How to increase web traffic

Social media marketing comes with several benefits—one of which is referral traffic to your website. Here are some ways to turn these massive platforms into traffic generators for your site.

Promote your content on social

It’s not enough to produce great content and hope that people find it. Promote your content on the most popular social media channels for your audience.  Twitter is ideal for short, snappy (and tempting) links, whereas Google Business posts can help your site show up in local search results. If you’re a B2C product company, you might find great traction with image-heavy social sites like Pinterest and Instagram.

Not only will this drive traffic to your site, but the more eyes you get on your content, the more likely you are to get those backlinks we just talked about

Add hashtags

When sharing your content on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and other hashtag-friendly sites, include relevant hashtags to improve the reach of your posts. Keep the hashtags highly specific to the topic of the post, however, so you can get discovered by people most likely to read, share, and/or link to your content. Our guide to Instagram hashtags has everything you need for this

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Target amplifiers

In Rand Fishkin’s excellent Who Will Amplify This? And Why? post, he makes the excellent point of creating content for potential amplifiers, and not just potential customers. Such amplifiers include:

• Industry publications like trade journals, news sites, big-brand blogs, and social influencers.
• External sources of influence like journalists in mainstream media and social influencers outside of your field.
• Customer evangelists: the people with industry followings who use and recommend you.
• Potential evangelists: customers with big networks and followings, or well-read publications

• Post native LinkedIn articles

  The world’s largest professional social network is a valuable publishing platform in its own right, which means you should be posting content to LinkedIn on a regular basis. Doing so can boost traffic to your site, drive more visitors to your LinkedIn Company Page, and increase your reputation within your industry. And you don’t have to reinvent the wheel—write a reflection piece on a recent topic or repurpose content you’ve already written.

  Interview industry thought leaders

  Think interviews are only for the big leaguers? You’d be amazed how many people will be willing to talk to you if you just ask them. Send out emails requesting an interview with thought leaders in your industry and publish the interviews on your blog. Not only will the name recognition boost your credibility and increase traffic to your website, but the interviewee will also probably share the content too, further expanding its reach.

  Add social share buttons

  This is an easy website traffic win. Social share buttons allow readers to share the page they’re reading with their social networks in just a few clicks.

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