6,667.
That’s how many times our brand new podcast was listened to on average EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. That’s during just the first 5 months of being on iTunes and Stitcher.
If you do the math, that’s 1 million listens. Crazy.
Using Twitter to get massive amounts of traffic has been one of our most powerful free traffic strategies. We also believe it’s the reason we had so many podcast downloads for a brand new show. We’re going to explain how we did it in just a minute. First we need to talk about why this social media platform is different from the rest.
Have you ever watched ESPN or CNN?
You know the ticker with all the headlines scrolling by? You know how you can feel a little overwhelmed by all the data flying by you?
Welcome to Twitter.
Designed by Freepik
Twitter is one of the most misunderstood social media platforms around. Despite this misunderstanding, Twitter is growing.
Twitter is especially popular for the college educated, 50 and under crowd.
Hint: if this sounds like your avatar, then you might want to keep reading.
Twitter is becoming more popular with users who have annual household incomes greater than $50,000.
Now that’s interesting if you have a business that sells things. We hope you do, because that’s why you are reading this article.
We hear people say all the time that they just “don’t get Twitter.” We believe it’s because they are trying to approach Twitter like they would Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest or any other social media platform.
No wonder they “don’t get it”.
Twitter is a wickedly fast-paced platform that is all about short, concise communication. This isn’t the place where you write your 10000-word manifesto to the world. (You’ve probably seen a few of your Facebook friends do that)
Twitter is all about content distribution. It’s quite simply the best social media platform to share great, valuable content.
It’s definitely NOT about sharing what you ate for lunch, what chew toy your dog threw up, or what you’re plans are for Friday night.
No. Twitter is the place where smart people go to get access to really high-value content and stay on top of all that is flying through the interweb.
The day we finally cracked the Twitter code.
Designed by Freepik
I had been on Twitter for about 6 years before I can honestly say I figured it out, and neither of us will ever forget that day.
The day our traffic spiked.
Up until that point, we had been using Twitter like any other platform. Posting a couple times a day with whatever we were talking about that day.
But this day was different.
I’d love to tell you it was because of some amazing ninja strategy that got downloaded into my mind, but it wasn’t. I must admit, it was completely by accident.
One of our team members had a moment of brilliance where they thought to themselves that more must be better, so they queued up about 20 tweets for one day.
That was significantly different from our normal 5ish tweets.
The results were significant too.
We realized that Twitter was like that news ticker on CNN or ESPN and that the information moved FAST.
Super fast.
And if you didn’t keep your news in that news feed, you weren’t relevant, no one was seeing or consuming your amazing information and you would continue to “not get Twitter”.
10 Steps To Grow Your Business With Twitter Even While You Sleep
Once we had this breakthrough it was as if it was in front of us all along! All this time not really “getting Twitter” and suddenly we realized with the right strategy in place, we had a literal gold mine in front of us.
And you’re about to have one too.
You’re probably going to want to bookmark this page, save it to Evernote, or do whatever you do to save content that you go back and revisit over and over again. I’m about to layout our exact strategy.
If you want to dive deeper into these strategies and look over my shoulder as I do all this, then check out our Twitter Traffic Workshop course.
Hashtag & Keyword Research:
All good marketing starts with research. You could have the best product or service in the world, but you have to know who you’re targeting, and what those people that you are targeting are looking for.
In Twitter, you do this with Hashtags.
When doing your hashtag research, you want to compile as big of a list as possible with relevant hashtags for your business.
You want to go from broad to uber specific.
Our favorite tool to start hashtag research is Hashtagify.me.
Let’s say you’re a dog trainer. You could do a really broad search for #Dog, and you would get this:
What’s neat about Hashtagify.me is that you can start to click on the related circles to dig deeper into related hashtags. For example, if I clicked on the hashtag #dogtraining I would get this:
Or, you could get a bit more specific and search for #dogtrainer and you would get this:
Other resources for hashtag research that we use are Twitter itself and Ritetag.com. Twitter has an amazing advanced search feature that is mostly unknown.
Once you have a solid list of 10-20 hashtags that are relevant to your business, it’s time to move on to the next step.
Ongoing Twitter Growth Strategy:
Designed by Freepik
This part of the strategy is hugely important and we found missing in many people’s social media strategies. You have to be continually growing your audience of followers or this strategy just won’t work.
When we started this, we had zero followers and at the time of writing this article, we’re over 11,000.
You must have a growth strategy that will continually increase your Twitter audience, but not just any audience. Highly targeted and relevant followers.
This step goes back to the first step, hashtag research.
