Twitter is a relative newcomer to the social networking arena, but for the budding blogger /webmaster it offers plenty of opportunity to generate web traffic.
If you do not have a Twitter account, then you should get one right away. As a blogger, your next step should be to review and install some of the Twitter related tools available to bloggers. These plugins can be configured to operate in either a one-way mode (posting your Twitter tweets to your blog, or posting blog posts from your blog to Twitter) or in a full two way mode (posting both ways).
Additionally, you should consider installing a social networking sharing plugin to allow readers to post your blog articles to one or mopre social networking sites (such as digg, StumbleUpon or Twitter). There are several of these available form the Wordpress plugin directory, but I can vouch for and recommend Sociable and TweetThis.
Ok, so now you have a Twitter account and your blog set up to interact with Twitter. The next step is to recruit/befriend potential acquaintances on Twitter. At the time of writing, the intrinsic Twitter search function is extremely poor. However, a there is a very nice tool for locating people who share common interests called Twellow. It is accurate and fast. Simply type in keywords related to your niche and “follow” people from the returned results. Oftentimes, there is a quid pro quo aspect to Twitter. If you follow someone based on a common interest, they will often follow you.
Add Twitter friends at a rate of 50+ per day. Be sure to Tweet frequently and in an interesting, personal manner. People like to read small dispatches from real lives instead of simply links to blog posts. The golden rule to using Twitter as an efffective traffic generation tool is to participate on a human level.
In order to generate large traffic from Twitter, you will want to gain “retweets”. This is where a link you tweet is subsequently tweeted by one or more of your followers. Of course, it then goes to all of *his/her* followers and so on; you can appreciate how traffic from this oucome can build rapidly. This is identical to the concept used by StumbleUpon.
