Spread your blog far and wide with Twitter

As a blogger who's just getting started, I depend on every visitor who finds their way to my blog. I've looked at many guides to gain viewers, and implemented many tips. One of the most important, I have discovered, is twitter.

I'm not any kind of influential person on twitter - I have only 30 followers at the time of this post. However, the traffic driven to my blog from twitter is huge.
How traffic comes from twitter
I'll admit it, there is an inordinate amount of bots and bot-like accounts on twitter. Many of these accounts are just waiting for you to tweet something containing influential keywords. Once you hit these triggers, it's really surprising how popular your posts become. Of my blog post tweets, all of the retweets have come from user groups and other bloggers that appear to be mining twitter for fresh content and aggregating it. Just by linking to your blog posts on twitter, and applying careful hashtags, your posts can quickly get in front of thousands of followers like mine did.
Posting to twitter
Since I don't have the time to tweet each of my blog posts, I looked for a service that could automatically tweet my blog posts. The leader in this field appeared to be twitterfeed. However, I was quickly let down by the service at twitterfeed; the servers were quite obviously overloaded, crashing the website often and preventing my feed from updating. It was time to look for another solution.

I happened to already be using feedburner, a service acquired by Google that enhances your RSS feed. Among the many fantastic features offered by feedburner is the ability to tweet a link to your posts automatically. Not only does feedburner work really well, it even inserts hashtags into your tweets based on the tags of each post!

I'd recommend that all bloggers out there check out feedburner. In addition to posting to twitter, you can also insert ads and analytics, automatically ping blog aggregators, and optimize your feed.