Social media is becoming an essential part of internet marketing. If your site doesn’t have social visibility, then it will struggle to be seen or heard. Even if you aren’t into social media as a user, you can easily tap into this terrific hive of internet activity to improve your search engine ranking and deliver viral traffic to your website(s). There are two aspects to consider when looking to market your site(s) using social media – social networking and social bookmarking and the Traffic Mania system has some very simple tools for tapping into both of these.
Social Networking
There are a huge number of social networking sites but the three that really matter are Twitter, Facebook and Google+1. The key to distributing your content virally on these social networks is to encourage other people to do it for you.
The Free Option is to use a WordPress plugin to invite people to share your content on each of these three main social networks. We recommend and use a plugin called Social Share Buttons for WordPress that can be downloaded through your WP admin area. You can see what these buttons look like at the bottom of this page. If people like what they see, they will often click on one of these buttons and share it on their favorite social network. The more people that do this, the more that your content is being distributed by other people across each of these key social networks.
The Enhanced Option works on the basis of actively encouraging people to share your content on these three networks via incentives. To do this we use and recommend a premium WordPress plugin called CommentLuv. First of all, this plugin really encourages people to interact with your site because it gives them SEO incentives (like keyword in anchor links, DoFollow options etc.) for doing so – more people will find your blog because people actively search for sites that use CommentLuv through the CommentLuv search engine. As a premium user of the plugin (there is a Lite version that is free), you also have the opportunity of offering incentives to people (after they have posted a comment on your site) to share your content on Twitter, Facebook and Google+1. These incentives include showing their last 10 blog posts below their comment or making their links DoFollow. The bottom line is for the sake of clicking a button and sharing your content, the extra incentive makes this a no-brainer to your site visitors who also want to market their own sites – the net result is that your content easily goes viral.
CommentLuv is a great plugin (we use it on all of our sites) and also a great community (there is a vibrant member discussion forum). The Lite version is free, a single site license costs $67 and a multi-site license costs $87.
Social Bookmarking
There are a plethora of social bookmarking sites where people are able to post extracts, links or quick reviews of useful and interesting content they have found while surfing the internet. Of course, if you create great content, over time people will naturally bookmark your content on many of these sites as a natural turn of events. However, you can also be more proactive about making this happen with very little effort on your part.
Option 1 – Social Monkee
As a free member of Social Monkee you are able to submit a summary of your site’s content plus a DoFollow backlink to 25 social bookmarking sites each day (there are hundreds of sites in the network). Each bookmark uses spun content so it appears to visitors and search engines that 25 people each day have recommended or reviewed your site. As a pro member you can submit to 100 social bookmarking sites three times each day – and you can become a pro member by referring 12 other people or paying a one-off-fee to upgrade. We suggest trying the free option first and if you want to gain greater exposure either promote the site or pay the fee to become a pro member.
Option 2 – SocialADR
SocialADR is a free program that enables you to get others to promote your content on social bookmarking sites by logging in each day to do the same for other members. The free option will get you up to 400 bookmarks each month. If you upgrade to the ‘lazy option’ you can get upwards of 1600 bookmarks each month for multiple sites without the need to login each day.
As you can see, utilizing social media to make your content go viral while also helping your site(s) to rank better in the search engines is really very straightforward – and it requires very little effort on your part.
Next, let’s take a look at audio marketing which is equally straightforward.
