Tag: Tips

Do You Want More Sales ?

We see a lot of ads all over in our lives! like internet, TV, Newspaper, Streets, Radio, beginning of a movie in the theater, at intervals etc. Its all around us. So much so that most of us have developed ad blindness. Geeks can smell adsense ads from far 🙂 let alone click it!

advertisement-everywhere-panti

Do You Have A Business? Want To Sell More ?
If you run any online or offline business, it’s wise to start advertising your business. Well this is common sense, but many businesses are still operating without ever trying to advertise.

“Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing, but nobody else does.”
— Steuart Henderson Britt
(Marketing Management and Administrative Action)

If you are making $5000 per month without advertising, then how about making $15000 per month, by spending $100 for effective advertising ?
It’s like having a sales force to bring in more leads, more business to you. Wouldn’t you spend $100 to get an additional profit ? Why not, right ?

Product First
But for all these things to work, you must have a good product in place. If you have that, then there is no need to step back.

“If you believe in what you do and you can really help people, then you have a moral obligation to try and bring it to as many people as possible.”
—- Chet Holmes

Most of us think advertising as evil..but if you have a good product, and a nice offer to make, then I don’t think you need to hesitate to get all your target audience to buy your product. Most people under-estimate the power of advertising. If you think you have a good product which helps people, then why not provide them a nice offer via advertisement and help them even more ?

#1 Form of Advertising
The old form of marketing – “The Word Of Mouth” marketing is still the #1. But to get to that point, you can use advertising effectively to build the brand.

See the biggest brands in the world, for any commercial product. There is at least one big dominator in most niches. How do you think someone became #1 ? Yes, they obviously have a good product, and a big budget to market via advertisement.

Darker Side!
There are some products which are not so good, but they still manage to sell ? It’s the marketing trick and the magic of advertisement. But you bet, they won’t be in the market for a long time. If someone has a bad product, and tries to sell via advertisements, these advertisements will eventually hurt the business, no matter how good they are at advertising. But sure, with advertising they will make some quick bucks for a short time.

Essentials
For long term successful business, these are the key ingredients:
1. Have a good product.
2. Market the product effectively.
If you fail in any one, your business is likely to fail as well.

Give advertising a try, if you haven’t already. Build the brand, sell the product, help as many as possible.

Tips for getting started
There will always be (most of the times) some offers for advertisers to get started. For example, Google provides Free Google Adwords coupon, Chitika and Bidvertiser also provides Free $$ for new advertisers to get started. Make a quick search on our blog and you will find a lot of discount coupons for advertising on various ad networks.
If you want to advertise on a magazine, ask for a offer. You will always need to negotiate and never compromise with the quality of the ad copy that you write.

Let us know, how you market your business, both online and offline.

7 Ways To Get Traffic – Before You Need It!

One common question we all hear, and at some point of time have asked – How to get traffic to our new blog?

Here are some examples of how I got my first 500 – 800 visits per day in my initial days of blogging:

build-it-before-you-need-it

I started it before I actually needed it:

1. Commenting on other blogs: I had spent some time in selecting a domain name(even though I din’t have much knowledge about selecting a good domain name at that time). And started participating in comment section of various blogs – niche which I was interested in. And included the URL of my blog in all the comments(not within the comment section).
Tips: Do not leave your new website blank. Atleast have a single introduction page, or better if you can have atleast 10 good articles published.

2. SEO benefits: As I already had the blog up, most search engines had already crawled my blog and was visible in results page for some keywords.
Tips: If you know your niche, then have atleast 10 good articles published – which are fully concentrated on your niche. Include keywords related to your niche and take time to carefully optimize those 10 articles, so that you rank high for some keywords.

3. Put up the email/rss subscription options on your blog: Even though I had a single page on my blog – where I wrote about myself(profile kind of), many people subscribed to it! I had 30 – 40 subscribers when I started blogging – when my first real article was live.
Tips: Put a big and highly visible(yet not annoying) subscription link on your blog. I guess people who signup for your blog updates in the initial stage are email subscribers, so make sure you put email subscription option and highlight that its a free service.

4. Include your blog link in any social networking site you use.
Tips: Have conversation with like minded people, who are interested in the niche your blog falls in. This strategy would help in more conversion rate, and you will enjoy the social networking as you communicate with like minded people.

