I am a fan of Twitter as one of the future ways of using Web 2.0 technologies to communicate across the internet, but I am going to try this year to avoid Twitter completely. You may wonder why someone would want to avoid the future and the reason is not because I am some kind of technophobe, because I am not. You may think that I am being negative about the technology, which I of course am not saying that at all.
The reason that I want to avoid Twitter this year is becasue there are already a lot of technologies that I am trying to leverage and just adding one more does not help, in fact it hinders my businesses growth.
There are a multitude of ways to make money online and most of them can be narrowed down to some kind of payment for having the visitor to your site take an action. Some people will start a blog and add every single affiliate program link they can find and then add adsense as well. There is no money in not focussing and instead taking a shotgun approach to making money.
Where does traffic come from?
This is the real secret why I am not going to do anything with Twitter this year. All Twitter is for any internet marketer is another way to get traffic to your site and there are already plenty of ways to get traffic if you are staking any energy in them. Lets take a look at a few:
Stumbleupon – If you belong to Stumbleupon and then add your link you may get some traffic. If you get lots of friends and then post a link you will get more traffic, if you have lots of friends interested in your niche and you sned them your link then you will get a crapload of traffic. I have seen only a little bit of this but I am sure it is prevelent within niches.
Forum Posting – If you post to a forum once then someone may click onto your signature lnk and visit your site. If you are adding lots of comments and helping people then you will get more clicks to your site, and finally if you are leading many of the new popular threads and are helping a lot of people, being the thought leader on the forums for your niche then you will get lots of traffic that will pay money because they trust your opinion. This would be like Willie Crawford a great example and a great marketer) over at the Warrior forum
Blogging – If you scrape traffic and get lots of posts on your blog then you are bound to get some traffic. If you write thoughtful posts once a week then you will get even more traffic. If you are adding comments to other blogs and posting relevent and smart new commentary on a daily basis to your niche blog then you will over time become a thought leader that people go to for opinions and are willing to pay you in many ways for your points of view. This would be someone like Darren Rowse over at Problogger
How to get traffic this year
When you look at these examples you can see that it is far too easy to spread yourself thin and not make concentrated effort within your niche becasue you are in fact using a shotgun approach and getting nothing when your time would be better spent focussing on just a very few methods of traffic generation. The above examples are of course not the only onces but they are the ones that pop into my head and are often overlooked by everyone chasing the Web 2.0 traffic everywhere.
What I have been doing and will continue to do is reign in the different ways that I use most successfully to get traffic and start to leverage those sources and to expand them instead of using Twitter or any of the other very new and growing methods, forums and blogs are growing and I have been leaving money on the table in those areas already.
Maybe I will find time for Twitter next year. It can certainly wait.
