How to Leverage Twitter For a Flood of Traffic
If you are not using Twitter to drive traffic to your websites, blogs, and articles then you are missing out on a great tool and leaving lots of traffic for your competitors. Traffic properly handled turns into profits.
Let’s take a closer look at how to leverage Twitter to drive tons of traffic to your articles, whether your content is on your website, blog, or an Article Directory.
7 Steps to a Ton of Traffic
Step 1 – Tweet that you are working on a new piece of content. Include the working title and when you expect to have it done by. This builds the anticipation in your followers and puts a bit a pressure on you to get in done.
Step 2 – When you submit your article to a Directory, let your Twitter followers know your new content has been submitted. Include the title, and let them know when you think the article will be out by. This continues to build anticipation.
Step 3 – When you set up your account at EzineArticles correctly, your newly published articles are “auto-tweeted” to and announced on Twitter, including the title and the link. This is done automatically for you. If your article is coming out on another Directory, watch for it’s publication and then tweet that the article is out. Include the title and the link.
Step 4 – Along about this time a really cool and powerful thing begins to happen. Your followers on Twitter begin to Re-Tweet (RT) your article, and now you are reaching all of their followers as well. Thank those who RT your article and Re-Tweet their announcement too.
Step 5 – Follow up the automated announcement of your articles with announcements of your own. Just because your article was automatically announced does not mean every one saw it. Twitter is much too fluid for that. So follow up with announcements of your own. Ask “Have you seen this yet?” and include the article title and link.
These first 5 steps drive traffic to the Article Directories that host your article. When you have written your article well and crafted your Resource Box well. this will quickly turn into traffic to your websites and blogs.
The next 2 steps involve repurposing your article on your own sites and driving Twitter traffic their as well.
Step 6 – Repurpose your article onto your website and then invite your Twitter traffic to check out the article there. Now you are driving Twitter traffic to your own website.
Step 7 – Repurpose your article onto your blog and then invite your Twitter traffic to your blog to check out your article there. Now you are driving Twitter traffic to your blog.
Filed under Twitter coach | Comment (0)Twitter Lists Go Live
After a two-week test launch, Twitter Lists are now fully functional.
The new feature allows Twitter users to organize the people they follow and streamline their feeds. Others can then follow their lists, sparing them the time of hunting for individual Twitterers with shared interests. As previously noted, the lists create something like a popularity contest, as anyone can see how many lists a Twitterer has been added to.
Twitter Lists launched in beta earlier this month but was only available to select users, who were asked not to tweet about it. Many of them disregarded the request, spurring an unofficial word-of-mouth-marketing campaign for the feature.
TechCrunch reported yesterday that Twitter employee Nik Kallen said that one quarter of all users had lists. The feature disappeared briefly after that, followed by a subsequent Kallen tweet: “Alright Lists are back on. BTW, currently 50% of all users have Lists,” followed by, “Thank you TechCrunch for ruining my afternoon.”
The phrase “Twitter Lists” quickly rose to the top of Twitter trending topics Friday morning, as users began chatting about the new-to-some feature. Some are offering lists of Lists and questioning whether Twitter Lists might even serve as an adequate RSS-feed function like Google Reader.
Filed under Twitter coach | Comment (0)Using Search to Build a Targeted Twitter Following
It is quite simple to build a Twitter following, you just follow hundred of random people, a percentage will follow you back, delete the non followers, repeat, repeat.
This is all well and good if you have a generic or personal message to tweet, but supposing you want your tweets to reach an audience of like-minded people or potential clients? Then you need to build a targeted following, either by geographic location, subject matter or industry.
This obviously takes a lot longer than building a random list, but the rewards will be much greater in the long term.
My preferred method of list building is to use the search facility in either Twitter itself, Twellow or Tweetdeck. Each method is slightly different, but all produce results.
As an example let’s use the subject of guitars to build a targeted following.
In the Twitter search box, just type “guitars”.
This will then bring up a list of tweets with the word in, in real time. At the top of the list you will see an update from time to time saying something like “25 new tweets since searching”. Just click the box and the list will update. You now have a list of everybody who is currently discussing guitars. briefly scan each tweet and decide if the person tweeting would be a useful follower for you. If they are, follow them. Hopefully, they will follow you back and you are on your way to creating a nice useful list of guitar buddies.
On a side point, avoid sending out an automated response to new followers, especially ones with a spam link in them about teeth whitening or adding 16,000 followers a week. Nothing will earn you an unfollow more quickly.
