How to Get More Traffic for Your Blog Through Twitter

Using Twitter is a great way to increase the traffic that you receive to your blog. Of course, you must already be a member of Twitter, and it is very easy to sign up here:

http://www.twitter.com

You do not have to have a large number of followers to get people to visit. But follow these easy steps and you will soon see an increase in the numbers of people who visit you and want to read what you say and if you do it properly, maybe an increase in twitter followers as well!

1. The very first step is to make sure that your blog looks at its absolute best. Build up a nice number of interesting and informative articles on your subject. This way when you get visitors, they will have something to read to stick around for, and hopefully join.

2. Test your blog by loading it using different browsers and get friends and family to test it on their computers. It must load quickly and be easy to read. The average visitor who comes along from twitter will not stick around if a lot of large graphics and fancy widgets slow the loading speed down. 

3. Sign in to Twitter.

4. On the twitter home page, you will see your timeline on the left hand side and on the right in the blue column, it list a varied amount of information, including a list of the top trends (TT) occuring on twitter at the moment. These sometimes have the hashtag symbol (#) and sometimes are just some words or a sentence.

5. If you notice one of the TT is relevant to anything in your blog, then it is really easy to tweet about it to that group of people who are currently discussing that subject. This could be thousands of people! The more relevant it is the better, because that means that your visitors will actually be interested in it and might stick around to read the rest of your blog and tell other people about it.

6. Because twitter limits the characters to 140, your blog url can take up a lot of this the first thing to do is to shorten your url so that it leaves space for the rest of your tweet. Visit a website like tinyurl and paste your url into the box so that you end up with a shortened version like this: http://tinyurl.com/74lmnqt

7. Now you are ready to tweet your information into twitter. 

8. Make it short and meaningful. I get some visitors to my How to Survive Spreadbetting page whenever there are relevant tweets on twitter by tweeting things like: Read How to Survive Spreadbetting (tinyurl link to page) and the hashtag, whatever it is. I do this when people are discussing the economy or the credit crunch, or banks, finances or anything relevant. 

9. Do not try to be obscure or witty or interesting, you can do that in your own timeline with your friends etc, Keep it short and simple enough and to the topic to make people want to click it and know what they will find. A lot of people will not click on a strange link in case there are viruses, but if it is interesting to them and about a topic which they have already been discussing, then they might click on your link.

10. Have a call to action like 'Click here' or 'Click now!' will incentivise more people to click.

11. When they get to your page, keep them there by having a few links of your other topics, this is easy in blogger by putting the 'Labels' widget somewhere on your page, like I have the 'Categories.' Click Now, if you see something interesting!

12. Don't spam. You will not get any visitors who are interested and they may never click on one of your links again.

13. Don't overdo it. About one or two of these types of tweets along with 30-40 of your tweets is OK but any more will really put people off!

14. A good thing to do might be to have two accounts where one of them is your personal one about your life and another one where you only tweet links. This way, anyone who signs up to join you will know what they can expect.