WARNING:

Twitter can be evil.

Some less-than-scrupulous people can easily take advantage it and wield frightening influence over poor innocent subjects.

On the other hand, use it with responsibility and you perhaps have the most powerful relation-building medium online today.

Why? That’s because Twitter is currently the closest app on Earth that replicates the actual thought patterns of the human mind. You see, the human mind does not really think in blog and article form. It does not think in huge chunks of information.

Instead, it thinks in a stream of consciousness way, random disjointed thought layered upon random disjointed thought.

That is why when you use Twitter, your mind is “tricked” into further receptivity than it normally should have, because it’s now in its most natural environment.

It’s almost like you are communicating telepathically with other people, because you’re able to uncover a 100 different thoughts that are contained in a 100 different tweets.

After all, what’s more intimate than the whispering voices in your head?

If you know how to take advantage of that state of mind, your microblogging can make you rich.

After a few months of testing and tracking what works, I have discovered 3 ways that Twitter can impact your business unlike any other site on Earth. Once you understand the Twitter user’s borderline hypnotic state of mind, these 3 covert techniques can pre-sell prospects on warp speed.

1) Psychic Market Research

Marketers often talk about the Robert Collier concept of entering the conversations in your prospect’s mind. Information marketing genius Porter Stansberry says that our marketing should start where they are.

In other words, the closer you can align yourself to their top-of-the-mind thoughts, the more receptive to your marketing message they become.

However, the problem is that more often than not, you don’t know what they’re really preoccupied with.

What’s worse, you sometimes make harmful guesses and assumptions. The end result is a bomb in your promotions and a dent in your sales, because your offer is not in tandem with what the prospect is thinking and feeling in the first place.

Good news. The whole interface of Twitter is one big web conversation taking place in a meeting of minds.

You see prospects exchanging rapid-fire thoughts, opinions, and random finds. In just one screen, you can read the hopes, dreams, interests, fears and dominant emotions of your niche.

To do this, just use http://search.twitter.com and Monitter, put in your niche keywords and boom–you’ll instantly be transported to the heart of the conversation.

Start your marketing there and see the difference in your response.

2) Network Like a Viking

Vikings have a brutally effective way of making friends, and meeting potential mates.

They sail to random villagers and within minutes, they kill all the inhabitants, pillage all the houses and capture all the maidens.

Why are they so successful?

It’s because they catch people by surprise, and there’s little in the way of resistance.

And in the nearly spam-free waters of Twitter-ville, prospects are more often than not caught by surprise, and there’s really very little resistance and a whole lot of receptivity.

For one, Twitter requires very little investment in expanding the social circle, because you can securely follow and unfollow people at will. As a result, it’s easier to access the market leaders on Twitter because well, other than the investment of clicking a button, they won’t really lose their privacy by accepting you as a friend–unlike email or mobile.

Furthermore, since you’re confined to only 140 characters for your Twitter message, the effort for them to reply back to you is only a sentence and a click away. No relatively complex email writing process.

And because one-liners are lot less threatening than blocks of text, so people instinctively resist the messages less.

Plus, if they do get annoyed, the BLOCK button is only a push away.

Making connections has never been easier, and as long as you’re not blatant with your promotions, you can make friends and influence people literally at the click of a mouse.

So do the Vikings and plunder prospect’s wallets away.

3) Establish Your Place on the Mountain

Gary Vaynerchuk said this in his most recent keynote address for Web 2.0 Expo, “If you give good shit, people will follow”.

This rings true especially for Twitter, because if you can share good stuff on a regular rate, you’ll be perceived as a guru in record speed.

It’s because the Twitter user’s frame of mind is a very conducive one for making yourself larger than life.

Prospects get on Twitter to find out the latest gossip, to chat with their friends, and more importantly–to seek out important summarized information and short inspiration and revelation quotes.

Once you do that, it’s like you are setting off flares in the middle of the night, and your prospects will notice.

As you know, getting prospects through the sales funnel is always a numbers game. The more good content you get out there attached with your name, the more chances you have at converting prospects to customers.

Because Twitter’s push-button easy way of delivering messages instantly with a low investment of 140 characters, you can keep sending out quality stuff over and over again. Indeed, there’s unprecedented opportunities for something to snag or hook the consumer and keep them for life.

And with that newfound authority, you can use it to sell more stuff and make more money from your now pre-sold audience.

So the conclusion?

Twitter is subversive territory.

When you understand how a prospect uses Twitter, getting your marketing message across has never been this unfairly simple.

It is software built on the base of NLP programming. So even if you have not gone for a day of training in your life, Twitter makes the mind easy pickings because it leaves the mind in a vulnerable state.

So use these 3 secrets and profit from them. In fact, let me know if you’ve used them and seen results.

Because I have. Amazing breakthroughs have been happening since I hopped on to the micro-blogging bandwagon.

To see these controversial techniques and other secrets I will not reveal here in action, feel free to follow me on Twitter: Email Copywriter

Watch me closely, emulate me, and apply them to boost response rates in your marketing.

Again, here’s the link to follow me on twitter:Â email copywriting

You might be wondering how Brad Antin and I ended up talking business.

Did I walk up to him and say, "Hi, I’m Mike, I actually plan to be your biggest competitor, could you please tell me your secret?" Not quite.

Because all of us have a very different mindset, and that’s the one crucial difference that differentiates us from the rest.

I believe in a world of abundance. I think there’s enough for everybody, so I’m not competing with them.

I approached them because we are in the same market and together we can help each other become vastly more successful. That’s the attitude I have, and that’s the attitude they share.

