I am hearing this Twitter buzz going on about getting more followers and the ways you can get them.

If you don’t know Twitter, it is sort of like a truncated but still fun social networking site where users submit “statuses” of what’s going on with them in less than 140 characters. Many celebrities are using Twitter as well, the real verified ones. On Twitter, you can follow somebody if you like their updates and wish to keep in touch with that someone’s updates. Unlike with other social networks, if you follow (add) someone on Twitter, it doesn’t mutually have the other add you back so you have “following” and “followers” separate. People become very addicted and crazy about getting more followers to make them look like somewhat popular or to attract ad services.

I’m not here to promote about Twitter in general, so let’s get to the chase (don’t worry, this is not a promotion speech); back to Twitter followers. There are many ways to get Twitter followers; buying through eBay or websites, joining what are called Twitter trains, and task offering services as with Clickthru. I tried all of them to see if they are real and the quality of results for testing purposes. I used both a test account and my main Twitter account where they both have real profile feels since I didn’t want the test account, random profile picture, or any test account feels to interfere with the results.

eBay/websites: There are many providers on there selling X followers in X days. I bought a test package from each seller for my test account (didn’t use my main account here because they require me to send them username and password and can’t change any until the service is done). Such services usually follow people for you using a software, follow and unfollow those who doesn’t follow you back, send messages through your account and some send even spam. I’ve been promised 1000 followers in 7 days or so; with very few vendors I did get about 800 but with most, either way less and took very long time. If you do quality tweets that fall into the keyword the mutual followers are interested in, they’ll keep following you but there is a risk of losing them even with one unrelated tweet. Also choose service providers carefully since they keep your username and password during all those time and their activities can sometimes trigger Twitter’s “watch” and “TOS violators” list.

Offering Tasks: This is similar to a “get paid to” advertising method. You offer a task and pay the users to complete them, in my case to follow me in Twitter, and I used Clickthru.net for such service. Both my main account and test accounts were used for this experiment, along with 4 Clickthru test accounts and offering raffles & pay per follow through it. I received an average of 30 followers in one month time frame per account (a 3 months test). I found out offering tasks to follow you can get you followers but you are at high risk of losing them as soon as you pay them. If you’re lucky yo do have a chance of attracting 1-2 users to keep following you if the two’s interests clicked. (On a side-note, my other problem through Clickthru was offering a $10 raffle to follow; some users did not realize that with raffles they are paid only when the raffle ends and that only one winner will be chosen. They did follow you but also unfollow in few days later with negative feedbacks stating no payments received.)

Twitter Trains: I used Free Twitter Train, Spread My Tweets, TTrain, and PlzFollow (Before it relaunched). General immediate results were that my followers counts did go up from 0 to 1000+. However, since the people joining the so-called Twitter trains mostly do not care about following you (with the exceptions of the few rare ones) but getting followers for themselves, most of them “add all as advised” to get themselves on the train but once they were on, they mostly go back through their following lists and delete the recently followed ones. Above results were from monitoring the same day as paying for a premium VIP service on the trains. General long term results were that since most people joining the trains are teens, fanclub profiles, business owners, and spammers, almost none of them has the same interested as you. I was monitoring unfollowers with the script providing who unfollowed and at the time of posting which tweet. Everytime I posted quotations of my liking, my thoughts, or share books or adult contents (as in teens unrelated, not porn), I lost the teenagers or the fanclubs profiles, which were also setup by teens. Most business owners stay but all they did was post their business links but there are also some who do quality tweets at times too. Spammers ALWAYS stay but they will @reply you all the time once they noticed you exist on Twitter. In the end, I ended up with only 4-5 actual Twitter users with similar interests or tweet types. To sum-up the overall image, in general, using Twitter trains, followers count can peak temporarily to a certain amount, but it’ll drop back daily (1000+ to 700 now) once people found out you’ve been followed through a train site and you’ll end up with only 4-5 quality or less users per 1 month period!. Also Twitter Trains may misuse your account to spam for their own goods (that doesn’t include the initial tweet after joining but mass tweets at some point); I haven’t received problems with Spreadmytweet, TTrain or PlzFollow, but with Free Twitter Train, even to buy a premium account, I was already forced auto followed about 15+ people as soon as I logged in!!!

