How to Get 5293 (Automatic) Monthly Twitter Visitors [Traffic and Conversion #5]

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It’s time for the 5th edition of the Traffic and Conversion series!

In this monthly report, I list the exact strategies I use to increase traffic to this blog {and other websites.}

Today I’m going to detail a specific technique I used to generate 5293 monthly visitors from Twitter.

The best part?  I did this by only spending an hour (in the last month) on this social media site.

Some people might *disagree* with this strategy.  But I’ve found this is the best way to maximize your Twitter results.

Now before we jump in this month’s topic, let’s go over the current statistics:

[title color=”green-vibrant” align=”scmgccenter” font=”verdana” style=”normal” size=”scmgc-2em”]January 2012 Statistics[/title]

First lets recap the stats from December:

  1. 24,239 Visits
  2. 81.24% Bounce Rate
  3. 1:32 Time on Site 

So what happened in January?

Let’s take a look at the metrics from the last month:

Click to Enlarge

I use three metrics to measure the “success” of  my traffic generation efforts.  Here’s how they did in January:

  1. 29,309 Visits (20.92% Increase)
  2. 78.13% Bounce Rate (3.83% Decrease)
  3. 1:32 Time on Site (0.05% Increase)

Again, there wasn’t a big change on the bounce rate and time on page metrics.  Hopefully these numbers will change  with the new, straight-forward design I’m about to implement on this site.

What I’m happy about is the 20.92% increase in traffic in the last month.  That shows that my “traffic generation” techniques are starting to work.  And I hope this number will also improve with the new design.

Those are the general stats from the month of January.

Now, let’s move on to the point of this month’s topic —> How to Get 5,293 Automatic Visitors from Twitter

[title color=”green-vibrant” align=”scmgccenter” font=”verdana” style=”normal” size=”scmgc-2em”]A Little Background Information…[/title]

In December and January I was busy with a lot of personal obligations and Internet projects not related to SteveScottSite.com. As a result, I had to eliminate certain activities.  Specifically I stopped using Twitter on a daily basis.  Instead, I set up a few “automatic” Tweets that were posted every few hours.  The end result is only spent about an hour on Twitter for the last two months.

What’s interesting is this new Twitter strategy generated…

  • 4769 Visitors in December 2011
  • 5293 Visitors in January 2012

I think these are impressive numbers considering I basically ignored this social media site.  So today, I thought I’d list the exact steps I’ve used to generate this amount of traffic:

Step #1 – Build a Large Following

I was fortunate enough to start Twitter when I began this blog.  One technique that worked was to use certain tools to do automatic follows and unfollows.  This helped me quickly build my followers to over 20,000 people:

Unfortunately I got pretty lazy when it came to Twitter for most of 2011.  For some stupid reason, I stopped using automation and doing a lot of interaction.  The end result is I could have easily built my account to over 50,000 followers.  Now, I’m back to using one of these tools on a daily basis.

Anyway…it’s not too hard to build a large group of followers.  The only tool I use is Tweet Adder {affiliate link}.  What I like about Tweet Adder is it saves me a lot of time with getting people to follow me.  All I do is target the followers of a popular Internet marketing authority and have it automatically follow these people:

In the above example, I’m adding people who are followers of John Chow.  Since the focus of my free report is 111 Affiliate Marketing Tips, I mostly target the followers of leading affiliate marketing experts.

Overall, I’ve learned the best way to get results from ‘automatic following’ is to target groups of people who have a specific interest in the primary topic of your content site.  So my advice is to only follow the people who follow authority figures in your niche.

Now…I don’t like to push the envelope with my Twitter account.  I set my automation to around 200 follows per day and set the time delay between follows from 0 to 180 seconds.  I feel this is a safe number for adding people without incurring any sort of Twitter slap.Get More Twitter FollowersThe main reason I recommend Tweet Adder is because this program makes it super easy to unfollow people.  Like it or not, you NEED to unfollow people who don’t follow  you back.

