How to use social media to drive traffic to my website

Well, I'm sticking it in the MicroISV Digest for this week - hope it helps!

The best way to leverage the power of Social Media is to just participate in the conversation.

Think of Social Media as going to someone's house for a dinner party. At this party you are not going to bring in a megaphone, walk around the house, and announce what it is that you do and what you want them to buy. Rather, you will politely engage in interesting conversations, build small relationships, and eventually, either that night, or some time in the future, the topic of what you do will come up.

Since you've then spent all of this time building the relationship, they'll trust you enough to go to your website, or trust you enough to refer your website to their friends.

Looking at twitter, it's enough just to have your website link in your twitter profile, and if people like what you have to say on twitter and become more involved with you, they may happen to click through to your website.

It's amazing how many visitors you can get by not selling to people.

Cheers, Drew

I've been building websites and trying to get attention on the web for a number of years now, and there really is no shortcut aside from building great or very distinctive content for your website, ideally consistently and over a long period of time. It takes a lot of effort, but kills spammy Twitter schemes or SEOing a thin website in ROI.

If you put some time into your content, it really isn't that hard to get social media traffic if that is what you are after. Good links spread passed around Twitter like wildfire for instance. The people on those networks and all of the bloggers are eager for good, original content to pass on, and good content bubbles to the top surprisingly easily even if you don't have a following when you start out.

There is no overnight solution to this. Here are my suggestions, which I have seen working for our clients:

1. Read the basics of SEO and make an effort to be found on Google for low competition and relatively low traffic keywords. Optimize your page content and SEO elements (title tags, headers) for those keywords. Also make sure your pages don't have flash (flash can't be read by search engines) and your site structure is technically sound. This process of driving organic traffic to your site is slow but extremely beneficial and a great source for free traffic.

2. Participate in discussions around your business on blogs and other forums. It is surprising how much traffic a blog comment on a great blog can drive to your site.

3. Have a blog and introduce fresh content on your site often. This might be frustrating at times for a startup (when you are not getting blog comments etc) but persistence will pay off.

4. Lastly keep monitoring your analytics account. See which keywords are driving traffic to the site. Make usability changes and try and engage your visitors as much as you can.

Hope this helps!

Can't hurt to submit it to Hacker News:

http://news.ycombinator.com/

Two things:

1) Why 300 characters? You appear to mention Twitter a lot, and your site has a Twitterish look and feel. Do you have any particular reason to deviate from twitter-standard 140 characters?

2) I feel that posting a link to another site on startup advice would technically be walking a thin moral line. You are basically the competition, or do you feel otherwise? ... On the other hand, you presumably do own that startup and do need advice. How do people here feel about it? Can you leave comments?

Thank you

"Don't make me think"

A quick "driveby" on your promoted domain name "thisizsparta.com" has little meaning to me, and i'm not quite sure what it would be about, nor would I know it would be about startups.

(and yes, I saw "300" , but again, given urban use of the phrase, "this is sparta" could mean almost anything)

If you want to promote the sparta connection, the front page needs a quick and dirty what it means to the target audience & why it describes them (oh, and promote activity). Even Fmylife.com has a faq entry that describes what they are all about. I would also change the logo on the top "this is startup" since it would confuse those who thought "hey, isn't it supposed to be 'this is sparta' ?).

thisisstartup.com seems a lot more on message - and would probably resonate better with your target audience. Tell visitors from "thisizsparta" that going forward the site will be called "this is startup" (a top announcement strip would do fine).

FMLife is pretty straightforward - "Today, this happened. FML." Mimics real world conversations. People add it to the their story, since it is almost natural. FML just happens to be related to the domain - you don't see many posts ending with "fmylife".

I don't think you will be able to enforce people to end with "thisizsparta" or "thisisstartup" since it doesn't not mimic real world conversations - and would look forced.

If you had the name "just another day in startups" One could finish the story "Today, this happened. JADIS."