Are you taking advantage of social media channels?

Gaining traffic to a brand new site can be a little difficult, with no trust rank or incoming links, time is needed for the search engines such as Google to start sending and ranking content for healthy search traffic.

Leveraging social media combined with relevant referral traffic can drive immediate and valuable traffic to a new site. A case in point would be Better Photo School; this site is a personal hobby being a photography nut I decided to start a niche site in an extremely competitive market.

Starting from scratch with a brand new domain name coupled with a competitive market will have you chasing search engine traffic for quite some time until trust rank and incoming links start to take place.

With a brand new site you can expect the first year to be a tough slog to say the least no mater how good your content is, this is just the nature of the beast.

Enter social media marketing

Social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook, Digg and Stumbleupon just to name a few are far from fads furthermore if used in the correct way can provide a continual flow of valuable targeted traffic.

One of the most common statements we hear from clients is the simple lack of time to devote to these channels and the lack of understanding of how to leverage these channels. This is where we come in with managed plans to take advantage of these resources so you as the business owner can get on with what you do best, running your business.

For a site to continue to gain good search engine ranking, content needs incoming links. If you have heard the saying ‚’content is king’‚ then links are the queen.

You may hear some people saying that social media traffic is useless; this is far from the truth and shows a lack of understanding of how the social media market works.

It is true that an article that hits the front page of Digg will bring an extreme amount of visitors that will often never go past the page that was promoted. Although an article that does go viral will ultimately pick up a large percentage of incoming links from the by-product of going viral and ultimately has a large percentage of people talking about the site it originated from.

A viral article will continue to funnel search engine traffic into the site and this is the valuable traffic. People are short sighted, it is not the immediate traffic that is valuable it is the long-term benefit that was generated from leveraging the social media channel.

In traditional marketing we would often value add a product with a give-away that enticed people to buy the main product. With a website we have the same goal but instead of giving away a product we are giving away information. It is the soft sell content that is the valuable content to almost any website or market. Once you understand how to value add your market and use social media to your advantage you are cooking up a winning recipe.

Every business should be looking at how to leverage

• Link bait / viral content
• Facebook fan pages for your company
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Digg
• Stumbleupon

These are just but a tip of the iceberg in the social media world, but represent the major players.

If I had not used social media to promote Better Photo School, we would have little traffic as currently search accounts for 12% of our traffic. Of course the pendulum will swing in the favour of search eventually but for the time being it is social media that has driven the site to a substantial traffic-drawing site.

No matter if your site is new or old, social media is a channel you must be taking advantage of. When you see major players such as Westfield leveraging social media even if that case was controversial, it still means you need to stand up and take notice.