If you’re a blogger, one of the most effective ways for you to dramatically increase traffic to your blog is to tweet each of your articles.
Is everyone of your articles going to go viral? NO!
But if you’re consistent, learn about what titles are working, and build upon the positive, then you’ll get quite good at writing for Twitter and capitalizing on all of that retweet traffic.
Calculating Twitter Exposure
So how do you know exactly how much exposure Twitter can deliver to your blog postings and articles? Simple – just search your blog posting’s URL that was part of the original tweet.
For example, here’s one of my recent blog postings that got tweeted:
*Breaking* Google To Send Out More Than 100k Wave Invites – Get Your Request In – http://bit.ly/1p2d49
I then go to Twitter search (http://search.twitter.com) and paste in the shortened URL. Of course, that shortened URL is the link to my blog post.
When I search that URL of my blog post (or the shortened URL) in Twitter search, the results you get back will be of all the tweets that reference that URL.
And since that URL is unique only to your blog post, then the results you get on Twitter search will be the either the retweets of your Twitter update, or other tweets that are directly referencing your Twitter update.
Now all you need to do is visit each person’s profile who retweeted your URL, add up all the followers for each profile, and then you have the total exposure count for your blog posting or article on Twitter!
The Take Away
If you write in a blog, then I strongly recommend you tweet each of your blog postings with a shortened URL. A great way to automatically send your blog postings to Twitter is with Twitme – a WordPress plugin – which not only allows you to customize your Twitter update in permalink formats (%POSTTITLE% – %POSTURL%) – but it always allows you to use a URL shortener like bit.ly for all of your blog postings and articles.
I’ve noticed that it really only takes 2 or 3 people to retweet a blog posting to send your traffic soaring. And now with the strategy above, you can go back through and calculate the number of retweets for each of your articles.