I was just reading a very interesting article by Chris Garrett called, How to Grow Both Twitter Followers and Your Blog Subscribers. Garrett points out that for most of us Twitter users, our followers count grows much faster than our blog subscribers count.
The reason, Garrett suggests, has a lot to do with how easy Twitter makes it to build a network:
Twitter is like blogging but accelerated and concentrated. Rather than links, comments and trackbacks, we discover new people to follow through replies, both to you and to others. If someone replies to me with an interesting comment, or if someone I am following has an interesting conversation with someone I haven’t discovered, I am more likely to follow them.
People who would otherwise go unnoticed in the blogosphere have found attention far more efficiently in the Twittersphere (emphasis mine).
This is even more pronounced when you get noticed by the Twitter movers and shakers. As in the blog world where an A-List link can boost your subscriber count, this happens much more often on Twitter. Tweets are cheap, it isn’t a big deal to fire off a message, compared to writing up a blog post, so a conversation with a big named Tweeter can drive hundreds of follows with little effort or risk on either side.
There is also the “reciprocal follow” where someone follows you so you follow them back. It doesn’t happen all the time but it is virtually unheard of in blogging.
One of the frustrations of blogging is how long it takes to build a readership. But this seems to be a non-factor for most of us using Twitter. I am finding that every day I send a couple of tweets with a link to my new article, about 5 to 10% of my total number of followers click through. (I am able to track this click through rate using Tweet Burner).
Assuming this 5 to 10% ratio holds true, the more I grow my number of subscribers, the more traffic I will be able to send to each new blog post.
But it gets better. I also keep my archived content working for me by tweeting about them periodically as well, mixing tweets about the new with tweets about the old (as long as the old content is still relevant). So even more visitors from my Twitter follower list also click through to other articles that are on my blog, not just the most recent post.
Important note: When they click through, I am not subjecting my followers to a sales message. I do my best to make these articles informative and helpful. If these articles add value to them, all the better, I have achieved my goal.
Yes, I want to sell my coaching program and I am developing some audio CDs and ebooks I would like to sell to people who have come to respect me as a knowldgeable resource. But my mantra is "Add Value, Add Value, Add Value."
In all forms of networking (both offline and online) the goal is to extend your influence. I can think of no better way to do this than to become a valuable resource using Twitter to gather followers and your blog to add value.
What results are you getting from Twittering about your blog? Leave your comments and let me know.
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2 comments:
Hay great article... keep them coming..
Thank you very much, I will try. And you, please keep reading. lol
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