Part 2: How Can I Get More Website Traffic – Tackling Social Media

A few days ago, I wrote Part 1 of this two part series about answering this burning question of “How can I get more website traffic?” which you can read HERE.  In this Part 2, I will dive into the social media aspects of your online business.

Part one was about your website and its contents, making sure you’re using the right keywords so your site is search engine optimized and keeping your audience engaged with comments!

Once you have that going, you need to implement and start your social media accounts.  The earlier the better so the accounts can grow with your blog.

As seen in my third income report HERE, you saw that, besides direct traffic, my traffic mostly comes from social media.

Therefore, it’s important to have your social media accounts set up right from the get-go as your organic traffic from search engines won’t be as immediate if you have a new blog.

 

 

WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA?

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Social media to me is:

A way to connect and share with other people from all over the world.

Meet and find people with the same interests by joining groups or communities.

Using social media, you can find like minded people to talk to, connect with, share to and learn from.

 

Now, let’s look at some “real” definitions of social media.  If you search the term “what is social media” in Google, this will return:

 

When I click on the first link, Tech Target, this is what they have:

 

Why it is important to connect with others is because you can easily share your blog content with them instead of waiting for people to search you out of the infinite world wide web!  This is your first step to free traffic when your site is new, and continued usage of them will only grow your site even more.

Social media provides a medium to share your thoughts and website content to millions of people who otherwise would not see your content at all.  If you are already getting organic traffic from SEO then that’s great, but adding social media can only increase your traffic, doubling it even or more if done successfully!

In this day and age, it’s hard to ignore the benefits of having social media accounts.  It’s a must to any online business and you can only benefit from using them.

 

SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS

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Social media platforms come in all shapes and sizes.  Which one you’ll join will depend on finding the right fit for your online business.  I will summarize a few of the biggest platforms that you should consider for your blog.

 

INSTAGRAM

Good for:

• visual content, images and photographs
• videos are the next rage here
• bloggers, especially for niches in fashion, travel, food, and mom/babies
• high engagement
• hashtag usage, a must

Not good for:

• sharing links, non-clickable links in captions, only one clickable link in profiles
• online shops, product images

 

Love this side by side by @lexivaughan!!! Just so amazingly like Rapunzel!! Gorgeous hair! Who loves this??

A photo posted by My Mickey Life (@mymickeylife) on Dec 8, 2016 at 8:01pm PST

Instagram is really great for visually enticing content or sharing funny things like quotes.  Having great photography on this platform wins you engagement.  Some of the biggest bloggers on there have some amazing photos.

Hashtags are a must when you use Instagram, this helps with getting exposure if you can hit Top 9 of the hashtags you use.  Top 9 are the 9 most popular posts for that hashtag in the last day or two, and it’s updated frequently.

I use Instagram the most and I hope to start one for this site soon on there.  I like the way you can easily get engagement on there compared to other platforms.  If you want to learn more about my background experience with Instagram, read this post HERE.  If you want to boost your Instagram followers, read my in-depth look at the strategies I used in my Top 10 Tips.

 

TWITTER

Good for:

• sharing of links, all clickable
• concise information
• hashtag usage, a must
• medium engagement
• all niches

Not good for:

• photos, as it only displays a portion of it on mobile
• long captions

Twitter has been around for a long time now and continues to be a strong platform to use for sharing links.  It’s hashtag usage is a must on this platform as people can search you out with them.  You can only write 140 characters at a time, but this forces you to be concise and get your point across quickly.  With people not having a lot of time these days, quick short snippets of info for people on the go is great for them.

If you can capture your audience with that little amount of characters, then they’ll either like your tweet, retweet, or click on your link and go to your website.  For example, you can find people having bed bug problems by searching the term “bed bugs“, you’re golden if you can send them a link to a page on your site that offers them solutions to fix this problem.

When you engage with others, the more likely they will like, follow, and retweet your content.

 

FACEBOOK PAGES & GROUPS

Good for:

• sharing of links, all clickable
• SEO
• all niches
• easy to target your audience

Not good for:

• Engagement
• Hashtags

For businesses, I recommend you use Facebook Pages to create your Facebook presence because if you’re like me who signed up on Facebook to connect with friends long ago, you don’t want to use your personal account for your business, instead, you create a Facebook Page.

A Facebook Page is a stand alone page for your business which will have all your business info on there and share your business content publicly.  You can also create a Facebook Group for your business as well but I don’t recommend this until you have some solid plans for your group because you don’t want people to join a group and you have no guidance for the people who joined.  They will leave the group if they don’t see any value in joining it.

Instead of creating a group, you can join groups in your niche.  Joining targeted niche groups will help your Facebook Page because if you pick the right groups, you can share your Page content on these groups which can gain you followers, i.e. Likes to your page, or clicks to your website.

