How To Attract More Visitors to Your Blog With Tweet Wheel

Remember that after you get your blog up and running and start blogging, you have to promote your blogposts. There’s no way around it. If you want people to read your blogposts then you need to invite people to read them.

Today I want to show you Tweet Wheel. One of the plugins that will help you get the word out about your blogposts using Twitter. This guide is a beginner level guide.

You need to have your blog ready and a Twitter account. I recommend that you have at least three to seven blogposts before you activate Tweet Wheel. Below you’ll find a link that lets you download this as a PDF download.

Tweet Wheel  is a really good social media plugin for WordPress because it automates the scheduling of tweets that share your posts. But it does it differently than every other plugin out there. It is smart and contextual.

The great thing about Tweet Wheel it is that you can manually craft each tweet for each blogpost. This prevents you from repeating the same thing over an over like other plugins do.

Take for example this post you’re reading. The title is:

How To Attract More Visitors to Your Blog With Tweet Wheel.

Most Twitter plugins will take that exact title of your blogpost and post it to Twitter the moment you hit the Publish button. Even Jetpack does it… that’s the way they work.

There are other plugins that will post it every few days (depending on settings), but they will always repeat the same thing, the same title and a link to the post.

Needless to say, your Twitter followers may not appreciate you saying the same thing over and over. Also, if you are still practicing your title-crafting skills your title may not be the best thing to tweet out. It is much better to come up with some contextual phrases that will make sense to a specific paragraph of the blogpost.

That’s where Tweet Wheel excels! You can hand-craft each tweet for each blogpost and even add multiple tweets to be used to promote a single blogpost. At the end of the tutorial I show you how I did it for this blogpost.

So I can change each tweet to show a different phrase and not just the title that I mentioned earlier, I’ll show you at the end of the tutorial how this works. Let’s get started.

How to Attract More Visitors to Your Blog with Tweet Wheel

First search for the plugin from your blog’s dashboard and install the plugin like you would install any other plugin, if you need help with that part then review this: How to install a plugin to your WordPress blog. Tweet Wheel is available in the official WordPress plugin repository.

Installing and configuring Tweet Wheel

1. Install and Activate the plugin.

Review the instructions on how to install a plugin if needed.

2. Authorize your Twitter account to work with the plugin.

You’ll need to allow your blog to work with your Twitter account. It’s easy to do.

Before you continue, make sure you are logged in to your Twitter account, then go to the Tweet Wheel menu and find the “Authorize” link.

You’ll see a screen like the one below, just click on the Authorize button.

This is pretty standard stuff, you’ll be asked to confirm after this.

The next step is to let Twitter know that you do approve the Tweet Wheel app to work with your blog.

Make sure the Tweet Wheel logo shows up and then click on the Authorize app button.

If you aren’t logged in before you start the authorization process you will be prompted to login before you see this screen.

If all went well, you’ll see a confirmation screen, and you’ll be taken back to you blog in a few moments. If you take too long to complete this process or something goes wrong, you’ll be notified and you can try the Authorization process again.

Standard Twitter confirmation after authorization

3. Configure basic settings

After Tweet Wheel has been authorized, you’ll notice the Authorization menu has been replaced with a Settings menu.

Click on the Tweet Wheel Settings menu and configure the settings to suit your needs.

If you are following my guide from the beginning and just got your blog setup then the default settings are fine to start with. This assumes you mostly have blogposts or will be writing blogposts.

If you are going to be publishing many pages and you want to send tweets about those then you should check the “pages” box as well.

The section where you define the template for your tweets is configured to work automatically but if you have a specific niche or topic and you will be focusing on that, you can also add hashtags to this template.

Select the type of posts, template and behavior of Tweet Wheel here.

The {{Title}} part of the template will take the title of the blogpost as-is, the {{URL}} will take the full address of your blogpost. Remember that Twitter will shorten that link so don’t worry if your URLs are long.

However… If you follow my advice, most of your tweets will not use the default template anyway because we will customize them manually on a case by case basis. See optional step 6.

4. Setup a schedule

The next step is to decide when you want Tweet Wheel to send out your tweets. From the settings tab at the top, click on Schedule.

I recommend that you start off with just a few tweets per day so that you don’t self-promote too much. If you are tweeting 10 – 20 times per day, you would want your blogposts to be three to six of those.

Please note that I’m just giving you some rough numbers to use when tweeting. There’s no hard-set rule for this but the general consensus is that you don’t want to send out tweets that only self-promote.

You can select each day of the week you want the tweets to go out, then below that you’ll select what time you want the tweets to be sent out. Blue days (see screenshot) indicate days where the schedule will be active.

I would recommend you stick to days and times that you are normally tweeting so you can engage with people that interact with your automatic tweets. You don’t necessarily want a tweet to go out at 3:00 am if you are asleep at that time and can’t respond to questions or feedback!