5. Participate in forums: Forums are good place to meet like minded people and to share your knowledge and to gain knowledge from other participants. Use your blog link in the signature area of the forum and in your forum profile.
Tips: Do not try to promote your blog in any ways. Because you don’t have an active blog yet and that may act against you. So be genuine in helping as many people as you can. This increases your credibility and builds a community around you before you actually need it.

6. Write Testimonials: As you probably read some books, attended some course, used some online services before you started your blog. Send your testimonial to those people, if you really like them and recommend them to other people. Again be genuine and don’t do it just to get a link back.
Tips: See previous testimonials. If the owner of the product is linking to the person who gave the testimonial, then you can expect a link back, if he thinks your testimonial helps his business.
Take time and form a very good, real testimonial. Do not make it over hyped inorder to get through.

7. Public Speaking & Presentation: If you get a public speaking opportunity and/or you have to give a public presentation for a social cause, then at the end its not a bad idea to show your blog Name and URL along with your Name and designation or whatever. This will give people a way to follow up with you, in case some one is very much impressed with your presentation and want to get more from you.

Caution
At this stage do not try to promote your blog in any ways, because it may have an adverse effect. Just enjoy the benefit of having a blog before its actually fully active.

Do not keep postponing the date to start blogging actively. no time is perfect time.
Imagine, if you are planning to have a blog and never actually taking your first step to find a good name, register it and write atleast 10 good articles – you would miss a lot of opportunity. You will have to leave comments on other websites/blogs as an anonymous guy, you will loose the SEO benefit etc to name some.

Do not plaster your blog with ads when you’re not yet blogging consistently, because this may give people a wrong impression.

I am not saying that – If you don’t start your blog/business now, you will loose money. But you will surly loose some benefits of starting it early enough. You will loose all the extra benefits I have talked above.

Finally
Its a good idea to take some time out of your busy life and find a good domain name(which is the only thing probably which will take some time), register it, and try to write atleast 10 quality articles concentrating on your niche.

Often times we get a brilliant idea for a blog post, but only to know that – “It would have been great, if I had started a blog”. Let that not happen to you, start a blog early and learn along the way.

Slow and Steady Wins the Race. Stop thinking about all the details, just start a blog/business. You are bound to stumble along the way, but you will figure things out as you move along.

It would be better to make a mistake while blogging than to never start the blog. Learning never ends and if you are thinking of starting a blog or a business after learning everything, then take it from me – You are not going to start your blog or business. Because learning is a never ending process.

10 Ways To Make Your Blog Load Faster and Save Bandwidth

This post is part of Saturday, Sunday Series for Newbie Bloggers. You can contact me, if you have any questions.

Sridhar
basic-blogging-Question
Q. I have been tweaking my blog to make it load faster, but nothing seems to be helping. And eventhough I don’t have heavy traffic to my blog, often times it goes down 🙁 Can you please suggest me something to over come my problem? Am I missing something or is it normal with all blogs. And I am hosting my blog with basic hosting package, so is that the problem?

To make blog load faster
1. Remove any extra widgets you are using on your blog.- Twitter updates, Facebook fan widget etc
2. If you are running banner ads, make sure you host all the images on your domain.
3. Make less http requests from any webpage.
Ex: Instead of using “http://yourdomainname.com/images/123.jpg” you can use “/images/123.jpg” in the img tag.
4. Use less images. Having one or two images for a article helps, anything more will really slow down the site. Use multiple images only if highly necessary.
5. Move all the CSS and JavaScript codes to an external file. And make sure to optimize them – remove extra spaces, delete the useless codes and make the scripts small and smart(good coding).
6. If you have any badges and banners which does not provide any value to your visitors, then remove it mercilessly.
7. Optimize the images that you are using on your blog.
8. Use Gzip compression. Add the following code to your .htaccess file if your web host have content compression (gzip compression) turned off. You can test it using http compression tool.


