How To Turbo-Boost Your Twitter Profile Without Paying a Penny!

What is twitter ??

Since you read this articles, I assume you know what twitter is. If not, I give you a very short overview. Twitter started out as a slick way to let people know what another person was doing in messages of 140 characters. Today, twitter has evolved to something much bigger and much more complex than just a status update service. Twitter has become one of the most important social networking devices and is growing at incredible speed. It will soon become one of the biggest sites on the internet, so the moment to join the game is just right!

There's a nice video on YouTube explaining twitter in plain english: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddO9idmax0o

Step 1 - Set up your profile the right way

The first thing a prospective follower will see is your twitter profile. And as in real life, people make decisions about other people within the first few seconds. You need to make your profile as appealing as possible to give people no other option than being attracted to you within seconds.

This is key! If your profile isn't really good, you won't get all the followers you could! A good profile consists of the following:

1. A good twitter username
2. An attractive picture of you, or a professional logo if you are a company
3. An appealing background
4. An interesting bio
5. A bunch of captivating tweets

If you fail on any of these points you are reducing your chances
dramatically!

The first thing you wanna do is create a twitter account. If you haven't
done this already, head over to the signup page at Twitter.

1) Select a good twitter username

Your profile must have a good username, avoid anything that looks like spam. Don't use "Jim3231" – this looks like an automated profile built by some piece of software. Use your real name! If this is already taken, don't add a number, add something cool, like "JohnSmithMarketmaster".

You can always change your username later if you don't like your current one. Of course you shouldn't change it once your profile starts to get big so your username can act as your brand.

2) Upload a compelling picture or your company logo

The worst thing for a twitter profile is to have no picture. That will push off most people, because automated spam profiles usually have no pictures attached. You will have to make sure that you upload a really compelling one. Take a picture of you smiling or show your friends a couple of photos and ask them to choose the most attractive one. You can use a logo or product picture as well, you just need to make sure that the photo looks good and professional.

3) Ad an outstanding bio

You have 160 characters to describe yourself. Be funny and be creative. Exaggerate! Write about unusual hobbies or skills. Add a benefit you can give to your followers. As inspiration, take a look at Bill Crosby‘s profile @billcrosby.

4) Use an outstanding background picture

This is one of the most underestimated points. People will see your background immediately, so use this space to give them some important info right on the first view. If you are talented and know how to you use a graphics program like photoshop you should definitely design your own unique background and include your picture and your bio on the background image.

If you don‘t know how to handle photoshop, you can use one of these free services to create customized backgrounds:

http://www.mytweetspace.com
http://www.twitbacks.com
http://www.tweetbacks.com
http://www.twitrbackgrounds.com
http://twitrounds.com

5) Add some good tweets

Before you start adding lots of followers you have to provide some good and interesting content. Nobody will follow you if you have an empty page without some tweets. So be sure to fill up your profile with at least 10 or 20 tweets. We will talk more about the anatomy of a good tweet in Step 4.

Step 2 - Autofollow new followers and automatically send them a welcome message

SocialOomph is a free tool that serves multiple purposes. It allows you to schedule tweets and to post prepared tweets at a certain time, but the most important feature is the auto message function. This will send a welcome message to every new follower.

To use SocialOomph you will have to register an new account there. Go to www.socialoomph.com and click Register. After registering your account you can login. Click Accounts, Add Account, select twitter as account type and then click Continue. Fill in your twitter username and password and then check the box Auto Welcome. This will automatically send a welcome message to new followers. For the text fill in something that gives your follower a benefit.

For my profile i could use this text:

"Hi and thanks for the follow! Be sure to visit my blog to help you make money online at http://affiliatex3.blogspot.com/"

Then check the box Auto Follow. This will automatically follow new followers. This a very important point because many people will only follow you if you follow them back. You don't need to check the Vet Followers box.

Here's a screenshot:

Step 3: Get targeted followers automatically

There are 2 different ways of following new people automatically. The first one is to follow people who are using certain keywords in their tweets. The second one is to follow all the followers of a certain authority in your niche.

The basic principle behind mass following other people is this: around 20-30% of the people you follow will follow you back. So for every 1.000 people you follow you will get 200-300 new followers.

1) Follow targeted people by using Twollo

Twollo is a free service that finds and follows twitterers with similar interests to you by listening to all the conversations and picking out the ones including certain keywords defined by you. So if you wanna build a profile around the topic "playing tennis", then Twollo will go out and follow all the people talking about "playing tennis" in their tweets.

To use this service, head over to www.twollo.com. You don't need to setup an account there, you can login using your existing twitter login data. Either click the button Sign in with twitter or use the login box below. After the login, setup one or more keyword triggers.

