Drive Traffic to Your Blog Using Twitter

You've realized that blogging is an excellent way to enhance your website's search engine rankings, but it's not performing as you expected. What you need is traffic, and in the noise that is the Internet, traffic can be hard to come by. However, you can use Twitter to drive traffic to your blog (and hopefully result in some conversions). Here's how to make that happen.

Customize Your Twitter Profile

This one is pretty simple and helps to distinguish a real business or person (you) from the crowd. The first thing you need to do is replace the default profile image with either a photo of you or your logo. This is what shows up in everyone's timeline next to your tweets, so it is very important that you have something here that they can identify.

Next, Twitter gives you 160 characters to state your bio. Think of this as an "elevator speech". Tell people who are interested in your profile exactly what you do in 160 characters or less. If you're the type who has trouble with elevator speeches, this is a good place to practice.

Finally, consider customizing your Twitter background. You can add information about yourself or your business in an image here. Make sure to put the most important information on the left side because users might have a very high resolution monitor that will effectively hide anything that you try to put on the right side.

Use Twitter

Get this: a majority of people who create Twitter accounts don't return to them from one month to the next. For many, it's just not the right media. If you're not actually using Twitter, you can't gain followers who might read your blog.

So how do you gain followers? Interact. Some people recommend following as many people as possible hoping that they will follow you back, but that doesn't yield quality followers. What you want are people who are likely to be interested in what you are selling. You can achieve this in multiple ways.

The first is to follow other Twitter users in your industry or region. If they have something that is worth sharing, then retweet it no matter how few followers you have. Some people will follow those who show up on the retweet list, and those are likely to be followers that are actually interested in what you have to say.

You can also user Twitter Search and find what people are saying about your product or service. It takes some time to get the hang of it, but once you do, it can be very rewarding. If someone has recently asked a question involving something you have expertise in, send them a reply. Don't treat it as a sale, treat it as offering friendly advice just like you would to a frequent customer.

Content is King

Just like the quality posts you are writing for your blog, "content is king" also applies to your tweets. If you want more followers to click through to your blog, you need to provide not only good content on your blog itself, but also good content in your tweets. If you provide quality content that is link worthy, you will see links come in.

Use Your Blog to Promote Twitter

Finally, this is going to sound odd, but you'll understand if you think about it: promote Twitter from your blog. That's right! Encourage readers of your blog to follow you on Twitter. Encourage readers to tweet links to your blog for their friends.

Think of this as customer retention. You might have got someone in the door with something that they wanted to see, but how do you keep them coming back later? If you encourage your readers to follow you on Twitter, they will start getting your updates through your tweets. (You are linking to your blog posts in Twitter when you add a new one, right?)