My 3 Favorite Twitter Tactics For Creating Fresh Traffic

Put on your thinking cap for a minute.  You read the headline and you are curious about generating more traffic for your website with Twitter.  But before we get to that,  I have a quick quiz for you.  What’s bigger in terms of revenue, Twitter or Popeye’s Chicken? No, not which one is more delicious.  Which one is bigger?Give up?  In 2011 Twitter is around $200 million in revenue.  Popeye’s Chicken is around $1.56 billion.  Winner?  Popeye’s Chicken. But do we care?  Not really.  Twitter has a challenge in generating revenue.  It’s brand is growing daily in influence while it’s bottom line is crawling along.  That will change in the years ahead, I promise.  You and I can leave the daily chore of making money for Twitter up to it’s executives.  Our focus is in leveraging the reach of Twitter to direct visitors to your website.Perhaps when it comes to biscuits and gravy, it’s tough to beat Popeye’s.  But when it comes to generating traffic for your website, Twitter has nearly every other free tool beat!Here are my 3 favorite tactics for creating daily traffic for free to my blog from Twitter.

1.  I leverage 10-20 minutes each morning over coffee to grow my Twitter following

How?  I use a tool called Tweepi.com.  I locate celebrities in my niche, and I follow their followers.  If someone is interested in Jillian Michaels from The Biggest Loser and The Doctors, then they might be interested in reading my diet and exercise blog.  I follow Tweepi’s recommendations to the letter.  I don’t aggressively over-follow, and I don’t churn.  I follow people Saturday to Thursday, and then on Friday mornings I flush anyone who isn’t following me back.   One of my niche Twitter accounts grew from 2000 to 4000 followers in a month with less than 15 minutes of effort a day.  This could be outsourced to your virtual assistant.  I like to do it myself on my IPad while laying on the couch drinking coffee while I get my morning started

2. I leverage other people’s Twitter followings through Triberr.com

I am a member of a tribe of bloggers called The More I Talk About It, The Bigger It Gets.  We use the automation of Triberr to repost each other’s most interesting content across all of our collected influence circles.  When I write a blog about The 5 Things Every Mother Should Know About Baby Slings it get shared with over 8000 followers of my collected tribe of mommy bloggers.  As we individually grow our Twitter lists the entire tribe benefits.   In June 2011 on one of my newer niche blogs Triberr was my #3 traffic stream just after Google and Facebook and ahead of both Bing and MSN.  Don’t underestimate this tool.

3.  I attempt to create a huge value proposition for my Twitter followers

I don’t post off topic junk, and I give my best articles and YouTube videos to my Twitter stream.  I realize that the true commodity that all bloggers are competing for is attention, and I do my best to give anyone who takes the time to click on a link in my Twitter feed the best experience in terms of return on their time.  This requires creating punchy headlines that are directly related to the article topics.  I also ask a lot of questions on Twitter that goes to surveys and polls.  That gets me competitive intelligence from the wisdom of crowds.  In return I compensate the Twitter follower with a freebie like an e-book or coupon.

Even though Twitter is not as large as you might guess in terms of revenue, it’s potential to give you more traffic is delicious in itself.  There is no magic bullet or hands-off automation system that delivers money to your PayPal account like the empty promises that you see in the ads.  But a mere 15-20 minutes a day building your following and then working on giving them unparalleled value is a winning formula.  If you want to follow me on Twitter you can find my marketing goodies

Do You Whine About Other Blogs And Expect Yours To Grow?

Because it has become so easy to get a new blog people have joined the blogging train. The general behavior of such people is that they blog for a couple of months or maybe up to six months and when they don’t see the

3 Important Elements of On-Page SEO

Everyone knows that there is value in search engine rankings.  They are the best way to get found, gain customers and grow your subscriber base. There are all sorts of benefits to channels like social media, online communities and traditional advertising that can be used to promote a web site. And the concept of internet marketing is a broad concept covering a number of different online strategies.  But when it comes to bringing traffic and attention there’s nothing quite like dominating the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS)

Titles 

A title sets the tone for newspaper articles, books, and movies. It’s not so different with websites, except the audience is a little more literal.  Title tags appeal to users in SERPS helping them choose who to click on. But once they reach a site, page titles fade into the top of the screen.
But for search engines, title tags are the biggest on-page indicator of topical relevance.  The 50 or so characters that occupy your title tags should always be use d to express your most important concepts.  The words you use in a title tag should above all else reflect phrases that people are searching for.  The language you think describes your products or services may be completely different from what is actually being searched for.  That’s why keyword research an proper structure is essential if you are writing or re-writing your title tags.

