One of the things necessary to establish passive income is to have an audience of some kind. I created a few new Twitter accounts along with this website. One to use for realsies (@glwngrctngls), and a couple for testing some theories. Here’s some tricks I learned from playing around with my test accounts…

1. Find and follow NEW Twitterers – Use Tweetdeck and create a search for “my first tweet” with quotes. It’s a bunch of people that just signed on to Twitter and are desperate for someone to acknowledge them. Just the act of following shows up as a huge blip on the radar screen of someone with only 2 followers.

Here are some Tweetdeck search columns I am using:

• “my first tweet”
• “welcome to twitter” (follow the person @’d in the message)
• #newbie

I just monitor the colums and follow the people as they popop. Most have <5 followers and many have none at all. I imagine being someone’s first follower has some measurable benefit, especiall when combined with…

2. Reach out to new Twitter users after following them – A great thing about Tweetdeck, other than the constant crashing and memory wastage </sarcasm>, is that it updates live and very quickly. Reaching to people right as they are tweeting means you are much more likely to gain their attention. Just monitoring those columns and responding to several folks tweets yielded some great results. I wasn’t keeping track as much as I should, but I’d say more than 80% of the new users that I reached out to with a personal message followed me back. I was basically adding followers as fast as I could tweet at them.

This makes total sense. Taking a page from UX design, putting yourself in the role of the user, they are confused and a bit overwhelmed. If you reach out them right at that early stage, you’re likely gaining a follower for life. My target audience for this blog is very much regular folks, usually with regular jobs, so reaching out to these types of users brings me really relevant and engaged followers. Remember way back when you read EVERY tweet of EVERY follower? That’s every single one of these folks right now.  So for the new-to-twitter crowd reading this article, go find some more of your kind and get together.

oh, and if you liked this article or this site, feel free to follow @glwngrctngls on Twitter

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Sketchy Bonus: Be a hot girl (or at least have your profile picture be one) – Surprisingly enough, the internet is filled with dudes that would really love some attention from a hot girl. Shocker. Anyways, the results were great: I followed 100 people who came up for the search “radiohead” with an old picture of me as the profile pic. After 24 hours, out of those 100 follows I received 13 follow backs with out any communication from me. Then I changed my profile to this image:

 

and tried the experiment again. Wouldn’t you know it, I got 36 follow backs from 100 follows. That’s 36% for you math whizzes out there.  The thing is, that’s not me and my Twitter account is going to act as an extension of actual me, so this whole technique is invalid. And it’s kiiiinda creepy. Thus, I’m done with this experiment. Moving on…

stay tuned for pt. 2.