Twitter sets a limitation on the ratio between how many people you’re following vs. how many people you follow.  Your account might get locked when you’re following number vastly exceeds followers number.

I’ve found that most “automatic Twitter” programs suck because they don’t make it easy to unfollow people.  With Tweet Adder you can do this automatically.   All you have to do is set an automation rule like you do with following people.  I prefer to unfollow 200 people each day who don’t follow me back after three days and do this from 0 to 180 seconds:

How to Unfollow Twitter Users

That’s all I really do to build a large Twitter following.  Every morning, I turn on Tweet Adder, then it runs in the background on my Systems Tray. And every week, I’ll switch up the target authority figure.  In total, this task takes about 10 minutes of my time each month.

Step #2 – Create Automatic Tweets

Again, you might not agree with the following strategy.  I’ll admit that it goes against the idea of building a community through social media.  But the following is a technique that can bring you results with Twitter without wasting a lot of time. These are the things that I do on a daily basis to generate a decent amount of Twitter traffic.

Sidebar: The beauty of this system is automation.  You can set it up once every week and have it run while you work on other aspects of your Internet business.  The tool that I use for automation is Market Me Suite. 

Once upon a time, Market Me was a paid product.  Now it’s free for anyone who subscribes to their email list.  I highly recommend this tool for managing your Twitter activities.  

I. Daily Post of Old Articles:  I’ve written around 550 posts on this blog.  From that number, I feel there are 70+ “evergreen” articles that are full of useful content.  So once a day, I’ll re-tweet a link to one of these articles.  Since there are almost  three months of content, I’m not worried about hitting people with the same articles over and over again.  Plus, I change up the time each month when these articles are posted.

II. Daily Post of Current Articles:  I’m at the point where I only blog once or twice a week.  This gives me plenty of time to re-Tweet my articles a few times each week.  What I do is Tweet a link to a new post 3 to 4 days in a row.  To make this killer effective, I change the title and when it’s being posted.

III. Daily Post of “High Value” Content:  One thing I’m developing are a series of lengthy tutorials, “money pages,” and free reports.  These provide value that exceed the average blog post.  Right now, I have seven of these Tweets.  So every day, I’m posting a Tweet to one of these resources.  The trick is I’ll change up the time every week:

  • Week 1 at 9:30 am
  • Week 2 at 3:30 am
  • Week 3 at 11:40 pm
  • Week 4 at 6:00 pm
  • Etc, etc.

Again,I like to change up the times so I’m not hitting the same people with the same information.

IV. Daily Post of a Tip: What I like about Twitter is you can communicate powerful ideas or techniques in under 140 characters.  So every day, I provide a quick tip on how to improve Internet business success.  The time when these tips are posted are also rotated on a monthly basis.

V. Daily Post of a Free Tool: The Internet is full of free tools that can help any online entrepreneur.  So every day I’ll link to one of these tools and provide a quick explanation of how they help.

Step #3 – Be a Helpful Resource

In addition to publishing self-serving links; you should Tweet other sites that provide awesome content.  I don’t have a rule of thumb for how often you should do this.  Really, I’ll Tweet articles whenever I find time to read and comment on other sites.  So sometimes this means I’ll Tweet 10 to 15 sites in a day.  Other days (like the weekend); I’ll Tweet none because I’m not on the computer.

The important thing is to be a helpful resource where you’re letting people know about a variety of content that is not your own.

Step #4 – Be a *Real* Person

I have to admit there is a MAJOR flaw with my Twitter strategy…I don’t add the *personality element* to my Tweets.  This will change in the next week when I complete a number of projects and have more time for social media.

My suggestion is to add a Tweet every day that talks about your business and/or something going on in your life.  Here are a few questions that can help you get started:

  • What have you read today?
  • What vital skill did you learn?
  • What happened in your personal life?
  • What did you do to expand your business TODAY?
  • What project are  you currently working on?
  • Can you take a picture of something from your life?
  • Is there something inspirational that pumped you up (ie: song, movie, tv, book)?
  • What post is about to be released on the next day?
  • Did you check these news services: AllTop, StumbleUpon, and Digg?