Searching Twitter users via keywords: I also used Twittgeek.com to test out their functions. They let you insert a keyword, their system automatically find the Twitter users tweeting that keyword and auto-follow them. The service wasn’t that bad but first of all, you will be following people with keywords of a close-match as well, where the reason they typed in the keyword will not necessarily mean what you’d thought about; for example: dressing – dress or salad dressing. Second, you end up following 150 or 300 Twitter users (depends on free or paid service) while yourself is being followed by only two digits after the end of “following” day. To convert those you’ve followed to become your followers, you have to contact each of them and get acquainted in non-spam manners (not very feasible unless you’re using automated messaging, which will get noticed easily & get unfollowed). Not to also mention Twitter frowns upon users with very large discrepancy between following and followers ratio because following a lot means you are in hope of getting followed back and a potentially spammer.

It appears only keyword targeted searching is the only service that can close to somewhat promising to find Twitter users with similar interests as you. The other methods are just temporary ways of getting followers, where you get followers fast, get unfollowed fast, and end up with advertisers and spammers, who do not make your profile reputation look good.

My recommendation is that use the good old fashioned be an active member method. Use Twitter and tweet daily as you would. Tweet using the trending topics only if you have a reason to do so, don’t just tweet about TT just for the sake of “I tweeted in it!”. People will eventually find and follow you; sometimes this can take a long time but the people you gain that way are the people who are worthy of following back and people who will answer your tweets if you ask a question and express your thoughts!

Cheers,
Kaung | KMKBlog

ENTRY CLOSED. WINNERS WILL BE ANNOUNCED SHORTLY!

It’s almost Valentine’s Day again! The time to spend times and share the loves with your loved ones. What are your plans for the special day? I believe that all special days should consist mainly with the thoughts of giving than receiving, so here you go, I am hosting a Valentine’s Day Give Away! (Don’t forget to also subscribe – on the right – to my blog to get updates on future giveaways!)

How do you participate?

1. Share this link with your friends through one of the social bookmarking services listed below or via retweeting through Twitter or blog about it or the old fashion linking: http://bit.ly/d0Vdid
2. Leave a comment here telling which method you used
3. Tell what you think about Valentine’s Day! (You can be creative or just give a plain answer)
4. Tell which gift you want and a short reason for choosing it.

How will you notify?

Be sure to use your real working email and/or provide your username/link to your appropriate networks!

How many will be chosen?

3 Lucky Winners!

Any country restrictions?

None what-so-ever. But delivery times of the albums may vary. Especially to international shipments (Non-US).

When’s the last day to enter?
February 14th, 2010 by 12:00:00 AM (Feb 13th’s Midnight)
Count Down Here

What are the prizes? – Music Albums!

1. Your Choice

2. Nick Jonas & Administration – Who I am (Feb 2, 2010 Release Date)

3. Justin Bieber – My World

4. Selena Gomez & The Scene – Kiss & Tell

5. Taylor Swift – Fearless

Is this for real or a joke?

I will not have my reputation become a joke!

Enjoy the give away & the Valentine’s Day!!!

Cheers,
Kaung | KMKBlog.com

Recently I signed in on Twitter to search for an important mention or @myname made by an associate. I was in a hurry and have hoped that this would be an easy job to dig through my @myname. However, in contrast to my high hope, digging through and searching had to be one of the painful things that happened to me (apart from the moment resulting from foolishly not saving that message content in the first place!).

“More”, “More”, “More” and “More” at the @myname didn’t really help since I had many replies from university colleagues, business partners, and other users. I figured there had to be a way and I found out Twitter Talk few days later. I chose to use Twitter Talk not just for me but for all out there who wants to search through their @names without any or minimized frustrations.

“What did you do?”, you may ask. It is more like a ‘how’ than a ‘what’. I used a script to connect to Twitter via API to gather my @myname information. It helped me see all my most recent conversations in a threaded view. Threaded view means the conversations are displayed as in the forums but in Twitter’s case only between my associate and me (only 2!). This saved me huge amount of time going through @myname to search for replies scrolling down and down skipping other “unwanted-at-the-moment” replies by other tweeters.

