Sunday, June 28, 2009

Using Twitter For Marketing And Driving Traffic

Well it seems these days you can't go anywhere without hearing something about Twitter. It would seem as if everyone and their mothers are on Twitter including celebrities, athletes, companies and even politicians. Just like with the other websites I have shown you on this site you can generate plenty of traffic and or sales from Twitter with a little hard work.

It's not the easiest site to gain a million followers on, but with some dedication you can grow your followers quite easily. First thing you need to do though is sign up, which you can do here. Just pick a username and fill out your profile included a link to the website that you want to drive the most traffic to. Once you do this you can beginning your tweets. It could be anything that runs across your mind, or you can link to one of your sites or blog posts with some clever saying. Don't concentrate on this too much in the beginning though, because if no one is following you then no one will ever see any of your clever tweets.

So what you need to do is start following people. Twitter has a link up at the top called "Find People" which will automatically go into your e-mail and find out your contacts that are already on Twitter. This is under "Find on other networks". Twitter also has a "Find on Twitter" option where you can simply type in the name or username of anyone on Twitter and find people this way. Go nuts and follow all the people you want at this point. After you have added in all your contacts it is time to take it to the next level. You need to think about what your website is about and some possible keywords that are relevant to your site. Take these keywords and enter them into the search on Twitters homepage on the left side. For example, if your site is all about Fish you can typing in fishing or aquarium or an individual fish even to see if anyone is Twittering about that particular topic. Now you have located the people that are interested in your websites topics enough to Tweet about them, so make start following them, or even send them a reply to their tweet giving them some insight about what they said, or just say hello. Rinse and repeat until you are following about 2,000 people.

At this point Twitter makes is so you can only follow 200 more people than are following you. For example if you are following 2,000 people you need to have at least 1,800 followers. This prevents spammers from completely taking over Twitter. What I do at this point is go back into the people that are following you by clicking on the "Following" under your profile picture. Now under each profile picture that you see it will either say "Direct Message", or it will be blank. The ones that are blank you need to remove, because this means that even though you are following them, they are not following you. No sense following them if they aren't going to follow you because of this ratio that Twitter puts into place. Of course there are exception if you really like the person and don't care if they follow you. Continue to build your followers and Tweet your websites out along the way and you will start to see traffic coming in from Twitter. Everytime you make an update to your site or post a new blog post, tell people by giving out a short Tweet about what you did. If your followers are interested in the topics on your website and in your Tweets they will respond.

Twitter can be particularly effective in selling individual products too, like the ICUcopyclip for example. This is a rear view mirror/note holder that attaches to your computer monitor. So knowing that people would use this at work and especially in their cubicle, I can target people that are Tweeting about their cubicles and even ones that are looking for cubicle decorations just by searching for "cubicle" or "cubicle decorations" on the Twitter search. Then you can follow them or even send them a Tweet about the ICUcopyclip. I am sure you can begin to see just how effective Twitter can be for marketing products and websites.

If you liked this article or you just want to check out my profile on Twitter just click here, if you follow me I will be sure to return the favor : ) You can even leave your twitter URL in the comments below and I will be sure to follow you!