5 Ways to increase traffic using social networks

If you are an avid online social network'er, you will have a pimped out profile page. Here are 5 ways to get free traffic from spending 5 minutes a day pimping out your profile pages on MySpace, Digg, Facebook and other social networking sites. Utilize your friends list, send out bulletins and reap the rewards, but don't push so hard or you are bound to loose those great friends! 

Friends

Friends are the core of the social networking philosophy, and when promoting content this can be a valuable tool in viral marketing. The more friends you have in your network, the more visibility you will have when promoting. Here is a small example of how you can use your friends to promote your content.

At digg.com you can send a shout via 'sharing' inside a particular story, in my case I have over 300 friends and I need about 100 diggs to make a story to the homepage. In most cases a shout will receive about 10-25% chance of getting a digg and about the same chance of getting a comment on the story. So every time I submit a worthy story, I will send a shout to all my friends. But be careful not to send to many of these 'shouts' as your ID will start to be known as a spammer and know body wants that.

Bookmarks

Bookmarks are a easy way to get free traffic and I will present a perfect case example. Recently I wrote a an article on the top social networks and bookmarked the URL (http://www.seotrail.com/seo/social-networking-traffic-and-sites-you-shou...) to stubmledupon via my browser. Within an hour I had 300 impressions from the site and the bookmark still is visible via this link: http://www.stumbleupon.com/tag/myspace/. Since I bookmarked the site I have been sent over 600 users in 2 days, and that is much higher then Google will send to me in the same timeline.

Profile Pages

If you are an avid online social network'er, you will have a pimped out profile page. Here are a few examples of how you can increase visibility to your content. On my profile pages at myspace.com, digg.com, linkedin.com, stumbledupon.com and yahoo.com I have links to all my social network profiles & personal projects. This does 2 things; increases my link back total to my projects and shifts visitors to my other profile pages so I get more friends! Use rss2image.com (http://www.rss2image.com) to promote your RSS feeds via your profile pages, the service displays recent RSS activity and the service is free. Another service you find interesting is myspacestats.net (http://www.myspacestats.net), a service that tracks and stores your social networking traffic. The service simply puts a image on your profile and counts the total amount of visitors per day, month and year. Again, the service is free.

Bulletins

Bulletins utilize your friends list, basically the more friends you have the more views your bulletins receive. Common sense! Some people use bulletins way to much and if I catch these spammers they get deleted ASAP. So my advice is to use this angle a few times a month and keep them simple, this raw approach keeps the bulletins friendly and not to over bearing.

Blogs

Blogs are another great way to spread the word, most blogs allow you to post anonymous comments. I use these blogs to post a comment then I include a link to one of my sites. I achieve a free back link for simply commenting on a story.