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Unless you are famous you will need to go farming for followers but the problem is deeper than this. If you simply follow people many of them will automatically follow you back. This is fine except you don’t know that they are good prospects for your book. This article is about how you farm for those people that are likely to be interested in your book.

Laying the foundations

If you have not read the other articles in this series go and read them now. If you have you might now be seeing why you have to have all of those things in place before you properly farm for followers. If you don’t already have a great profile, background and a fist full of compelling tweets the people you are looking for will not follow you.

Once you have all the foundations down when the right people find your profile they will be compelled to follow you. By having three or four tweets a day going out that is directly applicable to your subject you are already creating some exposure and you may already be finding people are starting to follow you.

Farming for Followers

Lots of people on Twitter will auto follow you back whenever you follow them. To kick start your followers you are going to use this principle. The basic sequence is that you will start following lots of relevant people, I’ll show you how to find them in a moment.

Between two and three days later you will go back and see if they are following you. If they are then great, if they are not then you unfollow them and find more people to follow. You keep doing this keeping your ratio of followers to followees roughly to 1:1

If you do this consistently you will suddenly find that you are getting hundreds of followers and the numbers starting to increase very rapidly. This is because there is a tipping point. Remember everything you tweet is seen on the timeline of all the people that are following you. That means all their followers get to see your tweets. Remember you have already stacked the deck with three or four tweets of value every day. Very quickly you will be seen as someone worth following.

In this way you will be self selecting for relevant followers, but let me give you the other end of the strategy that will increase your results dramatically.

Finding the right people to follow

This is amazingly simple to do. Research your subject and find experts in the field, search profiles for people that mention the subject in their bios, look for hash tags (Twitter groups) on your subject.

Once you find any of these people you follow them and you follow their followers. For example if you go to http://wefollow.com/ you can find all the tweeters that have the greatest following for any subject that is tagged.

Working on the basis that the followers of a subject expert must be interested in that subject…they are likely to be interested in you because you have a great profile and some tremendous tweets. You just follow the expert’s followers to give them the opportunity to follow you back. In a very short while you will have hundreds of followers.

With some of the biggest experts in my field I have also followed the people they are following. The way I look at it if a personal hero of mine is following someone there will be a reason for it and perhaps I might be bumping into the teacher of my teacher and they must be worth listening to.

Do you reall want to sell your book?

Now some people might think this is a huge amount of effort and is it worth bothering with. The reality is that there is a fair bit of work setting this up. But the beauty of it is once it is set up 90% of it you can automate. You can automate your tweets, and there is software you can use to search, follow and unfollow people automatically.

It would take another series of articles to discuss the ins and outs of the various software packages. So just search around on the internet and make your own decisions. All the software I use I found through Google searches and asking twitter users.

Once you have done all the automated sequences you will never have to do them again. All you are left with is the spontaneous, fun and creative things that you can do with Twitter.

A Final Caveat

As I have stated several times Twitter is a social media platform. This strategy really creates a strong platform but it won’t get you the best from your legion of followers. To really get best advantage you need to interact with your audience not just talk at them.

In future articles we will look at getting marketing information, drawing your audience closer and being perceived as an expert through a few choice questions.

For the moment consider a few simple things such as thanking people when they retweet you, asking and responding to questions and generally having conversations over Twitter. All of this will expand your Twitter empire.

A Final Note

At the time of writing (early November 2009) I have around 2000 followers. I got them in the space of three weeks. But those 2000 followers rocketed me up the USA Amazon bestseller chart. The initial hit I got when I started the Twitter campaign I went from being about 20 000 to suddenly up to 1500 within that two week period. Since then I have been in the top 1000 in the general bestseller chart and regularly number one for sales techniques. In the same period sales for all my other products, views of my blog and hits on my website have also increased dramatically.

So for those people that might thing this is a lot of effort might want to consider how much they could get from developing a Twitter following.