Search Engine Journal

This morning I awoke to update myself on the scandal and news surrounding the blog post on optimizing start-up costs by Jason Calacanis, and clicked over to his blog homepage, instead of the post itself. I then came across Jason’s post on his 9,000 + Twitter followers and read this quote : “Twitter is the #2 referrer of traffic to my blog… behind Google.”

Last week I joined Twitter for the first time after witnessing the amount of other search marketers using the service to keep up and down with each other, connect on a personal level, and also get the scoop on some news before it hits the other blogs.

I’ll admit, I’m a newbie at Twitter, but have acquired 60+ followers in one week (mostly people I know in search marketing) and have been using the service to post personal thoughts, and not much site promotion.

Follow me on Twitter : lorenbaker

I do admit however that I have dropped a few links on Twitter, only when I felt needed, to test the overall response and in terms of generating social votes, Twitter has upped my vote count for those links at StumbleUpon and Sphinn. If I had 1,000 followers, there would be quite a difference.

Since my Twitter account is more of a personal account, I’m going to launch a separate link dropping account for Search Engine Journal using Twitterfeed. The process is quite simple.

• First set up a twitter account where you would like to broadcast your blog RSS feed.
• Then, go to Twitterfeed and login using OpenID. If you are a Yahoo user just login using your Yahoo profile information.
• Then set up your Twitterfeed account by entering in your blog’s RSS feed.
• As you can see in the screen capture below I set up the SEJournal Twitterfeed to update every 30 minutes with only 2 posts at a time.
• I also included only the post titles in the Twitterfeed as the descriptions may be too much to run and lend to too much clutter.
• I also added a prefix of SEJNews to brand the feeds a bit more and give them a newsworthy feel.

After you create your feed, I would recommend giving your profile a day or two to warm up before befriending and following other Twitter members, that way, there’s more beef to your feed and a higher chance that people will follow you (following my own advice, I’ll wait before broadcasting the SEJ Twitter feed)

Once you have populated your blog’s Twitter account, then post a link to its Twitter profile on your blog, send it to friends, share it on Facebook and offer it as an alternative to subscribing to your site’s RSS feed.

How much traffic does your site receive from Twitter and do you have any tips on Twitter promotion to share?