Inbound Marketing and Twitter

Inbound marketing is a strategy to lead or pull visitors/readers back to your site and what you're offering. Ideally, you will be leading these visitors to a landing page with a call-to-action on it. It is a means of grabbing search engine attention and thereby traffic.

Twitter is one of the strategies (along with other social networks such as Facebook and Linkedin) that can be used in inbound marketing. Twitter and the other social networks are now a core part of every marketer's strategy tactics.

10 Steps to Utilizing Twitter Effectively:

1. Make sure you have a bio on your profile that includes a link.

2. Be sure to use keywords. These keywords are actually registered or picked up by Google which creates another path pulling leads back to your site. Make each title/headline count.

3. Make sure your headline represents your content.

4. Make sure your headline is effective. Review it carefully, does it draw you in? Would you click on that link?

5. Provide useful content. This is probably the key to success on Twitter and any of the other social networks. If your content/link is valuable, other tweeters will not only be likely to click on the link, but will also retweet it.

6. Post regularly. The more often you lead that visitor back to your site, the more likely he/she will begin to trust you. Trust leads to sales.

7. Try to use a 70% content and 30% promo, in your tweeting. What this means: provide more valuable content than prompts to purchase your products or your affiliate products. It might be a good idea to raise the content percentage and lower the promo a bit; this will help ensure your readers don't feel you are pushing too hard. There are a number of emails I don't open because I know that 9 out of 10 times it will be all about their promotions.

8. Make sure your landing page is effective. Utilize a stat counter or a similar tool and analysis the flux of traffic to your site. Also, keep track of your conversion rate - the number of sales in regard to the number of visitors.

9. Finally, use the retweet feature on tweets you appreciate and on articles or posts you think your twitter readers will find of value. This adds to the valuable content you are providing.

10. Post regularly to Twitter and your other social networks.

How many times to post to Twitter per day and how many times for a specific article is questionable. Different marketers have different views. A general rule might be 5 - 10 tweets per day (3 times for a specific article).

Since new followers are joining your forces all the time, and your posts do not last long on Twitter, and there are many other tweets, I think (after your initial 3 tweets) retweeting your articles once a week or every couple of weeks is not a bad idea.

These are some of the basics to using Twitter effectively in your inbound marketing campaign.