Top 10 Ways to Drive Social Media Traffic to Your Website

The centre of your online marketing strategy should be your website so that you can add potential customers to your marketing funnel and eventually to become buyers.  This means that social media shouldn’t to be the destination for your followers. Instead it should only be the beginning of a long relationship that involves sharing, interacting, learning and engaging.

We suggest you use social media

• to remind followers to visit your website for more information, products and services
• as a way to listen to what your audience wants
• as the method by which you become an important industry expert from whom your audience seeks information.

The following tips are used by industry experts, large organisations and businesses alike to drive social media traffic to their websites. No need to reinvent the wheel, these ten tips work!

1. Become a Thought Leader

It may seem strange that the more popular you can become off the Internet, the more popular you will be on the Internet and the more people will connect with you, follow you and then go to your website. Spread yourself around, write for other popular blogs, magazines and newsletters and then cross promote. Accept speaking engagements outside the Internet but record them and put them on YouTube.com, embed the recordings or links on your site and share them via social media. Write a book and use that as your calling card.

2. Create an Interactive Community

People love to talk to each other about issues that affect them. If you really want to offer a huge benefit to your customers and potential customers, form a community around them. Create a message board that is interactive and generates a lot of visitor activity and participation. Promote the board, which will promote your website – thus garnering not only more social media traffic the first time you promote the forum but, if it’s active, people will also come back again and again. Facebook Groups are also a great place to create a community.

Message boards, forums and Facebook Groups are great places to create an interactive community

CLICK TO TWEET

 3. Don’t Forget SEO

Search engine optimisation is a very important component in any online marketing strategy. Optimise for social media by including the right keywords, the right metadata, information about images, content and more, so that you can be found. Plugins like SEO by Yoast or All in One SEO are incredibly useful tools. Remember to focus on both on-page and off-page SEO for best results.

 4. Engage on Social Media

You can’t just open a social media account, fill out a profile, start blasting updates and expect any results. Well, at least not the results you want! You need to start with a plan, understand your goals, choose your tactics and then seek to engage with others on social media.  This way you ensure your plans happen and your goals are met.

 5. Listen to the Buzz

A really great way to use social media is to use it to listen to the buzz around your business. But don’t just listen. When you find something about your industry or product in general, or your business in particular, ensure that you respond with the right answers, links and information so that you can get your message out to participants. If you don’t find any buzz, create it. Make your own groups, start your own discussions and share, share, share.

 6.  Track, Measure & Adjust

Find out which types of content get more shares, more comments and more action. Know what your customers want to read. Ask them what they need to know. The more you can track the success of your campaigns the more you can improve. You can actually adjust and improve any campaign while it’s in progress if you have the right information.

 7.  Use Strategic Paid Advertisements

Paid advertisements can be very expensive if you aren’t sure why you’re doing them. When it comes to social media, run an advertisement to get more sign ups for your newsletter or more likes on your Facebook Page. Then market your products and services to them that way, rather than using the ads as a way to market your product directly. While at first you may not notice much of a change in traffic, you will over time because you’ll have them in your marketing funnel.

8.  Use Different Forms of Content on Social Media

Mix up what type of content you share and add to your social media updates. Use newsworthy content, evergreen content and content in different forms like video, infographics, and text. You want to write a blurb before each share in order to pique the reader’s attention and share high-quality, relevant content on a regular basis.

 9.  Work with Influencers

There are always going to be “rock stars” in every industry who are well known and who can highly influence your audience. Research who these people are, connect with them and find ways to engage with them that helps you leverage their audience to spread your message. If you can get an influencer to recommend your products and/or services to others, your traffic will explode.

10.   Present Content with Strong CTAs

Never send out any content on social media without a call to action (“CTA”). Your CTA must be varied, and to the point. Don’t beat around the bush. If you want your audience to share your infographic, ask them to. If you want your audience to “like” your post, ask them to. If you want your audience to click through to read the rest of something on a website, ask them to. Finally, if you want them to buy something, ask them to buy it. Tell them the benefits of doing so and ask them to do it.

