It’s the, excuse the pun, BUZZ word that is racing around the internet at the moment, everywhere you look Google Buzz seems to popping up and a lot of people are going crazy over it, saying that it will fend off the likes of Twitter and become the new kid in town, but will it?

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Now I’ve been blogging on Blazing Minds for over a year now, though I had a bit of a slow start and didn’t usually get that many comments back and my earlier blog posts where somewhat short and far between, over the past year my blogging has improved, so I would like to take the opportunity to give some blogging tips to you all on what I’ve personally learned.

1. Write informative blog posts.
   Even if they are just about what you did in the day, show that whatever you did you have a bit of knowledge about it.
2. Write as you!
   When you typing out your blog post, type it out as if you are talking to someone and write as you would talk with all you little quirks that you would normally have when talking to someone.
3. Read the rest of this entry »

Since using Twitter my follow count has gone up quite a lot lately and many have asked me, “what is the secret to gaining more twitter followers?”.

There are several ways to increase Twitter followers, the most important one is to tweet something that is interesting, don’t tweet things like, “Washed hands” or “Bored, nothing much to do”, tweet things that people may find interesting like the news you may be reading on the net, or an interesting place you may be visiting and utilise TwitPic to show the great place you may be visiting to show people to get some feed back.

Another important thing is, try to make conversation, if someone tweets you a question or a reply to one of your tweets, then reply back it’s good manners for starters and people like to have a conversation.

ReTweet, twitters love to have an interesting tweet ReTweeted to your followers and with a little luck others will start to follow you from the ReTweet, but don’t just ReTweet anything, RT something interesting.

Check out the #FollowFriday hashtag, every Friday twitters tweet who they recommend, check these twitters out and if you find them interesting follow them 8 times out of 10 they will follow you back.

Use tools such as Tweetdeck, Twhirl and a wordpress plugin like TwitMe to post your blog posts, not only will you get followers, but by tweeting your blog posts it shows that you have something interesting to blog and tweet about.

So if you follow some of the above then your follower count should increase, I’m not saying it will over night, but it will help.

Now on to something that a lot really hate, mass following tools.

There are plenty of sites out there that will grab followers to your twitter account, but it’s not always guaranteed they will follow you back and they usually get classed as spamming, so use them with caution, sites such as FlashTweet is one such site. You could also join a network such as iFollowBack, but at the end of the day, you will get a lot of twitters who just want to increase their numbers and net their networking, so I would still go with the ways mentioned at the beginning of this post.

So tweet interesting thoughts, or a least try to, it’s not a 100% rule that you shouldn’t tweet “Took me ages to get to work today!” but if you do say why it took you ages such as the location of road works etc. People always like to know what others are doing, if you are worried about why your losing followers then use a site like TweetEffect to know what tweet lost your followers or even gained more followers.

Check out some of my list of Some Handy Twitter Websites for more info of twitting etc.

If you are starting out using Twitter then you may be wondering what all the fuss is about, but once you get going on it, it can be quite addictive, so to help you have a bit more fun with Twitter here’s a small collection of sites or Twitter Tools that you may like.

If you are looking for new friends then Mr.Tweet is a great little site that will act as your own personal networking assistant with Twitter. All you have to do is follow Mr.Tweet and then you’ll recieve a DM (Direct Message) suggestions and more on good Twitters to follow. This is one of my favourite Twitter Tools and it’s just so easy to use.

For organising your new followers etc then try out Tweepler. With Tweepler you can allocate Tweeps in to two buckets, those to follow and those to ignore, very simple, but effective, even has a more option to find out more about the Tweep.

Tweetlater is a site that some people use and rave about, yet some don’t like it. Tweetlater not only has the options to tweet at a future date, but also allows you to choose from options such as autofollow new followers, autounfollow those that unfollow you and also the option to vet new followers.

A fun site to use is Twitter Grader, this site takes you Twitter name and grades your Twitter profale with info such as overall rank, followers, following and updates, it will also show you a tweet cloud and recommend other users to you.

And finally a site which I find very useful is Twitter Counter, this is a great site, not only does it give you information on how many followers you have, predicts how many you may have the next day, it even show how many follow and unfollowed you. Best of all you have the option of adding a Twitter Counteer to your own website to show everyone how many followers you have

Don’t forget to follow my Twitter