Twitter is quite a common word these days and it had been like that for the past 1.5 years. The speed at which it the Social Networking phenomenon has crept into the normal human life is unbelievable and unstoppable. You might be aware of several businesses which run just because of Twitter and several people who are paid a hefty packet to tweet a single post to their thousands of followers.

So, how do you get a zillion Twitter followers to follow your each and every tweet like God who exist in Zion? You must be a celebrity or you should have done something which has celibacy. You should have been in an Earth shaking controversy or simply put, you should NOT BE NORMAL.

Forget all these, there are several other ways by which you can have quite a good number of followers on your twitter profile. Let’s look at those several easy and simple methods, which you are aware of, but never paid any attention as of now.

Lets make out a simple list first:

• Let your friends and relatives know that you are on Twitter. Don’t forget to tell your grandma about Twitter and it’s uses.
• Place a link on your blog to let your readers and visitors be aware of your Twitter profile.
• Place a link on your visiting card so that you can share your Twitter ID to the people you have just met.
• Make a post on your blog and let your ardent readers know more about Twitter tricks and also about your profile and suggest them to follow you.
• If you are looking out for people and you are targetting them from any particular niche you are working on, search for that particular niche using #(hashtag) followed by keyword. Eg: #wordpress
• If you want to meet some new people who have the same hobby as yours, do the same as suggested above. Eg: #ploughing
• Same profession from some other companies. Check above for example.
• Do not forget to fill in the Twitter profile in a neat and appropriate manner so that the new followers can learn more about you and find your enthu.
• Do not share long and broken URLs while sharing any interesting article you found online. Use several URL Shortening services.

These are a few of the tricks to get more followers on Twitter. Do not forget to tweet interesting links now and then and maintain the active participation so that your followers do not assume you to be a zombie, who wakes only when your stomach rumbles.

Let me know if you have more tips down your sleeve to add more twitter followers. Also do not forget to follow me @criticsinfo. I will follow you back.

India gets a new symbol to denote the currency ‘Rupee’. Earlier we used to denote Indian currency in terms of ‘Rs’ which stands for Rupees and while mentioning a single rupee, we used to denote it as ‘Re’ which stands for Rupee. In the near future, this is going to change to a new symbol much like Dollar, Pound, Yen, Euro and other currencies.

So, how is it going to look like?

The symbol adjacent to this text is going to be the next new symbol of Indian currency, the Rupee.

Udaya Kumar, an IIT alumni is the designer of this symbol and his name is going into the footnotes of Indian History. He has also won the prize money of Rs.2.5 lakh as his design has been chosen to represent the currency of one of the ‘developing’ countries in the world.

Kumar’s symbol is a well composed mixture of ‘Ra’ from Devanagari script and ‘R’ from the Roman capitals. Indian Finance Minister has approved the design and quoted that this reflects and captures Indian ethos and cultures.

What does the symbol mean and signify?

Kumar’s concept, an official said, is based on the Tricolour and “arithmetic equivalence”. While the white space between the two horizontal lines gives the impression of the national flag with the Ashok Chakra, the two bold parallel lines stand for ‘equals to’, representing balance in the economy, both within and with other economies of the world.

Other interesting facts related to India:

1. 3 Month old baby dipped in hot water to please Gods.

2. Grooms get kidnapped by Brides to get married.

3. Indian voters can vote or not vote based on this strange rule.

Let me know whether you liked the new design of Indian Rupee.

Many new bloggers and webmasters are so traffic-frenzy and wish to get 1000s of visitors in their first days of launching websites. Posting a few articles and developing a few pages of content does not drive traffic. Leave alone the traffic, at times, even search engines do not crawl the new websites for a short period of time. This happens because the DNS propagation does not happen so soon as one or two days.

And there is also inevitable task of submitting the sitemap to search engines and waiting for their crawlers to suck up our content and index it. All this needs time and there is also a indisputable factor of Search Engine Optimization(SEO).

Lets move ahead and know where and how this traffic is bought and brought from and how this traffic does not serve the real purpose of capturing interest…

1. Where is this traffic bought?

This kind of traffic is usually organized and maintained by several people who have several ISPs tucked under their own belts. ISPs in the sense not the original Internet Service Providers which provide bandwidth to people to browse the internet, but, the masking gateways which replicate the functionality of an ISP.

So, this paid traffic is usually advertised on famous webmaster forums like Digital Point, V7N, Warrior Forums and several other.

