Quite a lot has changed since that post, both with Twitter and with the tools you can use to add followers. Most of the tools and techniques either no longer work, or have had restrictions placed upon them that greatly reduce their effectiveness by removing the bulk follow and bulk unfollow features, requiring much more time and effort on your part to grow your list.

Why You Should Grow Your List

As of January 2010, ComScore put Twitter.com traffic at 75 million people, 11 times as many as it had at the start of 2009. This number is only for twitter users on twitter.com. It is estimated that fewer than 50% of twitter usage is through the site, so the true number of twitter users may be closer to 150 million.

That’s a lot of users, but what does it mean for you and why should you try to increase your number of followers? No matter what your business is, the answer can be summed up with MBM, marketing, branding and money. This post will focus primarily on how to increase your twitter followers with the intent of generating income.

If you are unsure of the potential for making money on Twitter, you need look no further than Jeremy Schoemaker who reports making $15,000 from advertisers through Ad.ly and Spnsored Tweets in October and his twitter earnings keep rising, now getting $5000 for a single tweet.

While Jeremy has a profile that enables him to get such high prices, the average person can also make hundreds, or even thousands of extra dollars by simply tweeting. However, unless you are a Jeremy Shoemaker, you won’t generate any large advertiser income unless you have a large group of followers, the higher the better; if you can engage directly with an active group, you will increase your earning potential enormously.

How To Increase Your Followers Quickly

As I said in my previous post, getting more followers is not difficult, you simply need to follow more people yourself. The problem with this is that, Twitter has limits on the number of people you can follow each day and adding a couple of hundred people manually takes time, a lot of time, even more if you are looking to add people with particular interests. Once you begin adding a couple of thousand people each day, you really have no option, you have to automate the process.

There are still a few free ways to gain extra followers, but most of the services and tools are limited and/or scammy. There is one tool that stands head and shoulders above all the others out there.

Tweet adder The Best Tool For Getting Followers

Out of all the methods I have tested, Tweet adder is simply the best tool for automating your twitter activities and the ultimate tool for quickly growing your twitter followers.

Tweet adder has every feature you could want to fully automate your twitter activities, including:

• Multiple Twitter account management
• Fully auto follow and auto unfollow
• Ability to unfollow ALL except your VIP SAFELIST
• Keep track of people you have unfollowed so that you do not re-follow them.
• Auto Follow Twitter Users — Fully Control Twitter following with Follower Ratio, Max # of follows per day
• Auto Follow Stop Feature : Automatically stops when Twitter follow limits are reached
• Auto Unfollow Twitter Users: Unfollow by #, follower to follow ratios, users who do not follow back with time frames
• Random Time Delay Settings- You choose what time intervals between follows, unfollows, tweets, and direct messages
• Safe VIP List: Create a list of twitter users to never unfollow
• Full Twitter Stats and graphical historical viewing
• Automated Tweet Posting and Direct Messaging
• And much more

Tweet adder is unparalleled for rapidly growing your twitter followers; the sooner you start to grow your followers list, the better your chances of increasing yoru earnings.

It can be difficult to get this information and many people, especially those new to twitter are not aware of the constraints Twitter has put in place, so I will detail them here so you can get the most out of the service. Many of these limits have been put in place to help prevent spam accounts and to limit gaming the service.

Twitter itself provides the following information on limits:

• 1,000 total updates per day, on any and all devices (web, mobile web, phone, API, etc. )
• 250 total direct messages per day, on any and all devices
• 150 API requests per hour

They also have this to say:

“We’ve also placed limits on the number of people you can follow. The number is different for everyone, and is based on a ratio that changes as the account changes. If you hit a follow limit, you must balance your follower/following ratio in order to follow more people- basically, you can’t follow 50,000 people if only 23 people follow you. Based on current behavior in the Twitter community, we’ve concluded that this is both fair and reasonable.“

Maximum Following Limit

Twitter has a maximum following limit of 2,000 people or 110% of your total followers. Many people hit this limit and don’t know why they can’t add any new people to follow. This limit means that you can only follow 2,000 people until you have nearly that many people following you back; that is where the 110% figure comes in. Basically, if you are following 2,000 people, you will not be able to follow any more until you have at least 1,820 following you. If you have come up against this limit and do not know how to get past it, you don’t have to wait until you get to 1,820 followers to continue, just follow the tips in this post and you’ll be back on your way to adding more followers.

Once you get past the 2,000 limit, the 110% restriction is still in place so, even if have 3,000 followers, you are restricted to being able to follow 3,300 people.

