This is a guest post by Arkadij Shkolnik, PR Manager of SiteValley.com.
The popularity of social media resources keeps increasing. Many people use forums, blogs and different social networks for communication and ideas sharing. The business owners are the ones, who participate the most actively – apart from searching for problem solutions and potential partners they set goals to attract attention to their creative projects or businesses via those social media.
Since everything is digitized nowadays, almost each project or business has a website and a corporate blog, where the general information and the latest updates are revealed. Thus, the marketing coordinators of such projects strive for creating a community of existing fellow users or project contributors and attracting more new visitors to the company or creative group website.
Though it may look rather easy at first glance, many people – especially the beginners – face many problems that make them waste much time. Sure, there are a lot of SEO and Social Media Marketing tips on the Internet, but they usually tell you what to do. This presupposes anyone to follow the same blueprint that may not always work. Therefore, it may sometimes be reasonable to tell what mistakes to be careful about, avoiding problems while reaching goals. The following are five things to be on the lookout for when trying to drum up new traffic.
1. Beware of Spamvertized Comments
When posting your comments on one’s forum, blog or Twitter or Facebook website/company page, you should always make sure your comment is not going to be reported as spam. Avoid direct links and posts of “Best
If it’s a blog comment – just provide your website name (don’t forget to put http:// for the link to be clickable), if it’s a forum post – put your website or blog URL (better hyperlinked to the name of your company or project with no domain extension). Posting on Twitter or Facebook does not require any promotion merits at all – if you look and sound interesting enough – the other visitors will check out your page and find your company details and interesting blog articles there.
2. Avoid Irrelevant Websites
When looking for a third-party website to use for promotion, you should search for sites which are truly relevant to your resource. Choosing the wrong site usually delivers disservice to your site.
For instance, you may get banned at a certain Internet source, if your comment or post looks spamverized. It is also possible that the bounce rate of your site visitors may increase, since those who follow your links find no related useful information. Or you may even have worse problems, getting too many unneeded connections which cause the slowdown of your hosting service, while brining no actual profit.
Thus, you should pick your promotion spots wisely, analyzing each site you are going to leave your posts on and estimating the expected traffic. Those sites should be as close to the niche of your activity as possible and have nice rankings. Additionally, you should check those sites for being popular. Even if the source you are looking into does not have great ranking, check its activity. Be it a forum – look at the views/replies rate, be it a blog – check for the average number of Diggs, Tweets, Facebook shares, etc.
3. Don’t Be Careless
If you submit a guest post at some blog or leave your comment there, you need monitor it and check for further updates. You cannot be simply careless if you want to attract more people to your site – not just their one-time clicks.
Take part in discussions, share your expertise and be active enough to become a respected and welcome community member. You shouldn’t forget that many blog owners appreciate experienced commentators and some even announce the most active ones at their home page. This may also be a nice and useful way of promotion.
This also applies beyond just blogs. If you are an active forum resident, it may be reasonable for you to become a moderator. The bigger the forum is, the more moderators it requires, so if you are lucky enough to become one – don’t lose this chance. Your care and activity is going to be rewarded by the number of visits to your forum profile (where you can provide a detailed bio with all your links and contact info) and the ability to insert links to your resource in the signature.
4. Avoid Saying “NOâ€
When doing your first promotion steps, you should be tolerant to any partnership proposals. If other website owners offer you link exchange or propose to promote your website at their source for sponsored provision of your product or service – do not refuse at once. Think of all the possible pros and cons and make your decision then. In most cases the number of pros may outweigh, so you will accept the given option of bilateral co-operation.
There are, however, sources to beware of – you shouldn’t deal with websites offering warez or any other illegal content or those, which do unapproved email marketing (those sites usually get blacklisted in spam data bases). And of course, it is desired to co-operate with sites which are more relevant, unless you receive an offer from a well-ranked source that is actually out of your given niche. You may still consider partnership – just study the activity of the site and analyze its visitors’ interests. Maybe you will find some visitor groups, whose attention is worth being attracted.
5. Don’t Mill the Air
Once you start promoting your blog via different social media, you will definitely form a number of your favorite websites to promote with a certain range of topics to discuss. You should not, however stay limited to those. Find more interesting topics within your niche and more popular websites with higher ranking to get spotted on.
Apart from widening the number of referral traffic sources, this solution will also enable you to extend the range of niches to cover according to the development of your project and to the growing number of topics, discussed at your business blog.
Summary
Promoting a website may become a lot easier if following general tips and guides. It is sometimes, however vital to know not how to do things right, but how not to do things wrong, therefore the tips above do not give direct answers to the questions you may have, but provide a general overview of the most common mistakes among starting promoters.
Your Thoughts About Attracting New Traffic
What do you look out for when driving new traffic to your blog, and what methods do you use to bring that traffic, ie. through commenting, social media marketing, forums, or other methods?
