You may be thinking, “But isn’t my Twitter account enough?” No. With Facebook being more popular than Google as well as the number one ranked site in several countries, you need to take advantage of the 400 million users that are on the site. We will start with how to create the page itself to how to find more fans so you can promote, promote, promote!

Step 1: Creating a Facebook Page

If you don’t have an account yet, then get one. It’s quick and easy to create. Once you have your very own account, you can then find the “Ads and Pages” link on the sidebar of your Profile.

NOTE: A lot of users have found that this link seems to be mysteriously missing, but you can still access the “Ads and Pages” link from this URL: https://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php .

Step 2: Select your Page Type

It has fortunately offered a load of different pages types that you can choose from. Most bloggers will probably want to choose the “Brand, Products or Organization” option, and then scroll down to the very bottom of the drop down available to find “website”. From there, you will be able to give your website a new name. It’s always best to go with the name of your website so that users can quickly and easily associate it with your site.

After you are finished setting up the site, make sure that you tick the box that will authorize you as the representative for your own blog. Then all you have to do is click “Create Official Page”.

Step 3: Customizing your Page

So it may look a bit empty at first. You can easily start fixing it up to make your page more exciting. For an image, make sure that you add either your website’s logo, or a picture of yourself. Using a picture of yourself will make the page more personal, but if you want to brand your site more than brand yourself, use the logo.

You will also need to add a short little blurb about your blog. Make it short yet descriptive so that users will know exactly what they’ll be in for when they visit your blog.

Step 4: Using the FMBL App

Congrats! You should now have a fairly well set up Facebook page that is almost ready for fans. You will find that in the sidebar an “Edit” tab. Click this tab, and then scroll to the bottom of the page to find more applications. Click on “Browse More” and then choose the “Static FMBL” app.

TIP: You may need to conduct your own search for this application. You can easily do this by typing “Static FBML by Facebook” in the application search box.

Once you have obtained the app, then all you have to do at this point is click on the “Add to my Page” link at the upper left hand side. You may receive a popup too; make sure you select on the popup that you would like to add this app.

Step 5: Setting up the FBML Application

Once you have added the FBML application to your Facebook page, make sure that you go back to your page. Once there, click on the “edit” tab and then scroll right on down until you find the “FBML Static” app. Click on the “Application Settings” and then swap the default settings so that you have removed the ‘box’ and then added the ‘Tab’. This will enable you to create a new tabbed page as your Facebook landing page.

Step 6: Adding the Coding for your Facebook Landing Page

You can now start to fully customize your landing page. You may first want to change the box title. An easy box title you may want to have is “Welcome”, simply because this is the very first page that any visitor is going to see. You can then insert the code that you want to display. The coding can be as advanced or as basic as you see fit. You can start with having it be just one image that will redirect visitors to your blog or to an offer that you are making online.

Step 7: Set Up your Landing Page

Click back over to the edit screen again. Find the “Wall settings” and then click on the “Edit” link. This will expand the box. From the second drop down menu you will now be able to find your brand new landing page by the name that you gave it (in this case, it would be “Welcome”). You can then change some permission settings, such as whether or not you will allow visitors to write on your wall, post links, post photos or post videos.

TIP: You may want to disallow anyone from posting links or photos or videos to external sources. This is your page, after all, so the focus should be on your blog and not on whatever the visitors are posting.

Step 8: Promoting your Facebook Page

The best and easiest way to start promoting your page is to “like” your page and become a fan. This way it will be automatically added to all of your friends’ feeds, and you will definitely have a few fans by the end of the day.

Once you have done this, it’s time to hunt down some new fans. You will want to post about your new page on Facebook to bring awareness to it. You will want to add the link to your Twitter account. You can also find apps online that will help you find Facebook members who you can add as a “Friend” who may have an interest in your blog!

Facebook is the number one social media site on the Internet. It has a population that is larger than hundreds of countries on this planet, with members coming from every corner of the earth. Just being a member means that you are potentially exposing yourself or your business to millions upon millions of people – and all with little to no effort. Though a lot of bloggers don’t realize this, Facebook offers a number of tools to promote your blog. Let’s start with the most basic of them all:

Change your Profile

What’s the purpose behind your Facebook profile? Is it to connect with friends and family? Is it to showcase pictures of your wild night out last Saturday? Or do you want it to be associated with you, a professional blogger who is an expert in your niche? You have to really consider how seriously you want to be taken, starting with how your profile is set up. People will be looking at everything about you, from what you “like” to what you are a “fan” of to the different pictures you have taken of yourself. Say, for instance, you have a blog about putting a stop to animal cruelty. A picture of you eating a steak probably isn’t the best thing to have on Facebook.

