Are you willing to put in some effort into getting more followers? Want to build your brand on twitter? Then here are some of the ways that I used to get started building my twitter following. When I started moving forward with twitter, every day I followed 75-100 people.

I would sit there and click on over 100 people’s profile for around 30 minutes every morning. I looked for people in Illinois who would follow me back, because that was where I lived. Then I looked for people with big followings who would follow me, because I knew that it would be huge to have their follows. After that I looked for my targeted businesses, such as real estate agents and investors (At the time I was a mortgage broker).

I would scurry through twitter randomly searching people to follow me. It became a game, and every day I would see how well I did by how many people followed me back.

Then I progressed to using Twellow. One of my recent posts was about using Twellow, so for those of you looking to find out what this website is, check out my video post. I used twellowhood and followed every twitter account that had more followers than I did in Chicago, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Madison, etc. I was ranked around 1300 in the Chicagoland area when I started using twellow, because I had just over 1,000 followers at the time.

In less than a month following every big account in Chicago I had over 3,000 followers. When I got down to following every account down to 500 followers I started following people in Indiana (Where I own properties as an investor and had a mortgage license).

I continued to follow larger twitter accounts and a funny thing happened along the way. The larger I got the more the smaller accounts wanted to follow me. It is one of those weird quirks that when you have an account with 1,000 followers there will be a lot of dismissive people who will discount your twitter account. Those same people will see that you have 10,000, 15,000, and 20,000 will then look differently at you.

Perhaps it was because I was more established. Maybe it was the fact that people want to see what I had to say, because they themselves only had 200, 2,000, or 6,000 followers. The point is grow your followers to grow your brand and then with great content build your business.

Write every day about your passion. The words from this post flow easily, and I have to stop myself before it turns into a book. I love talking about twitter, because in a geeky way it is fun. It is fun like playing Risk or Stratego for me.

I view it as a game. A game that is built around the premise that you bring people to your twitter account and have them follow you. Once you do that you find ways everyday to keep them interested. Some days you succeed! Some days you wonder if you just connected with a bunch of twitter bots. And then there are the days when 10 people respond to your tweet, or 100 people look at your blog, and you know that it was worthwhile.

So how do you grow! Start by building your twitter account by looking for those close to you geographically, professionally, and mentally. Look for people to emulate, and follow them. Look to people you know from business, and follow them. Look to people who live around you and follow them.

Then after you have done that, do it again the next day. In the next blog we will talk about the spark to do this repeatedly, and eventually we will talk about automating your twitter account. My belief, however, is that before you automate it or hand over the reins to someone else you must first know how to use all of the tools effectively.