If you’ve been on Twitter more than about 47 seconds, you’ve likely read or received a tweet about how to grow your list of followers. Many promise hundreds if not thousands of followers within a matter of hours or days. When I first joined Twitter, I was lured into clicking on one of the promotional tweets for growing my list of followers. I wound up with more emails than followers, though, and quickly opted out of the program. Almost instantly, the 50 or so new followers I’d gained “unfollowed” me. No biggie. About half of them didn’t even tweet in my language.

Maybe some of the programs are legitimate. Maybe there is a faster way to grow my group of Twittermates, but I won’t be trying any  more gimmicks to increase my followers list. Besides, the point of Twitter is to network and make friends, which is hard to do with people I either don’t understand or have no common interests with, so I recently started a concentrated effort to gain followers on Twitter and within a week, I’ve nearly doubled my list. The best part is, the group I’m growing is targeted to the same interests as me — Blogging and Internet Marketing.

How did I do it?

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The best posts for bloggers that I read during the week of November 30 – December 5, 2009, are:

• Actions instead of Predictions — by Amber Naslund
• Why you owe it to the world to be your true awesome self — by Chris Garrett
• ProBlogging: 10 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started — by Darren Rowse of ProBlogger
• 5 Tips to Prevent Blog Wandering and Traffic Loss — Guest post at DailyBlogTips by Robb Sutton
• 4 Ways to Post Longer Tweets on Twitter — by Charnita France at BloggingTips

Twitter can be your best friend, or your worst enemy — and it all depends upon you. Check out today’s Freebie Friday gift for a free report: “Taming the TwitterBeast in 20 Minutes a Day.”

When my dad was a young boy, he was at church with his mother listening to a sermon about the land of milk and honey and he blurted out, “Eat your spinach!” He could’ve been a poster child for the public health initiative, 5-a-Day.

Although we know we’re supposed to eat our fruits & vegetables, (yes, even our spinach), I’m talking about blog promos. Yes, five. The concept comes from book marketing guru John Kremer. In his 1001 Ways to Market Your Book, he tells authors to pitch your book at least five times a day — every day. And that’s the key, consistency.

That’s a pretty simple promotion plan. How effective is it? So far, so good. Continue reading →

Unless you’ve been stranded on a remote island for the past three years (hey, it could happen!), you’ve heard of Twitter, the free “micro-blogging” service where users send and receive 140-character messages called “Tweets.” What you might not know is that business “tweeple” are using this platform as a major product promotion tool. And you can use it get the word out about your blog.

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