Jul 11
3
Ever wondered how people will find your blog out there on the big world wide web super highway of information?
Well like anything you have to make it easy for them to find. Apart from search engine optimisation, word of mouth plays a huge role in how people find out about your product, service or even just your opinion on something.
In fact this is so true that my mentor, Alex Jeffrey’s, focuses much of his efforts to spread the word about his services through social media rather than search engine referrals. After all, search engines can change the way they rank pages at any time and for any reason.
I recently installed Google Analytics and I’ve been noticing that the biggest percentage of my traffic comes from facebook! This is also true for a friend of mine who I’m helping to grow his blog using some of the techniques I’m learning – most of his traffic also comes from facebook. So I decided I wanted to make it easier for people to share my posts that I hope will be content rich valuable information that I learn from the experts in the future! So how did I make it easier? By adding a sharing button!
You’ve probably noticed many blogs out there with a share feature that allows people to either ‘like’ it on facebook, tweet it, send by email or tell people about it in a multitude of ways. This can be an excellent way for people to find out about your site.
How does it work? Well, supposing someone stumbles across your site and really likes what you have to say they can ‘like’ it on facebook. Instantly all their friends will see a link on facebook to your website from a person they trust. If just 10 of their friends also ‘like’ your site then everyone on their friends list also become aware of your site! Some of them may visit your site and the process can repeat forever! Can you see how quickly word could possibly spread about something you post??? This is exactly how things go ‘viral’ online! But you have to make it easy to get the word out!
Not only can people share by facebook but a whole range of social media sites. There are many ‘sharing apps’ that you can install on your blog to make it easy for your site visitors to get the word out. I use WordPress to create my blog and one of the benefits of WordPress is that there are so many different apps that you can easily install that will do different things on your site – and you don’t need any programing/web development knowledge. So if your using WordPress this is how you can install a sharing app in 5 easy steps:
- Log in to your website, go to the dashboard and click on ‘plugins’ in the menu. Then click ‘Add New’. I initially typed “addthis” which is a sharing app I had read about from a google search.
- So type in “addthis” and click ‘search now’. This search will find you a range of sharing apps that you can choose from.
- Click ‘details’ to read a description and see screen shots and check out a few and then choose the one you think is best for your site.
- Then click ‘install now’. It will quickly install direct to your blog.
- Then click ‘activate plugin’. This should take you back to the plugin page where you can modify settings if the app you chose allows.
While I initially intended to install “addthis” I ended up choosing SexyBookmarks (by Shareaholic) because I liked its layout but most importantly I liked it’s call to action. As you can see by the picture in my post it encourages readers to share the knowledge and that’s something I liked about it. It is also quite customisable and allows you to alter the order that the sharing services show up (eg facebook before twitter or visa versa) and lets you choose from a huge range of services to make available for your readers to share with. In the settings it also reports how many times people have used the app to share your page.
So I am going to try out this app and if it works well I’ll keep it. If not then I’ll try something different.
I’d love to hear about a sharing app you’ve installed and how you found it works. Or if you’ve tried many write a comment reviewing the one you found was best and why. This is the place for us to learn together!
Nick
Hey Nick
Facebook is a cool way to get traffic to your blog and everyone should be taking advantage of it after all isn’t it even more popular than Google now?
I use the FB like plugin myself along with the TweetMeme and the Follow me plugins.
You can even get your blog comments fed into your Facebook and Twitter account on autopilot which is really cool.
Sally Neill told me about it and if you want to know how to do it, check out the video on her blog.
Take care
Dawn
Hi Dawn and thanks for your post. It is great to hear about these other apps and got me curious about what they do.
I checked up “FB Like” which is exactly what you think – adds the like button to each post. I found “TweetMeme” lets people retweet (resent a tweet or post that has already been written to your twitter feed) the blog post or page they are on and keeps a counter of how many times this has happened. Apparently this plugin is on heaps of big popular media sites.
It looks like the “Follow me” plugin links people to your social media sites (like FB and twitter and your youtube) so people can follow you.
I checked out Sally’s website but couldn’t see the video so I’ve asked her to send me the link so I can post it here (it might help other people also interested) or I asked her to post it directly here.
Watch this space!
Nick
OK So Sally got back to me at lightening speed and so here is the link. I’ve just watched the video and I’m gunna try it for my next post (which I will put up later tonight). It will be my very first guest post that I promised I was going to post in an earlier video….
Anyway… the link!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qaw4xoSkJo8
Enjoy! – And share this info with your friends!
Nick
Hi Nick
I’m glad to see that this blog has become a thriving centre of activity since we last e-mailed each other. I’ve still got to get back to Sally myself as I promised her I would get in touch when we met at the Instant Profits seminar… but it’s great that she’s sent you the link.
These plug-ins are really important so that the World can see what you are doing here !!
Sue Worthington, who was also at the seminar, has made a fantastic course about this sort of this. Sue is also on Lee McIntyre’s coaching course with me. I will get the link from her if you want?
Anyway, get in touch buddy 🙂
cheers
xxxxcarlxxxx
Hey Carl,
Sorry for the delay in reply. If you check my post today you will see why I’ve been delayed.
If you could get the link from Sue that would be excellent… I’m tying to make this place a bit of a “resource central” for people starting out like myself so its really cool of you to offer!
Post it in the comments or just email it to me and I can put it up on the site!
Nick
Frankly I think that’s absltouely good stuff.