It can be easily noticed that most of the people with lot of twitter followers were somehow famous before twitter era! or are popular in some field or the other, at present. They all had one or the other ways to get connected with their customers/readers/followers etc. When twitter was launched and started getting popular, all these customers/readers/followers started following them, as twitter gives an easy medium to follow someones tweets.

1. Treat your twitter profile as you would treat any other website. Send as much traffic as possible to your twitter profile.

2. Maintain good tweets in the first page of your profile. This seem to be a lot of work in the beginning. But seriously this will help you a lot in gaining followers. If people visiting your profile see only handful of links being tweeted, then they may not follow you, thinking that you are some sort of a automated script or some may think you as spammer. So see to that each time you decide to stop tweeting, make sure to tweet some useful things and minimize links. Because your recent tweets will be displayed in the first page of your profile.

3. Use a “tweet this” button below all your articles or below the articles which you think can go viral in twitter world.

4. Use different other services to know who is following you, and use the suggestion tool to get the suggested twitter users to follow. By this you can connect to relevant people around the world and they are most likely to follow you back, if they find you as relevant.

5. You can conduct twitter contests on your blog. This one strategy will drive a lot of followers in small amount of time. But it highly depends on what you are giving away in the contest. The higher the value of the product/service, higher the chances of getting more followers.

6. Get your twitter profile link featured on any famous website.
Ex:- If you are listed in the top 10 re-tweeters, then you can get still more followers. As people will think that you will re-tweet even their tweets!

7. If you have a website or a blog, display the follow me button at the top or any other highly visible regions.
If you get sudden hike in the traffic, you can’t expect that all those visitors will turn into your blogs subscribers or your loyal readers. But if they like the content of the blog they are most likely to follow you on twitter, as they think that you have the capacity to deliver the value.

8. Participate in twitter contests. By this you will be in a group of people who are into the contest, by this people participating may be willing to follow all other participants. So it is important that you leave a status message of the tweet or the twitter ID that you used to enter the contest, in the comment section, so that other participants can find you on twitter.

9. You can also use your twitter profile URL, while commenting on other blogs.

10. Participate in twitter actively. Re-tweet others useful tweets and get their attention. If they also re-tweet one of your tweets sometime, you will end up getting noticed by their followers, some of them may even follow you.

11. Use twitter ID in your email signature, so that your business partners or others will get to know that you are also using twitter.

12. Print the twitter profile URL on your business card.

13. If you have any other product, then you can get your twitter link printed on it.

14. Use your twitter URL at the end of each SMS(Short Messaging Service) from your phone.

15. Basic thing, but still ignored one: Invite all your friends in your Gmail, Yahoo mail etc, and they are the most potential followers you can ever get.

16. Tweet valuable things. Don’t just try to get traffic to your blog by tweeting only about your articles. You can tweet about what you are presently doing etc, bit personal things, this is what twitter followers like to know. But try to provide some more valuable things. Like tweeting a breaking news, cricket scores, latest happenings at your place etc.

17. Participate in certain groups. Groups can be created using hashtags. And some times if the group message is a hot topic, then your tweets will be listed in “hot trending topics” in search or other famous twitter services.
Ex:- #followfriday

18. Use a custom background for your twitter profile. This will show that you are a professional and chances are there, a visitor to your profile may turn into your follower.

19. Use a good twitter ID. Many people suggest to use their real name and most of the others suggest to use the business name. In case of bloggers, people mostly use their blog name inorder to build their brand recognition. If the twitter ID is somethink special or attractive, many people will endup following you without any reason!

And many such attractive twitter ID’s are auctioned at different marketplaces. It shows the importance of having a good twitter ID. And make sure that your twitter ID is not too long, which will eventually add up to the 140 character of the person who is tweeting you or re-tweeting your tweets!

20. Try to involve in conversation with people having more number of followers. When the famous person reply to your tweet, his followers see your twitter ID, if they find the conversation interesting, they may start following you and the conversation.

21. Use your twitter URL in other social networking, social bookmarking and social media sites profile page and any other online places where you have an account and space to write something. This will help you get interesting and targeted people follow you.

22. Do not use annoying profile picture. Using your real photo or your blog logo/banner is recommended. Many people use the animated images, this is ok as long as its not annoying.

