“Maximize Social Media Traffic to Your Blog” plus 1 more

Maximize Social Media Traffic to Your Blog

Posted: 18 Jul 2011 01:08 PM PDT

This is a guest post by David Cowling of SocialMediaNews.com.au

As bloggers, we are always looking for new ways to increase the level of traffic and readers to our websites. You may have a great product to sell or you just monetize you blog through display advertising—increasing your traffic to the next level is sure to increase your potential blog earnings.

Using Social Media traffic to methodically drive more eyeballs to your site is a great way to capitalize on the Web 2.0/3.0 boom. Have a look at these tips to increase user engagement on your topic, and boost new readers clicking through to your website:

1. Use social media distribution tools to send out your RSS feed

As a blogger, you want to promote your RSS feed as much as possible. Getting other websites to display your feed can result in increased visitors clicking through and viewing your posts.

This can also result in back-links to your blog, which results in better search engine rankings. So how can we ensure our RSS feed is getting the attention and exposure it deserves?

You can take advantage of social media distribution platforms, such as Hellotxt.com or Ping.fm, which can distribute your RSS content to over 100+ different social media websites around the world.

These sites allow you to save in your RSS feed, and then they can automatically post your content to your social networking accounts whenever you write a new blog post. This is all done automatically behind the scenes so there is no extra work for you every time you create a new blog post.

While distribution tools like this can get your content in-front of a whole new readership, I don't think signing up to every single social networking site that is integrated with these tools is the smartest idea. A better approach is to sign up with the social networking sites your readers and audience are most likely to use themselves.

2. SEO your social media profiles

We are now leveraging maximum traffic from our various social media profiles with the help of posting automation tools. The next step is to drive even more traffic to our social media profiles, which will in turn go onto our blogs.

A smart way to drive more traffic to your social profiles is actually through Search Engine Optimization—yes, that's right, SEOing your social media profiles. This is a fairly new idea where we are mixing the power of social media with SEO.

Facebook Fan page SEO

One of the only parts of your Facebook pages that are seen by the search engines is the About box.

This is only a small section of the page, so make this product-descriptive if you are selling something, or if you are promoting a particular website, include your URL and primary keywords.

Whilst the URL won’t be clickable, this will display to search engine users, and correct keywords will also push your Fan page higher in the rankings. While that increase may only be a small amount, every bit counts.

If you have other Fan pages on Facebook, link them all together. In some ways, Facebook is like a big social search engine, and they will crawl the links between your pages.

When filling out the Info tab on your Fan page, make sure the information you include is keyword-rich, and again has some reference to your URL and/or your products.

The search engine inside Facebook is not just for people—we now have the option to search “everything,” which includes Fan pages and groups. Having keyword-optimized pages will help you show higher in the Facebook search results.

Twitter profile SEO

When you are creating your Twitter profile, take note that your username actually becomes the Title tag of your page. Since Twitter is so highly trusted by Google, many profiles rank highly in organic Google searches just because of a keyword-rich username, which becomes a keyword-rich URL.

If you decide to use your full name as your username, be aware that your Twitter profile may rank first when someone Googles your name.

If you’ve uploaded a picture to Twitter, the search engine also uses the exact image name of your picture. So you could further optimize your Twitter profile by using a keyword-rich image file name, (e.g. your-name-your-primary-keywords.jpg).

LinkedIn profile SEO

As LinkedIn is a pure business social network, its developers have made a number of tweaks to help your profile stand out, particularly in the search engines. Your name, LinkedIn headline, current location, and the industry you have selected for your profile are placed into the Meta Description tag on your profile page.

That’s often why when you Google someone, their LinkedIn profile may often be the first social network to appear in the results.

3. Use social groups to promote your topic

To get even more traffic to you blog, consider creating Groups and Discussions on both LinkedIn and Facebook about your blog and products. Facebook and LinkedIn users are generally very active, and if you can get active users in your own group, this will have a positive effect on your blog.

You may actually have a large LinkedIn network but not really sure how to take advantage of it. Create a LinkedIn group about your topic/blog and invite your network to join it. If you can get engaging discussion occurring you are likely to find more professionals in your space join the group. If suitable for your own blog or product, consider the option of an Open Group, where anyone can join and invite others.

As the group administrator, you are able to send LinkedIn messages to all Group members (if they have opted-in to receive notifications when joining the group). This is a great way to push-market to your LinkedIn network, as often, InMails have a high open rate and are not considered as intrusive as other email marketing tactics.

Conclusion

I hope these tips give you some insights into new ways you can leverage traffic from social networking websites to your blog.

If you are a blogger and actively use social networks as a traffic generation source:

What networks send you the most traffic as a blogger?
What % of your traffic is coming from these social networks?
What has been your most shared article? What can you learn from this?

Consider optimizing your profiles to rank higher and get even more profile views and click-through traffic.

This is a guest post by David Cowling from Social Media News Australia.
If you are looking for more Social Media hints and tips check our David Cowling's blog on Social Media.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Maximize Social Media Traffic to Your Blog

Make the Most of Product Reviews on Your Facebook Page

Posted: 18 Jul 2011 07:09 AM PDT

This guest post is by Jenny Dean of Business Blog Writers.

You might have seen the ProBlogger post by Tommy Walker that talked about using photos to your advantage on Facebook. This post will add to some of Tommy's ideas.

I have two websites, Floppycats.com and Antioxidant-fruits.com, and corresponding Facebook fan pages where I like to set up albums for the product reviews that I do on those sites.

