Social Media

Ok now that I have your attention you need to read further. Social media is one of the best ways to get traffic to your website but you have to have tracking installed so you can track what you are doing and the response you are getting. Below you can see my report of my Twitter account. I get this daily as part of my Raven Tools report.

I normally only track one month at a time and have it versus the previous month. This report shows two months worth of data though. At first you may look at this and say OMG Vinny you had over 1000 post in the time. That is correct about 500 a month, but when you factor in that about 700 are automatic I only did about 300 post in two months. Most of my tweets were during Affiliate Summit. I really didn't do much tweeting at all.

The number to look at here though is the amount of re-tweets. For very little effort I get RT's on my post like crazy. That is the goal so that I get new followers and I can funnel them towards my email newsletter list. You can also see that I get a lot of other mentions and that is just fine by me. Lets break it down even further. In the graph below you will see that I track post, mentions, and events.

What I do is when I make a post on my site I create an event so I can track it. This is the dark gray lines on the chart below. I can see what post received traffic and more important what post didn't see traffic. By looking at this I can see that my post on 8/9 and 9/6 worked well on Twitter. I need to go in and see what they were and find a similar topic to write about.

The main thing is that I track every single thing I do when it comes to social media. If you look above you can see my follow 500 people experiment in full effect also. The results of that aren't in yet since I am waiting on some more figures. I also get reports on Facebook and G+ that look just like this.  I have this report emailed to me every morning along with the rest of my Raven Report.

Do you know what you are doing on social media? Are you just posting to Facebook and Twitter praying that something will get retweeted? That isn't a good idea and is probably a waste of time.

A few years ago when I bought my first smartphone I figured I would make a little video on how I can watch NFL games from my phone. Little did I know that by using “Direct TV on the Droid Phone” I was tapping into something that was to go viral. I shouldn't say viral I should say it got a lot of traffic. When I made the video (Which Sucks BTW) I didn't do any keyword research before I named it. You should always do that to help with traffic. This video has 41,000 views and it could of had more.

Now I did no promoting for this video and actually forgot all about it until I started seeing traffic in my Google analytics to my cell phone site which was in the description at the time. Every week I would see a few hundred hits from the text link in the description box to my site. When they clicked on the link it gave them a text wrap up of what I said in the video. I also embedded the video on the bottom of that page in case anyone wanted to see it again.

My cell phone site was an old looking frontpage made site that is currently being redesigned so in the mean time I changed the video to link back to my site where those people now end up seeing the pictures I take with the cell phone. It is only a stop gap measure until I get the cell phone site back up.

Use The Reply Button On Your Videos

What I learned about the video though is that when someone ask you a question on the video you should reply. People end up liking the video and the video gets ranked higher on YouTube based on the action. From now on I will always reply back to people no matter what their crazy question is.

People will end up subscribing to your channel and sharing your videos. You always want to put your videos in the best places to get the most views.

After you make a video you should also embed it on a new post on your site so it goes out to your newsletter subscribers. Tweet out that page a few times and tweet out the page it is on YouTube also. The more plays you get the more YouTube notices its popularity and that helps with rankings. Send an email to your friends and ask them to watch it. Bribe them and tell them there is a surprise ending or something.  You should also place the link to your page on Facebook and G+. In a few days go in and do the same thing with the YouTube page that your video is on.

Do not upload the video to Facebook as that won't help you with visitors back to your page.

Before you upload the video to YouTube you should rename the file name. Instead of uploading 21312312312323.mov you want to call it something like watchtvonphone.mov and help Google find it better. You also want to add a few paragraphs of text in the description field with a relevant website url somewhere so the viewer can click on it and be on your website.

At Affiliate Summit I was talking to an affiliate that was telling me that he didn't have a real social media plan. I told him I know that he didn't because I was on his site a few days before. It was then that I saw something that stopped me in my tracks.

He had all the social media buttons on the site but they all showed 0 clicks on them. I said to myself if he didn't think the post were good enough to share why the heck would I share his post. When I told the affiliate about this he looked at me like wow I never thought of that. Not saying that having 1 click will help you but if no one knows the post exist in the first place it has 0 chance of getting spread.

I am sure someone that reads this will say no wonder why no one is using the social media buttons on my site! They are not using them because they never saw your post in the first place. Every time I write a blog post I will take 3 minutes to click on the social media buttons and share the post across the 3 or 4 social media platforms that I have buttons for on the post.

This gives me a head start and allows others that follow me a chance to see the tweet or Facebook like or whatever I have done and share it with their friends. I also suggest in the newsletter that goes out that people should use the share buttons on the bottom of the post if they like it and want to help my site get more readers. You will be amazed at the amount of social shares your post receive when you put it in your readers mind what to do when they read a post. After a few newsletters with that message your long time readers will re-tweet and like your post naturally as long as it is quality.

I also told this affiliate that he should hook up with a few bloggers that are in his niche or even in his area and team up. Having 3 or 4 bloggers helping share your post on social media when they see a new post. It is pretty simple to set up, all you have to do is sign up for each others newsletter and just use the social buttons whenever they get a new newsletter.

Since having only 1 click on a social media button isn't that good when it comes to crowd sourcing (Which is what you want to happen) having a few buttons that show 3 or 4 clicks helps with that. After being spread on a few places by other bloggers you will end up with a few new readers that will start liking your post and you will end up with more than the 3 or 4 likes.

I see this situation a lot when someone launches a new blog. It takes a lot of work and then they make a few post and nothing happens and they get discouraged and the site ends up failing. Using this simple tip will help a new blog get its legs a little quicker.

If you have a good relationship with a few bloggers in your niche (and you should) you can set up this system very easy. You may be surprised at the results.