How to Get Twitter Traffic To Your Blog

Over the last few weeks i have been investing a lot of time learning to better leverage Twitter.

The more and more I learn about Twitter the more valuable it becomes, and over the coming weeks I will be blogging alot about what I have discovered and why Twitter is one of the most powerful Social Media Sites on the Web today.

While I was doing my daily Twitter research I came across a Twitter post by Jim Yaghi, and he had just posted this awesome article about using twitter and your Blog together for great traffic increases.  Check it out : Jim’s Blog

For the past few weeks, I’ve had Google Analytics installed on this very blog to track how people are discovering it.

In the beginning, most visitors came in by directly entering the URL into their address bar. As it became more popular, referral traffic and search engines played a bigger role.

Over the past few days though, I noticed 500% spike of new visitors coming from Twitter.

Light bulb went on in my head of course. It occurred to me that the reason was a stupid little post I did a few days ago which had a picture of my crazy book shelf. For whatever reason, that was interesting enough that a few of my Twitter pals re-Tweeted to their pals who then discovered the blog.

Anyway, so I decided to ditch the other social bookmarking plugin I was using with wordpress and get another called TweetMeme. It’s pretty simple to install and activate and makes it easy for visitors to share on Twitter any of this blog’s posts. Simply genius.

Only thing I didn’t like was that it posted the little sharing box EITHER at the top or the bottom of a post but not both. I wanted it both at the top where it’s easy to spot…and at the bottom where it’s convenient to share a post when someone is done reading it.

So i jumped in to my wordpress plugin editor and modified it as I do with any plugin that needs minor tweaks to suit my uses. I was going to leave it at that…but I thought you guys might want to try to modify it on your blogs too.

• Save yourself the effort, just download the modified Tweetmeme from here .
• Upload to your wp-content/plugins directory.
• Activate the plugin.
• Click Settings on the left of your Wordpress interface.
• Choose Before AND After option
• Save Changes

Now you’re set to go. Enjoy

Original Post can be found here