Twitter is a great site to use if you are intending to earn income from a website or blog. You can find many people who share your interests and by tweeting regularly about them, get them to visit your site. People who have this intention when signing up are more likely than most users to try and get as many followers as possible in a short space of time. This could be risky, since there are quite a few rules and regulations on Twitter and it would be very easy to flout some even if you are not a spammer. Actually, you could just be guilty of being overly enthusiastic.

One mistake a lot of people make on Twitter soon after joining is to follow as many people as possible so that a certain percentage will follow back. But then they hit the dreaded two thousand limit! They then start to frantically unfollow people, so that they can follow still more. Then they hit the limit again and repeat the process.

But using this approach is risky. If you engage in "mass unfollowing" -- particularly if it's done over and over again -- you can get your Twitter account suspended or even banned. It's hard to know exactly how many you need to unfollow before you end up on Twitter's radar for this transgression. Some people say that it's fifty people a day; others believe it's a hundred. I would say that you should keep the number well below fifty just to be on the safe side. And you should also give yourself stretches of several days duration during which you're not unfollowing anyone (or following them for that matter).

The important thing is to keep tweeting about your particular niche. And remember to use keywords in those tweets. That way, more and more people will find and follow you without you having to follow them.

Another thing you should avoid is constantly tweeting links and nothing else. So, if you are going to tweet your latest blog posts and articles then make sure you've got text around these links. And throw in tweets that don't include links from time to time.

Needless to say, you should be interacting with other tweeps. That's what the site is primarily designed for, after all. If you do that consistently then you'll necessarily have lots of text-rich tweets without links.

You can still build your following a bit quicker by following others. But as long as you don't overdo it, and apply the tactics described above, account suspension is highly unlikely.

Matt Hayden

Matt Hayden is an online marketer in Perth, Australia. He has a site to help people build an online income by using Twitter and other techniques.