10 Ways to Increase Blog Traffic through Social Media Marketing

The relevance of social media in the quest to increase blog traffic is soaring by the day given the growth most social networking sites have recorded overtime. Also, our target audience and prospective customers have found them useful to connect, interact and share contents with their family and love ones.

Facebook for instance, according to Wikipedia has grown to over 950m registered users; Twitter is in excess of 450m while LinkedIn is following with 100m population of members. The population of other social sites is also growing exponentially. It is therefore imperative to give as much importance and attention to these sites as it has been given to search engine.

Search engine do no longer represent the only major source of high traffic to blog/websites. An articulated, well marketed and branded blog on social networking sites will pull as much traffic as it would have done on search engine given on-page optimization. For blog business to succeed in its marketing drive, the two must be married together.

Below are ways to catch in on the enormous growth of these social media sites as an avenue to increase blog traffic in order to generate lead, drive sales and maximize ROI, for friends and family influence and shape the perception of prospective customers to our products and services.

1. Setup an account on major social network site: Create presence and community that reflect your brand uniqueness by creating account on Facebook and twitter. I beg to assume you are a complete novice on this subject even though I perceived you already have a blog. Skip this if you already have account or know how to do same.

The reason being, I want to have a holistic approach on this with the aim of delivering total package for the sake of beginners who may find this post relevant. However, experience has shown that must people get profile setup wrong because, it does not reflect their true expertise and professionalism. Make sure your profile reflect your brand and niche for easy recognition and association.

2. Connect your social media account to your blog: create a link URL from your social profile to your blog so that your friends can have easy access to your blog. A column for website is always available on most social sites for this purpose. Use it effectively. However, most blogger would want to separate business from pleasure.

So, building a separate account for business is always expedient most especially a blog that is meant for marketing. For instance, Facebook page can be created to promote blog. Here is an example of a customized Facebook page and twitter account built for Frandimore. Contact us if you need one. Meanwhile, you can learn how to create your business Facebook page on this blog.

3. Auto post blog content to social media sites. There are platforms already created solely for this purpose. They are blognetwork, twitter feeds, dlv.it, pingfm. Setup an account with them and submit your blog feed url. These platforms have the capacity to automatically update your pages on social network activated with them whenever you post on your blog.

I have used them when I was starting out blogging to syndicate post from my blog and other sites of interest, but later drop them. I discovered that my target audience doesn’t pay much attention to automated deliveries. So, I now use social sharing icons for manual update except twitter where I also use timely.com to target optimum post delivery.

The beauty here is that, I can add additional voice to the post making it natural. Try your luck and competence. What works for me (niche and visitors) may not work for you. Keep trying, but study and analyze performance. You will surely hit the chord with the loudest string.

4. Use social media icons: It is necessary to add plugins that enable visitors share blog posts they like. It is also advisable to prompt visitor or blog reader to share blog post across the social networks they belong. It helps to spread the post giving it wider coverage. A link back to the original source of content is always available at the convenience of a click on the post title.

5. Install social media tools and widget: Facebook and twitter are the best widgets I have used over time on my blogs. They make it convenient for visitors to join the conversation from that point, like or follow you and also, a smart way to grow fan/audience.

I’m not comfortable though adding this widget when the number of audience (like and followers) is still small. It strikes something below competence. I advise you wait until you have a handsome number of audience before installing these widgets on your site only then would it lend credence to blog overall assessment thereby increasing growth rate.

6. Make your voice heard across social media: Creative and intelligent posts aimed at serving the needs of your audience across platforms (groups, friends, pages, followers) will make you earn trust. Do this on regular basis and you will have dozen and even thousands of audience willing to link and associate with you. This would then be an opportunity to serve them better and market your products or services.

Though, this may take awhile, but you will surely get to your expected destination. Just stay at the top of your game and you will soon receive massive traffic to your blog. Blog business is about consistency and perseverance in the display of knowledge to serve people. You can become the latest trend in your industry.

7. Stage tweet up at events: Connecting with people within the same niche radar at events to discuss issues, problem or share knowledge is about the best way to strengthen relationship. Link exchange become easier and knowledge can also be transferred that ordinarily should have cost few bucks. It is now common place to see bloggers congregating for seminar or attending functions/events within a niche or personal interest. The opportunity to increase blog traffic in this type of forum is indeed enormous.

8. Create link to your blog on forum: If you have not join a forum within your niche, the time to join is now. Create a signature that link back to your blog when signing for an account. The traffic associated with forum can be phenomenon. But it has to be done rightly, just like leaving a comment on blogs. Forums are more advance. There, you will see like minds, learn new things, ask questions and so on. You have to be really good and professionally inclined to gain traction on forum.

It is a community filled with diverse opinions. How do you gain trust and presence in a place like this? Creative and intelligent display of knowledge and expertise will definitely single you out. Simply own up to what you don’t know or let them give you time to do research work and then get back to them. No one is an epitome of knowledge even within your niche. Times are changing; trends are giving way, so also is your niche. Do your best to stay at the top.

9. Leave comment on other blogs: Blog commenting is viewed as a social gathering like forum because, it is an association of relatively like minds. It also has the human face advantage. Leaving an opinion that address one or two advantages or disadvantage or omission of a blog post may earn a visit to your blog.

Consider the advantages of engaging in this consistently couple with the ease of doing it against the result. It is like an icing on a cake. I would advise to get your picture profile on gravatar. This will automatically show your picture and your name with a link back to your blog on any blog you leave a comment. This would facilitate speedy reach to your blog.

10. Re-purpose your content: Get an old post that is still relevant to current day happens within your niche. Rewrite it in a more unique way that further address the present situations and realities. Include pictures, current data and statistics. Link new web pages contextually. This has to be done very well with the aim of transforming the post into a new one so as not to be penalized by search engine for duplication.

This can be a great way of updating old post. Mark you, the post will still get to your friends and the pages you have on social networks, either by directly sharing it yourself and/or prompting visitors to use the share icons provided to deliver it across their individual social media circle.

It is my hope that you are fully equip with the necessary actions to be taken to market your blog across social media for the purpose of increasing blog traffic that will then improve your customer acquisition and retention, sales targeting and ROI. Contact us should you need help in any way. Be the best.