I only resurrected this blog last week. I already have 40 posts, 9 categories and over 100 tags. I set up a Facebook account, a Twitter account, a Youtube account, a FeedBurner account and am working on this whole Google+ thing. I am thoroughly impressed at the amount of exposure I’ve received just from engaging others with a bit of elbow grease.
Google doesn’t even know who I am. I don’t show in Google search and don’t show in Google Blog search. Those two areas take a few days to get sorted out. I purchased this domain way back in 1999 and it has some authority, so I don’t see that issue becoming much of a problem. I just need to be patient.
Most of my traffic has been coming from direct referrals and from Facebook. It’s the Facebook arena that I’d like to talk about today.
Say, for example, you were the owner of a nightclub and had a goal of getting as many people through your nightclub doors as possible. Say that once through your doors, you know that you could get these people to spend all sorts of money on beer and merchandise. You’re confident that these people would spend their money because that’s what they’ve done in the past. The ones who you’ve attracted to the club already. So that’s a given. All you need is more people. People equal money.
Say that you want to start a targeted advertising campaign and you feel that cheesy club flyers is the way to go. If you could get these flyers in the right people’s hands, you know that they would read the flyer and say, “Hey man, check out this nightclub. I’m GOING!!!” The only question is – what’s the best way to get your flyers into the right people’s hands?
You have a few options. You could:
1. Leave a stack of flyers at the local mall help desk. If regular nightclub goers conjured up the brilliant idea of searching out the help desk with the possibility of someone leaving nightclub information there for them, they would find exactly what they were looking for. They would need to come up with the idea though and they would need to know where to look as well.
2. Hand flyers to people as they are in the act of dancing and drinking in another nightclub. No one needs to come up with any idea and no one needs to search for anything. You’ve already done the work for them. People are lazy, but if you want to get their attention, you can’t be.
Which option should you choose? Umm, I think you should choose number two.
This same scenario can be applied across the internet. Far too many people rely on organic search rankings to win traffic to their websites. Especially those in tight niches. While search traffic is huge and can win you inordinate amounts of visitors, you should work as many avenues as possible.
With Facebook and Google+, the majority of work comes with building the right audience. Once your ever growing (and very targeted) audience is there waiting for you to feed them information about your great and exciting products, you start feeding. They gobble it up and act upon it. Usually in the way you want them to. They talk and share and forward and consume. You win and gain more and more targeted traffic to your site.
I guess the moral of this story is this: If you don’t have a Facebook page for your website, create one. You can create pages under a personal account. Get going by visiting this page. Once that’s done, start recruiting people to “Like” your page. Once they like your page, you can begin adding your blog posts to your status box on the Facebook page. Your link will appear there and it will also appear on your followers pages. They click the link and check out your stuff. It’s like magic.
If you need any help with this, please let me know and I’ll help you out.
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