This is a guest contribution from Marc Guberti.
No matter how much blog traffic we get, we will always want more, right? More blog traffic opens the door to more opportunities, relationships, and sales.
Not only do we want more blog traffic, but we also want to get blog traffic from a variety of platforms. This is why many bloggers are active on multiple social networks.
I have experimented with dozens of different methods for gaining more blog traffic. I pin, post on Facebook, and write guest posts, but my most successful platform for driving traffic to my blog is Twitter.
Twitter alone is responsible for close to 50% of the traffic that my blog gets, and the amount of traffic I gained from Twitter has dramatically increased in a short period of time. In 2013, Twitter brought 3,408 people to my blog. The following year, Twitter brought 97,321 people to my blog. The big increase in traffic also led to a big increase in opportunities, relationships, and sales.
Many people ask me how I made such a quick transition. How did I suddenly go from getting 3,408 visitors from Twitter to almost 100,000 visitors from Twitter in just one year? I am going to share with you the methods I used to get more blog traffic from Twitter and make my big shift in just one year.
Pin A Tweet Of Your Most Popular Blog Post
When you pin a tweet of your most popular blog post to the top of your Twitter timeline, that tweet gets more exposure because its lifespan is infinite. The reason most tweets get some engagement when they are first posted but then get virtually no engagement a few days later is because most tweets have short lifespans.
Although the lifespan of each tweet differs, most tweets’ lifespans end in a day because other tweets take its place on your feed, and your followers’ home feeds are filled with other people’s tweets at that point. Pinning a tweet to the top of your profile page guarantees that the tweet will be seen by anyone who views your account. Thus, the lifespan of the tweet is infinite (until you unpin it from the top of your feed).
Pinning your most popular blog post to the top of that feed will lead to more traffic for that blog post, and all of that extra traffic for your popular blog post will equate to a better search engine rank.
The first tweet I pinned to the top of my feed was a tweet that promoted one of my free eBooks. While most of my tweets get around five retweets and favorites, the pinned tweets has been retweeted and favorited over 100 times.
Pinned tweets will get more engagement than your average tweet, so if there is a popular blog post that you want to give special attention, tweet it out and pin the tweet to the top of your feed.
Include Visual Content In Your Tweets
The value of visual content can no longer be overlooked. On every social network, including an image in the post leads to more engagement than not including the image in the post.
On Twitter, including the image in the tweet leads to a 150% increase in engagement for that tweet. It makes sense that tweets images get more engagement because the human mind processes images 60,000 times faster than text.
Buffer tested out what type of impact images have in tweets. Here’s what they found:
Including an image in your tweets is important, but not any image will do. The best images are often the ones that we create ourselves because we can create an image based on what we want in the image instead of trying to find the best (but not perfect) match on Google.
IT turns out that creating your own picture is surprisingly easy. Here are the two tools I use to create my own pictures:
#1: Canva
This free tool lets you create pictures in any pixel dimensions you want, and the tool also offers pictures perfectly sized for social media posts. Canva comes with numerous free features and images to choose from, and if you can’t find the image you are looking for on Canva, you can upload pictures from your computer to Canva.
Canva easily allows you to add text to your images and play around with the background.
#2: KeyNote/PowerPoint
Normally, when you think of KeyNote or PowerPoint, you think of creating a presentation. However, these tools also allow you to create your own pictures.
You can resize the slides in your presentation to any dimensions. You can make a slide 1000 pixels wide and 4000 pixels high if you wanted to. You can add shapes, text, and other pictures from your computer to the slide.
I primarily use KeyNote for creating Infographics because of the flexibility that KeyNote provides. I can easily move one part of the slide anywhere I desire, and I can see a full preview before I put the infographic on my blog.
Tweet The Same Blog Posts More Than Once
One of the biggest secrets about Twitter is that it is okay to tweet the same thing more than once. If you do it right, it is okay to tweet the same thing more than 100 times.
I schedule my tweets using the HootSuite bulk scheduler which means I send tweets in a cycle. Every 4-8 days, you will see the same tweets delivered in the same exact order, and these tweets always get engagement.
Since I send over 100 tweets every day, the identical tweets are barely noticeable. I get interaction for my tweets to this day as if I had never tweeted them before. Here are some reasons why it is okay to tweet the same blog posts (and for that matter, identical tweets) more than once:
#1: You are going to get new followers who have not read any of your tweets before. For these followers, your tweets are actually new.
#2: Many of your followers will miss your tweet the first time. If you send your tweet at 4 pm on a Monday, then your followers must be logged in at that time to possibly see the tweet on their crowded home feeds.
#3: The world has different timezones. If it’s 4 am in New York, then it’s 9 am in London. If you send a tweet at 4 am eastern time, many of your followers from New York won’t see the tweet. You can schedule the same tweet the following day at a better time for your followers on the east coast so they can engage with it all the same.
Optimize Your Tweets For More Engagement
Having an image in your tweet is just one step towards optimizing that tweet for more engagement. The more you optimize your tweet, the more engagement it will get. Here are some of the additional methods you can use to optimize your tweets for more engagement.
- Make your tweets 70-100 characters long
- Use 1-2 hashtags in each tweet
- Include a number in your tweet
- Occasionally include an exclamation point in your tweets
- Use popular words. Dan Zarrella, the social media scientist, compiled a list of the 20 words and phrases that will get you the most retweets.
Twitter is the main reason my blog gets so much traffic. In one year, my blog traffic jumped leaps and bounds primarily because I focused my time on growing my Twitter audience and promoting my blog posts to that audience.
Getting hundreds of daily blog visitors from Twitter takes patience, but that patience will eventually allow you to get hundreds of daily visitors to your blog from Twitter alone. Constantly experiment with your tweeting frequency and what you tweet to determine what impact it has on your audience and blog traffic.
Do you use Twitter to get more blog traffic? And if you aren’t using Twitter to get more blog traffic, when will you start?
Marc Guberti is a teenage entrepreneur, author, and digital marketing expert who shares his advice on his blog MarcGuberti.com. His mission is to teach teenagers how to become entrepreneurs.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
4 Methods To Get More Blog Traffic From Twitter
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