Twitter as depicted in Crun…” width=”210″ height=”49″ />

Image via CrunchBase

Twitter is a mad beast. It can be a tremendous tool, and sometimes a nightmare.

I’ve been using Twitter heavily since March of this year. Following Jason Calacanis and Robert Scoble’s lead I followed as many people as my little fingers could click.

I also followed everyone who followed me.

I ended up with an unmanageable mess of 19348 twitters to sort through, and only 5705 followers, roughly 1 in 4 followed me back.

Was I trying to be a spammer? Nah. I really don’t think spamming is possible because someone has to actually click on your profile and choose to follow you - if they follow you just because you follow them, that’s their right and their choice.

Then came the follow limit, and I could no longer follow new people, sure I could create a new account and start over, or just use multiple accounts.

I largely went from being a huge user of twitter and conversationalist to being primarily a broadcaster of my blog posts via ping.fm.

I’m currently spending about 1-2 hours weekly unfollowing those who aren’t following me, then eventually I’m only gonna follow those who sincerely interest me. That’s just my opinion - everyone should make their own decision how they’re going to use Twitter. I think the beauty of twitter is that there are a million and one ways to use it.

These are the three main things that I’ve learned from twitter - as I commented on a post “To Follow or Not To Follow ALL Twitter Followers?” on AdvancedIncome.com by Yisel.

1. Content is king. As with blogging write good content and people will follow you. They will flock to you like bees on honey. Make sure all your best blog posts are tweeted.
2. Be a Conversationalist. This applies not only to Twitter, but social media in general - the keyword is Social, if you’re not building relationships, then you just don’t get it! Talk to people, help people, share your success with people, etc..
3. Be Popular by Talking to Popular People. We are who we associate with. It is said that your success in life is the sum average of the success of all those with whom you surround yourself.

   To go a bit further - if you reply to someone famous, and they respond to you - you may get a few followers out of it - do it on a daily basis, even become someone they mention a lot and who knows - you may become a Joe the Plumber, or equivalent.

We all want to be successful. I totally believe that the day of the small A-list is over, and that the day is dawning for the everyday person to make it online. I believe that more small-timers will be able to chart their own path. Just keep being real, stay focused, and don’t give up.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Jason Calacanis hearts Robert Scoble [Geek Love]
• The Secret to Twitter, Part II
• 10 things Twitter users should not do [Silicon Valley Users Guide]
• The Economist Gets It Dead Wrong on Social Media - FAIL
• Turns out FriendFeed has clones and that AOL acquired one [Acquisitions]
• Twitter Buys Summize?
• Calacanis, Scoble, Arrington pawns in FriendFeed’s smart marketing campaign [Social Networks]
• What People Say When They Tweet

My Tweeple.com is a pretty nifty service, it basically pulls all your friends from twitter and lets you view those who follow you, those you follow, and mutual followers, and you can follow or unfollow right from the interface.

This is extremely useful, especially since Twitter has instigated the new follower limits.

I will say that I initially followed many people as robert scoble had suggested as a means to build my network, and it did work out hugely in my favor - for every 4 people I followed, 1 person would follow me.

So with 19000 people that I was following, I’ve gotten 5500 followers of my own, not too shabby in the least bit.

But alas the face of twitter and social networks in general are a changing. Of course I got upset at Twitter for making the changes, and I’ve been using twitter a lot less and experimenting with other sites such as Identi.ca, Rejaw, Tumblr, Plurk, etc…

However, with tools like monitter I don’t really need to follow everyone to get new followers and to build my personal brand or community, now I can focus on keeping my current network strong and building up my blog.

I’ve been using MyTweeple to unfollow those who aren’t following me. The most important people to me right now are the ones that listen to what I have to say, in essence they’re the ones paying the bills. My thoughts are why follow anyone who isn’t willing to reciprocate, and I already have enough followers that I can just unsubscribe to all the rest and focus on my little group, and build on that.

One thing I’d like to see on Mytweeple would be an option to just automatically unfollow anyone who isn’t following me, I’ve been clicking unfollow on link after link after link, or perhaps a checkbox next to each item on a page, and a select all link, and another button that says unfollow all, or something easier like that.

But overall I’m quite impressed, and think the service will do pretty well. I definitely recommend trying it out in order to organize your followers, and friends on twitter.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Plurk - Ooooooh Another Shiny New Twitter-Like Thing!
• Are Your Friends in Your Suitcase?
• Twitter, Friendfeed, Jaiku, Pownce, Plurk, Identi.ca
• My 1000th friend | we follow eachother
• Don’t you just love…
• Social Media: 2008 to 2011
• Are your social networks too scattered?
• Finding people with the Twellow directory
• Rejaw… yet another micro-blog
• Where do You Keep Your Social Profile?
• MotherPlurker!
• The tipping point for Twitter is coming
• Is Twitter vs Plurk a repeat of Myspace vs Facebook?
• Twitter’S Move Towards Semantic Info and the Content Graph
• Fake following
• Social media, meet Achilles
• Guidelines for Brands Using Twitter
• Twitter Updates Follower Counts… Twits Erupt!
• The secret to Twitter…really?

Image via CrunchBase

I launched this blog a year ago this month, and when I first launched it my primary focus was to make money. I’ve learned a lot in that year, and made many mistakes. I actually gave up on this blog for about 7 months.

