I'm going to let you in on a little secret about how you can get more traffic to your blogs from Twitter - even if, like me, you barely tweet at all.

Best of all, once you've spent a couple minutes to set things up, there's no more effort required on your part.

What's the secret?

Twitterfeed!

What is Twitterfeed and how does it work?

Twitterfeed takes RSS and Atom feeds and republishes them on your Twitter timeline. You choose how often you want the sytem to check your blog feeds and republish a your post(s) from once every 30 minutes to once every 24 hours. Up to 5 posts at a time can be sent to Twitter. Note also that your posts need to contain a publish date so Twitterfeed will know which posts are new.

You are given the option of posting just the title of the post or the title and truncated description to Twitter. You can also prefix each of your tweets from Twitterfeed with something like 'My latest post: ' or 'New on YourSiteName: '.

I however would suggest that you avoid using the prefix, especially if you have a tendency to write long blog post titles which will get truncated if the prefix is too long.

You will also want to make sure that you check the 'Include item link' box, otherwise Twitterfeed will send the tweet without a link back to your post. You have choices as to which service Twitterfeed will use to shorten the link including;

• TinyUrl
• TweetBurner
• SnipURL
• bit.ly
• is.gd
• URLshot

Tweets don't have to come just from your blog feed.

For example, I set up a Twitter feed that tweets whenever I post a new article to the article directory here on NetProfitsToday, as the ArticleLive content management system that I use supplies feed URLs for each category and sub-category.

Open a Twitterfeed Account

To get started, go to Twitterfeed.com. You will have to supply your Twitter username and password so the system can post your blog updates to your twitter account.

Twitterfeed supports OpenID, a service that eliminates the need for multiple usernames across different websites. You probably already have an OpenID if you use services such as Flickr, Yahoo! or Wordpress.com.

So... check out Twitterfeed and enjoy the extra traffic! :-)