Welcome to the 3rd instalment of my 5 articles, helping newbie bloggers to kick start their writing career. In this article, I will explain how to successfully promote a single article (emphasis on article, not blog), and to gaining you maximum traffic. This is useful if your blog is solely based on making you money, maximum traffic = maximum earnings. 1st - How To Maximize Your Impact On Each Post! 2nd - Writers Block - Literature Brain Freeze? 1. Social Networking - Back To Basics! People often do not use their Social Networking accounts for promotional uses. I'm sure you've all seen people liking groups on external sites? Yeah, that's promoting viral sites. Even though slight, it works! So let's get started. Facebook - Utilise your friends! The easiest way you can promote your articles is through friends and family at first. If you have no experience, this is the first place you should look. If you're promoting your own coded website, you may want to manually add a "Facebook Like" button onto your site at the bottom of each post, or whatever it is you use it for! This means your site will be listed on all of your friends' home screen! Simply go to this facebook developers site and change the options to suit you! Then add the code into the part of the page you deem acceptable! http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like Code (markup): Wordpress Plugin If you want to add a "Share" button to your wordpress blog, here's the one I use at BiggestFish: PLUGIN: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/social-media-page SCREENIES: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/social-media-page/screenshots Code (markup): Twitter - Update your followers! There are many ways you can get followers on twitter if you already don't. Make sure you use the Twitter Profile Widget to alert your blog readers of your latest updates. My followers tripled after adding mine in, so it's worth a shot! There's also a great tool to add to the bottom of your posts if you just want a tweet button, and not a line of Share buttons. This is the Tweet Button Resource and most social networking plugins for wordpress come with this integrated, so it's worth a shot if you use twitter alot for publishing new articles manually! 2. Social Media - Knowledge Is Power! There are several social media sites which people regularly browse to get interesting and funny articles. If you have no idea what social media is or how to use it, I'll simply link you to another article because it would be in vain writing about it when there are thousands of articles already written. 550 Ways Marketers Can Use Social Media To Improve Their Marketing Here's the short list of sites you should be submitting to without a doubt, every article you write, as soon as you write them! DiGG Reddit Stumble Upon Delicious This will instantly attract visitors to your site. don't start to worry if you don't get loyal readers at first, people are shy and will think most good posts are a one hit wonder if they can't see other links to various articles on your blog immediately at the end of your post. So make sure you use a variety of plugins to optimize this (list at the bottom!) After submitting a large range of articles, you'll soon start to see reoccurring visitors. This means you have loyal readers of your blog, and most likely new followers on Twitter or Facebook. Related Posts: Novice Writers – Do We Really Stand a Chance? Blog Layout - Are Appearances Everything? Plugin Shortlist: - Social Media Page - WordPress Related Posts - Twitter Tools - Wordbook - AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button
I have tried all these methods and honestly I am a firm believer that they do not work. Twitter is awful and very few use it compared to Facebook and those that do tend to be almost 100% garbage traffic. With 1500 friends on my account on FB I receive hardly any clicks on my blog links. I do use it frequently so I know the issue is not that I am not doing it right. Most social media sites like SU, Reddit, Digg are terrible sources of traffic that even come close to working. It sounds like I am saying don't waste your time, but really I am saying don't make it your focus. A combined effort of social media, organic search, article marketing, and other areas work in harmony but my opinion of social marketing is dismal at best.
If you have niched followers and friends on FB that are there souly for your blog, then they will click. It people are friends/followers because they know you personally, they don't have a reason to click unless they're completely interested. Don't make this a focus, make it a habit.
What if you want to add a "Like" button to your wordpress blog? I've read that the "Like" button has many of the same features as the "Share" button now, so it's best to use that now instead?
I've tried and used these methods and for me yes they do work. Not sure what you could be doing wrong adam, maybe your approach is wrong. I focus more on giving instead of here's a product, here's the affiliate link, buy it. And then post that link on every account. Rather you should be posting to information and things that your readers will actually want. Then if you're worthy enough, sell the product. Not every post and article has to sell a product.