Lately, I’ve been getting pretty serious with Twitter, while having a lot of fun. The reason why I’m interested in Twitter is not to spam offers and stupid opportunities to make money like a lot of the affiliates out there, but to network with others. Since I live in Montana, it’s hard for me to make connections with others in the affiliate marketing field. I’m a very hands on sort of guy, so I respond well with brain storming sessions or discussions vs. just reading things on my monitor.

I created my Twitter account (@hanjicode) about a year ago, but really didn’t push it aggressively. I thought I’d work on getting up to speed. I’ve been following my favs (@shoemoney and @problogger) for a while, but since I’ve been pursuing Twitter, I’m real psyched on the conversations I’ve been having with some great, smart and productive people (@MattLevenhagen and @chrishedgecock) as a small example. I’m really hoping that I can develop a forum with a few people and talk about some affiliate marketing ideas. I have massive room for improvement and I would like to take things to the next level.

The first thing I did to improve my presence was to create a custom background image. I’m still tweaking that, but I wanted to put some effort into my profile. After I dialed in my background I started including my Twitter link to my forum signatures (like at Digital Point). I noticed immediately new followers trickling in.

The most important thing I did, was become active in my Twitter network. Ask questions, reply to questions, etc. By doing so, you’re showing activity and increasing your update counts. Watching people like Shoemoney, Jeremy posts ALL the time! And when I say post all the time, I’m not saying to post crap that everyone else is posting or constantly re-tweating, but actually contributing with something useful.

I’m also following most of the people that follow me. I first check out their profile and make sure they don’t post spam every minute. If it looks like we may have a common interest or are cool, I’ll follow them. Adding them to the conversation generates more followers, and so on.

I’ve looked at various get-followers-quick services, and frankly, and think they’re lame and don’t really want to participate in that. I’m not seeing how that could help me, when I identified that my goal is to make connections and network with affiliate marketers, not get thousands of non-related, spammy followers. I’ll create another Twitter account for that (wink).

Since I started focusing on Twitter I was able to get around 100 followers relatively quick. I’m hoping this rate continues!