And no, I will not be selfish and use the method or keep it for me only. I’ve decided to share it with you all! Go to my blog’s Twitter Talk and simply enter your Twitter username and password to log into your account. Once logged in you will see a list of friends you recently chatted with. Select one and you will see your recent conversation thread with that person. You can also make replies through here!

And once again, no, your information including your username and password are not saved in any format. To be honest, there are only 2 folders and 2 files for Twitter Talk, no database what-so-ever. I would give you the database password to prove it but well, there isn’t any!

Enjoy the threaded conversation with KMK Blog’s Twitter Talk! Make sure to bookmark it before you forget the link! I haven’t found out a ‘grab info from someone’s memory’ script YET!

PS: In case you were wondering, yes, I did found that one @reply after 5 “Mores”!

Cheers,
Kaung Ko

You may be wondering what the above display is. It’s a proxy detector! Read on if you want to know more and wish to get one.

If you operate e-commerce sites, you may have frequently or often experienced fraudulent purchases done by “customers” through anonymous proxy servers. That is to say, the “customer” first visits a proxy site that helps him/her hide the true ip address (computer address), so that no one can track from where and who made the purchase with fraudulent payments. As a reliable seller, you have to make sure all of the charges and cases are resolved efficiently and this can take some times and can give you and your employees headaches. If there is a way to detect those proxy servers and block accesses from them, don’t you think your business will run smoother and have more time to focus on product qualities and customer purchase satisfactions?

If you think so, then you need to consider investing in a proxy server detector for your e-commerce site. There are many out there so you have to pick the right one for your business. Most of the scripts are either sold by unknown companies or from known companies but come with little to no instructions; and it is rare to find a company selling easy solutions. Regardless of how rare they are, IP2Proxy comes close to it when it come to providing simple web solutions to detect and blacklist proxy servers. All you have to do to have it running is to download, and import in your system backend and let the script do the wonders (automatically start blacklisting proxy server accesses!).

True, You can also add individual ip address to your htaccess or server firewall to block the proxy server ips but remember that there are MANY proxy server ips out there with new ones coming up daily or ips changed daily. And it will be troublesome for you and your server management team to locate each ip and manually input them to server firewall! With IP2Proxy, it automatically locate and detect proxy servers and proxy list for you and that Anonymous Proxy List is updated as soon as new ones are detected. You might wonder how the script was coded or what algorithm is used for the production. You can find out more at the official IP2Proxy site.

Not to mention, you are not committed to buy the software and you can even get the FREE version with them! You can continue your search on finding easy ways to prevent proxy accesses to your e-commerce sites or you can go straight to IP2Proxy, end your search and enjoy fraud free services!

- Kaung Ko

Building traffic to your website

In order for a webmaster to succeed in building a valuable website, you need traffic. Traffic, in short, is the number of visitors to a website, which will eventually determine the success of your website in terms of monetary resell value.

In building traffic to your website, and before we continue with this guide, you need to take into account the golden rule:

“Building traffic does not cost a lot of money, but rather some time and effort you dedicate to establishing a good traffic base. Also, remember, traffic to your website does not happen overnight!”

In this guide we will focus on building long term and quality traffic to your website. By following the steps in this guide, you will soon find visitors visiting your website on a routine basis.

Before we continue explaining some methods you can follow in establishing traffic to your website, we need to focus on the basics first. The basics we are referring to is your website itself. You need to ensure that your website is in the correct format and complete before you attempt any of the suggestions contained in this guide.

An improper formulated or incomplete website will prevent your site from being promoted correctly and will cause you to loose tons of potential visitors.

Your website

A completed website

The first and foremost important factor is to ensure that the design and information contained within your website is complete. There should be no broken hyperlinks between pages, broken links to images or ‘Under Construction’ pages.

Take the time to visit each page of your website and ensure that it is complete. Make use of this opportunity to look at spelling or grammatical errors and fix them.

Your HTML Structure

The HTML structure of a website is of utmost importance when it comes to search engine visibility. If your HTML structure is correct, the majority of search engines will be in a position to crawl your website. An incorrect HTML structure will lead to you losing thousands of potential visitors as search engines will be prevented from crawling and indexing your website.

