Last week, Dell announced that it has gained an additional $3 million in revenue thanks to its activity on Twitter. It’s probably fair to say most of us would be delighted with a fraction of that, but how should we go about using Twitter to generate revenue?

There are certainly lots of ways NOT to do it: following thousands of random people; using Twitter as your personal online diary; and spamming other users with sales messages are just some that spring to mind.

Here are the top ten ways that have helped us monetise our Twitter account:

1)    Give the account a person’s name, rather than the organisation’s name. Our Twitter account is registered to our founder, @emilyhill1982 and displays her mugshot. The profile page has been designed in our corporate colours and contains our logo and web link, but we wanted to give the account a personal voice as well.

2)    Be polite. Thank people who help you, give #FollowFridays and retweet other people’s posts if it will help them. They’ll return the favour when you need to put the word out about something.

3)    Use your page to post a mix of advice, opinion and interaction.

4)    Build a network of targeted followers. Unfollow people who don’t update their accounts, don’t follow you back or don’t interact. Download Tweetdeck to track people who are using your keywords, then follow them and see if they follow you back. If they don’t, delete them and follow other people instead. You should aim to follow no more than 10% more people than are following you.

5)    Mind your language. Twitter is more casual than other forms of business networking and it’s great to put a bit of your personality into your posts. However, don’t take it too far. Stories about last night’s drunken escapades can be reserved for your personal Facebook page. Don’t use text-speak and don’t swear.

6)    Post links to your blogs and press releases. If they’re interesting and well written people will retweet them, comment on them and share them on other social networking platforms.

7)    Stick to a common theme. It can be quite broad – ours covers blogging, social networking, language, and general small business concerns – but your posts should follow a consistent line of discussion. Remember that most of the time people don’t click through to your profile; they just look at their amalgamated home page feed of everybody’s updates. Therefore you want to stand out as having useful things to say on a particular topic.

8)    Write what your followers want to read. It’s the same principle as blogging: your content will be far more ‘sticky’ if you write about topics that actually interest other people rather than simply posting mini sales pitches for your company.

9)     Promote your Twitter account. Link to it from your website, your email signature and any industry forums you belong to. Twitter is free, it’s easy to use and if you stick with it you can generate new customers through it and keep in touch with your existing customers.

10)    Post updates regularly- but not too regularly. Logging in two or three times a day for a few minutes is about right. Apart from anything else, you have a job to do!

If you have any tips to add to this list please feel free to add a comment!

We’re starting to come round to the idea of Twitter. Much as we love our “no fads, no bandwagons” policy here at Write My Site, we’ve got to admit that Twitter has been paying dividends for us recently. After several weeks of posting about chocolate, last night’s TV and anything else that seemed like a suitable distraction from work we finally got our collective act together and started posting links to this copywriting blog, as well as engaging in dialogue with other business users. And guess what? We made some money! And then we made some more money. And now Twitter’s generating a steady stream of revenue for us – not bad for a free service.

But many businesses are quite understandably suspicious of Twitter, and are reluctant to use it as a marketing tool. Not only is the web-based version still pretty embryonic structurally, Twitter etiquette is still in its infancy too. There’s no established code of conduct in terms of the appropriate way(s) to promote your service using the tool and there’s no telling what which Twitter-based campaign will work, and which will go horribly, horribly wrong.

Even Wendy Tan-White, whose web hosting company Moonfruit recently enjoyed a huge publicity coup via the site, admits that she was unsure whether her strategy would work. The company gave away 10 Macbook Pro laptops for the most creative tweets using the hashtag #moonfruit, and the campaign shot to the top of Twitter’s trending lists, with people drawing pictures, making videos, and even singing songs about the brand.

“I really love the medium and it felt like it could work” says Tan-White, “But it could have gone the other way - we could have been vilified for spamming.” This is exactly what happened when UK furniture retailer Habitat hijacked popular hashtag topics to gain attention, and merely succeeded in winding up users, creating a huge backlash when an “overenthusiastic intern” linked the brand to the post-election protests in Iran.

Habitat probably won’t be Tweeting again for a while, but Twitter still holds massive potential for creative and innovative digital marketing campaigns, and I can certainly say that Write My Site can’t wait to see what happens next!

We have today published the results of our blogging survey and we were not surprised to discover that 70% of the small businesses we interviewed struggle to find the time to keep their blogs up-to-date.

We asked 125 small business owners about their blogging habits and found that, while 62% of respondents set up a blog in the hope that it would increase traffic to their websites, only 29% are managing to populate them between one and three times each month. The remaining 71% have admitted they just weren’t able to find the time to maintain their blogs.

