I have actually had an account at Twitter.com since August of 2006. I was in Ed Dale’s famous, 30 Day Challenge, and he was raving about the potential that Twitter held for engaging with our audience, building a following and sending traffic to our blogs. However, there was one small problem. There were not enough people on Twitter yet who ‘got it,’ so, I had about a dozen followers for about six months.

Flash forward to today when I have almost 2,000 follower. I find Twitter to be a fabulous marketing tool. I get lots of traffic from it, I am able to spread the word about what I’m up to and I’ve developed a community of friends there where we chat and re-tweet each others posts.

I do not use any of those apps that auto-tweets for me, although it would save me a lot of time. I don’t spend more than about 30 minutes all together over the course of a day on Twitter. I often send some tweets in the morning and then I sprinkle them in throughout the afternoon. I check my @replies and see if any of my peeps have anything that needs re-tweeting.

In my estimation, I send about a dozen or so tweets a day, unless I am trying to get a lot of exposure for something like a webinar or teleseminar. Then I might send a few more.

So, yes, I’m a Twitter fan. I try to keep it real, and yes I tweet about what I’m cooking, what I’m eating, what I’m writing, and when I find inspirational quotes. I tweet about what’s happening in my world–for instance right now I’m a bit snowed in as we’ve received about 24″ or so of snow this weekend and I haven’t got a shovel to dig my car out. . .

My Twitter handle is: @evelynwrites. Follow me.

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At least that’s what the little voice in my head gasped when I joined Jeff Herring’s Article Writing Marathon earlier this week. I’m a writer, and a blogger, but somehow I’ve only managed to get less than a dozen articles submitted at Ezinearticles.com. I spend a lot of time working on my sites and writing for my clients, but recently I committed myself to becoming one of my best clients and writing more articles to get the word out about my blog and to hone my skills.

While I enjoy writing a lot, I have never been a fast writer. Recently, I did some research on how to be a more productive writer and I wrote a blog post about it. I am putting some of those strategies into place, and one of my goals is to shave down the time it takes me to produce an article. I also want to continue to improve my writing skills, so joining an article writing marathon should do the trick nicely.

When I got started on this project I made a list of topics that I enjoy writing about, that I am knowledgeable about and that I can write on fairly effortlessly without needing to do a ton of research. I divided that list into sub-topics, and an idea I got from the 100 Articles in 100 Days forum is to make a mind map of each topic as I narrow the focus. I also intend to keep my eyes open for article ideas to pop into my head from my daily life. This journey can also lead me to even more topics of interest to write about.

This week I have begun each day by writing my designated article before I dive into the other writing projects that are vying for my attention. That serves to give me a big boost of energy and accomplishment to start the day off in a positive way.

We even have a hashtag on Twitter.com: #HAHD. I’ve been tweeting my progress and I’ve gotten some good encouragement from my twitter peeps.

So, in the end I will have more than just 100 articles under my belt. I will have a ton of new back links to my blog, more visibility in the search engines, more traffic–nothing but good stuff. I’m excited about my progress so far. If you join us at 100 Articles in 100 Days you can look at my profile and see my running list of articles. I will also find a way to keep my progress updated here on my blog so that my readers can observe and hold my feet to the fire if I begin to falter.

If you’re a writer, I encourage you to check out the challenge and see if it might be just the thing to breathe some new life into your writing practice.

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