2. How much will this traffic cost me?

Many traffic drivers(strange term) promise you the sky for as low as $5 for 5000+ visitors thronging on your website. They promise and actually swear that all the traffic consists of human visitors who are waiting to see the content for which there had been no traffic(read, our new site for which we are buying the traffic).

Following is a screenshot of a few offers from DigitalPoint forum.

I tried several users for some of my clients’ blogs and websites. Even though the traffic does come at the advertised amount, the traffic is supposedly from the PTC websites which offer a certain amount of money to logged in users. There is one question lingering in my mind: How can people who click the link for a few cents buy a product online?

I am asking this because most of the traffic sellers do state that the traffic is the premium traffic who are desperate for information and product, but lazy to roam around. I doubt this a lot.

3. Who profits the most from this kind of traffic?

No doubt the seller. And, the people who are into flipping websites/blogs. Flipping is a very profitable business online and the paid traffic from these vendors can actually be displayed as the real human traffic for a bunch of keywords thrown in.

As this paid traffic can be actually seen on Google Analytics and several other websites statistics, there is every chance that people buying these kind of websites can actually think that there is real human traffic. So, a flipped website with more than 1000+ traffic per day can really sell off well.

4. So, what would you suggest? Buy or Not Buy?

If Flipping is on your mind, then go for it and maintain a ratio of at least 500+ visitors per day for at least 2 month time period to make your statement and sell off well at your quoted price.

If you need targeted traffic, then forget Paid Traffic. This traffic is not supposed to buy anything because this traffic mainly consists of bots from random IP addresses accessing your blog/site.

5. What can I do to drive traffic to my website then?

Learn a little SEO(Search Engine Optimization). It’s not that difficult, just go step by step. Here are a few articles that will get you started.

• How to search niche keywords to start and popularize your blog or website?
• How to search for backlinks and SERPs for a website/blog?
• How to find .GOV, .EDU websites to comment and increase backlinks?
• Increase backlinks with valid comments on WordPress blogs
• WordPress.com redirection shifts from 302 to 301. What does that mean?

Do not stop at these, search for articles related to SEO and read and learn from several other prominent bloggers like Darren Rowse and follow the comments on the articles to get to know more interesting and informative articles.

If you have any questions, suggestions, updates do let me know through the comments section or use the ‘Contact Us’ link above.

Today I have download and installed a whopping 8.96MB of Mozilla Firefox 4.0 Beta. We are already aware of how popular Firefox is because of its stability and the huge number of addons in its library making it the most extendable web browser in the known history of internet evolution.

Mozilla Firefox had made quite a news recently because it announced that breaking the conventional norm of tabbed browsers, it would offer the users to customize where they want the tabs to be placed. Whether it be above the navigational bar or below it.

Lets see how we can play with the tabs a little bit here…

Right click anywhere on the menu bar. If you do not know what a menu bar is, then right click on the empty area beside ‘Help’ which is the last menu item after ‘File’, ‘Edit’, …… on the top of your Firefox browser.

The choose whether you want ‘Tabs on Top’ or not. Easy, isn’t it?

Firefox Tabs on Top

There you are, the choice is yours.

Other Mozilla Firefox related interested articles:

1. Manage Bookmarks in Mozilla Firefox easily.
2. Delete the URL History and earlier visited links permanently from Firefox Address Bar.
3. Edit your photos using Firefox
4. How to browse safely in office without getting spied on?

Don’t forget to submit your feedback on Firefox 4.0 beta version to Mozilla.

We have already seen detailed explanation with screenshots on How to Create a Custom Navigation Menu in WordPress 3.0. Now, we are going to have a look at how we can add the newly created navigational menus to themes in WordPress 3.0

This is quite an easy task to accomplsih as long as you are not worried to edit your theme files. The videos below will assist you through a tep by step process. So, do not worry. But, as a matter of precaution, just take a backup of your files in advance.

Here are the detailed videos explaining step by step on how you can add your custom navigational menus to your themes.

Create Custom Navigational Menu for WordPress 3.0

Add the Custom Navigation Menu to themes using WordPress 3.0

The piece of code that we have added to Header.php after deleting the original navigational menu is below:

<?php wp_nav_menu( array( 'sort_column' => 'menu_order', 'container_class' => 'menu-header' ) ); ?>

Save the header.php file and you are good to go.

Let me know if you come across any hiccups.

For a brief text tutorial, please visit: WP3Hacks.com