Daily Follow Limit

Twitter had previously set the daily follow limit at 1,000 people, but seem to have revised this down to 500 and for some people as low as 200. The exact figure is difficult to gauge, as it primarily seems based on the 110% calculation.

If you provide poor quality tweets, i.e. you appear to be spamming a lot and you add more than 1,000 people per day, your account could be flagged, suspended, or at worst, banned.

Maximum Follower Limit

The good thing is that there isn’t any limit on the number of people who can follow you, so even if you have hit a follower limit in a day and you get some new followers, you seem to be able to follow them back, once you have gone past the 2,000 limit.

Hopefully this will help clarify some of Twitters limits for you. If you are suffering from any of these limits, read my post here on how to get past Twitter’s follow limits so you can follow more people.

I see a lot of links posted on Twitter for software and services to help you grow your Twitter followers list, so I thought I’d give you the rundown on some free alternatives as well as some of the paid offerings.

Whether you are new to Twitter or not, many of you are probably wondering how people get so many followers to their Twitter accounts so quickly; surely they can’t be that popular? The truth is, outside of having a celebrity profile, or being a Webstar, the majority are using tools and techniques that help them grow their follower list faster and larger then would happen organically.

There are many reasons to develop a large followers list, the majority of them being gaining more exposure, allowing you to attract more people to your site, or simply earn more money through advertising. Some people may think that this makes your group of followers less authentic and to some degree it is, but it has also allowed me to meet some people and get information, products, etc that I otherwise would not have heard about. I should also say that I have only been using these techniques for about one week on this account and in that time I have more than doubled the number of followers.

Whatever the reason, if you want to grow your follower list, there are several free options available to you that will allow you to grow your list fairly quickly and relatively easily.

The one caveat to all this is that you should not become a spammer. People wont listen to what you have to say and there is also a good chance that your account could be flagged, which will kind of defeat the purpose of growing your follower numbers.

How To Get More Followers

Put simply, the basics of getting more followers is to add more people. The problem with this is that, Twitter has limits on the number of people you can follow each day and adding a couple of hundred people manually takes time, a lot of time, even more if you are looking to add people with particular interests. This is where the automatic tools come in handy.

There are tools you can buy that cover almost every feature you could want, but these range in price from $55 – $197. Luckily, there are free tools available that will give you most of the features you require.

Using Firefox

The first tool is a simple Firefox Greasemonkey script. If you don’t know what Firefox is, it is a free Web Browser that offers many more features then Internet Explorer. You can download your free copy of Firefox here. Once you have FireFox installed, download and install the Greasemnkey plugin. Once you have added this, just download the free Twitter Friend Adder.

With all this setup, you are ready to start adding friends automatically. To do this, find a big name you want to follow, to begin with preferably in the same niche you are in. For example, if you are in the tech niche, then you might go to Chris Pirillo’s profile and click on his followers (see image below). In the top left you will see a button saying “Add All Followers”. Clicking this will automatically start adding one of his followers every 2 seconds until your follower limit is reached. In theory, you are permitted to follow 1,000 people each day, but there are some constraints to this number, which you can read about in my post on Twitter Limits Explained.

Finding Followers

If you are stuck for profiles to add, just got to wefollow, where you can find a list of the top Twitter users across a range of niches.

Another tool I use to add users is a service called twittgeek, which allows you to add users based around specific keyword. You provide a list of keywords that you’re interested in and twittgeek scans profiles to find who uses those keywords in their statues and automatically follows the.

Deleting People Is Important

Remember before where I said in theory you can follow 1,000 people each day, well that would be true if each of them followed you back. Unfortunately, in reality, that rarely happens, so it is important that you delete people that don’t follow you back, otherwise you will quickly be hammering at your Twitter account limit.

The other reason you will want to delete people is because, is that your following to follower ratio is important for several reasons. If you have lot less people following you then you are following, you will not make you look very popular. Like many aspects of life, people want to associate with popular people, so it is important to keep this ratio in check.

You should automatically unfollow everyone who doesn’t follow you back, so you keep your following to follower ratio in balance. You should only do this every couple of days, as you want to give people the chance to follow you back before you delete them.

