Twitter is a relatively new craze that seems to be sweeping the online world. Many of my golf blogging buddies are using Twitter, but I was slow to get on the bandwagon. I wasn’t sure why except for maybe it was just something else to follow and take up precious time and thought energy.

Promotion

Many people promote their sites or blogs by using tools like social networking sites, photo sharing, participating in forums and now Twitter. I never really did any of that. I make comments on blogs I read that pique my interest but never just to spread myself around. Some people are really good at that and their sites grow in traffic and popularity because of it. I understand the value of all that, I just can’t keep up with it all – there’s so much to follow and stay up on. I joined many of the sites where perhaps I should spend more time to actually make them work for me, I just can’t be bothered. Now I’ve done the same thing with Twitter.

What is Twitter?

In case you don’t know, Twitter is basically a constant chat room in which you can select the people you want in it at all times. You find people to “follow” and add them to your list, and you can have all their “tweets” come right into your own custom chat room. (Tweets are how people communicate on Twitter – kind of like text messages – and must be 140 characters or less.) People can choose to follow you, and your tweets are seen by them. If someone clicks on your Twitter place, they’ll see your room and all your tweets and can choose to follow any of your followers or followees. It seems to be a great way to share interests, join groups, and expose your site to potential new readers/customers. It probably works more quickly because of the directness and interaction than myspace, facebook, flikr and many others. But again, now that I joined, I just can’t seem to put in the “work” to go around networking and getting myself out there to really make this chat room for grown ups work for me. Maybe I’m just lazy – I don’t know.

When it’s not enough to have good content

I’ve put so much content on this site over the years and I get decent traffic from google because of it. I haven’t really done any SEO or promotion, and just let my content do all the work for me. Dumb, I know. A golf blog can come along and with hardly any content, do some promotional networking, take advantage of Twitter, and surpass me in a heartbeat. At least with quantity of visitors. But what about quality? When someone clicks on an outgoing link or ad from my site, it’s a pretty good click. So am I just a twit?

Next post.