# Turn GZip compression on (as per http://tr.im/fnn6)
<Location />
# Insert filter
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
# Netscape 4.x has some problems...
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
# Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
# MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
# BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
# NOTE: Due to a bug in mod_setenvif up to Apache 2.0.48
# the above regex won't work. You can use the following
# workaround to get the desired effect:
BrowserMatch \bMSI[E] !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
# Don't compress images
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \
\.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary
# Make sure proxies don't deliver the wrong content
Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary
</Location>

9. Do not make use of lot of javascript codes to track your visitors. Try to stick only to the necessary things. And do not forget to test your sites performance using Webmasters tool.
Goto Webmasters Tool -> Labs -> Site performance.
optimization-tips-webmasters-tool
Here you can see the performance over view graph and lot more information like: Load time of certain pages from your blog, You can install a 1.5MB add-on to evaluate the performance of your pages and get suggestions on how to improve them, it also reports – what is consuming more time to load and what you can do to improve the performance etc.
10. Above all the speed of the servers where you are hosting your blog is very important – without which any tweaking will go in vain.

Bonus tips:
1. Use only the necessory plugins and remove the rest.
2. Do not use Widgets. Use handcoding and put the things into the WordPress theme directly – reducing the number of calls.

Have a backup of your blog, and if you are comfortable: Use DataBase cleanup plugin, Database optimizer plugin, delete the extra post revisions, use static links – this helps very little, if you already have Gzip compression enabled or Super cache plugin enabled.

Final Thoughts from Matt Cutts:



Hosting
Invest in a good hosting company. See to that you are paying atleast 5 to 6 $ per month for your basic hosting package. If you go far a cheaper web hosting, then the problems are mostly obvious. I suggest going with Doreo host, Blue host, Host Gator, MediaTemple etc. And a basic package is all needed in the initial days.

If you are hosting at a decent hosting company, and still facing this problem, then you must consider evaluating your blogs log files. It contains information about what is consuming the bandwidth. You can mail your hosting company support team and can ask them to check it for you and to report the possible problem. In most cases it would be a plugin problem or a faulty code introduced into the CMS. Or sometimes if you are using some automated scripts to handle some tasks, all these could create some problem, if there are some bugs.

A good hosting company should be able to help you with this – if not, you know, its time to move on. And there are plenty of good web hosts to opt.

Happy Blogging!

Related Read: 20 Tips To Optimize Your HomePage

Guide To Make Money Via Twitter: We Hate Spam Too!

First of all, let me make it clear – I am not here to suggest you or convince you to start using your Twitter account to scatter some sponsored ads and make loads of money from it.
A single rule of thumb be – “Provide Value to Your Followers.”

First of all, let me make it clear – I am not here to suggest you or convince you to start using your Twitter account to scatter some sponsored ads and make loads of money from it.

I am here to suggest some of the ways you can make money without annoying/hurting your followers.

My simple excuse for trying this service!
If you have used a product/service and satisfied with it, and if you get to tweet about the same product/service, then why not?

With so much of buzz about Making Money using Twitter, many people will be eager to know whether its just a hype or something worth while.

With this in mind, I started researching and testing some of the sponsored tweet services.

My official Twitter ID is @technotip and I tested sponsored tweets with my brand new Twitter a/c @thinkwithsatish

I got 2000+ followers in matter of days using twitfever.com. This is an online tool designed by Daniel Scocco of DailyBlogTips.com.
I suggest you to visit the website(even if you don’t want), and signup for the newsletter there. You will get a valuable Twitter course for Free.

sponsored-twitter-bird

Sponsored Tweet Service:
There are lot of websites which promise to make you rich, but never show up with a sponsored tweet again! I personally tested many of these websites(with my unofficial Twitter a/c @thinkwithsatish ) and here are some of the websites, from where you will get maximum value for your tweets(will add more websites to the list, after testing and retesting).

1. Adly: Calculates and shows how much you can expect to earn from 1 tweet.
2. SponsoredTweets
3. My Likes: This one is for most of us. You get a list of sponsored tweets, you can select the one you like, and tweet it or post on your blog. And you will receive money when someone clicks on those sponsored ads. Simple. The advantage is, even people will small number of followers can also participate and make money. Now the exciting thing! Payouts are fixed to as low as $2. Yes, you read it right. And the payment will be made once in a week i.e., on each Friday. You can almost get paid each week.

There are many more such services, but I suggest not to get distracted with any low paying services. Use only those services which you think will satisfy your followers and your pocket! ( I mean, provide best value to your tweets. )

All these websites have a market place where advertisers will select a particular group of twitterers to spread their message. In order to get more sponsors you need to maintain a good conversion rate stats, otherwise you will not get more sponsors. If you think of long term, then engage your followers and make sure that your tweets get some attention(in the distracting busy timeline of your followers).