One script that allows you to automatically unfollow people is Twitter Karma. Using it, you the option to unfollow everyone not following you in one action. Once your list begins to get large it does take a while to load though. Another tip you may want to use is to unfollow those who do not tweet very often. Untweeps is the tool to use for this. The reason for unfollowing those who haven’t tweeted for a while is that the lack of tweeting means that they aren’t really active on the service and so do not really lose anyting by unfollowing them. The other advantage to this, is that if they aren’t active on the service, then there is a good chance that they wont know you have stopped following them. Untweeps allow you to set the number of days since a profile has been updated, but personally, I would choose something around the 14 – 30 day mark.

Pro Twitter Tools

As I mentioned earlier, there are paid tools that provide the functionality I have detailed in this article and much more. If you are serious about using Twitter for marketing or some other purpose, using a professional tool will greatly simplify your tasks. I will gove a full review in a later post, but in the meantime, you can check out what I feel is the best of the current tools, tweetadder.

This really is the complete tool for taking your Twitter marketing to the next level, go and check it out now.

There are various options that you can freely use, but I had some specific requirements that most of them didn’t meet, thus limiting the choices.

Requirements

I had some fairly simple requirements that had to be met.

• It must easily integrate with the blog.
• It must be able to format the email in HTML.
• It must have autoresponder functionality.
• Users must be able to subscribe directly from the blog.
• User data can be exported for use in external programs, such as in CSV format for Excel.
• The ability to direct to specific landing pages.
• Confirmation email.
• The ability to customize the email layout.
• The ability to broadcast to multiple users.
• There should be some reporting functionality with various statistics and information.
• Reliable email delivery.
• Minimal impact on website.
• Preferably free.

These requirements are by no means exhaustive, but they are fairly essential for effective email marketing. Armed with this list, I went searching for available tools that could meet these requirements.

I can say that I was surprised by the lack of options in this market. After much searching, I came up with the following options:

• shiftthis WordPress plugin. – looks reasonable, but costs $30 to purchase.
• cforms II – quite easy to integrate, but lacks functionailty.
• PHPList Form WordPress Integration plugin – meets many of the requirements, but requires installation and management of separate application.
• Zookoda – meets nearly all of the requirements.
• Aweber – The best of the lot by a far way, but is not free.

Out of the above selection, I chose to use Zookoda, primarily because it met most of the requirements while also being free. Zookoda has many good features, but it appears to be quite neglected since IZEA (PayPerPost) purchased it in April 2007 and does not seem to have had any development since the last time I tried it.

TechCrunch even forecast it going to the deadpool in December 2007, after IZEA suspended the service due to what it called excessive spamming.

The service is functioning again at the moment, but it does appear to be heavily neglected, and slightly old now, which is a pity, as it could be a very valuable service in IZEA’s collection.

Because of this neglect, and the increased features offered, I will probably switch to Aweber at some stage in the future, as it does provide the most complete solution.

I first heard of Brian Campbell on John Chow’s blog. If you are not familiar with John Chow’s blog, he basically writes posts about products or services that generate affiliate income for him.

At the end of April, John had a post on a guy by the name of Brian Campbell who was going to demonstrate how to make $10,000 in 37 days on Facebook.

I read the post and immediately thought, ‘ok, here we go again, some guy is going to suck a bunch of people in to the trap and then hit them with the sales pitch’. As it turns out. I was not too far off.

To condense Brian’s strategy, essentially he searches for appropriate people on Facebook, i.e. people who have an interest in marketing, entrepreneurialism and any associated area with making money online. He then proceeds to add at least 500 of these people as friends and create a Facebook group with these friends as members.

He repeats this process, creating more groups and inviting more people to join them, while promoting his Website, product and seminar series to each group and continually updating his status to increase his profile in each ‘friends’ Facebook feed.

Once his friends list is large enough, he creates and mailing list (not in Facebook) and sends direct email marketing to the list.

Brian explains all of the details on how to achieve all of this in a series of MP3’s and videos. If you are not familiar with this type of marketing (it has been around for years in the form of all those get rich quick books), there is some useful information in Brian’s videos.

I briefly skimmed them, as the general premise and concepts were nothing new to me. I actually thought that if he had a slicker presentation, his scam strategy would be far more effective.

When you get to the end of Brian’s videos, you find out the secret to making money from Facebook; you need to have a product or service to sell; the more expensive the better.

You need to pick very popular niches, with minimal competition. Easier said then done, but don’t fear, here is where Brian makes his money. For an upfront fee of $47 and then a monthly fee between $27 – $297, depending on the package you have chosen, Brian will show you how to do this.

When Brian fist announced this ‘money making scheme’ he said he would show everyone how he did it for free and to some degree he has, but, in reality, he hasn’t. There is nothing illegal with what he is doing, it is just a typical example of taking advantage of people’s susceptibility to be taken in by the prospect of easy riches. Don’t buy into, you would be better off saving your money.

