Twitter not only creates a new world when it comes to building your personal chef business, it also creates a new paradigm of exactly what business building truly is. In this day and age marketers are beginning to realize that it's no longer cost effective to blow good money on faceless advertising. Folks have become so desensitized to the onslaught of 'push' marketing that big business has started rethinking their marketing models. This is where twitter comes into play. Twitter creates an opportunity for you to build a following, a billboard of events and real to life, miscellaneous, minutia, that given the right frequency, can take your business and turn it into a living and breathing entity in the online world. You just have to know how to structure it so that it doesn't overtake your life and misdirect valuable time you should be dedicating to other, equally as important, business building practices.

Here's how you can do it...

1. Sign up for a twitter account at twitter.com.
Pick your desired user name and start looking for interesting people and organizations in your field and complementary fields.
[Twitter has a great the micro blogging platform and there are many tutorials out there if you run into trouble in your set up process.CommonCraft has a series of great tutorials on many topics and Twitter is one of them.]

2. Fill out your description in your twitter profile with a brief on who you and or your company are. Make sure you place the url to your lead capture page, website, blog, Facebook, LinkedIn or other social media contact site you use for your business. If you're not on any of these get on them. This is a method used to funnel your followers directly to you.

3. Once you've finished signing up you should be given the option of following various twitter users. Poke through them and see which ones fit in with your interests and follow them. You will start getting follow-backs. This is good, but not as good as the next process.

4. Now to create your first series of posts...
They should entail the following:
A great down-to-earth introduction of you.
Who you are-
What you do-
Why you do what you do-
Words of wisdom and contribution you have-
What you are on twitter for and what type of folks you would like to interact with-
[There's more, but this is definitely a great start!]

Give it some time and stay encouraged. Sometimes it takes a moment to get a good dialogue going and sometimes it's immediate. It all depends on who you catch and how you catch them. Make sure your description has at the very minimum your desired mode of contact in it; so if it's your website, make sure you have your web address, if it's your phone number, make sure you include your number; and by all means... make sure you include in your description, in brief, enough compelling information to give your follower, or potential follower [that's what they're called on twitter] great reason to want to know more about you and connect with you.

Twitter is all about:
building relationships
opening up dialogues
creating another point of contact for your public to find you
creating opportunities to refer and to be referred
driving traffic to your desired destination

That about sums it up. There's far more to twitter that we don't have time to go into in this article, you get the gist on setting your foundation to boost your business using twitter.

As always, it's my pleasure to share these business building tips with you. Until next time...