In a previous article I gave a brief explanation on what is so great about Twitter, now in this article I will briefly explain how you can use Twitter to drive traffic to your website or blog, or more specifically why you should use Twitter to drive traffic to your website or blog. And remember, the only way to be successful online is to get traffic to your website or blog. The beauty of using Twitter is that Twitter puts you in charge of your own promotional strategy on the internet. In the past, website owners were at the mercy of the major search engines in the sense that they couldn’t fully control where their website showed up in the search results when people searched for the keyword phrase they were targeting. Sure they could employ good SEO techniques which could help improve their results but even good SEO is no guarantee of getting organic traffic from the search engines. This left folks buying traffic from services such as Google Adsense, and while Google Adsense is still a great option to drive traffic it can also become very expensive.
Twitter has changed the game. You can use Twitter to drive targeted traffic to your website or blog.
Here is how it works… with Twitter you follow the updates of people that you find interesting, and other folks that find your updates interesting follow you! Imagine if you had 100 people that were very interested in every update you made on Twitter. With a single update you could send 100 people to your latest blog entry or update on your website (via a link in your Twitter update). You might tweet “Check out my new blog post on how to save money traveling to Europe http://myblog.com/story-link” – BOOM 100 targeted visitors! The more followers you have, the more website visitors you will get with your update. 500 followers? 1,000 followers? 10,000 followers? Even more! With Twitter all of this is very possible. There are Twitter users that have over a million followers.
How do I start using Twitter for my online business?
Get a Twitter account for each website project that you want to market. Make the Twitter account personable and welcoming, give it a custom picture and design. In the Twitter “one line bio” setting add a sentence that contains the keywords that are relevant to your blog or website. Once your account is all set up make few status updates so that your page isn’t vacant.
Now it’s time to start getting followers. I will cover the art of getting followers in more detail in a future blog post, but I would like to help you get started with a few tips. First, start following folks that you think would also be interested in reading your blog, that sounds counter-intuitive but the truth is many folks will automatically follow every person that follows them. Therefore if you follow people that you know would be interested in your product they will likely follow you. From Twitter click “Find People” use the tools there to find hundreds or thousands of people that might be interested in your website (I recommend following a few new people everyday, and it’s best to do this in the evening when people are on Twitter).
Without question the best tool to use to get targeted Twitter followers is Tweet Adder, this tool is no gimmick, instead it’s merely a way to automate best practices in Twitter. Anyone serious about using Twitter on the internet needs to buy Tweet Adder.
Place a Twitter graphic on your website or blog that invites people to follow you. There are also many tools that will allow your twitter updates to be displayed on your website or blog which will make Twitter more integrated into your project.
Enter your Twitter account in the various Twitter directory on the internet. (search Google for Twitter directory).
And most importantly, start making updates to your Twitter account. Make informative, helpful updates and do not include links at first, you don’t want people thinking you are there just to sell them something. Reply to other Tweeters, let them know you are REALLY reading their tweets! Retweet other tweets (a retweet is an exact copy of another tweet yet with the original tweeters username referenced as well as the letter “RT” for re-tweet).
Here is an example of a retweet:
Original tweet by John… “wherever you go there you are.”
Retweet by you… “RT @John wherever you go there you are. (great advice John!)”
Retweets are good because you help spread the info that the original tweeter was trying to spread as well as acknowledging the effort of the original tweeter. Therefore the original tweeter will know you are enjoying their tweets and also may recommend you to their followers. With retweets you are building Twitter goodwill.
The more you tweet and retweet, the more followers you will get. The more followers you get, the more traffic you can drive to your own website or blog when you make a new post! One note of warning… avoid the urge to gain mass followers via Twitter-train schemes and other tricks that promise thousands of Twitter followers in a short amount of time. Remember, the value in Twitter is that your followers are opt-in and targeted to the topic of your business. I would rather have 100 quality followers than 10,000 followers that don’t care about what I am saying. Build your followers one at a time the hard way, be patient and if you do it right you will build a army of potential traffic for your site that you can reach with a simple update on Twitter.
Twitter is growing at a massive rate so it’s time to jump on the bandwagon and take advantage of Twitter while the getting is good!
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It seems a very large number of the tweeters are in this for business. So, I wonder what the rate of effective return is on a comment aimed at the interests of my followers and how effective is it compared to a good search engine placement? I guess time will tell. Good info.