5 Creative Ways to Drive More Traffic to Your Blog Posts
Do you want more traffic to your blog?
Are you struggling to catch the attention of more readers?
Does this sound familiar? You write an amazing piece of content. You made sure to craft an attention-grabbing headline. You share the link on Twitter, Facebook, even Google+.
Then you wait in breathless anticipation for your share count to skyrocket. Except it doesn’t.
Never fear, in this article you’ll find fresh ideas to generate buzz and get your posts noticed.
Use a two-pronged approach with a variety of platforms and different types of media to get your post shared. Image source: iStockPhoto.
Promote Your Article Across a “Wider” Variety of Platforms
Everyone is using Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn to promote their content. It’s tempting to focus only on these four networks because they have popularity and community numbers on their side. 
How to Ensure Your Facebook Contests Attract Genuine Fans
Are you thinking of running a contest on Facebook?
Have you run a contest and had little success with retaining fans past the award date?
One goal of a successful Facebook contest should be to recruit fans who are genuinely interested in you, while avoiding the cheaters and faux fans who are only interested in material gain.
In this article you’ll discover five tips to help ensure that your contests attract genuine fans.
#1: Award Appropriate Prizes
Don’t offer attractive prizes that have nothing to do with your brand.
Everyone wants an iPad—not just your potential customers. A free vacation will not just attract fans who are interested in your beauty products, but pretty much anyone who sees the contest.
An appropriate award deflects the prize-hunters who hide your posts or unlike your Page as soon as the prizes have been awarded.
Offer a prize that interests your current or future customers. If your contest attracts entries from people who have no reason to become your customer, change it.
Lord & Taylor, an online fashion retailer for women, is awarding fashion accessories from its website.
Facebook Reduces Ad Options: This Week in Social Media
Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.
What’s New This Week?
Facebook Streamlines Ad Offering: Facebook says they plan to “streamline the number of ad units from 27 to fewer than half of that” while mapping all of their ads to “the business objectives marketers care about—be it in-store sales, online conversions, app installs, etc.”
Facebook will eliminate redundant ads. "This includes removing the Questions product for Pages because marketers can simply ask a question in a post and get answers in comments."
Twitter Traffic: How to Double Your Traffic to Your Content
Do you use Twitter for business?
Are you wondering how to use Twitter to increase traffic to your blog?
To learn how to use Twitter to grow your business, I interview Kim Garst for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner.
It’s designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.
The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting).
In this episode, I interview Kim Garst, CEO of Boom Social, a company and blog that specializes in social media marketing. One of Kim’s areas of topical expertise is Twitter marketing.
Kim shares how she uses Twitter to promote her content and offers.
You’ll learn about what type of content works best and how frequently you should share it.
Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below!
Listen Now
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You can also subscribe via iTunes, RSS, Stitcher or Blackberry.
How to Use the LinkedIn Contacts Feature
Are you looking for a smarter way to stay in touch with your most important business relationships?
What if you could store all of your contacts in one place?
Well now you can with LinkedIn Contacts.
In this article, you’ll discover how LinkedIn Contacts looks and take a tour through its features.
What is LinkedIn Contacts?
LinkedIn announced the new LinkedIn Contacts in April.
This new feature brings together all your address books, emails and calendars, and keeps them up to date in one place.
From these sources, LinkedIn will automatically pull in the details of your past conversations and meetings, and bring those details directly into your contact’s profile.
Contacts hasn’t been rolled out to everyone yet, so you may have to check back later or join the waitlist.
To see if you have this new feature, click on Contacts in the top navigation. If you’ve been given access to the new functionality, it will look like the screenshot below.
The first screen in the new LinkedIn Contacts feature.
How to Convince Your Skeptical Boss That Facebook Marketing Works
Is your business on Facebook?
Do you need to convince your boss—or a client—that Facebook is a worthy marketing investment?
In this article I’ll show you 7 things you can do to convince decision-makers of the value Facebook.
#1: Assess Your Goals
Before you can convince anyone that they need to be on Facebook, you’ll need to understand what they want to accomplish.
Remember that not every business needs to be on Facebook.
If you are in a B2B that sells concrete to two or three huge companies, LinkedIn might be a better fit.
Not all businesses need to be on Facebook. Assess your business goals first. Image source: iStockPhoto.
5 Mobile Social Media Marketing Ideas to Grow Your Business
Your customers and prospects are using smart phones.
Have you figured out how to connect with them using mobile social media marketing techniques?
Mobile is not as difficult as it may seem, especially when you access it with the social media tools you’re already familiar with.
With that in mind, I’ll reveal 5 ways you can use social media to integrate mobile marketing into your business.
#1: Connect With Prospects On LinkedIn Mobile
The LinkedIn mobile app brings a streamlined version of the desktop site to your smartphone or other mobile device. You’ll have access to all the key LinkedIn features, including updates, your profile, messages and groups.
An example of the LinkedIn home screen on a smartphone.
From your LinkedIn home page, tap on your profile photo to access your profile screen to see who has viewed your profile recently. If someone has viewed your profile, it’s a good indication that they might be interested in hearing from you.
With the mobile app, you can reach out to them from your phone or tablet. Just tap on their profile photo and say hello to them via LinkedIn.
