As I write this post, I have joined Twitter only 24 hours ago. Already, after only about 30 minutes of effort, I have almost 120 followers, and I expect more to come on board over the next few days.
In the meantime, I will spend a little more time working with Twitter to get even more followers coming my way.
Twitter is a hot item right now, and a powerful way to drive traffic to your blog or website, and to begin establishing a relationship with people. Whether that relationship develops into a friendship or a business relationship, or a mentor-student relationship is irrelevant, as the point is that Twitter is enabling these relationships to get started.
As step one to the process of getting followers on Twitter, you need to spend a few moments getting your profile set up. There’s not much to it, just get a short bio statement and a link to your website. Also upload a picture of yourself so that people can identify with you.
When you get new followers (be patient), a natural activity is to send out a thank you response. That’s a fine idea but as you can imagine it gets time consuming if you are getting 100 new followers a day. There is a solution. You can sign up for a free Twitter-related service at TweetLater.com that will send out automated welcome messages for you. It’s a great time saver.
The messages are short, so you need to be creative with the available characters. Definitely thank them for following you. Without being pushy or trying to sell anything, you could offer your URL to get more help or learn about you. You can also offer a promise of future help, without any link.
The TweetLater service has other features as well, including one that will automatically follow anyone who follows you. That’s always nice and encourages them to stick around, so that’s what I’m doing.
How to Get Twitter Followers
Signing up for Twitter is easy, but then many people wonder what steps to take to get followers. I’ll give you the strategy I’m using. I’ve only tried it for one day, and that consisted of about 30 minutes of effort, and I got almost 120 followers, so it looks like it works to me.
Of course, I learned this strategy from an expert who has nearly 3,000 followers as we speak, and he’s not even trying hard to build his list further.
Here’s the key tip: in order to get followers, you must first follow other people. Many people will reciprocate with a follow. This is a pure, simple strategy that is super easy to implement.
But you don’t want to follow random people. What you do is search Twitter to find the “gurus” in your niche, or field, and follow the people that are following them. The gurus will have already attracted a targeted following, perfect you you to tap into and benefit.
You can also find guru’s promoting their Twitter link from their blogs and websites. That’s another way to find these valuable portals into the Twitter system.
Twitter allows you to follow a maximum of 2,000 people (unless you have a strong following yourself, in which case you are allowed more followers) so start sending out follow requests.
Find several gurus and make requests from their follow lists. Spread your requests around to get a more diverse group of followers.
To avoid the appearance of following many people with few followers yourself, you may want to space out your requests somewhat to allow people to follow you. Personally, I send out about 400 follow requests and got over 100 to follow within one day. I expect another 50-100 over the new week or so.
In the meantime, I’ll send out more requests.
As you attract followers, and they visit your profile, you will want to be sure that you have a link back to your blog or website. Twitter is a great source of traffic.
After sending out your follow requests, allow a week or two for people to follow. If they don’t you might want to unfollow them so you can make room for more requests. You should get a 25-50% follow ratio depending on whether your bio, picture, and any announcements you’ve prepared create a favorable impression.
So you will need to put together a few quality announcements to create the perception of value (and hopefully adding value is your primary objective).
After a few weeks, from your 2000 follow requests you sould be about to get 500 to 1000 followers!
It’s that fast and easy, and these are just the right targeted market you seek. That’s why Twitter is such a powerful resource.
All you need to do is get started and you could have a strong following in no time. Why not start today?
Tags: followers, getting started with twitter, Twitter, twitter followers
Twitter is a phenomenon. I head about Twitter quite a while ago, and I paid no attention. It seemed foolish to be telling people what you are doing in little 140 character messages. Sounded like a complete waste of time.
I was dead wrong about that.
Over the past month I’ve been exposed to Twitter almost everywhere. I was shopping in a convenience store and I saw a news broadcast that was covering Twitter. I bought some Thai food and while I was waiting for my order I browsed a news magazine ( I think Time) and found an article on Twitter. I opened the newspaper and found an article on Twitter.
