How To Promote Your Website Using Twitter

Using twitter is a great way to promote your website or blog and increase traffic. If your new to twitter and never used it before it works like this. You get 140 characters to write a short statement or advertisement depending on what you’re using the site for. Most people tweet simple things like there not feeling well or changes in their social life. All that’s fine but you want to use it to promote your website, so here are some simple things to optimize your tweets to get the maximum traffic return.

1. Keep The URL Short

Because you only have 140 characters to use you don’t want a massive link pointing back to your site that eats up your entire tweet. If your link takes up all the space no one will know what information is being presented and will ignore your tweet.

To shorten your URL add a bookmark or “share his” button to your website or blog. Then when you want to tweet a post click on the button to tweet and a shorter version of your sites URL will be displayed.

If I was tweeting my homepage for example it would go from

http://www.therazors-edge.com to

http://t.co/9DjMNSz

A sub page is an even more extreme change

http://www.therazors-edge.com/offline_seo_tricks.html to

http://t.co/ohVEk4K

2. Keep Your Tweets Short

Even though you have 140 characters to play with you don’t need to use them all. Remember that tweets are constantly pouring in; this means that people will tune out information that’s too long in the tweets. A good rule is to keep your tweet to 120 characters or less. Emphasise only the critical points that you need to get out there, the rest is just fluff.

3. Have A Good Title

Think of your tweet as an advertisement, you want to catch people attention and present them with information that there going to be curious about and want to check out. One way is to use numbers to help emphasise what you’re trying to get across

Good examples would be

10 ways to promote your website

4 ways to get traffic from YouTube

10 Offline SEO Tips

4. Don’t Tweet Crap

Your tweets should be something of value, there are more then enough people flooding twitter about “not feeling well” or other completely useless garbage. Because of this useless information overload we tend to filter out tonnes of things. This goes hand in hand with having a good title, you want to grab their attention and provide them with information that they actually want to see.

Tweets about useless things are just that, useless. Your wasting your time posting them for starters, and second once you start getting followers who are interested in your content their not going to care about these tweets and may even unsubscribe because of it, so just don’t do it.

5. If You’re Tweeting Video Links Tell Them It’s a Video

One real easy way to piss off a viewer is for them to click a link when at work and be blasted by a video because they forgot to turn off their computers speakers, which gets them in trouble with their boss since they were supposed to be working and not surfing the net. Give your viewers a heads up by simple adding the word video to the beginning of your tweet.

6. Get Followers

Sounds simple enough right? It is for the most part. Add an invitation on your site (Follow me on Twitter). Also be active on Twitter itself, check out other tweets and subscribe to them. You’ll find most people will return the favour and follow you in return. And the more followers you get the greater your tweeting influence will be.

7. Tweet Old Content

Just because you don’t have new content doesn’t mean you can’t submit links to older posts. To get website traffic keep posting tweets regardless of how old the content is. Remember not everyone out there has seen your post, so keep promoting it.

8. Find The Best Time To Tweet

There are going to be better days and times to tweet then others, using a site like Google Analytics or other related analytic site can help determine the best time to get your tweets out there.

9. Make Yourself Easy To Follow

Last but not least make yourself easy to follow, have some form of Twitter “follow me” button so that people can follow you. The more followers you have the more effective your tweets will be, and the more effective those tweets are the more traffic your sight gets.