And make sure to enter the interest area of the sponsored tweets(using keywords), so that only those tweet requests which you think would be a best suit for your target audience/followers will show up to you.

Caution: At times, when you start getting more sponsors, hence more money out of your Tweets, don’t be tempted to go the spammers way to make money. Stick on to your policies and make sure that you don’t annoy your followers by endorsing crap product/service.

A single rule of thumb be – “Provide Value to Your Followers.”

Disclaimer: I am not using my official Twitter a/c( @technotip ) for tweeting sponsored ads, thinking that it may disappoint my followers. As I said above, I used a brand new Twitter a/c( @thinkwithsatish ) to test all these. So using the above services is solely at your discreet.

Simple tweak, to maximize the chances of getting Re-Tweet

This is a small tip, but worth a separate post! So here is the small tip for this Sunday, hope you find it useful.

Always use less characters in the tweet that you want people to re-tweet. Do not expect people to rephrase the sentence and tweet it for you. If you are using a long URL in your tweet, then it will get shortened and the number of characters will get reduced automatically. But when you are tweeting the shortened URL or when you are tweeting only the plain text, always make sure that you use less words, interesting and conveying words. If you cover the whole 140 characters then how will your followers or others re-tweet your tweet? [ Here I am talking about only those tweets, to which you expect or ask a Re-Tweet ]

Recently Darren Rowse released his e-book and offered it for 25% less price, for some time. And announced it on twitter. He had used almost all the 140 characters. I found that the offer was very valuable, so wanted to re-tweet it, only to find that I was exceeding the word limit!

darren-workbook-offer-Twitter

I could have shortened it myself, but still wanted to inform Darren that, his other followers might be willing to re-tweet it and that he should rephrase it with less number of words. Darren immediately rectified it and sent another tweet, with less and effective words. This also reminds me of “The Power of Less” ( Choosing only the essential ). Removing the unwanted things or less useful thing and using only the most wanted things.

darren-workbook-offer-rephrased-twitter

After seeing Darren indirectly agreeing to the fact that “Tweets which are originally less than 140 characters tend to receive more re-tweets”, I started experimenting with it. We know that it’s a mere common sense, but twitter is a new phenomenon and we need to experiment before coming to any conclusion. (Experiment atleast before publishing the post on the blog 🙂 )

So I started asking for re-tweets once in a week or once in two week. I use to phrase the tweet with full 140 characters and would receive re-tweets only by friends with whom I chat most of the time in twitter. They never mind taking the pain of re-phrasing the sentence for me and retweeting it. But when I asked for the re-tweet on some other days, which had 100 or less characters, many people re-tweeted it. I had never seen those guys on twitter till then. I started following them after getting those re-tweet!

Remember, it may not make much of a difference for people with less number of followers, but for people with lot of followers, following this one simple technique will drastically increase the number of re-tweets.

Some other things to keep in mind are:
1. You need to give before you ask: Retweet interesting things of others, before asking for a re-tweet. If you give before asking, people will be glad to help you.
2. Ask for retweet only when you have really good piece of thing to share. Because many people wouldn’t like to recommend anything which they think will not bring value to their followers as well as to their recommendation.
3. And remember, twitter is not just about sharing links and marketing. Ofcourse it’s a very good marketing tool. But use it wisely. Provide great value to all your followers. Do not just try to sell them some thing. If you do so, one day you will end up with no followers (or just some boots following you), who will not provide value to your links or anything that you tweet.
Be genuine, be real, help people, involve in the discussion. Tweet the links or retweet only when you find the links interesting or when you think that it might interest your followers.

If you have any other small or big tips, that you have observed or experimented with twitter, then please share it with all of us..

You can follow me @technotip

Adding Your Name Beside Taskbar Clock(system tray) – In Windows

We have bought an old trick for this Sunday!
But some new approach is also mentioned at the end! Make sure to check it out.
Limitation of this old trick:
You might have already observed that, you can not insert more than 12 characters(after deleting the AM and PM symbol). To over come this limitation, we shall enter into registry.(Tested in Windows XP)

system-trayWe have bought an old trick for this Sunday!
But some new approach is also mentioned at the end! Make sure to check it out.

