ROLLING FORWARD

Trying to get more traffic for your site by buying links and investing in ads is costly and doesn’t guarantee a good conversion rate, especially if you don’t have already a strong reputation in your market. A cheaper, more effective way to drive traffic to your site is by using social media. But before you get started make sure your site looks and feels great.

Make Your Content Shareable

That takes more than adding social media sharing buttons to your site. You’ve probably seen already plenty of sites with a myriad of social media sharing buttons and a big ‘0’ next to them. Implementing the buttons doesn’t guarantee a click. It’s the quality of the content that matters.

What makes content shareable? A compelling headline, the consistent use of ‘you’ throughout the article, the inclusion of up-to-date, relevant facts, and a call to action or question at the end. A good formatting is just as important. The type of the content also matters — how to, list, and resource articles get the most shares.

Promote Your Content Through Social Sites

Set up compelling business pages on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, and other major social sites and share your website content through them. To encourage social users to visit the content on your site, post only snippets or links, not full articles. If you’re a technology company, you may want to focus on Twitter – 50% of technology companies have acquired [at least] a customer through Twitter, according to Hubspot.

Use Facebook Targeted Ads

Whenever you need a traffic boost to your site — before launching a new product or service, for example — consider using Facebook’s advanced advertising platform. It’s not only affordable and lets you target specific demographics, but it even lets you target friends of friends and friends of your competitors. According to Hubspot, 70% of business-to-consumer marketers have acquired a customer through Facebook.

Use Video Marketing

You have two options: convert existing textual content to video or create fresh video content. Whatever approach you choose, make sure you add a call to action at the end of your videos, as well as a link to your site. Don’t video-market only on YouTube, but also on Vimeo, Dailymotion, Metacafe, and Google+ and Facebook.

Use Blogging As a Marketing Tool

By dropping in links to your products and services in your posts and guest posts you can drive more traffic to your site and increase sales. Also, use blogging to network with other bloggers in your niche, whether they are buyers, competitors, or reviewers.

Reciprocal linking and sharing will boost not only your traffic, but also your reputation..

Image Credit: [Flickr/Jo@net]