It’s clear that social media can be an important avenue to gain more traffic to your website or blog. But, it’s not going to happen automatically. You are going to have to work a little bit more to get the ball rolling. Fortunately, these tried and true tips really do work. By using them you will drive social media traffic to your website. Not only that, if you’re clear on your message you’ll drive targeted traffic that is ready to answer your calls to action.

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6 Reasons Your Website Isn't Good Enough

You've had this discussion before with your business partner. "Why do we need to spend money on a website?" Or, perhaps it's "Look, I know our website needs updating, but honestly, we've got so many other things to work on right now....."

And the discussion goes on. But are you making the right decision? True, there are a lot of things that draw the attention of the small business owner. But stop and take a look at your current website. Your current site isn't exactly how you'd like the world to perceive you is it?

Think back to when you started your small business. Remember? Back then, you'd have fixed something as important as your website. But, running a small business got the best of you. Well, it doesn't have to be this way and here's why.

90% of all purchases begin on the internet

I'd suggest re-reading that statement again. That means that nine out of ten people that you talk to about your business have already looked online to begin their purchase decision. This isn't limited to just consumer purchasing either. This is also business to business shopping. Does your current website best reflect what you'd want purchasers to find prior to contacting you?

Buyers are 54% of the way through the buying cycle before they ever engage with a sales person

That means that by the time you talk to a prospective small business customer, they've already been scouring the internet to help in their buying decision. If your website is not up to par, that's not good.

78% of people trust opinions they read online

Not only do you need a good website, but you need to be watching your social media presence to be sure you know what your customers are saying about you. Remember, online opinions / reviews can be both good and bad. You don't want to have good reviews on the internet about your company, and either have no website, or have an outdated one.

In 2013 more people will use mobile phones to get online than PCs

But why should you bother updating your website? After all, you have a website, right? It's not that bad is it? Well, maybe it's not, but does your website know how to display itself to a mobile device? Maybe it's not that your website is all that bad, but if you don't cater to people who are surfing using their iphones and other smartphones, you are missing the point.

But why should you really work on this website thing?

Your website is your best employee working 24/7/365. Do you have any employees that work that hard? I didn't think so. Heck, even you took that lengthy coffee break last week when you told your business partner you were reviewing the tax filing. Your secret is safe with me.

But working on our website is hard. I just want to be able to update it myself!

Working on your website doesn't have to be hard. You may want to switch over to a WordPress website. You'll find it so much easier to update. That's why WordPress has become so popular.

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Top 8 Social Media Pluggins For Your Blog or Pluggin

Social networks and their icons are indelibly printed on our visual memory.

If you’re a business owner or publisher with a website or blog, you cannot ignore the importance of social media. You might spend hours working on an article, but it will not be of much use if no-one reads it.

Social media is the most effective medium for taking your voice to your readers and customers. In this post, I’ll discuss the most effective ways to integrate social media features into your WordPress website to widen your reach and gather a worldwide following.

WordPress is perhaps the most popular content management system or CMS. You can easily customize it to create professional business websites, online stores or boutiques, newspaper or magazine sites – the sky is the limit.

The look and feel of a WordPress site generally depends on your theme, but there is another powerful component – the plugin! A plugin is an external piece of software that works in the background to enhance your site.

So let’s hunker down and have a look at how these top 8 plugins will help you distribute your content. They are all free. 

This is my favorite one for adding share buttons to posts and pages. You might have seen this attractive plugin urging you to share with messages like ‘Sharing is sexy’, ‘Share the wealth’ etc. There is a slight animation built in when you move your mouse over the icons. This plugin gives you a whopping 80+ networks to choose from. You can choose the ‘sexy bar’ or other classic versions. You can even choose to add Like and Follow buttons below the bar, add share counters, and place it both above and below the content as you want.

Shareaholic also provides analytics and can be integrated into your Google Analytics too. 