Here is the Old trick (For windows XP):-

1. Click on Start menu. Then on Control panel.
2. Now click on “Regional and Language Options” icon.
3. In the “Regional Options” tab, click on “Customize” button.
4. After clicking “Customize” button, another window pops up. Now click on the “Time” tab.
5. Besides AM Symbol and PM Symbol, you can add anything that you want to display in the system tray.
6. If there is limitation of characters, you can even delete the AM and/or PM symbol. Apply, OK. Done.. Look at your task bar 🙂

For Vista : In the bottom of the Format tab click on Customize this format button.

Limitation of this old trick:
You might have already observed that, you can not insert more than 12 characters(after deleting the AM and PM symbol).

To over come this limitation, we shall enter into registry.(Tested in Windows XP)
1. Click on Start button.
2. Click on Run.
3. Type regedit. Click Ok.
4. Now click the plus mark besides each of these -> HKEY_CURRENT_USER and then Control Panel and then International.
windows-registry
5. Now click on International. And find these s1159 and s2359. Right click and select “Modify Binary Data“, as shown in the above figure.
time-format-windows
6. Now follow the above figure and modify the name.
Do not change the numbers. Just modify the text in the right most side. See to that, there is a period (DOT) after each character and 3 dots to specify/display a DOT in the system tray.

Hope you enjoyed.. Please share your tips, tricks in the comment section. Have a nice week end.

60+ Ways To Increase Your Twitter Followers

It can be easily noticed that most of the people with lot of twitter followers were somehow famous before twitter era! or are popular in some field or the other, at present. They all had one or the other ways to get connected with their customers/readers/followers etc. When twitter was launched and started getting popular, all these customers/readers/followers started following them, as twitter gives an easy medium to follow someones tweets.

Update: We already have more than 60 tips to increase your twitter followers in this article and we will add some more, in the future.
NOTE: Recently Twitter made a change to its system. Where you can not see the conversation of two persons, if you are not following both of them. Ex:- If the tweet starts with “@username” then you will not be able to see it, unless you are following @username as well as the one who is tweeting it.
Disclaimer: I am writing this article to those people who want to know almost all the possible ways to increase their followers. Personally I am not interested in the number, but in the person that I follow, because we get, from whom we follow. Whom others follow is left to them.

twitter-bird-2
Tips, tricks and strategies to get more twitter followers:-

1. Treat your twitter profile as you would treat any other website. Send as much traffic as possible to your twitter profile.

2. Maintain good tweets in the first page of your profile. This seem to be a lot of work in the beginning. But seriously this will help you a lot in gaining followers. If people visiting your profile see only handful of links being tweeted, then they may not follow you, thinking that you are some sort of a automated script or some may think you as spammer. So see to that each time you decide to stop tweeting, make sure to tweet some useful things and minimize links. Because your recent tweets will be displayed in the first page of your profile.

3. Use a “tweet this” button below all your articles or below the articles which you think can go viral in twitter world.

4. Use different other services to know who is following you, and use the suggestion tool to get the suggested twitter users to follow. By this you can connect to relevant people around the world and they are most likely to follow you back, if they find you as relevant.

5. You can conduct twitter contests on your blog. This one strategy will drive a lot of followers in small amount of time. But it highly depends on what you are giving away in the contest. The higher the value of the product/service, higher the chances of getting more followers.

6. Get your twitter profile link featured on any famous website.
Ex:- If you are listed in the top 10 re-tweeters, then you can get still more followers. As people will think that you will re-tweet even their tweets!

7. If you have a website or a blog, display the follow me button at the top or any other highly visible regions.
If you get sudden hike in the traffic, you can’t expect that all those visitors will turn into your blogs subscribers or your loyal readers. But if they like the content of the blog they are most likely to follow you on twitter, as they think that you have the capacity to deliver the value.

8. Participate in twitter contests. By this you will be in a group of people who are into the contest, by this people participating may be willing to follow all other participants. So it is important that you leave a status message of the tweet or the twitter ID that you used to enter the contest, in the comment section, so that other participants can find you on twitter.

9. You can also use your twitter profile URL, while commenting on other blogs.

10. Participate in twitter actively. Re-tweet others useful tweets and get their attention. If they also re-tweet one of your tweets sometime, you will end up getting noticed by their followers, some of them may even follow you.

