15 Ways to Increase Your Blog Traffic with Irresistible Tweets

When a post moves off your blog’s home page, fewer readers will see it. If it’s a piece you were particularly proud of, well, that can hurt.

Maybe you wrote it just one month after you started blogging, so only three people read it.

And one of them was your mother.

Maybe Tuesday’s post was so incredible, you’d like to frame it and hang it on the wall. But for some reason, it got just 9 page views.

You can attract more readers to your blog with intriguing tweets

Studies show that, on average, 96 percent of all tweets are not retweeted. They just fall away from the stream and are never seen again.

That’s kind of depressing.

You can get more love for your blog posts if you apply a few of the tricks copywriters use.  If you write your tweet with your reader in mind, you have a better chance that it will be shared, and possibly even go viral.

Remember that on Twitter, every word counts. And because you must leave room for someone else to retweet, you have even fewer characters to work with.

The general rule is to leave 25 characters for the retweet. That means that your tweets should be no longer that 115 characters.

15 kinds of tweets that will get your blog posts shared more

Think of your tweet as your headline. People will decide in a split second whether they will stay or move on.

Here are 15 ideas for writing awesome headline tweets that will get more people to click on your blog post link (and share it with others).All of these tweets got huge click-through’s and social media shares.

1. Ask a question everyone wants the answer to.

Our brains are hard-wired to want to know the answers to questions. An example:

Are you trapped in your blogging niche? Is breaking away the answer to getting more readers?

2. Make a unique comparison.

My blog post topic was how to leave a useful and  interesting comment on a blog—and what we can learn about commenting on blogs from a child. My tweet:

First graders rule. What I learned about commenting on blogs from them.

3. Start with a strong verb and tell them what to do.

The command headline can be powerful. Example:

Get three dozen more blog post ideas in 10 minutes with this technique.

4. Use a little old-fashioned fear.

As humans, one of the biggest fears is that we will be seen as not very smart. On a tweet about a post I wrote about better writing, I tweeted:

These 5 writing mistakes will make you look stupid. Do you make any of them?

5. Get personal.

Get in there close and whisper in your reader’s ear. It makes her feel you’re talking to her as a friend.  Example:

Does your website’s error page say the right things about you and your business?

6. Make ‘em curious.

Propose a question that makes people so curious that they just have to know the answer. This post was on how people’s learning and thinking styles affect who they follow and interact with on Twitter. My tweet was:

Does who you hang out with on the Twitter playground have anything to do with your learning style?

7. Ditch the exclamation points.

When you use an exclamation point, you are screaming at your reader. Sometimes it makes sense to do that, but most of the time, it’s just plain rude. And hypey. And a bit of a red flag.

8. Don’t give it all away.

If you tweet: “Home prices drop 56%,” the reader doesn’t need to know anything else. You gave her the whole story. Instead, whet the appetite and make us want to know how big a drop it was:

Biggest drop in home prices since 1976.

9. Make it a ‘page turner.’

Try starting a story and stopping in the middle. A recent example I saw on Twitter:

Man scribbles idea for love button, gets embarrassed, then…

This was a link to a post about—well, I won’t tell you, but don’t you want to know the end of the story?

10. Mention someone famous.

For a post I wrote on the challenge Chris Brogan made to bloggers to take any one of the 100 ideas he proposed and write a blog post on it, I tweeted:

Chris Brogan told me to write this.

It certainly got the attention of the Twitter crowd.

11. Go against conventional wisdom.

If your post challenges something we have always thought was true, we will sit up and listen. For instance, I recently saw this tweet:

Customer surveys can hurt business.

Everyone writes about the benefits of asking your customers the right questions. So how can surveying our customers hurt us? I wanted to know, so I clicked through.

12. Promise something incredibly useful.

Offer a solution, but don’t tell what it is. Example:

The single e-mail subject line mistake that loses you the most sales.

The promise here is that if you correct the mistake, you’ll get more sales. And that’s a pretty useful piece of information.

13. Be funny.

One of my personal favorites: make your reader laugh. Example:

Your last web designer was abducted by aliens and he took your password with him? Make sure it never happens again.

The blog post was about taking control of your site and recovering your peace of mind.

14. Make a confession.

If you show your vulnerability, you become more interesting to your readers because they can relate to you. Recently I blogged about just how awful my very first post was—and how much I’ve grown. My tweet:

5 insanely simple  things I’ve learned about blogging since my stinky first post.

15. Disagree with someone.

I wrote a post a while back dissecting a popular Internet marketing model and disagreeing with the tactics.  The tweet:

That sensitive, pony-tailed, Internet marketer guy is getting on my nerves.  Does he bother you?

How about you?

Have you experimented with different styles and flavors of tweets to get more readers for your blog posts?

Do you think any of these could work for you?

Do you have other ideas?