10 Twitter Tips To Drive Traffic To Your Site

A large percentage of my website traffic comes from Twitter. I know that many of you enjoyed the tips that I shared in my FREE 7 Day eCourse about making money from blogging and making your own website, so today I wanted to look more in detail at how Twitter can help your business.

I am a big fan of Twitter marketing! It is such a great tool that you can use to find targeted traffic for your website, whilst allowing you to network with people from all over the world.

Most people that use Twitter tend to tweet meaningless nonsense, such as what they ate for lunch! That is great for people that use it purely for social reasons, however if you are planning to use Twitter to help you market your business, then you need to be using it in a more productive way.

The best thing about Twitter is that the people using it are so diverse! It doesn’t matter what your business is about, you will be able to find people almost instantly who are interested in your niche. This allows you to quickly find people who are part of your targeted audience.

The following are some tips that you can use to improve your Twitter account and increase traffic to your website.

Driving Traffic From Twitter To Your Blog

Lets get to the point! You want to use Twitter to drive traffic to your blog/website. Twitter is one of the best social media tools for driving traffic to your blog. I use it to update all of my followers about what’s new on my websites and what I’m doing (@matt_oit). It is such an amazing feeling when you tweet about a new post on your site and people start to re-tweet it, spreading the word.

Using Twitter and Blogging Together

To get the most out of Twitter, you need to promote Twitter on your website and there are a few ways to do this. The most obvious way to do this is to display a Twitter button on your homepage, or better yet within your sidebar so that it displays on all of your website pages. This button links directly to your Twitter account, allowing people to sign-up and follow you.
Another great way to promote Twitter on your site is to display sharing links on your posts. As you can see, at the top of all of my blog posts I display ‘AddThis‘ share buttons. This allows anyone to share my posts on any of the social media sites online, including Twitter. Counters can help show how popular your posts are to new visitors.
Also, consider placing a ‘Recent Tweets’ box on your site. This will display your newest tweets that your visitors may be interested in. Ultimately, this is just another way to encourage people to ‘follow‘ you.

Promote Yourself

You need to make sure that you promote yourself and your blog on Twitter. If you can do this well, then you will be able to build a strong brand identity that will be beneficial in the long run.
One of the key parts of your Twitter profile is your bio. Write a bio that clearly states what your blog is about and add a link to your site. This sounds really easy, but take some time to think about this. You only have a limited amount of characters, so make them count. If after reading your bio, people don’t get what you are about, they won’t stick around.
The best way to promote your site is to tweet about it! Tweet about all of your new posts a couple of times a day and keep everyone up to date about everything that is happening with your site. Surprisingly, a lot of people think that if they promote themselves on Twitter, then that makes them a spammer. That is just not true! It is fine to promote yourself, as long as you do it the right way. Tweeting every 5 minutes about your new post or an affiliate link would be classed as spam. Mix it up a bit and you will be fine. Tweet about your new post, but then tweet about other things that might be related.
If you can get the right balance and learn to promote your site in the best way, then you will begin to see results.

Make Friends

Twitter is a social site, so be social! There is a whole community related to your niche out there, so get involved. Chat to people, make friends, share ideas, ask question, re-tweet, etc.
I am always amazed when I get followed by someone that doesn’t tweet. When I check their profile, they are following x thousand people, but have never tweeted a single thing. You can’t expect to make friends and build your brand without tweeting.
Blogging is a community, so find similar people that blog within your field and interact with them. The more blogging friends that you can connect with, the better your blog will be as you will be able to share ideas with each other.

Listen To Your Twitter Followers

One of the best things about Twitter is that you can get almost instant reaction to your tweets from your followers. It is important that you listen to your followers as they can tell you what is working and what isn’t. A particular post that you tweet may be particularly popular, so you might want to do a follow up post on the same subject. Similarly, if you don’t get much reaction from one of your tweets, it may be because there isn’t much interest for it.
You can just ask your followers what they like and what they don’t and why. This way you are almost treating Twitter as a tool for market research that can help you with your business.
Have Conversations
Twitter is full of people having great conversations with one another. The best ones are full of useful information that can be very helpful to you. Don’t be shy, jump into conversations, ask questions and contribute to the discussion, or better yet start your own. People are very helpful when you are nice to them, you can learn a lot from many different people and build a useful network of people.

Honesty Is The Best Policy

I think that this is important for every aspect of your business and life in general. It is very easy to tell when someone is clearly talking a load of rubbish about something. Doing that only results in loosing business. Just be honest about who you are and what you are talking about. Trust is such an important part in any relationship, whether that be a romantic relationship or simply a business relationship. People are much more likely to listen to you and do business with you if they trust you.
Be honest on Twitter. If you come across something that you really like, or that you think your followers will like, then tell them about it. If you find something that you don’t like, then also tell them about it and why you don’t like it. You may find that not all of your followers agree with everything that you say, but ultimately they will value your honest opinion, which is far more important!

Straight To The Point

I am a big fan of writing informative posts that people can read. On Twitter, this is not possible because you have a limited 140 characters to use. This means that you need to get to the point with your Tweets!
This can be a bit of an art form, but the more you Tweet, the better you will get at doing it. You need to provide maximum information with minimum characters. Keep your titles, questions, comments, etc. short and concise, whilst still being easy to read.
Any links that you want to include should be shortened. This is easy to achieve with the many online URL shortener websites that are available online. I myself use bitly.com to shorten all of my links. This is such a great tool that dramatically reduces the amount of space that your links take up in your tweets.

Twitter Backgrounds

Twitter allows you to customise your Twitter account, so you can change all of the colours and you can upload your own background image. Why is this important? Well, by customising your own account, you make yourself stand out from the rest of the crowd. You can make all of your account colours match your website colours. Check out our Twitter account to see how we did this to match our website.
The background image is the most important part of this process. You can include a lot of important information on your background image that your followers might find useful. The most obvious would be to display your website address, but you could also show social network addresses, any products that you are promoting, company logo, etc.