The complaint I have about Facebook is that they control what people see which has also rolled out to Instagram but not as bad.  Facebook doesn’t cater to businesses because it wants ad revenue.  It wants to you pay to get Page Likes, and pay again to get your posts seen by those followers you just paid for.

However, Facebook is highly ranked and has powerful SEO, so even though you may not see the engagement you want on there, you can still get exposure from your links being shared because it can show up easier on a Google search.

 

GOOGLE+

Good for:

• SEO
• sharing of links, all clickable
• all niches
• communities
• easy to target your audience

Not good for:

• Engagement
• Hashtags

Using Google products is a must if you want to help your SEO.  It only makes sense to use Google+ to share your content as Google search will give these links better ranking.  For a quick simple example of how quickly Google+ got this Wealthy Affiliate member’s article ranked, click HERE.

The other thing good about Google+ is that it has communities you can join or create, much like the Facebook Groups.  This is a great way to find your targeted audience and engage in there.  However, this platform is not high in engagement at all from my experience.  Use it for SEO and share all your links on there, can’t be ignored.

 

PINTEREST

Good for:

• online shoppers
• online shop owners
• fashion, crafting, sewing
• link sharing
• easy to target your audience

Not good for:

• men products

According to Expanded Ramblings, Pinterest users consists of 85% women.  It’s known to be the one of the top social media platforms for online shopping.  Links can be shared directly to your website content where you sell your products.

Your posts are shared by others “pinning” them to boards they created and others who follow that person also see the pin, so this is how your post can go viral as many can pin your post quickly.

Because pins are organized by boards, you can easily find your target audience.  You can ask to pin to these niche boards or follow the people who are members of these boards.

I personally haven’t found such success with Pinterest but I know others have and if you have a product to sell, especially to women, it’s a great place to be.  I’ve been wanting to target the female audience of the make money online niche, so I will have to open one up for this site.

 

TUMBLR & LINKEDIN

Tumblr and LinkedIn are not as big as the platforms I’ve mentioned above and you can add them if you have time to grow these accounts as well.

Tumblr is blog based and can be good for SEO.  You can share photos and your posts can be very long like any blog post.  Links are easily shared on there as well.

LinkedIn is a site for professionals, kind of like having your resume online.  You connect with other professionals like people you worked with.  Recruiters often go on here to find potential candidates.

 

 

HOW TO WIN AT SOCIAL MEDIA

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Here are some quick tips on how to win big with social media:

#1) Branding – have your social media accounts have the same branding as your website.  This provides consistency and people can recognize you across multiple platforms.

#2) Content – share your blog content with captivating captions, this is especially true for link sharing sites like Twitter, Google+, and Facebook Pages.

#3) Photographs – use sharp, bright images, especially on photo sharing platforms like Instagram, Google+, and Facebook.

#4) Engage – the more you can engage with others, the more followers and engagement you’ll get on your profile.  Be social!

#5) Consistency – don’t let your account go stale, post consistently and often at least once a day.

#6) Automate – use automation tools to help you manage all your social media platforms.  Without a doubt, there’s no way I could have grown my Instagram accounts to have 60K followers and 37K followers if I didn’t have my MassPlanner!  My brand new Twitter account for this site started end of September and it already has 3.2K followers as of this post by using this tool.

 

Do you have to have all these social media accounts for one website?
No, you don’t, you can try out a few and see what you like and stick with the ones that is the best fit for you.  Once you find the social media platforms you like, stick with them and grow them.

What’s the one most important thing about growing these accounts?
Engagement!  I can’t stress this enough.  If you don’t engage, your posts won’t get seen.  This is precisely how the Facebook and Instagram algorithm will show posts, they want to show posts that are engaging.  If you like someone’s post, they may like your posts back.  If follow them, they will follow you.  Once they follow you and liked your post, your posts will start showing on their feed, exposure.

Who do you engage with?
Make sure you are engaging with your target audience!  To find them, search hashtags in your niche, find bigger accounts than yours, connect with them and their audience.  Find boards, groups, and communities in your niche if that platform has them and engage with the people in there.

 

 

SUMMARY

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I hope you have learned a lot from this introduction to social media.  If you are able to put in the time and grow your social media accounts, you can attract a lot of free traffic and thus, money to you.  I have been using social media for both personal and business for years now and can honestly say it’s a no-brainer to have as an extension of your online business.

All social media accounts posted in this article are mine as an example what can be done in that platform.

I will be having more posts on this topic and would love to hear what other aspects of social media you’d like to learn in the comments below!  Please let me know and I can incorporate them in my next post about social media.

 

Let’s make money online!