Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Using Twitter to Drive Traffic to Your Sales Website

By Dominic D. Johnstone

Twitter.com gives users up to 140 key strokes to send their friends and followers a brief message. That says what? It answers the question, what am I doing right now?

Did you ever imagine that a social networking concept as basic and simplistic as this could become so popular?

Pretty well everyone we know knows about Facebook. The reason it is interesting is because we can see into the daily lives of our friends in a way never before seen. People post photos, websites, interesting news, and even their status at the moment. Who would have imagined that a site dedicated to nothing but status updates would become so universal?

As you know, Twitter is a very future minded website. It is becoming the rage with people young and old, and has captured the eye of online marketers around the world.

Regardless if your sophisticated mindset deems the concept at first glance, it is a very powerful tool. Just a few years ago not many people would have thought anyone would care if say for example - I am going for a venti valencia cappaccino at Starbucks with Bill. Nowadays, people are very interested in the minutia of each others day to day lives. Well add that to the exponential growth rate of memberships on these viral networking sites, and it introduces a very powerful Internet marketing tool.

You see, Twitter.com allows you to post as many updates as you can and want to in as short a time as you feel like. Most people dont want to be annoying or spammy with their posts, but many people do add multiple updates per day.

Furthermore, Twitter.com allows you to post your website address as a hyperlink into the update. The benefit here is twofold. First of all, those who are subscribing to your updates on Twitter.com will see your hyperlink and may click onto your website. Secondly, Twitter is gaining a great reputation in the Internet world, and you may find that Google regards links from highly active user profile pages as being from a positive neighborhood.

Example, have a look at the twitter profile page of EZineArticles.com publisher Chris Knight. http://www.twitter.com/ChrisKnight. He has thousands of people who subscribe to his daily updates, and he subscribes to those of thousands more. His profile page has a pagerank of 5 which is fairly impressive for just another page on a social network site.

The implication of the second facet is that Google will identify numerous inbound links from higher page rank pages, to your website. While your own page rank itself is not a critical factor, it is important to have links coming in from highly regarded web pages.

In summary, Twitter.com is a new and fairly rudimentary website at first glance. Yet under the surface it is clearly a very effective viral marketing tool. When you consider the considerable growth experienced by sites like YouTube.com and Bankrate.com due to the introduction of viral growth mechanisms such as inviting friends and following people, you can understand the importance of using new and burgeoning sites like Twitter.com.

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