Part of growing a relevant Twitter following is by finding people who are talking about, identifying with, and Tweeting about the hashtags that pertain to your business.
A great place to start is to do a search with your hashtag or keyword right in Twitter. You’ll end up with all sorts of great information. Pictures, people, videos, and more….all talking or tweeting about your topic. We start with doing some digging to find thought leaders and influencers in our space and then begin by following them. From there, you can start to create a strategy where you follow people that meet certain criteria.
We’ve automated this process using ManageFlitter and if you want to see how we do it in exact detail, pick up or Twitter Traffic Workshop. We walk you through step by step in video 5.
One word of caution when it comes to growing your Twitter following.
Don’t go too fast.
Just like any social network, you can end up in “Twitter Jail” if you try and follow too many accounts at once. Think of this as a marathon, and not a sprint. You’re building a business for the long haul, and the same should be the case with your social media followings.
Keep in mind, when you’re first getting started, Twitter has some limits on how many people you can follow. You can read more about Twitters follow & unfollow policies here: Twitter Follow Policies
Take An Inventory of All Your Content Assets:
Twitter is all about distributing great content. So in order for this strategy to work for you, you’ve got to have content.
Start out with a simple excel spreadsheet or a Google doc’s spreadsheet. We use Google docs because we’re sharing the information with a team for many purposes.
Designed by Freepik
Hint: Never create a piece of content without a plan to repurpose it!
Now start listing out all your blog posts, YouTube videos, podcasts and whatever else you’ve published in the past. As long as the content is “evergreen,” add it to the list. (Evergreen content is something that is timeless, not season dependent).
What if you don’t have much content? That’s okay, Rome wasn’t built in a day, right? Odds are you have more than you realize. The entire process of performing an asset inventory is exciting when you realize how much you do have.
If you go through the process and still don’t have a lot, just look at it as an opportunity to start planning to create some!
When creating your asset inventory, you’re going to want to capture a few things on your spreadsheet to start. What type of content it is (i.e blog post, video, etc), the link to that content, and the title of the content. Once you go thru this process, you’ll want to update this asset inventory each time you create a new piece of content with that same information. Once you have all your “assets” listed, it’s time for the magic to begin…..
Creating Tweet “Series” for Your Assets
This one step could be the single thing that separates you from the competition.
What happens when most people create content is that they share it once. Perhaps they share it a few times but then it goes off into the interweb ether, then never heard of again, and that’s a huge shame.
But not you.
You’re about to be different.
This one step also has an added “secret” benefit that I’ll tell you about in a minute.
Now that you have all your assets on this beloved spreadsheet it’s time to start writing Tweets. Trust us, if you despise spreadsheets, this process will make you appreciate them.
We typically write at least three different versions of Tweets promoting each “asset”, including hashtags and the link to our “asset”. There’s no reason why you couldn’t write more than three.
In fact, when we’re writing Tweets to promote a lead magnet, a webinar, or something along those lines, we may write as many as 20 different Tweets to promote that asset.
Once you start writing your series of Tweets, you’ll end up with something like this:
One of the side benefits of this step is you are going to get good at writing headlines.
Because you’re limited to 140 characters, you’ll have to learn to say what you want to in much fewer words than you’re probably used to. As a matter of fact, it’s recommended that your Tweets are around 100 characters to make it easy for people to Re-Tweet you.
So you really need to get to the point. We’ve found that the more tweets we write, the better we get in writing email subject lines, headlines for Facebook ads and more.
How to Avoid Your Asset Link From Using All 100 Characters
Twitter is such a great place to share content, but what do you do when that blog post, YouTube video or podcast has a URL that is about a mile long? It’s taken up all your precious characters.
The answer is simple.
Link shorteners.
There are lots of great and mostly free link shorteners out there that you can use. Some automation tools for Twitter have link shorteners built right in.
We’ve used most of them, Goo.gl, Bit.ly, Tiny.url, Ow.ly, you name it.
You should choose a link shortener that works for you and then stick with it. We recommend choosing one that keeps statistics on your links so you can see which piece of content is getting the most clicks and traffic. Our favorite used to be Goo.gl. Once we started to use our favorite Twitter automation tool, we no longer needed link shorteners. The software has a link shortener built in, as well as reports.
Twitter Automation – Set It And Forget It
Designed by Freepik
This is the step that really makes all our Twitter strategy work.
Automation.
True Automation.
Before we dive too deep into automation, there’s something important you need to understand. We’re talking about automation of distributing valuable content to your following. We’re not talking about automating spammy messages or even advocating a completely one-sided relationship.
