If there there was a simple way to get more people to your website would you be interested to find out about it?
As you may know I am a keen blogger, blogging allows you to demonstrate to your potential customers that you know what you are talking about and engenders trust. It’s also a great way to get people to visit your website, and in my opinion is a vital part of any online marketing campaign.
Many dental practices are not keen on being on Facebook, and even if they are they are often not very interactive or engaging with their fans. However there is another way that one can use the power of Facebook connectivity without actually being involved in Facebook itself.
Facebook is essentially a database of connections between people and Google plus is their equivalent of this connected database. It is possible, without actually being on Facebook itself, to make use of this database and to allow other people to do your marketing for you.
And how do you go about doing this?
Simply add a share function to your blog, similar to the sharing function at the top of this blog post. This has many advantages, such as
- As people share it, or like it, the Post has the ability to go viral and attract many visitors to your website.
- The more people that share the post, the more this generates social proof for future visitors. Think about it, you land on the website and can see that many people have already shared it, it makes the website look interactive and ‘lived in’.
- Google loves seeing the fact that your site is being shared, it is an indicator to Google from a search engine optimisation point of view, that your site is popular. Google wants to send visitors to popular sites, and so this sharing is a great signal to the search engines that your site is a good one.
So how do you go about getting these share buttons?
There are two basic ways, you can either download the code from each of the various websites.
- Add the Facebook like button here.
- Add the Google plus share button here.
- Add the Twitter share button here.
However, this is a rather cumbersome way of going about it, as you need to visit each one, configure the button and then add them individually to your website or blog.
By far the simplest way of doing it, and my personal favourite, is to use the AddThis set of buttons.
The great thing about AddThis is that you can install analytics, it will then send you an e-mail letting you know the number of people that have shared each individual page and the resultant number of clicks. If you have more clicks back then people visited, then the blog post has gone viral and AddThis will report it back to you.
If your blog is on WordPress, then simply go to the ‘add plug in’ section and search for AddThis. Configure the plug-in to go on every page and every blog post to ensure maximum sharing ability and maximum search engine optimisation from the post.
Since I’ve been doing this, and then sharing my own posts on Facebook and Google plus I’ve noticed traffic increase to clients websites from these social media platforms. It’s a great way to utilise the database of connections without having to get involved in the conversation yourself, although being involved in the conversation magnifies the effect even more!
Are you using social sharing on your website and blog? What effect have you noticed?