Pick each day then add a schedule below. You can add any time or date.

Now you’re ready to fill the Queue!

5. Fill the queue

This function takes the settings and your schedule and fills the queue of tweets to send out accordingly. You will have a chance to edit the queue.

If you are still setting up Tweet Wheel during the initial setup stage, you should see a button at the top that says Fill-Up The Queue. Click that.

Click here to automatically fill-up your auto-tweet Queue

If you don’t see that button, you’ll find the Queue menu under the Tweet Wheel menu on the left hand side of your dashboard.

The standard Queue menu is under the Tweet Wheel menu

From the Queue page, just click on “Fill-Up The Queue”

This will take your settings and apply them to a list of tweets to queue up for auto-tweeting

Depending on how many blogposts you have, you’ll see a list of them queued up for delivery to Twitter.

Technically, you are ready to go but I like (and suggest you do the same) to take it one step further. Customize each post to have its own unique message and not just the title.

You’ll notice that your queue will be paused initially. Before the system starts working, you’ll need to click on “Resume” at the top.

You can also empty the queue and refill it from this location. That’s in case you made changes to a few posts.

As you scroll down the list of posts, you’ll also notice that each post has three actions underneath the title.

• Tweet Now, as the wording suggests will send the tweet out immediately; this is great for testing to make sure everything is working.
• Remove, will remove the post from the queue temporarily; it may be added to the queue later when you refill. If you want the tweet omitted from future tweets then you need to edit it out (see next section).
• And Edit Post will take you to the edit window for the post where you can customize the tweet that will be sent out.

At the bottom of each blogpost, you will see an edit box for Tweet Wheel. You can also use the “grab” button on the left of each title to drag the post up or down and rearrange the order.

The Queue screen in Tweet Wheel is a bit of a control center for the whole system.

6. Optional, customize each post’s template.

As I mentioned before, you can setup a template for your tweets, and this will make Tweet Wheel work just like all the other auto-tweeting plugins out there. It will take the title of the blogpost and the URL and tweet it out. But like I said earlier, this will annoy your Twitter followers.

It’s better to customize each tweet. Even if this takes a little more time to complete, you only have to do it once for each blogpost. I recommend you come up with at least 3 unique tweets per blogpost.

To customize the tweets, from the Queue screen (shown above), click on Edit post. This will take you to the standard edit window for the post in question, so if you want to do this witout going to the Tweet Wheel Queue screen, just go to edit a single blogpost or page and you’ll see the option at the bottom of the edit screen.

Tweet Wheel adds two new sections to your blogposts. A post-specific section and a section to create your own tweets for the post.

The Tweet Settings allows you to exclude the post from Tweet Wheel altogether. The other setting available lets you pick your tweets to be sent out randomly or in the order in which you create them.

This is where you can completely exclude a post from showing up in the Tweet Wheel Queue

The next section is the fun part. The idea behind customizing each tweet is that your blogpost has different sections or items that are worth mentioning.

At least it should have those features, –you are following my 4-part blogging course… right?

To add a new tweet, just click on the button that says Add a Tweet Template.

The format is the same as the main template, the same variables are available.

You will then take some of the best parts of the blogpost and turn them into a tweet. Here’s how I did it for this tutorial so you can get an idea.

In the screenshot below I show you four custom tweets I created. Notice that I added some tags manually to create relevance and context, #socialmedia, #tutorial, #blogging.

You should also have the {{URL}} variable on each tweet so that Tweet Wheel includes the link to the blogpost.

On the right hand side, you’ll see that there is a counter to keep track of how many characters you have taken up. Remember the 140-character limit with Twitter applies.

Custom tweets are a gazillion times better than the default (and boring) Title tweet.

After you created your tweets, save your blogpost. If the blogpost is already published then next time you refill the queue for Tweet Wheel, these tweets will be included in there.

Here are some questions I had when I started using it.

How do you prevent Tweet Wheel from tweeting out a blogpost.

In the same area where you can customize the tweet settings for a specific blogpost, you can specify that you DO NOT want that post on Twitter. Look a couple screenshots above and in the per-post settings screen you can see a checkbox that will take care of this for you.

Can you customize the schedule on a per day basis?

Not as far as I can tell. I wish this was a feature. It’s a fairly new plugin so I would imagine they might consider this option in the future. This would give us a Buffer-style of scheduling system.

But if you’re using Twitter properly and adding in regular manual updates and interacting with people, then it should be okay to have a static schedule.

Can it send out Tweets with images?

Yes but you need the paid version ($19.00) and you can find that here: Tweet Wheel Pro. It will take your featured image for that post and use it to tweet out your posts.

Hope you liked this tutorial and found it useful! I would love to hear your feedback and especially if you have any questions or if you have suggestions for other ways to get more visitors from Twitter to your blog.