Grow Your Twitter Following Exponentially - With The Best Followers, Too!

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If you want to attract readers, members, purchasers or simply visitors to you blog or cluster of blogs, Twitter is an outlet which you cannot afford to neglect. Just as every blog attracts a certain audience which relates to its subject matter and its writer’s style, a single twitter account is actually a topically-based news and commentary feed. 

And it draws a crowd, in much the same manner as a blog does, but often more easily (people have less patience, and they are not quite as particular about becoming Twitter followers as they are about becoming blog email or RSS Feed subscribers). 

There is also a great synergy -- you can attract visitors to your blogs by using your blog address in your Twitter Profile, and you can attract followers to your Twitter account by  simply posting a Twitter Follow Button at the bottom of your blog.


You can choose from an assortment of Twitter buttons here:
https://twitter.com/about/resources.



This same site also generates widgets, logos and other magnetic adornments for the footer section of your blog posts and RSS Feed posts. If you want to customize the look of your site and get especially fancy, you can conduct a Google Search on such word strings as “twitter+icons,” “twitter+buttons,” “twitter+graphics” and the like. Search both the web and images (on the upper left-hand selection toolbar of the Google page). Many of these are quite nice, and they are free as well.



Here are some sites for you to explore -- they are either free or very inexpensive sources for building a following for each of your themed (keyword- or topic-based) Twitter accounts. Visit each, then hit the “BACK” button in your browser, and look at the next. These services do not require that you purchase lists of “guaranteed followers.” 

The only other essential tools you should have in order to centrally manage all of your blogs and twitter accounts are TWITTERFEED (free, and available at http://twitterfeed.com), and TWEETADDER, which requires a one-time expenditure but which is the best tool of its kind for managing multiple Twitter accounts (up to thousands of separate accounts, if you’d like) and Twitter followers (up to millions of followers -- you may wish to start a cult....just kidding). 

You can purchase your own TWEETADDER by simply clicking on the visual ad toward the end of this post. If you do purchase it here, you will absolutely receive a bonus.


Here are the sites to review:


http://www.twellow.com/


http://www.free-followers.com/login.php


http://twiends.com/followers


http://twitclub.com/


https://twitter.com/about/resources



With the exception of the last link (discussed earlier), which is a wonderful site filled with twitter buttons, gadgets, logos, widgets and other highly-functional decorations to get your blogger audience to join your Twitter accounts as well, the the other ones are free, friendly, natural ways to rapidly build a strong following. I am not a big fan of paying for quantities of guaranteed followers -- the companies that provide these generally produce some twits with whom you would best not be associated, and they also tend to be somewhat unreliable.


While TWEETADDER, below, will help you automatically oncrease the number of followers for each of your Twitter accounts, its principal purpose is as a means of managing (automating) many time-consuming Twitter functions. It also allows you to send wonderful personalized thank-you letters and even some tasteful marketing information to each new follower -- and it gives you a choice of responses for each case -- heck, it’ll even randomize the responses if you’d like to be totally hands-off.


Just click on the display ad below, and build thee a Twitter Empire!

Note: Automate and Dominate the TwitterSphere!

The BEST investment in your social media campaign that you can make.







Regardless of the more liberal (and expensive) “get followers quick” approaches, a combination of the ones suggested above, along with TWITTERFEED and TWEETADDER, will build you solid, cohesive groups of follows who are the, members, subscribers or customers most likely to be converted to clients. Quantity is wonderful -- but quality is every single bit as important.


Douglas E. Castle [http://aboutDouglasCastle.blogspot.com], 

for
BLOGGING TIPS, TRICKS AND TOOLS and FREE SEO TOOLS FOR BLOGGERS.

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Increased Download Speed: Supersized Rankings!

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There are a number of reasons to be very interested in accelerating your blog or website's load speed. Faster Download Time has become increasingly important in a multi-tasking, overworked and increasingly impatient world.

Firstly, you should constantly have user (i.e., prospective site visitor) experience in mind when optimizing your website. A fast, full-screen download, especially for the home page of your site, is crucial to capture and keep a prospective visitor's attention.

If your site is very slow to appear (leaving the prospective visitor to look at a blank screen and to wonder whether his or her browser or internet connection is working properly), or is slow to fully download (it comes down in disjointed pieces, with entire graphics, or other dazzling effects to fill in boxes which remain blank or empty for quite some time), it is likely that your prospect will go back to the search engine results (or to wherever he or she received your url from) and look at the next site following or before yours on the list. In either way, you will have reduced your SEO prominence and lost a possible friend, member, follower, or customer.

Secondly, search engine rating algorithms give some credence, i.e., credibility ranking as well as prominence in positioning, to how fast your page loads. Faster is considered to be better.

