How to Use Twitter to Drive Traffic to Your Blog

No matter what others are saying, Twitter is a great traffic source, period. In this article I’ll reveal to you a very simple to implement strategy which will help you to grow your Twitter community with 500-1000 followers per week and increase the traffic to your blog in the process. It may look not very fast, but your followers will be mostly real and responsive people who are genuinely eager to read your content.

I must warn you though: DON’T BUY FOLLOWERS! If you’ll do, you’ll get stuck with a dead community of zombie followers. Well, you can do it if a vanity social proof is all you are after, but you’ll get no traffic at all this way.

Note: Some time after I wrote this article, I realized that something is missing here, so I included the missing info that I consider essential for a successful implementation of the strategy outlined below, and at the same time, I removed some other info that I found to be irrelevant and distracting. In other words, I made it better. 🙂

The tools you need

So, you built a blog and want targeted traffic to it, but you don’t know how to start. I can tell you for sure: Twitter is a very easy free traffic source!

Regardless of what you want to do, managing your following/followers by hand is very difficult due to the lack of some needed features in the Twitter’s web interface, such that you need some tools to help you with that. There are many social account managers extending the native functionality of Twitter, and here are some of them:

• Unfollowers.com – I’m currently using this one to track my community.
• CrowdFireApp.com
• ManageFlitter.com
• Commun.it
• HootSuite.com

There are countless more of them, and for this reason it is so difficult to choose the one that fits the best to our needs. In my case, I’ve chosen Unfollowers.com premium plan which costs me barely $10 per month. I’m using it mainly for two of their features: “not following back” list and “recent followers” list. Read further to find out how.

How all this can bring traffic to your blog?

I organized this part in 5 simple steps to make things clearer.

1. Create a bait on your blog

Create a landing page or post to direct your new followers to, where they can learn how to use Twitter to better meet their goals, for example. Or let them have an eBook for free.

Let’s call it the bait. It doesn’t have to be perfect from the beginning, you can adjust it later. Also create other related pages or posts and link them from your bait to keep them longer on your blog.

If your niche is online marketing, you could do something similar to this very post. Just prepare that bait and link to it from your bio.

A better idea would be to offer a free gift with great value (lead magnet) in exchange for their email address. This way both you and your readers would benefit from this exchange. They get valuable information from you, and you get their email address in your autoresponder to be used for email marketing. This is the simplest way to build your email list, by the way.

2. Prepare a set of direct messages (DM) and mention tweets linking them to your bait.

Use Unfollowers.com to set-up a set of DMs and a set of mention tweets to be automatically sent when somebody follows you. Include a link to your bait, so your new followers know what you are offering to them.

There is something about DMs: as per Twitter policy, DMs with links can be blocked, but you can use some tricks to overcome this limitation. For example, direct them to your bio where you added the link to your bait. Or you could misspell your URL on purpose, so that Twitter couldn’t recognize it as a link, like using triple slash instead of double: http:///example.com.

The ability to send links by DM is only enabled for verified users, or if the links are pointing to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. But after some tests I figured out that any bit.ly shortened link can be sent by DM. At least a shortened link to my blog works.

At this point, if somebody follows you, he or she will get a DM from you with your thanks, and shortly after that, your mention tweet, all this without even logging in to your Twitter account!

They will hopefully like or retweet your message and will visit your blog. They will engage with your content, share it and the word will spread. 🙂

3. Create a catchy profile for your Twitter account

In a Twitter bio there is possible to include a clickable link. Also, you have only 160 chars, so use them wisely.

So, in my opinion, to optimize your Twitter profile you should follow these main ideas:

1. In the bio include a short description of yourself, a punchy call to action and the link to your bait. Make your bio keyword rich. As an alternative, use all 160 chars for more text in the “bio” field and include the link in the “website” field.
2. Use a profile picture, don’t let an egg stand in the way! If it’s your personal account, use a picture of yourself. This will give you more followers because people are more willing to connect with real people, not with an opaque corporate avatar.
3. Also, add a catchy header picture illustrating a large graphical call to action with the invitation to visit the bait page. You can use canva.com free graphic editor, or you can outsource it at Fiverr.
4. Preferably, use your real name if your name is also your brand.
5. Fill out your real location, not “Planet Earth” or something.
6. Fill out the bait URL in the “website” field.

