[Editors Note]

Hi there everyone, this is the first guest post on my blog, and I’m glad to introduce to you Funto, a blogger with a nice readership base. He’d be talking today on how he uses Twitter to market his blog post.

Without further ado, here’s Funto.

It’s hard work.

I own a blog, my URL is http://www.obafuntay.com, I know how discouraging it is to publish something on there and still see ‘0 comments’ days after. I’m a Stat addict. Yes, I stay refreshing my stat page every other minute. Maybe it’s just me but I want people to read what I write, I want them to enjoy it, I want them to critique, comment on it, I want them to relate to it, it’s why I write. But for all of that to happen I have to get them to click that link, I need to get them on my blog page.

When I started blogging, I had nothing specific I blogged about, I really just put out what I felt like, anything really, you know, the initial “I have a blog gra gra”. With time, I got this advice from someone who had been in the game longer than me. I was told to blog a little more particular. Remember the saying “Jack of all trades, master of none”? By this, he meant if I was going to have a Fashion blog, let it be. If its photography let it be… if it were story writing, let it be. You get my drift. This doesn’t mean you can’t chip in something new and different once in a while. The idea behind this is so that I get myself a circle of readers that come to my blog because they want to and are interested in what I blog about and so they look forward to checking my blog once something new is put up.

Also, you’d want to write something interesting, attract the reader and captivate them from the very beginning. A catchy title would increase the chances of your post link being clicked. As a kid, I loved to read stories that had images alongside, it’s one of the reasons I love Enid Blyton. Personally, the likelihood I read a blog post without an image (which you could get from Google or design your own thing) is very low.

What am I trying to say? … If you’re going to put something up the internet. Do your best to make it appealing, sought after and interesting.

Now, when all of this is good and done, the next pressing question is how do I get readers to my blog post?

This is where people underestimate the power of the Social Media, I’m talking Facebook, Twitter, Stumbleupon, digg and other social networks. Anytime you have something new up, make sure to tell it to the whole word! What better way than to use this easy tool called the social media? This part is easy really, get your Facebook friends to check you blog link by posting it on their walls or sending them individual messages to check your new post and let you know what they think… after all, this is why they are your friends. No?

Twitter has been a major contributing factor to the traffic that comes to my site. It’s your job to tweet the link of your new post to anyone and everyone, followers and following, nonetheless, this shouldn’t be done day after day, else it becomes spam and people just get tired. The retweet function on twitter is another reason why I love to use twitter in publicizing my post, get your followers to always help retweet your link to their followers.

At the beginning, I mentioned it to be hard work; I should also add that it is totally worth it. I’ve seen the positive effect social media publicity has on the traffic that comes my way.

Note however, that thousands of hits will not happen over the night, it takes time, dedication, be patient. One outstanding benefit of using social media yet again is that you are able to reach targeted readers. The quality of readers you get, the quality of their reviews, comments surpasses quantity.

I may not have thousands of readers but I have readers, quality regular readers.

It’s worth it.

But then, this is what I think, what do I know?