I think this strategy should be blended with any updates you do on Facebook and Google+.  So when you’re updating those sites; you can post a quick Tweet.

Putting All of This Together…

Ultimately I’m only averaging about 7 to 10 Tweets on a daily basis.  You can see how this looks in my Twitter stream:

Steve Scott Twitter Stream

You can see how I’ve mixed up helpful Tweets with links to my site and others that I like.  I think this is a good way to blend content with recommendations of content that’s helpful to followers.

Final Thoughts…

Once again, I know this goes against what most people recommend for Twitter.  Unfortunately I found that I was wasting an hour a day on this site and not seeing a lot of results.  Eventually I’ll go back to doing more daily interactions; but right now this strategy provides a nice way to generate traffic without spending hours on a single site.

Again … the primary tool I use is Tweet Adder.  It’s what’s helped me automate a lot of my social media activities.  So I definitely think it’s worth checking out!

So what do YOU think?  Agree with my automation techniques?  Disagree?

Leave a comment below and let me know your thoughts…

Take Action. Get Results.



40 thoughts on “How to Get 5293 (Automatic) Monthly Twitter Visitors [Traffic and Conversion #5]”

  1. Awesome post Steve. And just in time for my networking efforts. I’ve been trying very hard to use Twitter these past few days. And I think I am making some headway. I will devour this post and implement what you stated here.

    cheers!

    • Mighty,

      Twitter is a long process, just keep chipping away at it, building you list and building as many “real” connections (one thing I admit I could be batter at) as you can and you will get there.

      Good luck with your twitter efforts.

  2. I know how easy it can be to find your self spending 2 or 3 hours on Twitter (or any other social media) and feel like you’re not getting any results. What you present here is interesting and has me considering what I need to do for my own strategy. Thanks for sharing!

    • I agree. For me twitter is a balancing act. I like the idea of getting social media traffic, and it is important to really engage to get something out of twitter (IE: JUST automating makes Twitter fairly useless)

      But some people spend way to much time using it. I am not sure my system is “perfect” but I do strive for what I hope is at least a “productive” and “efficient” use of Twitter and more than just the automation.

      Good luck finding your own perfect balance to Twitter!

  3. Great post Steve. Social media is one of those things that can be a real time suck. Automating Twitter is a good idea for saving time. That being said, I don’t think I would automate Facebook or G+ because those are completely different beasts. Facebook Edgerank makes it hard to get visibility if you are using any type of API call for your posting, and G+ users don’t seem to tolerate automation well.

    • Daniel,

      True. As far as I know there is no “good” tool for automation for G+ or FB. Even with Twitter, it is important that you do not “just” automate. But at least you can get rid of some of the more mundane and boring tasks

  4. Hey Steve,

    This is an awesome post on getting traffic from Twitter. I’ve started using Twitter more effectively and so far it’s working pretty well.

    I keep hearing some goods things about TweetAdder and now is the time to give it a try. Gonna buy it, very soon.

    Thanks for sharing this ultimate post, my friend.

    -Dev

    • Devesh,

      I have to say I love Tweet Adder. I have had long lulls without using it (as i said in the article). But I have been using it -fairly- regularly for over a year now. It really can take care of a lot of the mundane daily tasks for you and free up the time to take care of the things that matter. (both on and off the social network)

  5. Hey Scott, that all sounds good but I’d be worried about potentially getting banned from Twitter for using automation tools. I heard of a that happening to Ana recently on Traffic Generation Cafe. Any concerns around that?

    • Well getting banned is of course a concern. I did read that article from Ana (about 3-4 weeks ago, right?)

      If I remember right, she may been running all 5 accounts through it and perhaps this was part of the problem.

      This system -could- certainly draw the ire of twitter. I would never say it couldn’t. I think though, that if you are fairly careful, you should be OK. At least I know that I have never had an issue even after using it for over a year.