This market is enormous, the demand is almost insatiable and we’re only 2 tiny fish. If we can work together to help each other rise, that’s great.

So, I told them, we operate in the same market as you –spiritual and personal growth, we have similar businesses and similar sized lists, let’s figure out how we can work together.

Brad Antin immediately said he’d love to promote one of our products to their list, which is great because they have one of the single most responsive lists on the Internet.

I approached him like that, and I flattered him. I told him, you know what? I’m your biggest fan. I’ve bought your product just to figure out how you guys do business because I’m floored, what you have done is phenomenal, and we’re not anywhere close. I’d love to talk to you for 5-10mins and learn more about what you guys do.

That’s how I approached him –it was flattery and a mindset of abundance. But I didn’t lie –he knows that we’re in the same market, and he also has the mindset of doing cross promotions and helping each other grow our businesses.

Partnerships are some of the best ways to grow and improve your business.

My question to you is –is there someone in your market whom you can work together with? Is there someone doing better than you are? How are you going to approach them and work together towards a more successful future for both your businesses?

When you have really good posts on your blog, it probably bothers you when you don’t get as much feedback as you’d hoped. Sometimes, there are no comments at all when what you really want is to feel appreciated buy your readers. I’ve identified seven ways to increase the comments you receive on your blog posts.

1. Incentivize.

Give people a reason to comment. The classic way method is to hold a contest and give away prizes for the best comments on your blog within a specific period of time. This will spike up comments because, obviously, people always want to win something.

Unfortunately, it probably isn’t the most long term solution because once the prizes are gone, people won’t be motivated to comment any more.

2. Keep The Conversation Going.

The writers and owners of the blog have to step in to respond to comments. In general, people are often very guilty of looking at their posts but not responding even when people write nice things about them because they are simply too busy.

But, according to Yaro Starak, the minute you stop responding to the comments left on your blog, all the comments will stop flowing because to the reader, it shows that you, the blogger, don’t care. The converse side is that when people see you actually taking the time to respond, they’ll care because you care too.

3. Kiss Ass. Strategically.

If you want to get the attention of other bloggers, write about them. For example, you could write about Seth Godin in your post and hopefully, either through track back or through a search engine, he’ll find your post and leave a comment on your blog.

I think you’d agree that it’s cool to have Seth Godin leave a note in your comment box. We’ve had pretty impressive people comment on our blog lately – Jack Humphrey and Paulie Sabol, among others, so it’s a pretty neat way to attract their attention.

4. Be Controversial.

Write on a topic you can’t be neutral about. Write about something such that you’re either on one side of the fence or the other. You could give your take on Hilary and Obama, or other current issues. In Internet marketing, a popular one is, "All Gurus Suck." You just need to keep the conversation going.

5. Be Relevant.

Use the USA Today Secret about which I spoke earlier, which is basically finding the most relevant things in the prospects’ heads, be it through USAToday.com or CNN – and blog about it, connecting it to your story.

You will probably get more comments because that’s at the top of the prospects’ minds.

6. Email Them Nicely.

Use your auto responder to email them and say, "Hey, the blog’s a bit lonely, why don’t you join the conversation?" which has been proven to boost responses.

7. Ask Specific Questions.

I think this is the most powerful. On the blog itself, ask specifically, "Now tell us, what can this technique do for your business?" Be sure to ask specific questions, and not to just say, "Tell us what you think". Email your readers, or ask them on your blog.

Ask questions that draw them out, for example, by asking how the content of that particular blog post will benefit them.

Blog comments do help with the search engine optimization of your blog, and increasing the number of comments on your blog is to your advantage. On a more personal level, once your blog community becomes more active and engaged, you will get to know your readers and that you will feel that no effort you put into writing your posts goes unnoticed.

Ramit runs a great blog with some excellent content and a wicked sense of humor. But I was most impressed with a little conversion trick he’s running on his blog.

When someone comments on a post they are taken to a page that invites them to signup to Ramit’s mailing list and to visit his discussion forum. The copy and look of this page all make it seem like Ramit is rewarding the visitor for the comment and granting access to private, top-secret info. Check out the screen shot below.

Why do like this idea?

The visitors who comment on a post are usually ones that are most interested in your content. They are, in other words, “hot leads”. But with most blogs, these visitors will often move on and never revisit unless they’re hooked up to your RSS feed. But RSS feeds are not enough.

To keep your visitors coming back, why not offer them a newsletter subscription or an invitation to join a forum.

Ramit does this and improves upon the idea by using the sense of ‘exclusivity’ to make the visitor feel that they earned the right to access the forum and subscribe to Ramit’s newsletter due to the time they spent commenting. I bet this aura of exclusivity boosts the value of his forum and newsletter in the visitor’s mind and should lead to more returning visitors.

Ramit’s Blog is here. (make a comment!)

This probably isn’t new to most of you, but one idea stuck out.

What if you’re new to the market or launching a new product and don’t yet have testimonials (the most common way to show social proof)?

How do you show social proof then?

Instead of using testimonials, you must work to actually create that community around the product.

The key question, then, is what can you do to build a community from the ground up and make customers/leads feel a part of something bigger?

If you’re launching something new, this must be molded into your strategy.

One statistic you might use is the number of people opted into your mailing list or signed up for a free trial so far, that day, per minute, etc.

Or, how many people in your market search for a common search-term in Google? Share it with the user in their confirmation email.

Create a peer group on the fly and leverage it to appeal to our natural desire to be a part of something.

The people buying your product or in your market are inherently in a community based around their desire for said product or market.

How can you magnify that sense of community and use it to your advantage?

Here’s an example from an email recently sent out Frank Kern