Social Networking Sites
No wonder social networks keep dominating in the digital marketing world. The second generation is growing alongside them. Obviously, these platforms have become a main source if you are a blogger.
The internet offers a wide range of social nets for everyone’s needs. Such platforms play a vital role of professional services, offering both commercial features and space where it’s possible to post blogs for free. Let’s get inside of each one and see what advanced marketing tools they have to assist bloggers with in making a profit.
Facebook is the largest social network service in the world. It gets more than two billion active users per month with more than a million pieces of content posted on Facebook every minute. This a huge corporation that receives a vast media coverage. It’s used in almost every country in the world. Facebook owns apps such as WhatsApp and Instagram. To get more statistics on this platform, click here.
To use all the benefits of the platform, first of all, you should create an account dedicated to your blog. Secondly, take care of writing unique and gripping content for promotion. Finally, start paid advertising to direct traffic to your blog. This feature can be easily adjusted to your needs as you can select your target audience by setting up the age, gender, interests and location of the people who you want to see your ads. Here you will find the tips on how to use a Facebook boost post button.
To drive traffic to your blog from Facebook:
- Use eye-catching headlines for your posts. We live in the era of click-bait, so it’s important to attract users attention in this initial stage.
- Never forget that brevity is the soul of wit. Use informative narratives.
- If possible, blend the content with visual elements.
As for your personal engagement, which does not require any funds invested, please
- Try to post the links to your blog posts in different groups.
- Be consistent in your postings. Update regularly but do not spam.
- Interact with visitors, answer comments, be friendly and positive.
Twitter is an American service where people use messages-tweets to interact with each other. A distinctive feature of this platform is that users cannot make posts longer than 280 characters. People can like, comment and share the information posted. Twitter gets more than 300 million active users per month. This platform is widely used to cover breaking news and express opinions on any matter. If you want to know more curious facts about Twitter, visit here.
To promote your blog posts on this platform, you are granted the same paid features to boost your tweets popularity so that they could appear at the top of the search results and the home timelines of users. Check out how to use Quick Promote on Twitter.
To drive traffic to your blog from Twitter:
- Hashtags: Make them as relevant as possible.
- Twitter Cards: This feature increases traffic as users sharing links to your content will have these cards attached to their tweets, and as a result, their followers will be able to see them too. You will find a simple guide on cards creation here.
And once again, adjust to all the same golden rules – don’t leave your followers to fend for themselves, be a hearty host.
Instagram is a well-known photo and video sharing service. As it’s been mentioned above, it’s owned by Facebook. Users can add photos and videos using tags and location information. Here are some interesting facts about Instagram that might inspire you to use this platform for promotion.
Basically, there are five main types of ads on an Instagram business account:
- Photo Ads. Your product image grabs users’ attention.
- Video Ads. A video version of what you offer. It also appears in users’ feeds inviting them to visit your page.
- Stories Ads. You can feature it so that people can see it in your stories.
- Carousel Ads. It’s something like a photo album which a user can scroll through.
- Sponsored Ads. This option contains a direct link to a store or blog profile.
To drive traffic to your blog from Instagram, you can make use of the “promote” option under your post, which will redirect you to a page with detailed information, so that you only have to follow a few simple steps.
Also, it is possible to boost any post with the help of an influencer. Just find one or a few of them within your niche, contact the person and discuss cooperation details.
You should remember Instagram is all about visual content. If your blog involves texts only, you’d better think of how to solve this issue. It’s not that hard, though. You can use different stock images or ones of your own. However, despite Instagram’s nature, texts under a photograph or a video mean a lot. At the end of the day, even your followers use texts to express their reactions to your posts or simply get in touch with you or each other. Remember, the more they are engaged in the discussions under your posts, the better blog coverage you get.
A Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann said Pinterest is a “catalogue of ideas” that inspires users to “go out and do that thing.”
You can find a quick guide on how to promote paid pins here.
The rest of the logic is almost the same as for Instagram – you create good visual content with a link to your blog post.
Other steps to drive traffic from Pinterest:
- If you have many pins, split them up into different categories with the help of a blogboard function like this one
- It’s an interesting fact but pins with a higher pixels height are more likely to be repinned
- Take part in discussions, answer comments, follow your followers in return. You can even dedicate a special blogboard to your followers’ great pins to show them respect
- Use keywords and hashtags when posting your pins so that they could easily be found
- Make a contest board to engage followers and drive more traffic
- Be yourself. You can even create a board where you pin things on your lifestyle, biography and more
- Don’t forget to post links to your blog posts
Pinterest offers a great deal of tools for your blog development. Jump at the opportunity to make use of them!
