Use Twitter To Get Instant And Ongoing Traffic

In my recent post on how to increase twitter followers, I concentrated on how you can make money directly from your twitter account. As most people realise, you can also use twitter to drive traffic directly to your website, however, unless you have a very viral tweet, you won’t get as much benefit from this unless you have a large and loyal twitter following.

Many people I speak to are still struggling to get even one hundred people to visit their sites each day, while others can’t get more than a few thousand, despite having good, regular content. If done correctly, twitter can help increase your site visitors, both immediately and in the longer term; I still get traffic from old tweets.

The Basics Of Driving Traffic With Twitter

• One important caveat with using twitter to drive traffic is, do not spam. If all your tweets are nothing more then links to your own sites, people will get sick of them pretty soon and not bother visiting, so make sure you include other topics and links in your tweets.
• Do not direct message people with spam (your links). I get so many of these that I nearly have complete DM blindness. My favourite is people sending me links on how to get massive amounts of twitter followers, when they have fewer then 300 themselves.
• The time of day you post your tweet is important, especially if you are not based in the US and want to tap into that audience. It is no good tweeting at 3am US time, when there are going to be very few people online. To over come this problem, you can use a tool that allows you to schedule tweets at specific times. You can either use a tool like Tweetadder that provides all the twitter sentimentality you need, or use a browser based application like Hootsuite to schedule tweets for a lter date and time.
• Join in the conversation and respond to tweets.
• Retweet others tweets if you find them valuable, or interesting. It is like link love, the more you give, the more you are likely to get returned.
• Analyse your tweets so you can see what was popular and what worked to bring in visitors. You need to know what is effective, in order to refine your tweets and also as a way of learning what your potential audience finds interesting. To do this, I use the tools above for twitter and Perfromance Metrics for analysing my website statistics and visitors. This allows me to see a realtime live of view of visitors on my sites and is a really great tool to have; I’ll write more about it in a later post.

Remember, keep your tweets interesting and regular and gain the benfits with increased traffic. Not only will you gain instant eyes on your site, but you also have the potential to gain more long term visitors.