The More You Follow, The Less You Connect

Above all else, social networking is about, well… socializing and networking online. It’s about making connections with other people who share common interests, goals, and mutually benefit from communicating with you.

The more people you follow, the less people you can effectively connect with. A huge list of “followed” results in a wall cluttered with a bombardment of messages, most not even directed toward you. The chance that you’ll be able to read any single person’s update reduces substantially every time you follow someone new.

To make sure you get the information you need and receive messages from people you want to establish an online relationship with, whether for personal, entrepreneurial, or entertainment reasons, you need to be picky. Only follow those people worth listening to, who provide useful information, and who create value in your life. Avoid the hacks with tens of thousands of followers, who follow tens of thousands of others, and just spew out a bunch of marketing garbage every 30 seconds. They do not care about you, they just care about getting your money and wasting your time.

If you seek to mechanically follow thousands yourself, you show you do not care about the many individuals who follow you because you most likely you will never see their messages. As an example, a client of mine posts frequently to market herself. When I first built my Twitter list, I too randomly followed people to push my numbers up. The several months I used Twitter, I saw merely one post from my client, one out of many that went up every day. Imagine all the posts I never saw from people who casually post, people who I am missing the chance to establish a viable relationship with.

I want to hear what my clients have to say because the more I know about their business, passions, and needs, the better I can help them with their goals.

The More They Follow, The More You’re Ignored

The fad keeps preaching “you follow me, I’ll follow you” and many automated services exist to increase numbers by building lists based on reciprocated follows. However, the more people others follow, the less updates of yours they will read, if any. How does that help you? It doesn’t…

Think about it, if JoeShmoe follows 34,318 people, that’s 34,318 possible messages a day that scrolls through his wall. If he’s following many of the people who build their lists this way, you can multiply that number by 24, 48, even 100, because most of those guys use their twitter account as a marketing ticker. You’re messages will just get buried in cyberspace, never read, never connecting, never helping you grow your business or make more money. Just wasting your time, your cash, and your effort.

What’s the Real Twitter Gold Standard?

Just look at the really successful people on Twitter – the celebs, the industry gurus, the information and communication super stars. Millions follow these people, but many of them follow less than 100 others. That’s because they value their time and want to spend it reading meaningful posts. People follow them not because they reciprocated the follow, but because they actually earned their followers by attraction.

Your goal should not be to follow as many people so that many people follow you, your goal on twitter should be to follow people you want to listen to and connect with, and gain followers who want to listen and connect with you. Your goal should be to earn MORE followers than people you follow, to earn followers simply because people DESIRE to follow you. That’s really what twitter is all about.

How to Start Fixing Your Twitter List

Wipe it out and clean it up.

Awhile ago a colleague of mine completely cleaned out her client’s twitter list, along with Facebook’s, because she found it full of meaningless connections and people not really interested in her client’s business. She rebuilt it from the ground up using a basic Internet marketing principle… stay within your market or niche.

The client’s business focuses on MMA training, so she sought out similar minded people in the industry, people who would be interested in establishing joint ventures and other people just enthusiastic about martial arts. After building the list up, she saw her client’s bounce rate from twitter referrals fall from the 90% range to the 20% range. That’s huge! The number of referrals also shot up. Quality over quantity counts big time.

I’ve begun to do the same thing, removing all the people…

• following more than 10,000
• who follow the same amount of people that follow them
• who post every couple minutes, or every hour
• who repeatedly post the same marketing tag lines
• who only post about their products and business

You know these people, they’re called spammers. We all hate them and we would all like to get rid of them. Well on twitter, you can! Sure, you’ll see your followed numbers go down initially, because most of these people won’t continue to follow you unless you follow them. But guess what, you don’t need to follow everyone that follows you. You need to focus on who brings you value and insight and follow them. If you like the info ProBlogger posts every day, follow him. Seek out your interests when looking for people to follow.

And if people don’t want to follow you then your problem really falls into the category of not creating enough benefit. That’s something you need to fix on your own.

Note: As an alternative now to cleaning out all your following duds, you can add everyone you want to follow to organized lists. However, this could be just as time consuming.

Creating Benefit and Value for Your Followers

This is not necessarily a marketing piece, so I will be brief on this topic. Communication goes both ways, you need to listen as much or more than you tell. People can spot a dedicated marketer when they see one and it turns people away, big time. Focus on building relationships on twitter, getting to know people, creating relationships and trust. Give people useful, quality induced information and they will thank you for it. Keep pitching them products and up-selling them, and you deserve to get dropped.

Apply This Philosophy to Other Social Networks

Facebook, LinkedIn, twitter…. You can use the principles here on any social network.

• Concentrate on the relationships, not the numbers.
• Search for your people in your field, not just any random person that will befriend you because they need a few more on their list.
• Participate in groups and discussions related to your interests.
• Listen instead of preach.
• Inform instead of sell.

