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.
Getting unlimited free traffic from Twitter has been one of our most powerful traffic strategies. And it's free. 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.
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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, and you want to get free traffic from twitter, 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 code, and started getting crazy amounts of free traffic from Twitter.
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 And Get Free Traffic From 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 to get free traffic from Twitter.
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:
This part of getting free traffic with Twitter 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.
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:
How to Avoid Your Asset Link From Using All 100 Characters
Twitter Automation – Set It And Forget It
This is the step that really makes all our free traffic from Twitter strategy work.
Self Promotion: Where Does it Fit In?
Engagement: The Other Side of The Conversation
Now it’s time to talk about engagement, actually talking and engaging with people on Twitter.
Beyond The Twitterverse
You “Got it,” Now What Are You Going To Do With It?
This article is worth a double-read. I learned a lot in a short time and I’ve been on Twitter for four years. I did not set out to use my personal Twitter account to sell anything but rather as a tool for gathering news and opinion and general observation of human habits, likes and dislikes. But my clients definitely want to sell THEIR products/services and I am not Twitter-savvy enough to advise them on all facets of this powerful little tool. Now, at least I have something to refer them to and it’s all laid out in nice, easy lay language.
So happy to hear that Claire! We so appreciate that you’d refer our piece to your clients. We love Twitter and it’s been such a great avenue for traffic…love hearing others embrace it as well!
Cheers!
Traci
Great article! I have it bookmarked to reread again and again! Can’t wait to check out the workshop as well.