Don’t always believe that, “If you write it, then they will come,” that traffic will just flock to your site. Are you a small business owner or an online marketer who’s just established a brand new blog to attract traffic and to get your message out. You’ve developed the site in the hopes of driving massive hoards of targeted buyers with money in hand storming to your website.
It is true that maintaining a regular blog by writing unique content is an excellent way of establishing yourself as an expert in your particular field or industry. Doing so also connects as well as helps your new and existing customer base to get the exact information that they need about your company or product. The biggest hurdle however is attracting enough targeted visitors to actually read it.
That’s when you have to go external into the wild wild Web and begin utilizing the various Social Bookmarking sites, such as Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Delicious. Most likely by now, you’ve heard of all of them as social sharing and connecting outlets. If they are utilized properly, they have the power to command interested readers to your site.
One important distinction however that you need to know is that unlike the ultra famous social media networking sites such as LinkedIn or Facebook, where the content is usually secondary, people who use the various social “bookmarking” sites use them for the strict purpose of finding exact and specific Web content.
So it’s recommended that you at the very least research and then become familiar with these various bookmarking sites. Also know the type of content that you can write and tailor for that particular audience which should help increase your web traffic and ultimate success.
So the following are a few of the best practices that you can utilize by using these social bookmarking sites for the sole purpose of promoting your blog:
Bookmark Just Your Best Posts But Not All Of Them
Because of the ease, and especially if you’re using a blogging platform such as WordPress, it makes it extremely easy for you to easily share all of your blog content with the various social bookmarking and media sites, which isn’t always recommended.
By using specialized software or a plugin, you can just share your best and most relevant articles to post. For instance, after you’ve written an extremely powerful blog post which you feel fits exactly within the content theme of your site, you can then “tag” it to your Facebook page, then to StumbleUpon and to Digg, along with all the others that you choose as well.
Have All The Social Bookmarking Icons Easily Available
Placing all the various social icons on your blog will effectively maximize the social bookmarking process. So it’s recommended that you place these icons after each post that you write by using a plugin such as “ShareThis” for WordPress.
What this does is it makes it easier for your reader who happens to be a member of any of the various bookmarking sites, to be able to voluntarily share your post to others, in the hopes they find it useful or beneficial.
Make sure that you pay close attention to both all the well known established bookmarking sites as well as the new “up and coming” ones as well. When you create these valuable backlinks to your blog using the free social bookmarking sites, it’s an excellent strategy for exponentially increasing your traffic to your site.
So while you should be using all the well known established sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit and StumbleUpon, who dominates the social networking scene, there are also newer sites which are available, such as Y Combinator (ycombinator.com) which you can try out.
The newer site’s are always hungry and at times desperate for new users as well as readers who are looking for new content that’s targeted towards their business or just information in general. Similar to Reddit, when using ycombinator, users will submit your posts which are then voted by the readers.
Keyword Research Always Important
Make sure that you intensively research your target keywords that you want associated with your blog. As with all things that’s related to Internet marketing, targeted keywords are extremely important to your sites ultimate success.
So before you actually submit your post to the various social networking sites, you’ll need to take the time and effort to strategically research and then optimize the “tags” which your wanting to target and be relevant for.
It’s always a good idea to do a quick Google search for your blog post and then see what comes up in the results surrounding your blog post to get a better idea on which keywords that you should be targeting for better optimization.
You should also be adding images to your blog posts whenever possible. Posts which have photos, videos, or graphics are more likely to go viral because of today’s visually oriented mentality.