With the ever changing search engine landscape including recent updates like Google Panda and even more recent, Penguin you’re probably wondering if it’s time to stop relying on the search engines?
Well, in this post I am going to show you what I have been doing recently to take some of the load off of the search engines and put it more in the hands of interested people instead.
Going Social
Recently, many people have mentioned to me their woes in the search engines and I wanted to share some of the things I do to not need to rely completely on the search engines. Look, I get a lot of traffic to my sites from the search engines but I also build social media components to them.
Building a fan page is a great way to start gathering fans for your site or topic. Keep in mind certain fields will not make good social media pages. I mean, ask yourself would you put a “like” on a Facebook page about jock-itch even if it helped you out? Probably not.
So, the embarrassing topics are probably not going to build up social audience. But, things that offer help, entertainment or are about a cool product will work great.
Facebook is also great because you can interact with your audience there. This allows you to comment on any questions someone might have and also prove you’re a real person. Facebook isn’t going away and it keeps growing larger and larger.
Facebook also allows you to connect to an audience you might not have had otherwise. When all of someone’s buddies see your post simply because that person befriended you or liked your fan page you can get quite a few extra clicks and sales this way.
In the last 30 days this blog has had 144 clicks from Facebook itself. That’s not huge; in fact, many people are getting many more clicks than I am from Facebook. But, that’s 144 (about 8.5% of this sites current total monthly traffic) extra clicks to my site that didn’t need to come from the search engines and people who may have never seen or heard of me. Keep in mind I haven’t really put out much content on this site in the last 30 days either!
Imagine if I posted daily? Now, imagine if you put out a post per day onto the social networks like Facebook?
I have also never really “worked” on growing my fan base on Facebook and have a very small, modest following. If I put some more focus in this area I could grow it exponentially.
I’ve always expressed my hatred for Twitter. I can’t stand platforms like this and I really do not care what anyone ate for breakfast, including myself. Remember, the post I put up about distractions & being productive the other day? I think of Twitter as one big distraction.
However, about a month ago I was chatting with a buddy of mine in the internet marketing world and he echoed my hate for Twitter. But, he said “you’ve got to be using it man!” So I said, prove it to me. Then he posted a tweet for me linking back to one of my pages and in just a few hours it had over 100 real clicks from real users and inspired some interaction on this particular page.
That’s not bad for a tweet to an untargeted audience. So that gave me an idea to experiment to a targeted Twitter audience and see what happens.
So I built a brand new site, and wrote and scheduled some post to go out on it. Starting on day 1 I had just 2 twitter followers and day 30 I had 180.
I used a free tool called DLVR.COM to automate my posts from my blog to Twitter. This will also allow you to send out tweets and Facebook messages through the system as well.
I built up my Twitter audience with a tool called TweetAdder. This tool allows you to follow your targeted audience and in return many of them will follow you back. The ones that do not follow you back can be un-followed and everything can be set up on auto-pilot.
This tool simply automates mundane tasks that I’d rather spend making money or building my business.
Of course on the actual site I put up social buttons to allow people to join my Twitter following through there as well.
Ready For Some Cool Stats?
I haven’t targeted this site for the search engines at all, haven’t worked on link building on it at all and here are the current numbers. Keep in mind this is from 0 followers starting out.
262 Clicks on just 28 posts. Obviously, the first few posts had little-to-no clicks due to the fact it didn’t have an audience at first.
But, the average click per post is now 9.4 clicks and again the audience is currently only about 180 people. Imagine when it’s 1800, 18,000 or even 180,000? I will grow it there.
Imagine when I focus the site on link building and ranking my posts in the search engines too? The growth can be enormous.
A Combination
I suggest a combination of writing high quality posts that not only are targeted to your audience, but are optimized for the search engines. I still recommend link building to your posts and sites but you should also consider a combination of social elements and search results for more growth as I’ve shown you above.
If you’re giving your audience what they want, they will come.
Using a combination of the search engines and social media allows you to not “put all of your eggs in one basket.” Plus, can extra clicks and a wider audience ever really hurt?
This is just a small taste of the social sites that are out. Many people use far more than these two. I just wanted to share some of my early results and tests I’ve been running in a brand new niche market.
Make sure not to waste your time looking at pictures and getting nothing done while at these social outlets. Do what you need to do and get off of the site!
Are you currently doing anything on social media? If not will you be soon? Are you using anything that is working well for you?