Working on getting more twitter followers

We all like Twitter and know how powerful it is. And the game really gets started when you have tons of followers following you. So working on getting more followers on twitter is something that is worth doing. The effort putting into it will finally pays off one day.

There are tons of tips, tricks, guides how to do it all over the place. For example, you can soar your follow number in a short period of time by joining TwitterFollower.com, founded by John Chow.  It’s a free program that only targets two very specific things, mass unfollow and join to the list by committing that you will follow whoever follows you.

The program does actually work, largely because of John’s huge influence that attracted tons of people to join the program, me included. However, it doesn’t sound that the followers are very targeted and related users so the number may not mean anything to you if you are not in an Internet market niche. And for that reason, the method "Get More Twitter Followers Today” Chris Brogan posted today may work a lot better but that takes time and require a lot of consistent work and effort.

1. Find great stories from other people and share them with a link (and/or attribution). Do this 3 times or more a day!
2. Share useful information that others can use, too! example: “I’ve discovered that Blip.fm is very useful for sharing my musical interests.” (Bonus points if you provide the URL).
3. Participate in online events that use #hashtags, because others in the event will find you and appreciate you, too!
4. Respond to OTHER PEOPLE using the @reply method. This is advanced, so here’s an example: “@glendawh – Is it true you were out all night last night singing karaoke?”
5. Use Twitter Search (http://search.twitter.com) to find people talking about the things YOU talk about, and follow them!
6. Add your Twitter URL to your signature line in your email! (Easy to do!)
7. Don’t overtweet (more than 20 a day is a bit spooky to most people).
8. Don’t talk about your food (unless you’re me!)
9. Don’t use Twitter like IM (use direct messages for that)
10. Don’t tweet all about you: tweet all about them.
11. And never, ever, ever invite your friends to be part of your Ninja dojo (unless you’re @cspenn), your mafia family (unless you’re @jgottinotdead), or to participate in a “what type of piercing am I?” quiz.

I have been thinking of building a web app myself for a while to simplify some of the work I do regularly on Twitter, mainly simplify the process finding and following the target users, but haven’t really found enough time to really get into it. Jonathan kindly offered his time to help me out so we will work together to get something out real soon. However, we won’t release it sooner until we have proved that the theory of the app actually does work.

9 First Step Goals for Blogging

Words from Darren Rowse on ProBlogger.net:

Many bloggers start blogs these days with the dream of millions of readers and making large amounts of money.

While it is possible to build blogs that are widely read and profitable and there’s nothing wrong with dreaming big – the reality is that it takes time and a lot of work to build these kinds of blogs.

And he went on and suggested a list of 9 first step goals to people who want to get into the blogging venture with a big dream of making money from it.

1. Publish 10 Posts
2. Getting your first comment from someone you don’t know
3. Get your first link from another blog
4. Build your readership up to more than 20 readers a day
5. Hit a level of 20 RSS subscribers
6. Getting your blog indexed in Google
7. Get your blog earning $1 a week (update: only if making money from your blog is one of your goals – it’s not for everyone
8. First guest post on another blog
9. Having someone (not you or your mum) tweet about your blog

I seemed to have accomplished most of them, except the guest post on another blog, but Darren is very right that it’s just a beginning to get my feet on the right track. There is a very long way to go.

Yes, blogging is my new venture on making more money, and I am doing it with a dream that would make me completely off the regular job one day, or at least gets me retire earlier. With that big dream in mind that is still in “day” stage, I am totally prepared doing that in a long term. A very long journey is laid out right ahead of me.

9 First Step Goals for New Bloggers [ProBlogger.net]

What to do if your website is banned on Google?

My last post touched the first step what to do when the website is banned or penalized by Google. Now, let’s move to the next step.

