Twitter is a great way to identify potential clients, fans, partners and customers.  However there are a lot of people who know they would benefit from it but don't have time, know where to start or are frightened by it.

There are two ways you can help people like this and I use both. Chances are if you are reading this post, you will be the internet marketing expert/guru in your community.  Go and tell them about it, and show them what you can do for their business.  Next you need to decide whether to give your clients the fish or teach them how to do it for themselves.  

Giving them the fish can be very time consuming so I suggest you get them up and running and teach them how to manage some of it themselves.  

One of the smartest things you can do as an internet marketer is to help other people.  Did you know that home businesses are the fastest growing industry in the UK, and many of them do not know how to use the internet well?  And there are a lot of existing businesses who don't have an online presence.  Or they might have a website that is not doing anything.  Just think of your local community, or the community of businesses that you are involved with.  

Many of them will need your help and they might not even know it! They don't know about the power of Twitter, how to search it, keywords and terms, or how to get in front of people online.  Showing them how is a hugely profitable industry and one that will help local businesses regain their position in the marketplace.  

This is the same for people like musicians, artists, charities and other people who do their job well, but don't know how to leverage the internet. I run a local website with about 800 businesses and organisation on it, and I only live in a small town.  I help the businesses build websites, optimise them and use social media to make them work.  It works, I get paid and they get to succeed.  Win Win.

You can use a number of tools like search.twitter to search what people are doing in real time.  You can search for very specific statistics.  Then follow these people and begin communications. You can also create lists of people who are united by a common interest and communicate with them.

Growing a following is very time consuming if you do it all manually, especially if you have a number of clients. Each client will need a Twitter  account, their own branding and a targeted following.

Once you have set up the accounts, I would suggest using Twiends to grow the following.  It can be automated and targeted. Then all you need to do is manage the Tweets and messages.  I use Social Oomph to follow anyone who follows me and then send a welcome message.  My welcome message does not try to sell anything, it opens communication.  I then use ThewIn to unfollow anyone who unfollows me.  This is really helping with the mass unfollowing crowd.  Social Oomph and ThewIn are free.  It is well worth investing in Twiends if you are serious about using Twitter to market a number of clients.  

Once you have set up the accounts, grown a following and established a great Twitter community, you can be sure that your client will be telling other people about you.  It really is a hot niche and if you are not involved in this yet and want extra income, this is the way to go.  And if you love social media and helping others at the same time, you will soon have yourself a very busy local 'online' business.