Improve Your Site Traffic by 2,900% Through the Power of Social Marketing

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Aside from the daily grind at Fuel Interactive, I'm a powerhouse dad blogger who's used to seeing big two-digit numbers of visitors on my blog, www.therogueparent.com. Like most site owners, I imagined the day my site would cross into the three digit world of over 100 visitors in a single day, but my previous high of 60 was well short of cracking Alexia's top sites.

That is until I discovered the power of social marketing first hand through an integrated promotional campaign to launch my latest post, "All Bands Should Take Names from Photoshop," to internet stardom.  It all began around the lunch table when we were discussing the great potential band names hidden inside of Adobe Photoshop such as Gaussian blur, angled strokes and the great gamut warning.

After writing the post and sharing a link on my typical parenting sites such as HusbandsandDads.com, parenting type magazines and others, we took the campaign social by tweeting, Digging, Stumbling and Facebooking the post.   What happened next is not a big deal to the Amazon.com's of the world, but a gigantic success for a small blogger like me.  The adjacent graph shows how my user sessions went from an average of 24 per day to a peak of 717, an almost 3,000 percent growth.

Five Steps to Launch Your Site into the Stratosphere of the Blogosphere:

#1: Write Something People Care About

I've been posting parenting insights, product reviews and commentary to the Rogue Parent for about eight months and never saw much more than 50 user sessions on any given day.  That is until I wrote about something people cared about, if not just for humor's sake.

Lesson one when writing content: if no one cares... no one cares.  You may have the greatest post in the world about the perfect way to carve a face in a bar of soap, but if no one is interested, it's not going to get read much less picked up socially.  Once you have something others like the social benefits are amazing.

#2: Start the buzz on Twitter

Twitter is an amazing resource that gets completely overlooked by those who have never used the service.  If you've tried Twitter, give it a shot.  Thanks to the following twitter people my post was promoted to over 11,000 people:

• @briancarter shared the post with 6,500 people
• @lookadoo shared it with 575
• @pdimaio shared it with 90
• @iodine74 shared it with 150
• @dawnMHSH shared it with 320
• @thewholeworld shared with 1,200
• @chuckobama shared with 2,100

#3: Tell Your Friends on Facebook

For me, this only accounted for a little over 100 people; though on average a Facebook user has 164 friends.  The goal of this element of the campaign was to get my friends to comment on my profile to spread my influence to their network.

#4: Hit the Social Bookmarks

This is the social networking 101 aspect of my launch to parent-blogger stardom.  Several people Dugg my post and many more Stumbled it.  This was my single biggest source of traffic to the site and continues to drive users to the site.  If you're promoting an article, site, or anything web based, you've got to make sure you spread the word on the social bookmarks.

#5: Share With the Like Minded

Got something that the people on a message board would like to see, make sure you let them know.  A simple, "New article on the hidden band names in Photoshop, check it out." Can do wonders for traffic and start the viral snowball of traffic.

There's countless more ways to spread your message virally through video, linking, email and more.  These are just five of the ways you can make a big impact.  Though one thing I've found is if you want it done right on a big scale, call in the professionals.