For our tennis example, you would fill in tennis as keyword and click the Add button. You can use as many keywords as you want.

The system takes some time to add new followers, so it won't follow hundreds of people immediately. You can always click the Quick run button to instantly follow 3 new people.

2) Mass follow followers from a authority in your niche

This method will give you lots of new followers in just a matter of minutes. To use it you have to find an authority in your niche first.

If you don't already know one of the gurus you can go to www.twellow.com and find one. Twellow are the yellow pages of twitter.

You just enter a keyword (let's say tennis) and twellow suggests people tweeting about that topic. Browse the twitter-profiles of the first ten people and then pick out the one that looks like a authority. He or she should have many followers (couple of thousand) and the aura of a guru – meaning the person attracts people with their tweets.

After finding your guru, go to www.flashtweet.com and login with your twitter login data. Then click Mass Follow, enter the twitter username of your guru and click Go. Now Flashtweet loads all of the followers of your guru. There are 100 followers on each page. Click the button Check All and then the button Follow. This will select 100 people from the first page and follow them. This could take some minutes, so be patient. After flashtweet has finished, go to page 2 and repeat the process. You can follow hundreds or even thousands of people in almost no time!

Flashtweet seems to have server problems sometimes, so if you get strange error messages, just try again after some minutes.

Important:
Twitter has a built in limit. If you are starting out with your profile, you can't follow more than 2.000 people until you have at least 1.850 followers. So you have to accumulate at least 1.850 followers to be able to follow more than 2.000 people. After that, there's a second limit and you can't follow more than 10% above the amount the people that follow you. So if you have 5.000 followers, you are allowed to follow 5.500 people.

3) Automatically unfollow people who don't follow you using twitter Karma

As said above, twitter has certain limits regarding the number of people you can follow. So you can't just follow 10.000 people at once. That means that every spot is precious and you have to clean up your followers from time to time to make space for new ones. 2 or 3 times a week you should browse your profile and unfollow all the people who didn't follow you back. Of course, this would take ages if done manually!

Fortunately there's another free tool which does exactly this job. It's called twitter Karma and it‘s located at . Go there and sign in with your twitter login data. After logging in click the Whack button. It could take some minutes to load all your followers, so be patient. When twitter Karma is done loading you'll see a list of all the people you are following and who follow you. Clicking on Show: Only following will filter out the ones that you follow, but who don't follow you back. Scroll down to the bottom of the page, click Check All and then click Bulk Unfollow. This will remove all the people who didn't follow you back so you can add more people by repeating steps 1 and 2 and grow your follower base.

You will have to wait some days until removing people with twitter Karma. I give them 2 to 3 days to follow me back, after that time I remove them. I have a simple schedule: I remove people every Monday and Thursday and add new people right after that, so they have enough time to follow me back.

Sometimes twitter Karma is down, as an alternative you can use Flashtweet. They have an auto unfollow service as well, but i found this less reliable than twitter Karma.

4) Get untargeted followers very quickly by following your recent follower's followers

If you wanna get a bunch of new followers very quickly, there is a sneaky technique described first by @BigRichB in his program Brute Force Twitter. If you want more of this techniques, i suggest buying his product, which i did too.

This is the method: Just take a look at the list of your followers. Click the newest one to go to his profile, then click on his followers. Now just follow all the people on the first page. Repeat this whole procedure whenever you get a new follower. The trick is that your recent follower's followers are in a "following mood" and likely to be online the moment you add them so that many of them will follow you back instantly.

Step 4 - Make the right tweets to keep your followers interested

There are some basic types of tweets you should use to keep your followers interested in you and your profile:

Talk about your life

Let your followers participate in your everyday life! Don't talk too much about that but intersperse small stories of your life. Tell a joke, post links to funny videos! Show them you are a human being – you get the point.

Ask Questions

Start a conversation and bring up an interesting topic. This will engage people!

Answer Questions

This is a good way to make your followers happy! Look for questions they ask and try to answer them. This can make you an authority soon.

Nuggets

Nuggets are chunks of information that are very valuable for your followers. Provide value by posting links to interesting websites or articles. The best ones are the nuggets that amaze yourself. If you think you don't have enough content, check out these websites – you'll definitely find good content on any topic there:

www.popurls.com
www.alltop.com

ReTweet

ReTweeting means re-posting another person's tweet and giving them credit for that tweet. This has a double-effect: you give good content to your followers and you connect with the original tweeter by appearing in their list of replies. Make ReTweets on a regular basis! There‘s a very good article on mashable (one of the best blogs on social media) on how to ReTweet the right way, please have a look at http://mashable.com/2009/02/17/twitter-retweets

Replies / Mentions

You can reply to other people by making tweets in the format @username the message. Again, this is very useful because you will appear in the other person's mention-list and you are more likely to get into his or her personal network.

