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In December 2009, Twitter recorded nearly 20 million visitors, a growth in traffic of 900% on 2008.  That’s over 10% of all internet users following the website, with up to 10,000 people joining every day to take part in the constant stream of communication.  Imagine if you could tap into some of this regular traffic and bring them to your blog or website.  You could increase your traffic dramatically and more importantly develop a loyal following of subscribers interested in your niche, which in turn means greater profits for you.

This article shows you exactly how to tap into the Twitter phenomenon and use their high traffic to bring more visitors to your WordPress website.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a social networking site that allows you to keep people updated about what you’re up to at any moment of the day.  Each Tweet has a limited number of words so it’s like sending an SMS text message to all your friends and followers.  Some people talk about what they’ve had for lunch, others tell their followers about new posts on their blogs or exciting news about their industry.  Some people are just Tweet followers, which means they don’t Tweet at all but simply follow that others are up to.

How to Use Twitter to Drive Traffic to Your Blog

• Direct Publicity: Once you’ve set up your WordPress site using the website builder, you’ll need to get a Twitter account.  Then do a Twitter search for relevant people who are interested in your niche and begin to follow them.  Then start to comment on their Tweets and hopefully they will start to follow you back.  The idea is to create a large group of followers, who will then encourage their own followers to follow you, and so it goes on.  As you write comments, you can then leave remarks such as, “on my blog at the moment (with the URL) everyone is talking about this.”  Also if you sell through your WordPress site, you can tell everyone about your latest promotions.  It’s like a massive advertising campaign that’s completely free!
• Twitter Feed: this is a really useful plug in which allows you to put your latest posts as RSS feeds on your Twitter account.  Also it updates your blog with any Tweets.  This is great for increasing your search engine ranking, because it increases the number of external links, as well as bringing new traffic directly to your blog.
• Thread Twitter: another really useful plug in which fetches your Tweets and displays them in a thread style, which helps to get people involved in the conversation and create a loyal readership who want to keep coming back to join in.
• Other Essential Twitter Plug ins: if you’re serious about boosting your traffic from social networking sites such as Twitter, there are a couple of essential plug ins.  ShareThis and Sociable are two really useful add ons to your website builder, which make linking to Twitter very easy for you and your users.  Sociable is particularly great because it automatically adds links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your post, pages and RSS feeds.
• Make Tweeting easy: if you want Tweeters to spread the word about your website, you need to make it easy for them.  TweetThis adds a link to every post and page with the words, Tweet this Post, as well as the ability to automatically Tweet your new and scheduled blog posts.  Tweetly Updater is another easy to use plug in that updates your Twitter account every time you post, keeping your followers up to date on your site and saving you valuable time. All the Twitter plug ins mentioned are available completely free on our resources and plug ins page. 

Don’t forget that using Twitter is about a two-fold strategy.  It can really help to increase traffic and generate a loyal interest in your website, as well as increasing your search engine ranking by adding external links, which in turn also generate more traffic.  A win win situation for any WordPress site!