How To Increase Traffic To Your Business or Blog

Transcription
Hello everyone! Welcome to Social Media Money Up. Episode 8. In this episode I will explain my step by step strategy to increase traffic to your site and also if your are a local business. In case we haven’t met before, my name is Angie Perez B, I’m a Social Media Marketing expert and you can find me on Twitter at @Angie9z and on Instagram at @AngiePerez.B. if you are new to this podcast, please consider subscribing. I record weekly podcast about the best techniques to grow your business or your blog and making money using social media and digital marketing. In this episode I will talk about how bloggers and small businesses can attract lots of traffic to their websites. The technique we are going to use to attract traffic to your website is called link building, and I will explain my estrategy step by step, so that you can easily follow all the steps. So this is step 0 (only for small businesses, local shops, agencies, ecommerces, online stores, and similar). If you are a blogger, you can skip this step, but keep listen the reasons why small biz need to have a blog. So, if you are a small business, the first thing I would suggest you need to do to bring traffic to your site is to have a Blog. Blogging is an optimal way to attract traffic to your site by creating a link building strategy. Link building is a technique that places links to your website in specific places, and at the same time it’s a great way to spread your content all over the internet. Another advantage is that the chances to get viral increases, since your content can be found, and anyone that finds your link can share it again. One of the main reasons why if you are a small business you need to have a blog, is that direct sales is not very appealing to any internet user, (in fact they hate it) and it is not easy to get into people’s feeds. You need to create a blog that talks about the benefits of your products or services, or how your product or service can solve a problem, or make you feel better, or help you, or news on your industry, or anything related to you product, service or industry. If you have no idea how to create a blog, go the show notes of this episode on angieperezb.com/podcast to find a link to my article about how to create a free blog in 5 minutes step by step for non techies. And to another tutorial how to Create a blog (step by step guide). In case you are a blogger you already have a blog but you still need to spread your message over the internet (so keep listening). And in case you don’t have a Blog and you are small business remember that you need to create one in order to our strategy of Link building. Once you have a blog you need to update it with content and blog post articles and all the stuff you would like to share to share online. So now, let’s suppose we have a new article on your blog. So let’s start with the steps of my link building strategy. Step 1: Create an account on Bloglovin and Feedly. The reason to do so is that every time you write a new content on your blog it will automatically populate your account in this platforms. This platforms by themselves have loads and loads of users that everyday check these platforms looking for new articles, content or whatever. Bloglovin and Feedly will update automatically every time your publish a new blog post, and your blogpost is immediately available for all the readers on these platforms. Don’t forget to check the show-notes of this episode on angieperezb.com/podcast to find all the services, links and all that I’m talking about here. Step 2: Create images for Twitter and for Pinterest. Once you have your blog post written you need to create an image for it. That image needs to have at least versions: one version with the Tweeter image dimensions, and another one for Pinterest (that needs to be vertical). With those two images you can work in almost anywhere on the social platforms also you can use them on the blog post itself so that anytime anyone share your content right from your blog, those images will appear as well. So you must try to make those images appealing and adjusted to the sizes of the social media channels. You only need to create two images with the sizes of Pinterest and Twitter for all the following reasons:
Pinterest has a very particular size which you absolutely need to create an image with those dimensions. And the images with Twitter dimensions work very well on almost all the other social media platforms (except Instagram of course). But in any case we will talk about Instagram at the end of this episode because it has particular conditions in terms of the link building strategy I’m explaining here. Step 3: Create captions and research hashtags. You need to create an appealing caption that will be used on every share you use for this content. I have a blog post about how to create a catchy headlines which will be very useful for your captions as well as for the title of your blog post. I will leave the link to this article on the show notes. In the same way you need to research the appropriate hashtags you are going to need for this piece of content. Hashtag are extremely important in platforms like Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. Also LinkedIn and medium needs hashtags. Step 4: Create a Pin on Pinterest. Use the specific image created for Pinterest on step 2, with the appropriate size for Pinterest and share this image on this platform. When it’s properly used, Pinterest can be the social platform that would bring most traffic to your website. Pinterest is also great for your products as well. You just need to create boards with your products. Please check in the show notes the link to my free Pinterest tutorial. So going back to our link building strategy, your Pinterest image needs to be vertical and eye-catching and also don’t forget to use keywords on the caption and also on your hashtags. Step 5: Social posts with your Twitter image. Use the Twitter image, the caption created on step 3 and the link to your blog post, and create posts for: Twitter, your Facebook page, Google+ and Medium. For Twitter, use the text, your link, and 2 or 3 hashtags.
For Facebook only the caption and the link, no hashtags. For Google+, use the text, the link and 2 or 3 hashtag And for Medium I would suggest to write the caption and a couple of paragraphs of your article, and then I would write a line saying something like this: “to read the full article, please click on this link”. You can also upload your content on Medium (I will leave the link on the show notes to upload blog post on Medium) but some authors don’t think this is a great idea since it can be a kind of duplicate content for SEO purposes. Step 6: Direct sharing. Now it’s the turn of direct sharing your blog posts on StumbleUpon, Mix and LinkedIn. Just share your content directly from your blog using the sharing buttons on your blog. On LinkedIn don’t forget to add your caption and add 4 up to 8 hashtags. Believed or not, content shared on LinkedIn without images, works much better in terms of engagement. So I wouldn’t add the image of the blog post on this platform. Step 7: Reply people’s questions. To do so you need to go to Quora and search for questions related to your blog post. You just need to properly answer them and also add a link to your blog post.
You can also do this on another powerful platform called Reddit. This step takes a long time so you can do this step when you have plenty of time to spend maybe one hour to write good answers to people’s questions. Finally, I’m going to talk about Instagram. It is not included on my steps only because it is not a right place for link building, since you cannot share links on Instagram (other that the one on your bio). But still you can drive traffic to your site in 3 ways: Using the link on your bio. You can either use your last blog post link, or better yet, what I recommend is using Linktree, where you can use multiple links. You can take a look at my Instagram bio to see how it works. (My Instagram handle is angieperez.b) Way number 2 is by mentioning on your IG caption you have just a new blog post, and ask people to go to your site to read it.
And the other way is on stories. This is the best way to talk about content of your blog on Instagram. Also, if you are so fortunate to have more than 10K followers, you will have the amazing feature of swipe up to drive traffic to your site!!! Use it!!!! Now go ahead, and put into practice this strategy and of course let me know how it goes!!! Please don’t forget to leave your questions or comments on my Facebook group called Social Media Money Up Group, a place for collaborations, offering services, requesting help, sharing your projects, asking questions, inspiring and learning from one another!!! See you in the next episode of Social Media Money Up! Happy Socializing!!