How Linkedin increased my blog traffic?

In spite of joining Linkedin.com several years before, I never bothered to explore it. 4 days before was a free day. I plunged into linkedin and came out fully loaded with exciting information.

Linkedin offers extraordinary potential to promote one's online business. If you carefully create your profile, it would attract several clicks.

Browse through hundreds of groups related to your business, join them and establish connection with targeted customers and similar businessmen. Unlike Facebook, majority of the group members are very knowledgeable.  Facebook to me is more for casual socializing whereas Linkedin provides great opportunity for professionals to increase visibility of their online presence.

Promoting your blogs is much easier in linkedin. Search for bloggers in the same niche as yours, connect with them send a message to them, participate in discussions of the groups you have joined with a signature to your blog URL are some of the ways to promote your blogs.

Personally I found replying to discussions in the groups that I have joined and sending private message to group members established me as someone with knowledge in the topic.

Some groups have several thousand members. Imagine the exposure your blogs can get when join such groups.

You can share your blog post URLs to your Linkedin profile and cross post them to the relevant groups you have joined.

Linkedin gets you a lovely profile badge that you can display on your blogs.
Below is my Linkedin profile badge.



Click on itand you will land on my Linkedin profile page that shows links to my website and blogs, groups that I have joined etc.

If you join Linkedin, please add me to your network. It would help strengthen my social signals.

How to test social media signals?

Of late, we keep reading frequently of social media signals, social butterflies etc making us wonder whether we are getting worthy signals to our social media marketing.

I picked up some very interesting infostats about social signals, steps to be taken beforehand and finally measure the results. Naturally, we have to take Google as the weighbridge.

6 sites in name niche were marketed through the following highly popular social media marketing methods:
1. Getting followers to a Google Plus page 
2. Getting G+ votes
3. Getting FaceBook likes
4. Getting retweets
5. Getting Twitter followers

The first method pushed up the site in Google SERPs by 14.63 position! What does this imply?
Obviously, Google values its own social signals.

Read full

 

Google Panda and Penguin (BTW, who gives such names )
 updates have created big ripples in the social marketing ocean.

Every blog post of every respected blog master that I have subscribed to mentions these social media signals, social butterflies etc but they don't really elaborate on what next to do.

 I have read enough of writing unique, keyword rich content for better SE rankings. Is there any worthy ebook or step by step guide on strengthening social media signals?
Any recommendation?
How to test social media signals?
 Thanks in advance.

Auto deliver your blogs' feeds to 3 social networks.

I don't know about you but I bank on an automated service that creates a 140 character message about my blog post whenever I make one and delivers it as a Tweet in my Twitter timelinee.

Of late, I came to know of a few services that auto deliver your blogs' feeds to Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin simultaneously. This is the latest one: http://dlvr.it/

Just enter your blog's feed URL in the box and 'Dlvr" does the rest.

It is alright to use these automated services. It certainly a big time saver for me as I write a minimum of 6 blog posts a day. But, who will read my Tweets, my Facebook Wall?

There must a tracking service that reports how many Tweeters read my Tweets and similarly my Facebook Wall.

Find and share content easily.

For bloggers who have a handful of contents to blog but can't find many followers to their blog and for bloggers who have already managed to build a number of followers but would like to find new and fresh content to blog, Red Anyway is an ideal social platform.

Redanyway, just like Google Followers gadget, provides a friends' and followers' widget which you can place on your personal blog. This enables your friends or readers to directly add your blog to follow or add you to their friends list right from your blog.

Sounds familiar-eh?

As soon as you register, you are presented with a set of bloggers to follow. Before pressing the 'Follow' button, you can view his/her profile.

The code for the widget is given to you. You can see the widget in this blog.

Go to http://redanyway.com It is a good way to build your blog traffic.

ps:Redanyway.com loads very slowly.

What you can do in Social Authority?

Social Authority is silently moving up the scale that measures the popularity and usefulness of social marketing.