When looking at your HTML structure, there are three tags that should always be present and completed on each and every website page. They are:
1. The Title Tag
2. The Meta Description Tag
3. The Meta Keywords Tag

These tags are used by search engines to identify the contents of your web pages.

Tip: In each of these attributes you should always mention your main keyword of your website at least once, but not more than twice.

Another important tag in your web pages is the <h1> <h2> and <h3> tags. These are often refer to as your Heading tags and many search engines pay particular attention to these tags in order to identify the content of the various web pages.

Many search engines only look at the first <h1> tag, as this is seen as the most important tag. For this reason, you will always ensure that your Heading tags contain at least your most important keyword.

Years ago, Meta tags played a huge role in search engine rankings, but this has changed. Search engines have become more complicated in their algorithms when determining rankings and are now focusing more on the actual content of your web pages than on your Meta tags. For this reason you should not expect high rankings in search engine results, but rather ensure that your website is at least crawled and indexed.

Search Engine Spiders

Search engine spiders, in short a programmed script, which will visit your website and collect certain information, such as content, code, link popularity, etc. This information is then analysed by an algorithm which will determine your search engine ranking for various keywords related to your website.

Here are some tips, which will ensure that search engine spiders read the content of your website:

1. Use HTML

Although various scripting languages, such as Javascript or flash, add cool features to your website, the majority of search engines do not read these scripts. Limit the usage of these scripts to the utmost minimum and stick to the plain old HTML language.

2. Use of Keywords

Search engines love reading information contained in tags. When placing images on your web pages always attempt to add keywords as descriptions to the images.

When making use of hyperlinks to internal web pages, make use of keywords that describe the different pages you’re linking to. As example, instead of creating a hyperlink like: Click here, rather create a link like: Visit my Car Racing page.

When creating your pages, always ensure that keywords are used in the filenames associated with your web pages. As example, if you have many pages do not name them page1.html, page2.html, page3.html. Rather spend time at looking at each page’s content and create page names like car-racing.html, car-accidents.html, etc.

3. Google Adsense

If you are signed up as a member of Google Adsense ensure that the ads are placed throughout your website. Once your website is uploaded and live, Google will automatically start to crawl your website.

Images

Ensure that all your images have completed HTML tags with descriptions. These are often great for search engine listings, such as Google’s Image search.

Great, we are done looking at your website. You have corrected and completed your website content and HTML source.

We are now ready to start with the recommended steps in attracting traffic to your website.

Day 1 – Search Engine Submission

There are tens of thousands of search engines on the Internet. Just by doing a Google search will damp the spirit of many prospective webmasters when they realise the large number of search engines they will need to submit their websites to.

Do not fear, here is a secret you need to know about search engines. The majority of Internet users only use a handful of search engines, with Google being the most popular, followed by Yahoo! The majority of search engines on the Internet are Meta search engines, meaning they extract their results from the larger search engines such as Google and Yahoo!

“So what are you trying to say?” you might ask. Well, what we are saying is that you need only to submit your website to a small number of search engines, the bigger ones. Eventually your website will appear on all the smaller search engines.

The first and foremost important step is to start submitting your website to the following search engines:

Google.com – http://www.google.com/addurl/
Yahoo.com – https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit
Live.com – http://search.live.com/docs/submit.aspx
Entireweb.com – http://www.entireweb.com/free_submission/
Scrubtheweb.com – http://www.scrubtheweb.com/addurl.html
Alexa.com – http://www.alexa.com/site/help/webmasters#crawl_site

While at Alexa.com, also take a few moments to update the contact information for your website. If possible, download and install the Alexa browser. Each time you visit your website and work on it, you will be increasing your Alexa rank.

Aboutus.com

Go to the website, aboutus.com – www.aboutus.com. In the search box type in the URL of your website. A page will then be created automatically for your website. Having a page in aboutus.com is great for a backlink and actual traffic over a period of time.

You can now create an account with Aboutus.com and start to edit your website’s page.

Great, you have completed the submission. Now, please remember not to submit your website to any of the above-mentioned sites within at least 8 weeks. By submitting your site again may lead to you being banned from being listed in these search engines.

