Leveraging Social Media To Increase Site Readership

The Rise Of The Social Media Age: As the web continues to develop, expand and grow, social media profiles continually increase in importance; and the value they have is phenomenal. Social media is utilized for a wide variety or reasons, namely networking, socializing and more recently, marketing. These aspects of social media are only one part of the larger picture, there are many more features and elements of them that will make having a profile more worthwhile than not having one.

There are a huge amount of new social media sites emerging at the moment, they all allow you to take different actions and one feature most of them have in common is adding friends, joining communities and submitting your latest; and best content. But, what hidden benefits do these profiles have? This post explores 3 of the hidden benefits about social media profiles which will help your blog or web site in the areas of traffic building, readership development and link-back quality.

1. Get High Quality Links To Your Site Via Profile Development

As a blogger or a web site owner, you will most likely already be used to submitting content to social media sites and voting for them; but as you are doing this, continuing to add friends; and join communities. You increase the popularity of your profile, this means that you are getting link-backs to the profile from within the site, and you should also be actively linking to your profile from your own site or blog to increase the amount of back-links to the actual profile itself.

The process of increasing back-links to your profile means that it will have a higher likelihood of getting Google Page Rank and higher prominence at the social media site itself, this means that you can leverage the rank from that profile to your own site by inserting one or two links to it. Do not use social media profiles as an opportunity to spam and include tens of hundreds of links; people will no doubt flag you and you will be eternally banned from the service.

2. Grab Interested Readers Using Highly Targeted Categorization

Any well trained marketer will tell you that getting readers who are already interested in what you have to say (topic or subject) is a huge advantage. This is what you can do on social media sites, you can pinpoint the kind of people who are most likely to go to your site and subscribe to it or interact with it in one way or another.

You can easily find these targeted readers by clicking on popular ‘tags’ or searching for them by inputting popular keywords into a search box on the site. Popular tags, stories, news items or keywords will usually be displayed somewhere on the site, most likely on a sidebar or at the footer, so look carefully and you’ll be sure to find them.

When you find these people, interact with their profile, visit their sites or blogs if they have one, comment on a couple of their posts, add them as a friend, vote for their submitted articles and you’ll soon grab their attention and they’ll be visiting your site.

3. Increase Your Conversions By Building Strong Relationships

Building relationships is a vital key to success, in the online world it is of even greater importance as face to face communication does not exist as such. How do you put your best foot, or best virtual foot, forward? There are many different ways to go about doing this, and some are certainly better than others. The most effective way is to have a prior connection with the person, you can do this with the people who have previously commented on your blog or have had some sort of interaction with you via email, voting your stuff etc…

Why do I suggest already having a point of recollection? It’s simple, they’ve seen your stuff around before, articles, ebooks, newsletters etc…They’ve already made that first step with you, so you can use that as a springboard to start furthering this relationship. The best way to do this is by finding as much common ground as possible, I am referring to social media profiles and adding them across all of the ones you and the target person share in common.

After you’ve added them across all the social media sites you share in common, add them on your IM (Windows Live Messenger, Skype, AIM, ICQ etc…). You can usually include a greeting of some-sort, state who you are, how you know them and that you’d like to get to know more about them. People have become more open nowadays, so they will most likely accept you. From hereon in you can talk to them more and more and keep those communication lines open. Another way of keeping in touch is by sending out a weekly newsletter to their inbox to strengthen that bond that you already  have between them.

Continue To Conquer And Expand Your Readership Online…

The methods mentioned above are only one of many ways to conquer and expand your existing readership online. The most valuable lessons to learn from this post are firstly, the fact that you should develop existing relationships online, secondly, you should be targeting highly relevant readers to make communication with; and third and most importantly - you should always respect the person with whom you are communicating. You should never use abusive or vulgar language in conversation, keep it clean and highly valuable for both parties. 

Posted on May 17, 2008
Filed Under Social Media |

Tags: fight-spam, high-quality-backlinks, instant-messaging, marketing, networking, newsletter, opt-in, site-popularity, Social Media, startup

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