Jan, Great story, and I’m glad things worked out so well for your friend, in part thanks to the Twitter technique. Commenting on blogs is especially effective these days, precisely because Twitter siphons off so many comments. As a blogger, I still appreciate comments (thank for yours!), even though my posts may be ReTweeted many times over.

Barbara, Indeed you are an excellent Twitter resource! You’ve taught me quite a bit these last six months or so.

I have a reader who at first did not blog. He’s just content to read and comment on my blog and friends’ sites. He has so many doubts about blogging. But we’ve prevailed on him to let go of his worries. He eventually put up a blog. And because he has unintentionally built up a good network of friends via his prolific blog commenting, his first post was a resounding success. No baptism of fire for him – no lonely nights, wondering when will the first commenter come. He’s capitalized on the huge goodwill he has created thru making his presence felt via blog commenting. I can’t see why the same can’t be replicated by a sensible use of Twitter.

So my suggestions is this: use both blog commenting strategy and branding yourself in Twitter.

Twitter is a brilliant interface for building up ‘followers’ of your business or brand. So many company’s are now using it as part of their PR strategy.

I totally agree that it can be disheartening when you feel you are writing lots of text and yet nobody seems to be reading it, giving people a taster of what you do on Twitter is a great way to introduce them to your blog.