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Twitter: A Newbie's Guide to Followers, Re-Tweets, Links and Making Money

By David Jester

For those of you who know me you will know that, as a Newsblaze writer since the beginning of the year, I have feverishly tried to cover every aspect of English, European and International football. I am also an avid Gambler and this year alone I have posted heavy profits on that front, therefore I have also shared a few tipster articles with the community - although I must say that the World Cup was a heavy dent to my profits.

I have always enjoyed Sports but I have spent my time writing other things, the opportunity to write about Football/Soccer came to me when Alan asked me to write for the site, and as an Englishman with little grasp of US (let alone World) News and no interest in Celebrity culture, the Sport section really stood out. The canny Editor also suggested that I try a few Social Network sites.

I can honestly say that they have never appealed to me before. My girlfriend and my family are obsessed with them, I see them as a distraction and avoiding them is a good way to further avoid my girlfriend and my family. But, after giving it some thought I decided to opt for Twitter. It seemed as impersonal as they came and I figured it would be a good place to post links to my stories.

Then, tragedy struck, the football season ended, the World Cup finished and I had nothing to write about. So I began a Twitter crusade and turned 200 followers into 2500+, I still don't know much about the place and rarely pay attention, hell, I'm still just waiting for the football season to start, but I figured I would tell you what I have learned. It seemed I had been hiding under a rock for a long time so just in case anyone else out there is just emerging from that rock, here are a few starters.

Followers

This is the easy part. Twitter is a popularity contest and if you don't particularly care what shows up on your homepage, then you'll be happy to let anyone join your clique. It's like befriending the entire school and then turning your phone off.

The trick is to find people who are following more people than are following them. If you follow them they are always likely to follow you back. Luckily Twitter has its own hashtag for this and seemingly has created a whole culture. Search for Teamfollowback to find the people getting involved in this, not only will they follow you back but if you click on their followers and follow them, they will also follow you back. Just run down the page of 'Followers' (@TeammFollowBack and @OperationFollow are good members to start with and I also have plenty @DavidJester) and click "Follow" for each member. It takes less than 15 seconds to cover the page and the 20 people on it.

Do this for 50-80 people a day (anymore and I am led to believe Twitter will get suspicious, although I have gone above 120 in one day without any problems) and then wait. If you use Twitter for your main account you may want to remove the option to receive Emails every time you get a Direct Message or Follower, because they will flood in by the hundreds.

The people that you follow should follow you back and then you will appear on their lists so that people you aren't following will also follow you. So be sure to check your followers and follow everyone who takes the time to follow you. Too much use of one word there...but it had to be done. My apologies.

Making Money

This is a tricky one, but it can work in a few ways. Firstly there are sites that will pay you to Tweet adverts based on the amount of Followers you have, the best of which seems to be Sponsored Tweets which can be found here. I tried a couple of others but they haven't found me a single sponsor yet, whilst these guys have picked up 6.

When you join you will be greeted with a list of opportunities to join Pay Per Click programs. These range from 2c a click to 10c a click. More importantly though are the Sponsored Ads themselves. Advertising companies will pay you to Tweet out one message, the rate of which depends on how many followers you have but you can also change it to lure in more sponsors. With 2500 followers my current rate is displayed as $2.86, although I dropped it to 50c and then to $1 just to check, receiving requests for sponsors on both occasions.

This is very small time but what really is interesting me is how many clicks my own links can bring in. After playing and enjoying Betfair Poker recently I tweeted about it, adding a referral link (http://bit.ly/cfx4vf), and this link brought in over 90 clicks, which is quite respectful considering the majority of these followers are non-targeted. Adding a catchy title and promoting a story would also help greatly, for which I would suggest top Newsblaze writer @RobertPaulReyes. A lot of his headlines are catchy and his stories are punchy, to the point and just what the majority of Twitter fans like to read. It can't hurt to boost the ratings of fellow Newsblaze writers and to keep your Twitter page updated in the process.

Re-tweet Requests

This is something I have tried and succeeded with on a couple of occasions, the first of which was the most successful.

A few months ago I wrote an article about a friend who had 'pimped' out his scooter in the colors of Liverpool Football Club. It cost his thousands to do and the end result was simply amazing. He took some pictures for me to post and this was all boosted when I learned that he lived next to the Manchester United training ground (fierce Liverpool rivals) and often drove there to annoy the locals. It made for an amusing and quirky article.

At the time the link was only shown to my 100 or so followers and it received very few hits, the vast majority from Newsblaze. A few weeks later, when the link was getting no more hits, I sent a Direct Message to an official Liverpool FC Twitter page, sent them the article and asked if they could re-tweet it. They did and within hours of it being posted to their 25k+ followers the link was near the top of the Most Read page at Newsblaze. The same link was then picked up and re-tweeted by some of those followers and it ended up with a nice amount of hits. So, although Direct Messages can be annoying for people with many followers on Twitter, it still doesn't hurt to ask - the rewards can be great.

And Finally

One last site that you will want to try is Manage Flitter. They will log into your Twitter account and give you easy access to all the people who aren't following you back. After a few weeks of adding 100 or so followers a day, you will find that a number of them aren't following you back. You might have slipped off their radar or they might have cheekily unfollowed you (seems to happen with a few members in the hope that you won't notice). Either way, it's best to get them off so that you can continue to add more. When you follow 2000 people Twitter will stop you from following anymore until your followers increase, so going here and making sure that everyone you are following is following you back, is a simple way to budge up past 2k and continue to collect even more followers.

That's about it. Sorry for the long winded article, I hope you managed to stay awake to the end. Essentially this is all simple stuff and I'm sure most of you know it already, but I figured it couldn't hurt to put it together, even though I still have a lot to learn myself. I will be back to writing my Football/Soccer articles soon and will also drop in the odd tipster article. Drop me a line on Twitter or through Newsblaze if you want to chat and feel free to add me, you can be sure I'll add back:-)

David Jester is the Newsblaze Soccer expert. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/DavidJester