Look for long-tail (3 or 4 word) phrases that encapsulate primary short-tail keywords.Words like

What is LSI and Why Your Blog NEEDS It

I am sure you are thinking, what else could my blog possibly need? Including some crazy acronym like LSI. I am going to tell you what LSI is and why your blog desperately needs it.

What is LSI?

If you have been in blogging for any amount of time, you will know the importance of keyword research. Without proper keyword research, you might as well be shooting arrows in the dark. The goal of your content is to get that information indexed in Google and to make it to the coveted first page.

Now that you have done your keyword research and selected your search term or phrase, you are ready to write; or are you? Well, if you want to make it to the first page of Google and even grab that top spot, NO; you are not ready. There is a second layer to keyword research called LSI. LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing.

Did that freak you out? Don’t be alarmed, it’s just a fancy pants way of saying related terms.

The Socialization of SEO

Marketers have been singing the praises of social media for awhile now.  It helps to build a brand and provides a place to form relationships and interact with current and potential customers and clients.  If that’s still not enough reason to get involved in social media, this might be the clincher- your social media involvement now affects your SEO.  We all know how important it is to be on the first page of a search result and now social media factors play a part in determining your rank.

Here are 3 reasons why it’s now essential to be involved in social media for long term SEO success:Reason #1 – Personalization of search

What some people don’t realize is that not everyone has the same search experience.  If a user is signed in to their Google account and performs a Google search they will see relevant results that have been tweeted and

Social Media across Cultures

Although social media websites have been around for over five years, they’ve never been as significant and influential as they are today. There’s hardly an Internet user who hasn’t heard of social media, with Facebook and Twitter now home to nearly a billion accounts the world over.

Plenty of businesses have realized the potential of the social media and started utilizing it to promote their products and services, to get feedback from clients and to conduct PR campaigns. Thanks to the global reach of the internet, companies can interact with people back home as easily as they would with clients in China or the Czech Republic.

But before you jump on the social media bandwagon, there are a few things to keep in mind.

Is it worth it?

The main problem with social media marketing is that you can’t see a clear picture of your return on investment. Social media doesn’t reflect directly on your sales, however, being able to monitor your brand reputation, gather important feedback and answer to criticism are all benefits you can’t afford to miss.

A survey of 1100 small business owners conducted by market research company Ad-ology revealed that social media is an all-important marketing tool.  Proprietors identified the ability to keep up with developments within their field, to generate leads and to monitor the online conversation about their brand as the greatest advantages of social media marketing.

Content is king

Social media marketing is just one of the many pieces of the jigsaw you need to take your business beyond cultures and borders. Keep in mind that social media input is not all that different from any other web content. Try and update it as often as possible, engage in conversations about your business sector and remember this is an ongoing process, not just a one-off marketing endeavor.

One size doesn’t fit all

Although Facebook and Twitter have a massive share of the social media pie (around 750m and 200m active users, respectively), there are plenty of potential clients out there using different social media platforms

Page Titles and SEO – What to Avoid

Page titles can be one of the most important parts of search engine optimization for your website and for individual pages. Writing proper page titles that please search engine spiders and human searchers alike isn’t that difficult, but there are certain things you need to avoid. Here’s a quick list:

Avoid going over the 70 character limit. Normally, your page title should be between 60 and 70 characters. If it’s longer than this, the page title will get cut off in the search engine results page. Even though spiders will still see the title, real viewers won’t get to see the entire title. It’s not hard to keep most titles under 70 characters.Avoid leaving your main keyword out of your title. Every SEO page you write should be centered on one main keyword, with possibly a few secondary keywords added in for good measure. Your main keyword definitely needs to appear in your title, though, since it’s the search engine spiders’ and the human searchers’ first indication of what the page is actually about.Avoid burying your keyword late in the title. On the same note, it’s a good idea to have your keyword in the first few characters of the title. This makes it more visible, and it makes the topic of your page easier to understand. When human visitors are scanning a list on the search engine results page, they’ll be more likely to click on your page if they see the keyword they’re looking for right near the beginning of the page title.Avoid over-stuffing your titles with extra keywords. Have you ever seen page titles or listing titles on sites like Craigslist that just repeat different forms of the same keyword? It’s a little annoying, and it doesn’t give you a good indication of what the page or listing is actually about most of the time. It’s okay to try to work a secondary or related keyword into your title, but just like you shouldn’t keyword stuff your actual pages, you shouldn’t keyword-stuff your titles, either.Avoid vague or cute titles that don’t tell what the page is actually about. Again, your title should tell both the search engine spider and your actual human visitors what the page is actually about. There’s nothing more likely to turn a visitor off to your entire site than clicking on a page title from a search engine results page only to find out that the title doesn’t come close to matching up with the actual content of the page!Avoid repeated titles on your webpage. Each page should have a unique title, since similar or repeat titles