Why having albums on a Facebook Fan page is important

Opportunity: Since I feature a product every Tuesday, that's pretty much 52 product reviews per year. That means 52 (or 53, depending on the year) opportunities for my sites' Facebook fan pages to show up in people's news feeds.
Link love: You can link or tag the manufacturer's Facebook page on each photo within your Album, which means you’ll get a link back to your Facebook page from theirs.
Clickthroughs: You can add a link back to your website from your Fan page. I like to link back to the actual product review, so that users will visit the site if they are interested in learning more.
Communication: You'll get questions—and if you are doing product review albums like me, it might give you more insight on how to do your review, or provide you with feedback for the manufacturer, showing the manufacturer how valuable you are as a blogger for them.
More fans: That's right, when you link to the manufacturer, you never know who will see the link on the manufacturer’s page, and then will come and check out your Facebook Fan page—or your site.

In this article, I’m going to explain how to set up a successful Facebook album as well as how to tag and link photos in that album to the manufacturer's Facebook Fan pages.

Setting up your album

Facebook has changed up a bit since Tommy's post, so first, I’ll show you how to set up a Facebook album.

First you want to start from your blog's (or business’s) Fan page. Under your photo, there is a category called "photos". Click on that, and your photo section will appear.

To add an album, click on "Photos."

Another page will open and on the right-hand said there is a button that says, "+ Create Album." Click on that.

A dialog box opens, and you can start adding photos from your hard drive that are applicable to the album.

Adding photos to an existing album

Now, every Tuesday on my informational website about fruit, I do a product review on a product that has fruit in it. I have, of course, already created the album. Every week, either when I write a review or after the review has been published, I add a photo.

To add a photo to an existing Facebook album, simply click on the album (follow directions above) and then click on "Add Photos" in the upper right-hand corner once you are on the album page.

As I was writing this post, I decided to add the photo of the product that will make its debut on my blog this week: blazerfarmz Fresh Frozen Aronia Berries.

When the upload is complete, click on "Done." Then, scroll to the bottom of "Edit Album—Product Reviews" until you find the image that you've just uploaded.

Enter the name of the product (you might want to throw in a keyword here, too, but since "aronia berries" is already a keyword for me, I don't worry about it) and then include the URL link to your product review.

Then click on "Save Changes,” then “Publish.”

Once this image is published, Facebook will return you to the album in question. So then you want to go find the photo you just uploaded and click on it. When I do this, I can see that it has a product name and also a clickable link back to my product review. You might even want to make this link a bit.ly link, so that you can track the number of clicks.

Now, here comes the important part that will help you stretch your reach across multiple Facebook pages: you want to tag the manufacturer's page in your photo.

When you've clicked on the photo and the photo is open on your screen, in the white section below the photo on the lower left side you will see a "Tag This Photo" link. Click on that.

Move your cursor over the photo and then click on it (anywhere is fine in this situation because there is only one product in the photo). Then start typing the name of the manufacturer. In order for this to work, you have to have already liked their page.

Select the manufacturer’s name ("blazerfarmz" in this case) and then click on "Done Tagging.”

You'll see that "Blazerfarmz" has been tagged in the photo, which means your photo is now on their Facebook page. So all the fans of their page now have the opportunity to click on your photo as well as click on through to your review. My photo is on my page and on their page—it's double the exposure for little effort.

If we go back to my album, you can see that I have several manufacturers tagged in my Product Review album.

Benefits of using Facebook albums

Some benefits of this approach to using Facebook’s albums include:

Cross posting of photos with minimal effort creates much more exposure.
It shows manufacturers that you have interest in them and are making an effort to expose their products.
If you offer giveaways, product reviews, or advertising on your site, you could always add your Facebook albums as an added bonus to product owners. In other words, you will cover their products on your Facebook page and will include them in a permanent album where their product images will be located alongside those of other manufacturers. So if someone comes from one manufacturer's Facebook page, they might discover other manufacturers’ products through your Facebook fan page.

An added touch

Something I like to do to finish it all off is to post my review on the manufacturer’s Facebook page. I like to do that from my Antioxidant-fruits.com account, though—I have to switch from my personal account to my Antioxidant-fruits.com account.

To switch accounts, go to the Account Tab in the upper right-hand corner, click it and choose, "Use Facebook as a Page." A dialog box will open showing all your pages. Click on the one you want to use.

When you click on the switch, it will take you to your Facebook home page. Next, search for the manufacturer’s name using the search bar.

Then go to their page and type a message. I wrote, "Thank you to blazerfarmz for letting us review their awesome Fresh Frozen Aronia Berries over at @ant." When you type the "@" symbol and your page's name, the full page name will come up. You can select it, and it will link to your Facebook page.

I can also then include the URL of the YouTube video I did for the review. If I just copy the URL from YouTube, paste it into that field on Facebook, and then hit the space bar, a photo will appear from the video, and the link will be there too.

Then, click on "Share," and you'll see your message show up on their page. Here, I forgot to include a link to the actual review, so I added that in the comment section.

You can do the same on your page. The beauty of posting on your page and linking to their Facebook page with the "@" symbol is that that message will show up on the manufacturer’s wall too!

What ideas do you have for making the most of your blog site and photos on Facebook? I’d love to hear them!

Jenny Dean is a 31-year-old-business owner and entrepreneur from Kansas City. Jenny is currently working on Business Blog Writers, a company that supplies blog content specifically for company's blogs, Floppycats.com, an informational website about Ragdoll cats and Antioxidant-fruits.com, an informational website about the antioxidant powers of fruit. Follow Business Blog Writers on Twitter or on Facebook.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Make the Most of Product Reviews on Your Facebook Page