How to Grow Your Twitter Following

Growing a large following is something many new Twitter users struggle with. They see all these big accounts with 20, 50 or even 100K followers and wonder how did they ever get there?
Today we will give you some tips and tools on how to grow your following steadily and we’ll also make sure that you stay within the Twitter guidelines to avoid account suspension. There are certain practices that are not allowed and the last thing you want is to get your account suspended after you worked hard to get a decent following.

Quality or Quantity?

This is the first thing you have to ask yourself. Do you want a small group of followers where you can easily keep track of the timeline and interact with everybody or do you want to grow as big as possible and utilize Twitter lists to keep up with the tweets you care about?
If you have a Twitter account for personal use, the first option will probably work best for you. If you have any commercial aspirations and would like to promote your brand or business to the world market, your goal will be to reach as many potential clients as possible. Growing your Twitter following is an easy and low cost method to promote your business or brand worldwide.

Tools of the Trade

These are a few tools we use to manage our account. There are many more tools out there but today we will stick to the tools that work for us.

• FriendorFollow Simply enter your user name and it will show you who isn’t following back, who is a fan and mutual followings. If you connect with Twitter, it will also give you the option to follow or unfollow users.
  
• Manageflitter Similar to FriendorFollow but more advanced and it can filter your account for a variety of stats such as users without a profile image or users that are quiet or tweet a lot. There is a pro upgrade available but the basic mode has all the features an average user will need.
  
• Socialoomph When your account starts to grow exponentially it becomes hard to keep track of all your new followers. If you want to set up a welcome message for all your new followers, this is the tool to use. You can set up an auto DM and welcome new followers. DO NOT add a link to that message because that’s what everybody is doing and will only tick people off. Come up with something creative and original within the 140 character limit.
  There are also features that will allow you to auto tweet status updates but that is NOT done as you should keep it real on Twitter, more about this at the end of this blog post.
  
• Twiends Fun and addictive would be the best way to describe this tool! You can actually use this to grow your stats on Twitter, Facebook, Website and YouTube. You can earn credits for connecting with other Twiends users and use those credits to let others connect with you. Sort of like a marketplace. You can even tweak your setting to get higher quality followers and there is an option to buy credits if you don’t have the time to earn credits manually.
  
• Twellow If you want to find followers in a specific geographical area or category, this is the tool for you. It lets you search for users per city or from a directory of categories. This is great if you have a local business and you want to connect with all the Twitter users in your city for example. You can also follow and unfollow within this tool.

Now How Do I Get Followers?

All the above will help you to manage the new followers as your account starts to grow. Obtaining new followers can be done in many ways.

• Follow users from follow back lists. Many users have created lists consisting of people that returned the follow so there is a good chance those users will follow you as well if you start to follow them. Just Google: “follow back list twitter”.
• Use the Twellow tool to find users in your niche or city and connect with them.
• Add Twitter links to your website, blog and email signature if you use one.
• Use the Twiends tool to get new followers.

As your new followers start to roll in it’s time to use the account management tools such as FriendorFollow and ManageFlitter. Find out who followed you back and who didn’t. You can also unfollow people that didn’t return the follow if you wish but DO NOT mass unfollow people or unfollow those who did return the follow. These are bad practices that could get your account suspended. We’re not celebrities that have 500K followers and only follow 10 users back. Your account should have a healthy follower ratio.
Remember that you can only follow 10% more than your follower count when you pass the 2000 follower mark. Example: 3000 followers will allow you to follow 3300 users.

Keeping It Real

This is what it’s all about. It’s alright to try and get a large following but don’t do any of the following:

• Don’t spam your product link over and over again.
• Don’t use auto tweet tools except for a meaningful auto DM perhaps.
• Don’t mass follow and unfollow since this could get your account suspended.
• Don’t unfollow those who return the follow just to make yourself look more popular.

If you stick to these guidelines and use the above tools you can easily grow your following to any size you want.

