LinkMoney.org

First of all I am not promoting any automated giddy gadget and this will not cost you one red cent.  This post is straight up as to how I added 5,000 plus followers on Twitter in two months.

I wrote a post last month about how I had started to build my Twitter followers list from a paltry 200 to 300 followers using @ALLTOP for locating quality tweeple to follow.  You can read the previous post here:
How to Get Targeted Quality Followers on Twitter

Well I still do that because ALLTOP.com is a directory of high quality websites in all fields of interest and once your site is accepted into their directory they grab your RSS feed and keep updating every time you post.  They do not accept everyone but if you want good ranking and to see your site improving with more subscribers you should submit to ALLTOP if you think you have what it takes.  They are looking for a few good Blogs.  Because an actual human being goes out and verifies each website for content quality you can be assured that these sites are the best in their field.  So find their Twitter name, follow them, retweet some of their posts and then most important, follow their followers.

So lately I am using another well known resource to find things to tweet about.  I use StumbleUpon regularly to find things that interest me and then I copy the title of an article from the Stumbled website and paste it into the Twitter message box, go back and make a tinyURL from the address line and copy that in to Twitter and there you have it.  You have just tweeted something of interest to your followers and very often many of them will retweet that post to their followers and suddenly you will have new tweeple following you.  Not to mention that you often get a thank you from the original article poster when they get a message that you tweeted about them.

Now how to break through some of the Twitter built in stumbling blocks.  Twitter likes to see your twitter messages as being of value.  Following the above they will be.  Then they do not want to see automated programs trying to game the system, though many of these do work you stand the chance of doing one wrong move and suddenly you will be banned.  Not worth the chance to me, so I use manual tried and true methods.

I usually follow anywhere from 50 to 200 new tweeps a day, selected with care from other followers lists.  If they are using the default image I usually do not follow them, not that I am elite or anything it is just that they are not likely to be a sophisticated Twitter user yet.  If they do not bother to upload an image than I usually pass them by unless I know them.

By selecting your followers manually you can avoid “some” of the spammers and porn idiots.  If you use an automated follower tool they will be in your list and then your followers might be apt to place you in the ranks of the crappy tweeples and you do not want that.

When you get up near 2,000 followers you want to go in and drop your list of people that you are following down below your followers count.  That way Twitter will not hold you back from going beyond 2,000.

Once you have over 2,000 and less than 4,000 followers you will do best to keep the ratio of following to followers to about + 10% or less.  Then once you are over 4,000 it seems as though Twitter will let you follow as many as you want every day, but I still keep to my 50 to 200 and my list just keep growing and growing.  I am now over 5,500 and many of them come in organically on their own.

Please Stumble this post:

Oh and with the StumbleUpon trick your followers will think you are a genius.  So go for it.

I’m Rich

If you have been struggling to learn the answer to the question, “How do I put an RSS feed on my web page?” This post will explain the RSS Data Feed, and how to install it on your WordPress Blog web site.

For months I have been trying many different methods to try and learn how to make the RSS Subscribe button work properly, and then would get exasperated and move on to something else. I now “get it.”

RSS Explained in Steps:

Dave Winer, a software developer and entrepreneur in Berkeley, California is referred to as the pioneer of RSS (Really Simple Syndication.) There are other common terms for RSS but this is the official one.

RSS Data Feed:

Typically a publisher inserts some code in the website, usually behind the various forms of RSS feed buttons that you see on almost all websites, and the users of the website can register with an aggregator program that is commonly called a “News Reader.”

There are dozens of different types of News Readers and for this example we will discuss the one that is provided for free by Google, called the “Google News Reader.” Go figure.

When someone reads a web post that they are interested in and want to follow the author in future posts, the user subscribes by clicking on the “RSS Subscribe” button and then selects which News Reader they want to use.

Then in the future every time the publisher puts out new content the post is sent right directly to the subscribers News Reader. You may unsubscribe at any time.

How do I Put an RSS Feed on My Web Page?