11. Use twitter ID in your email signature, so that your business partners or others will get to know that you are also using twitter.

12. Print the twitter profile URL on your business card.

13. If you have any other product, then you can get your twitter link printed on it.

14. Use your twitter URL at the end of each SMS(Short Messaging Service) from your phone.

15. Basic thing, but still ignored one: Invite all your friends in your Gmail, Yahoo mail etc, and they are the most potential followers you can ever get.

16. Tweet valuable things. Don’t just try to get traffic to your blog by tweeting only about your articles. You can tweet about what you are presently doing etc, bit personal things, this is what twitter followers like to know. But try to provide some more valuable things. Like tweeting a breaking news, cricket scores, latest happenings at your place etc.

17. Participate in certain groups. Groups can be created using hashtags. And some times if the group message is a hot topic, then your tweets will be listed in “hot trending topics” in search or other famous twitter services.
Ex:- #followfriday

18. Use a custom background for your twitter profile. This will show that you are a professional and chances are there, a visitor to your profile may turn into your follower.

19. Use a good twitter ID. Many people suggest to use their real name and most of the others suggest to use the business name. In case of bloggers, people mostly use their blog name inorder to build their brand recognition. If the twitter ID is somethink special or attractive, many people will endup following you without any reason!

And many such attractive twitter ID’s are auctioned at different marketplaces. It shows the importance of having a good twitter ID. And make sure that your twitter ID is not too long, which will eventually add up to the 140 character of the person who is tweeting you or re-tweeting your tweets!

20. Try to involve in conversation with people having more number of followers. When the famous person reply to your tweet, his followers see your twitter ID, if they find the conversation interesting, they may start following you and the conversation.

21. Use your twitter URL in other social networking, social bookmarking and social media sites profile page and any other online places where you have an account and space to write something. This will help you get interesting and targeted people follow you.

22. Do not use annoying profile picture. Using your real photo or your blog logo/banner is recommended. Many people use the animated images, this is ok as long as its not annoying.

23. Link to your twitter profile often. You can also add a link to your profile at the end of each article on your blog.

24. If you have an online service, then use Twitter as another tool for tech/customer support. This will make the customers to follow you inevitably!

25. Include your twitter ID in forum signature.

26. You can ask other twitterers to recommend you to their followers and you can recommend them to your followers.

27. Some bloggers publish the twitter IDs of some people as: Recommended to follow list. You can participate in such events and if your ID has been listed, you can get a lot of followers.

28. Some bloggers also collect the twitter IDs of their readers and publish on their blog, for mass following. Participate in such events and you will keep getting a lot of followers from that single page over years.

29. Some people mass follow others as they are sure that most of them followback almost all their followers. Once they reach a certain target number, they will start un-following those mass followed people. Thus they will be able to have a high number of followers with a low number of following! This is not a recommended strategy, but its still popular and most effective.

30. Utilize the about me section of twitter properly. Put your blog URL or about your business along with your small description. If you make it interesting, there is a high possibility of getting more conversions(visitors into followers). Remember, your bio is shown in the Suggested Users section, that will highly decide your number!

31. Follow others. If you do not follow anyone and keep expecting lot of people to start following you, this will not work for everyone. If you are following atleast some people, then others will feel that you are open to conversation and that you like to listen to others.

32. Remember you only have 5 to 7 seconds to convert a visitor into follower, so make your profile as good as possible. Tweak all the aspects mentioned above(related to profile page), and you can see a drastic increase in your followers number.

33. Try to pay individual attention as for as possible. Don’t just think of yourself! You can talk to one person at a time. But never isolate yourself after having all these followers. People may find you inactive and may start removing you from their following list.

34. Be helpful to other twitter users, so that they can recommend you to others, without your request.

35. Block spammers and other useless automated boots by using the blocking feature in twitter. By this you will be able to give your attention to only genuine users and will not get distracted and your twitter experience will be good. By this you can give more to twitter and get more followers.

36. If you have some 500+ followers, you can use some service to display it on your blog, as a social proof. This will defiantly attract more people to follow you. Inturn increasing your followers number and inturn attracting even more people to follow you.

