social media

Things I Wish I had Known About Twitter Before I Started Using It

August 1, 2011 By Energy Healing Reiki Master Leave a Comment

I am very action oriented which means I leap into things with great gusto and enthusiasm. I also learn quickly which usually means that three days after I make the leap, I figure out a better way to do it and wish I had not leapt in so quickly or deeply. I recently have begun getting active in Twitter and I have learned several things from the experience that I would like to share with other people who are pondering getting started on Twitter.

Figure Out What You Want to Achieve in Twitter First: Before you do anything on Twitter, go within and ask yourself: What do you wish to achieve on Twitter and why? Get as clear as possible. For example, I want to accomplish two things. I want to connect with people like me on Twitter and I also want to introduce my healing work to a wider audience.

Choose the First 2,000 People You Follow Wisely: Twitter lets you follow the first 2,000 without any constraints, but after that you can only follow ten percent more people than are following you. So if you want to build a large list, the people you choose to follow at the beginning are critical. Try to choose people who resonate with who you are, are open to following you back (have very balanced follower to followee ratios), and have tweeted within the last month (LOTS of people on Twitter join and then drop off). A lot of people who will end up following you are people in Social Media and Marketing who want to build a big list but who may not resonate so much with what you do so you need to try early on to build up as good a base of followers in Twitter as you can. A lot of subject matter experts in your field may not follow people back so to get around this, you can create a Twitter list for your field (I created a list for healers, spiritual growth, business, creative, etc.) and add these experts into your list so you can follow their tweets in one place. Or you can use Listorious.com (see below) to find a list of people in your field that you can follow.

Encourage Your Existing Customers and Email List People to Join You in Twitter: I hope to be able to use Twitter to deepen my connection with people who resonate with me energetically. As a practical matter, this means encouraging people on my email list to follow me on Twitter. This will be an interesting challenge because most of them probably do not have a Twitter account or are inactive on Twitter. So I will have to create some great content for release on Twitter to tempt them to signup. I love to create stuff so I am not too worried.

Focus on the Quality of People that You Follow in Twitter: There is a lot of debate in Twitter about whether you should automatically follow people who follow you. I initially auto followed people who followed me because it felt like the right thing to do. Later on as I became more Twitter savvy and looked at who I was following, I realized a lot of them were probably spammers who I do not want to encourage. Spammers love people who automatically follow. So I stopped automatically following back and now I am looking at the people who follow me and if they look like they are a real individual or company I follow them and if they look dubious I do not. It takes more time but I hope this will increase the quality of my base in Twitter. Spammers often use the default egg profile or just have a face picture; they often do not have a lot of tweets; and very little information in the profile. If I cannot figure out who or what the follower is about by glancing at their profile, I don’t follow them back. You can use an online service to validate followers but this extra step HUGELY discourages people from following you.

Many Inactive Twitter Users have Great Profiles: Unfortunately lots of very good contacts in Twitter no longer use the system. Either they get tired of Twitter or burned out or whatever. There are a lot of awesome but inactive people on Twitter and it does you very little good to follow them. I look at the last tweet date before I follow anyone to see if they have tweeted within a month and if they have not, I move on to the next prospect.

Automatic Following would be Awesome if There Weren’t So Many Spammers on Twitter: There are a lot of dubious services out there that offer to build up your twitter list to thousands of people and this creates a huge perverse incentive for scammers. It is a catch 22 because it feels rude on the one hand not to follow people who follow you but I do not want to encourage spammers either.

Tap Into the Power of Twitter Lists: There is a site called http://listorious.com/ that provides lots of information about lists people have created in Twitter. It is a great way of finding good people to follow in your field. I wish I had known about this on Day 1 before I followed 2,000 people because I would have made different choices. I feel lists are a very powerful way to locate people similar to you on Twitter. I played around a bit with Formulists but I read that they can spam people so I stopped using this service. I do feel you should do some research on Twitter apps before you use them because when you sign up for one, you give them a fair amount of power over your Twitter account and when you stop using one, make sure to go into your Twitter settings and disable the application from running.

Use TweetedTimes.com NOT Paper.li to Aggregate Content from People You Follow: There are so many streams of information coming into my Twitter account that I could not easily monitor it. So I looked for a content aggregator to help me make sense of all the data. Unfortunately I initially chose paper.li for this because someone sent me a link to it and I thought it was a good system. I realized later that the newspapers looked very poor quality so I searched the web for sites like paper.li and came up with http://tweetedtimes.com which I like a lot better. I created newspapers for each of my lists and they sort the articles each day by relevance and popularity. This allows me to focus on important resources in each of the fields I am interested in and saves me a huge amount of time.

About Bill Austin

Reiki Master Bill Austin is a spiritual healer, teacher, artist, writer and visionary living in St Petersburg, FL. He is the founder of several energy healing modalities and he specializes in distant healing, spiritual growth videos, healing art and healer training. He provides numerous free healing resources and a powerful line of energy healing products. Please follow Bill on Twitter!

Filed Under: Money, Popular Tagged With: social media, twitter

New Rules of Success for Self Employed Entrepreneurs

August 1, 2011 By Energy Healing Reiki Master Leave a Comment

Last week I was thinking about how Google inspires everyone who markets online to operate in a certain way to continue to do well in search engine results. If you do not play by Google’s rules, which tend to favor high quality content, people will not be able to find you when they search using your industry’s key words. The huge influence of Google has reshaped what you have to do to succeed on the Internet.

