The Not So Shocking Reasons Why Twitter Is A Must For Your Blog
08/13/2009 - Internet
So your ulterior motive is off course to drive traffic to your blog. That's fine. Nothing wrong with that, but you have to think a bit about how you go about doing it. Twitter is a community and it's important that you actually have something valuable to share. That's easier if you follow people who are actually interested in your niche. You also need to stay in touch with your people on Twitter. It's no good only being an active part of the Twitter community whenever you have something new at your blog to share.
Still, the goal is to promote your blog. There are many different things you can do when promoting your blog. First of all, put the link to your blog in your public Twitter profile. While you're at it and if it's within your resources it's well worth it to show your blog address on your Twitter background image. People can't click it, but if something sounds interesting you'd be surprised to know how many people are actually willing to type a url into the address bar themselves. Whenever, you create a blog post you should off course tweet that post as soon as possible. There might not be enough room to tweet the entire URL so you might need an URL shortening service, but that's ok. You're not posting your blog posts for SEO purposes, but solely to drive people directly from twitter to your blog. If you don't have anything to say yourself don't be afraid to share other people's tweets. Although that might not initially help you, people will be more inclined to share your stuff if you are willing to share their stuff.
Along those lines, you should focus your tweets on helping people. They say that you have to give to get and that is certainly true when it comes to Twitter. If your tweets generally help people with their questions they are far more inclined to click your links. When you run a blog it's fair to assume that your blog posts are generally advice or information that people in your niche, your followers, would find helpful. So why not use a plugin to automatically tweet your latest blog post? If you're using Wordpress I know there are about a gazillion out there that will help you do just that. The important thing in your posts, however, is still to be as helpful as you possibly can in everything you tweet. If you make sure of that you are far more incline to get traffic from your tweets.
So, are you ready to use Twitter with your blogs. There are many incentives to do so and Twitter is a perfect match for just about any blog. The key things to remember is to be actively involved, be sociable and be helpful. Have fun Twitter-blogging.
