Firstly, has it really been so long since I wrote a blog post? What have I been doing! Let me apologise for that straight away.
The Viking's Apprentice has continued to do very well and during a recent free promo day (23rd of March) it was downloaded 23700 times. This was amazing and made it the most downloaded children's book in the world that day and the 4th most downloaded book on Amazon. This was also the day that audible version came out. I'm running a competition on my website to win the audible version for free. This will run through April for all of you that are interested. There are 5 copies up for grabs and it is a simple competition to enter with just one click. Follow this link to my competitions page where you'll also find a free signed paperback giveaway being hosted by goodreads.com Here is the link My Competitions page. It's always worth checking back as more competitions will be coming up. If you just want to go ahead and buy a copy of the audiobook you can here Audio version
Enough about me now on to twitter and how to build that following. Interesting content and the best book in the world will not guarantee you success on twitter. If no one sees it then no one reads its right? I've begun to really build my following and I'm doing this using two simple techniques that anyone can do and costs nothing. My twitter following used to consist of my wife and two fake followers. It's now up to just over 6000 and grows about 100 to 200 a day with very little effort.
The first technique is called the 6 minute technique. Go on twitter and find someone who is in your area of interest with a large following (don't start that clock yet). Once you've found the perfect person on twitter follow them (it's only polite) and then have a look at their followers. What you're looking for is people with roughly the same amount of followers as people they are following. So for example they are following 5000 and are followed by 4900 then this person is ideal! Start your clock. Go through the followers and follow everyone who fits into the above category. Once that clock hits six minutes stop. Why? Well for one you don't want to spend your whole day on twitter trying to follow people and you don't want to fall foul of any of twitter's rules on following people.
If you had completed this step you've probably followed between 50 and 100 people. Of those it's a sure fire thing that most will follow you back. It's what they do and you can tell that by the followers to following ratio.
The second technique is similar to the first but it uses a software that's twitter approved so don't worry. It used to be called justunfollow but it is now called crowdfire. It's free and simple to use. It loads up your twitter and shows you who doesn't follow you back. This is important especially if you are below 2000 followers as twitter won't let you follow above that until you have 2000 followers.
Crowdfire allows you to see who on your following list hasn't tweeted in a long time and is effectively dormant. This allows you to remove them and frees up room to follow more active accounts. You can look at who you are following and again go back to the six minute technique and bring up their followers. Crowdfire goes one step better as it shows you when the person last sent a tweet so you get an idea how active they are. Crowdfire also allows you to send out an automated thank you message to everyone who follows you. This is important as you can provide a link to your book or website or facebook page etc in this message. The free version has limitations but none that will stop you doing any of the above. The paid version just lets you do a bit more. Click the link to go to their website. Crowdfire
Once you start to build up that following get interacting and keep tweeting out your great content. The more you get retweeted the more reach you'll gain and the more the world will see you. Here's a link to my twitter account. Be great for you to join me there. My Twitter