For the purpose of this article we will discuss Feedburner, which is a company that is now owned by Google, (go figure again,) and the publisher has to sign up for a free account, and then “Burn a Feed.” What that means is that there is a box to type the url of your blog into, and then Feedburner will return a unique identifier feed for that website that can be used in the HTML code for subscribing.

For instance; for this website at LinkMoney.org the unique identifier returned is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/linkmoney/mvZE.
You should copy your new feedburner feed code to a file somewhere for future use. I mean your new code, not the example above.

Then comes the fun part. Depending upon which theme you are using for your WordPress Blog, you may already have a widget that is all set up to just place your feedburner feed code into, or you may have to build the HTML code yourself and install it in a “Text Box Widget.”

By now you no doubt know what a widget is for your WordPress Blog and you use them to insert nicely formatted sections of data for your readers enjoyment, such as Recent Posts, Archives, Blogroll, advertising block ads, etc.

If you see a widget box in your theme that is marked RSS Feeds, do NOT use that one to build your RSS Subscribe button. That one is used for publishers that want to automatically receive generated content from other publishers to be displayed on their own Blog.

So here is what you do. Select a “Text Box” widget, and click on the edit for that widget. Here is where you will paste some HTML code that includes an image of your RSS Subscribe button and a piece of code that actullay does the subscribing to the feed.

Now we shall discuss how to build the proper HTML code for this button. This is very similar to the post that we presented previously about “How to Make a 125 Banner Ad.”

The following example has a piece of bold text that says “Subscribe Here” within the display box. You do not have to do it exactly the same way, for instance you can use the title bar of the text box widget to say something like “Subscribe via RSS.”

The code <center> and </center> just positions the button image within the center of the text box on the final web page area.

<b> RSS Subscribe Here: </b> <br>
<center><a href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/linkmoney/mvZE”>
<img src=”http://[***note this is the url where your image is hosted]” alt=”subscribe via rss” />
</a></center>
<br>

[***Note: the above note is where you insert your own unique url to the image.]

Then the second main part of the code shown, <img src=, is where the image is located. You may elect to host the image any where you wish. Just remember that wherever it is hosted it should be a reliable website or server that is on all of the time, otherwise your image might not display at all if that server is down for some reason or other.

As I explained how to host an image on Photobucket in the previous article about How to Make a 125 Banner Ad, I would suggest you go there to read the procedure. You will probably do better by parking the image on the same hosting server that your WordPress Blog is hosted on, but I have not done that yet.

Now when a reader wants to subscribe, all they do is hit the Subscribe Button and they will have your new posts directed to their News Reader. Really Simple Syndication indeed! I trust this helps you to understand RSS Data Feeds.

To those of you that might read this and say it is elementary, I say that is exactly what most of the new Bloggers need. All of this crud does not come easy to me and I think I am in the majority. So when I make a new discovery and learn how to do something after countless hours of trial and error, I try to simplify the description and write it up for the readers of LinkMoney.

From emails and comments I know that many people do appreciate this information and that is good enough for me.

Now if you find this post of interest you want to SUBSCRIBE with my nice big RSS Subscribe button at the top right of this page.

If you want to subscribe by email, go ahead and then in a future post I will explain how to set your email subscribe box up using feedburner also.

I’m Rich !

Here is how you can set up a no-cost 125X125 Banner Ad on 5,000 websites very quickly. ( No-cost as in FREE ! )

Just set up a free account with 125exchange.com

Then you upload your own 125X125 banner ad for your website and it gets immediately posted on 5,000 websites.

Then you create a place on your website for a 125X125 banner ad, and insert their code and you get revolving ads that you can make relevant to your website topic and everything is a free trade.

If you don’t know how to make your own 125 banner ad, I wrote a Blog post about it a while back on my LinkMoney dot org website.

Here is the link: How to Make a 125 Banner Ad

This is an excellent way to cross-promote your Blog with other like-minded Bloggers.

Rich Hill