Today, Rob brings up a great way to market your site thru Twitter using very effective marketing strategies. Don’t forget to show your friendly love to Rob on Twitter @Robswebtips. Want to write for us too? Read here for more details.

With Twitter having over 4,000,000 users it is definitely an effective way to drive traffic to your website. Twitter has become a very effective tool for traffic for many bloggers, including myself. With over 8,000 Twitter followers, and driving in over 7,000 page views from Twitter monthly. I think I’m safe to say I’ve mastered the ways of Twitter.

However, some people are unable to create a large enough audience, and find the techniques to effectively market their blog.

Finding followers on Twitter

In order to market effectively on Twitter you need to first build your audience right? So let me break down the easy 2 step process to getting followers on Twitter.

1: Build credibility in your Tweets

Nobody likes a boring tweeter, or someone who tweets about when they just got out of the bathroom. Tweet with interest! Maybe you came across an article and you think it might have some interest for your followers, go ahead and tweet it. This process is how you build credibility through twitter. Displaying valuable tweets of interest!

2: Find people who are targeted in your niche

What is the point of wanting to people to follow you if they have absolutely no interest in what you have to tweet about it? This is why it’s important to find people who are big on Twitter that’s in your niche.

For example: @Problogger is one of the biggest names on Twitter for my niche blogging. With over 75,000 followers, your bound to drive some over to your side of town.

But how do you do it? The secret is to add their most recent 1,000 followers for that day. 30% people on Twitter will follow you back if you follow them. So… for the other 700 that do not follow you how the hell do you get rid of them? Huitter is a service I use to un-follow everyone who does not follow me back.

How to add 1,000 people without any hassle at all

Now clicking on 1,000 “follow me” links can get a little annoying, and time-consuming right? So why the hell waste your time doing it, when you could be catching up on your favorite T.V show or writing a new blog post. The secret to this nifty trick is to use Grease monkey’s Tweet adder.

Setting up Grease monkeys Tweet adder:

1. Download Firefox browser
2. Download Greasemonkey add-on for firefox
3. Install the Tweet-Adder script (Make sure greasemonkey is enabled)

Using Greasemonkey

Using Greasemonkey is very easy to do. Find someone in your niche and click their followers (make sure Greasemonkey is enabled) and the moment you load the follower’s page, Greasemonkey will automatically add everyone.

Pay attention to these next following sentences closely: Greasemonkey will continue adding followers to your Twitter account even if you reached your maximum follower count for the day. I suggest checking your Greasemonkey status every 2-3 minutes to avoid being flagged by Twitter.

Effectively marketing your website

Now that you have the followers, and have built a pretty reputable status on Twitter it’s time to start marketing your website. There are 3 simple, but effective techniques that I use to drive traffic to m blog.

Twitterfeed

Twitterfeed is a great tool I use that syndicates all new articles I release, and tweets it on my Twitter account. Another great thing about Twitterfeed is I’m also allowed to add other blogger’s blog on my feed list, so I’m sharing the love to my respected bloggers and providing valuable information to my followers.

Check out Twitterfeed

CoTweet

CoTweet is by far my favorite Twitter application to use. With CoTweet I can schedule my tweets to be sent out ANYTIME of the day I want, without me being their to send the tweets. All I have to do is schedule the tweet, select a time I want it to be sent, and I’m done!

Building an effective Tweet schedule for maximum results

A lot of new tweeters would try and take advantage of this by scheduling a tweet to go out every 5 seconds, thinking it will do their blog better. Unknowingly they’re lowering their traffic + credibility.

If you’re going to schedule tweets schedule 2-4 articles to go out PER HOUR with at least a 15 minute wait time, between articles. Also…it’s important not to tweet duplicate posts. If you already tweeted about that post earlier today, don’t tweet it the next hour. Give it sometime and let it marinate.

Using these simple techniques will help you become a more effective tweeter on Twitter, and will double your page views.

Check out CoTweet

Being a “friendly” tweeter

Nobody likes someone who is stingy and holds all the glory. So instead of always tweeting about your website, take the time and RT (retweet) some other peoples articles. Now, everyone may not do the same for you but… it shows people you’re a respected tweeter and the ones who do value your content will RT your posts.

Group Discussion

Do you tweet? If so what are some of the techniques you use to be considered an “effective tweeter”? Share some tools you use to dominate twitter, and tell us what do you think about this post? Did you find it helpful? I’m interested to hear your thoughts.

Oh… and remember!

Focus on what you’re good at and the (quality) followers will come.

-Matt Cheuvront

Photo by Jeff Turner

Related posts:

1. 7 Simple Tips for Effectively Marketing Your Blog on Twitter

2. Why Twitter Might Sink?

3. Twitter – The Double-Edged Social Sword!

Firefox is one of the most recognized competitors to Microsoft’s horrible Internet Explorer (IE8) because of it’s vast functionality and quite impressive flexibility. Straight out of the box, Firefox is a stable and useful browser, but with a few plugins and themes you can really customise to look and function as par with your heart’s content.