In all likelihood you will still have some time on your hand for the rest of today. Why not use this by submitting your website manually to smaller search engines? As stated, this is not necessary as many of them will display your results in any event when you are indexed by the larger search engines. In some instances, smaller search engines may index you quicker if you manually submit your website to them.

A list of recommended search engines and Day 2 and beyond totaling 15 pages can be purchased through the link below.
Topics covered are:
Day 2 & 3 – Directory Submissions
Day 4 – Bookmarking Your Site
Day 5 – Commenting on Blogs
Day 6 – Links Exchange
Day 7- 8 – Forum Posting
11 Steps Guide

BY: Kaung Ko | KMKBlog.com

MySpace is an online social community which was designed to be a network where members can make new friends, meet up with old friends, network businesses or partners, be creative or even marketing your own talents, business, products or services. Due to this aspect it is often required of users to create a website that will reflect the personality of the person or business joining this community. One of the functions offered to members of this community is the uploading of images and video files to the created websites on Myspace.com

Uploading Photos to MySpace

Before uploading any images to a Myspace.com website, it is of utmost importance that you consider every photograph you wish to upload. Remember, all photographs uploaded to Myspace.com websites are viewable by all Internet users. Again, of importance is to note that many businesses research social networking websites in order to conduct a background search on potential employment candidates. If you do upload a personal photograph of yourself place yourself in the shoes of another person and consider if you would offer an employment opportunity to the person in the image.

Special consideration needs be given to uploading images of minors. Users should always remember that there are a large number of predators around the Internet. Sexual offenders often identify potential victims by looking at profiles of minors. Other offenders may at times manipulate images of minors and distribute it illegally over the Internet.

Another aspect to take into consideration when posting images is to determine if the image might be in breach of any copyright infringements. Many Internet users often face civil litigation due to distributing copyrighted material.

Uploading Photos and Videos to MySpace.com

Uploading photos to a MySpace.com user account is quite easy. Once logged into your member account click on the links that says, “Add/edit photos.” You will then receive an alert, which restricts the upload of certain material, such as nudity or multimedia files that may breach copyright protection. You are then given the option of making photos visible to only you or to everyone.

After this you may choose the photograph from your hard drive and then upload the image to Myspace.com. Photos uploaded to MySpace.com can only be in .gif or .jpg format and must be smaller than 600k.

Once a photo is added you can create a caption for this photo.

MySpace.com members are free to search through existing video clips located on MySpace.com to find video clips to add to their own websites. Users may also upload their own videos for use on their own websites and for others to view and share.

The process of uploading videos is done in the same manner described above.

By: Kaung | KMKBlog.com

The teenage community comprise of a large percentage of Myspace.com users. Myspace.com is an ideal community for teenagers where they can interact with friends and family and express themselves.

Myspace.com only permits users above the age of 14 years in registering on their website as a member. This is a security measure instituted by Myspace.com in protecting their users and teenagers are in all likelihood more at risk to offenders than any other older user.

Parents & Teens

It is highly recommended that parents of teenagers continuously stays involved in their children’s’ online activities. Parents should know if their children have Myspace.com profiles and should visit and view these profiles frequently.

It is also recommended that parents continuously read through messages of teenagers on Myspace.com in order to establish in what activities their children may be involved in.

Educating Teens

It is the responsibility of parents to ensure that teenagers are taught the dangers of the Internet and what risks social communities may bear. Due to the fact that the Internet, in large, allows the disguising of an identity, predators can easily infiltrate teen groups and mislead teenagers into physical meetings with catastrophic results.

Teenagers should always be warned not to give out personal identifiable information to other online users. Teenagers should never upload photographs without the parents consent. Threats or harassment should be ignored and reported to senior staff members of Myspace.com.

Offline Meetings

One of the aspects of Social Networking websites are that regular offline meetings are arranged. This is often a very dangerous aspect of social networking online, as the real identity of the other party may only be seen at the time and place of the meeting – in some instances too late.

Parents should advise teenagers not to arrange any meetings with strangers without their consent. It is also highly recommended that parents accompany a teenager to the first meeting and conduct a closer investigation into the new friends circle.

By: Kaung | KMKBlog.com