That’s right I said it, your a tool Twitter… When Twitter came out I didn’t really see the appeal. It may seem a little pointless especially with the advanced text messaging you can do with cell phones. But of course I ended up creating an account (smmguru) and I can already tell how useful it would be to some people.

Now keep in mind that in order for Twitter to be of any use your account will have to have some level of followers… If no one is reading your tweets then you cant expect much. I only have around 30 + followers so the traffic is nothing special (about 40 hits a day.) However if you take in to account what a base of 3K followers does to your visibility, you can easily push decent traffic that also tends to convert well in terms of subscribers. The trends I’m seeing is that many see large increases in RSS subscribers when they receive visibility on Twitter.

To start off, find some people on Twitter that fit into the overall topic of your blog. In the next step you can take two very different paths:

1) You can continue to follow people relevant in your niche and keep your follow list shortened to people you actually want to see tweets from. Pick this option if you plan on using the service for something more than getting as much visibility as you can from it. This will give you visibility but your followers will be much more organic and build up slower.

2) You follow every person you can find relevant, and continue to follow everyone that they are following so on and so forth. This will totally work but it will take some time to kick in. As long as you post quality tweets the visibility of being on all of those people’s pages will draw new followers. The more people that can find you, the better your chances.

Once you have all of your followers it’s time to start pushing links. There are a number of different plugins for auto-updating your Twitter page with new posts from WordPress. There are also various Twitter clients for the iPhone, BlackBerry, Mac, and Windows desktop applications. Give it a try, chances are if you put some work in you shouldn’t have any problems.

If you have a new blog you may be facing a common problem. You got all amped up with your original idea and before you know it you are all out of ideas for posts. Chances are your blog is going to have others like it… Why not use your competition for inspiration?

AideRSS is a tool that analyzes a given RSS feed and then determines a ‘PostRank’ on the given posts in the feed. Each post will also get some other info drawn such as how many comments it had, number of Diggs, number of Tweets, and more. What this will do is give you the top performing content on the site. Go and read some of their top posts and while reading be looking for ideas that you can expand on or build on… Keep in mind your not copying them, rather looking for ideas that have not be touched upon. Staying up to date and current within your niche is also very important. Be on top of new delvelopments that may be taking place in your industry, read the news, and keep tabs on various related blogs.

Using these ideas you should be able to keep the ideas going. Another method that works is guest posting. As long as your site is of some sort worth being featured on, finding people to write a relevant post with a plug to them in it should not be too hard. Just make sure you are posting as well, after all your readers are there for your content and that’s why they come back. Your persona and view combined with the information you give is why your readers essentially do (or don’t) return.