So today I want to talk a little bit about how cluttered my desk and twitter account has become. I think its important to note that I don’t always practice what I preach but I am getting better and following through with all the things I start.

Today I was looking at my new twitter account and I realized I had 27 DM’s sitting there in my account, only two of them were real messages from actual twitterers, the rest were all auto DM’s I get from the people I have started following.

That brings me to my point for this post, de-cluttering your life and DM’s is a good thing, there is nothing worse then a messy twitter account or garage that needs organizing!

Note: I know this was a rather short post but that doesn’t make it not very important! Take time out today to complete one of the clutter tasks on your to-do list, whether that’s around the house or on your twitter account!

Decide, commit, its as simple as it gets!

As promised I am making 2 posts about how I am building my new twitter account @shblogger so fast.

I am doing several different things so I will go over them briefly here and then you can do the same for your own twitter account, no matter how many followers you already have these techniques will work! I started out with zero and I know others who started out with hundreds and quickly reached multi-thousands after doing these techniques!

Step 1 – Power in a name.

Believe it or not the techniques I am going to show later on in these posts may not work without a good twitter account name. When it comes to choosing a name for your twitter account, remember “smaller is better”.

The twitter account name is like your calling card and should be simple, short and to the point with your company or blogs brand. The shorter names are easier to remember and to re-tweet.

You dont like your time wasted so why waste someone elses?

Step 2 – Twitter profile.

One of the mistakes I see a lot of young twitter users making is with there twitter profiles in general. The profile should not only compliment yourself but it should also make a statement of some kind. If you teach people to do something then put that in your bio line.

Aside from the right sidebar stuff which you can edit to your own descretion I encurage you to get a great Twitter Background image setup. If you visit Twitter.com/Shblogger you will see my mascot and a cool background all at once! This is how it should be done, it shows potential followers that you care enough to have a customer twitter page instead of the default boring ones!

There are lots of people who create these backgrounds (including me for $15) so feel free to contact someone to get it done for you if your not a decent designer! Feel free to ask me any questions in a comment below about your twitter profile and I will be happy to answer them.

Step 3 – Follow Trade.

Now that you have picked the perfect short easy to remember catchy twitter account name its time to start getting followers. We will be discussing several techniques for this so lets get right into it!

The first technique is the follow trade, basically the way twitter has worked since it started was simple, you follow the people you knew and in return they followed you back so you could all connected and be connected with your daily lives.

Not much has changed in this regard and the techniques still work great!

All you have to do is follow people and they will return the favor, however as a person you can’t possibly know Hundreds Of Thousands of people yourself unless your a celebrity with fans correct?

There is a site that @JohnChow started called TwitterFollower.com, twitter follower allows you to do follow trades very easily. The system is pretty self explanatory so I won’t go into detail here on how to use it, just watch John Chows video explaining how it works here.

Step 4 – Link to it, promote it, get it seen.

This step is a little less effective right off the bat but over time you will see results by doing it. I encourgage you to if you havent already go ahead and link to your twitter name on your blog, websites and even your email signature can be  some great places to start!

When it comes to promoting your twitter account you should try anything and everything (be sure to comment below if you have any ideas for me to try). I promote my twitter name here on my blog, through videos and even to my friends and family on Facebook that already know and trust me.

Why not try linking to your twitter account through other social media sites? You may be suprised at the results it delivers!

Step 5 – Run a contest.

The final and last step to replicate my success with your own twitter profile is to run a contest through twitter. By running a twitter contest you will not only let your current followers know about the contest but everyone who enters finds out about it as well!

A twitter contest should work like this, make a post on your blog about the contest, tell them to enter they simply need to re-tweet the contest message (actually give them the contest message to copy and paste, be sure to include your twitter account name in the contest message as well as a link back to your blog) then sit back and watch twitter do all the work for you.

As long as you give away a decent prize (no ebooks here guys, give away cold hard cash or an electronic device) then you will see your twitter follower count rise over night without even lifting a finger! Its kinda like cheating the sytesm but in a good way!

Lets wrap it up.

I believe if you follow all these steps I have outlined above you will get over 100 followers in your first day. I did not even run the contest nor get my twitter background fixed up the first day and I already gained over 100 in my very first day which is amazing!

God bless and send me any success stories you may have!

Well it finally happened, my twitter account was hacked about a week ago and they changed the pass so now I can’t login to make tweets! I had over 1400 followers on my twitter account and I can kiss all those goodbye.

