Using Social Media to Increase Blog Traffic

As promised, this post is on social media to increase traffic for blogs. Social media is quite a vague term but it is generally accepted to mean any thing from leaving comments in a blog to the large content community sites. A good blog should foster opportunities for communities to interact. Not only does it have a feel good factor that make you want to carry on writing a blog but it also reduces reliance on traffic from search engines and the whims of the mighty Google. The key to success of a blog is to create content that will bring visitors to your site and will make them want to come back  to read more in the future.

There are so many social media community sites and they all have their own idiosyncrasies. The big content community sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit have the capability to send a lot of traffic in a short time for the right kind of story but it is not well geared to convert into sales and ROI.  It can have a part to play in building up the site and developing backlinks and brand awareness but  it can also lead to spammy and negative comments. These are not really the sort of places you should be trying to hawk your new stock of torque wrenches. What can you do give your blog more exposure and keep people returning to the site?

Commenting – invite comments  without requiring the visitor to register. Sure you will get lots of spam but there are plugins that can stop most of it. Askismit does a very good job and is included by default. People often come back to the site to see if their own comment has been followed up. Popular blogs that have this dialogue of comments have this momentum. There is a lot of useful information that can be gathered from the comments themselves.  Unless you receive so many comments to your site that it is impractical you should  reply to comments where appropriate and visit your commentor’s sites. Leave useful comments on other blogs and participate in discussions. No followed comments are still useful in driving traffic, ideas for blog posts, etc. Ask questions of your own and request opinions within your posts.

Guest Posts – writing for another blog is another good way of becoming noticed in your  field, usually you will get a nice juicy, relevant link from a credible, high-quality site and possibly traffic from links to that post. But it cannot be complete self-promotion. There has to be something in it for the readers and the blog owner that you intend to post to. Some good tips on  this subject at Problogger.

An RSS feed can take your content and make it available to an online reader such as Google Reader, Netvibes or Bloglines. This is a good way of getting people to read your latest posts because it is often more convenient  for them than visiting the site. WordPress comes with an RSS feed as standard so, make sure that you place your RSS feed icon in a prominent position.

Twitter – this is the darling of social media at the moment. Now we have the twittering classes, who use this social network to create groups of followers and followees. Use it for social networking, advice, information, news, reputation management. It can even run you a bath and massage your feet.

You can use Twittertools to notify your followers of every single blog post as soon as it is published. Good quality posts can expand their reach beyond your own list of followers by the use of retweeting. Retweeting is the practice of  repeating an existing tweet. A cascade of retweets can send your blog post throughout the twitter network beyond you own list of followers. For more information about retweets,  an extensive study of retweeting was carried out by Dan Zarrella. Twittering your blog posts is a good idea.

Social bookmarking web sites  at the end of every post, there is a share this or add this icon. The idea being that people would bookmark the post in their social bookmarking account. I am not sure that it is well used but it is another opportunity for someone to revisit the site.