Every social community site including the giant (is it still a giant?) announce them to be a place for sharing photos, videos and what not. But the moment a social media site comes online, a few thousand bloggers and webmasters become members and the statistics is proudly displayed in their sites.

Because, every one wants visitors and social community sites are considered the most effective medium to get your blogs/websites across thousands from many nations. It is highly convenient media to market self with no money to advertise.

I have recently joined Social Authority, which can also be used to promote yourself and this is how it is done:

You clicked on the link and saw my profile page in social authority.

You have seen the images of my friends which are hyperlinked to their profiles. You can add them as your friend, add their friends to your list of friends and so on. Your contact grows to literally thousands in a matter of days.

You can send messages to your friends all at once or individually. Well, you can add links to your online presence in your message. Here is my special friend’s profile-Chris Lang. http://socialauthority.ning.com/profile/ChrisLang

You can invite more friends if you know their email ids. They become members and they invite their friends. Well, isn’t that how Orkut or MySpace has grown?

Then, there are groups you can join and what you see on my page is the names of the groups that I have joined, the number of members in each group. Groups are the best place to ask questions and answer others’ questions showing your knowledge.

You can start a discussion (your profile is linked through your image) on anything that is related to the topic of the group; include links to your websites and blogs. You can reply to discussions and follow them too through daily email digest.

In my profile page, the next thing you see on the left sidebar, the titles of the discussion that I have started and all are hyperlinked to the actual thread. Viewers of your profile are impressed by your frequency of activity and the number of replies you get.

Next shows my blog’s last five posts that is displayed here via its feed. You can configure it show the titles only, change the feed URL daily if you have more blogs/websites.

The center part of my page displays all my recent activities like who I have added as my friend, who has made a comment on my profile, what blog post I have made (yes, you can write a blog post or copy yours made elsewhere). As the displays increase, you can remove some of them.

Even this page is given a RSS URL by social authority. Isn’t that very thoughtful?

Then, my profile is displayed as I have edited/configured as follows:

Social Status: Intermediate Social Marketer

About Me: I am a Maths lecturer in India. I blog for fun and money. My life slogan: Pass it on; Share.

Website: http://theshelters.com

Blog: http://theshelters.net

So, you are again an opportunity to show your links.

After this part, you can your choice of photos and videos. Mine is blank because I have nothing of my own creativity.

The last part displays my blog posts’ synopsis with a link to full read.

At the top men, you can see the members of Social Authority, find out various forums and groups. You can customize your page’s appearance, edit your preferences etc.

Have I left out anything?

Create multiple profiles for yourself.

All the other social networking web sites allow you to create only one profile but in iStarLive you can multiple profiles different from each one. For bloggers who maintain different niche blogs, this is an advantage. People in the same niche can quickly find you and interact.

Though I have been writing about many social networking sites, somehow I don't find time to join one and be active there. Yes, I did join a few but mostly Indian based. I quickly got fed up with spam messages. And more over, majority of the topic will be centered on Hindi movies of which I have least interest.

In iStarLive, we can post classifieds which are said to be very responsive among the members. Video chat facility is an added attraction in iStarLive. And not to forget the Web Conferencing service exclusively created for business people.

Hmm... it seems this is a very professional social networking to me.

Earn points and convert it to cash.

When was the last time I took a break off blogging, I don't remember.

But of late, I have been getting loads of email from my blog readers to ask for some finer details about blog content and blog networking. Well, I like myself when I am useful to somebody.

Have you heard about Gather.com?

It is a community of bloggers who are looking to generate extra traffic and also interested in reading others' blogs. Whenever you make a blog post there, you earn some points which can be converted to goods or cash.

I joined and tried to upload a few posts and found it very easy to do. Today, I got two new visitors to my blog because I used Gather.com to promote my blogs.

I know my readers are intelligent and are quite at navigating social networking websites, so I won't go in to more details about Gather.com

Just use it and share it.