Can using Twitter to drive traffic REALLY make a difference?

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After a major upgrade of my web site I decided to use Social Ad Pro(1) to setup auto tweets to my twitter.com/mrcomptech account to see what would happen. I was doubtful that there would be much advantage in this, but I like to experiment and find the 'what if' answers.

I have many articles on my web site, my own original articles but most of the articles I pulled from article directories, this save a lot of time in setting up a web site. I decided to use the ones from the articles directories as the subject of my experiment. Under the general category of 'Internet and Affiliate Marketing' these articles cover 4 sub-categories which are 'Email Opt-In' 10 articles, 'PPC - Pay-Per-Click' 9 articles, 'RSS - Really Simple Syndication' 10 articles and 'Blogging' 10 articles.

I have setup my own URL shortener(2) which also tracks IP, Date/Time, host name, hits, and referers. Although it's referred to as a URL shortener I very often use it not to shorten, but to create a URL with keywords in the URL. This time since the length or the article titles is rather long I decided to use the title (alphanumeric and replace spaces with dashes) as the URL.

Using the subject line of this post as an example, if the URL shortener domain is short.com then the entire URL would be "short.com/Can-using-Twitter-to-drive-traffic-REALLY-make-a-difference". Remember that Twitter only gives you 140 characters. Since I wanted the title in the URL there weren't many free characters left for 'fancy sales talk' and besides this was 'just an experiment', right? Turned out to be a real eye opener instead!

STEP 1 - I created a custom URL for each of the articles. The format of which was just "Article Published - {place URL here}".

STEP 2 - Add each shortened URL to my Social Ads Pro account.

STEP 3 - Set the account to send out an auto tweet every 30 minutes. No tweet is repeated until every tweet has been posted.

STEP 4 - Wait about 12 hours and check the results!

WOW! Was I amazed.

I have 1934 followers at the time of this experiment.

The URL traffic records on my URL customizing domain showed 173 hits from the auto tweets after about 16 hours! I thought OK that's pretty cool, certainly didn't expect that. But then I wondered 'If I got these visitors to my web site did they read any other articles?'.

The incredible answer was an overwhelming YES!

I had recorded the total number of hits of every article on my web site on 5/28/2011 just before I upgraded my web site.

I recorded the total number of hits again just 16 hours later and did some number comparisons.

The articles that were auto tweeted had an total increase of 1261 hits spread over the 39 articles AND the 48 articles that were not tweeted had a total increase in hits of 3268! The total increase in article hits was 4529.

So using Twitter to drive traffic to a web site definitely works!

Since Google Adsense statistics don't show up for 24 hours I can't yet tell if this additional traffic turned into revenue.

I have tried using Twitter to directly promote affiliate offers but with no success. By direct promotion I mean placing the affiliate link or a shortened version of it(recommended method) in the tweet without going to any web site or other landing page to pre-sell the offer to the customer. To me using Twitter for direct promotion of affiliate offers seems futile. If anyone has had any success with this I would certainly like to hear about your success.

(1) Concerning Social Ads Pro, there are other products out there that will let you schedule tweets. One free software product is 'TweetDeck.com'. You install this program on your computer (I think there might be an online version as well). There is plenty of help on the Tweetdeck website so I'm not going to go into details of it's use here.

(2) The URL 'shortener' that I use is a Wordpress website with the 'Prettylink' plug-in installed. I also purchased a very short domain name for use with my 'Wordpress - Pretty Link' web site, this is all that I use this web site for!

UPDATE!

Now it's the next day and the stats for the entire day yesterday are amazing.

A total of 335 article hits for yesterday and today it's only noon and already there are 189 article hits!

Also, my followers have increased 'naturally' by 51 in less than a day!

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