23. Link to your twitter profile often. You can also add a link to your profile at the end of each article on your blog.

24. If you have an online service, then use Twitter as another tool for tech/customer support. This will make the customers to follow you inevitably!

25. Include your twitter ID in forum signature.

26. You can ask other twitterers to recommend you to their followers and you can recommend them to your followers.

27. Some bloggers publish the twitter IDs of some people as: Recommended to follow list. You can participate in such events and if your ID has been listed, you can get a lot of followers.

28. Some bloggers also collect the twitter IDs of their readers and publish on their blog, for mass following. Participate in such events and you will keep getting a lot of followers from that single page over years.

29. Some people mass follow others as they are sure that most of them followback almost all their followers. Once they reach a certain target number, they will start un-following those mass followed people. Thus they will be able to have a high number of followers with a low number of following! This is not a recommended strategy, but its still popular and most effective.

30. Utilize the about me section of twitter properly. Put your blog URL or about your business along with your small description. If you make it interesting, there is a high possibility of getting more conversions(visitors into followers). Remember, your bio is shown in the Suggested Users section, that will highly decide your number!

Angry Birds, Instagram and Facebook continued to be among the most downloaded apps of the year but rising stars also earned coveted spots on smartphones and tablets. This year consumers spent on average two hours each day using mobile applications, an increase of 35 per cent over last year, according to analytics firm Flurry. The number is expected to continue growing in 2013.

"2012 was a transformative tipping point in the way consumers use apps," said Craig Palli, a vice president at mobile marketing company Fiksu, adding that the biggest shift is in consumers' eagerness to turn to apps for a broad range of day-to-day tasks. Categories such as social networking, media and entertainment, photo editing, and games, continued to captivate consumer interest, with YouTube and Angry Birds being the top free and paid apps respectively at Apple's App Store.

Meanwhile, several apps released this year quickly joined the ranks of the top downloaded and revenue grossing apps of the year. The game Draw Something for iPhone and Android quickly gained widespread popularity when it was released in February, and despite dropping off, is still the second most downloaded paid app of the year Android and Apple devices.

"It had a big run and other multi-player puzzle-oriented games like newcomers LetterPress and ScrambleWithFriends proved popular, too," Palli said. "But in many respects these titles were inspired by the more revolutionary Words With Friends." Songza, a music-discovery app for iPhone, Android and Kindle Fire, saw significant growth in both the United States and Canada, where it is now one of the top free apps on the App Store.

Paper, a sketchbook app for the iPad, is estimated to be one of the top grossing apps released this year according to Distimo, an app analytics company. It was named by Apple as the iPad app of the year. But the real revolution, according to Palli, is among consumers who are eager to turn to apps for their day-to-day tasks, such as finding a taxi or hotel, following current events or increasingly, making payments.

"It is really consumers who are turning to apps first and traditional methods second," said Palli. Uber and Hailo, which allow users to book limos and taxis, and AirBnB and HotelTonight, for finding accommodations, began to move mainstream in 2012, Palli said. Payment apps such as Square, and Apple's introduction of the Passbook has further positioned the smartphone as a digital wallet.

This year, during major events such as the Olympics, Hurricane Sandy and the US presidential election, the top apps on the App Store reflected those events, said Palli, showing the demand for keeping up with current events through apps.

There are many ways by which people make money through blogging. In this post I mentioned only the ones which is widely adapted by many bloggers.

PPC stands for pay per click, when some one clicks on the ad you get money. There are many sites which offer a third party advertisement through your blog. Means we don’t need to bring advertisers to our blog so we give off that duty to a site which handles the advertisers. Our duty is only to publish the advertisement in our site. These sites act as a mediator between an advertiser and a publisher. Some of the sites which support this service are AdSense, adbrite, infolinks, chitaka ads, adonion, smowtion, nuffads, bidvertiser, etc. There are many sites which offer these services. So we just need to register with these sites get approved as a publisher. Then we can select the ad size depending on our requirements and paste the HTML code given by them in our blog that’s it. Whenever some one clicks on the ad in your blog you get paid.

