Chris Meistre

Afrihost is one of the cheapest ADSL bandwidth suppliers at the moment.  I signed up for it as soon as I heard about it, and was surely not disappointed.  At the time it was a lot cheaper than any other offerings and the speed was good as well.  This has sparked a price war in the ADSL arena with various ISP now starting to offer a lot cheaper packages.

It occured to me today that Afrihost is perhaps encouraging piracy indirectly in two ways:

1.  People that might already have been partaking in pirating by downloading from places like Mininova and ThePirateBay could get encouraged to download even more now due to cheaper bandwidth prices

2.  People that never downloaded pirated software or movies will start doing it because it has now become cheaper to download (R41.30) a 700MB movie than going to watch the movie (R25.00 excl. VAT popcorn + cooldrink + petrol)

Either way, more people will be pirating.  This is not Afrihost’s fault obviously, but it did make me think why piracy can be such a big problem in other countries.  Sure, our country downloads it’s fare share of pirated movies, tv shows and software, but at the end of the day we’re very limited because of high bandwidth costs.  Other countries with virtually limitless bandwidth obviously download pirated wares a LOT more than we do.  Cheaper bandwidth = more piracy.

Good or bad, thank you to Afrihost for getting us one step closer to affordable bandwidth in South Africa.

Ok, here’s my take on how to get the best ouf of Twitter.  I might be totally wrong, so don’t take it as the gospel.

Twitter is a mini blog system.  You post updates, and people “following” you view your updates.  It’s sort of like having a blog and putting 1 sentence on it consisting of 140 characters to enlighten people with whatever you’re currently busy with.  I.e. “chrismeistre is busy uploading a new website at www.domainmonitor.co.za, check it out”.  So it’s a way of keeping in touch with your friends.

Put a business spin on it though.  Get your clients or potential clients to follow you, and they can read your updates.  Sort of like the Petesweekly that we get every week from Peter keeps him in touch with us, you can use Twitter to keep in touch with clients.

But it takes a lot of effort to get enough people be interested in what you have to say and to follow you on Twitter.  Although there is no sure way to build relationships quickly, you can speed up the process a bit by finding people that are likely to follow you.

There are loads of websites already available where you can subscribe to, and then they get people to follow you.  That’s great if you want random people that might not even want to know anything about your industry.  It’s also becoming very common for people to not like this method anymore, because a lot of people are spamming using this method.

I played around with something for a couple of weeks now.  I setup two twitter users, http://twitter.com/proxymusmaximus and http://twitter.com/stuffwhatrocks.  I merely wanted to see how many people I could get to follow me.  Read more about the Twitterbot.

So I rewrote a the initial twitterbot to search for certain terms on Twitter.  These will be terms people mention in their posts.  I.e. “joke” or “internet marketing”.  What I did was then follow these people.  I found that for every 4 people I followed, 1 person followed me back.  So in a matter of a few weeks I have about 500 followers for each of those users.  During that time I’ve read a bit more and have used Twitter a lot more myself, so I’m getting a better idea of what it’s about and how to use it.  That’s 500 people that were interested in the same things I’m interested in, so are more likely to take note of my posts.

So what makes this different to the other websites available that does the same thing?  Following people that are posting about the terms you are interested in, it’s possible to target people that might be interested in your industry.

For instance, if you’re a carpet cleaner, you’d setup a carpetcleaner Twitter user.  You’d then search for other Twits talking about “carpet cleaning”, “carpet shampoo” or “vacuum cleaner”.  You would then follow those users, and 1 in 4 would follow you back.  They would then see all the posts you make about carpet cleaning.  Then you’d get the people that are really into carpet cleaning and find a tip that you posted very interesting.  That person would then retweet your post, which basically means posting your post to other users with your details attached to it.  So if he had friends that were interested in carpet cleaning they might go and read your tip and start following you to receive more tips.  Get what I’m saying?

• I use Twitter to drive traffic to this blog, and so far it’s not going too bad for the amount of people following me.  For every post I make, I get about 45 hits out of the 98 people following me on @chrismeistre
• http://www.proxymusmaximus.com/ is not advertised anywhere and I don’t promote it besides on Twitter, and it’s grown to 18 users in a couple of weeks
• http://www.pichost.co.za/ traffic is up by 30% just by posting tweets on Twitter every time a new picture gets posted

If you’re interested in making use of a service like this to help build your Twitter user base why not contact me and we can discuss it.  I don’t want to release the software and have thousands of people doing this, because it would just become another way of spamming.  I also don’t want just anyone to use it to spam people.  I want you to use it to really make Twitter work for your online business.  I also don’t think I’m the first to create software like this, but somehow I’d like to preserve it, just in case.