Imagine there was a way you could find out what people are wanting, what they are asking for, what questions they have that have remained unanswered, by simply asking the question: What’s everybody doing? How powerful would that be? If you knew that one of the most asked questions and problems people faced bringing home a brand new puppy was actually  ‘what should I name my dog?’, would you do things differently? How many profitable products could you release based on what topics are really hot right now?

You also know what whenever you search a question in Twitter you will receive a load links to information and affiliate products rather than genuine concerns and questions. Even if you find the good stuff, filtering through the clutter would take forever and a day. So doing the above is virtually impossible without endless days of work.

Well I’ll tell you that it is possible. I’m going to show you a way you can cut through the clutter, find the information you need so you can create relevant products and sell them for profit. Are you ready?

Ok here it is:

Visit Twitter Search. Now Type this in: (obviously replace keywords with whatever you like)

-http Insert Keywords Here since:2009-05-30 ?

What have I done?

1. By putting the ‘-http’ I have removed most links so you don’t get people trying the redirect you through to a page of information or their affiliate product.
2. The ’since:2009-05-30′ asks Twitter search to only find stuff relevant since that date. You can take it back as far as you like to get a larger response. (in the Year/MM/DD format).
3. The “?” at the end tells the Twitter search engine that we are only after questions. ie Anyone know how to stop a dog barking?. Also because we have removed the links we won’t get any questions like this -> Want to know how to stop a dog barking? Visit http://etc etc. So we have filtered out all the rhetoricals and commercial questions and replaced these with genuine concerns. You can remove the “?” and you will get more responses including both statements and questions so either way will work. I just used the ‘?’ in this example to show you another feature you may want to implement.

What do you do now?

Essentially the fiddly time consuming stuff that would usually takes days, even weeks to do, has already been done! Now go through the findings in Twitter, read the posts and jot down the concerns one by one. You will start to notice a pattern developing about what people are after and what’s in demand. This is your market research data. Take this, run with it and create an in demand and profitable product.

To see this in action check out my video at the Bootstrapedia Blog

What I didn’t expect was the amount of people to actually call me up on it! So maybe people are actually listening? Maybe its just that you really need to put the time in to nourish your Twitter community just like you nourish your blog community. I’m interested in trying to put an effort in so I have decided that I will put in 10 quality Twitter posts everyday for the next 30 days. Then I’ll re-evaluate the effect it has on both traffic to this blog as well as the level of interaction from other followers.

Just on that, John Chow has relaunched his Twitter Follower system, TwitterFollower.com. I strongly recommend you join this if you want to increase your Twitter followers. The great thing is that the system is absolutely FREE and all you need to do if register. Great work John!

Thanks - blogs.sun.com

I do have a couple things to say more specifically in regards to Twitter. I’m sure anyone using this platform understands how addictive and also how useful it can be. Yet there is a level of frustration of how much SPAM you get on this medium. Also one other frustrating thing is knowing that any time you spend away from your Twitter hub you miss out on plenty of great and valuable resources which would have possibly solved a current problem or issue.

So I have a couple of suggestions.

1. Introduce a user rating – rated by their peers, this rating gives you an idea of what people think of this persons Tweets. Would be simple to implement and would help improve the quality of followers you wish to follow.
2. Have a post rating. At the moment the inclination is to Retweet popular or useful posts. How about implementing a system Like Digg or Reddit where you can vote for your favourite Tweets. You can only see common “Tweeted” Tweets on your sidebar so every morning you get up… have a look at your sidebar and read all the interesting stuff.

What do you guys think?

So the question is, do we really need to complicate things even more? Well of course we do! That’s what Internet people do, they make things simpler and quicker by complicating them. Sort of anyway. They take a simple concept and funk up the name so you need to spend hours researching what it is only to find out you knew what it was all along, however through another term coined by someone else.

Lets take DoFollow and NoFollow links for example. The first time I laid eyes on these terms I thought here we go, another way to drive traffic or optimise your site to get an extra 3 visitors per year or give you brownie points for the search engines (also known as “page rank juice“). I decided to ignore it and move on yet these silly terms kept popping up all over the place. The funny thing is no one ever bothers to explain them, they use the term like its assumed knowledge by dropping them in and moving on. Or if they do explain, they explain them like it was some new uber feature leaving you perplexed and contemplating whether what you have learnt so far needs to be discarded to make way for this new mega-concept.

