Using Social Networks To Generate Traffic
By FTS | June 2nd, 2011Many people today have their own website or blog. As a web designer I love that there’s so many people that I can talk to about web design. The topic of how to increase website traffic or how to increase website ranking almost always comes up in conversation without fail. When discussing search engine optimization and site promotion I love to bring up free methods. After all, what’s not to like about free methods of promoting your website or blog? A big free resource that all web publishers use regularly, but may not take advantage of for promoting their website or blog is social networks.
Many people who use the internet regularly belong to a social network, and with that being said it just makes sense to use these free resources to reach as many people as possible. Some social networks even devoted sections of their sites to web publishers and business owners to promote their site or business.
Facebook for instance, offers an option to create a page just for the purpose of promotion. This page works similar to Facebook pages. The main difference is that visitors have the option to “like” the page opposed to friending, and the page is managed by administrators. Other than that this special promotional page can be used to tell people about your site, post the latest site related news and updates on the wall, and upload pictures. Bloggers should definitely take advantage of this page because RSS feeds can be linked to these pages, and a summary as well as a link to the blog posts can be automatically posted on the wall.
Another awesome social network to take advantage of is Twitter. So many people use Twitter so it’s great to promote a site or service because you literally will not have a problem contacting your targeted demographic. This being said don’t abuse Twitter and spam your site because there’s a very good chance you will get banned, or people will just stop following you after discovering you are a spammer. Promote your website or blog appropriately by presenting unique relevant tweets with a link to your site. By tweeting this way any traffic that you do get is probably going to be targeted and those people will be interested in what your site has to offer. RSS feeds can also be connected to Twitter in the same capacity as it can with Facebook, and tweets will be sent out with a brief summary and hyperlink to the blog post.
The last social network that I would like to mention is YouTube. Being creative and producing an entertaining or informative video and uploading it to YouTube can drum up a substabtial amount of traffic for your website or blog; especially if your video goes viral.
Overall, social networks are an excellent free resource that should be taken advantage and used for promoting websites and blogs. Hopefully this article was helpful and helps some of you publishers as you work towards being listed on google page one.
More information:
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Tags: SEO, Social Networks, traffic, web development, Website Tips