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Landing Page Optimization 101

Landing page optimization is perhaps the most important Internet marketing tactic you need to master if you truly want to succeed online. Having an effective landing page that maximizes your conversions will help you dominate your niche market. This applies to both product vendors and the affiliates promoting for them.
In fact, if you're into Google Adwords you should already know the extreme importance of landing pages.

What is a Landing Page and Why is it Important?

A landing page, as you may already know, is a page that you drive traffic to. It's part of your overall website, but different landing pages can be customized to suit the product or the traffic source. Depending on the type of landing page, it can also be known as a squeeze page, sales page, opt-in page or money page. However, the basic purpose for any landing page no matter what it's called is to get conversions.
When you have your landing pages setup, you need to go out and get traffic. You may have heard that traffic is the lifeblood of any affiliate marketing business. The more traffic you get, the more money you make. Although that is true, there's only that much traffic you can get with a limited budget and time.
The real lifeblood of an affiliate marketing business is conversions. If you can convert your traffic to sales more efficiently than others, you'll be the dominant player in your niche market within a short period of time. As far as optimization goes, there are basically two kinds of tests you can do on your landing pages.

Landing Page Optimization with Multivariate Testing

Hardcore conversion experts preach about Multivariate Testing or MVT. In a typical MVT, you will test multiple variations of elements on your landing page simultaneously. MVT can handle complex experiments and deliver great results, but it has two drawbacks.
The first flaw is that you need to get loads of traffic for MVT. If you cannot get a few thousand impressions per day, then it will take forever. As a matter of fact, MVT just doesn't work well for low-traffic websites and landing pages.
Besides that, the other flaw of MVT is its sheer complexity. If you really want to do MVT, you need to study MVT. You need to be able to develop effective test cases and elements. You also need to be pretty good at interpreting results. There's a tendency for low-traffic site owners to accept variations that are not yet proven to work. That's when MVT backfires and actually drags your landing page conversion rates down.

Landing Page Optimization with A/B Split Testing

A/B split testing on the other hand is much more simple. You start with web page A (the control) and web page B as a test page. Both web pages are identical except for the single variable you want to test. For example, both pages may be identical except for the main headline, or the signup link.
Once you've setup your simple A/B test, you split your traffic between the two pages and observe your sales or leads. After both pages have achieved a reasonable number of conversions, you'll be able to see the winning page. The losing page is removed and replaced with another contender.
You repeat this process with different layouts, different ad copy, and different headlines until you find the best possible landing page. You'll know this when your split test results no longer show any significant difference between pages.
Can you test more than two pages at a time? Of course you can, but keep in mind that the more pages you add to the A/B test, the longer it will take for you to get any kind of meaningful result. That's why I recommend that you test no more than three pages at a time.
With A/B split testing, landing page optimization gets much simpler and faster. You can get really meaningful results with only a small number of website visitors, and get higher conversion rates consistently. You don't need much technical knowledge either.

Pitfalls of Landing Page Optimization

Although the benefits of optimizing your landing pages are immense, there are several pitfalls to avoid. The first is inconsistency. Make sure all other aspects of your landing page remains the same when you're doing your tests. Do not change your landing page designs, your source of traffic or other elements when testing a page. Doing so will only give you skewed, inaccurate results.
Redundancy is the other big pitfall that you need to avoid at all costs. Keep track of the elements you have already tested. Do not repeat tests when you already know the best possible variable for the test. It's very easy to be running around in circles instead of moving forward.
The final pitfall in landing page optimization is ineffective software. Keep the time you spend setting up and managing software to a bare minimum. Instead, you should redirect your effort and time to the content and sales process of your landing pages. If you have to constantly upgrade or troubleshoot the software you're using for landing page optimization, you're really not doing your business any good.

