The other day someone once again swore to me that you couldn’t sell using Twitter – those 140 characters just aren’t enough to get your message across.
The fact is I’ve sold tens of thousands of dollars worth of books, courses, consulting and speaking via Twitter and he’s right, 140 characters aren’t enough.
The secret to selling on Twitter, and in any setting really, is the collective 140 or the sum total of useful content that you put out there every day. Please note the word useful in that last sentence. Unless some group of potential customers finds what you’re sharing useful, it qualifies as good noise and little else.
Marketers have been selling using 140 characters or less for years. Go back and dig up some old issues of magazines like Popular Mechanics and flip back to the classified ads and you’ll find some great examples of tiny little ads selling access to what somebody thought was useful information. Many of those ads ran for years, meaning somebody was making money.
Some people have wondered over the last few years how I’ve turned the Duct Tape Marketing brand into such a success in such a short time. (Note that success and time are both relative terms.)
Well, here’s how and, there’s no real magic, anyone can stumble to success in the same manner.
- I have produced and sent 572 weekly newsletters
- I have written 2,709 blog posts
- I have written 3 books containing 213,549 words
- I have produced 121 “how to” workbooks
- I have written 11 eBooks
- I have conducted 173 online seminars
- I have presented 156 live workshops and speeches
- I have recorded 315 podcast episodes (thanks Jared Dees for reminding me of this one)
- I have crafted 11,491 tweets
And somewhere along the line someone found some of it useful.
So, yes, you too can be a 25-year overnight success by riding your collective 140 into the sunset.