If you do want to have your profile about your personal life, then strongly consider having two separate accounts – one for “you”, and one for the professional blogger.

Seek out Friends

Don’t wait for people to find you; you’ve got to go out there and find them! The search tool  is pretty thorough, allowing you to search for people not only by name, but also by company, school, networks, email address, and more.

And don’t think that you need to know a person before you send out a friend request. You can send a friend request to absolutely anybody on Facebook. What’s the worst that can happen? They can decline your request or ignore it. But what happens more often than not is that they do accept your friend request (many people have a strong urge to have a high “friend” tally) and you then have a brand new addition to your Facebook blog network.

You can also try to seek out people who may be interested in your niche by checking out people on your friends’ friend’s lists or through group and fan page lists.

Create your own Group or Fan Page

One of the best tools for it is the Facebook Page. We’re not talking about just creating an account and friend everyone. People won’t follow you just for that. Instead they want to get updates from your blog. In fact, the first fans of your Facebook page might just be your own friends. Have them click on the “like” button. That way when you post something, they’ll be able to see it on their feed.
When you do create a Facebook page for your blog, make sure that you also upload your blog’s content onto it. When people comment or reply, make sure that you also reply and keep the conversation going. It  is an online community, so in order for that community to survive, everyone has to keep on talking and participating. If you post and never reply, you’ll find that people will quickly lose interest in your Facebook page and your blog.

One big difference between a fan page and a personal page is that the former can have an unlimited number of follows, while your personal page is limited to 5000. Obviously, you hope that your business will bigger than that at some point.
So how to you get people to like you page. Well put the “like” button on your post. It’s a matter of engaging the Facebook audience on your site, and have them eventually subscribing to your Facebook page as well.

Comment

You know how a lot of blogs have comments by default. Well the problem with that is you get a lot of spams. Facebook solves that problem by offering a plugin that requires actually Facebook accounts. So it means only authenticated users can post on your blog. Additionally when someone post comments about your article, it shows up on their wall and feeds that’s visible by their friends. So it creates a viral environment that promotes your blog.

Like Box/Facepile

It’s a box that you can embed into your website to show the number of people who likes it. Someone can click on the Like button, and become a follower as well. There’s also Facepile which shows the pictures of users that like your blog.

Hook Up with your Other Social Media

Every social media site can work with the other social media sites in some way. If you create a Facebook page, for example, you can include this link in a number of your Twitter entries. Link your blog’s RSS feed right up to Facebook to create up-to-the-minute status updates. While you’re at it, link up your Twitter feed and if you have a SlideShare account, add that to Facebook too. Keep on connecting different social media to other social media that you have to create a web, or network, of sites that are all promoting your blog and what it’s about.

Remember to Be Human

Whether your blog is written solely about daily observations, or whether it is more business-minded, you still have to be human. Facebook is less professional and more casual in nature (unlike some other business-related social media sites, such as LinkedIn). People aren’t on Facebook to be bombarded with promotions and business-only material. If that’s all you’re giving people, then they will be de-friending you soon enough. Make sure you do a fair mix of both personal stuff and promotional material. As long as the personal material isn’t too personal, your customers will appreciate it. Funny observations, pictures, quotes, and videos are all great to share. Talking about what your dog, cat, child, or friend did – as long as it’s appropriate and, preferably, universally funny – will give your Facebook page a fun, personal edge.

So these are some of our favorite tips & tools tools. Tell us about which ones that you like the most.

But what if Facebook just not your cup of tea, or what if you have maxed out your brand’s or website’s effectiveness on Facebook? There are plenty of other social networks out there that you can utilize to draw more folks to your brand or website. Below is a list of four of these types of sites that you can use.

Microblogging Sites

Microblogging sites are social networks that are just what they sound like – you tell the world what you want to say in very small pieces. Twitter is of course the main example of such a site. You make a statement or a comment in 160 characters or less, and the people on Twitter who “follow” you will be able to see it. You can also reply to other people on Twitter and have a conversation with them.

Twitter is great for businesses, as it is expected that companies and websites, while they should offer helpful information, will be largely self-promotional with their information given out on the social network. So, your site or business can use about as many shameless plug as you want on Twitter, as long as you do not get too overbearing!