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How to do SEO

There are many ways how to do SEO. Sometimes SEO can be a pain in your head... But if you approach it from the right angle it can be quick effective and even fun. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is one of the best methods to generate targeted traffic to your website. Traffic comes from organic search engine listings and from my own experience, this traffic is the most targeted and hence valuable. Conversion rates are far way better from organic traffic than from any paid advertisement like AdWords. Nowadays internet is flooded with swindlers and scams, that’s why paid ads are getting less and less trusted...
This is why I consider SEO as the only reliable way to go for a long-term online business. First off, you need to choose one of all these techniques and strategies how to do SEO. It’s really easy to get lost in the beginning but then you will get more and more confident with every right step you make. Making on-page optimization is the most reasonable first step you can make.

On-page optimization means maintaining your keyword density at 2-4% out of all content, setting up the appropriate meta tags (not that important these days as it was before) and page tittles. If you have any images on your website, don’t forget to set your main keyword as an alt text of these images. Having your main keyword in the domain name is a very good idea to boost your rankings as well. These steps are the easiest from the whole SEO process and not making them chances are you are wasting your rankings straight away.

When you are fine with on-page SEO it’s time to get on off-page optimization. Many marketers dislike this process defining it as tedious one. Well, I can say that it’s all about how you are approaching it. When you know how to do SEO and are confident about the future results of your work, it’s not tedious or boring at all. Best of all is to set up your own working plan ad follow it. 
When you are fine with on-page SEO it’s time to get on off-page optimization. Many marketers dislike this process defining it as tedious one. Well, I can say that it’s all about how you are approaching it. When you know how to do SEO and are confident about the future results of your work, it’s not tedious or boring at all. Best of all is to set up your own working plan ad follow it.

When starting off-page SEO optimization it’s important to remember about the quality of backlinks you generate. Ten quality backlinks to your site worth a lot more than hundred of low-quality backlinks. How do we define if the backlink is quality... Link from relevant and high-respected website considered to be a quality one. Page rank is also an important bit. On the first stage you want to focus on building quality backlinks, this will boost your website rankings well. If you start off with crappy links back, Google will treat your website the same way.

The power of fast and effective SEO lies behind instant and quality backlinks. Instant link –appears online straight away without any approval process. How can we avoid waiting for our backlinks to be approved along with our articles or blog comments? This is actually easier than you ever imagined.

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How To Rank Your Website on Top in Search Engines Results

Webmasters always want their website to appear on top of Search Engine Results. However, it is not as easy as it seems. Getting ahead of your competitors and achieving top ranks in Google, Yahoo or MSN required a lot of work. It is well known fact that top ranks in search engines results lot of organic traffic and in return more revenues. Therefore, website owners are always ready to do everything to attain their desired ranks.
In order to achieve top ranks in all major search engines you need to understand the search and indexing mechanism of all popular search engines. Always remember, that there are no defined criteria to make your website on top of any search engines. You need to follow the basic guidelines set by them for a search engine friendly website. However, search engines experts suggest several tricks and tweaks that may help you in easy indexing of your website by search engine robots/crawlers. 
The contents of your websites, META tags (Description and Keywords appearing on all pages), inbound links (links appearing on other websites but pointing to your website), and alternate text given on your images play an important role in easy indexing of your website. You can expect better ranks only if your website is equipped with all the above described things.
One more thing that is very important for your website’s performance in search engines is selection of right keywords and contents based on those keywords. Remember, if you are not targeting proper keywords, you may not get desired results. Therefore, in order to fix this issue, you need to do a proper analysis of your business domain and niche market along with keywords research prior to making any plans for online promotion of your website.
Usually search engine tracks your website through two popular mechanisms:
Links based tracking
The success of your website in top rankings is determined by the number of links point to your website. If your website has lots of incoming links from other top rated website in your niche, the possibility of success is more. Search Engine Submission, Affiliate Marketing, Directory Submission, Article Submission, Press Releases Distribution, and Blogs help a lot in achieving such quality inbound links.

Contents based tracking
This is relatively a complex mechanism of tracking your website. It depends upon the relevance of META tags (keywords and description) with the contents of different web pages in your website. Freshness of contents on your website enhances your chances of getting indexed easily.