However I still have a smile on my face and for very good reason, when I found out yesterday that I no longer had access to the account I decided instead of getting all worked up about it that I would just start a new account and build it up like I did my last one.

In just 1 day I already have over 100 followers (the amount most people only dream of), not only that but I have already had people reply to my tweets and send me direct messages!

Over the next 2 days I will be making 2 twitter related posts (possibly video) all about what I am doing to build my twitter following so fast. Its not as hard as some people make it sound and I wager if I do these techniques for the next week or so I should have several hundred followers by then.

My new Twitter Account can be found @shblogger

Follow me and message me on twitter and I will follow you back (no strings attached).

Thanks everyone!

Sorry for not posting many updates as of late, I have been busy with some other projects and just have not had much motivation to post as of late. However I made this post for you all because it should help everyone out.

Have you ever wanted to know who you were following that was not following you back?

I know I have that way I could remove them from my twitter follow list, it would not be an issue at all if Twitter allowed you to Follow as many people as you want but they have a 2,000 followers or 110% max followers limit.

Its actually smart of them to do this but its aggravating for people like me who want to follow everyone and get followed in return! Today I am going to teach you AN EASY way to do this.

When you go to FriendOrFollow.com you will be shown a really cool search field, here is a screenshot!

All you have to do is type your twitter user name and hit the submit button. The FriendOrFollow.com website does the rest, after awhile (depends how popular you are) you should be presented with a list like this which displays all the people that you are currently following but have not returned the favor and followed you!

Once you are presented with this list it is your job to now go in and un follow all these people by hand (grunt work). I know it sucks but I did it when I had over 1,000 in this list and did it in about 1 hr so its not completely un-doable. You could also hire someone to do it for you!

I hope this post and technique have been useful to you, I know I will be using this method for a long time to get my twitter account to 100% pure followers!

Enjoy!

Update: Mass Delete UnFollowers

After creating the post above one of my loyal readers came on with a comment with a link to a tool that actually will allow you to mass delete all the people you are following that have not returned the favor! You can read about the tool here: http://dossy.org/archives/000570.html

And you can use the tool here: http://dossy.org/twitter/karma/

Just enter your username and password for twitter and click Whack!

I have not fully tested this tool yet so use at your own risk!

This post is to help you understand how to actually get people in your favorites list, it eluded me for some time until it finally clicked in my brain!

Here are the steps to do it, just 5 but its all you need!

1. Its really simple, lets say you just love me on twitter right? Go to my profile page which is at http://twitter.com/shandaman, once you are here find a recent tweet that I have made which you like.

2. Hover on that tweet, you should see two options on the right side of the tweet come up. One is an arrow so you can reply to the tweet (id love it if you did) but the other one is a STAR symbol.

3. If you click the star (Go Ahead And Do It Now) I will be added into your Favorites list!

4. That’s all their is to it, so simple yet so hard to figure out until you know (its kind of like magic tricks).

5. I hope this helps everyone and I know this was a short post but it was a necessary one I believe, try it out favorite your tweeters!

Connections do make a difference and social media aka Twitter is one of the best ways to do it, read along and I will show you my easy process!

Step 1.Do you have a twitter account? OK so your reading about how I doubled my twitter followers in one day but do you even have a twitter account? If you don’t then go sign up for one right now, twitter will be vital in the future “trust me on this guys”.

If you do already have a twitter account then here is all you need to do…

Sit back and think about what you currently blog about, is your blog focused around baseball cards, books or perhaps baby bibs? Think deeply about it and decide what your blog is 100% mostly about!

Lets say your blog is mainly about baseball cards and the people who would most benefit from your blog are of course other baseball card collectors.

Step 2. This is so easy a child can do it, seriously guys all you have to do is go to the twitter find people page, once you are their simply type in a related key-word to your main blogging topic. In our case type in baseball, you wouldn’t want to type in baseball cards because your searching peoples names on twitter not their likes.

You will then be presented with a list of people that have the word baseball in their user name!

Step 3.This is easier then you thought, from here you can simply click follow on every person on the page! But wait their is a second page (go on the second page and beyond adding every possible person with the word baseball in their user name).

There could be thousands or just a few hundred, it really does not matter. What we are doing is called targeted searching on twitter, once you follow all these people the fun part begins!

Step 4. Automatically people with like-minded baseball minds will begin to follow you back.