The survey focused almost exclusively on very small businesses, as these organisations tend not to be able to afford the ‘people power’ that larger businesses can leverage. 42% of our interviewees were one-man-bands; and a further 43% worked within organisations with 1-5 employees with the remaining 15% working for larger organisations.

The full release is available in our Press section. Please feel free to reproduce as long as Write My Site receives a credit and a link back to www.writemysite.co.uk.

As providers of blogging services it goes without saying that we’re super-keen on the idea of every business including a blog as part of their online strategy. Even if you’re not going to ask Write My Site to write it for you, here are the top five reasons why a blog is a great idea for your business:

1)    You can establish yourself as an authority in your industry

Christophe Langlois is a good example of this. His blog, Visible-Banking.com, is the leading independent blog focused on social media in banking and financial services. As a result, Christophe is frequently invited to speak at industry conferences and other high profile events. At Econsultancy’s Future of Digital Marketing conference last week, Christophe said none of this would have happened without his blog.

2)    Business blogging is a great way to gain a following of customers (and future customers)

If your content is interesting, people will come back to read more of it. Simple.

3)    The search engines – especially Google – love sites with regularly updated content.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) basically boils down to three things: one is having your site built in an SEO friendly way (talk to your web developer); the second is getting other sites to link to your site; and the third is fresh, unique content. A blog is the perfect way to achieve two out of these three aims: a good blog will not only provide the search engines with the regular content they’re looking for, it will also generate inbound links when other websites refer to your articles.

4)    Business blogs provide regular opportunities to use your keywords

Look at how many times you can see the words “business blog” in this article. It’s one of our keywords and as soon as this business blog post (see?) goes live, the post and its keywords will be indexed by Google.

5)    Blogs give you a great excuse to direct people towards your website

Write an interesting article for your business blog and then link to it from Twitter, Ecademy and online forums. It’s the perfect way to bring your website to the attention of potential customers.

A blog that was set up to encourage young people to vote in the European parliamentary elections has been declared a huge success. The Think About It blogging competition, which targeted voters aged 18-25, received more than 2.7 million hits between its launch in February and the elections on June 4th.

The blog proved even more popular than EU Tube, the European Union’s online television channel which received 2.2 million hits in the same period. 81 bloggers from across the EU used the website to post 600 articles about European issues.

The European Journalism Centre (ECJ) and the European Commission, which funded the competition, expressed their delight at the outcome: “We never expected it to work so well,” said Wilfried Rütten, director of the ECJ. “The success can be seen in the site’s statistics: 2,000 comments, 5,000 trackbacks from external websites, 14,000 Google links and millions of visitors over a short time.”

Ruth Spencer, the associate editor of Think About It, said the blog had made European politics accessible to a younger audience. “This was a complete experiment because nothing like this has ever been attempted in Europe before. Our expectations were non-existent.”

Historically it has proved difficult to persuade young people to exercise their right to vote. In 2004, 67% of under-25s did not vote, compared with 54% of the electorate as a whole.

Statistics for voters aged under-25 in the 2009 election have yet to be revealed, but a YouGov poll published two days before the elections found that only 28% of 18-24 year-olds said they planned to vote. It remains to be seen whether the blogging project made a significant difference.

We’ve put together a little survey for UK businesses in order to find out who’s blogging and how often they’re doing it.

The survey has been designed to help inform us about people’s views on business blogging. We want to know whether UK businesses see blogging as an important part of their search engine optimisation or PR strategies. We’re also interested in finding out whether the size or industries of the businesses who respond to the survey make a difference to the way blogging is viewed. The results so far are looking pretty interesting: many of our most enthusiastic business bloggers are in the professional services or marketing industries, and most are small businesses (fewer than 6 employees).

Plenty of studies have issued depressing findings about the number of abandoned blogs floating around in cyberspace, but based on the responses so far, we’re going to go out on a limb and say that in fact small businesses are well aware of the benefits of having a blog. Early results from our survey suggest that the only thing stopping small businesses from maintaining their blogs as often as they would like is time - very few people are of the opinion that a blog wouldn’t be beneficial to their business. In fact, even amongst the people who haven’t yet got a blog, the most common reason is simply that they haven’t yet found time to set it up. Of the people who do have a business blog, 70% said they update it less frequently now than they used to, because of time pressures – this certainly tallies with the most common reason people give for using our corporate blogging service!

We’ll be releasing more results as and when the number of respondents rises. If you’d like to take part, go to our online business blogging survey and fill out the ten questions on the form. It will take no more than five minutes of your time. Please feel free also to post your views about business blogging on this thread.