In our last post, we talked about WordPress, which is where you’ll host your content. Now, we’re going to talk about how to promote your content, how to drive traffic to your site and how to generate buzz. Twitter is one of the best ways to promote your brand, keep in touch with your peers and to build community. And Twitter makes it really easy (or hard if you lean towards the verbose) to communicate with your audience.

Remember those old Reader’s Digest condensed books? They were basically a shorter, or abridged, version of complete works. These were the precursor to the Cole’s Notes which came along later. Yes, I’m probably showing my age now. Well… Twitter is like the Cole’s Notes of blogging.

Twitter is a “micro-blogging” service. You use Twitter to “tweet” quick updates to your “followers”. Each tweet must be 140 characters or less. This forces you to be brief, which should translate into the ability to convey more meaning in less space – although, this is not always the case. But that is the goal.

SIGN UP

Twitter is free. Simply sign up at twitter.com and you’re in business. Make sure that you align your twitter name with its purpose: your real name, your company name, your alias, etc. It’s important to keep it meaningful.

FIND SOME FOLLOWERS

 From there, you’ll want to find some followers. Twitter offers a few ways of doing this. On your main activity page, Twitter suggests “Who to follow” (left hand side, under neath my profile summary widget).

Twitter also helps you out by offering a Find friends feature (bottom of the “Who to follow” widget mentioned above. This feature allows you to search your Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or AOL contact lists for people that you know that already have Twitter accounts.

The key here is to start following some people. They will be notified when you follow them and hopefully they will follow you back.

TWITTER WORDPRESS WIDGET

You’ll want to enable the Twitter widget on your wordpress blog. This way, blog visitors will be able to see your latest tweets and they’ll be able to follow you as well. And, you’ll want to enable the Publicize feature for Twitter as well. This will tweet your new blog post each time a new post has been published.

They key here is to get people to follow you. The larger your follow list, the larger your reach.

From there, start tweeting. Say what you want, 140 characters at a time. You can include URLs and photos. Twitter integration is everywhere nowadays. New Macs running OS X 10.8 have Twitter integration built in for many native apps. iPhone and iPad Twitter integration is there as well. The list goes on.

So get yourself a Twitter account and get busy tweeting!

Todd