It’s definitely not end of the word if your websites got banned or penalized on Google. Just face it if it does happen to you. It doesn’t matter whether or not your site is still indexed on Google. If it happens it’s the time to seriously go over the Webmaster Guidelines again, especially the guidelines that specifically tell you what NOT to do, such as:

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links
• Don’t use cloaking or sneaky links
• Don’t send automated queries to Google
• Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords
• Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content
• Don’t create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing, virus, Trojans, or other badwares.
• Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines.
• If the site participates in an affiliate program, make sure the site adds value that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

If you have one or more places that violate these guidelines make sure fix them first, and submit reconsideration request to Google telling them you have fixed the problems on your site. It’s required that you have a Google account that participates in Google Webmaster Tools. It’s also much easier because the communication will be all within the Google Webmaster Tools program. However, it takes time for them to get the issue resolved, usually can take a few weeks.

It does seem a lot easier if your site only got penalized but still is indexed on Google, because that also means you are not so bad that you only have one or two things that need to be fixed. It is a lot more serious if your site got banned because that indicates that you are doing something really bad that Google doesn’t even want you being in their game anymore.

There will be another one or two posts on the same topic, stay tuned.

How to know if your website is banned on Google

If you are wondering why your site isn’t doing so well on Google, and suspect that your site may be banned or penalized by the giant, the first thing you may want to know is if your site is completely out of their database and banned.

You can do that by either performing a search for site:domain.com, or following this site status wizard from Google. If both results come back showing positive, your site most likely is still well indexed but still has something that Google doesn’t quite like. Otherwise, you are screwed, it’s quite obvious that your site is deadly banned.

Either way, the next thing you need to do is to go over the Webmaster Guidelines to make sure your site completely follows them.

How much your website worth? [Fun]

Here are 14 interesting websites that checks the real worth of your hard work on websites. Some of them actually use their own formula calculate the value of your websites. Don’t take it very seriously but absolutely fun to check out.

If you are checking out your own website for getting the idea how much roughly it worth, make sure to try the following one first. The others are more meant to be for your competitors.

At least, according to the results, the value of my geek talk site has more value than JohnChow. LOL

What’s the secret behind the JohnChow.com

Ever since I knew there is a guy living locally in Vancouver making $40,000 every month blogging, I have been wondering how he made it. I have been following his blog quite closely and have been reading a lot of his posts since. However, I just couldn’t get the picture clear how he made it. Simply looking at his blog, other than tons of blog posts in wide topics, there are numbers of ads nicely organized there too. But there is just no way he can make that much money only from these ads, even though from his advertise page the income from these ads are awesomely decent. So what’s the secret behind the scene?

Yesterday, he posted a video of his presentation from the latest Vancouver business meetup. During this one hour video, he laid out what his business model is in very detail and claimed that:

The video contain information that I have never written about before – it revealed my blog business model. As you can read from the reviews, the information was extremely well received and everyone thought it was well worth the price of admission. And you’re going to get it for free!

He’s not lying. I watched out the video in full and am so glad I did. I urge you do the same too. You will find one hour you spend on watching this video is very worth it.

Before laying out the details of his business model, he claimed very clearly that business model of adopting Google Adsense doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because 1) it requires so much traffic that most of the blog are not going to have; and 2) the rate has gone down so much for the past a few years. And then he went on and revealed what the secret is on his blog. Simply put:

• Capture the lead
• Build the relationship
• Put them through the sales funnel
• Workout the cost per lead
• Add pay per click

And details, you will have to watch his video to find out.

How I Make $40,000 a Month From a Blog [JonhChow dot Com]

Tips to Save Money on Grocery Shopping

Time to think about saving money in any possible way, because

1) “every penny counts while we are still in recession”, and

2) considering there will be more members joining my family later this year.

The Simple Dollar shares a tip that I can simply do while doing the grocery shopping. It reveals a fact he discovered that

on some products, the higher volume version often has a higher cost per unit than the smaller version.

He then went ahead and did some research to find why, and listed 10 products we should study carefully before going ahead buying a bulk.

