5 Amazing ways to drive traffic to your site Part 2 – Social marketing

Steven Aitchison — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 18:23:39 +0000

I have to apologise for not getting this article out sooner. This article has been a labour of love over the last few weeks. I have had a series of obstacles which have been put in the way of writing this such as moving house, having no internet connection for 5 days, a major infestation of viruses on my computer and a host of minor obstacles. However I got there in the end and here is the second part of 5 Amazing ways to drive traffic to your sites .

You can read the first article here:

5 amazing ways to drive traffic to your sites – Part 1 – Article marketing

Social Marketing

There are many social marketing sites you can use to drive traffic to your main site. I will go over a few and list some others that will get you started.

The 3 I am going to talk about is stumbleupon, Hub Pages, and Squiddo.

When you use all the sites I mention I feel it is important to have a strategy.

First of all you have to answer why you want to use social marketing sites, to get your name known, to drive more traffic to a site , to earn more money etc.

I wanted to use it to get earn more money however I have seen the huge benefits that these sites can bring and have started to incorporate them in other ways such as getting my name out there as an expert on a particular topic.

I will list a lot of these sites at the end of this article. I would all the sites mentioned and link them to each other to maximise SEO and visability.

Stumbleupon, Squidoo and Hubpages

This has to be one of my favourite social media sites and it is responsible for over 30% of my 50,000 visitors per month.

What is stumbleupon?

Stumbleupon is a social media site which allows browsers to randomly click through sites based on specific tags they set up for themselves. This is done through a toolbar which is installed into your browser, it’s quick and easy to set up. When the reader reaches a site they have a chance to thumb it up, thumb it down or stumble to the next page. The more a page gets a thumb up or commented on positively the more the page will be shown to other readers.

The social side of the site comes into play as readers can comment on and connect with other stumblers and share each others stumbles. You can also befriend other stumblers and the more friends and connections you have the more your site will get seen by others.

As soon as you comment on a page, the page you commented on gets shown to all your friends on a front screen board on your stumble page. This gives more exposure to your site the more friends you have.

How much traffic can you get?

On average I receive between 200 – 5000 visitors per day to my site depending on my activity with stumbleupon and the quality of my content.

How to get more traffic from Stumbleupon

Use SU every single day for at least half an hour and befriend people who have given some good quality stumbles.
Leave comments on the sites you really like. This has the added benefit of it acting as a bookmark page for all the sites you like as all your comments are stored in your ‘likes’ page.
If you want to submit one of your own posts make sure you stumble pages for 30 minutes or so before submitting your own post. I have found that the more I do this the more visitors I get to my page when I submit my own post.
Write great content all the time and only submit your best articles. If all your articles are great then submit them all but be sure to submit lots of others pages as well.
Once you have submitted your site or blog post send the link with a quick message to your friends (be careful that these friends will accept your invitation to stumble you as some people don’t like it. You will get to know who your SU friends are over time).

There are some great sites out there which give more information on Stumbleupon, here are just a few:

www.stumbleupon.com

www.searchenginejournal.com/the-why-how-and-who-of-marketing-in-stumbleupon/4470/

www.seomoz.org/blog/stumbleupons-fantastic-ability-to-drive-traffic

http://website-marketing.suite101.com/article.cfm/how_to_use_stumbleupon_to_drive_web_traffic

http://www.dangrossman.info/2007/01/04/the-stumbleupon-experiment/

Seth Godin, the famous marketing genius, created a site called Squidoo to help people to talk about the things they knew about. It is like a blog platform but a lot quicker and easier to set up. You can set up a squidoo lens in around 15 minutes with no technical knowledge whatsoever. Basically squidoo is a free space on the internet to use how you wish and talk about your hobbies, interests and start linking back to your main site.

The benefits of squidoo are:

Squidoo lenses get ranked extremely quickly in google, I’ve seen them ranked in as little as two hours. Google, at the moment, adores squidoo and it’s content. The benefit of this is that you can write a short pice on squidoo have your keywords in the title and depending on the keywords you could be ranked in the top 10 in Google for your keywords (It’s important to do keyword research first before making a title foryour squidoo lens).
The more lenses you creat you will be ranked higher in the squidoo system.
You can earn money from squidoo by using ebay, amazon and adsense widgets on your lens.
The social side comes in as other people can link to your lens and rate them and befriend you as well. Obviously the more friends you have the more your lens will climb quicker up the rankings.
If you are into internet marketing then squidoo is a godsend as you can create as many lenses as you want and link them all back to your main sites.
Used in conjunction with other social media sites such as stumbleupon you can drive traffic to one main site if you wish.