This is a new term for people who doesn’t blog at all. Its all about blogging about a product and making its sales through your blog. If you are having a blog about web designing then you can recommend a site which helps in providing webspace. So visitors who read the article and click on the affiliate link provided by you and if he buys the product then you get some commission. You simply cant recommend a link. You have to first make a affiliate link with the company before recommending them. Needs some knowledge before becoming a affiliate marketer. 

This is like selling advertising space directly. Advertisers buy a space from you directly paying some money for every month. You just have to place the ad provided by them in your blog. This is a deal directly between advertiser and you.

Sponsored links look something like this.

Applying these methods you will not become rich instantly. This post is only a guide to give an idea on how people earn through blogging. Still there are many methods used by bloggers to earn money. I wrote only few widely applied ones. Will write more clearly in later days.

WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool and a content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL. It has many features including a plug-in architecture and a template system. WordPress is used by over 16.7% of Alexa Internet's "top 1 million" websites and as of August 2011 manages 22% of all new websites. WordPress is currently the most popular blogging system in use on the Internet. It was first released on May 27, 2003, by founders Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little as a fork of b2/cafelog. As of December 2011, version 3.0 had been downloaded over 65 million times.

Blogger is a blog-publishing service that allows private or multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. It was created by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003. Generally, the blogs are hosted by Google at a subdomain of blogspot.com. Up until May 1, 2010 Blogger allowed users to publish blogs on other hosts, via FTP. All such blogs had (or still have) to be moved to Google's own servers, with domains other than blogspot.com allowed via custom URLs.

New blog writers everywhere are faced with a serious dilemma when they first reach the Internet and must decide which blogging platform is best for their new website. There are actually dozens of options on the market, ranging from the basic blog settings of the social networks to the self-hosted open sources software solutions.

However, for most new bloggers and those who don't want to pay for their blog, the choice boils down to one of two websites: Blogger and Wordpress. These two services have become synonymous in recent years with the blogging phenomenon, making up a massive percentage of the Internet's most popular blogs. For that reason, there has been a bit of discussion over which service is better.

Provided here is a solid answer to that question once and for all, 7 reasons why Blogger is in fact better than Wordpress. These comparisons relate to the free accounts available from both Blogger and Wordpress.

Integrated Login with Your Google Account
With the ability to easily connect all of your Google accounts, this is a big plus for Blogger. Many of the most useful features for a website are offered by Google, including AdSense, AdWords, and Webmaster tools for Google indexing. Instead of adding code into your templates, something that can quickly become confusing and result in broken websites, Blogger allows you to simply click a button and integrate AdSense or banners into your site.

This allows you to use the same login information for all Google services and that sets Blogger a few steps ahead. Wordpress is an open sources solution, meaning that all extra services must be manually integrated into your blog after you have signed up for your account.

Backed up by Google
Along the same lines, Blogger has the backing of the largest and most powerful Internet Company in the world. For some this might seem like a negative, but it means the most money and development time can be placed into creating new features for Blogger that Wordpress may need to wait for. Historically, features such as widgets, add-ons, and templates have been enhanced first by Blogger. Wordpress is usually a step or two behind the curve. For the best features as they are developed, Blogger is the winner.

Change Visual Appearance and Code of Templates
Blogger's options for making changes to the visual composition of your blog are numerous and easy to use, something that Wordpress has had problems maintaining in the past. In Blogger, there are a number of pre-built templates as well as thousands more available from any number of websites. Simply copy and paste them into your blog's template page and you have a new look. Additionally, the style sheets and HTML code for your template (if you are willing to do so) can easily be changed and enhanced to suit your specific needs.

Indexing Time
Whether it is because of the link with Google or because of the sheer volume of Blogger blogs, your posts will be indexed in the Search Engines much quicker with Blogger. Usually within a few hours of posting your newest page will appear, allowing you to receive the most traffic as quickly as possible. This is especially important as most blogs strive to talk about the newest and most relevant news as it breaks. If that news does not index for two days, it will already be old when people start to read your posts.

Ease of Use
Blogger is truly a plug and play design for a new blog owner. Signing up takes seconds, allowing users to use their Google login and asking only for a few basic pieces of information such as blog title and description. From there, blog posts can be typed up and entered with two or three clicks and are automatically indexed. For newcomers to the blogosphere especially, Blogger is the best choice when it comes to ease of use.

