Tuesday, August 18, 2009

11 Proven Ways to Increase Your Twitter Followers

When something is said to be proven, it helps others readily. These are easy, tested-and-proven ways to increase your Twitter followers.

Anything achieved in a short period of time demands great respect. Twitter has indeed grown from a startup which was about status updates to a medium that has revolutionized the way social networking is done. But instant success in social networking brings with it the threat of bots. When you try hard to increase your followers you can be scammed by bots. Don't be deceived by bots. The simple ways listed below can help you increase your twitter followers steadily:
11 Proven Ways to Increase Twitter Followers

1. Focus on your niche and start tweeting. – You maybe a blogger, entrepreneur, service provider or a developer. Be focused. Choose your niche and start tweeting about it. You can earn a lot of followers with similar interests.

2. Be more professional than personal. – Twitter was once a space to express what you were doing. Now, being a powerful social medium, Twitter is known for knowledge-sharing, connecting to people of similar interest and a lot more. To increase your followers be informative and professional.

3. Use simple Push and Pull.– When it comes to increasing your followers, you can use the simple Push and Pull techniques. Pushing is all about spreading your Twitter profile. It can be via blogs, forums, profile links and other social media. Pulling is something related to attracting people to follow you with your content. One fine example of pulling is the RSS feed.

4. Keep the conversation going. – To increase your followers, it is always necessary to keep in touch with your current followers. That way you let your followers share their ideas with you and retweet your content. So it is important to keep the conversation going with people who reply to your messages.

5. Read the minds of your target audience. – Hit your target audience straight with information. You have to make them look for your ideas and the information you share. To catch the pulse of your followers, Just make sure what they talk about and tweet about. This will help you to gel with your target audience.

6. Don't Self-Pamper. Be Neutral. - Don’t keep on tweeting about your blog or your own stuff. Be neutral and share new ideas in your niche. You can be a perfect blend of personal and professional tweets. But do not forget to tweet the breaking news and the latest happening in your industry to gain more followers.

7. Be one among the recommended list of followers. – Popular bloggers sometimes publish the Twitter IDs of their readers and if you get into the list, you can get a lot of followers from that particular post.

8. Just ask a question. – To have interaction through your Twitter account and to start communication with fellow tweeters, just ask a question. This will open the doors to convert a stranger into your follower. You can easily pick up a conversation by asking a question.

9. If you ask, why not reply? - Also to be popular among your group of tweeters, try to answer as many as questions as possible. But be sure that you are confident with the answer. People will start following you for your answers.

10. Cross Promotion – Many a time this works. Don't just think of online promotion to spread your Twitter profile. Why can't it be word of mouth? When you are a pro and you help your followers with their queries, you can gain a lot of followers through word of mouth promotion itself.

11. Use Twitter directory services.– You can list your Twitter ID in any of the Twitter directory services. You need to choose the right category in such directories so as to get followers of similar interest.

Friday, August 14, 2009

Link, Content, Design - Do they add value to your SEO?

If web design is the heart of website success, we can term SEO as the brain of website success. Normally, a website comes for optimization once the design part gets completed. At this point, the website is raw, without any SEO stuff.

The burden of optimization worsens things for both SEOs and designers. SEOs need to optimize the visually-compelling website. Designers need to make phenomenal modifications in it to achieve higher ranking in SERPs.

To avoid all these circumstances, it is better if SEO and design get married in the initial phases itself. Better if they evolve together into a well-optimized and well-designed website.

SEO is not an old snake oil with stereotypical strategies or straitjacket methodologies. It is a fast growing, ever-changing 'happening' field in the world wide web. Search Engine ranking algorithms change every now and then so much so that one can easily forget about meta tag optimization, keyword stuffing etc.

In such a state of flux, does Link, Design and Content deliver any value to a website? If they do, should web design and SEO work together to achieve this? The answer is a big YES!

Make Links Carry Value

No more “click here” and “learn more” links will be seen in a website if SEOs and Designers work together. When we try to go with terms like “click here” and “learn more” for making a clickable anchor text, we lose vital keyword rich anchor texts in internal navigation / internal linking.

Tweet for a job!

So you are a post graduate. Ok. Let's make that a double-degree. Ranker. Etc. Etc. The numbers on your mark sheet make you beam. Your parents walk three foot above the ground, especially when neighbors are around. So, everything is falling in place.

And then, you want to work for a company. You await the recruitment ad. When the ad comes out, you see some new requirements and some new numbers.

Candidate should have 250 followers on Twitter.

500 Friends on Facebook.

250 Connections on LinkedIn.

You are stumped. And you wonder, what’s changed with the world. After all, Orkut and Facebook were banned in college. And the only ones who used to spend time over there, were 'losers'! At least, that was what you were told. And then the doubts start creeping in. About the job. The company et al.

Hmm.


Tweet for a job

You think that all of that is a wave of imagination in a jobless mind. Well, think again.