Twitter is a free social networking site which enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are messages of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s home page and delivered to the author’s followers. Twitter’s Alexa rank is #12, which makes it a very powerful platform for making contacts, but there are certain tricks to making it work for you.

It is used by different people for diverse purposes; it was initially set up in 2006, and used in a similar fashion to SMS messages. Nowadays it is not only a social network but an information network and is a major way of getting your name known to a global community,

How It Works

There are the people that you follow, then there are the people who follow you, and after you have set up your Twitter account, on your home page you will see the icons for “Following” and “Followers”. To get started pick out some people who have posted any interesting ‘Tweets’ and follow them, or you could search for people you know. You will find that most people will follow you back, and there are several websites around that will allow you to do this automatically. The idea is that you keep the numbers of following and followers within 10% of each other, the reason for this is that if you follow a lot more people than you have followers, Twitter may suspend your account, as they think you may be spamming.

Building Your Followers

You need to try and do this every day – again, it can be automated, but I personally prefer to pick out say 3 of my followers, and follow about 5 pages of their contacts. It takes a bit longer this way, but it means you have the ability to pick and choose who you are following.

Next I go through my Direct Message box, and choose who I want to start building up a relationship with, then send a ‘DM’ back to them, addressing them by name, perhaps inviting them to also contact me on Facebook; the rest of the messages I delete.

The other thing you need to do every day is delete those people who you previously followed, but who haven’t followed you back; again, this can be automated. By doing this it generally keeps the balance down to 10%.

What to Tweet About

It is important to understand, that Twitter is not a sales platform. This is where many people get it wrong. If you immediately start pitching your product, business or service you will lose your following and your friends quickly. You first need to establish credibility and cultivate a relationship with your followers by posting newsworthy items, interesting quotes, funny quips etc. You can also retweet any tweets which you particularly like, simply by typing in RT and then the @ symbol followed directly by the person’s username.

I normally post around 10 Tweets a day, of these 5 would be quips or quotes, the other five would be made up of links either to articles I’ve written, which have the link to my website embedded in them, or a direct sales pitch. I find this is a good balance, and with persistence you should start getting some leads for your business.

Once you get familiar with Twitter, you will find that you need only spend 30-60 minutes a day, and your followers will build up surprising quickly. It is important to 1) do it regularly, and 2) don’t get sidetracked, otherwise you’ll find you are spending too much time on the site, to the detriment of your money making business. It is a great way to build a contact list, and make some new friends along the way. There is plenty of help and videos on the site itself, so if you’ve been umming and ah-ing about whether to try Twitter or not, give it a go, you will be pleasantly surprised how easy it is.

I am an Entrepreneur and Internet Marketer who works from home in Tropical North Queensland. My office overlooks the magnificent rain trees, iron barks and ghost gums on my 5-acre property, which is home to lots of wildlife such as kangaroos, frill-necked lizards and many different bird species – rainbow lorikeets, pink and grey galahs and sulphur crested white cockatoos to name but a few. My free time is spent brewing my own beer (which my partner loves drinking!), looking after our 4 dogs and taking photos of the flora and fauna on the property. I enjoy sharing my knowledge and helping people achieve their dreams; to see how I can help you achieve financial freedom, go to http://wealth4lifeonline.com

Most people have probably heard how valuable Twitter can be in marketing their business, but will never take advantage of it. Why? For many, Twitter looks too confusing. They don’t know where to start!

While it can take some getting used to, getting started on Twitter is actually quite easy. There is no reason to know all the ins and outs in the beginning. You can always try out some of the more advanced techniques and tools along the way.

