I tweet a lot and thanks to TweetDeck I am kept up to date with what the people I follow are doing. By watching them I have tried to pick up as many good aspects of their habits and tried to combine it to market our blogs.

I believe that these methods are working well and would like to share them with you:

Step 1: Gaining followers with the power of the retweet

By now we should all understand the power of a retweet. If someone with 10,000 followers retweets your post then there is the potential for massive impact. The problem is that many of us don't have someone like that.

So the key is to get 10 people with 1000 followers to like you. How do you do that?

Well first you have to be genuine, if you are fake and cuddly people will pick it up almost straight away and you are more likely to lose followers instead of gaining any... you have to find 5 or 10 popular tweeters who you can genuinely have a conversation with.

You can start off by retweeting their new blog posts. You must also be able to answer some of their questions and cries for help that they put out.

By doing so you make a mark on them and there is a good chance that, by consistently being in contact and retweeting, those people will start following you.

Once they start following, and realizing that you retweet a lot of their content, they will start retweeting your content. Often what happens from there is that one of their followers will retweet that post and so on.

Step 2: Create a buildup

So now that you have the retweet power you want to leverage on that as much as possible correct?

The way you do this, and we now consider this a pivotal aspect of our tweet marketing, is by creating a build up.

If you know what next weeks post is going to be about make sure that people get a sniff of it this week.

For example:

"Do you know who John Smith is? Follow him now because next week he is on our blog."

Two days later:

"Did you know that John Smith did x,y,z... find out more next week on our post"

And so you carry on, but you do it subtly. It must not be the main focus of your tweets, it should be a random mention every now and then. By the time it gets to that Wednesday some of your followers will be chomping at the bit for when you mention that the post is live.

Another aspect is that your buildup tweets can have retweet potential.

Step 3: Consistent reminders and timing

You have the RT power, and you have created the buildup. It is time to tweet your post.

So you tweet it.... Nothing happens.

This is the part which some people may not respect and may even initially misunderstand. When you post a tweet about your latest post make sure that you do so every 4hrs on the day of it being published.

Some of you may consider it spamming but I disagree. There are many ways to skin a cat.

Part A - gauging the popular times

First of all let us focus on the basics. Not all of your followers will be online at the same time. So since you want all your followers to know about it, you will need to time your tweets so that as many of them find out as possible.

My suggestion is gauge when the popular times are. When is it that most of the retweeters are retweeting? Learn when the best time is to launch a tweet and stick to it as best as you can.

Also remember that you have to consider multiple time zones. So it is no use saying ‘oh well I will just post at 12pm my time'... 12pm your time could mean 4am in the most popular Retweeters country.

So gauge your timing correctly and tweet consistently.

Part B - Consistent tweets

If you decide to tweet about your post every 4hrs then make sure the tweets are different and that they lead to different aspects of the post.

For Example:

Tweet 1: "New blog post ‘Interview with John Smith' <link>

Tweet 2: "Have you seen out latest post? Please help #float it <link>

Tweet 3: "Our latest post is generating quite a bit of chatter! Get involved <link>"

With all three tweets you have provided different links and different subjects, which avoids the spam label and has RT power and points to different areas which promote your post in different ways.

Some tiny tips and reminders

• Tweet about old posts once in a while. The chances are that your new followers have not read previous, top drawer, posts from your blog. Let them know. The key here is to only tweet it once and to make sure that you timed it correctly.
• Create conversation. Don't just tweet about your post, talk to other tweeples. Show people that you are normal so that when you tweet about your post they will respect it. If you don't involve yourself in the community you will seem like a corporate machine
• If someone tweets something good about your blog then retweet their comments and maybe even follow them, it is good twitter etiquette.

And that ladies and gentlemen is how you should prepare a post. It is not just about the SEO, or the comments or that single tweet. It is a long process. Good planning can yield good results with visits, comments and diggs.

p.s - Follow us on Twitter and stand a chance of being retweeted (I love to retweet). Twitter.com/obox