Some other great sites talking about squidoo and how to build upyour lens ranking are:

Some tips on making a great squidoo lens

Squidoo allows you to use tags to help people find your lens, use them and use lots of them. Use a keyword research tool like http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com when you have a key word or phrase that you want to target type it into wordtracker and look at all the listings for the keyword or keyphrase and use them as tags on your squidoo lens. This way more people will find your lens and google will also track your tags.
Have a great headline and content. You need to grab readers attention when they are going to your lens and you need to keep them interested. Having a great headline will be the first thing you work on. Use something called a headline analyzer which you can get at http://www.aminstitute.com/headline/index.htm this site basically gives you an EMV score of your headline and gives you a percentage of your emotional marketing value. For example, consider the following two headlines:

Questions on Lucid Dreaming?

Lucid Dreaming made easy!

The first one has an EMV score of 50% whilst the second headline has an EMV score of 75%.

What this means to you is that more people are likely to click on the second headline or read more if you have an article.

Read the top lenses in your category and find out what they are doing to rank high on the squidoo scene.

Some more squidoo resources

http://www.squidoo.com/lensbrainstorm

http://www.squidoo.com/easyboost

http://www.squidoo.com/advancedhtml

http://www.squidoo.com/squidoo-lens-of-the-day

http://www.squidoo.com/basichtml

http://www.squidoo.com/first_lens

Hub Pages

Hub Pages is similar to Squidoo in it’s format and web 2.0 like feel but there are some differences. The main one is that you do not create lenses but rather you create hubs and use them in a similar way to attract traffic, backlinks and you can also monetise your hub pages. In a recent interview with the marketing manager of hub pages Jason Menayan, he defined hub pages a being different in the following ways:

1. We removed all adult content. This was tough since it accounted for about a third of our overall traffic.

2. We disallowed spam Hubs. We forced users posting aggressively promotional articles to create genuine informational value, and to tone down linking to sites they were promoting.

3. We unpublished purely personal articles (like blogs!), as these were less likely to be useful to readers or to attract traffic from search engines.

4. We checked all articles for copied content, and applied a score penalty to those with content already published on the Web (even if they had rights to republish that content). Those articles with very low scores were not shown to search engines.

5. We identified and flagged articles linking out to questionable sites, like sites that potentially phish, or display obnoxious popup ads, or redirect visitors to a different site than they intended.

6. We set up a discussion forum on the site, so users could help each other out, share advice, and socialize beyond the scope of publishing articles.

7. We started paying users up-front for exceedingly high-quality articles. Their quality attracted significant traffic from search engines and created success stories, which, in turn, set a good example that users followed.

Hub pages is a little more restrictive than squidoo but it is fantastic for getting into google quickly and getting visitors to your sites.

Tips on better hub pages

Use the same tips as the squidoo lens tips and you will get high rankings for your hub pages.

Here are some top ranked hub pages for you to have a quick look at:

http://hubpages.com/hub/Christmas-Gifts-for-Mom

http://hubpages.com/hub/Different-Ways-To-Make-Money-Online

http://hubpages.com/hub/10-reasons-to-have-sex-toninght

http://hubpages.com/hub/Ten-Quick-Ways-to-Make-Money

http://hubpages.com/hub/Palm-Reading-Guide

As you can see from above the topics on the top hub pages is diverse so there is no need to limit yourself on hub pages.

Some other great sites to build up your traffic

I would use all of these sites and have similar articles on all of them and link them to each other to get the most traffic. Yes it is hard work initially but it is worth it especially if you want more traffic and would like to earn more money.

www.wordpress.org – Having a blog is a must if you want to maximise your visibility on the web. I would use a self hosted blog rather than a blog hosted by wordpress, having this allows you more flexibility.

www.blogger.com – Google owns blogger so they are already optimised for Google’s search engines so I would also see this as vital part of traffic generation.

www.wikidot.com – I love using this site. It takes a little longer to get used to the coding but it’s very simple when you get to know it.

http://www.tripod.com – I use this as another link to my main site but it’s easy to use and you can build whole websites with this.

http://www.geocities.com – Another great site which gives you a lot of control over your content and layout, worth a try.

www.weebly.com – Similar to other sites but another useful one for backlinks.

www.wetpaint.com – I liked using this on a recent campaign, it’s quick, easy and you can have a site within 10minutes.

www.livejournal.com – another easy to use site similar to wordpress with plenty of templates and design choices.

I would also use the following:

www.googlepages.com -

Affiliate recommendations

One great ebook on this subject is Craig Beckta’s book: The Secret Affiliate Code 2 which is a must read for anybody wanting to know more about this strategy and looking to drive traffic and money to their sites.

If you have any sites which you would recommend like the ones above why not post them here.

The next article will be on video marketing to drive traffic to your site.

Change your thoughts» social marketing

5 Amazing ways to drive traffic to your site Part 2 – Social marketing

Stumbleupon, Squidoo and Hubpages