The floating vertical bar is quite popular nowadays. Sharebar allows you to choose the networks you want and the size or look and feel of the button. It has counters for the number of shares, and moves along with the page, so no matter where the reader scrolls, the share buttons are always in front of them, urging them to share.

As the name suggests, this plugin allows you to tweet about your old posts so that you keep attracting new readers. Whether you have 20 posts on your blog, or 50 or 100, this plugin tweets their title and link one by one at a designated interval. I have had many Retweets and visits to my blog thanks to this plugin.

You can specify the interval between tweets – every 2 or 4 hours, you can exclude certain categories, and even customize the text of the tweets. If you are not using this plugin yet, just download it and give it a try.

This is a good way to encourage people to comment on your posts. When readers leave a comment, CommentLuv goes to the their website and extracts their latest posts, then adds a link to it. This gives them an opportunity to advertise their content too, sharing some ‘luv’.

Everyone who read the comments on your post also sees the title and link of the commenters’ blog post, and will surely click on it if they find it interesting. They will also be motivated to leave a comment of their own, since they see an actual example of how this works.

Here’s the Comments screen with the plugin showing the commenter’s recent posts. Now the commenter can choose which one to display below their comment. In the image, I have chosen the ‘Falafel’ post to be displayed as a link.

Many bloggers add their Twitter feed or Facebook updates feed in their sidebar. This plugin shows your activity on a social network right on your blog, spurring people to follow your feed. Social Media Tabs is the granddaddy of them all. It allows you to choose multiple networks and adds tabs for each of them. The reader can click on each tab to see the feed from that network. The tabs can be set to a timer and auto-slide so that the readers will see feeds from various networks as they read your page or post.

There are several settings you can configure such as position of the bar, dimensions, slide speed, alignment etc. Networks you can choose from are Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, RSS, Google+, Pinterest and Flickr. Social Media Tabs is a great addition to your sidebar, especially when you are active on several social networks.

Author boxes are a great way to highlight the writer’s bio. High-end themes like Thesis allow adding author boxes at the bottom of each post. About the Author is a newer plugin that adds an author box to the sidebar widget area. This is great to highlight author information on every post or page. It is also very effective when you have more than one author contributing.

This plugin offers several good options. The author’s photo can be pulled from their Gravatar image. You can choose the format of the name to be displayed – just a first name, or last name etc. Other fields such as company, title, email, phone, social media etc. can be added by choice. You can even choose the labels that appear for various fields like email, phone etc.

Social media icons are displayed below the bio making it easy for your readers to connect to the author via social networks. This is a highly effective way to get your readers to connect with your authors (who will be connected to you) on various social networks.

This plugin helps you build a following on Twitter as well as Facebook. The Tweet2download plugin is quite popular nowadays as a way to offer a gift to your readers and ask them to tweet about it before they can download it. The first time I encountered this, it was for an eBook promoted as a free download. The banner said ‘no email needed’ and when I went to the actual page, I was asked to send one tweet before I could download the eBook.

The Share & Get It plugin asks the reader to choose between Twitter and Facebook. The tweet or Facebook share message is configured by the blog owner. There is also a Like or Follow button that the reader needs to click before the download begins.

This is a great way to reach a wide audience, especially people who are reluctant to put their email into a ‘subscribe’ box. You are also giving the reader a choice between Twitter and Facebook, two of the most popular social networks. And you not only get your message shared across the reader’s network, you also get a new Twitter follower or Like on your Facebook page.

You can configure numerous buttons, and place them on any page or even within your posts. The only catch is that you will have to come up with a freebie that really helps your readers.

This plugin offers much more than just a link to your Pinterest account. You can actually display your board in your website’s sidebar. You can pick the number of columns and the number of pins you want to display, and choose to display it on posts as well as pages. But you need at least 10 pins on your Pinterest board for the plugin to work!

The plugin also offers Pinterest follow buttons that you can add before and after your post. Pinterest may be very popular for brands, but whatever your area of business, it offers an attractive visual aid to help tell your story. This is a must-have in your sidebar.

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