There are other microblogging sites besides Twitter, but it is really the 800 pound gorilla of the microblogging world. If you have not used it before, it is very simple to get signed up and started right away. You can start sharing links to your new blog posts or other helpful information and following people who might be interested in your niche right away.

Blogs

Blog sites, such as wordpress.com, tumblr.com, and others, make great social networks for companies and websites to join. These sites are simply blogs hosted at different websites that you can use to update information about your website, about your company, etc. You can even get creative with it and highlight different staff members, customers, etc.!

With one of these blogs, make sure you have it linked to your main site so that people can find it. Also, ask questions of readers and customers and encourage conversation. The more comments you get, the better!

Another tip for blogs – make sure you update them regularly with good content and have a way for people to sign up for notifications about updates. This way, your followers can come back knowing there will be new quality content on your site regularly. Make sure that your content is helpful and something that people can really use

Social Bookmarking Sites

Social bookmarking sites are a great way for internet users to share their favorite content on the web. A few popular social bookmarking sites include Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, and Del.icio.us. It works essentially just like a regular bookmark in your browser, except it is public, and other people can “vote” on your submission. The great links that get shared and voted on by the most people go on to end up on the first page of the social bookmarking site, and can actually end up getting a lot of traffic!

These social networks really require that you submit some exceptional content to get noticed and voted up by the users of the sites, but they can be very powerful. Not only can you submit and vote on different websites, you can even “friend” people like you can on Facebook. If you add to your list of followers on these sites, you may see some traffic from the people who follow you, as they will be notified when you upload new content.

Another great benefit of these sites is search engine optimization. When you submit a link from your site on one these social networks, you are actually helping your SEO by building a high quality link back to your site! So you get the social networking and the SEO benefit all in one shot.

Video Sites

Finally, our last (but not least) set of social networks is video sites. Video continues to grow in popularity and in numbers online. People are even watching video on their mobile devices and tablets these days as the internet and processing speeds on them get faster and faster. Video now seems to be incorporated into almost every site that you visit, and it is said that YouTube is now is #2 search engine after Google. In other words, people are using YouTube to find answers to questions just like they would any other search engine.

With YouTube and other video sites, you can add “subscribers” to your video channel, which are similar to friends on Facebook. This is a great feature for businesses, especially ones that plan to upload videos regularly. Subscribers to your channel will receive a notification when you upload a new video, so you can get regular eyes on your offers or websites just by uploading good videos regularly. Outside of YouTube , you can try out Vimeo, Dailymotion, and a host of other video sharing sites out there to get more exposure for your video content.

While you will need some expertise if you want to create your own videos, it has never been easier to create and upload videos to these social networks. If you do not want to create them yourself, you can easily find someone online who will create them for you for a small fee.

While Facebook may be the largest player, by far, in the sphere of social networks, as you can see, there are plenty of other options when it comes to growing your follower base online. If you focus even on one of the four above, you are very likely to see some increases in traffic to your website, which will hopefully turn into an increase in sales for your website or business!

Here are a few simple ways to make a connection with a guru you admire who can help get you a significant amount of exposure to your blog.

Follow Them

First, of course, you need to be following on Twitter any guru who you want to connect with. Seek them out and make sure you follow them and pay attention to what they are sharing on Twitter. They cannot know you if they have never seen you!

Retweet Their Tweets

You should definitely make sure you re-tweet the things that he or she shares on Twitter. Do not share everything, as that might get a bit weird! However, do re-tweet the things that they want to have shared – maybe a link to their new blog post or something that they want to share publicly. Doing this may well garner some goodwill and attention from them as you try to connect with them.

Reply To Their Tweets

When the guru you want to connect with on Twitter shares something that you could reply to, send them an @ reply. Converse with them about what they shared. They may not always be able to respond, but you may well get their attention if you do it enough! Keep in mind with this, however, that he or she may get a whole bunch of replies when they tweet something, so they may not always be able to respond to you if you reply to their tweets, so do not get upset if your reply goes unanswered.

Send Them A Direct Message

If you want to make a personal connection, you can also them the guru a direct message on Twitter. Send them a brief introduction and an invitation to connect. Keep in mind with this as well, that they may receive many direct messages, and direct messages are often automated messages, so some people ignore them entirely. Therefore, you might not get a response this way, either, but it is just another way to get your name in front of them.

Follow Them on Other Social Media Sites

Check to see if they have a Facebook page, a LinkedIn account, etc., and follow them there as well. Try to interact with them on these sites, too, as this is another way, outside of Twitter, to get the guru’s attention and to get your name in front of them once again.