Oh yeah, just to make sure there is no ambiguity, that’s not me in the image…..

What is unusual about this post is that although I hadn’t previously checked how much traffic it was bringing in, it had never been near the top of the stats, so hadn’t jumped out at me as an effective post. Sure, the day I posted it, it received a quick spike in traffic, but after that, nothing major.

Now though, that one post has brought in somewhere around 30,000 new visitors to the site in the last three weeks and is regularly rating as the top post on most days. Even better, each visitor is averaging 4 page views per visit.

The story itself is not that good, I have, and do post much better content. When I wrote this particular post I set out with the intention of generating a lot of traffic and while the content may have been simple, it took some time to put it all together.

What’s The Story

So what caused this sudden boost in traffic for this ‘old’ post?

Several factors came together at the same time, but the primary one is that I redesigned my theme. The new theme seems to generate a lot more Google search traffic. So it would seem that with the previous theme, the post simply wasn’t being indexed as well by Google. It jsut goes to show the value of a good SEO enhanced theme.

Will It Last?

So how long do I expect this surge in traffic to last? Going by the stats of my other posts that rate quite highly, I expect this post to do the same. It will taper off and eventually drop down to bring in 300 – 400 new visitors a day, but that is still a nice healthy figure.

Capitalize

Now there is not a lot of point in generating traffic, if you are not prepared to take advantage of it. Rather then sit back and simply wait for the surge to drop, today I wrote another post along a similar thread to the previous one. Rather then simply wait for this post to be found by the search engines, or by readers looking at the related links, I put a link in each of these posts, promoting the other one. I also did a couple of other little things…

Now my new post is rating number two on my stats, not all that far behind the top rating one.

Know Thy Stats

Of course, none of this would be evident unless I was actively following my Website stats. I do this several times a day, and it takes nothing more then a quick glance at the dashboard to see how things are going. There are a lot of stats tools you can use for doing this. My favorite though is this one. I have posted about it previously here and I can highly recommend it as an invaluable tool to have.

I received an email from the founders of DealDotCom this morning announcing the launch of their new service, an excerpt of the message is repeated below.

Something BIG is coming. Next Wednesday (April 16th) the founders of DealDotCom are launching a “get traffic” service.

What Is Traffic Kahuna?

I will have more details for you soon. But, in a nutshell Traffic Kahuna is a high-quality network of 650 blogs and 1100 websites that will publish your articles and content (and give you high-quality backlinks).

If you have even basic knowledge of how the search engines work, you are probably jumping out of your chair right now!

Yes, this is VERY exciting.

There is nothing out there like Traffic Kahuna. This has been 2 years in the making.

Look for more details early next week as we move towards featuring Traffic Kahuna on DealDotCom next Wednesday.

As I am a DealDotCom member, I am able to take advantage of the affiliate program when it launches. By the sound of it, it could be very big. If you are not a member of DealDotCom, I suggest you join now, because the affiliate program is closed to the public.

Strange title I know, but I was looking at some video on Youtube tonight and came across a video of Donna Summer singing one of her hits called ‘Love To Love You Baby’.

I remembered reading something about this song years ago, so I did a little research and found what I was looking for.

Now you may be wondering what a Donna Summer hot from the 1970’s has to do with the title of this post and blogging in general, I’ll get to that.

Love To Love You Baby

In 1975, Donna Summer released Love To Love You Baby in the US and Britain. The song was a full sixteen minutes long and took up the entire first side of the album of the same name.

OK, all very interesting stuff, but what does this have to do with viral blogging? Well the thing about this song is that it had a viral element to it.

Going viral is not a new phenomenon, that has suddenly appeared with the Web. Sure the Web makes it easier in many respects, and certainly faster, but it is not unique.

The viral element to this song was the sound and the story behind it that created the fuss. In the song.

It was reported that Donna Summer literally laid on her back and recorded the song in one take, groaning and moaning her way through all sixteen minutes of it.

The orgasmic pleasure she portrayed was so realistic that the song was banned by the BBC — whose censors counted 22 “orgasms”. Likewise, Time Magazine counted 23 “orgasms” and the song was denounced by the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

I bet you can figure out what happened next. Yep, the song became an International hit, climbing to #2 on the US charts and making the top 5 in the UK.