Now don’t get to excited here, they have only started following you and remember they can stop following you very easily at any time.

This is the hard part, once they have actually started following you don’t go blasting them with your blog url and asking them to subscribe. Instead send them a message and ask how they got into baseball and what they like.

Twitter is about relationships and developing them can take time, I have just started using twitter but because im gracious and reply to the messages I get and of course send messages to other people I am connecting with people on their level. In a couple months I can then hit them all with my link by doing a tweet and they will all see it.

What do you think? Is twitter for you, can you see yourself making friends on twitter, I know I can but id love to see and hear your thoughts!

Anyways, lets get onto the tweeting goodness of this post…

I signed up my InfectedByBugs Twitter account several months back, when I first signed up to twitter I tried to get everyone I knew to follow me. Around (47 followers at the time), slowly after time I stopped updating twitter, mainly because I did not see the importance it would have a a few months down the road (now).

Well I came across twitter again the other day, so I fired my account back up (can’t believe I remembered the login info)! I have decided to tweet at least once per day for the next couple of months to see if anything happens, while tweeting I will of-course be trying to grow my follower counts and make money off those followers (go ahead and follow me right now guys)! My frequent updates are now only possible because I got a app on my iPhone for twittering, you can read a review of this app on my BrainLeaked.com blog!

With that said I think its important to note a couple of ways we can build followers and also make money from our tweeter account, so in no particular order here are a couple of tips / ideas I came up with, be sure and add your input to this post by commenting with other ideas you may have!

Oh, below the tips is a video basically saying the same thing but I thought it was time for a little text input on this blog as well as video!

Getting Twitter Followers?

The first question everyone is asking is about gaining followers on twitter, I concur that this can be a difficult task. Here is a couple of ways that should not only work but be extremely easy to make happen! I will be trying these myself in the coming weeks to see what happens with my own twitter account!

A. Follow me & I will follow you! Its simple, you ask people to follow you with the guideline that if they do you will follow them.

B. Run a contest! Try running a contest to get followers, you may be suprised how well this works!

C. Ask and you shall recieve! Just ask your friends, family and co-workers to follow you! Most are more then willing!

Making Money Of Twitter Followers?

The next thing people want to know is how they can make money off their tweeter followers. I mean, who wants to do all the work of getting followers simply to talk with them every day about useless stuff? Well this is where the video part of this post comes in, here is the truth about making money off twitter right now and for the future!

Well today I want to list my top 5 social websites that I like on the net. Granted these are not all the biggest but I love them because they work and don’t have a ton of spam in them which devalues each submission!

Here we go….

Digg.com – Although your not supposed to submit your own site the Digg people do it anyhow. However if you can get your readers to submit your posts to Digg regularly your well on your way to massive traffic and visitors that will signup!

Blurpalicious.com – My buddy owns this one and at PR4 its a great way to get power from the search engines! Try it out and see your site get indexed in about 1 hr from this social site!

Propeller – This is one of my favorites because its PR7 and I have gotten sites to pr5 and even a pr6 using this one site alone! Its all about how you and when you hit this one to get page rank benefits!

StumbleUpon – When it comes to getting traffic from a younger generation community you really cannot get any better then StumbleUpon!

YouTube – Although this is a video site its one of the easiest ways to get traffic from people because everyone loves videos! Try it out and see for yourself!

Here is a small video to seal the deal on this post! Be sure to comment!

When someone visits your blog what do they see? Perhaps a gorgeous wordpress theme, perhaps not? Maybe when they come in they are plastered with advertisements all over the place, maybe you don’t have any listed at all?

Whatever your visitors see will either make them come back or steer clear forever more. What I like to do is get my family to look over the site and see what they see because they are kind enough to list what they see so I can correct it or stick with the parts that work!

You could do the same, just ask your friends or family members. Now, you may be wondering what this has to do with traffic? Well tbh right this second im not sure but I will type it here once I know…

So now that you have some info as to what visitors see when they enter your site you can tailor your site to suite everyone’s needs and more then likely you will have some happy rss subscribing campers!

Thats the key really, the key to big traffic is return visitors. You need to somehow convince your readers that you are worth coming back to over and over again.

If you don’t they will find a blogger who does and they will be lost to you forever!

So I will now leave you with a question… What are some ways that you feel are good ways to get return visitors? We know now that its important but how do we do it? I would love to hear any of your input to the subject while I think myself!