I came back to it on March 15th of this year. In fact I had lost all the previous posts, I’d done and had to start anew. (Roughly 130+ posts gone). My original theme was using the law of attraction to bring $1 Million into my life by the age of 30, which I believe was perhaps a bit over zealous.

My new goal - apply what I’ve learned in my year of blogging, and help other’s become successful. I’d also like to launch a few social related businesses eventually, that are currently in the ‘idea’ stages.

My 50 States Roadtrip / American Blogger Directory is just part of gaining an keeping an audience.

You’ll notice the most successful blogs out there aren’t just individual people talking while everyone listens. The most successful blogs are communities, where people interact with what the blogger is writing.

You’ll notice almost every post they write gets tons of comments, trackbacks, pingbacks, etc… It’s no coincidence - without this community atmosphere on your blog it is nearly impossible to keep your blogging growing.

Without interaction from your readers your blog will die. Just as a flower needs sunlight to live, a blog needs comments / reactions from the community at large.

Here are some tips to build your Community.

1. Tweet ALL posts to Twitter. There are some good wordpress plugins for this like Twitter Tools or Twitter Tools for Tweetburner. I highly recommend tweetburner because of it’s statistics and shorter urls.

2. Build your Social Presence. Many might call it spamming, but if you look at Robert Scoble, and Jason Calacanis this is how they got huge. They built up the max number of friends on facebook, and they have 15000+ followers, a lot of those were gained by initiating the follow, ie following first.

3. Comment Frequently on other blogs. There is a secret power method for this which I will mention in another upcoming post, I will show you how to build hundred of incoming links extremely fast and easy.

4. Respond to your Audience. If someone sends you an email, drops a comment, replies to a twitter comment you made, etc.. Take the time to respond. Now when you have 10,000 hits daily it can get hard, and you might miss a few here and there - in blogging you don’t need to be perfect, just do your best.

People like to know they’re being listened to, this will go along way towards building a large following.

5. Ask a lot of questions. People like to be heard, and asking your readers questions via blog posts is a great way to give them this opportunity to voice their opinions. This makes it more fun to visit your blog, and increases the interactivity of your blog.

A lot of times I will ask a specific question at the end of my blog posts, and it will usually garner a lot of comments.

6. Be kind to those who are kind to you.  When someone takes the time to follow you or add you on a social networking site - reciprocate. Also when someone takes the time to link to your site - go to the post and leave a thankyou comment.

7. Stumble incoming links. If you stumble all of your own links, you’ll eventually end up getting banned. One secret is stumbling any and all incoming links. If someone is kind enough to link to you in a post, go ahead and stumble or digg it, and you will get a lot of traffic, plus you’ll help them get traffic. It’s a win-win scenario.

8. Link to other blogs often. I’ve talked about this a lot - but linking to other blogs will get you on their radar as it shows in the dashboard on wordpress, and secondly you’ll get a pingback / trackback from their site.

9. Start a meme. My Twitter Meme: Feed the Twitter Monster, has taken off hugely and gained a ton of incoming links and traffic, be creative though, and make it your own idea. Do something unique.

10. Start a resource for bloggers or website owners. I’ve just launched my American Blogger Directory, but it has already received a ton of hits and results. This of course is also part of my 50 state roadtrip, which is looking to be getting a lot of acclaim online as well.

11. Network with other bloggers. Friends will always give you more attention, and having more blogger friends never hurt anyone.

You can use some tips from my article on becoming friends with A-listers, many of the tips relate to networking in general.

12. Build your subscriber feeds. Market it anyway possible. The simple fact is you need subscribers, if you haven’t read it - here’s 39 great ways to get more RSS Subscribers.

13. Make your posts simple to follow and you’ll have mass appeal. Make sure the text doesn’t run together, as most people have low-attention spans and can’t be bothered with reading whole paragraphs anymore. Lists are huge in fact I try to write 1 list every week, as they tend to bring me a lot of traffic just because they’re lists. - I know it’s crazy!

14. Get active in Forums. If you have the time, you might want to try being active in popular forums, or just answering questions on the different answer sites like yahoo answers, this will help build credibility, and lead to more traffic.

15. Share and share alike, then share some more! When you launch a new resource, pillar article, etc you definitely need to tweet / send it to your social networks. However, you should also retweet it, if it is bringing in traffic, and subscribers.

I generally send my rss feed link to twitter once every 3-4 days asking for more subscribers. Especially when I get close to the next big number like 200 - asking people to help you ‘break’ a number is a great way to get them to actually subscribe, it might be tricky but it works.

I also send my best links, resources, and posts to my followers on twitter and ask them to digg or stumble the posts. This usually brings in a huge amount of traffic. When doing this make it extremely simple, though. Send them the actual link to digg or stumbleupon, so they don’t have to work. People are lazy and want instant gratification.

Another good tip is to help out other bloggers by forwarding their promotions to your followers, they may do the same for you some day. This can lead to some very interesting viral marketing.

16. Write your damn content, already! Last and foremost the #1 method to building a community blog is frequent posts. The more the better, I’ve said it a hundred times the more content you have,  the more traffic, comments, and interactive your site will become.

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Secret to Twitter, Part II
• Blogs Are So Over… Huh?
• Blogs are so over, Wired magazine says
• The Old Dull Thing Is The New Shiny Thing (or deconstructing the Calacanis email newsletter)
• Jason Calacanis hearts Robert Scoble [Geek Love]