Viral Orgasm

At the time, the media reported that the orgasmic sounds on the album were real and made all kinds of fuss over it. I am not sure about the marketing, but I would say it is a pretty reasonable guess that the record label and marketing execs deliberately pushed this angle and more then likely were the ones that instigated the entire campaign and uproar.

It worked, this one hit took Donna Summer out of European obscurity and catapulted her to the top of the International charts as the Queen of Disco. I’d call that a pretty effective example of viral marketing.

How To Leverage Viral Blogging

Now I am not suggesting that you all go out there and moan and groan your way through a podcast, that’s just not sexy; what you can do though is pay attention to your posts, especially the title. You should not aim, or expect every post you write to go viral, it just ain’t gonna happen. What you should do is think about your titles a little more when you are writing something you think may get attention.

If you want an example, take a quick look at the front page of Digg; I just did and here are a couple of examples.

• The Bizarre History of 10 Common Sayings
• 10 (Almost) Impossible Things to Do With Your Body
• Man with suicide victim’s heart takes own life
• The Saddest Picture You’ll Ever See

Now see if the same stories are as attention grabbing with more mundane titles.

• The History of Common sayings
• Things to Do With Your Body
• Transplant Patient Commits Suicide
• You can see the difference can’t you.A mangy looking kitten

New Power

Now that you are in possession of this amazing new power, do not abuse it, you still have to give something back, or you will quickly get ignored by the same crowd that was attracted to your title. Unless you have an abundance of entertaining articles or content, you should not try and make every single title have a viral element. What you should do though is build upon the traffic it creates.

One viral post is not enough to give you long term growth. While it can be extremely effective, you need to build upon it. If all you did was run the one viral campaign and then sit back, thinking that your marketing is done, you would have wasted a golden opportunity. You need to grasp the moment and maintain the buzz, building upon it to establish your blog.

I am going viral tomorrow. This is just a heads up.

I think you have all had a good run, but it is time to give you all the Webtrepreneur bug; well that’s what you come here for isn’t it?

So tomorrow, I give you a viral post to demonstrate the technique.

I have never tried to go viral on this blog before, so you may be asking how I can make such a statement. Well, I have done it on my other sites and even on this one without really trying I have had stories really take off.

So how will I do it, come back tomorrow to see…

Cut Out The Middleman

The trouble is, managing everything associated with your site’s advertising space can be very time consuming. Sure, you can just stick with Google Adsense, but generally, for the minimal amount of money that it will bring in for most blogs, it is useful for nothing more then acting as a filler. I know, there are exceptions, with some people making a great living off Adsense, but there are a lot of factors at play that the average blogger can’t easily attain. Adsense ads are also getting stale; they are losing their impact.

For most bloggers, the real money is in selling their own advertising space; for most, this involves signing up with an ad program, where you give them 50% of your ad earnings in exchange for letting them sell your ad space. Worse still, you often don’t get to set your own price for the ads and have very little control over many other aspects.

Control Your Own Advertising

Wouldn’t it be great if you could have your own simple system that took all the hard work out of running your on advertising sales, allowed you to control every aspect and also let you keep 100% of the profits? Well there is and it’s called the OIOPublisher Wordpress plugin.

Configuration

OIOPublisher WordPress Plugin is very configurable, and can handle, email advertising, text link ads, inline ads, banners and reviews.

One of the great features of this plugin is that advertisers can see for themselves, the type of ads you are accepting, the price you are charging, and if it is what they are looking for, fully automated system makes it easy for them to upload their banners, input their links or request a sponsored reviews without you having to do anything more then approve it (and that is only if you select that option).

Payments are fully automated with PayPal and you can set it up for specific campaign durations. Even the previously tedious task of contacting advertisers to organize renewal of their ad prior to the expiration is handled automatically by OIOPublisher. Prior to expiration of the ad it will notify the advertiser via email if they’d like to renew their advertising. If they choose not to renew, the banner or link will expire, and the ad space will then be available for a new advertiser to purchase.

Extras And Price

OIOPublisher also provides a marketplace where advertisers can search for specific areas to advertise, so there are even more ways for you to be found.

I am using this plugin on most of my sites (I’ll use it on all of them, once I get around to adding and configuring it) and can definitely recommend it to anyone looking at monetising their site.

OK, the thing that most of you are interested in, is the price. You can buy OIOPublisher WordPress Plugin for only $37. If that isn’t good enough for you, it gets better. If you have more then one site, no problem, you do not have to purchase extra licenses. The one payment is for all and any site you want to use it on. A one off payment of $37 for unlimited use! Doesn’t get much better then that.