Every day there are more and more "get followers" quick schemes floating around Twitter. We see them tweeted in our friends' feeds, we see them on Twitter-based websites; in fact, we see them just about anywhere that there's a place to advertise them.

The thing is, as the more astute of you may already have guessed, those "get followers fast" schemes tend to work out about as well as those "get rich quick" schemes do - because at their core, they're really not very different.

Ask yourself a very basic, simple, common-sense question. If get-rich quick schemes worked, why would the person selling them be selling them, instead of just using them him/herself? The same principle applies to Twitter followers. If there's a quick way to get lots of high-quality followers, why would anyone share it, instead of just using it themselves? There's no profit in sharing the technique - unless, of course, they're selling it, which should make you realize that the followers they're selling aren't likely to be high-quality.

Just what is a "high quality" Twitter follower anyway? In a word: organic. High-quality Twitter users put their eyeballs directly on your status updates, which means that they don't have an outrageous number of people they're following. High-quality Twitter users click the links that you post and pay attention to the content on the pages that you lead them to. High-quality Twitter users write @replies and DM to their friends, indicating that they're engaged. High-quality Twitter users give #followfriday recommendations.

Now ask yourself if you think you're likely to find those kinds of users by clicking a "get followers fast" scheme. You see, on a certain level, those followers have to come from somewhere. I'm sure you don't think that there's a bunch of Twitter users out there, waiting for a service to tell them which people to follow. That means that most of these "get followers fast" schemes are scanning Twitter for people using auto-refollow features, meaning that if you follow them, they'll follow you back. The schemers are sending those users to you in the hopes that you'll follow them, and get a reciprocal re-follow back.

Don't buy into it. Want good, high quality followers? Here's my formula: set your Twitter client to display all tweets for a particular search topic that interests you (multiple topics are good too but don't overdo it or you'll run out your API calls). When you see an interesting post on a topic, give an @reply. Be nice. Be funny. You'll probably end up with a follower. Follow them back - that'll strengthen the relationship and ensure that you know what your followers are talking about. Take part in #followfriday. Most importantly, don't spam your Twitter feed with endless URL's - that's guaranteed to drive high-quality twitter users away.

Don't believe me? Try it.