Similarly to pleasing our eyes or making cool buttons; there are some very useful plugins to help us bloggers improve our blogging skills. Today, I want to showcase 12 Firefox Add-ons that every  blogger should have! This is an extension to a previous guest post that had some great Firefox plugins for blogging as well..

Firstly, I want to apologise to all our readers and Alex for my recent yet prolonged absence. I’ve been inactive for about a week due to a series of unfortunate events. However, all is well now and I’m back in the ball-game

If you aren’t using Firefox already, you can download it here. The latest stable version is compatible with an array of operating systems and languages. You can choose the one that is applicable for you. After downloading and installing it, return back to this post to super-charge your FireFox/Blogging experience!

12 Firefox Add-ons

1) Brief – RSS Reader

Out of the many organised RSS Readers, I find that Brief is the one that stands out. With several nice features such as viewing full articles/headlines or excerpts only, a built-in search function, ability to use keyboard-shortcuts and many more other cool customisations.

> Download!

2) Read It Later

Read It Later allows you to do exactly that; read it later. When you browsing the internet; either casually or in search of specific information – how many times have you come across something else that is of interest to you? However,  you don’t really have the time to diverge your attention – but using this tool; you can easily get back to it.This is a very useful tool for the heavy-stumbler.

> Download!

3) AutoPager

AutoPager is a simple tool that loads the next page, when you reach the end of your current page.  This, as said in the said in the description, is useful when viewing search results on websites such as Google, Yahoo, MSN or anything or search engine. When your near the bottom of the results of one page, AutoPager will automatically load page 2, and so forth.

> Download!

4) FireShot

FireShot allows you to take screenshots of any website; either of the complete page or a partial-shot. However, this tool also allows you to annotate (make notes) and edit the image in real-time. This makes FireShot superior to most screen-capturing programs because something’s don’t make sense after some time – so chuck in a quick note on the side to help you remember!

> Download!

5) ReminderFox

ReminderFox “displays and manages lists of date-based reminders and ToDo’s” – what else can be said?

The reason why this tool is on this list is because of its simplicity. It’s a simple program that notifies users of previously added dates/events.

> Download!

6) Headup

Headup has several key uses but one of the more significant purposes of this tool is the ability to enhance Google Search Results. According to many reviews, and personal experiences – Headup retrieves more targeted results than when running a search on the conventional Google SE.

> Download!

7) Instablogs Submitter

Instablogs Submitter, which plays on the word “instant”, allows you to submit any website/link/image/anything in fact you find that you might think is newsworthy.

It’s like a Digg or giving something a Stumble but just easier; no logging and all – just Highlight, Right Click and Submit!

> Download!

SkewzBar

In the blogosphere – your personal touch to content goes a long way. However, it also has a major down-side too; because your content can get TOO biased; especially on factual posts (doesn’t include personal opinions, stories and/or creative pieces). So, rooting from this comes a community called the Skewz that rates content for its “bias-ness”. You can check how biased is the content your reader is rated by the Skewz community. Pretty cool, IMO.

> Download!

9) Feedly

Feedly allows you to transform your homepage in a magazine-like page, where you can place different excerpts from different sources such as your Twitter profile, Google Reader, Frienfeed, Delicious and YouTube. Its a RSS-dependent tool, and most websites do offer RSS subscription – even Blogussion

> Download!

10) WordPress Helper

New to WordPress.com? This Firefox addon provides a bunch of very useful tools and help to maximise the functionality of your WordPress.com blog! Not only for beginners but anyone can use this tool to identify if the page you are viewing is of WordPress-based – sometime’s the custom themes can be so good; you won’t even know it’s WordPress!

> Download!

11) Resizeable Textarea

Ever come across a text-area that you just don’t have enough space to write in? Sure they expand with the “scroller” but sometimes, it can get really annoying. If you can’t see what you typed 2 lines ago – then the web-developer behind that page is pretty.. ignorant to be honest. Well at least small text-areas are a worry of the past.

> Download!

12) Update Scanner

Even though RSS Subscription is a recognised feature of modern-day websites; not all of them offer it. Personally; it is pretty sad because a form of subscription is almost compulsory for a web-master’s success. Having said that; there are still many websites out there without any subscription services available. If you know of such a site and want to still subscribe to its updates; this tool will save you the trouble.

> Download!

There WE GO! These are just some of the plugins avaible for Firefox – you can find many more over at Mozzilla’s Addon Showcase, specifically the Blogging Category. Do you use any other Firefox plugins for blogging? Not only Firefox, there are plugins for other browsers too – share them if you please in the comments below

Related posts:

1. Firefox Makes Blogging Easier

2. The Final – Blogger Versus WordPress.com

3. 6 Plugins to Help You Get More Comments on Your Blog