In Michael Dunlop’s 30 Day Plan to “Create a Blog” Day 24 is all about using Twitter to create traffic to your new blog.

I’ve been using Twitter seriously since 2007 when I first realised Rich Schefren was tweeting highlights from the SXSW seminar, but I had known about it before due to hanging about in Second Life (where all the early movers play) and being entranced by the TwitterVision mashup – check out the swirling 3D globe version. Very cool. Seems to have gone now though…

Why should you pay attention to Twitter if you are in business though?

From Wikipedia:

Twitter is ranked as one of the 10 most visited websites worldwide by Alexa’s web traffic analysis.^[48] Daily user estimates vary as the company does not publish statistics on active accounts. A February 2009 Compete.com blog entry ranked Twitter as the third most used social network based on their count of 6 million unique monthly visitors and 55 million monthly visits.^[49] In March 2009, a Nielsen.com blog ranked Twitter as the fastest-growing website in the Member Communities category for February 2009. Twitter had a monthly growth of 1,382%, increasing from 475,000 unique visitors in February 2008 to 7 million in February 2009. It was followed by Zimbio with 240% increase, and Facebook with 228% increase.^[50] However, Twitter has a user retention rate of 40%.^[51]

I grew my followers organically to over 2000 and it’s hovering around 2350 right now. In early 2010 I changed my twitter name from WealthCoach to NicolaCairnX earlier this year, but stupidly left WealthCoach vacant and of course it was snapped up by some opportunist, and worse than that, it took forever to track down all my links and change them over, so for a while he was getting traffic from my sites. That was annoying.

I’ve tried various tools to manage and grow my twitter account, my favourite so far being the free, browser and mobile based application Hootsuite, and Michael suggests we use TweetAdder and MarketMe Tweet – both paid for tools, one of which I know, one is new to me.

I tried TweetAdder and gave up after a while – it’s just too complex / complicated for me. Or perhaps I should just watch the instruction videos? Unless something is really simple and intuitive and quick to “get” I get bored and give up very easily, I’m afraid. Not a great trait and one I must endeavour to overcome.

TweetAdder helped me build a very big list at InternetAcette but I just can’t be bothered with running two accounts although that’s easier with Hootsuite. Perhaps writing this will make me watch some of those tuition videos over the long Christmas Holidays?

The main benefit of Twitter, I’ve always thought, is a way to distribute your blog posts to a wider audience, via Twitter to FriendFeed, Facebook, Ecademy, Linked In, etc. Thus bringing more traffic to your blog, where your main subscriber / sales action happens. While allowing you to mini-blog which lets people get to know you as a person and makes you more accessible.

OK, so how would you make sense of all this lot? I have several websites, some of which have their own twitter account.

NicolaCairncross.com – global, mainly blogging / speaking / motivation although I ‘ve been doing the blogging duel on here – linked to NicolaCairnX twitter account. 2398 organic followers built over time.

TheBusinessSuccessFactory.com – also known as TBSF, more UK orientated, promoting “done for you” internet marketing services, has it’s own twitter account TBSFBrighton which has 58 followers but is currently linked to NicolaCairnX twitter account and website (we were trying to streamline / simplify things in the summer as I was getting overwhelmed)

DigitalMarketingBrighton.co.uk – not linked to any twitter account (created for the Blogging Duel and mainly a traffic generator showcase site / actual traffic generator for TBSF and my new Spartan Marketing programme, aimed at Brighton businesses targeting key phrases “marketing brighton” and “digital marketing brighton” so perhaps should be linked to NicolaCairnX or TBSFBrighton? Don’t seem any point in having it’s own twitter account, surely?)

Warning: You have to be careful with multiple accounts, not to follow each other, or you get multiple tweets across all accounts which is annoying for your followers!

YourInternetMarketingBusiness.com – currently linked to the InternetAcette twitter account which is a bit of a waste, because nobody is blogging on it now, therefore the tweets are not being updated, which has 4186 followers mainly built by my previous use of TweetAdder so not sure how good quality followers they are. This is daft, I need to either sell that site with that twitter account or be tweeting on this one myself! Perhaps I’ll hook it up to TBSF? It’s a global following though, whereas perhaps it’s best to keep TBSF locally orientated or at least UK…….

Blimey, decisions, decisions.

Let me think about it – 4186 followers can be built on relationship-wise methinks and is too many to let languish unloved.

And perhaps I do need to investigate MarketMe Tweet too.

But back to DigitalMarketingBrighton.com – I think I’ll hook that up to InternetAcette for now.

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