• Tuna fish
• Ketchup
• Canned beans
• Salad & cooking oil
• Dishwashing detergent
• Laundry detergent
• American cheese
• Canned vegetables
• Jams and jellies
• Syrups

Very interesting find. I will sure think twice when thinking of buying these items in bulk next time when I do the grocery shopping.

Grocery Shopping 101: Qty Surcharges and 10 products to Watch out [the simple dollar]

7 Mistakes You Can Simply Avoid When You Write

I came across this post on Copyblogger while going through his feed today. Reading through the post kind reminded me one of the reasons that made me to start a blog a few years ago, which was basically to improve my writing skill while making my own web logs for my daily working and learning experience. It’s proved be a good one that have helped me to archived these two initial goals at some point.

To be honest, these 7 mistakes are quite common mistakes I see on the various posts I follow everyday. It’s definitely worth a post here emphasizing an easy way to improve the quality of the post by simply avoiding these 7 mistakes.

Mistake #1: loose vs. lose

If your pants are too loose, you might lose your pants.

Mistake #2: Me, Myself, and I

Many consider Chris a punk, but I myself tolerate him. Which brings me to ask myself, why?

Mistake #3: Different than vs. Different from

This vase is different from the one I have, but I think mine is better than this one.

Mistake #4: Improper Use of the Apostrophe

Mistake #5: Parallelism

When writing a list of items in paragraph form, this is even more crucial, and failing to stay in parallel can result in confusion for readers and scorn from English majors.

Mistake #6: i.e. vs. e.g.

i.e. is a way of saying “in other words.” while e.g. is used before giving specific examples.

Mistake #7: Could of, Would of, Should of

Please don’t do this:

I should of gone to the baseball game, and I could of, if Billy would of done his job.

Instead,

I should have gone to the baseball game, and could have, if Billy had done his job.

For more tips on avoiding grammatical mistakes, check out Five Grammatical Errors That Make You Look Dumb.

Do you make these 7 mistakes when you write? [copyblogger]

Go Rockets Go

Who would have thought this Rockets and Lakers series can go this far, especially when both Mutombo and You Ming were already out?? Hey, no problem, they have beaten down Lakers twice now since Yao Ming’s out. Why they can’t do it again on Game 7?

So, Go Rockets Go. This is the best changes going to the conference final, ever!!

Publish Blog to Amazon Kindle

Amazon has opened a door to all blogs over the world allowing them to publish their blogs over to their flagship product Kindle. Previously, it was a closed program that only opens to the large well established blogs.

Currently, the program is still in beta, which is a fast track self publishing tool to upload your blog for sale on Kindle store, and open to everyone. However, in order to get paid, you will have to either have a US residential address or a US bank account. Not bad to a Canadian since it’s pretty easy for a Canadian to open a US checking account.

All you need to do is to register an account and submit your blog RSS feed to the Kindle store. Amazon will format your content for the delivery on the Kindle. Be ready with images of your blog’s screenshot, and masthead/banner/logo during the submission.

I went ahead and got my geeks talk blog submitted and published within 30 minutes, and now it’s in the waiting list for be approved. Currently, it shows “not available yet” on the product page.

So what would it look like on Kindle? During the submission you can preview your blog to see how it will look like on Kindle. To be honest, pretty ugly, but that’s ok.

Will this new money making mode work? I don’t know but my gut feeling is who wants to pay to read the stuff that is already free on the Internet. Well, since it’s still at the very early stage, it’s too soon to nail the deal. And here is John’s opinion that seems to summarize it pretty well at the moment.

Subscription revenue will be divided 70/30, with 70% going to Amazon and 30% going to you. Subscription price is solely determined by Amazon. I don’t know how Amazon prices their blogs but the average rate seems to be $1.99 per month. Even if you doubt anyone would subscribe to your blog, it’s still a good idea to sign up and get listed on one of the biggest websites in the world. The free exposure can’t hurt!

And yes, “The free exposure can’t hurt” in any way, so go hurry to give it a try.

Kindle Publishing for Blogs