Get More Visitors with Social Media Buttons

Every blogger wants to have a lot of readers for their blog. No one wants to be writing without an audience. It’s human nature to always want more, and this is true with blog subscribers and visitors. For bloggers, one of the best ways to promote your site is to use social media and social networking sites.

If you’re interested in increasing your traffic through social media you should be focusing time and effort on writing the best content possible and connecting with other social media users. However, one easy change that you can make is to start using social media icons on your site so visitors can vote for your content.

By placing a voting button on your site you are encouraging visitors to vote for you (think of it as a friendly reminder) and you’re making it quick and easy for them to vote. Simply reminding visitors that they can vote for you will help to increase the number of votes that you get.

Common Mistakes When Using Social Media Icons/Buttons

Because voting buttons, widgets and icons can encourage votes and lead to more visitors through social media, many bloggers tend to overdo them. You will see blogs with voting buttons for every possible social media site you can image.

This approach does more harm than good. The buttons will clutter up your blog, make it look unprofessional, distract readers from the content, and most importantly, it could spread the votes that you receive to the point where they don’t have an impact.

Say you are using 30 different buttons or icons on your site, and each one of them gets one vote from a reader. If this is the case, you will see very little traffic from those social media sites, because it takes more votes to make a difference. But if you were to have 5 buttons/icons and you got 30 total votes, that would be an average of 6 votes per button, which might be enough to get some traffic.

With an approach that users fewer voting buttons you will be showing visitors exactly where you would like them to vote for you. This way you have more control over where you get the votes and your readers are less likely to be confused.

Do’s for Using Social Media Voting Buttons

Place only a small number of social media voting buttons on your blog, I recommend 2 or 3. Carefully chose the social media sites based on fit with your audience, as well as their potential to send traffic to your site.

For the best results, don’t focus only on larger social media sites like Digg and Reddit. These sites are often dominated by major websites and blogs that already have a huge audience. Don’t ignore smaller but more targeted niche-specific sites. They may not send as much traffic, but it will be far easier.

If necessary, explain to your visitors what the social media sites are, how they can use them, and why they would want to use them. Depending on the topics that you right about, it’s possible that only a small percentage of your readers will be familiar with social media. In this case you can help to educate them and they’ll be more likely to wind up voting for your content.

Tagged with: blog building • Blogging • internet marketing • Marketing • social media • social media buttons • social media icons • social media marketing • social networking • traffic generation

Filed under: Marketing

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