Please tweet your blog

I’m not sure if it’s sad to admit that I know get most of my news links from Twitter than your regular RSS feed, but that’s the way it is. However, there’s a fine line when getting Twitter links from article sites is more annoying than useful. Of course, the opposite is true to. If you have a blog, and you use Twitter, you need to combine them.

If you have a personal blog that is just that, personal, and not a product blog or regular news blog, then you need to have your entries automatically Twittered. Use a service like Twitterfeed or Hoot Suite and every time you post to your blog it will get tweeted for you with a link. It will instantly get your posts more readers…assuming that’s what you’re after.

Using Twitter is especially important if you don’t post to your blog all that often. If you’re posting less than once a week then Twitter will help. I use the iGoogle home page and it’s filled with some of my favorite feeds, mostly from “pro” web sites. I also subscribe to a lot of my friends’ blogs but they don’t update all that often - which is fine - but then I’m filling my reader page up with feeds I really don’t need to check all the time.

But if you’re on Twitter and your unfrequent entries are tweeted automagically, it will remind people that you a) have a blog, and b) to go read it. Your seemingly random posts need to be hand fed to people because they’re just not used to going to your site out of habit. I don’t need Kotaku or Ajaxian on my feed readers because I’ve been trained to go there daily.

And even if all of that sounds like a load, well, auto-tweeting your blog posts certainly can’t hurt. It’s a set-and-forget thing anyway. If anything, it will surprise you the first time you see your auto-tweet with your blog link - and it’ll be pretty cool.