Comment on Their Blog

If they have a blog that they post on regularly, make sure you leave a post there that is helpful. Join in the conversation by adding value to it in the comments. Do not however, try to solicit their help in their blog by being overly self-promotional in their blog comments. This is generally frowned upon by website owner and bloggers.

Go To Live Events

Will the guru you want to connect with be speaking in your area, make sure you attend! I actually got to do this recently and had the opportunity to meet in person with someone considered a guru, and whom I admire, greatly before and after a meeting he held in my city. It was a great chance to chat, and now he knows who I am if I ever contact him.

Send Them Information

Let them know about when you are posting something new or something exciting on your blog, especially if they are in that person’s area of expertise or experience. They might just see fit to share it with all of their followers!

Seek Out More Than One Guru

You may not hit it off with the first guru you get in touch with. Keep in mind that they probably get flooded with information and invitations, so you may or may not hear from them in the long run after trying. So, hedge your bets! Try to contact several different gurus. By doing so, you significantly increase the chance that someone will get back with you and will share your profile or your information with others.

What you will find is that there are only 5-7 big players in any niche and you want to be one of them. The best way to get there is by following the other 5!

Do Not Be Annoying (That’s Just Creepy)

While following all of the above ideas can get your name in front of any gurus who you want to connect with, keep in mind that you do not want to annoy them with too many messages or invitations to connect via twitter or anywhere else.

Think about how you would feel if someone sent you several messages daily. This is probably not a good plan! Keep the interval to once every few days at most on your attempts to connect, and if your attempts are ignored after a long time of trying, it may be best to move on so that you do not alienate the guru entirely. You never want to push too hard and alienate someone who could be a great partner in the future.

Once Connected, Continue To Give

Once you have connected with a guru and they have sent out information, make sure you thank them publicly on Twitter and elsewhere, and make sure you continue to keep that relationship with them. After all, you do owe them some gratitude for their assistance.

Conclusion

If you will work to connect with gurus on Twitter by using the steps mentioned above, then give them good information that they could share with their followers and constituents, you might just find that one of these days, you are the guru that everyone is trying to get in touch with for assistance! By the way, if that day comes, make sure you take the time to remember the little guy and help them out as well if you can.

This article assumes that you already know the basics of setting up your Facebook ad campaign and moves into some of the advanced methods for generating traffic.

Choose Your Demographic Appropriately

One of the mistakes a lot of people make when setting up a Facebook ad campaign is to choose the wrong demographic. You need to know who your target reader is. So how do you find out what these people are interested in?

By using Facebook! If you start with one thing that you know a reader of your blog is going to be interested in, you can start clicking around Facebook, finding people that like those things and going to see more of their likes. This won’t be easy and will take some time and effort.

Not everyone has everything available for public review. So you will need to find the lists that are public. Take this information and put it into a spreadsheet.

Collect as much of it as you can, and then cross reference each list. Make a new list of all of the things they have in common. That will help you ensure that you are focusing on the right demographics for advertising on Facebook.

Write A Great Title

It’s important to pick a title that is going to draw people into your ad. You don’t want to simply tell them what you are offering. They won’t pay attention. Write the headline of your ad in a way that leads the reader to believe that there is something important that they need to find, which they will.

But avoid the clichés, such as “One secret to…” as people already know this is a trick. You want to come up with more interesting headlines that are specifically tied to the type of content that you are going to be offering the reader.

Go back to the list of interests you collected and see what sort of inspiration you find there. Drawing people into your blog using a good teaser is easy.

Use Pictures To Get Their Attention

Did you ever see those pictures that don’t seem to be related to the Facebook ad in any way? Those are pictures that are there simply to attract people’s attention. You can use any number of different types of pictures, but you should aim for one of a few different kinds: sexy, shocking, funny.

Those three will get the most attention and also keep the reader focused long enough to read your text. If you have a good title, the whole ad will start to come together, and you will be pulling readers into your blog before you know it.

You can find pictures at a number of different places. There are many stock image sites on the Internet and the Wikimedia commons has plenty that are totally free for you to use.

Just always check the terms of use before you commit to using any specific image for your Facebook ads.

Writing The Body Of The Ad

This is an important step. You need to bring out some sense of urgency here. You can do this if you are offering something as a prize or gift.

But for many blogs this just might not work. So what are you going to do to instill a sense of urgency in your potential reader? Think about offering something that they might be interested in reading or watching.

