The days of spamming your links manually in as many places and signing on to hundreds of link directories are over, you don’t need to do that type of work to get yourself traffic any more, and you don’t need a big expensive press campaign to promote your site either. You don’t even need to have a Google Adwords account.
Social Media is one of the fastest growing marketing formats in the entire world, and is miles ahead of the competition with the way it can target mass groups of specific market demographics. ‘How?’ you ask?
You have (most likely) at some point filled more information on the internet than a market research company could ever ask for, and you did it out of free will!
In case you’re still wondering…
What is Social Media?
Social media is Facebook, social media is MySpace, its Bebo, its Hi5, its Digg, Stumbleupon, Twitter, Sphinn, Slashdot, Technorati, Delicious, Reddit, Simpy, Newsvine, Furl, Spurl, MyJeeves, Google Bookmarks, and many, many more. Social media is absolutely everywhere, social media is any site where users congregate and interact with each other.
So How Does Social Media Triple Your Traffic?
Pretty easily. On a social media site; you register, you fill out your profile, and you start interacting people. The type of site that you’re on dictates the type of interaction that you have with the other site users. On Facebook for example, you create your profile and keep in touch with your friends, organise events, and share stories and photos. While on Digg you submit news articles and the rest of the community vote on them based on whether or not they are ‘news-worthy’. While finally on twitter, you post constant 150 character messages on your profile telling the world what you’re doing at that moment in time, and anybody who is interested enough to care that you are eating beans on toast yet again can tune in to your ‘twittering’.
Essentially, all these sites are ways of getting links back to your site, and not just random links, but links on pages that are already getting a high amount of traffic, so you have a higher chance of some of them clicking through to your site.
My previous post on How To Get 3,000+ Diggs in 24 hours highlighted just how powerful Digg can be, I would estimate based on experience that I generated the BBC over half a million page views based on my submission that day.
When I submitted my own article talking about how I got the 3,000 Diggs to this very site, it went mad on Stumbleupon, and I started getting 100-200 unique visitors a day. (not bad for a blog that was only 3 weeks old at the time) and so far just from that article this month I’ve generated over 1,600 visits and just under 4,000 page views.
Here are my stats for the first 10 days of March, 90% of which was down to Stumbleupon referrals.
My RSS Subscribers also jumped up by about 400% and have held pretty steadily since then. The best part is that since the large spike in traffic above, I’ve seen a consistently higher level of day to day traffic as well.
I should note in closing of this section that social media did not triple my traffic. It multiplied it by a factor of about 12.
So How Do You Get Started With Social Media?
Its quite simple really, if you don’t already have a MySpace or Facebook account, then go and get one! My personal favorites are Facebook, Stumbleupon, Digg, Delicious, and Reddit. You will notice that I have all of these in a ‘Social Bookmark This!’ link at the bottom of all of my blogs. If you want this for your blog you can download the I Love Social Bookmarking plugin for Wordpress.
Remember though, if you use social media just to spam your links, you will get nowhere. Social media sites are picky and choosey and they hate spam, so involve yourself in the community and you will reap the rewards, but you have to put in the time and the effort.
What have your experiences with social media been thus far? Got any great social media sites that I’ve missed here? Drop me a line in the comments!
[…] last post I gave you a brief introduction to social media marketing, or more specifically, to Digg. A more in depth guide to social media marketing to follow at a later date. Today, I’ll tell you the story that I alluded to in the […]
How To Hit The Front Page of Digg with 3,000+ Diggs | EggRage.co.uk
March 20th, 2008
I agree that social media marketing is extremely powerful, but I don’t know that it’s easy. The hardest thing for most of the companies that I work with to do is find content that is genuinely interesting (digg-able, if you will) and also something they are comfortable saying. (We write about this every day on our site, and work with clients all day doing this.)
To be really successful in social media marketing over the long-haul, you’ve got to learn a new way of communicating. That’s the tough part for some people, even though it should be a more natural way of communicating.
~Jim
Jim Tobin at Ignite Social Media
March 27th, 2008
Hi Jim!
Thanks for the comment, I’m in a similar line of work to you so I deal with and write about this stuff pretty much all day long too :)
When it comes to making something your clients have to say ‘diggable’ I find its often a better strategy to promote an external article with inbound links to the relevant client. This way you can write diggable material, and your client gains power through link value!
John
March 27th, 2008
[…] That bookmark is now public, though the chances of other people finding it are a tad slim, unless it’s an article that others have also bookmarked — and if enough people bookmark an article, it gets moved to the ‘popular’ section, where the top articles are bound to see heavy traffic. […]
Using Social Media to Promote Audio Drama - Internet Marketing for Radio Drama Series - Radio Drama Revival!
April 16th, 2008