Introduction
Unless you have been hiding under a rock you’ve probably heard the buzz about twitter. It seems everyone is talking about twitter these days.
While most people use twitter to connect with friends and family I want to show you how you can actually use this innovative social medium to send traffic to your website every single day for free.
Tweet about new posts to your blog
I run a blog called Nick’s Traffic Tricks and every time I post to my blog I also make sure to tweet about it.
Now I don’t have an enormous number of followers like Ashton Kutcher but I do have a few and every time I tweet about a new blog post it gets traffic within a few seconds.
And the best part is that the traffic is free and took me very little time to generate. All I did was connect my followers with a blog post that was already written.
Use good keywords in your Tweet
One of the things I love about twitter is that it has a keyword search feature:
http://search.twitter.com/
Using this search tool I can search for any keyword and see people’s tweets with this keyword in it. I have used this tool extensively for researching numerous topics. It’s also useful to follow trends.
So when you tweet about a particular topic make sure that you use good keywords. This will ensure your tweet will come up when people are searching for topics that you have tweeted about.
Ask for feedback
Another way to get traffic from twitter is to ask your followers what they think about a particular page on your website. You may be surprised at how many people will click on the link in your tweet and give you some feedback.
In my experience the feedback that I receive is far more valuable than the traffic it generates. But I certainly don’t mind getting a little extra traffic.
The effectiveness of this depends greatly on the relationship you have with your followers. The better relationship you have the more traffic you will get and the more suggestions you will receive.
Just don’t do this too often or it will seem like you are merely trying to get traffic.
Make sure it’s quality
If you’re going to tweet about something and provide a link for people to follow make sure the link goes to something that is valuable or worthwhile to your followers.
Please don’t link to a sales page for some third rate product that no one is interested in. Doing this will cause you to lose followers. It will also destroy the relationship you have with your followers.
Tweet about old but valuable blog posts
Sometimes you don’t have any new blog posts to Tweet about. That’s okay.
Find some blog posts that are what I call “oldies but goodies” and tweet about one of them. Chances are if you have good content on your blog you have something you wrote a week ago, or a month, or year ago.
And it’s very possible that many of your followers have never seen it. Tweet about it and get traffic to it.
Make it easy for visitors to tweet about your site
While you’re in the process of driving traffic to your website it’s a good idea to give your visitors the opportunity to tweet about what they are reading.
There are a number of tools to help you with this. One that I have used and recommend is called tweetmeme:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tweetmeme/
It’s a simple plug-in for WordPress and it automatically puts a button on each post of my blog for people to click on and tweet about that post.
Make it automatic
If you’re a frequent poster on your blog it may seem a bit tedious to always be tweeting about your newest blog post. So make it automatic.
One plug-in you can use for WordPress is called twitter tools. It offers complete integration with your twitter account and will allow you to automatically have a tweet posted every time you publish a new blog post.
Download it here:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-tools/
Get more followers
The effectiveness of getting traffic from twitter depends largely on the number of followers you have. Obviously the more followers you have the more traffic you will probably get.
One of the best ways to get followers is to build a reputation for tweeting about worthwhile things. Become an expert in your field and people will flock to your website and follow you on twitter.
Just remember they getting additional followers on twitter is more of a marathon than 100 m race. It won’t happen overnight and it requires a lot of effort and patience.
What do you think?
I would love to hear your thoughts so please leave a comment below.
