When I first set up my Twitter account I had the same thoughts I have heard many times since then. I just didn’t get it. Posting a comment of 140 characters and sending it out to Twitterland just did not seem like something I would want to do.

Well, how wrong I was. One of the big catalyst to entering the twitter craze in full force was when I read an article on how twitter could be used to increase your online business. That’s all it took and I was twittering like a fool.

I had signed up for the account because I had just read a post on a blog I had started to follow called Clicknewz. It’s a very informative blog by Lynn Terry, whom I have learned a lot from. I was reading her blog one night and she was talking about being in Atlanta that very weekend.

I was at a point with my internet marketing where I had just made a decision to either start to do something or stop thinking about it all together. You see, I had been thinking about doing something for a while, but all I had done was purchase a couple of Ebooks that just sat on my computer collecting Cyber Dust.

Well, here I was reading a post from a successful internet marketer who was talking about being in Atlanta that very weekend, the very city I live in. She was going to host a little round-up in a hotel lobby that was holding a large internet marketing conference. I decided if I was going to get serious about internet marketing, here it was starring me in the face. She was asking people to twitter her about their attendance and any questions about the roundup time, place, etc.  So I signed up for a Twitter Account.

My account sat dormant for about 3 months and when I finally posted to it,  I instantly got a message from someone I had met at the little round-up. I was very intrigued. I started posting and consuming as much information as I could find about this strange new world. I posted religiously, just like the information I was reading was telling me to do. I created a Bio, uploaded a picture, made a cool background and kept posting good content and trying to converse with other tweeters.

My following rose to about 200. It took quite a while to get that many and it hovered there for a couple of weeks and slowly crept up. It took another 3 weeks to get to 250. I was working hard at it and getting a little discouraged. I was doing everything I was suppose to do, why wasn’t I getting any more followers. Coincidentally, I had a friend in Chicago that was doing it with me and he was getting the same results.

How were people getting so many followers?  I couldn't figure it out. 

One day I was looking through my twitter messages and I came across a little link that was talking about getting twitter traffic so I clicked on it. You see, up until that point I had avoided all the little tricks that were promoted as ways to get a bunch of twitter followers quickly. I thought that was like cheating or spamming.

What I found was a great tutorial of exactly how this guy had figured out a number of different twitter tools and put them all together to produce good quality results while providing good quality content. Here is the video I watched.

The results have been steady. I have actually set up a few other twitter accounts for different niches and all of them have a steady stream of twitter followers being added on a daily basis. The same results have occurred for my partner in Chicago. I think if you really wanted to push it you could see the results they claim in the video but in my experience there is a good steady influx of twitter growth and that is what I am looking for.

It allows me to have some play in the marketplace, that is twitter, and to correspond with a variety of people and receive @ comments directed to posts I have made. This gives you a good insight to what people like and what moves them to comment. It is exciting and fun and certainly gives me a feeling like I am making some progress in growing my online business.

In closing, I have read a number of articles where people have made a stand for not caring how many people follow them and to be honest, I am not about creating a huge following of twitters just to say I have a large following. All I know is its a lot more fun seeing your number go up steadily than it is pumping a bunch of content and not seeing any results. I have also found a good deal of traffic flow from twitter to my blog, sagaciousnews.com,  posts and squeeze pages so it can be a viable business tool.

Where Twitter goes from here, who knows. It has already had a very dynamic life in the short amount of time I have been involved with it.

I look forward to seeing the progression and hopefully the continued success of Twitter.

Here are a few of the twitter applications I use and have been very helpful.

Tweetils.com | User Auto-UnFollower

Direct messages to your Twitter accounts | Splitweet

If this post struck a chord with you or even if it didn’t, let me know what your thoughts are and leave a comment below.

Happy Twittering and Blogging.