The Tweet Circle That Puts Your Blog Post in Front of a Million Readers in Five Minutes

You already know the feeling. You log into a social network you barely use, see fifteen tabs of settings and options and trending panels, and close the laptop without posting anything useful. Then you open the next platform and do it again. If you are building an online business one evening at a time, spreading yourself across every network at once is not ambition, it is a slow way to accomplish nothing on any of them.

Michelle Schaefer built her blog traffic to roughly 40,000 unique visitors and 600,000 page views in a single month, and Twitter alone was responsible for about a quarter of it, second only to her own email list. She did not get there by juggling ten platforms. She picked one, learned exactly how it worked, and stopped there until it was actually producing.

Why does adding another network make you worse at all of them?

The instinct when you feel behind is to add more channels. More platforms, more posting, more surface area. Schaefer’s advice cuts against that instinct directly: pick one, focus, and only add a second once the first is actually working. She admitted the same confusion most people feel logging into an unfamiliar network.

Twitter’s appeal, in her telling, is that its limits make it hard to overcomplicate. A short character count and a narrow set of actions mean there is less room to hide from actually doing the work. The 80-20 rule still applies, meaning most of what you post should not be a link to your opt-in page, but the platform itself does not give you enough rope to build something needlessly complicated.

What actually gets you noticed by people who already have the audience you want?

Here is the part most people skip. Everybody on Twitter is talking. Almost nobody is listening. Schaefer’s method was to build a list of ten influencers in her niche, follow their tweets closely, and watch for the moment they asked a question. She was first in line with a genuinely useful answer, every time.

That single habit, repeated for years, built real relationships with bloggers she says she would have been too shy to approach cold. Some of those same people now share her content with their own audiences without being asked, because she earned it one answered question at a time. The same approach works for finding leads directly: watch for people asking about working from home or getting started in network marketing, and answer with a real solution instead of a pitch.

How do you get traffic before you have a single follower?

The objection is obvious. All of this sounds fine if you already have an audience. What if you have fifty followers, or none? Schaefer’s answer involves borrowing reach rather than building it from zero, and it works in two stages.

First, find the five or ten accounts already blogging about your topic, open their public followers list, and follow the people already interested in that subject. Somewhere between thirty and forty percent of them tend to follow back immediately, because they are already primed to care about what you post. Second, set up what she calls a tweet circle, a small group of bloggers who agree to automatically share each other’s new posts to their own following. She laid out the process in three steps:

1. Make a list of bloggers outside your own company who share a similar audience.
2. Reach out and propose the arrangement directly, framed as a mutual favor.
3. Set up the automated feed once, and every future post gets pushed to everyone’s followers without any extra work.

Now I know the minute I hit publish, it’s going to go out on about 50 different people’s Twitter feeds. It’s going to be in front of about a million readers within five minutes.

That is the mechanism doing the work that used to take her manual promotion after every single post. As she put it, describing the moment before she had any of this in place, “if I log into a social network, and there’s like 15 zillion options and things going on, I get confused, and I get distracted, and I don’t do anything effective with it.” The tweet circle exists precisely to remove that friction. You do the setup once, and the reach compounds every time you hit publish afterward.

She also pointed to a smaller detail worth stealing: instead of only letting Twitter auto-share your post headline, embed a few pull quotes directly inside the post itself, so readers can tweet a specific line rather than the generic title. One post where she tried this got eight times the normal number of tweets. Small mechanism, real difference in what actually spreads.

None of this requires becoming a Twitter personality or posting constantly. It requires picking the one channel that fits your business, learning its actual mechanics, and building the handful of relationships that turn a single post into thousands of impressions without you lifting a finger twice.

The full session goes further than what’s above, including the specifics of setting up automated blog feeds and using visuals to stand out in a crowded timeline. Watch it in full, free, when you Create your free account.

The full session transcript follows below.

Transcript

Now I need you to stand on your feet and welcome to the stage, Michelle Schaefer! I have slides somewhere. Awesome. Alright.

The topic that Mr. Osh will ask me to share with you about today is Twitter. And if you feel like Twitter is a little bit of a foreign universe, hopefully, in about 20 minutes, instead, you'll feel like this little bird, ready to tackle it. So what I'm going to share with you today are five things that you must know to get results, which is traffic and leads from Twitter, three very, very simple ways to build your audience, and a couple of smart ways to get traffic, even if you don't have any followers yet.