Apart from these two popular mechanisms, you can also adopt other modes of online advertising like banner ad placements, paid submission, contextual advertising and social media marketing. These strategies are of great help if you want a quick interaction with your potential customers.

Easy Submission simplifies the complex task of website submission to search engines, article submission, directory submission, and social bookmarking for optimizing websites. For more information visit us at: http://www.easysubmission.net

This article taken from here

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How To Maintain A Relationship With Your Mailing List

If your list is small then there is no need to worry because you can still make money online. The most important thing to remember is that you have to establish a connection or even better a relationship with the people on your list, and to write to them as personal and conversational as you would do talking to your close mates. Getting someone to join your list is not that difficult, but its not necessarily easy either. However to overcome and be at an advantage point you may want to offer something for free, people love free things and don't want to miss out on anything being handed out for free and are going to be more likely to join your list. Even though they have that free course or software, what is keeping them from unsubscribing from your list?
The answer is to keep your list interested by continually supplying them with special offers. You should be emailing your prospects at least once per week, and your customers at least once every two weeks. When you email your prospects, give them something of value for free, and then give them a special offer only available to list members, making your offer exclusive to them this will definitely win them over. 

I also like to write a short report and give them to my list as a gift. These reports contain lots of useful information from how to start an empire online to useful websites where they can benefit from in many ways. The best thing about this is that I create a trust between my list and myself so over time, readers of these reports will purchase products and courses that I have recommend. On a side note, make sure you do not HARD sell where this will only make people in your list unsubscribe.

I have noticed that a lot of people wait until they have a specific number of people on their list before they start marketing their list and make money from them. Why on Earth would you want to wait to make money, all you need to do is become a good marketer, treat your subscribers how you would want to be treated, and you will profit from the very start of your relationship.
The number one reason for many people unsubscribing from mailing lists is because they are not actively participating and receiving value for being a member. Due to this they will unsubscribe from your list as soon as they have had enough of you without purchasing anything.

Before I finish there is one more list building tip for you and that is to offer your customers good information that is valuable to them every time you send them an email, you have to give them what they want and not what you think they want. Then at the end of your email, you can offer them an exclusive buy it now price on a product that will further help them solve the problem you addressed in your informative email. Even if the list member doesn't buy, they are more likely to stay on your list because of the information they receive, the exclusive discount prices and the relationship you have maintained with them. 

This article taken from here

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9 Tips to Improve Your Copywriting Skills

We all learned how to jot down in school, but taking part in advertising, there are a number of down-to-earth techniques that veteran writers apply to convey messages with greater effect and brevity. Lacking being too tutorial, you’ll discover these 9 tips quite usable as writing style for your subsequently sales letter, brochure or webpage. Get round the wimpy verbs - is and be.
These “do-little” verbs simply occupy space and state that something exists. So don’t put in writing “There is a single down-to-earth omission that can transform a sentence from boring to brilliant.” Do write “One down-to-earth omission can transform a sentence from boring to brilliant.” Similarly, circumvent “We will be running the new-found program from our Dallas Company.” As an alternative, opt in support of “We want run the recent program from our Dallas Company.”

Place the longest item at the end of a series.

Start with the down-to-earth and exert yourself on the way to the complicated. It’s less confusing and makes a more memorable finish to the sentence. If you have a sequence like “He was every time shortly after Joan, loud and boring.” Go for “He was loud, boring and every time shortly after Joan.”

Details are often more convincing.

Unless you must for legal reasons, except you must for officially authorized reasons, don’t make use of terms like many, several, approximately, virtually and other such mushy weasel modifiers. Information tells your audience that you know what your product can do based on tests, research, results, and so forth.

Modify thy neighbour. 
Neighbouring clause that is. Make guaranteed your modifiers apply frankly to the significant clause inside question. Sort out this and you’ll dodge such gaffes equally “I collided with a stationary truck approaching the other way. (The truck wasn’t approaching the other way, it was stationary.) Better to tell the judge “I was approaching the other way and collided with a stationary truck.” (You’ll still shell out the penalty for running into a truck, but at least you’ll come across as sober.)