How about this:

DoFollow Link: <a href=”http://www.xxxxx.com”>Link</a>

NoFollow Link: <a href=”http://www.xxxxxx.com“ rel=”nofollow“>Link</a>

DoFollow is a normal link that search engines will regard as a link back to your site. A NoFollow link is a link where a search engine will disregard the link back to your site. DoFollow is better for search engines and page ranks (aka page rank juice). NoFollow not so great for search engines and page ranks. Use NoFollow to ensure best optimisation and value for paid links from your site.

Now why do we need this jargon to clutter up the net? I understand the need to term a “NoFollow” link as it is different to the standard link but why the “DoFollow”? Its a normal link!!! The problem arises when people, bloggers in particular, start refering to forums as DoFollow and NoFollow forums. Or DoFollow and NoFollow blogs. I feel sorry for the NoFollow blogs because they have been branded as “No – Follow” which to the untrained and relatively normal brain means that you “should not follow them”.

I’m calling for simple organic meanings to stay like that, simple and organic. If they are special then sure, name them, but for the basic and clean  terms keep them as is, it’s confusing enough as it is.

The big hype with twitter is in its networking capabilities and the opportunity it presents to be in touch with those in your same field of interest(s). This has led to the theory that the bigger network you have, the better. In my opinion I would rephrase this theory as the bigger network of like minded people you have, the better. It’s not exactly your Napoleon Hill Mastermind group but a large network can provide you with interesting and useful information as well as allow you to get your message across to people with roughly the same interests.

So how do you get a good number of twitter followers that will follow you back? Well here is a way to get 237 twitter followers off the bat. These are people on Twitter who have over 10,000 followers. The trick here is to be observant. What do all these people have in common? What you will notice is that for many of these Twitterers (can’t believe I just used that word) their number of followers roughly match the number of people they follow. What this means is that most of the time, they will follow back whoever follows them (hence the name of the article).  Not exactly rocket science but I thought I would state the obvious anyway!

Now that you understand the principle of “follow me-i follow you” you can use it to your advantage. What we know is that people tend to befriend those who have roughly the same amount of followers as they do people they follow, that’s why you befriended the 237 in the above list. That means if your likely to follow back then it is more likely that people will follow you in the hope that it will be reciprocated.

You will notice that you will need to spend a bit of time finding people you wish to follow (and will most likely follow you back) especially in the early stages. However as your followers increase an interesting snow-ball effect begins to happen and you will notice more followers coming your way without you needing to follow them in the first place. This occurs as your list of friends grows and you effectively become viral and hit a certain critical mass. In essence as most friend lists are public, your profile becomes more prominent and people begin to notice.

There is another technique I have used to increase my followers. I was considering whether or not I should put this in my blog in the first place but I want to show that I do have a sneaky side, a side that we all have somewhere. First of all, I am not one of those people who will just add anyone, I usually quickly check a person’s profile before I add them but I will follow the majority of people who are in my related field nevertheless. On the other hand there are people who have Twitter pets and Algerian wrestlers as their followers, yet regard themselves as “online entrepreneurs”. These people are Twitter gold. You can also spot these people by looking through their profile and realising that the only posts they make are the one’s promoting their blog. I ignore Oscar the pooch and find those followers that are in my related field and ad them as chances are they will follow me back. The reason behind this is actually quite cynical but I will explain. I call these Telstra Twitterers, in that they have nothing great to offer yet people flock to them because it’s easy to do so. People following Telstra Twitterers can’t be to picky (because they added them in the first place) so it’s very easy to get these people as followers. It doesn’t make the followers any better or worse but you know that chances are, they will follow you back.

This is probably one of the most candid posts I have written but it seems to be the topic of the day and everyone wants to put their 2 cents in. People have created membership sites and businesses based around getting plenty of Twitter followers. Some bloggers such as Problogger state that you need to be active on Twitter to generate a large following but that is fine for someone like Darren who people recognise but I have seen many people who are extremely active yet only get a trickle of followers. I have also seen some Bloggers who pump out drivel, day in and day out, yet have several thousand followers (Telstra Twitterers). It doesn’t make sense until you dive in a little deeper and find out whats happening.

In essence its just a case of looking at a profile, asking yourself whether or not this person is most likely to follow you. Then ask the question, is this person a Telstra Twitterer? If so, find their followers that are relevant to you then add them, chances are they will add you back. I know, it’s not all noble and organic but did you really expect it to be?