How to use social networks to promote your blog
In recent years, the importance of social media for website promotion has become a major topic of conversation within the realm of online marketing and SEO (search engine optimization) tactics. While the largest websites have entire departments dedicated to marketing their product and website, it is often up to individual website owners to market their site on their own. This is especially true for bloggers, who hope to reach a potential audience of millions with their unique content and writing. This article will discuss the importance of social media for promoting a blog or personal website. I’ll use personal experience to highlight how some seemingly ineffective techniques can increase your website traffic.
When starting a blog and beginning the marketing process, it can often seem overwhelming. There are so many options to choose from, and when combined with the ingenuity that comes with most first-time self-promoters, a lot can go wrong or be done incorrectly. Although there are a wide variety of options to choose from, there are some websites and programs that should be used to spread the word about your amazing and unique content.
An example of this is Twitter. While generally dismissed as a mindless program used for meaningless updates on one’s life, it has become a powerful marketing tool for freelance bloggers and large companies alike. In addition to its obvious use for “tweeting” your new updates (some blogging platforms do this automatically), you can divide followers into groups and target certain people with your updates. Additionally, you can include a Twitter button after each post, giving readers the opportunity to update their own Twitter accounts with your post. This allows your work to reach a whole new audience and hopefully you could get it submitted to a popular social media site like Reddit or Digg.
Reddit and Digg are websites that allow users to submit content for users to vote on. Given the sheer amount of content and diversity of users, there’s no guarantee that these sites will provide any serious benefit at first; However, once you’ve established yourself, or if you have a really great article to share, the popularity of your work can attract a new batch of readers in the long run. Although the latter hasn’t happened to me yet, several articles I’ve written for my own website have gotten an additional two to three thousand hits. Even though this only lasted a day or so, the chances of it attracting new readers are much higher than if the article had never been submitted in the first place. Like Twitter, there are buttons that can be placed within the website template code that allow readers to submit a story to one of these sites or, if it has already been submitted, be upvoted.
Another popular method of online marketing is the frequent use of Stumbleupon. This website allows users to “stumble upon” a website they find interesting, which in turn adds it to a database. Other people eventually come across the site, bookmark it, and promote it themselves. Several weeks ago I was on Twitter and a fellow blogger from a fairly popular movie site asked me for advice on something. I responded, and the next day I noticed that it had linked to my website as a way of saying thank you. The site was hacked in Stumbleupon, and now every time I do an update, my site’s stats skyrocket into the thousands. This is a far cry from the 150-200 I normally get. This double whammy of social media has proven to be a boon to my website and a great example of not only how beneficial they are in the world of website promotion, but how they can all be used together.
These are just a few examples of how social media can benefit your website. As time goes by, more opportunities will open up and you will eventually learn how to use them all to their fullest potential.