It’s time to give away a few tips and tricks on how to get more Twitter followers. I mean c’mon, who doesn’t like more Twitter followers right?

The more Twitter followers you have, the more leverage you have to promote your brand or website. Before I list these 10 tips, just think about how important Twitter is when it comes to promoting your brand. It’s not hard to imagine that if you offer some type of value to people, naturally your Twitter followers will climb in a short amount of time.

Think about having 500 followers. You simply leave a quick “tweet” about a new post you wrote on your blog. You just advertised to 500 unique visitors for free! There’s also a good chance that a few of your followers will “re-tweet” your message to all of their followers as well!

The moral of my ramblings… Don’t underestimate the power of Twitter!

10 Ways to Get More Twitter Followers

1. Be Social: Be active with your followers – Reply to them, comment on what they’re doing.
2. Be Smart about who you Follow: Follow people with a large number of Followers and reply to them. Your replies will be in front of thousands of followers. Don’t follow someone just because they have a lot followers, be sure they are of interest to you as well.
3. Blog Posts: Have a blog? Guest posting on a blog? At the end of each post, ask people to follow you with a link to your Twitter profile.
4. Email Signature: Promote your Twitter account in your email signature.
5. Forums: When posting on forums, leave your Twitter profile with your signature on your threads.
6. Activity: Twitter more Often. When you use Twitter more people will find you through Twitter search.
7. Promote: Create a Twitter badge on your site promoting your Twitter profile.
8. Facebook: Facebook has an application that includes your Twitter updates. Add that application to your profile.
9. Other Social Networks: Add your Twitter Profile to all of your other social network profiles.
10. Acknowledgment: When you get a new follower send them a direct message and say “Thanks for Following.” They’ll be more likely to be an active follower and tell their fellow friends to follow you as well.

Does anyone else have any other tips on how to get more Twitter Followers?

Are you or your company running Multivariate Testing?

I just signed up for the Always Be Testing Webinar, added it to my iCal and I can’t wait!  Why?  Read on my friends.

If you haven’t heard of Always Be Testing, it’s a book that was just released by Bryan Eisenberg of Future Now.  This is coming from someone who has read his book and attended his SES sessions.

Normally, I would just keep this to myself but the author of this book has just been awesome.  So I have to share it.  He sat down after his session at SES, gave away 500 copies of Always Be Testing and signed each one.  After the session I wrote about it on Twitter.  In about an hour or so, he some how saw it and replied to me.  I was shocked!  Now he’s following me on Twitter.  How’s that for being just a cool dude?

So if you’re wondering why I have been talking about this so much, well that’s why.  Just feel like I got a lot of value from him and the GrokDotCom blog and I’m just trying to return the favor.  I have already had a few buddies of mine purchase this book.  If you haven’t already done so yourself, then do it already!

Anyway, I am only asking you to do 3 things now after listening to my ramblings.

1. Check out the GrokDotCom blog – Subscribe via RSS
   
2. SIgn up for the free Always Be Testing Webinar
3. Kick yourself in the ass for not doing it sooner!

When you get done with all of that, come back and tell me thanks!

My buddy sent me this article on the “Battleship Grid” analogy. It gives examples and also shows great techniques on how to prioritize the way you website is laid out.

Designing web pages is challenging. Unlike almost any other media, a web design’s integrity is compromised by the nature of a fluid medium. In other words, just because you want something to look a certain way doesn’t guarantee it will — differing browsers, resolutions, screen sizes, monitor calibrations and operating systems all distort the experience.

The one good habit I’ve picked up over the years: learn to compromise. Compromise, however, should be done intelligently and accountably.

One of the more contentious issues in web design presents itself when deciding where specific elements should go and how much space they should occupy. This is especially true in cases where politics (read: Who’s the most important person in the room?) rules. In print, such as in catalogs, they often look to cost and revenue per square inch. We’ll do something similar.

A popular technique we’ve developed over the years for removing politics from these important decisions is the Battleship Grid. The Battleship Grid is where you divide a page into a grid of horizontal and vertical lines of approximately equal size. (I’ll explain why it’s approximate shortly.) The main purpose for using this tool is to spark conversation. Click on the thumbnail image to see an example for a page from Dell.com.

You can read the rest of the “Revenge of the Pixels: The Battle of Screen Real Estate”

Here is one example of how the battleship grid is laid out on “Dells” website.

He is right web design is a very challenging task. Learning and actually using these type of techniques will help make your life much easier down the road.