Stick by these rules and quality will beat out quantity. You will see a better response and bigger rewards for your efforts. You will be one step closer to twitter success. Sure, it’s more difficult and more of a struggle than just randomly clicking away for new followers, but it’s more fun too! Social interaction brings lasting enjoyment and business. It’s the real key unlocking the secrets to using this medium for business endeavors.

As for the twitter twits out there with their follower building scams, drop’em and block’em!

Now ask yourself….

How many websites did you submit each individual article to?

You’ve probably fallen victim to the duplicate articles dilemma.

Rewind to a few years ago when “Internet marketing gurus” were pushing their viral marketing strategies and encouraging people to submit the same article to every known article directory they could get their hands on. Well, guess what? They were encouraging countless people to essentially spam the search engines with their writings and trick a system big on copyrights and original content. Everybody knows how huge a taboo spam is. Eventually, Google and the other guys caught on and implemented algorithms in their web crawlers to weed out and bury the duplicates.

And who can blame them? How reliable would users consider an engine that listed the same exact information in the top ten spots for a search, just on different websites? That’s like a library only offering different editions of the same book when someone was looking for research on a particular topic. What if someone turned in a paper with a works cited for 10 sources all essentially the same piece of information? Intelligent people would find a new library and the guy who wrote a paper would probably fail the assignment.

Google wants to bring value to their users and offer a service second-to-none, that’s how they climbed to the top in the first place. So, if you’re trapped in the habit of creating duplicate content, you should ask yourself the same question - are you creating any real value for people?

The Reality of Article Submission

Most of the article databases receive very little relative traffic to begin with and return a low residual effect. Their traffic rankings cannot compete with more prominent sites like universities and news sources, or high traffic directories and blogs. If you’ve spent several hours on a top notch article, why publish it on www.most-awesome-articles.com (not really a website) where it won’t get ranked, it won’t be found by the website users, and when other sites like WordPress, HubPages, Squidoo, and EzineArticles are around? If you wanted to include a guest piece in your magazine or paper, which source would you rely on… one from a prominent editor at CNN or a random letter received from spikeymikey@nowheremail.com?

Google thinks in a similar fashion on their end. Why list an article from www.most-awesome-articles.com when they already have a version from HubPages?

You might be thinking to yourself - what about Reuters? What about authorized syndication? It’s true that Google and the other engines allow some room for syndication from common news sources, but most of us do not operate in those circles or have access to that content to freely use, so why take the chance?  Probability dictates that Google will pick up one of your articles, but the rest will get lost in the engine and with them all the time spent submitting to dozens of useless directories.

Truth betold, no one can guess why Google keeps one version of web copy over another. It could be related to the age of the page (how long it’s been live online), the reliability of the source, the code to text ratio compared to the other versions… and sometimes, the engine will list more than one copy. It’s all guess work, but you can bet that more often than not, only one version will be viable.

The Solutions That Almost Saved You

But then there came in the works a hybrid solution to try and trick the engines again! Re-write the article so the web crawlers think it’s something new, so one can submit almost the same article to at least the top publication sites without needing to create something fresh. And so began the age of www.dupecop.com and similar services to check the percentage difference between docs.

Here too though, writers beware, Google’s web crawlers are more sophisticated than people give them credit for, and even an article that appears to be 50% different can be picked up as a dupe. To safeguard this technique, a service like QuoteFinder http://blogoscoped.com/quotefinder/ is recommended. Just change the sentences that show more than one online source in your new article.

The Best Solution for Duplicate Content… Doh!

I however, have an even better solution! Stop creating duplicate articles completely and start writing original and unique content that really offers value to your readers and hopefully potential clients. Nobody likes a fraud, a hack, or a two-timer – and that’s what you’ll look like if the smarter-than-you-think readers find out you’re duplicating content out there, or worse, simply rehashing someone else’s. Don’t destroy your potential credibility, visibility, and profitability because of laziness. Make each article you write count and make sure it’s one-of-a-kind.

The following benefits of article marketing can be yours…

• Increased page rankings (with inbound links)
• Increased webpage traffic
• Increased credibility
• Increased visibility
• Increased clients and customers
• Increased profits

But if you duplicate content all you’ll do is lose the above benefits plus…

• Waste time
• Waste money
• Become discouraged

What to do with your now unwasted time?

Search engines also like pages to stay fresh! Update your articles from time-to-time. Add in new information, take out parts now obsolete, add in some graphics, optimize the keywords, and keep editing until you get ranked on the first page for your targeted keywords. A well maintained and fully tweaked article can bring in more traffic and more business than 15 hurried and forgotten pieces any day!

So do continue with your article marketing, and do submit your awesome work so people can find it at EzineArticles, your blog, or other sites, but steer clear from tendencies to submit duplicates – in the end, you’re just committing internet marketing suicide. And like spam, we know how deadly that can be.

You can read more from the source over at Google and their warnings and guidleines about duplicate content.