About once a week, my daughter Grace will wake up early in the morning and “help Dad drink coffee”. I love these mornings when the house is quiet and it is still a little dark out.

One morning I did the “parent thing” and decided that I needed to take some pictures of her because she was growing so fast.

So I took out the camera, kneeled down to capture my memory…

“No Dad! No Pictures”, she ran off.

I was determined not to lose my Kodak moment so I went over her to and tried to explain, the best I could why I wanted her to smile and take a picture.

* For the memories
* To show mommy
* It would make me happy
* She will be glad some day

All of the reasons that made sense to me, but obviously means nothing to a little girl whose biggest concern is when Diego is coming on TV and if she can sneak a “jump, jump on couch”.

Finally, I asked her if she would like to take a picture of me.

Her eyes lit up, she grabbed the camera and did her best to take a picture. She giggled with excitement as she told me to smile and “took my picture”.

Then, she handed me the camera and told me to take her picture. We had a great time while she smiled and ran around the house posing with her toys.

Now she loves taking pictures and this has become a game we play and a way Grace and I connect. Oh yeah… and I get to have pictures like these for my old days…

It is funny how our friends, our families and our mentors can “tell us” over and over again what is good for us, but we don’t really grasp onto that until we are ready in our way.

My friends, Jit Uppal and James Rivers have been trying to get me on Twitter for months now.

They have laid out all of the benefits and even shown me proof of how it is working for them, but…

I never cared.

I even signed up one day just so they would stop bothering me about it.

That sounds bad I know, but like you I have a million other things I am working on in my business and Twitter just seemed silly and a waste of time.

Just over a week ago, Jason Fladlien and I interviewed Jit on his use of Twitter.

During the call, I had an “a-ha” moment and I sat and implemented all of the tips that Jason was sucking out of Jit, since then I have spent about 5 minutes a day on Twitter and am building a list I can not believe!

I am going to be honest with now. I was the biggest Twitter skeptic there was. I couldn’t believe that anyone really cared about 140 character messages or that they would help with my business.

If they did, they certainly wouldn’t see them in the mess of Tweets that are posted.

I signed up for a link shortening and tracking service called Cli.gs. This is a free real-time service that tells you how often your tweets are clicked on. I was shocked when I sent out a test to my small Twitter list of Followers and got the following results.

Who would complain with that amount of traffic from such a small amount of time and work investment? Lots of traffic streams is the goal right?

I was definitely starting to realize the power of twitter so I thought I would try one more experiment just to make sure.

This time I used a script called MyFreeViralTweets and sent an email to small portion of my list telling them that I had a free gift for them. I do this occasionally for my list so I knew I would get some decent traffic. Only this time I added MyFreeViralTweets to the page “just to see”

I was shocked. I generated a bunch of traffic from other people Tweeting about it!

Now imagine the amount of traffic that you can generate from Twitter if you build a decent sized list. I have been at it for less than a month now!

My advice is to start slow and small. Don’t get overwhelmed. Just sign up and spend a few minutes each day watching the conversation and getting used to it.

Who knows, it may even become one of things you wished you had started doing earlier! Just Get Started.

So what is holding you up with Twitter? Am I totally crazy and wasting my time? Are you building a Twitter list? Leave your comment below and don’t forget to tell your Tweeps about this post!