      I would say:
      Make sure you do not follow or unfollow too many in a single day. (like many things, when you first start, start slower too)

      Use another program for actually automating tweets…AND DON”T over automate. I do automate tweets…but only 3-4 tweets a day are automated. There are some people who may do 3-4 an HOUR and they are running a much higher risk of being banned.

      Finally you want to ensure automation is just -part- of the package. Tweeting other people stuff, engaging and really using twitter to some extent is also an important part of the pie.

      If you are really concerned, but still interested, you could always create two Twitter accounts… one you try the method with and another that you do not. That way if something bad does happen you will not be back to square one.

  6. I do my Twitter totally opposite way BUT I do agree that this is probably a great way to handle it for people who are not into social media. You just can’t make yourself do something you don’t like or think is not worth your time, so I definitely agree with you here 🙂

    • Brankica,

      I know your way is really “right” when it comes to twitter. I DO strive to employ a little bit better “personal” touch in my Twitter. But as you said for those with limited time, this can still be a way to get -some- positive results from twitter without spending significant time on the network.

  7. Steve, this is impressive! 5k++ visitors from twitter with only 20k++ followers! I have tweet adder but I have not turned on the automation follow / unfollow due to some error a few months ago. When I do it manually, the progress tend to be slow, lol… Time to get back to automation 🙂 thanks for your great tips on what to tweet.

    • Yeah I think Tweet Adder is a cool program. Just make sure you do have some sort of “throttle” on the follows unfollows it does. I max it out around 200 a day, but I think it should be a percentage of your list to seem more natural. When my total numbers were lower I had my follows/unfollows lower (though 80-90 should be low enough for those just starting out)

  8. I’ve seen a lot of advice on “helper” blogs that say “Do not sign up for autofollow services” and the reason given is that you should always be following less than 3/4ths of the number following you, or your account could be frozen or dismissed by twitter. Now that was a couple years ago. Is that still true today?

    Also, a friend found that when she signed up for a service to get more followers, the service would then autofollow those who followed her. But in a few weeks time, she had been UNfollowed by more than half of 1,200 new followers – all of whom SHE was still following – she spent HOURS going through, finding, and deleting those who had stopped following her.

    Any advice there?

    • Dave,

      Basically there are TWO conflicting strategies on twitter. IN my opinion BOTH have valid points.

      One is engagement, and is what you have seen on those other blogs probably. This method says don’t automate. Take time and care building your list and REALLY interact. This can mean that you could have a 300 person twitter list that really engages and could really be as valuable as a 30,000 person list.

      In the “best” world this is the list we would all want…except it would be 30,000 deep :). But the problem is that to get this you really need to engage. You need to spend a fair amount of time each and every day truly working Twitter and building relationships. Nothing wrong with that…but it is a huge time sink.

      On the other hand, there is automation. Each person only has a small likllihood to engage…but sheer numbers count for something.

      …My attempt is to (slightly) mix the two. I automate…but hopefully not to much…and try to at least have -some- level of engagement…without making it a 2-3 hour a day time sink.

      as for the 3/4 number…that I haven’t heard. But you ideally you do want your following to be less…or at least very close to your followers.
      _____
      As for your friend..

      First of all, when you blindly follow, you will get a fair bit of people who do not follow back. Some may do it by choice, many others because they really don’t use Twitter.

      A program that JUST follows could be a huge headache (as I am sure your friend will attest) for those reasons. Because you NEED to unfollow those who don’t follow back after some set time.

      The program I use (Tweet Adder) has the follow option AND it has an auto unfollow. If I follow someone and they do not follow back within 4 days (where I have it set) it will then unfollow. Nice and easy. It also has a whitelist for this function, so if you want to follow somone you KNOW won’t follow you back..like a movie star with millions of followers, you can “whitelist” them and it won’t autounfollow them.

      ____

      This (semi) automation may not be for everyone, and you need to do it with some care (IE don’t go overboard on automation) but I think it is a good way to mix efficiency and results for twitter

  9. One of the most important things I got from your article is the questions in the Be *real* section of your post. Often times I am stuck for what to say on Twitter. Having a list of questions like this is going to be really helpful when I’m having a brain freeze.

