Friday, May 29, 2009

Twitter and Your Blog

I'd like to welcome guest blogger Joyce Anthony as she talks about "Twitter and Your Blog."

Twitter is basically a tool for getting in touch with people and letting them know what you’re doing. That however is only half of it—you want to get your followers involved as much as possible in what you are doing. The greatest way to accomplish this is to use your updates to ask questions rather than post statements all the time. It’s good to simply say something once in a while, but by asking a question you encourage your followers to tweet back at you and pull them a little further into your world.

There’s another benefit of asking questions. If you’ve got a blog that you’ve been working on for a while, you’ll in all probability have run across periods when you run a bit short on ideas. What can you do to come up with ideas day after day? It would certainly be good if you could get some fresh input into your blog without giving over control to anyone else, wouldn’t it?


Welcome to Twitter!


Ask your readers what they’d like to see on your blog that isn’t already there. Try asking what they thought of your last blog post. Have you ever thought about putting a poll on your blog and asking people to vote through a tweet? You can even ask a question and post the answers on your blog.


There are plenty of ways to generate extra traffic to your blog and get people more involved in it by using your Twitter account. All you need to do is think of the best questions to ask in your case. Make them short and interesting. Humor works especially well, as does anything controversial.


Don’t just think of Twitter as an island. Think of ways you can incorporate it into the other areas of your online presence and you may well find yourself doubling or even tripling your traffic.


For more information on Joyce, check out her blog.

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