I hope you signed up for your Twitter account. Make sure you have set up your profile and put the website you want to drive traffic to in the "More info URL" box. Once you have completed your profile, you want to start folowing people.

There are 2 ways to do this. You can click on the "public timeline" link at the top of the page but I recommend using the search box where it says "People" in the right hand column. Type in a keyword to find people with similar interests. Once the results come up click on the "follow" button to start getting notices on your home page when ever that person makes a "tweet".

By the way, a "tweet" is what you do when you post a statement. We are going to be discussing a lot of different Web 2.0 sites and most of them have there own termanology that you will need to familiarize yourself with. I would make it a practice to make at least one tweet a day if not more. Don't be spammy about it. If you post a link every time you make a tweet, then you won't get as many followers.

You have to use the service in the spirit that was intended and slip in the occassional plug for your website. Make tweets like "Taking the family to the beach this afternoon" or "Watching the football game and having a few cold ones." Then later that day, "I'm just made a new post to my blog at http://yourdomain.com". Just don't over do it.

That is going to be the case with most of these social websites. You want your backlinks to look as natural as possible. I will discuss each one as we go because some sites are much more tolerant than others.

When you signed up for Twitter, you probably noticed that you can use Twiiter with IM and SMS. You can also go to http://m.twitter.com with your smart mobile phone. There are a couple of Word Press plugins that I know of. One lists your tweets in the side bar and the other one gives you full functional acces to your Twitter account from your blog and will automatically create a tweet whenever you make a blog post. If you post on a regular basis, you can accumulate quite a few PR 8 backlinks . Just don't forget to mix it up by making daily tweets without links. You can also use the @ symbol in a tweet to target a specific Twitter user. This will also give you "social" credibility and help you be one of the crowd.

There are other ways to monetize Twitter, aside from building backlinks and creating traffic to your websites. Websites like Twitter love it when people create applications that are designed to specifically work with their websites. Use your imagination along with a programmer and come up with something that ties Twitter into another Web 2.0 site like MySpace, YouTube,  or maybe Ebay and you can see the potential.

There are already a bunch of widgets and what not that have been created. I also discovered more plug ins. The list is too extensive to put here so here are the links. Click here for the Top 10 Plugins and click her for the Twitter Wiki.

You will see that there are tons of different applications and more are being created all the time as Twitter becomes more popular. I recently read that so many people are joining , the technical team can't upgrade the servers fast enough to handle the load.