Do you feel stressed or discouraged at the thought of having to use social media to promote your life coaching business?  Are you one of the secret minority who have vowed never to join Twitter? And are you sick of hearing about Facebook, too?

Then I’ve got good news for you.  Your social media campaign doesn’t have to mean huge learning curves and wasted hours all for the sake of networking. Actually, business networking isn’t wasting time at all and can be done in just a few minutes each day. You may need to shift your mindset a bit, but social media can provide valuable opportunities for free advertising.

Start small with easy-to-use social media tools, like Twitter.

You can’t find a faster method of promotion than Twitter. For example, let’s compare it to the time spent article marketing. Writing a 500-word article, uploading it to an article directory, and waiting days for it to be approved is a large time investment.

Now write a short phrase describing your latest blog post or information product. It might look something like this:

“10 ways to reach your goals” (don’t use quotation marks)

Now add to it a link to your post or sales page, shortening the link if necessary (Twitter allows for no more than 140 characters). Voila! You’re done.

In fact, in the time it took to write an article, you could have easily published several tweets to Twitter, each of them like little mini-advertisements. Just don’t make the marketing too blatant. Remember that you’re supposed to be hanging out, sharing and swapping.

Of course, it’s best if you don’t stop there. Once you’re comfortable with Twitter, branch out to other social media tools like Facebook and YouTube. But if you’re truly busy, Twitter is a good place to start. You can post three highly-relevant tweets a day, in less time than it takes to water your houseplants. You can even preschedule your tweets, send tweets to Facebook, and tweet from your mobile phone.

Twitter is truly the place for people who are hesitant about social media. And it serves as a mini social media marketing plan!

If you haven’t joined Twitter yet, set up an account today and start tweeting.

P.S. - Wondering about the best way to shorten that link? There are two schools of thought.

Some say it’s better to use a keyword optimized post title leading directly to your blog, like so: “http://www.just-an-example.com/brainstorming.html”. Keyword-wise, it is better.

But most people shorten their posts with a shortening service like bit.ly for a couple reasons. It converts your URL to fewer characters than the original URL, because Twitter limits your “tweets” to 140 characters, so the shorter the better.It also allows you to add a button to your browser bar and check your click-throughs instantly. (And remember, social networking is driven by sharing, interest and need, not by carefully-optimized keywords.)

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