As a marketer, Twitter offers a way to get in touch with like-minded people much more easily than ever before. Today, I tried Twitter for the first time and within 30 minutes I had 16 followers. By tomorrow I could easily have over 100 and then I’ll use my tactics to get more.
All of these people are at least somewhat interested in what I have to offer. And when I deliver value to them, they will become even more interested and want to visit my blog, or my website. And then I can have a more in-depth relationship than 140 characters at a time.
I found it quite fun to blast out a few messages and watch the followers build up. I will continue my practice of giving away valuable information in my Twitter announcements, so I suggest that you sign up to follow me. You can do that here: www.twitter.com/Phil_McCollum
Next, I will integrate this follow feature into my blog.
Tags: getting started with twitter, sign up for twitter, Twitter, twitter announcement
Screen capture video recording using using software such as Camtasia Studio is a fantastic way to provide training related to internet marketing, and to tell your own story. The discussion of website layout and content can quickly become confusing without a visual frame of reference.
In order to optimize your screen capture video, you should record using a pre-determined size that matches the width versus height ratio at which your video will be displayed.
The standard ratios are 4 x 3, and 16 x 9. What this means as way of example is that a 4 x 3 ratio relates to a video capture of 320 x 240 pixels, or 640 x 480 pixels, etc.
When you record your video, you will want to use the proper aspect ratio to avoid distortion in the process of displaying your video.
And that brings me to the point of this post. There is a handy little utility software program that will automatically, at the click of a mouse, re-size your browser window to specific dimensions. That makes getting the right size a snap. And the utility has another use as well: it will tell you how big your browser window is. This is especially handy if you are sizing for non-standard dimensions.
The name of this utility software program is, not surprisingly, Sizer. It’s a free tool, and I recommend you grab it before they change their mind and start charging a fee. You can download the tool for yourself at www.brianapps.net/sizer.html
This tool is equally useful when you want to make screen capture images of a specific dimension. So whether you are tooling up for screen capture video or screen capture images, you can’t go wrong with Sizer in your toolkit.
Tags: free utility software, image capture tool, image capture utility, sizer, video utility
Have you ever seen your website on another computer (and browser) and been surprised that it doesn’t look right?
It’s a fact that browsers can display the HTML code differently. What looks great on your favorite browser (where you preview the results) may not carry over to other browsers.
You could try and look at your site in many different browsers, but there is an easier way. Here is a utility program that allows you to preview how your site will appear on a wide range of browsers. It’s easy to use…just type in the URL of the page your want to preview.
You can try out the utility for yourself at browsershots.org
Now you can make sure your site looks good on many different browsers.
Tags: free internet tools, Internet Tools, Marketing Tools, website browser display, website browser preview tool, website display
doPDF is a great PDF creater utility program
PDF files represent a common format that can be read by anyone. PDF stands for Portable Document Format and it was created by Adobe. To read the PDF format, you need a free Adobe Acrobat Reader software. You probably already have it on your computer, but if not you can download from Adobe.
Reading PDF files is one thing, but creating them is another story. If you’ve ever wanted to create PDF files, here is a simple and free method: doPDF
You can install doPDF for free and it’s a very handy utility. What it does is allows you to print documents as PDF files. Obviously, you don’t actually “print” the document, you create a PDF file instead.
Using doPDF will allow you to convert files to PDF just by printing them as you normally would, except you choose doPDF as the printer. Nothing could be easier.
It’s a blessing when you can find a simple tool like doPDF that does exactly what it claims with no fuss.
If you don’t think you need doPDF and don’t think you would ever want to create a PDF file, let me ask you this: have you ever ordered a product online?
What typically happens when you order online is that you are given a receipt page and told to print it. Well, what if you want to save that page to a file? Now you can with doPDF. There’s no need to print pages that will likely get lost when you can save the information to a file using doPDF.
Try doPDF and see for yourself. The setup is easy and usage is easy. It’s a great tool.
You can read more about doPDF and download a copy for yourself from www.dopdf.com
Go try it.
Tags: doPDF, free marketing tools, free pdf software, pdf, pdf file creation, pdf printing, pdf software
