By Wayne Davies - SEO Specialist.

This article is part 4 of a series. See part one. See part three.

Twitter is an exciting new way to generate traffic. There are 5 things you'll need to send traffic to your site with Twitter. They are...

1. A strong focus
2. Followers
3. Interesting content
4. A tweet scheduling tool
5. The Traffic Triangle

Naturally, you'll also need a Twitter account. If you don't have one yet, you can sign up here (it's free).

The Tweet

The tweet lies at the heart of Twitter. This is a short piece of text that contains up to 140 characters - including the site you're linking to.

Most business users of Twitter get a free bit.ly account, which allows them to create short URLs that save space. These redirect to the site you're actually linking to.

A typical traffic tweet will describe a webpage on your site and link to it with a bit.ly URL (i.e. web address). Here's an example of a recent tweet on my Twitter page...

66 Google-friendly ways to get links back to your site that your SEO company doesn't want you to know about: http://bit.ly/c7HsEp

This tweet ticks several boxes when it comes to generating traffic with Twitter...

• A bit.ly link that frees up space for the text in the tweet. The full URL of the page I'm linking to is 80 characters long. The bit.ly version is only 20
• The phrase "your SEO company doesn't want you to know" implies knowledge professional SEO insiders would rather you didn't find out about this information. This tease boosts the perceived value of the information
• The tweet is clearly aimed at people interested in SEO. In this case, people interested in doing their own SEO, rather than paying an SEO company to do it for them. This puts them in my target market
• The tweet contains several useful keywords (Google, links, SEO)

A Strong Focus

If you're going to use Twitter to get visitors to your business website, you're going to want to attract people to your Twitter page that are likely to be interested in your product or service.

Rather than tweet about your lunch, you're going to need to focus on your business. And in particular, your target market.

Who are you trying to attract to your website? What are these people looking for on the web? Your Twitter account needs to reflect this focus. In particular, it's essential that you gain followers who are in your target market.

Followers

Your first job as a traffic-hungry website owner is to get followers. These are people who like what you tweet about, and decide to follow you. You can pick up followers in any number of ways...

• Start following someone you'd like to have following you. There's a good chance they'll follow you back
• Include keywords in each tweet. People interested in those keywords will search on them using Twitter's search engine. Some will find your Twitter page and start following you
• Link to your Twitter page from your website, blog, Facebook page and anywhere else you have an online present. Ask people to follow you.
• Given people a reason to follow you. For example, at the bottom of this post I invite people to follow me on Twitter to receive updates about new articles in this series. There are all kinds of marketing and promotional possibilities you might explore
• Add your Twitter link to your business stationary
• Email your clients, suppliers, friends, family and colleagues and ask them to follow your Twitter page

The reason followers are so important is the retweet. A retweet occurs when somebody sees a tweet you've made, and reposts it on their Twitter page. It's called a retweet because their copy acknowledges your Twitter account as the source.

The Retweet

You'll find many retweets come from your followers, as long as they're in your target market. You'll also pick up retweets from people who find your tweets via other means.

The real power behind Twitter's ability to generate visitors comes from retweeting. To see just how powerful this can be, take a look at this.

Retweeting via LinkedIn

If you have a LinkedIn account, you can have your tweets automatically sent as status updates to everyone you're connected to. You first need to change the settings in your LinkedIn account as follows...

• Select "Settings" from the menu at the top of the page
• Click on "Twitter Settings"
• Check the "Share only tweets that contain #in"
• Save your changes

Now every tweet you make that contains the characters #in will be sent to your LinkedIn network as a status update.

Interesting Content

The tweets you make must appeal to your target market, and link to interesting content. They must be about something your target market is interested in. And they must link to a page that follows on from the tweet itself.

There's no point tweeting about some topic, and then linking to a page about something completely different. For example, imagine if my '66 ways' tweet merely linked to a page that said I knew 66 ways to get links to your site, and then asked you to hire me so I could implement them on your behalf.

Tweet Scheduling

Twitter works best when you tweet regularly. If you're in business, it's not possible to sit there and tweet throughout the day. This is where a tweet scheduling tool comes in useful.

I use a site called Social Oomph. It's free to use, and works with a number of different social media sites. It allows you to set up tweets in advance, that are then published at specific times that suit you.

It's a good idea to have tweets go out in short bursts. For example, you might schedule 5 tweets 2 minutes apart around 10am, 12pm and 3pm. Each group of 5 should include the same (or similar) keywords. These short bursts improve your odds of being noticed by the people in your target market. This is especially important when you're targeting popular keywords.

Time-based Targeting

Tweet scheduling allows you to target specific geographic markets by making sure tweets go out at the correct time. For example, if you're based in London and want to reach people in Los Angeles you won't have to stay up all night.

Next Instalment: The Traffic Triangle.

Be notified as soon as each new installment in this article series goes live via Wayne's Twitter page. Click here.

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