In today’s post: a reminder that what gets measured, improves. How I’m improving my blog’s exposure not just by using Twitter… but by measuring the results from Twitter… as well as some key people that I’m personally following and a couple of techniques and tips that I’ve learned already.

I’ve had a Twitter account for a while but until Monday just set it up to tweet whenever I published a new post. And because I wasn’t hardly following anyone, that had little impact if any.

BUT..! I had a bizness friend tell me about hashtags (I know, I know, you techie kids are making fun of me. Remember I’m old school) and I went out there, found a few likeminded folks to follow… Then I got followed back by a few.

Twitty McTwitterington, Just-a-tweetin’ Along…

Here’s a quickie snippet of my Twittery:

BTW these guys really ARE cool. “Sonic” to this nerdy kid means an historical video game.

I courted these folks same as I might chat up a girl (if’n I was single), with a little good-
natured teasing… and started off my convo with SonicSEO thusly:

 I reached out to the head Twit that was twittering about and teased them about the “Sonic” name, not knowing if they’d get the video game reference or not.

And they were pretty cool about it. So I think they’re pretty cool too.

This is how I’m starting conversations and what it looks like I’ll be doing for the next three weeks in order to score a 100 more readers to my blog without paying a cent.

I KNOW There’s A Bizness Point to all of This…

Okay, so Thursday is “Measure Everything You Do” day on SS101. THIS particular Thursday I’m pretty stoked because I began purposely using Twitter on Monday to drive traffic to my blog, and I have my first measurable results.

Results are GOOD… good enough to tell me I oughtta figger out more about how to use Twitter. Duh.

So what do we do with these numbers? Well, the big point of Measure Everything You Do is not simply to record numbers… it’s to use ’em to reverse engineer your desired results.

Here’s the results of my little free-traffic-grabbing experiment so far:

Time spent messin’ around with Twitter: 2 hours total over four days
Folks that I Followed: 179
Follow Backs: Well, I just started but got 83 total (oops, 84, Just looked in again and grabbed another 😉
Hits on my Blog, Referred from Twitter: 6!

Hey, not bad. That’s just about one in thirteen Twitter followers… at least TOUCHING my front page.

Now, I’m not sure that that is a high result or low… I imagine that many of those hits are because I actually interacted with a couple followers. Probably jumped on in the blog to see what I was all about.

Hey, shucks. That’s all a blogger could ask for!

SO What’s the Big Deal? You Only Got Six , Dude

I know, but it was free. And a byproduct of something I was gonna do anyway: investigate Twitter as a possible way to tune into other folks in my space and connect with ’em to swap ideas.

So what do we do with these numbers? Well, the big point of Measure Everything You Do is not simply to record numbers… it’s to use ’em to reverse engineer your desired results.

Say I want 100 hits to my blog directly attributed to Twitter. I got 6 by way of following 179… getting 83 (hey, up to 85 now) follow-backs… talking with about a half a dozen… and took about 2 hours to do all this.

Let’s crunch numbers:

People I followed to blog hits: 179/6…                        30 to 1
People I followed to follow backs: 179/84                     2 to 1
People I interacted with to hits: 6/6                                 1 to 1 (hmmm…)
Time I spent snagging a hit 2hrs/6 hits                        20 minutes per blog hit

If I want to get 100 hits to the front page of my blog, that means I gotta follow 30/1 =  3,000 people.

I gotta interact with 1/1 = 100 people.

I gotta spend 20 minutes/1 = 2,000 minutes (30 hours, 20 minutes)

Well, now… I don’t think 100 hits to my blog really needs 30 hours of time, so that’s a metric I’m gonna try to improve by making my time on Twitter a little more efficient. Remember, I’m just starting with this leg of my traffic machine. But without measuring, I wouldn’t have known I needed more efficiency there.

What I’m-a Gonna Do About Twitter…

Well, I’ve decided that I will in fact get 100 hits to the blog from Twitter. But It’ll be with a strict “diet” of Twittering; I only want to spend a half an hour a day for the next three weeks. That’s about TEN hours rather than THIRTY. Using the other measurements I figger I oughtta personally follow 30/1 = 3,000 people… easy if I use hashtags and some free software out there for grabbing the right folks to follow.

Three weeks is just over 20 days, so I’ll start out by following 150 people a day.

The other statistic was people interacted with vs. hits on the blog: 6/6.

SO… to get 100 hits it stands to reason that I talk with 100 people. Now, INTERACTING with a hundred may seem like no mean trick… but again, that’s only five brief conversations per day for about three weeks. Anybody can do that, right?

Okay, Steppers! I’m going to check in again in three weeks to let you know how many cool readers ended up getting referred by Twitter. In the meantime,

Keep Stepping!

Kurt

P.S. Hey, at the beginning of this blog post I told you I’d refer a couple of really really awesome key people whose thoughts I’M following… so here they are:

My friend and online bizness mentor, Joey Kissimmee @joeykissimmee

HIS friend and mentor, Pat Flynn @PatFlynn

A guy whose landmark book, Crush It! I am diggin’ right now, Gary Vaynerchuk @garyvee

The fella whose cool post I read about doing Bizness on Twitter, James Blute @JamesBlute

A thought leader in the category of blogging for income, whose book ProBlogger I’m knee deep now Darren Rowse @problogger 

SonicSEO, the cool folks listed in this post 😉 @SonicSEO