Here are six simple steps for getting started:

• Set up a complete profile. This consists of a username, a short bio and a picture. Make sure your bio gives a clear message of what you do. Give people a reason to visit your Website and learn more. A personal picture works well too, people tend to be more trusting when they know exactly who they are dealing with.
• Tell others where to find you. If you have a profile on a different social network or a blog, let those friends and readers know that they now have another way to get your great information.
• Find people to follow. The easiest thing to do is start with people you already know. You can look at who they are following, as well as their followers, to find people you would like to network with. You can also search keywords in order to find other people who are interested in the same topics as you.
• Contribute. Join a conversation, post an interesting link, give advice, the list goes on! Just remember, Twitter is an outlet for relationship building. You want your followers to get to know, like and trust you. Twitter is not a direct sales tool. Posting a bunch of tweets promoting your business will only cause people to stop following you. You can still promote yourself; just make sure that’s not all your doing.
• Always reply. If someone asks you a question or comments on something you have said, be sure to reply in a timely manner. Show your followers that you value them. After all, this is the first impression they will get of your customer service!
• Be consistent. If you want to keep your followers happy, make sure you are posting consistently. Decide how often to post, whether every day or every few days, and keep doing it. If you stop posting for days or weeks when they are used to hearing from you more often, they will get bored and stop following you.

By following these six easy steps, you can not only get started on Twitter, but accumulate a nice following as well. Now see how far your message can go!  

Congratulations! You have started your WordPress blog. Downloading, uploading, theme choice, plugins, widgets, niche – those are all done. You have even posted several articles. Now what? Who is going to read your blog? How are they going to find you?

As a website owner, have you ever wondered how some sites get on the first page of Google and others remain buried back on page 27? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is what it is all about.

Briefly, SEO is the creation of traffic and hits from other websites to your site. This increases the opportunity for the search engines to pull from your site. They may find images, keywords, local searches, or business specific searches. But when they find many hits on your website, they tend to like you better and rank you higher.

One way to increase your SEO ranking is to hire an optimizer. That means you pay to have your site reviewed, your keywords searched, and many other things. These services are usually expensive and require ongoing maintenance, which means an ongoing fee.

WordPress helps you to do it yourself. WordPress offers many plugins, most importantly “SEO All In One Pack,” that can help you increase your visibility on the Internet. Use these plugins, but follow these four rules, too.

1. Titles: front running words receive the most attention in a search string. Also, visitors read your page from top to bottom first, and then from left to right. The closer to the top you put your keywords (the beginning of your title), the more weight and attention the search engines will give them.

2. Increase Speed: Did you know that links in the beginning of a search engine result load faster than those near the end? Search engines actually weigh the length of time it takes for your site to load in their crawling matches. You can increase your site’s loading speed by cleaning it up. Remove code you do not need, lessen the video use, increase your cache speed. All of these will help increase the speed that your site loads.

3. Tag and Connect: If you tag each post with the same or similar keywords, you will increase your web presence. Pages are also weighted heavier than posts, so consider creating a page that links all the similar articles together with a “Read More” page or other link at the bottom of the page.

4. Keep Your Traffic: While links to other sites are a good way to lure visitors to your site, this may hurt more than help. Once someone links out of your site, you have lost the opportunity for them to browse your site further. If you do provide a linke, have it open in a new window – that way your reader can easily find their way back to your site.

WordPress actually supports several functions not found with other platforms. WordPress offers optimized descriptions, tagging, related posts, and defining titles. It is easy to use and allows the small entrepreneur to customize his site. This builds an online business presence through the use of search engine optimization without having to spend a lot of time learning the ins and outs of SEO or have to hire someone to do it.

Try these tips to enhance the presence of your site. Increasing your traffic will increase your web presence.
Did you find these tips on WordPress Plugin SEO helpful? You can learn more about WordPress by visiting http://www.learnwptoday.com. Here you will find videos that make it easy to learn all of the ins and outs of WordPress and having a successful blog. You can find it at http://www.learnwptoday.com.

For bloggers WordPress is the most used software available but it is also gaining ground as a content management system for normal websites too. As the use of WordPress increases every day though, apart from the fact that it is free, what makes this software so good, and should you consider using it yourself?

Website Updates

In the old days of building websites by hand, when you added a new article you then needed to rearrange all your website navigation to include links to this new article. Creating an article wasn’t just as simple as writing it then – you needed to do a lot more besides.

