One of the best ways to get your company name out there in cyberspace is to publish articles – both on your own blog and on other people’s. Ask other bloggers if they will publish your article along with a link back to your site – as long as what you’re writing about is relevant to them, and the nature of your business is not in direct competition with theirs, most bloggers will agree to let you do this – after all, they get some free web content out of it.

There are a number of things you need to consider when it comes to blog writing. First, you need to pitch your idea to the blog on which you want to publish an article. It’s a good strategy to pitch the idea before writing the article itself as a) you’ll find out straightaway if your proposed article isn’t of interest and b) it’s a good opportunity to get some guidance about how to shape your article.

When a blogger has given you the green light to write an article for their website, make sure you keep the readers of the blog in mind at all times. This will help you to ensure that both the content and style are appropriate for the people who are going to read the blog.

You also need to keep the blog owner in mind. What are their objectives? They are likely to want website content that’s optimised with particular keywords. Earn extra brownie points by finding out what these keywords are and working them into your article. If your writing helps the blog attract traffic from the search engines you will almost certainly be invited back to write for it again!

Finally, help the blog owner out by publicising the article you’ve just written. Link to it from your website and your social networking pages on Twitter and Facebook. Go back to the blog post from time to time in order to respond to any comments that readers have left. Keep the dialogue going as long as possible for everyone’s benefit.

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!