I have posted a few times about getting traffic on to my sites using Twitter. When I am making new sites I wouldn't even think of not using Twitter. Now we all know its hard enough getting traffic to a new blog or website but that is not something I worry about anymore.
Each one of my sites main writer (usually me) gets its own Twitter account as soon as the site is thought of. I will be building friends before the site is even close to becoming a reality. Finding people in the niche is easy as you use search.twitter.com and place a niche keyword in there and follow some of the people that are talking about the niche.I go in every other day and post a tweet with the niche keyword or two. In no time you get some followers.
While I launch the account early, it is one of the things that build slowly so there is no sense in wasting time. When the time comes I place my url in the Twitter profile box but that may be a month or so later as the site develops.
By using the Tweetmeme WordPress plugin everytime I place a good article on the site it ends up getting retweeted over and over by my like-minded friends on my Twitter account. Then all of a sudden their like-minded friends will retweet that. It makes people feel smarter when they are retweeting things to their friends. Its a “Hey look what I found I must have been smart to find it.”
The Tweetmeme button has a number on it showing how many retweets that post has, it is almost human nature to retweet it so you see the number go up. Now most of my stuff only gets about 10-15 retweets but after looking through my friends list and analytics I can see that even though the post may have 10-15 retweets it ends up going out to over 200-300 people and out of that I usually end up with 10 people that subscribe to my email newsletter or Rss feed. To me that is gold because that reader becomes MINE until they feel it necessary to unsubcribe which if you are producing enough quality content they never end up doing.
Now I will take it up a little, due to most of my sites having multiple writers they retweet the articles for each other as soon as its posted, so now it ends up going into the twitter stream of a few writers and their loyal followers. This can end up being a few thousand everytime a new article is posted.
Jess Joss says
Vinny-
A great post! Thank you.
Using the Wella Balsam principle; “And then she told two friends, who each told two friends…” certainly allows for viral spread and extra creditability and all these additional people are recommending the site.
Cheers,
Jess