However WordPress has now taken all this trouble away. Whenever you add a new article it is automatically linked-to by the software which makes updating your website not just easier but also far more fun.

Appearance Changes

Because WordPress uses a set of PHP scripts, it is easy to change the appearance of a WordPress-based website. Thanks to the use of “themes” you can find hundreds of different layouts available free online and upload any of these to your site. So you now have almost limitless design possibilities – and you can make changes in a matter of minutes.

Traffic Generation

Lastly and possibly most importantly it seems that the search engines have taken a liking to blogs – and WordPress in particular. It seems that websites made using the WordPress software find it reasonably easy to get good rankings in the search engines and so attract quality traffic. And after all there is no point having a website if you never get a visitors to it, wouldn’t you agree?

Produced in association with the brand new leaf insects website which can be found at http://www.LeafInsects.net

You probably use Google to search the Internet. Did you know that Google, and your browser, maintain a history of your Internet activities? In this article, we will take a look at why you want to remove this history and how to do it.

Most people do not know that their Internet activities are logged. These activities are ostensibly logged for your convenience. For example, if you have visited a page in the past, your browser maintains this information so that you do not need to type the whole website URL again.

Or in other cases, you may have typed something into the Google search box. These searches are maintained by Google to present you with similar searches if you happen to be looking for the same thing in the future. In fact, Google combines your previous searches with their own database to try to provide you with the optimal results.

However, what will happen if someone logs into your computer? Can they see your previous Internet activities?

In many cases, the answer is yes.

The answer is certainly yes if yours is a Windows-based computer which only has one user ID. In situations such as this, it is very easy to see the data used by other people on that computer.

If you do not want this to occur, you will need to take action to delete your Google search history.

There are three places to look to delete your Google history. The first place, and the place that snoopers are likely to first check, is your browser bar where you put in the address of web sites that you visit. This area maintains your search history which can easily be accessed by clicking the drop down box.

In most browsers, to remove your browser history, you will click “tools” and then “options” to find the tab that will allow you to delete your personal history.

Another location in which your history is maintained is in the Google Toolbar. If you have installed the Google Toolbar, your history can be deleted by right-clicking in the search area and clicking “Clear History.”

Finally, the third piece of information that is stored is the information that you have typed into the Google search box. This is maintained by your browser and can usually be deleted on a tab within your browsers “Tools-Options” choice.

In summary, if you do not want others to track your Google search history, make sure that you take the proper steps to delete it.

For more information on this topic, visit the how to delete Google history page, which is part of the how to Google series at ThisIsHowYouDoIt.com, your original home for how to do things.

Are you one of many people who are still wondering about Twitter? Maybe you are still intimidated by all of the lingo? Of all the social sites currently on the Internet, this one is one of the simplest to learn and use. You can have a new account up and running in minutes.

Start life on Twitter by looking for interesting people to follow. Many of your favorite celebs may be there, but it’s often non-celebs who post the most interesting stuff. Search by name on Twitter for friends, family, and others who you know use the service. Then look for those with common interests by searching on WeFollow.com. Choose to follow 10-12 others, and expand or reduce that based on the time you have to devote to it. Once you get the hang of the conversation, join in.

First, invite your personal contacts to follow you. Start sending updates on topics you enjoy, and chances are others will appreciate them, too. Send tweets on your hobbies, links to favorite websites, pages, or your latest blog post, or news from your industry. If you are using an account primarily for business, be sure to send updates with value, including links to how-to pages, discount opportunities, or links to quality information related to your products or services.

It is vital that business tweeters take a social/casual approach to their tweeting. Overt sales pitches will not be welcomed, and many who receive them will stop following your posts. Your posts will be viewable on your home page, and will also post to the time line of those following you.

Wondering why the fuss about Twitter? See a brand new Twitter tutorial guide for anyone curious about this hot social site.

Get it here: Twittering Guide.