Most people believe generating traffic to a new blog or website is hard, you’re probably one of them, I certainly know I was. This happens for 2 reasons:
Reason #1: They don’t have a systematic way of implementing their strategies and tactics. They try one technique for a few days, then read a random blog post that covers a different strategy and decide to switch to that. They have no guiding process, they don’t give it 100%. Instead they switch from one strategy to another and as a result go nowhere.
Reason #2: Almost all blogs on internet marketing and web traffic tell you it’s hard to grow your traffic. They always tell you to produce content for weeks and weeks and eventually people will find your blog. If you’re just starting your blog now you would believe this too.
The first thing you need to realize, is there’s and easy way and a hard way to jump-start your traffic. Before social media sites weren’t so “all over the internet” the only choice was to take the slow path: build backlinks to rank in search engines, building up a name on forums and other stuff like that. Of course this were and still are very good strategies to generate traffic but they have a big downside…they take time.
When I started out with my blog I remember that I would check my analytics everyday to see how many visitors I had. I was kinda disappointed almost every time. The key to keeping motivated when you’ve just started your blog is quick results. Today it is much easier to get those quick results especially when we’ve got sites like Twitter and Facebook with millions of users on them every day. They also make it very easy for you to find people in your target market on them too.
So the easiest way to jump-start traffic to your blog is to center your time and efforts into building your Twitter and Facebook profile. Here are the steps you need to take with each of these sites.
With Twitter take the following steps:
1. After creating your profile, start following other people and companies in your target market.
2. Perform keyword searches on Twitter, related to your market. Start following 100 to 200 of those people each day.
3. Start tweeting about topics related to your market(don’t tweet about stuff on your website at least for now).
4. After a couple of days you will start to notice that 20-30% of the people you follow will follow you back. You can start cleaning up your profile by manually unfollowing the people who don’t follow you back. If you don’t have the time for this you can use a service like Tweet Adder(affiliate link) which will do all the following and unfollowing in an automated way.
5. Start interacting on Twitter by tweeting people in your target market and retweeting some of their tweets.
6. At this point you should have been on Twitter for at least a week. Now you can start tweeting about your blog or website content. Make sure you’re not overdoing it with the self promotion and that 70% of the time you’re still tweeting stuff that isn’t related to your blog.
8. Use the 4-1-1 rule. This means for every self-serving tweet, you should re-tweet one relevant tweet and most importantly share 4 pieces of relevant content written by others.
With Facebook follow these steps:
1. Send friend requests to people who are considered leaders in your target market. It’s possible that a large percentage of the people will not accept your friend request, at least 10% of the leaders should.
2. Start interacting with your audience by posting stuff on your wall. The stuff you post shouldn’t be about your own content but more so about news and events relevant to your market or niche.
3. To build more engagement post stuff that is short and during times you think your “target audience” is online.
4. Start commenting on your friend’s wall and like messages that you like within your feed.
5. Start asking questions on your wall. Ask questions related to your market. By asking questions you will start to notice more engagement from your “target audience“.
6. After a week or so of interacting more heavily on Facebook you will be noticing more friend requests. Instead of ignoring people you don’t know, accept their friend request as they could be a reader of your blog or a potential customer of your product or service.
7. At this point you should be posting information related to your content about 30% of the time. Again, don’t over-promote your content, try to mix up your posting.
After you spend a month or so building your social media presence on Twitter and Facebook, it shouldn’t be hard to get at least a few thousand visitors from these 2 traffic sources. These are the steps you should take when building your presence on Twitter and Facebook, and you can do this on all the social media sites like LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest.
Overall Strategy for Getting Traffic from Social Media Sites
1. First build your presence on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest and LinkedIn. Be an active community member, participate in discussions and add friends.
2. Link each of your profiles to your website or blog, to help build your personal brand and get more visitors.
3. On your social profiles post topics that make you seem like an authority figure in your niche market. This increases your chances of getting more followers on each social media site.
4. As you start getting more followers on your social profiles, promote your website through there, which doesn’t just build traffic, it also causes new people to discover your content and possibly link to it from their on blogs/websites.
5. Since your social media profiles are growing, contact other blogs or websites in your market and ask them if you can write a guest post for them. Also tell them how you will promote that post on all your social media profiles and the amount of traffic you can generate to that post. These posts will also provide you with new visitors and quality backlinks to your own blog or website.
6. The last thing you must do is to actively monitor what people are saying about your competition on this social media sites.
By using these steps mention here not only will you get more traffic to your website, but more importantly you will start to grow a loyal readership that will always be coming back to your website for more tips and more information. Here is the power of social media today:
Again, getting traffic to your website doesn’t have to be hard, and by all means its no rocket science, trust me anyone that tells you different is trying really hard to sell you something.
I’ve worked hard to write this post for you guys so I’d appreciate if you would share and leave me your comments about your social media journey and how you’re doing. I’d love it if you would send me a tweet @PhilipAlex08 or just say “hello” on Facebook.
Related posts:
- How to drive traffic to your blog without Google?
- How to start a successful blog that stands out
- The Most Honest Tweet Adder Review You’ll Ever Read