Step 5 - Automatically generate content by tweeting feeds

Maybe you don't have the time to produce new and interesting content for your tweets all the time – I don't! The good news is, you don't have to! You can automate this process as well by automatically tweeting RSS-feeds to your account. If you don't know what an RSS-feed is, i suggest you do some reading at http://www.whatisrss.com

The main idea is to find RSS-feeds about your niche-topic and then automatically post items from this feed to your twitter account. To make this work you‘ll need to do the following:

1) Set up a Google account and create an alert

If you don't already own a Google account you will need to setup one. Go to https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount and fill out the form.



Sometimes you'll need to enter the word verification twice, so keep trying until Google accepts your input. After this go to http://www.google.com/alerts/manage. It will say "You don't have any Google Alerts. Try creating one". Click on creating one.

Type in your keyword terms and select Feed in the drop-down box saying Deliver to. Then click Create Alert.

Note:
Normally every article containing your keyword will show up in your Google alerts. Sometimes you only want articles that contain your keyword in the headline, because these articles usually are much more targeted. So what I do is using a special syntax called "allintitle:". This tells Google to select only the articles which have the keyword(s) in the title.

You just set up an alert which is a customized RSS-feed. You now have to get the link of this feed. Depending on your browser, you can do this in several ways.

You could right-click your feed-link and select Copy link from the context menu. Or you could click on the feed-link and then copy the link from the address bar. In any case it should look something like this:

http://www.google.com/alerts/feeds/05167798707591258358/10870076977472847081

2) Automatically post your feed using twitterfeed

You now have your customized RSS-link that you gonna use to post relevant content to your twitter profile. There's a free tool for that, it's called twitterfeed. Go to http://twitterfeed.com and login using your OpenID. If you don't know what an OpenID is, don't worry. By creating a Google account, you already have an OpenID which you can use to login to twitterfeed. Just click on Login to twitterfeed and choose Google in the drop down menu. Then click Login. Google will ask you if you want



to login using your OpenID, click Sign In. You are now logged in and ready to setup your first feed. Click on go to my twitter feeds (or create a new one), then click Create new feed. Now click on Authenticate at twitter and allow twitterfeed access to your profile. Paste your customized RSS-feed in the field RSS Field URL and click on test rss feed. If everything went right, twitterfeed should say "Feed was parsed successfully".

Now you can define how often you want twitterfeed to post and how many items it should post. This depends on how many feeds you gonna setup, but I prefer to post one item every hour. In the field "Include…" use the drop down item "title only". And in the field "Shorten link through" use the default setting bit.ly.

Side note:
URL shortening services bit.ly is one of many URL shortening services. As you know, twitter only allows 140 characters in one tweet, so a long link would eat up too much space. To get around this you can use URL shortening services. These websites will shorten your link so it takes much less space in your tweet. A link to one of my post on my blog normally looks like this: http://affiliatex3.blogspot.com/. This is way too long to tweet it, so i use bit.ly to make a short link like this: http://bit.ly/cExzb0. In addition most URL shortening services provide information about how much people clicked on your link and where they came from.

3) Automatically post personal messages using FeedMyTwitter

Beside your RSS-feeds you maybe want to automatically post personal messages on a regular basis. There is a free service called FeedMyTwitter which allows you to define a set of messages and then posts them to your twitter account in certain intervals.

Go to http://www.feedmytwitter.com and login with your twitter login data. You'll be taken to the main screen where you can define your settings. Start with setting the interval of your tweets between every 2 minutes and everyday. I'd suggest not to bombard your followers and begin with tweeting every 2 hours or so. You can change this value later. Below the interval settings you have three check boxes for three kinds of messages.

Category of Interest: Selecting one of the categories will post "personal messages". These are good to make your profile look natural. If you don't have the time to update your profile manually, use this option.

RSS Feed: This is the same service as twitterfeed but with less options. I recommend keeping this unchecked and using twitterfeed for your RSS Feeds.

My Own Tweets List: Here you can define your own tweets. FeedMyTwitter will rotate these messages evenly.

There's so much more info I could put into this post but i wanted to keep it short and handy. So i just make a small list of things you might find useful in addition:

Great Lists of twitter applications and tools

Hummingbird: Windows program to autofollow people
Twittersnipe: Auto follow application based on keywords
EasyTweets: Manage multiple twitter accounts via one interface
Social Media Content Factory: Bill Crosby‘s legendary course on how to get more followers. This is the course i started with.
ViralTweets: This is the software i use to promote my business on twitter

I appreciate your time and thank you for reading this articles from start to finnish! Be sure to follow me @affiliatex3. I'll see you in the twitterverse ;)