This is the step that ensures that you are consistently and regularly distributing valuable content to your following whether you log into Twitter or not. This is the part that trips most people up. Not having enough consistent content or not having the time to post on a regular basis.
Automation solves that problem.
In the automation step, we take all the Tweets we wrote in earlier, separate them out into categories or series. Then it’s time to upload and schedule them for distribution. They’re then Tweeted out at regular intervals and then recycled back into the “queue” to do it all over again.
Without our ever touching it again.
You can see our exact automation process in the bonus module in our Twitter Traffic Workshop.
A word of caution when it comes to setting up Twitter automation…
….be sure that your Tweets are “evergreen,” meaning they can stand on their own, any time of year, season, or time of day. You don’t want to be putting Tweets into your automation that are specific to holiday’s, years, days of the week, etc.
Self Promotion: Where Does it Fit In?
Now you’re clear on how you can use Twitter to distribute valuable content to your following. What if you have a lead magnet, you’re trying to grow your list, promote something, or even sell something?
Eh gad! We said it…sell something.
Just think of the 80/20 rule. It applies to Twitter marketing as well as just about everything else in marketing.
If 80% of the time you’re Tweeting out valuable content, then 20% of the time you can self-promote.
It’s the same process you’ve already used. You create an asset inventory and then start writing Tweets.
Take each thing you are promoting (lead magnet, webinar, product offering, etc) and list it as an asset on your inventory list. Then start writing some Tweets for it, and add it to your automation. It’s that simple.
Usually, we create 10-20 Tweets for each asset we are promoting (this is another place you’ll get really great at writing headlines.) Next, we create a separate series in our automation for our promotion. We schedule the Tweets to go out less frequent than our regular Tweets, ensuring we’re close to following the 80/20 rule.
Here’s the thing to keep in mind.
When you have massive amounts of content that you are sharing & re-sharing on Twitter, you’ll never have to worry that you are “overly self-promoting.”
This is an important step in growing your business with Twitter. We see many people shy away from this one step. They never get the kind of results possible with Twitter. If only they had just incorporated a series of Tweets to promote their business, offerings or services.
Engagement: The Other Side of The Conversation
Created by DryIcons.com
Now it’s time to talk about engagement, actually talking and engaging with people on Twitter.
Once you have the previous steps in place, and your automation is cranking out Tweets like clockwork, you now have freed yourself up to be able to spend your allotted time in Twitter actually engaging and building relationships with your followers.
You’re not concerned about what to Tweet about next, or if you’ve forgotten to share a blog post from last year. That’s all done.
Now it’s time to reply to comments, answer questions, ask questions and just be a real human being.
How long you devote to this part of the process is up to you. You may spend 5 minutes a day, you might spend 30 minutes….you get to decide. You have complete control over the process.
Doesn’t that feel great?
Here’s an example of the kind of engagement we get using this process:
Beyond The Twitterverse
Okay, so you have this mighty Twitter machine going strong. You check in and engage with your followers on a regular basis. You’re starting to get leads, and your list is building every single day. What now?
We believe that you want to build your business with the end in mind. All your social media activity must have a purpose and a direction for those who you can provide value to. It would make sense that you would want to continue the relationship. It’s time to move your new relationships from the “Twitterverse” and get them into your universe….your list.
It doesn’t matter how sophisticated or simple you run your business. It is important to have a process in place to continue the relationship with all these new leads you’ve generated from Twitter.
We recommend having a great email follow up series in place. This will begin to develop your relationship with your prospects and move them further along in the buying process.
If your email autoresponder has the capability, you can tag each new lead so that you know they came from Twitter. As you welcome them to your list via email, even mention the Twitter connection.
It’s the little, consistent things that will make a big impact on your business in the long run.
You “Got it,” Now What Are You Going To Do With It?
We just walked you through our exact step by step process. If you put it in place, will put you in a position to be one of those who can say they “cracked the code” when it comes to Twitter.
If you’re like many of our clients who have gone through our Twitter Traffic Workshop, you’ll quickly see results.
Ready to take this strategy to the next level and actually watch us go through this process step by step?
You’ll want to grab our Twitter Traffic Workshop. It’s a 5 part self-paced video home study that you can literally watch over our shoulder as we go step by step. We’ve even included a bonus video from a live webinar where we reveal our exact automation process.
Grab the Twitter Traffic Workshop now.
We’re excited to hear your Twitter transformational results. Be sure and leave us a comment below with your success as you put in place our proven strategy.
The post 10 Easy Steps To Unlock Unlimited Free Traffic From Twitter appeared first on Happy Hour Hangouts.