Hey there,

It's been a few weeks since I blogged here or participated and I'm sorry for that but I'm not gone! I'm just working a lot.

Anyway, today I just wanted to write a little post about how to get Twitter followers. A few weeks ago, Jay talked about the use of social media during one of his webinars and I had the chance to talk about how I use Twitter and some of you guys asked me questions about it. Afterwards I thought of other strategies that I use and didn't share with you so.. there you go!

I said I was using Twitter directories such as Twellow to be found and find followers. The thing is I spent some time doing that and the results weren't compelling to say the least. The problem with such directories are the categories. If you're trying to promote Wealthy Affiliate for instance, the people you're trying to find are not people that have a deep knowledge of affiliate marketing so they probably won't be listed under the "affiliate marketing" category but most likely under other categories that define them, their hobbies, ect. Of course, in this example, we should probably take a look at the category "small business", "online business" or "money" but then again you might find a lot of people who are already running an online business and are doing marketing on Twitter.

Basically you should know that people who you follow will follow you back, unless you're following Barack Obama or Neil Patrick Harris!

So what I do is that I look for people that my ideal customer would follow on twitter. Of course it has to be someone related to my niche. Here's a real example: I follow many Tony Robbins'  followers. Why? Because I'm looking for people who are motivated and want to succeed. Then I make sure these people don't have many followers and are pretty new to Twitter so that when they'll see that I follow them, they'll be super excited because I have many followers and they'll think "wow, I'm lucky, this French girl who's running an online business and has 1200+ followers is following ME!". lol, you got the idea.

But even if you're pretty new to twitter yourself, as long as you have a good bio, picture, a link to your site and if possible a professional looking background with the url of your site, it'll do.

Then, when the people I just followed will follow me back, they'll receive a direct message from me automatically (I use a service called socialoomph that takes care of that) and they'll see that I'm not selling anything (at first) but only saying something like "If you need help starting an affiliate marketing home business, bug me anytime! I'd be glad to help you. I'm French but I rarely bite.. ;)".

See? That's the spirit. Don't sell. Just offer help. People who are interested will contact you and you'll be able to mention the product you promote as something they "might want to take a look at" (yes, the "buy or die" strategy doesn't work). It's also very important to interact with your followers, ask questions, reply to tweets, retweet, tweet interesting stuff, don't put links in all your tweets. In a word, be social.

That's basically it. I'm not a Twitter addict nor a Twitter expert either, this is just how I use it and I do receive replies to my direct messages from followers who want my help and once I help them, they're interested in what I have to say and promote.

Hope that helps a little.

Cheers,

Louise