Drive Traffic to Your Blog Using Twitter

Looking to drive traffic to your blog? The most important weapon in your arsenal is a 140-character message with a couple of hashtags and a link. You can write the best content in the world, but building an audience requires you to share your content quickly to as broad an audience as possible.

5 reasons why Twitter works better

1. Hashtags vs. SEO

The difference? Top of the list at the moment you post or never appearing in the top 3 links of Google. Hashtags give you immediate visibility, the moment you post, for anyone searching on the term. All the optimization in the world may never give you a high enough ranking in search engine results (top 3) to get a single click. Of course, your message is only visible for a moment on Twitter, but you can regularly post and keep generating clicks.

2. Followers vs. subscribers

It is so much easier to follow you than to subscribe to you. The last thing I need is more email and I never did figure out the reader/subscriber/RSS feed thing. I only subscribe to a few publications that I know I want to read. I'll follow everyone else.

3. Retweet vs. forward

When your content is compelling, your followers and those who find your tweet by search will share it with their followers, instantly spreading the word for you. The threshold to forward an email or a link for most people is high. And even then, MOST people do not forward to their entire mailing list, just a select group.

4. 140 characters

140 characters may not seem like a lot, but it's more than a typical newspaper headline. And it's plenty of text to attract people who scan instead of read (as users do on the web). It beats an email newsletter. To get a click through from email requires a subject line that gets past spam filters and attracts an open. Then the preview content has to be compelling enough to get an open or a click through. That's only for committed readers.

5. Post once, show everywhere

The Twitter API let's you add a Twitter feed easily to other content sources. When you post to Twitter, the Tweet is immediately syndicated to your web sites. You'll see my tweets on  select pages of my web site (www.nimble-press.com) and on my LinkedIn profile page.

Twitter drives traffic to your blog, because it is more than a 140 character message. Twitter is a teaser to a link. We have been working with our clients to develop a comprehensive content strategy, not just for web sites, but for the social media sites that amplify the message on your site.