I give you permission not to do Twitter, so I'm just going to be up front with that. Twitter is something that is not for everybody. It is a fantastic tool. But you've heard a lot of different social media sites shared today.

You need to pick one and focus. Once you get that one figured out, add another one. So don't try to do everything today other than your Periscope. Make sure you do that today.

However, I am going to show you, and this may make you want to try Twitter, how investing 30 minutes of your time can get every new post on your blog in front of 100,000 people or more. That's good, right? Yeah. Alright, so I'll share that in a minute.

Let's get started here, though. So my blog, I just checked my stats before I came on stage. Last 30 days, I've had about 40,000 unique visitors, about 600,000 page views. Which, to tie this back into what we were on stage with yesterday, those two huge spikes you see in my stats were days I posted really long, epic blog posts.

So it does absolutely work. But Twitter is my second biggest traffic source. About 25% of my traffic comes from Twitter. The only reason it's second is because I use that traffic to build a list.

I email my list often, and that's… That's my biggest source of traffic. But of social media, Twitter drives more than 25% of it. Which, if you look at the numbers, 25%—should have done this math before I stepped up here— you know, 150,000 page views or so is coming from Twitter a month on my blog.

So it can be a fantastic way to achieve a couple of things. Drive traffic, generate leads and sales, and get noticed by influencers. I will show you how to do all of those. The reason I love Twitter is because it's very, very…

simple. I don't know if anybody else has this problem, but if I log into a social network, and there's like 15 zillion options and things going on, I get confused, and I get distracted, and I don't do anything effective with it. Twitter is very hard to mess up. Like Tracy mentioned about Periscope, there's only a couple things you can do.

If you know how to swipe, you're okay. Twitter's the same thing. It's 140 character limit, very short messages. You can't do that much, so you really can't mess it up.

That's why I love Twitter. There's five things you've got to know, though, to make it work for you. And I'm going to skip over basics because you've already heard them today. You guys know the 80-20 rule.

Not every single thing that you tweet should be a link to a lead capture page. Nobody's going to pay attention if that's all you do on Twitter. Follow the 80-20 rule. You guys know about profiles.

You heard John Oakes and Anna Zubarev were talking about how to set up your profiles the right way. Those rules apply to all social media. Real pictures. You're a review.

You're a person. And that you're connecting with real people. You've already got these things down. So I'm going to skip those.

The biggest thing to know about Twitter, if you want it to work for you, is that you need to listen because everybody else is talking. Most people on Twitter are just constantly posting tweets. Go see this. Click here.

Check this out. They're not really interacting with anyone. If you want to get noticed, take time to actually interact with people. If you hit a button and reply to that, you're going to get noticed.

Because so few people actually take the time to do that and interact. Answering and sharing solutions. One of the things that works really well on Twitter, especially if you want to do what Tracy talked about and engage with people on a level that gets them in a conversation with you off of Twitter, where you can present the business opportunity to them, where you can share with them about Kalaatu or about the products, is to start by answering their questions. You'll see people all the time ask questions on Twitter and it's crickets.

Nobody responds. So be that person who responds to their questions. This is also how you get noticed by influencers. One of the things that I did on Twitter I started years ago was I made a list.

If you're familiar with Twitter, you know how to make a Twitter list. If not, go to YouTube and search how to create a Twitter list and you'll find it. You can create a list of people that you want to see all their tweets. I created a list of about ten people.

I created a list of people who were influencers in the blogging sphere who I wanted to notice me, who I wanted to connect with. I'm a pretty shy person, so I don't just like go up to people I don't know and then, you know, hey, let's work together kind of thing. But what I did was I created a Twitter list and I started following them, watching all of their tweets. And what I was specifically watching for was a question.

When they ask a question, I was going to be the first person to give them the best answer I could come up with. And that's how I've connected with and tweeted with a lot of people that I might never meet in person or I might never be brave enough to say anything to in person. But I was able to connect with them. And now some of those same people, I'm going to share a strategy at the end of this, some of those same people are the ones who tweet out my blog post and get it in front of hundreds of thousands of people for me.

Because I answered a question, they appreciated that and they noticed me. So that's one way you can use Twitter to get people who are influencers to realize that you exist. That you have some valuable content to share and make that connection with them. This also works for other people.

If you're looking for leads on Twitter, watch for questions about getting started working from home or about network marketing. And answer those questions. Reach out with the solutions. Third thing is interact.

