin
TwitBin is a Firefox extension that allows you to keep up with all of your Twitter conversations right from your browser sidebar.

Just Tweet It
Another amazing Twitter directory. Find other Twitter users and list yourself so others can find you.

TwitterMail
This service allows you to tweet by email. Really cool.

TweetBeep
This one sends you regular emails with the latest updates of the people you are following on Twitter.

Who Should I Follow?
Very interesting tool that suggests Twitter users for you to follow, based on the profiles that you are currently following.

Twitter Search Feature
It used to be called Summize but now Twitter bought it. As its name reveals it, Twitter Search Feature allows you to search through the last tweets to find users that are posting a given keyword. TwitterMent is another great Twitter search engine.

Ping.fm
Although not a specific Twitter tool, Ping.fm is one of the coolest applications out there. It allows you to update your status in more than 40 social networking sites at once. You have to check this one out.

Qwitter
Qwitter is a tool that sends you an email when people stop following you. But what makes this tool amazing is the fact that they also tell you what of your tweets made them stop following you.

TweetLater
If you are like me, you want to keep your followers updated but you’d rather tweet several messages at once and choose when they should be posted. This is exactly what this tool is for.

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If I had to choose a favorite word, it would be “leverage”. I just love it. The idea of using other people’s money, networks, resources, contacts, time and what else is just fascinating. Of course, it’s not about taking advantage of them; it’s about creating mutually-beneficial relationships, or else it just won’t happen.

One of the ways we can use leverage on the Internet is by creating joint ventures. Basically, they are short-term (or long-term) agreements where the parties do something for each other. But you know how much I hate theory and fancy words, so I’ll do what I do best; I’ll teach by using examples.

Let’s say you are a motivational speaker and will give a seminar in Chicago. You have 100 seats and you want to fill them all. There are a few things you can do to promote the event yourself (read How to Promote an Event Online) but there’s a limit to how much you can do personally. What if you could partner with people with access to thousands of individuals in Chicago that are interested in motivational speaking events? That would be amazing, wouldn’t it?

Step 1: Identify Potential Join Venture Partners
The first thing you should do is to come up with a list of potential joint venture partners:

-    Administrators of Facebook groups about Chicago, motivational speaking, entrepreneurship and business owners.
-    Administrators of Meetup groups around the same topics, in the Chicago areas.
-    Administrators of LinkedIn, BizNik, Plaxo, and Ryze groups.
-    Bloggers that write about the topics mentioned above.
-    Editors of newsletter around business and entrepreneurship in Chicago

If I had to take a guess, I’d say that all those groups together have 100,000 members. If the group administrators agree to send information about your event to their lists, you will have absolutely no problem filling those 100 seats. In fact, I can assure you that there will be a waiting list.

Step 2: Identify What JV Partners Want and Give it to Them
This is actually the hardest part of the process. Most of the time, money is not what motivates people to spread the word about you. These are, in order, the top reasons why a group administrator will agree to send your information to his list:

-    He thinks that his readers will find the announcement highly interesting.
-    You’ve created a relationship with him and he wants to help you.
-    You have a revenue-share agreement in place.
-    You’ve offered him cash or some other kind of compensation upfront.

Take a look at the list above once more. Note that cash is last on the list. An announcement worth spreading the word about is #1. Group owners spend a lot of time and energy building their groups; they are not going to throw all their effort away promoting trash, so make sure that your event (or whatever else you want to promote) is of great quality. This is crucial to your success anyway.

StartupNation just posted one of my articles to their site. I think it’s one of the best case studies you will ever read on how a company applied Social Media Marketing to grow their business.

These days most people are trying to get involved in Social Media Marketingbut don’t understand how it works. This article will give you a pretty good idea: http://www.startupnation.com/articles/9441/1/social-media-marketing-missed-link.htm

By the way, I wanted to apologize for not having been posting very often lately. I’ve been super busy but everything is now back to normal, so stay tuned for the upcoming articles. They will be amazing! I have to make it up to you after all, don’t I?

On a different note, about a month ago I started a joint venture with John Assaraf, a New York Times and WSJ bestselling author, featured in the movie The Secret, and responsible for billions of dollars in sales at several companies. John is a great guy and a very good friend. Partnering with him is great news for The Outsourcing Company and I wanted to share it with you.

Be in the lookout for the upcoming articles. I will keep sharing with you amazing tips that you can use to grow your company using online marketing!

I wrote an article on the best Internet Marketing Books for StartupNation.com. You can find it at http://www.startupnation.com/articles/9423/1/internet-marketing-books.htm