37. Ask questions: By asking questions, you can easily start the conversation with any stranger. Make sure that you ask an easy question 🙂 So that many people answer you and you can start the conversation with them. Ask a simple question and also be prepared with some 1 or 2 follow up questions, so as to keep them engaged. By this strategy, you will increase the number of tweets coming your way and many of the followers of your followers will notice your conversations and may follow you. This also helps to grow the number of twitter public timeline(if you have not checked the “protect my updates” option in the settings) messages hence increasing the chances of appearing your tweets in search engines.

38. Use some twitter client or twitter apps or twitter messengers! Because people don’t like to wait for your reply. If you are still using the web page(with no AJAX implemented), then its time to switch to some twitter client and start replying. This saves a lot of time and followers! If you reply to your followers question after 24hrs or even 2 or 4 hrs late, then they probably don’t enjoy your conversation. And eventually may stop following you.

39. Tweeting at the time of US business hours i.e., from morning 9:00 to 5:00 evening would help to grow the twitter followers. I have not tested it extensively though, but still it sounds logical.

40. This tip for people who need to get followers at any cost:
You can use the PPC advertising to get the targeted twitter followers. This may seem very crazy in the beginning. But wait, this idea is better than paying twitter or any other service to feature your twitter ID.
This idea is for people who are running any business and want to get some target audience to follow them, so that they can serve those target audience.

41. If asking question is one strategy to build the followers, answering others question is another way to grab the attention. If you are following a famous person and if he is not following you, then its the right time to start replying/answering to all of his questions, as aptly as possible. By this way you can get his attention. And you can also get his followers attention, if you can make him to reply to you quite often.

42. Similar to the importance of tweeting time, the days that you spend on twitter also matters. On Saturdays and Sundays there will be less people using twitter. As people are free on these days, you may be thinking that they will spend a lot of time in these social sites, but it doesn’t work like that. People want to enjoy their life. They want to spend their valuable time with their family. So most of them or atleast those with success in their business will turn off their internet on these days.
So it will be of more beneficial, if we can follow all the strategies to get more followers, on days other than Saturday’s and Sunday’s.

43. Many of you may not think this as an ideal way to tweet, but this tip has proved to be most effective.
People follow a blog that they are interested in. The more focused a blog is upon a particular niche, more chances of it getting loyal reader base. Similarly, I have seen many people tweeting only about a particular topic, say politics, health and fitness, Google news, gadgets etc, get more number of target followers.
This also helps to get more re-tweets and drives more traffic to a blog post. For example, if you have a popular or even not so popular gadget blog, and if you tweet mostly about interesting and latest gadgets then gadget lovers will surly like, follow and recommend you to their followers.

44. If you are a blogger, then try to follow more people in your niche. Because these people are more likely to follow you back because of the niche that you are in. To help them get to know about your niche and interests, use the about me section effectively.

45. If you can use the twitter SMS feature or if you have internet in your mobile phone, then cover some live events.
Ex:- If you are attending a famous conference/sports…etc and if you can tweet about the happenings live, then more people tend to follow you and re-tweet your tweets. Use hashtags and people will notice you while they are searching for the news of that particular event that you are live tweeting.

46. Using twitter clients can make things easy and fast. But make sure that you do not tweet every second of your online time. This will surly annoy your followers and even twitter!
People will consider you as a spammer or an automated script, if you keep on tweeting, without listening and responding your followers tweets. Minimize your personal tweets. Try to involve in the conversation going on. Provide value.

47. If possible, teach your followers what re-tweeting is. By this, if your followers start re-tweeting your tweets, then your ID will again appear infront of your followers followers, and you will get more exposure and high chances of getting even more followers and even more re-tweets.

48. If you have a podcast service or if you shot a video and upload it to YouTube, then make sure to add your twitter ID in the video/podcast, at the end or in the beginning of the video/podcast. If people like the video/podcast, then they will surly like to get connected with you and start following you on twitter.

49. Follow the top twitter users and watch what they tweet and how they treat their followers. This may not be a huge tip, because those top twitter users are already popular in other fields, so they have lot of followers in twitter. While this is true in most of the cases, but there are some twitter users who have got a lot of followers just due to their tweets. Follow such people and you will learn a lot from them.

Being a celebrity doesn’t hurt.. but just being yourself brings followers that actually care about what you are saying and they are much more valuable.

