If you’re at all familiar with auto-responder services you’ll love these free tools…

TwitterFeed at http://www.twitterfeed.com allows you to post your blog entries, to your twitter. This is a set it and forget it account that checks your blog’s feed throughout the day and when it discovers a new post, it tweets it to all your followers.

Another invaluable service is Tweet Later – automating even more of your Twitter marketing in a multitude of ways. In fact I suggest clicking the link to see the variety of ways it can use Twitter that you may not have even thought of before.

Just one of the features allows you to send any new followers an instant message the moment they ‘follow’ you on Twitter. You could just send a quick thank you note for the follow, or you might endear them to your further by including a link to a free offer on your site. For example, if your profile on twitter has to do with “home cooking”, you’ll want to give new followers a free digital cookbook or guide as an incentive to opt into your email list. The click through rates you get on these initial messages can really be high.

Remember, if you have multiple Twitter profiles for multiple markets that you’re in, keep the free offer relevant to each profile or your thank you will appear dis-jointed.

This service also allows you to broadcast messages to all of your twitter friends at once, either immediately, or set up for some point in the future.