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Tip:

There is no need of using #hash characters in your bio. When searching for #hashtags in the search bar, Twitter will search for #hashtags in tweets AND for keywords in the users’ bios.[/dropshadowbox]

4. Grow your community

Now, all you have to do is target an influencer in your niche (it could be your mentor or your competitor for example), and follow his followers. Don’t follow everybody and don’t follow back everybody, be selective.

This is the most simple and effective strategy of growing your community.

Just search for influencers in your niche with huge followings, and follow their recent followers. If they are following him, there is a high chance to follow you as well.

This is a way to tell them “Hey, I think you might be interested in what I’m offering to you!“

From my experience so far, about 20% of your followings will follow you back. If only a very small percentage of them are following you back, like 1% or so, it means that there is a very low engagement around the chosen targeted “influencer”, so try another one.

There is also a small percentage that will unfollow you shortly after that, but this is perfectly normal, they have the right to decide if they want to stick with you or not.

The trick is to only follow new users and avoid the ones that you already followed/unfollowed in the past. Here is how to sort this thing out with Unfollowers.com (premium):

1. Select “Copy followers/following” list.
2. Enter the target influencer’s username.
3. Make sure that “Copy followers” and “Hide previously followed users” are selected/checked.
4. Click “GO”

There is also an alternative and more flexible method to select someone else’s followers, and here it is:

1. Add the target account as a source, then select it.
2. Select “New followers” list.
3. Add “Exclude Previously Followed Users” filter rule.
4. In the right sidebar set these filtering rules (you may save them for later use):
   • Last tweeted: 0-7 days
   • Sort by: follow order desc
   • Mode: Fast follow

You have to realize that not all of them will follow you back. Just give them enough time, like 3 or 5 days, and then unfollow the ones who did not follow you back within this time. You have to do it because they are an unnecessary burden.

Here is how to do it with Unfollowers.com (premium):

1. Make sure you selected your account, not one of the sources.
2. Select “Not following back” list.
3. Choose the desired number of days in “Exclude people you have followed in the past x days” option.

For example you may choose 3, meaning you want to give at most 3 days grace period to your new followings to have the chance to follow you back.

The trick is to keep the ratio following/followers as low as possible. Twitter has limits regarding this ratio, especially after 5000 followings. Read this article for more info.

That’s why it’s important to unfollow the ones who don’t follow you back, and this cannot be done by hand.

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Tip:

In your following campaign don’t be too greedy, don’t follow too many people at once. Ideally you should keep this number well below 1000 per day if you don’t want to be banned by Twitter.[/dropshadowbox]

In the Twitter guide there is a mention about suspending the account if the user follows/unfollows too many users in quick succession, but they never defined how many such actions are considered “too many”.

Right now I’m following about 600 per day (in two tranches, at 12PM and 2PM EST roughly), just to be on the safe side. Remember that your Twitter account is a valuable asset and you don’t want to waste it!

So far you learned how to get new connections and get traffic from them in the process. What’s next?

5. Get noticed on Twitter

Well, I see it as a two threaded process:

1. Continuously grow your followers as described, and
2. Keep them posted with relevant information from your niche.

Tweet every day. You can tweet every new post on your blog, but you should tweet also some content that is not yours. When you have no new posts, you can use your older posts as long as they don’t become obsolete.

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Tip:

Create a tweet with a call for action and a link to your bait, then pin it. Pinned tweets will always stay at the top of your account home page. Yet another place for your invitation.[/dropshadowbox]

You could use one excellent feature from HootSuite.com: bulk message upload. This way you’ll be able to schedule tens of tweets per day and cycle through the posts of your blog.

Twitter is not like other social networks, you have to tweet quite often to get noticed by your followers, and Twitter has nothing against this practice. Don’t worry, you’ll not be considered as a spammer.

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Tip:

Use ifttt.com to connect to relevant news feeds, including your own blog, and automatically tweet when new content becomes available, or schedule it through Buffer.com.[/dropshadowbox]

Conclusion

I’m using this very method as we speak, and managed to get almost 3000 followers in a month. I also noticed that the traffic slice coming from Twitter has increased significantly.

My conclusion: this is indeed a simple yet powerful strategy to naturally grow your Twitter community and get more traffic in the process.

Resources

Social account managers:

• Unfollowers.com – Twitter and Instagram
• CrowdFireApp.com – Twitter and Instagram
• ManageFlitter.com – Twitter only
• Commun.it – Twitter and Facebook
• HootSuite.com – Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, WordPress, Instagram

Tools:

• ifttt.com – If This Than That, an Internet programming language!
• Buffer.com – A posting scheduler to social networks.

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