Linkedin is a business-oriented social network. This site also allows you to cooperate with people from your field of expertise. It has helped many job seekers get employed and many employers find good specialists.
To drive traffic to your blog from LinkedIn:
- Register and complete your profile.
- Search for people you already know or would like to know. Build up your network. The more contacts you have, the more likely your profile is to be recommended to other people.
- Be active. Make status updates, post links to your articles but do not spam.
- Join the groups you are interested in. Entice group members to get involved in your activity.
- If you are eager, make your own group. Be prepared to moderate it.
- Be engaged – is a golden rule for everything. Discuss, comment and make polls.
- Create unique content.
- Learn from the LinkedIn influencers working in your sphere.
- Share your articles to groups and check comments throughout the day.
LinkedIn is used by professionals only. Don’t miss your chance to make an impression!
Tumblr
Tumblr is a microblogging platform which allows for short-form blogs.
To get traffic from Tumblr you should:
- Define the niche you want to occupy. Blogs with specific topics tend to be more attractive. Here is a good example of a travel blog.
- Follow and like popular accounts in your niche.
- Make as many posts as you can. There is a special feature to set up a queue where you can just schedule up to 300 posts a day.
- Use the most relevant hashtags. To do so, you’ll need to know which ones attract the most attention within your niche.
- Use calls to actions like “pass it on,” “see more here,” “for more visit my blog here,” “see more posts like this,” “like if you agree” and more.
- Get a custom theme and domain name.
- Respect your followers, and don’t put a lot of pressure on them.
Email Newsletters
There is one more tool to attract attention to your blog posts: newsletters. A newsletter is actually a report that contains news on some activities done by a business. They are quite efficient for these reasons:
- Newsletters help build a loyal society, so that visitors can always find you even if they’ve lost the link to your blog.
- There is a good chance to accumulate a comprehensive list of the most exciting things that happened within the last week or month.
- Newsletters are capable of building strong community relationships. Thus, you will have the soulmates by your side.
- Finally, you can make money with newsletters by placing ads there.
It’s obvious that newsletters can contribute significantly to your business. And, if you wonder how to create a good email list, visit this page.
Up-Vote Communities and Aggregator Websites
The next category indicating where to post blogs is to up-vote communities and aggregator websites. In up-vote communities, people share a lot of data and there are always a lot of discussions going on, so they are always live. Here, users vote on which posts should be the most distinguished ones. As for the content aggregator services, they don’t manufacture their own material. Instead, these platforms aggregate content from other websites and keep it in one place. Let’s take a look at the most famous sites and see how to use them for promotional purposes.
Reddit is a social news aggregation, web-content rating and discussion website. We will give you a hint on how to use Reddit to your advantage, as there is a comprehensive guide available on the internet.
Reddit members are young and progressive. Taking this fact into consideration, here are some tips on how to make your posts accepted there:
- Present the content using an interesting title and a picture. Don’t be afraid to be creative or even funny.
- Because it’s a discussion platform, you can ask any question right in the title. It’s quite enticing for the redditors to open and reply. Get them debate on your topic!
- There are many types of popular content on Reddit, but try to make it more personal, useful and easy-to-read.
- There are many subreddits. Try to post your articles to active, but not-too-crowded ones, and, of course, check if these posts really belong with this thread.
- Be an active member. The redditors are picky and they will trust you more if you’ve got a good “karma.”
- Don’t make the redditors angry and do not post anything worthless. If the members downvote your posts, they are not going to turn up in the feed
Generally, Reddit serves a powerful source of traffic, but it depends a lot on how well you manage to communicate with redditors.
Quora
Quora is a very popular question-and-answer website. It can become a good source for you to drive traffic to your blog.
Here what you should start with:
- Login with your Google or Facebook account and choose the categories you are mostly interested in.
- Fill in your bio. Some of the data is always shown under your name. That’s a good chance to tell people who you are in short.
- Answer questions related to your sphere of interests. If you’ve got an article written on one of the topics being discussed, include a link to this post. That’s how you get clicks and traffic.