Use single verbs to avoid doublespeak.

Single verbs can often sort out two comparable verbs. As a replacement for of “The notebook was operating and running smoothly,” choose “The notebook was running smoothly.” Otherwise, as a replacement for of “He was unfilled and ran made known of chatter,” go for the more direct “He ran made known of chatter.”

Vary sentence part.

A thread of sentences all the same part can be very boring. Start with a short sentence or at least a medium-length, then go long, short, medium or any combination thereof. Imagine a person talking in sentences that are all the same length. Robotic.

Are your sentences like the Energizer Bunny?

They go on and on. Just because you’re conveying legal or complex technical information, doesn’t mean you have to use serpentine sentences that never seem to end. Instead of saying “Laser beams, which have many properties that distinguish them from ordinary light, result from the emission of energy from atoms in the form of electromagnetic waves.” Break up and re-phrase to “Laser beams have many properties that distinguish them from ordinary light. They are produced when atoms emit energy in the form of electromagnetic waves.”

Go short and sweet.

Why use a 4- to 5-word phrase when a 1- to 2-word version will do nicely—with no loss in meaning? Statements like “in view of the fact that” can be easily reduced to “since” or “because.” Word economy is particularly important, especially when you’re paying for premium ad space in a major publication.

Don’t overstate the obvious.

Redundancy is good for space travel, but not for clear writing. Phrases like "anticipate in advance," "totally finished," or "vital essentials" will drive your readers crazy and communicate very little. The same goes for stringing two or more synonyms together like "thoughts and ideas" or "actions and behaviour.” It makes readers wonder if you really meant to say two different things or just wanted to reinforce one word with a needless synonym.

So the next time you’re struggling with that sales letter, mailer or webpage, follow these simple rules. They’ll help you communicate your message more clearly and with greater selling power. Remember, there are 26 letters in the English alphabet. Use them wisely.


This article taken from here

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What Is Pay Per Click?

By now even people who don't have and use computers have heard of pay per click. However; relatively few of the people out there who have heard of pay per click advertising understand fully what it is. So how can it benefit your business and is it even applicable to your particular business genre? Also what about costs? How does it stack up cost-wise when compared to other standard forms of advertising? Why Is it Called Pay Per Click? The name pay per click is used because that is basically how it works. That is that you pay a set amount of money every time a person clicks on an advertised add that takes them directly to your site. The exact amount you end up paying is contingent on several factors and thats where pay per click can get confusing and costly, unless you are aware.

Google and Pay Per Click – The Dominance Factor

Right now the most influential, recognizable names in pay per click advertising are Yahoo, MSN and Google. So which one is the most popular out of the these three? That of course would be Google, due to the fact that they have the top ranked search engine on the Internet. In fact Google almost dominates pay per click completely.
So Just How Simple Is It To Get Started With Pay Per Click?

On the surface pay per click is very uncomplicated. You simply contact and sign on with the pay per click service that you have chosen. The next step will be to set up your particular adds, decide the maximum amount of money that you're willing to pay per click and thats about it. However; as simple as this sounds, just like so many other aspects of business, the devil is in the details.

It Pays To Do Some Contract Terms Research

You simply must research carefully the contract terms of each pay per click service prior to choosing any one of them. As an example, while Google will bill you by the click after they have been done and the people visited your site, other services will demand that you pay for a certain amount up front. On the other hand, Google does have an initial set up fee that these other pay ahead of time pay per click services don't.

Don't Get Stuck Paying For Useless Clicks

It goes much deeper than that too, because there are also geographical considerations that may have to be taken into account as well for instance. What this means is that if you're marketing something that targets certain geographical areas, you don't want to have to be stuck paying for useless clicks from outside those areas.

Tens Cents Per Click Adds Up To Dollars Quickly

The fact is that ten cents a click may seem inexpensive on the surface but but ten cents when multiplied by a larger integer can add up to big dollars. So all things considered, it really does pay to take the time to learn as much as you can about pay per click advertising before you jump in head first.

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