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The following is a guest post by Nick Churick. Nick is a copywriter as well as an experienced Content & Social Media marketer. After several years of working for different companies, he is finally on his own way to success. Let’s wish him luck! You can always drop him a message on Twitter @NickChurick.

Did you know that each and every second, on average, almost 6,000 tweets appear on Twitter? This makes 360,000 tweets per minute and 500 million tweets per day. Impressive numbers? So shouldn’t this be one of the most powerful weapons of your Content Marketing strategy? Yet some bloggers have a lukewarm attitude to promoting their content on Twitter.

And here’s the reason why:

A study by Rand Fishkin from MOZ revealed that an average CTR (click-through rate) of the links you tweet is only about 1%. To put it simply, if you have, say, 1,000 followers, you will only get 10 visitors from your tweet. More followers – more visitors (but no more than 1%… OK maybe 2%).

Now, these stats are not too impressive… Really, why bother for this 1%?

Hey! Don’t surrender to despair, we’re just getting started. You can get this 1% not only from your Twitter followers. There’s another promising option:

Make your visitors tweet your content.

OK, you have a post and sure thing you shared it on Twitter. But when someone else shares your content, 1% of his followers now become your visitors. And now the traffic from Twitter will depend on the number of people, who shared your content, and, sure thing, on the number of their followers. The more the merrier!

Easier said than done, ha? But there are some tips to put this into life. And I’m willing to share them with you.

1. Magnetic headlines

On average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.

-David Ogilvy

For my money, a headline is the last (but never the least) thing to be polished in a post. The approach may be different but you must remember 2 things:

• A poor-headlined post will not even be opened
• A headline is the only informative thing people will see on Twitter

Now someone has tweeted your post. The headline will be the thing to grab his follower’s attention. And there are only 2 options for this tweet: it will either instantly motivate a person to click it and check the article, or it will be ignored.

If you have an awesome headline and it catches attention, some people will retweet it even without checking the article itself – just because they like your headline that much.

There are tons of advice on how to create cool headlines for your articles on the Web. The best piece I’ve seen so far is the Headline Hacks Report, created by Jon Morrow (ex-editor of Copyblogger).

This video may give you some ideas as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4sZtJSoKgg

Important notice! Since you’re optimizing your posts to go viral on Twitter, make sure your headlines fit the twitter window. This means as well that you have to leave enough space for people to express their opinion in a tweet (e.g. to say how great your post is) or add some additional info. So don’t make your headlines longer than 100 characters.

2. Find a proven idea to be your post’s foundation

What has been will be again,   what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

Ecclesiastes 1:9

In no way I’m telling you to grab the existing content and give it away as your own. The idea is to find out (research), what content tends to be shared. I commend to use a powerful tool by Ahrefs called Content Explorer. With it you’ll be able to see how many times the relevant content has been shared via different Social Networks. Just type in the keywords and phrases you’ve been thinking of and play with them a bit.

What you will see is that some things get shared a lot, while some perform quite poor. Hundreds and thousands of Tweets and Facebook shares is what you’re looking for. Of course you may have your own outstanding idea that will be the first one to be shared like hell. Please let me know what it is (no sarcasm).

3. Content with benefits

Every reader expects to get some use of what he or she is viewing. Once the content appears useful for your reader, most definitely it will be shared (unless your reader is a cheapskate and will not share a penny with those in need). The trick here is that by sharing something useful, a person adds value to himself in front of all of his followers. So the ideal content shall result in a share with a comment like “Look what I just found!”

Sharing the content, which is actually useful, allows people to position themselves as wise and experienced buddies in the eyes of their followers. So focus on really helpful things in your content, making your readers share it with others. Such kind of content simply promotes itself with no effort from your side.

4. Shareable sound bites

Naturally, by no means, all of your readers will feel the urge to share your content immediately. However, there may be some small piece in it that catches them. And they are ready to share it. Just think of it “They want to share, but they can’t!”. So give the readers an opportunity to share a bite of your content, not only the whole post.

Shareable visuals and tweetable quotes are what you need.

There is a bunch of tools to make an image shareable within your post. For WordPress, for instance, Shareaholic plugin is a neat tool. I’d also recommend a Slingpic plugin. They are pretty simple but bring more chances for your content to be shared.

As for the tweetable quotes, Click To Tweet and TweetDis plugins for WordPress come to your aid. With these tools, you will have a simple way to add tweetability to any text you want in your post. This may be the words of a famous artist or writer, a quote from the influencer in your field, your own wise words or just some text you’d like to emphasize.

While Click to tweet is free and simple, TweedDis has a bunch of options and nice templates, plus it can make images tweetable. Here’s a fine sample of what you can get:

What you should also see is a post by Kathryn Aragon, managing editor of the Crazy Egg blog, for click-to-tweet plugins review. Tweetable quotes are getting more and more popular, obviously because they work.

Every tweet of a sound bite like this will have a link to your post or website, giving more chances for your content to be viewed again.

5. Don’t be shy to ask!

So you want your content to be shared? Then ask for it! A single simple sentence at the bottom of the post can be the last (or even the only) straw, and suddenly you get another share.

Take a look at the Twitter stats by HubSpot. You can see the increase of Retweets, brought by call-to-action.

Your content is awesome, and you just remind your readers to share it, in case they forgot. Will you lose anything if you ask? Definitely not! If asking hurts your dignity and honor, it’s up to you. If you want a result – just ask.

I’m sure you will make a good thing of this post. May Twitter and your readers serve you well. Is there anything I’ve missed? Share more ideas of how to make your visitors share your content in comments. And after what you’ve read, I expect you to share this post 😉

Join our free Email Course to learn how to grow an audience and traffic from Twitter:

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