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How to Use Twitter to Drive Traffic to Your Blog

Despite what others are saying, Twitter is a great free traffic source, period. In

this short eBook I’ll show you a very simple strategy which will help you to grow

your Twitter community with 500-1000 followers per week and increase 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 think this picture is quite convincing:

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I must warn you though: DON’T BUY FOLLOWERS! If you’ll do, you’ll be 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.

The tools you need

So, you want targeted traffic, but you don’t know how to start.

First, I want to clarify one thing: in order to use Twitter as a targeted traffic

source, you have to keep things in perfect order and keep track of your

connections.

Regardless of what you want to do, you simply cannot manage your

following/followers and unfollowing/unfollowers by hand. Twitter is a little bit too

noisy and its web interface lacks some useful functionalities, so you need some

tools to help you with that. I want to bring to your attention some of them.

Unfollowers.com – I’m currently using this one to track followers,

unfollowers, fans (the ones who you didn’t follow back), those who didn’t

follow you back, and very important, automated DM and mentions for your

new followers. This is a real time saver, because you don’t have to

send these messages manually.

CrowdFireApp.com – this tool is similar to Unfollowers.com, only that it can

automatically send only DM for your new followers, but not mentions. The

free plan has daily limitations as well.

ManageFlitter.com – This one is the best tool for analysis of your Twitter

connections. You can track accounts with good/bad following ratio, by the

activity amount, whether they are fake, influencers, spammers or with no

profile image, etc. It doesn’t have message automation for new followers,

but it has far more powerful tools, for example a scheduler for tweets to be

sent when your followers are more likely to see them, and a multi-criterial

search facility to easily find people in your niche. It can also use feeds as a

source for tweets! Yes, you can subscribe to feeds sources in your niche

and have them enqueued using the scheduler! Just like Buffer.com.

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Commun.it – this one is like all of the above in one place, and beyond! I

didn’t know about it until recently, so I don’t use it yet.

HootSuite.com – is similar to the above, but it can manage a wide range of

social networks, besides Twitter.

I’m using these tools for different purposes. For example, Unfollowers.com sends

automated DMs and mentions for my new followers, but ManageFlitter.com

helps me schedule tweets and help me find the right people to follow.

I’m currently using 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 “copy followers/following” list. Read further to find out how.

How all this can bring traffic to your blog?

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

1. Create a bait on your blog

Create a page or post to direct your new followers to, where they can learn how

to use Twitter to better meet their goals, for example. Alternatively, 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

document. Just prepare that bait and link to it from your bio.

Wait a minute, a blog?

If you already have a blog, then you know what I’m talking about, but if you don’t

have one, you definitely have to build one. A blog is the link between you

business and the online world.

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For more reasons why you should start a blog, please refer to this article:

http://marketingwithvladimir.com/blog/why-build-blog/

2. Prepare a set of direct messages (DM) and mention tweets linking 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 enabled only for verified users, or if the links are

pointing to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. However, after more testing I figured

out that any bit.ly shortened link can be sent by DM.

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!

By using one of the mentioned tools, you can easily keep track of your new

followers. They will like or retweet your message and will visit your bait,

hopefully. They will engage with your content, share it and the word will spread.

3. Grow your community

Now, all you have to do is target an influencer in your niche (he 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. Think

about how you found this post!

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Just choose 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, if you offer them info in the same niche.

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. A

small percentage 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

withUnfollowers.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

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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 during this time. You have to do it because they are an unnecessary burden.

This can be easily done with any of the mentioned tools.

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

1. Make sure you selected your account, not a source.

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 followers to have the chance to follow you back.

The trick is to keep the ratio following/followers as low as possible. Twitter have

limits regarding this ratio, especially after 5000 followings. Read this article for

more info.

That’s why it’s so important to unfollow the ones who don’t follow you back, and

this cannot be done by hand.

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.

In the Twitter guide there is a mention about suspending the account if you

follow/unfollow 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 just to be on the safe side.

Remember that your Twitter account is a valuable asset and you don’t want to

waste it!

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So far, you learned how to get new connections and get traffic from them in the

process. What’s next?

4. 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.

You can use ifttt.com to connect to relevant news feeds, including your own blog, and automatically tweet when new content becomes available. This will make your followers get used getting interesting content from you.

Conclusion

I’m using this very method as we speak, and managed to get more than

2500 followers in a month. I also noticed a change in the traffic structure: the

organic traffic is still the most important, but the traffic slice coming from Twitter

has increased significantly.

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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+, Instagram, YouTube,

LinkedIn, Wordpress.com

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Tools:

ifttt.com – If This Than That, an Internet programming language!

Buffer.com – A posting scheduler to social networks.

Who am I

I’m Vladimir Unguru and my day job is mostly related to computer networks. I’m

also part time internet marketer and I’ve been doing this for over a year. In my

online business, currently my main income stream is from affiliate products.

I experimented many blogging, SEO and traffic techniques, I made many mistakes

also, and by trial and error managed to rank some of my posts in the first or

second positions in Google’s SERPs and brought nice traffic to my blog, so I can

tell now what works and what doesn’t.

If you want further internet marketing, blogging and traffic tips, please subscribe

to my newsletter here: http://marketingwithvladimir.com/blog/signup/.

Vladimir Unguru