When my father began working in the 1950’s, it was relatively easy to succeed. You largely just had to show up and be present. He lived in an era of tremendous and continuous prosperity for America. This situation continued for many years.

As more and more baby-boomers began working, the idea of success morphed so that you not only had to show up and be present, but also you had to be fairly good at what you did in order to move up the organization chart.

The combination of showing up, being present and being good at what you did was the basis of most people’s success up until the recession of 2009. A lot of businesses and people who followed the old rules of success ended up going out of business because they did not have strategic business expertise they needed to survive. It no longer is enough to be good at what you do; you also have to be fairly good at business now to survive.

With the advent of the Internet and millions of people spending a lot of time on social media, to succeed now you need to show up, be present, be good at what you do, be good at business and be connected to lots of other people.

I do feel that people who are very good at what they do often work for people who are very connected to other people. In the HGTV show “Selling New York,” the realtors profiled always stress the importance of relationships and the need to advise people what is in the best interest of the customer even if it costs them a sale in the present moment.

When I was building my network of experts on SelfGrowth.com, I found that the experts on happiness and the law of attraction generally had a MUCH larger network than experts in other fields. This makes perfect sense to me since numerous studies have tied happiness to a sense of being connected to others and communities and obviously it is easier for the law of attraction to help you if you are connected and networked to lots of other people.

Bonus Points for Success

The universe has always given bonus points to people who:

Set a clear intent upon what they wish to accomplish;
Are action oriented;
Give outstanding value to their customers;
Focus their time and energy like a laser upon achieving their goals and
Persevere until they get their desired results.

About Reiki Master Bill Austin:

Bill Austin is a Reiki healing facilitator and spiritual healer, teacher, artist, writer and visionary living in St Petersburg, Florida in the United States. Bill specializes in spiritual healing, spiritual growth, healing art and healer training. He is the founder of is the founder of several spiritual healing and Reiki healing modalities. He has trained healers in over sixteen countries and has helped people from all over the world to heal, grow, succeed and realize more of their full potential. Bill infuses healing and enlightenment energies into vibrational healing art images and has created a line of healing books. You can click on this link to download a free healing ebook called: Vibrational Color Healing Art. He offers a number of free holistic healing resources on the freespiritualhealing.com web site. Please follow Bill on Twitter!

Filed Under: Money, Relationships Tagged With: business, law of attraction, relationships, social media, success

Tweets I Posted on Twitter in July 2011

August 1, 2011 By Energy Healing Reiki Master Leave a Comment

I am beginning to invest the time and energy it takes to create and maintain a following on Twitter. A year ago, I created this blog to make the Mastery Training Module articles available to a larger audience. Twitter will be the way I get new Seeds of Mastery tips out to folks.

Each day, I am committing to placing one of my quotes on Twitter. My handle on Twitter is @healwithbill and if you have not followed me already, please go to www.FollowBillAustin.com and follow me.

People who look for problems find them. People who look for miracles find them.
Money flows to me from the flow of ideas within me. Money is an effect of consciousness.
When you focus on self love and healing your relationship with money, the Law of Attraction falls into place.
Ultimately love is the only thing that matters. Love is the only thing that is real.
Earth is a school where we learn how to love ourselves and others unconditionally.
To succeed in business, focus on your strengths and hire or outsource areas you are weak in.
Our outer world is the external out-picturing of our inner consciousness and awareness.
Self love is the only solid foundation to create a life that works and supports you on all levels.
Monitor how you feel during the day and try to only do things that feel good.
A powerful way to take charge of your money is to record where you spend money each day.
Our time and energy are our two greatest gifts. Honor your and others’ time and energy.
Luck is forged in the fires of intent, clarity, focus and perseverance.
It is challenging to live in a planet that is morphing from the paradigm of the mind to that of the heart.
Monitor how you feel during the day and try to only hang out with people who feel good. Flee from toxic people!
Whatever radiates out from you will come back to you multiplied. So stay positive!
People who cultivate a positive attitude attract good things, people and events to them.
People who complain about things become magnetic to negative life experiences.
Be YOUR own healer. You are the expert on your health and wellbeing.
Be YOUR own guru. You are the expert on your spiritual path and journey.
You don’t need to learn anything outside of yourself to grow. Your life is your path.
People who are clear, purposeful and focused are more likely to succeed.
To succeed you have to show up, have expertise and be good at business & connected.
Everything we say, do or feel plants seeds for the harvest we will reap in the future.
People who are very gifted often work for people who are very connected.
A great attitude helps people to succeed more than a great education.
The more you focus on helping other people to succeed, the more successful you will become.
The Law of Attraction works best for people who are connected to lots of other people.
Life is a series of many small choices and wise people choose love over fear.
When we try to please other people, often we give away our personal power and feel depleted.
All of the people in our life mirror back part of our own consciousness to us.
Mastery emerges from the choices we make each moment.
Each time we give away our power to others; we have less power to be ourselves.
People pleasing is often the first step to giving our power away to others.

About Spiritual Healer Bill Austin:

Bill Austin is an energy healing facilitator, spiritual teacher, artist, writer and visionary living in St Petersburg, Florida in the United States. Bill specializes in distance healing, spiritual growth and healer training. He is the founder of several energy healing modalities. He has trained healers in over sixteen countries and has helped people from all over the world to heal, grow, expand and realize more of their full potential. Bill infuses healing and enlightenment energies into healing art images and has created a line of self help books. You can click on this link to download a free healing ebook called: Vibrational Color Healing Art. He offers a number of free energy healing resources on the freespiritualhealing.com web site. Please follow Bill on Twitter!