When you produce regular content on your blog or website you want to attract as many visitors as possible and you want these visitors to share your content with their friends, followers, and connections.  The best way to achieve these goals is to link your site to your social networking sites by simply adding buttons (often referred to as badges) to your blog that direct people to your social media pages when they click on the relevant icon.

The great news is you don’t need to be a computer programmer to add this functionality to your site as each of the main channels has made it really easy for you and this blog post explains how to simply add social media buttons to your blog.

If you have a WordPress site like mine it’s fairly simple as most themes come with social media button functionality built-in, all you have to do is add your social media page URL to the button.  You can clearly see these at the top right-hand corner of my site.  The downside to these is they are often inflexible e.g. my current design forces me to display all of the icons or nothing and doesn’t have a LinkedIn option.

Thankfully WordPress enables you to also add a bespoke Text widget which enables you to create your own social media badges – look to the right-hand side of my blog and you will see these clearly.  All you need to do is name the widget and copy the code that you can create by following each of the links below:

• LinkedIn  – https://www.linkedin.com/profile/profile-badges
• Twitter  – https://about.twitter.com/resources/buttons#follow
• Facebook – https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/follow-button

Here is an example of Googles:

If you are signed in to the channel that you wish to create a button for simply click on the link, follow the instructions such as selecting the type of button you are looking and how you want it to be displayed and copy the code.  The code can be pasted into your site in the location you want it and hey presto you have a button that links to your site.

If you look at my site as an example all I did was copy the code generated at the Google, LinkedIn and Twitter links and paste it into one Text widget and added a title “Follow me here”, here is a screenshot showing how simple this is:

For the Facebook button I chose to use the ready-made Facebook Like Box widget found within Jetpack, all I had to do was add some text for the title and paste in my Facebook page URL.

I hope you found this article useful and please follow my social media channels for future posts

Also check out how:  How to write effective web content

Do you have a plan for building traffic to your site?  Do you know where to start?  The answers to these questions can often seem daunting but developing a brief action plan against all of the key traffic building areas I list in this post can help and yield results quickly.  This output will help you build the framework of a long-term digital marketing plan that will ultimately start to build traffic to your website

So this post is more of a list but a valuable one.  Think about what you can do now against each of these points and implement them as soon as possible.  Make sure you can track the new visitors you develop from each source in your analytics account so you can quickly measure the results to see what is working then do more of the same.

If you would like me to cover any of the points below in more detail just post the name of the topic you would like me to write about in the comments box below.

Search Marketing

• Search engine optimization – See my blog post How to optimize the design of your website which contains some useful tips.
• Paid search such as pay per click (PPC)

Online Partnerships

Who can you build an online partnership within your market?  Who operates in a similar space but is not competing?  Who is writing blogs on your market?  Who has a similar profile of customers or visitors that could be selling or promoting your product?  Types of online partnership:

• Affiliate Marketing – think about what deal would entice an affiliate to sign-up and make some approaches.  Are there any affiliate networks with a track record in your sector?
• Sponsorship
• White-labelling
• Co-branding
• Link building – this can help but make sure the links are natural and would resonate with your own audience,  make sure the traffic they are likely to generate is quality traffic, and not just there to boost visitors.

Online advertising

• Purchasing advertising space on specific websites – specifically those who attract your target market in large volumes
• Ad networks such as Google Ad Exchange or Google Adsense
• Sponsorship
• Audience targeting
• Re-marketing shows advertisements to users who’ve previously visited your website as they browse the web.

Email (Opt-in)

Make sure you always provide the recipient with a method of opting out of your email to make sure you stay within the law.  When you write your email content think of a title that will encourage the recipient to open the email and write the content to grab their attention in the first few seconds otherwise they are unlikely to read on. Types of email lists:

• In house lists, you’ve already developed
• Rented lists
• Lists your partners have developed
• Advertising in third party e-newsletters

Viral Marketing

• Buzz marketing – what shareable content can you create for the distribution of social media channels?  What works for your competitors? Video content is particularly shareable.
• Generating social media mentions – Buzz marketing will clearly help but so will engage with your followers.
• Sharable emails

And lastly don’t forget…

Offline Marketing

Make sure you mention prominently in all of your offline advertising efforts your website and if there is space in your social media channels.

• Traditional advertising – paper, magazine, flyers, radio, TV
• Sales promotions
• Personal selling
• PR
• Sponsorship
• Direct mail
• Product packaging

I hope this post gives provides you some inspiration for ideas on how to build traffic to your website.