subject: Treating Twitter like a Crockpot to Generate High Quality Traffic [print this page] Treating Twitter like a Crockpot to Generate High Quality Traffic
Why Twitter:
Building and managing a Twitter account can be a daunting task for first time and veteran bloggers alike. Once an account has a large following of active users it can be a massive help in driving traffic to your site. For instance, from my experience a click through rate of 1 5% is not uncommon, depending on the quality of your followers. Now, if an account has 1000 follower, which is not difficult, every tweet you send out could bring anywhere from 10 50 visits, each of which is of substantially higher quality than those you might get from stumbleupon or digg.
The problem is getting to the stage where you have thousands of active, quality, users hanging onto your every word. The key to getting there is patience. That might seem like a copout, but unless you already have thousands of visitors or a huge web presence you won't be able to attract any attention to your twitter account, at first. However, there is good news, you can automate twitter to the degree where you only need to spend ten minutes every other day managing your account. In other words "just set it and forget it."
User Authenticity:
There are a number of steps the owner of a new twitter account should take in order to attract a following. First uploading an eye catching picture is a must. Twitter users want to verify that you are a real person, not just a spammer, and having a unique user icon is a great indicator. Either upload your sites logo, a picture of yourself, or something humorous, these are all great ways to show that you are a genuine person with great content to share.
Second, you should write a one to two line bio. You don't need to provide any real information or anything at all. The only requirement is that you use proper grammar. The idea is to show that you are not a spammer, and since many spammers to not have a proper grasp of the English language showing that you do is a great indicator to any potential follower.
Automating your Tweets:
In order minimize the amount of time necessary on twitter automating your tweets is a must. There are a number of useful tools and blog plug-ins that will make your life easier. A simple Google search on tweet automation will bring up some excellent services like tweetmanager. Tweetmanager is a must, simply for the auto follow feature, but it also allows you to schedule tweets and send mass messages to your followers.
In order to maximize web traffic tweeting all your blog posts is a must. Word press and Blogger plug-ins like post to twitter which automatically post the title and url of every blog post when it is first published. Some services allow you to use link shorteners like bit.ly but I prefer to keep my original seo optimized url visible, just out of personal preference. Search your blogging service for the post tweeting tool that bests suits your blog.
Seed Followers:
Potential followers find you one of three ways randomly, via your website, or from their network. You can't do much about attracting users to you at random and if you don't have a substantial amount of web traffic you probably won't attract users that way. What you can do is build an initial network of followers to improve your odds of being found. This essentially comes down to finding some people who reside in your niche and following them all and then unfollowing those that don't follow back within a few days. That is the advice most twitter gurus will give you. There are however some dirty tricks to building a network.
The biggest of the dirty tricks is following autofollower twitter accounts, such as the aptly named autofollow account. Also, following those who follow autofolloweraccounts tends to be a great method of attracting those vital initial followers.
The End Game:
Eventually you will want to start using twitter in a more active manner. The Crockpot approach only goes so far. Events like follow Friday require that you are networked with the highest quality users who generally want to see more from your tweets than the automated tweets can provide. But, at least at the start, for the first few thousand followers, this approach should prove highly successful.
