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9 Ways to Build a Twitter Traffic and Lead Machine (… with ZERO ad spend)

Twitter is my #1 source of social media referral traffic…
… and consistently in the top 3 sources of my website traffic as a whole — I drive traffic to my free offers, which lead to “top of funnel” products and services with amazing results.
And the important part is… I can do it all for free!
These are my Twitter stats for the year to date:
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These are my Twitter stats for the last 28 days:
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I’m about to show you how to build your own machine to generate free traffic and leads on Twitter.
Let’s dive in…

Building Your Own Twitter Traffic and Lead Machine

There are 9 types of tweets that make up my Twitter sales and marketing strategy. Plug these into your organic Twitter strategy and watch your machine go to work…

1. The “Blog Content” Tweet

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I have written 527 blog posts over the last 5 years.
Over 300 of my evergreen (content that is still as relevant today as when it was written) blog posts are loaded into a single queue with one being posted automatically every 35 minutes. The results of one of these evergreen posts?

  • 20,000+ impressions,
  • 100+ link clicks, and
  • 57 retweets

This is how you begin building your machine. Loading your content into an automated scheduler (I’ll show you some of mine in just a minute) and putting it in front of your audience. They can’t click if they don’t see it!
Don’t think you need to get fancy either — posting your blog content can be as simple as posting the headline of the post and a link to it.
Bonus: If you do want to change up the style of your post, create an image with your headline and drop that picture into your tweet! See which one performs better and you’ll learn a little bit about what grabs your audience’s eyeballs.
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2. The “Value-Added” Tweet

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Can you tell I am selling you a book?
Tweets like this helped push my book to #1 in several categories for several weeks on the Amazon bestsellers list earlier this year.
I pulled quotes from the book and turned them into graphics and added the book branding together with a special hashtag, #beyou, that worked with the book’s topic. I receive tons of traffic, people love the quotes and I sell books each and every day using these value added quotes.
You say, “Well you only sold 4 books from this tweet”. True, but I have 10 book quote tweets a day running 7 days a week.
Did I mention I sell books each and every day?

3. The “Free Offer” Tweet

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I currently have 5 free eBook links to which I promote 2-3 times per day on Twitter. This particular tweet got 5 link click and 6 retweets.
Is that a big deal? Yep!
Each eBook has an opt-in and leads into a sales funnel to a related product. I add 5,000+ subscribers to my list and get nearly as many sales leads every month without spending a penny on advertising.
This link is particularly clever as it takes you to a custom app on my Facebook Fan Page. This strategy drives my Facebook fan count up!

4. The “Humor/Personality” Tweet

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Social media is personality-driven and it is VERY possible to show your personality on Twitter. Take a peek at the traffic and embedded media views.
I also brand all of my graphics. If you look closely at the graphic you will see our logo in the bottom right hand corner. Brand impressions are HUGE in the marketing world and it’s important to make sure you take advantage of all your real estate to get that message out there.

5. The Other People’s Content “OPC” Tweet

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I routinely share “other people’s content”.
What types of things do I share? Interesting articles and tweets that have value to my community.
It shows that I am keeping up with content that matters to them and develops relationships with the people whose content I tweet.

6. The “Motivational or Inspirational” Tweet

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Just like on Facebook, motivational or inspirational content gets great engagement. Look at this tweet that was retweeted 123 times!

7. The “My Content In Other Places” Tweet

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What a great way to build business relationships, seed my authority and generate traffic.
When I do write content for other people I make sure to support traffic to that content on my social media sites. You might recognize this one (hint: you are reading the same blog right now!)
(Check out this post and start expanding your reach on Facebook with ZERO ad spend!)

8. The “Tips” Tweet

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People LOVE tips!
In the early days of social media I used to give tips on how to do various different things on each social media site. Now I focus more on social selling, general business and leadership tips.

9. The “Retargeting” Tweet

This retargeting tweet was used to create a Facebook custom audience.
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I pixeled the page to create a Facebook custom audience to later run advertising for a new product I recently launched.
The understanding here is that if they’re clicking to read my post about making money with Facebook, it’s safe for me to assume they’ll be interested in a product geared towards….wait for it… making money with Facebook!
This tweet gave me an extra 60 people to pixel — who will hopefully purchase my new product!

Selling on Twitter

Did you notice what type of Tweet did NOT make the list?
The “Direct Sales” Tweet.
I very rarely will run a tweet directly to a product. I used to but I found out very early that it didn’t work and for the most part, annoyed people. Companies that think of Twitter as just another “push” marketing tool invariable fail fast and quit Twitter because they don’t see results.
Instead, I think of Twitter as a long-term relationship building tool I can use for traffic to my content and as an entry point to my free offers which then lead to sales funnels where I can sell them my products and services.

Pick the Right Tools

Guess how long it takes me to…

  • Manage 360,000+ followers,
  • Tweet almost 100 times a day,
  • Add 10,000 followers/month to my community,
  • Engage with 100,000 people/year (55,000+ so far in 2015),
  • Get 400,000+ bit.ly link clicks?

About an hour a day — and I owe it all to my tools.
Hootsuite is a great tool for engagement. You can create ‘streams’ that show what you want to look at — be it ‘mentions’, direct messages, sent tweets, or your news feed.
Screenshot 2015-07-01 12.34.55
I’m also using Sprout Social for engagement, publishing, analytics, an in-depth view of my followers.

I spend more time tuning my Twitter machine using a great little tool called Manageflitter.

Lastly, for an auto-scheduler, I’m using SocialOomph — a great tool for scheduling bulk content at once.

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Kim Garst

Kim Garst

Kim Garst is the CEO of Boom! Social Media Marketing. She has taken her 20+ years of online business-building experience and married it with her dominant social media position as a Forbes Top 10 Social Media Women Power Influencer and leader of a social media community of over 500,000 people. Download Kim's newest free eBook and get 27 Killer Facebook Post Ideas for Small Business Owners. Get your free download here.

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