Steal Some Traffic Today!

How would you like to take advantage of websites that draw millions of hits a day? How would you like to siphon off a small fraction of those visitors and send ‘em to your website? Social websites are some of the most popular websites on the Internet today – and it’s easy to take advantage of them to drive great traffic to your website.

There are two types of Social websites that you need to be aware of – there are the Social Networking sites such as Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Windows Live, Orkut, Hi5, Bebo, Squidoo, Youtube, and many others… (See a list of the Top 25 Web 2.0 Sites) These sites generally allow you to create your own webpage, or post your own content in one form or another. Since these sites receive millions of hits daily, it’s nice to be able to post your own content, and drive some of that traffic to your website.

The other form of Social Websites are the Social Bookmarking sites such as Digg, Yahoo! Buzz, Technorati, Del.icio.us, Propeller, StumbleUpon, and many others. (See a list of the Top 30 Bookmarking Sites)  As with the social networking sites, these social bookmarking sites have a great deal of existing traffic, and you should certainly try to take advantage of sending some of that traffic to your website.

Most webmasters understand well the value of links – Google (as well as most other search engines) rely heavily on links to determine your ranking in the SERP’s (Search Engine Result Pages). While having a link partner is good, it’s far better to have a one-way link coming from someone to your website – but no corresponding link going to that site. (That is, of course, what a “one-way link” means). Google rightfully believes that one-way links are a more valuable indication of the value of your website. Google also considers the page rank, or ‘authority’ of a website when determining the value of a link. Obviously, it’s far more valuable to have a one-way link from a site drawing thousands of people a day – than from a site who’s last visitor was three weeks ago…

Social websites by their very nature often rank very highly in the search engines – since search engines love fresh content – and social networking sites get daily new content by their members – this results in high page rank for most social networking sites. This makes social networking (and social bookmarking) sites extremely valuable to you for the links that they can provide to your website.

Always make it easy for your visitors to bookmark you using their favorite social bookmarking website – most CMS’s have modules for this purpose. It only makes sense to help your visitors drive more traffic to your website. It’s ideal when a visitor can simply click on an icon to vote for you using their favorite bookmarking service. Voting For Your Website is exactly what a visitor is doing when they bookmark your page – make it easy for them to do this!

Tips For Using Social Websites

1. Tweak Your Headline – when trying to attract visitors – the headline will either entice them to stay and read your website, or move on to the next website. See this: Case Study: How a Headline Made the Difference between 100 and 5,000 Visits
2. Teaser Paragraph – Make sure that your first paragraph or ‘teaser’ description will suck your visitor in to reading the rest of the page – it’s always a nice idea to tell people what benefit they are about to get from reading your webpage.
3. Content is King – This goes without question – if you’re trying to send people to a website filled with generic ‘article directory’ nonsense – you may end up with traffic, but they’ll quickly move to something better.
4. Bookmarking Ease – Make it easy for visitors to bookmark your website – have Digg, Del.icio.us, Technorati, Stumbleupon, and other icons just a click away for visitors to use.
5. RSS Feed Button – Have an RSS feed button ready – Visitors may find your site interesting – but are in a hurry – give ‘em a way to get your content via a feed. You may only have minutes to capture a visitor for the long-term – don’t miss the opportunity!
6. Newsletter Subscription – Make it easy for someone to subscribe to your newsletter – Your ‘newsletter’ can be as simple as a mass mailing letting people know that you have a new article at your site.
7. Related Content – many CMS’s allow you to show other related articles – this is a good way to keep someone at your site long enough for them to bookmark you as a site they’d like to come back to.

Along with other traffic generation ‘tricks’, social networking & bookmarking sites have proven their worth to webmasters around the world – be sure to take advantage of the tremendous traffic you can develop with social sites.

No related posts.