How do you interact? Well, you can direct message people on Twitter. But you need to move the conversation off of Twitter. You need to move the conversation to somewhere that you've got control of it.

As Tracy talked about earlier. We talked about on Periscope a more intimate setting where you can actually have a conversation with that real person on the other side of the computer. So keep that in mind. That your goal with Twitter is to find leads.

But then to move the conversation to somewhere that you can control it. And you have to keep in mind that you've got to be intentional about building your following on Twitter. You want followers because otherwise you're tweeting into thin air. That's not going to be a good investment of your time.

So I'll give you some tips for that in a minute. But really, this is how you get noticed. On Twitter. Stand out by being unique.

Being opinionated. And using visuals. Twitter allows you to bring images into it now. Where you can share images along with your blog posts or along with other things.

Make sure you use that. Because it gets you noticed in the news feed. I'm sorry, in the Twitter feed. But be yourself on Twitter.

A lot of people just hop on there and share links. Share personal stuff. You've heard other people talk about that today. Share what you're up to.

Share anything that you want. Anything that's unique to you. And share your opinions on stuff. When you see other people tweet things, hit reply.

Let them know what you think. You don't want to blend into the crowd in Twitter. You want to be yourself. You want to get noticed for that.

So you've got to stand out. So let's go over three really simple ways that you can build your audience. The number one rule, though, is to be intentional and consistent about it. If you don't take consistent action to build your audience, it's not going to just happen automatically.

Much like blogging. You've got to do more than just hit publish if you want to get traffic to your blog, right? You have to be intentional about attracting traffic. And you've got to be consistent with it.

So number one, reach out and connect with people. And this is really easy to do. You can search for hashtags. You guys know what hashtags are?

Is anybody awake? Yeah? Okay, good, good. You can search for hashtags.

You can use what's called tweet chats. And just interact with people. Tweet chats are something that if you go to Google and type in tweet chat, you'll find some sites that list literally hundreds of thousands of chats going on on Twitter about every topic under the sun. So you'll be able to find people in the community that you want to connect with depending on who specifically you're targeting with the opportunity.

You can use tweet chats to find them. They'll all be tweeting with the same hashtag that you can search for. And then you just go connect with all of them. Hit follow.

Send them a direct message. Say hello. Introduce yourself. Jump into the conversation with them.

And move it from there into getting them onto your list and sharing the opportunity with them. But hashtags, tweet chats are some great ways to find people. The second one is connect your networks. You've heard several people say this from stage.

Every social media network that you're active on connects them to each other. So make sure that you've got your Twitter connected to your Facebook, to your Pinterest, wherever you're at. Because one of the things that will help you quickly build relationships is that you'll be able to connect with people. And one of the things that will help you quickly build relationships and rapport with people so that you can sell them is the more times that they see you, the more content they see from you, you're building trust.

They say it takes how many times before somebody is willing to buy from you that you've got to connect with them. They've got to see you. Well, you can just focus on one thing and wait until you build those, what is it, 7 to 12, I don't know, the number changes all the time, touch points with them. Or you can get somebody to connect with you everywhere and very quickly hit that number of things.

Hit that number of touch points to where they're coming to you and saying, hey, okay, I see you everywhere, I see your content. Tell me more about what it is that you do to make money. So make sure that all your networks are connected. Make sure that you're sending your list emails that say, hey, did you know I'm on Twitter?

Let's connect. Or posting on Facebook, hey, connect with me on Twitter. Connect with me on Pinterest. Connect all of your networks.

Blank slide. Oh, third strategy. And you didn't hear this from me. Anybody know what this page is?

That's my followers on Twitter. That's a public page. Anybody can see every single person who follows me. Here's the thing about this.

If you send me a message and say, hey, Michelle, send me your email database. I want to get to know all the people who are following you. That's not going to happen. I'm not going to share that with you.

No, no, no, no, no, no. However, how many of these people following me do you think are on my email list? And if I am blogging about topics similar to what you're blogging about, how many of these people would be interested in what you're blogging about, too? If you go to Twitter and look up the top five or ten people who blog about similar topics to you, go to their followers page and just hit follow on the people who are following them, you'll see anywhere from 30 to 40% of them will immediately follow you back.

So you can essentially swipe somebody else's followers, their community, by going to their follower page and just following the same people. So for me, this would be things like if I go to HubSpot and follow everybody following HubSpot, I'm going to get a crowd of people who are interested in internet marketing, content marketing, blogging. It's the audience that I want. So this is one of the fastest ways to quickly build that community on Twitter of targeted individuals.