50. Have your twitter ID on all the guest posts that you write.

51. An effective and worst way to increase your follower base (spammers way to get more followers) is to create an account with a celebrity name and profile pic, and try to pretend like the celebrity. In a very short time, you will get a lot of followers. After you are satisfied with the number of followers, change the profile pic, bio and the twitter ID and behave normally.
This is not a recommended thing to do. But I am writing this article to those people who want to know almost all the possible ways to increase their followers.
Personally I don’t find any useful thing (other than getting traffic) in getting more followers. And I am not interested in the number, but in the person that I follow, because we get, from whom we follow. Whom others follow is left to them.

52. Biggest tip to enjoy twitter is, to tweet just for the sake of tweet. Don’t think of the number of followers. Just try to get involved in the conversation. Have interest to know about other people around the world. Be curious, enthusiastic. And spend some time using twitter each day(if you have time), and eventually you will have a lot of followers who are also interested in you.

53. Following everyone who follows you is also a best way to get more followers. People will follow you atleast because you asure them that you also follow them back.

54. When you tweet something worth Re-tweeting, then use less than 140 Characters. Because, if your twitter ID has 5 characters, then a re-tweet will add a @ symbol and “RT:” thus making a total of 140+1+3+5=149 characters. So use 125 or 130 characters. Tweets which involve breaking news or some offers/discount coupons or anything that you think might go viral in twitter.

55. Tweeting link of some good pictures and breaking news get viral most of the times. You can also tweet about a new job or event.

56. Offer some free stuffs for following you. I have seen some people doing this, and not surprisingly, they have a lot of followers. But once you get people following you, its all about providing value and retaining them as your followers.

57. Write an ebook(of good quality) about Twitter and start distributing it for FREE. You can even upload it to torrent sites etc. If you can make that ebook go viral, then you will surly get a lot of followers, as people who download and read it must be interested in Twitter and if they find the ebook of any use, they will start following you.

58. In the “about me” section of Twitter, there is a place where you can display your website URL. There, you can use a good quality article(better, if you have a good article related to Twitter) link instead of just linking your blogs homepage. By this way, people who check your website before following you, may get interest in you, if they like that article.

59. Write some interesting articles about Twitter on your blog, so that, people searching for Twitter related things find it useful and start following you, expecting more such valuable contents and tweets from you.

60. You can also list your Twitter ID on some Twitter directory services. Make sure that you opt into proper category. Such services will allow you to choose some topics of your interest and place you in those categories and it will show your ID to those who have similar interests to that of yours. So you will get targeted followers.

61. You can also use some services that asure you to increase your twitter followers, by listing your Twitter profile link on their site. Also take care that you do not give your twitter ID along with your passwords to such services. Use only genuine services. Ask people who have already used the service.

62. Try to help people as much as possible. This way, people will surely point some one with similar problem to you and high chances that they will start following you.

63. Run a poll: This actually works if you have high number of followers. But you can make it work the other way too.
Make the poll interesting. And request people to re-tweet about the poll.

64. Use Cross promotion techniques: Explicitly(while chatting in any messengers, talking in phone etc – Out side twitter ) ask a Twitterer to mention about your ID to his followers and in return you do the same for them.

65. If you are crazy enough, you can put your twitter ID on your vehicle. This will work because, people like to get connected with others who are in the same locality. And you can tweet and start conversation about some local events and start sharing your knowledge. Keep your security aspects in mind. Some people may use twitter to get lot of your personal info and may use it to harm you.

[Joke: At the worst, get your twitter ID printed on your wedding card 🙂 ]

The title of the article is 60+, because we would like to hear some more tips form you people. Please share your tips, tricks and different strategies to increase twitter followers. You can even share your twitter ID in the comment section with a small description of why you would like others to follow you or whats in it to follow you.

Many of the points listed above may seem to be similar. But still they differ in some aspects. But their main goal is to bring more traffic to your twitter profile and more number of followers.

Be cautious while tweeting, because it may take years to build a huge list of loyal followers, but it takes 1 or 2 tweets to break the entire thing. Creating controversies and damaging your online (even offline sometimes) reputation.
Be responsible and create a reason to be followed 🙂

Many of you or most of you may not agree with all the strategies mentioned in this article. But remember, we are writing this article only to show different tactics that can be used to increase the follower base in Twitter. Its not that we are recommending all these strategies to be followed. Actually we are against some of the strategies listed above to increase the followers. But still they may help some of you.

You can follow me @technotip.

Thanks for reading..