With this Website Speed Test provided by JAYDE B2B and Directory Listing Services (http://www.jayde.com/) a superb site search engine listing service and resource provider for SEO tools, tips and strategies, you can discover the speed of your site:

http://www.submitplus.com/freetools/tools/website-speed-test/

Some quick tips to expedite your page load speed and give your prospective viewers a better, more captivating experience. Some of these tips may involve some informational or design sacrifices, but the end result will more than justify the modifications. This list is being furnished by Douglas E. Castle for Blogging Tips, Tricks And Tools. It is not intended to be complete, nor is it warranted or otherwise guaranteed to produce favorable results for any individuals blog or website. I will say, that some of these have certainly been helpful for me.

1. Minimize the number and placement of high-resolution graphics Use clickable thumbnails instead, if possible) on your home page. Limited the number of any embedded videos to as few as possible, and position the video between the header and the "fold" at the bottom of your page.

2. Use the smallest number of lines of java script or HTML code, and use a code shrinking program if you can to compress these even further.

3. Avoid the use of pop-ups, pop-overs, modals, and especially long iframe forms in the body of your content.

4. Minimize your use of flash effects or remotely hosted buttons or text effects.

5. If you have graphs, charts, PowerPoint displays, slideshows, galleries and the like, just show the first frame, and give the viewer the option as to whether or not to see the presentation.

6. Avoid ambient music playing in the background. In my opinion, you should especially avoid the theme from "Hawaii Five-O" (even though I really like this one myself), heavy metal music in general, and the repetitive theme song from David Bowie's "Under Pressure." They slow download time, can be highly distracting, and can occasionally be offensive enough to the fatigued ears of the viewer that he or she feels that your sight is going to be a pure advertorial nightmare.

7. Break large paragraphs of copy into numbered or bulletized lists -- if further explanations are required, either put them into mouseover balloons, or into mouseover tooltips. Keep them brief, and never, ever, set them up so that the viewer has to click on an "x" or "Close" cue to to make a balloon or tooltip disappear. Everyone HATES this.

8. If a portion of your site will take a longer time to load, or will require some element of scrolling, make a note of it, and apologize in advance to your reader.

9. Avoid excessively large or florid fonts or designs. Elaborate wallpapers and borders are a waste and a distraction. They also can slow your downloading time significantly.

10. Keep your opening or home page as lean and mean as possible -- you can then direct your viewer (once you've captured his or her attention) to see the site in its entirety by using a clear, simple navigation bar under your header. Once you've caught his or her interest, then it's merely a matter of leading him or her around your site to see what you have to offer.

Douglas E. Castle

p.s. The little "click on me" birdie which follows actually slowed the downloading speed of this article (as it appears on the blog) by 6.67%! You might click on it anyway, just to learn from my negative example...





Related (And Occasionally Dated) Articles For Your Further Reference:

• Guest Post: The Great Debate: Are Meta Keywords Worth Your Time? (socialwayne.com)
• 7 Clear-Cut Reasons Why You Cannot Ignore Deep Links Anymore! (directorymaximizer.com)
• When Good Optimising Goes Bad (redguerrillaweb.wordpress.com)
• 20 Free Online Tools for Website Speed Testing (sixrevisions.com)
• Latest Stats Say We're Building a Fatter, Slower Web (webmonkey.com)
• New Web Tool Promises to Double the Speed of Your Website (mashable.com)
• Pingdom: Test the Load Time of Your Website or Blog (123beta.com)
• 12 Step Program For Improving The Load Speed Of Online Stores (searchengineland.com)
• Need for Speed: Google Adds Load Time to Algorithm (hubspot.com)
• How Speedy Are High-Speed Internet Lines? (blogs.wsj.com)
• Whiteboard Friday - 7 Ways to Take Advantage of Google's Site Speed Algorithm (Pop-Up Video Style) (seomoz.org)
• Site Speed For Dummies Part 1 - Why Bother?.. (distilled.co.uk)
• How to Audit Your Website (roundpeg.biz)
• Google Is Focused On Site Speed (searchengineoptimizationjournal.com)
• The Need for Speed: a Webmaster's Reflexion (famousbloggers.net)

Do everything possible to make your home page or first page download as rapidly as possible in order to increase site rankings, SEO prominence and to offer the overworked viewer the quickest aspect to your most important message. This is one of those exceptional cases in marketing where substance actually means more than form.

In dealing with viewers, both human and algorithmic/robotic, it is crucial to first capture their attention before you can deliver your words of wisdom. As my great grandfather once said (this is purely anecdotal, and likely a lie, but is a "politically expedient lie" because it cannot be verified one way or another), "If the letter don't arrive, they ain't gonna read it." - DC

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