So you don't just go randomly following them. You start somewhere. You can also see if you go there, if you were to click lists, you can see lists that I've made that are public of people I'm following. You can go and check that out for anybody.

So check out the influencers on Twitter who blog about whatever you do or who have that similar audience and go follow their people. You can't get their email database, but this is a pretty good alternative to that. So that's one way to very quickly build your followers. But if you're wondering, I don't have any followers yet.

Or I've only got 50. If you're 100 followers, what can I do right now to start getting traffic? If you've got that question, I'm going to give you a strategy for that. The site is called Twitter Feed.

And what it does is it automates sending blog posts out on Twitter. So if I set up my blog feed in here, every time I post a new blog, it will automatically get tweeted out to my Twitter followers. The cool thing about this is you can do it with anybody's blog URL. And I know there's a few of you in the room who are familiar with this because we've set this up.

I know, Lynn Brown, where are you? You're in here somewhere. Every time Lynn posts something to her blog, my Twitter account sends it out. So her blog post immediately gets in front of all of my Twitter followers because we're part of what's called a Twitter circle or a tweet circle.

Very easy to set up. I want you to write this down. There's three steps. Number one, create a list.

So who do you know that's blogging that shares a similar audience? Again, in this list, you want to look for people who aren't in Empower Network already, okay? So you want to look outside of Empower Network for this to work really effectively for you. Create a list.

Send a message, email, Facebook, whatever works for you to reach out to these people that you're connected with. And just say something like, hey, I love your blog. I'd like to make sure that I'm sharing it with all my Twitter followers. And I thought we could set up a tweet circle.

The way it works is I'll set up your feed to go automatically to my Twitter followers, and you do the same for me. Let's find a few other friends, do this all together, and every time we publish a new blog post, they're going to get in front of 100,000 people or more. Really simple. You only have to go set it up once.

Step three is to set up the feeds. You only have to do it once, and then it's automated. Every time you post something to your blog, it will go out on all of the people in the circles' Twitter feeds as well. So if you take 30 minutes and do this, every time you publish something, you know you're going to get readers back to your blog.

Because it's going out on lots of people's Twitter accounts. It's very easy to set up. Only takes a few minutes. And this is one of the fastest ways that I get traffic to my blog.

I used to hit publish on a post, and then I would have to figure out, okay, where am I going to promote it? Where am I going to go share it? Now I know the minute I hit publish, it's going to go out on about 50 different people's Twitter feeds. It's going to be in front of about a million readers within five minutes.

So this is something that can really work for you, and you don't have to have followers yet for it to work, because you can leverage other people's followers and those connections as you build your Twitter following. So it's a really great way to do it. Also, listen to Tracy. Do Periscope.

You will see your Twitter followers go up when you do that. You guys all committed to do a Periscope for the first time today? Right? Yeah?

Yeah? Okay. All right. One more tip.

Have you guys seen these before in blog posts? Anybody know what these are? Embedded tweets? Tweetables?

This is a couple that I put in a blog post that I wrote about breaking through writer's block, because I happened to have writer's block that day. So I'll share some strategies to break through it and get myself through it. And I put tweetables in the post to test out and see what would happen. Because normally, you know, you've got the little tweet button at the end of your blog post or at the beginning or on the side somewhere, and it just tweets out your headline and the link.

So whatever the headline on your blog post is, is what is shared. Well, I put four tweetables into this blog post that were not the headline, as you can see. These are all different things. One is a quote.

I love that quote. Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. Very important concept.

Very important concept to get a hold of. And a couple others that were related to things in the blog post. This blog post, normally a blog post of mine will get, you know, I get, I don't know, 50 or 100 tweets. This one got eight times as many tweets and it got way more traffic because there were these scattered throughout the post that anybody could click on as they read and share it on Twitter.

And I got permission before stepping out and up here to announce that we are going to be adding this to Kalaatu for you guys. So you will have this available soon. It's very easy to use. You select what the text is that you want your followers, your readers to tweet, and you can get it to show up just like that, formatted nicely inside of your blog post.

So that will be coming soon. It's another great way to get traffic from Twitter, even if you're not active on Twitter, even if you don't have followers yet, because you're allowing your readers to share for you and they've got followers. So I will wrap it up with that and just say get out there and give Twitter a shot. It can be a great source of traffic to your site.

Give it up for Michelle Schaffer, everybody. Michelle Schaffer.