- You can also use an option of creating a blog on Quora. Here is more info on why it can be effective.
Explore Quora. It has much to offer!
Slideshare
LinkedIn SlideShare is a hosting service for professional content including presentations, infographics, documents and videos. Users can upload files privately or publicly.
Here is a deliberate article on how to succeed with this platform. The most essential thing to do is embed links to your presentations, share them to other social platforms and direct visitors to your blog.
In short:
- Upload presentations of a good quality.
- Choose attention-grabbing titles.
- Make your points short and the visual part stylish.
- Include a URL of a blog post related to this particular presentation topic.
- Use keywords in the title and description, so that the post can be relatively ranked in Google.
- Promote your presentation on all the social network accounts to create traffic circulation.
Tribber
Tribber unites bloggers in tribes. So, if you write about traveling, you can get to one of those tribes according to your interests. Here is a SlideShare presentation on how to work on Tribber. Tribber is a tool in its development and some experts say it’s more about influence, not only traffic. Sounds good, doesn’t it?
In order to drive traffic to your blog from Tribber:
- Publish valuable, problem-solving content at least a few times a week.
- Join the targeted tribes and be active there: Post comments and share other people’s posts. Thus, you will secure trust and support from other bloggers.
- Finally, you can build your own tribe if you’ve got enough of expertise.
Well, have a good time brainstorming this service!
Social Bookmarking Websites
Social bookmarking sites keep bookmarks that serve as the references to outside sources. You can add descriptions to these bookmarks, so that users may become aware of the content essentials at once.
There are sites like Inbound.org, StumbleUpon, Digg, AllTop and more.
Here are some tips on how to drive more traffic from these sites to your blog posts:
- Participate in the community life. You will get new ideas for your blog as well as a notion of what content is more popular in your niche and how to present it better.
- Set up all the sharing options needed, so that you can provide your readers with a convenient way to deliver your content to any platform possible.
- Think about an inviting headline. It’s the first thing that really counts and catches attention.
- Think of an appealing visual preview. Together with an extraordinary headline, it makes a splash. That’s especially true for StumbleUpon and Digg platforms.
- Make up a schedule. Blog often. Remember, it’s all about traffic.
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website and is the second largest search engine in the world, after Google itself. Here are some slides for you to get familiarized with some intriguing facts about YouTube.
The most essential thing is that everything within YouTube can be automatically featured inside the Google search results.
To get traffic from this service, you do not need a great number of views. However, your visitors must be of a good “quality.”
So, here is what you should do:
- Think of how to better present your content in video form. Build it up around your target audience. Remember, it’s better to reach fewer people within your niche, than a multitude of random users.
- Your videos should tell your viewers what to do and why. Calls to action similar to any kind of invitations to visit your blog page are extremely important.
- Do not forget to add a description to your video. Also, add a link to your blog and you will turn this description box into a traffic-driving tool. Get busy SEOing your videos.
- Activate different ad features on all of your videos. Get to know these functions better here.
- Make up a short, outstanding heading for each video.
- Keep all tags relevant.
- Embed your videos all around your social network accounts and a blog. Support your posts with them. It will all work together to bind members from different platforms and bring you the desired traffic.
- Take part in vlogger collaborations to bring fresh blood to your channel and blog subsequently.
YouTube offers a ton of opportunities to your blog promotion. So, take your chance and use them wisely!
Bloggers Outreach
This technique is a well-known strategy. Reach out to people you want to cooperate with in any way possible.
- Find bloggers and influencers you want to get in touch with.
- Check to see if they have a lot of likes and shares. It illustrates if their community is active.
- Check out the content these bloggers already share. You will know what to offer.
- Make your content more interesting than previous posts of the influencer of your choice. You should stand out from the crowd and offer the blogger and their target audience something new.
- Send an email to the influencer you have chosen.
- Agree on terms that suit you both.
If you have a chance to get on a blogger’s radar before asking for cooperation – do that. Comment posts, like and share. You can even try to meet this person offline at meet-and-greet parties.
Best Practices to Promoting Your New Blog Posts
As you might have noticed, there are many places and ways to promote your blog. Every platform revised in this article is a special service providing you with lots of tools that help construct the whole machine driving traffic to your blog.
It’s up to you to choose which blog sharing sites you are going to use. It depends on which ones suit your needs better. Good luck!