If you want to send a direct message (DM) to welcome a new follower, take the time and personalise it. It will be much more warmly received and will help your followers build trust in you.
Twellow
Twellow can be used in a similar way, but also more specifically. Firstly you need to add yourself to Twellow and create a log in, which will verify your Twitter account. This is important, as you can then follow people directly from Twellow, without having to return to Twitter.
Twellow has a search facility too, but this one will bring up results from peoples description and location, not their tweets. Lets use guitars again, but this time add UK to the search. This will then bring up a result of any guitarists in the UK, assuming they have mentioned both pieces of information in their description. Obviously the results will be less, but they will be highly targeted; a useful feature. You can create combination phrases to search for, picking off highly targeted potential followers this way.
Tweetdeck
Tweetdeck is an Adobe application that needs to be downloaded and installed first, but it’s free and very useful. You can use it in the same way as the first two applications, but in Tweetdeck you can set up multiple real time searches, and follow directly from the results. If you have multiple Twitter accounts you can also switch between them, allowing you to respond to tweets from any account you choose.
These methods will, over time, allow you to build a (hopefully) loyal and useful following for whatever use you desire; building traffic to a niche blog, alerting potential new clients to your service or products, building a community around a subject, or whatever you can think of. Try it!
Filed under Twitter coach | Comment (0)10 Ways to Increase your Market with Twitter
We all know that Twitter is a hugely popular microblogging service. Although your Tweets are technically supposed to answer the question, “What are you doing?” Twitter has moved far beyond that.
Tweets are used to share stories, link to photos, promote content, break news, and a whole lot more. Twitter has also become an incredibly important tool for social media marketing professionals.
Here are 10 ways in which Twitter can be used in your social media marketing campaign.
1. Sharing Links to Items of Interest
As soon as you read something online that you think is interesting, it is easy to share it on Twitter with all of your followers. Twitter is highly effective in this manner because it is such a quick way to be able to reach a large group of people. You can also get a lot of great ideas for blog posts from Twitter since many new ideas and stories are floating around that haven’t even made it to the blogosphere and definitely not to mainstream media.
2. Building Your Network
Using Twitter is a great way to build your social and business networks because it allows you to find and follow people with similar interests. You can use Twellow or a similar service to find people who live in your geographical area. You can also use other tools that help you find new people to follow based upon who your Twitter friends follow.
3. Build Relationships within Your Current Network
People in different networks often use Twitter to connect with their contacts instantly rather than using instant messaging for that purpose. Furthermore, many people use Twitter to connect with their network during events like conferences.
4. Re-Distributing Content from Your Blog or Website
Twitter can be used to redistribute content from your blog or website. However, you should take care to do this thoughtfully since many of your Twitter followers may already read your blog. For that reason, you may want to avoid using a blog plug-in that automatically Tweets your posts. Your best bet is to Tweet your content manually and customize each Tweet so it doesn’t get old.
5. Get Involved in Live Tweeting Events
Live Tweeting events are great because they are a form of citizen journalism that allow you to connect with several new people in your niche while making active and valuable contributions to current discussions in your community.
6. Pitching Stories to Journalists on Twitter
You can send a direct message to a journalist who is following you on Twitter to pitch a story idea.
7. Communicating with Your Team
You can use Twitter as a company intranet that connects all of your employees. Twitter can be particularly useful in this regard if you have a virtual business with employees in different geographical locations. You can set your updates to private for security reasons. Anytime you are working on group projects, you can stay in touch with your team members using Twitter.
8. Brand Monitoring
Stay up to date with any mentions of your business on Twitter. If there is anything negative, you will be able to counter it quickly. You can also use Twitter as a way to receive feedback from your customers and improve your business. Just ask your followers to give their opinion on something. For example, if you designed a new website, ask your followers what they think about it and get their constructive criticisms so you can make your site design even better.
9. Acquire More Votes on Social Media Websites
If you have submitted a story to Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, or any other social voting website, tweet a link to that submission to try to score more votes from your followers. If your followers like what they see, they are sure to vote for your content.
10. Build Your Personal Brand
When you use Twitter to talk about things as mundane as what you ate for breakfast or how you are going to sleep early tonight, you make your followers feel like you are casual and approachable. Even those with running a company that has a cold, corporate brand image could create more appeal and build a unique personal brand using Twitter.
Filed under Twitter coach | Comment (0)