Integration of Multiple Accounts
Blogger makes it easy to view all of your blogs via a dashboard feature that links directly to your Google login. When you login, all of your blogs will display, with one-click options to post, edit, or alter posts. The number of blogs and accounts available is nearly endless and makes blogging on multiple topics easier than ever.

Massive Blogging Network
Because Blogger is the first stop for many new bloggers, it is also among the largest blogging networks in the world. The millions of blogs already created in Blogger are helpful to the new member as well because of how Google has integrated their search features into the site. Not only can visitors search Blogger blogs via the search bar at the top of the page, they can click "random" or "next blog" to visit a different Blogger blog. This increases your exposure by directly connecting you with existing blogs. And if you decide to hide this feature, you can do that too in Blogger.

Ultimately, Blogger is an ideal solution for anyone who is just starting their first blog. It is also a great platform for those who are serious about blogging, but do not want to hire a technician to set them up and make regular adjustments to their blog. It is easy to use, quick to start, and offers a host of features that the free Wordpress blog and its other competitors do not.

Not many bloggers think about SEO when they first start out. It is, and quite rightly so, all about the content. Blogs are outlets for thoughts, feelings, knowledge, and networking. However, if you want to draw people to your blog then you’ll eventually have to think about how they will find it.so to optimize your blog for search engine rankings is a must these days to rank high in search engines.

In an ideal situation what would someone be typing into a search engine to find your blog? Once you know this you can work out what sort of keywords and phrases to target in order for your blog to start ranking for each of them.

Once you’ve got a good idea, do a bit of research using Google’s free keyword tool. There could be better words and phrases to target.

Don’t let the quality of your content slide when you start focusing on promoting the site. Great articles will keep people on your blog. It also means they are more likely to share your content on their blogs or social networks. Great organic back links like that are invaluable.

Although there’s very little SEO benefit to the links you share in comments, it’s still a good idea to comment on other blogs. Most will have nofollow on all links in comments so Google won’t pay any attention to them. However, there’s a chance other bloggers could click your link, see your content and want to share it.

If you use a blogging platform such as WordPress then you’ll have a lot of plugins at your disposal. WordPress SEO by Yoast allows you to input your own meta data and descriptions without having to edit any code. It can also make your permalinks more SEO-friendly.

There are also plugins that can help you to create a site map. These are very important if you want search engines to be able to crawl each of your pages and see how they relate to one another.

Not only does your own domain give you authority but you set yourself apart from the other WordPress and Blogspot blogs. Because these are two of the most popular blogging platforms, there are a lot of spam sites hosted on each. Your own domain gives you credibility and says you are serious about blogging.

Top-level domains are preferred by Google. Search for other blogs in your niche and you’ll probably find that the ones at the top of the search engine results page all have their own domains.

Google now looks at how fast a website is. This means your ranking can be affected by slow-loading pages. Make sure your images are no larger than they need to be, cut down on over the top Javascript and only show a few blog posts per page.

A cute play on words might look great or elicit a laugh from your readers but Google prefers something more simple. Titles are important to search engines so you should try and include a keyword or phrase in the title of each post you write.

Google can’t see images when it crawls your site. It’s up to you to let the search engines know what’s there, you can do this by inserting a few keywords relating to your picture in the alt tag.

This allows search engines to crawl your website and take in a little bit about the images too. It also allows for people using text or screen readers to understand what images they should be seeing.

Where appropriate you should link to your previous posts that give more information on a topic. This is great for keeping readers on your site but it’s also great for SEO. You could also consider having links to featured posts on your homepage or in your sidebar.

If you link to a great post by a fellow blogger then they’ll be notified either by their blogging platform or their analytics. They will hopefully click through to your blog to read the post that mentions them. You’ll gain a new reader and, fingers crossed, they’ll like your blog enough to return the favour. You could also agree with other bloggers and relevant websites to swap links. Good quality back links from sites in your niche are worth so much more than links from spammy sites. Don’t jump at every chance to swap links because Google’s Penguin update means it’s looking very closely at who links to you.