    Cheers!

  10. Steve,

    Fantastic post. I have spent the last month or so experimenting with different methods, and you’ve given me a lot of food for thought here.

    Thanks! 🙂

    Tom

    • Quick question – I’m looking at the automatic tweeting capabilities of MarketMeSuite and it doesn’t seem as user-friendly as Buffer (i.e. you have to set the time of every tweet you schedule). Do you have an opinion on this?

  13. Hi Steve,

    I agree with your strategy based upon the fact that you didn’t have the time to do the personal parts of building relations. To me, twitter is not just a way to drive traffic, but build long term relations. But I’ve also been using TweetAdder in order to automate the follow/unfollow process.

  14. I have considered this and it would save me a lot of time but I am concerned about getting my Twitter account suspended or worse. So until now I have stayed away from auto follower tools. It is very appealing though.

  15. Steve, thanks for the nice strategy. I use Tweetadder as well, but I don’t use it everyday. Most of the time I forget to turn it on. But all I can say its really worth the money, coz time is money and I can’t afford to spend time to search for people everyday manually to follow and then keep track of those who don’t follow back and unfollow.

    This is a ind-numbing task. And with TweetAdder not only do I automate it, but everything is under my control – as of who I am following and all; its not just blind following everyone on the planet. I love Tweetadder for what it does!

    • Jane,

      I know the feeling. I have had tweetadder for over a year now and there have been quite a few time I forgot to turn it on for over a week. But still, like you said, it takes care of a lot of the dull and mundane tasks for you. Hopefully leaving you the time to really connect.

  16. Awesome post Steve. Being one of your followers on twitter I always wondered how you were consistent with your tweets. I’ve tried various twitter follower networks but none of them did the things I wanted them to do but I like your strategy. It’s well thought out and organized. I have a little over 100 followers on twitter (that sucks I know) but I do plan on implementing a few of your golden techniques to increase my activity on twitter…

    Thanks for the post Steve

    • Thanks Marc,

      I hope it helps ya. Really connecting with your Twitter followers means a lot. 100 followers can equal a heck of a lot more that have no real connection. However, when you do simply “build” your list you shake out some people who really will connect.

      Thanks for following me on Twitter, of course. 🙂 It is always appreciated.

    • Manual can be fine. IN fact some people think it is the only way…and in some ways I can’t disagree… but if you want to minimize your time on twitter AND build a large following, it simply takes too long in my opinion.

      Anyhow thanks for your comment, and I hope the idea of streamlining your Twitter helps you a little bit.

  19. Great Post. Very informative. This information should save many brand new internet marketers from making the common mistake of believing all the mis leading get rich quick
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  20. Thanks, these are some great tips, even if they do fly against the advice out there…Sometimes we just have to try something that goes against the grain, to grab the attention we want!

  22. Hey Steve. Awesome article! I love how you break down and exploit opportunities for each specific traffic source, but also set goals for quality (bounce rate, TOS).

    Truly inspired by your success. New reader here for sure 🙂

    Aaron

  23. Hey Steve, Great article, have just read your ebook too and am already putting together a plan of action.
    Really looking at things with a new perspective now.
    THanks a million
    Steve

  24. Hey Steve,

    Great post! This has to be the best breakdown of a strategy that I have read in a long time. Better than many I have paid to read.

    I think that your strategy is sound and I plan to implement something similar into my business.

    Thanks for sharing Steve and have a good one!

    Ian fro IM Graphic Designs

  25. Nice review bro. Yesterday I bought Tweet Adder 5 profile through your link and it’s working like a charm. So far I am so happy with the built-in function of the software. One thing, shall I use proxy to run my several profiles at a time? Is there any problem with using proxy? Thanks.

  26. Great job on making your Tweeter strategy clear, Steve! Thanks for sharing it.

    I was taking notes and will be putting some of your tips into practice right away.

    Best wishes,
    Lidiya

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