Marketing a Niche Website on Twitter

Want to market your website on Twitter? Today Jonathan Thomas from WebinerCentral.net (follow him at @jonathanwthomas) shows you how.

Many people have pondered the question: how can Twitter be used as a marketing tool? Twitter is becoming a powerful tool to market your websites, content and products. If you’re running a niche website, Twitter is an indispensible tool in your marketing arsenal.

When I launched Webinar Central last fall, a directory and calendar of upcoming webinars, I was faced with a dilemma. I needed to market my site to as wide an audience as possible with no budget other than the cost of spending my time. I decided to turn to Twitter and it has become a key tool for building readership and interacting with my readers. Not only have a I built a strong readership, but networking with other professionals has created partnership opportunities that have been very exciting.

Since Webinar Central was launched in October, 2008, I’ve gotten almost 25% of my traffic solely from Twitter. During the early launch days, it was responsible for most of my traffic until the site rose in it’s search rankings and I started generating traffic the old fashioned way. So, it’s great for creating quality traffic, when your site would otherwise be inactive, while it waits for indexing from the Google Gods.

Setting Up Your Twitter Backbone

I recommend being methodical when you go about initiating a Twitter Marketing campaign. It will save you time, which is your most valuable asset. Here’s a guide to the back end you’ll need for marketing a niche site on Twitter.

Setting up Accounts

I would advise against using your personal Twitter account to market your niche website, especially if you post about personal topics on your Twitter feed. It will look more professional in the long run to have a dedicated feed. There are exceptions to this; like if you’re building a personal brand. For Webinar Central, I simply setup @webinarcentral.

Customize Your Profile

I chose a cute logo as my avatar to draw attention to it, and it’s proved popular. I also matched the color scheme of the profile to the logo and filled in all the sidebar information about the website. You don’t have much room to say a lot, so be sure to get your point across as succinctly as possible.

Badges on your website

So visitors to your site know they can follow your feeds on Twitter, I recommend putting a Twitter Counter badge as well a Twitter Grader badge near the top of your website, usually in the sidebars. I would not recommend putting your Twitter feed directly on your site; you will run the risk of being redundant.

Set-up Feeds to Monitor

Twitter’s search function is incredibly powerful and perfect for monitoring the entire network for what your site is targeted at. Think about the key phrases that your website targets. Once you run a search, Twitter makes it really easy to turn it into an RSS feed that you can throw into your RSS feedreader of choice. As an example, I monitor the phrases ‘webinar,’ ‘webinarcentral,’ ‘gotomeeting,’ etc. For my Anglophile blog, Anglotopia.net, I monitor for the word Anglophile and follow anyone that mentions it.

Setting up these feeds serves several purposes. The first is you can immediately follow people discussing the topic your website is based on. If someone talks about a webinar, chances are they are interested in learning about more of them, so they are worth a follow. Another reason to have these feeds set-up is so you can monitor the mood and trends for your topics, especially if there is a #hashtag for it.

Seek Followers

The most important aspect of Twitter Marketing is to gain followers. Not just any follower you can get your hands on but quality followers who will value your content and what you have to offer.

The first step is to monitor the Twitter feeds. Next, you can find people in your industry/niche and follow them. Follow their followers and so on. You can also use tools like Twitter Grader to recommend users that you should follow.

How do you measure success in this regard? If they follow you back, then they are a quality follower. If they don’t follow you back, you can weed them out later.

Twitter has limits for most new accounts. You can only follow up to 2,000 people at any one time. So, if you start reaching the limit, then it’s time to weed out the people who aren’t following you back.

I spent several days following as many people as I could until I hit the limits. Once I hit the limits I started cleaning out the account, to the point where my follower/follow ratio is very similar. This has left me with over 1,300 followers and growing by about 5% a day, without any further effort.

Working Smart – Twitter Tools to Use for Niche Marketing

Using Tweet Later

I’m not a fan of totally automating your Twitter activities, but I think it’s perfectly all right to automate parts of it. I’ve avoided having auto-replies and auto-follows set up, I think it’s important to screen who’s following you and to actually engage with them instead of sending them a DM that goes to your website or a product you’re pushing.

That being said, I use tools like Tweetlater lightly. For Webinar Central, I set up daily Tweets to go out in the mornings with a summary of that day’s webinars. If I have a new poll out, I’ll schedule a Tweet to go out in the afternoon to catch the bored in the afternoon crowd who may be looking for something to do. You can find out more about Tweetlater in this TwiTip Post about TweetLater.

Using Twitterfeed

Once you have a good following, you need to leverage that audience by making sure your site’s RSS feed is being posted on Twitter. You can use great free tools like Twitterfeed. Twitterfeed is a fantastic tool to automatically have your RSS feed posted on your Twitter Stream every time it’s updated. It’s free and very customizable. You’ll need to sign up for an account and set everything up. Everytime someone posts a new webinar to Webianr Central, it goes into the RSS feed and shortly thereafter onto the Twitter Feed. You can read more about Twitterfeed in this TwiTip Post.

That’s the extent of my Twitter automation.

Don’t Forget to Engage

Twitter marketing takes a huge investment of time to setup, but once you have it going, you should not stop. You always need to be looking for new followers and talking directly with your followers. To succesfully market your niche site on Twitter, engaging in the ‘grand conversation’ with your users is so very key. Don’t set everything up on auto-pilot and expect success to come your way.

The Golden Rules

My four golden rules for niche marketing on Twitter are: Be Useful. Be Timely. Be Willing to Engage. Don’t be Spammer.

Good Luck!

When Jonathan Thomas isn’t seeking the latest Webinars for WebinerCentral.net he’s taking a breather on his popular Anglophile Blog Anglotopia.net. You can follow him on Twitter: @jonathanwthomas or @webinarcentral