If you have knowledge in a particular area then you can offer to guest post on other websites. This is a great way of establishing yourself as an expert in your field. Most blogs will let you leave a link to your site in your article too. Make sure your content is relevant, informative and beautifully written because you’ll want to entice new readers over to your blog.

This goes back to point one. Don’t try to be popular, just keep creating good content on a beautiful blog and the readers will come. Give new readers plenty of opportunity to find you but focus on creating a site that will keep them engaged. There’s no point in getting people to your site if you can’t get them to stay.

No doubt BlueHost is one of the best web host’s for Hosting WordPress Blogs and they are even recommended as an ideal choice for hosting WordPress blogs by WordPress.org website. They have 15 plus years of experience in the web hosting industry and they are one of the very few early birds in this industry. Millions of websites are already hosted on BlueHost Servers and more than 20 thousands new websites are added to this list every month. They are based out in Utah.

BlueHost serves the single hosting plan to all of its customers and you can host unlimited domains using the same hosting account. BueHost looks to a true winner when it comes about comparing BlueHost with HostMonster, which is its sister web hosting company and they are jointly owned by Matt Heaton. Matt is also the CEO of www.fastdomain.com, another domain hosting company. Apart from me, some of my friends are also using BlueHost web hosting and they are all really happy for choosing BlueHost over other hosts.

Here are some features you will enjoy after using BlueHost web hosting services:

As mentioned in the Features list, you will get a free domain name for one year when you sign up for BlueHost hosting. You can use this facility at the time of sign up or even can utilize it later from your BlueHost Cpanel. You will be getting all the facilities you have ever imagined in a web host with BlueHost. You should go through the BlueHost web hosting review here to know more in detail about Bluehost as a company and its web hosting features list.

Let’s talk about the most important thing in hand and its BlueHost discounts. BlueHost does not provide any discount coupon or code that you can use while signing up to save some money. Actually there is a BlueHost $3.95 Promo Link available that will help you get BlueHost hosting for as low as $3.95/Month Only for hosting your WordPress sites. Normally we need to pay $6.95 as the monthly charges while buying web hosting services from BlueHost. To make the best use of BlueHost 3.95 dollar promo offer, you should buy BlueHost hosting for your blog for a period of 24 months in advance. And if you are interested in buying Bluehost hosting for 12 months period only, you have to pay additional one dollar i.e. $4.95 as the monthly hosting charges.

To use this special BlueHost Promo Offer, you don’t need to use any BlueHost discount Coupon. When you click on this link, you will be moved to BlueHost WordPress web hosting page and you will be similar kind of screen. All you have to do is click on the Sign Up Now >> button to start buying hosting for your WordPress blog at the most affordable prices.

Enabling threaded comment system for blogger is now so easy with just few tweaks. Threaded comment system will help you to interact with the users via same comment instead of posting a new comment every time. In this tweak you get a comment system like below screenshot, where users have a colour and admin has a unique colour.

Blogger is one of the famous blogging platform used by many people in the world after WordPress. Its templates are of great demand and some people start their career as an freelance blogger template designers.    As a beginner you can try hands on designing few widgets for a blog later on switch to design a whole new look for a blog.

People always want to make their blog design look unique and user friendly. They want to have a special presence on the web and some people even look for a light weight templates to boost their search engine rankings. So to satisfy such people who are looking for a new blogger templates you can choose this career and if your work is professional then you can sell your work for people.

As a beginner you need to have a little bit knowledge on HTML, CSS, little bit of Java Script. But as a processional you need to be in touch with PHP, CSS3, HTML5, JQuery, Java. Even if you are not having any knowledge enthusiasm to learn can also make you stand as a designer. You can just design a template if you have copy paste knowledge. Man dies as a learner and every man is not born with knowledge but he develops it depending on his interest to learn.

You need to have few software's like Notepad++, Google Chrome Browser, Mozilla Firefox and every possible browser to check if your design is cross browser compatible, Paint, Photoshop if possible try any freeware which are alternate to Photoshop. You need to collect few simple blogger templates to start your customizations.

This needs a bit of struggle but is not so hard as it initially is. You need to first design your templates for free and see that your templates are loved by many then you can design some pro templates with some extra features which are not provided in a free template and charge a minimum amount which you feel is worth.