Offer that to them in the body copy and then tell them that it is free for a limited time.

For instance, if you are writing a blog about video games and you know that most of your potential readers are interested in a specific game, then you could put together an ad that uses the following body copy: “Get a free guide to dominate GAME X. It’s free for now, but retails at $35. Limited offer!”

If this doesn’t get you a lot of clicks to your site, then you did your research incorrectly and should go back to that step. You are probably targeting the wrong group.

Putting It All Together And Split Testing

The most important element of this entire process is the initial demographic research. If you get that wrong, the Facebook ads won’t get the right attention and draw traffic into your site. But assuming that you got the right stuff in the research step, how are you going to make sure that you get the best possible click-through rate?

Well, that’s easy! Use split testing. But how do you do it?

You have three elements in your ad that you can mix and match. The first is the picture, the second is the headline, and the third is the body copy. You can’t possibly know how any one of those is impacting the success of the ad, but you can verify the power of a specific combination.

Come up with at least three different pictures, three different headlines and three different body copies. They don’t need to all make sense when you mix and match them. You just need to be able to come up with nine distinct Facebook ads.

Run each one of these Facebook ads with an identical budget and then use the Facebook system to track their effectiveness. You will quickly learn which one works the best.

With this combination of Facebook ads, you can also cross reference and determine which picture is drawing the best attention. You can do the same for each headline and body copy. Just make sure that you are keeping good track of conversion rates.

When you finish with the first set ads, you can do another round, focusing on the elements that work the best. With these tips you can draw tons of traffic to your blog using the Facebook advertising platform.

Click here to view the embedded video.

As of the writing of this article, Facebook has surpassed 500 million registered users and that number continues to climb steadily. With that much power and potential, it is a wonder that more blog owners haven’t caught on to this form of marketing. Yet they will and if you wait, you will be fighting an uphill climb.

Perhaps one of the best assets going for Facebook is that you can post updates, links, and directly insert videos from YouTube onto your page. This makes getting your message out as simple as possible. As a result, when you build your network of ‘friends,’ they see your updates in real time.

How to Build a Network of Facebook  ‘Friends’

Different social networking sites have different names for the people within your social network. With Facebook, these are called ‘friends.’ Of course, this changes when you set up a  page, in which case you don’t have friends, but rather ‘fans,’ which means that your potential customers will need to ‘like’ your page. How each of these work is similar, but Facebook does not allow direct selling through your personal pages.

So, if you are building your Facebook presence for your business, then you want to build the business page. It’s as simple as that. The key to success with any network is building it with as many people as possible.

While it can be difficult to get people to ‘like’ your Facebook page if they don’t know who you are, you can make the process a bit smoother when you provide quality content that they would find interesting. There’s a balance between being too forward and not posting enough.

Provide the Right Type and Amount of Content

No one wants spam; spam is that awful junk mail that you receive in the inbox of your email account. When it comes to Facebook, spam is basically when someone posts thirty different updates about the same topic. For example, if you wanted to share information about how to start a blog or web hosting, as it pertains to your blog, don’t publish the same post a dozen times a day.

Young businessmen and those desperate for sales or traffic to their sites tend to do this. What happens is that when you follow this practice, the people who ‘like’ your page will see all of those posts from you, cluttering up their main page, and won’t be able to sift through all the junk just to see what their friends have posted. When that happens, they tend to remove or block you.

If you get blocked, then nothing you post will be seen by that user and you’ve basically removed them from your network. Also, when a blog owner takes three months to post their next update, the people who are fans or like the business on Facebook will forget about it. There is a balance that needs to be established when posting updates for your website pages.

The content also needs to be relevant. If you sell shoes, you don’t need to be posting about the latest political scandal in Washington. In fact, if you value your blog, don’t engage in political discussions at all, unless of course your business is in politics.

While personal networks of true friends on Facebook may have no problem sharing the latest stomach bug that they’ve contracted, your personal stuff doesn’t belong on your business page. It’s important to remember that you are a professional when it comes to this environment. If you don’t act professional, it will show and you will lose interest from your potential customers.

Interaction Is The Key

When you want to use Facebook to get more traffic and sales, interaction is the key word. You need to interact with the people who have taken the time to ‘like’ your business on Facebook. Whenever one of your followers posts something about your business, whether it’s a question or a comment, engage them. Answer the question or comment on their concern.

Do not dismiss these people. Customers today have more choices than ever before when it comes to where they will spend their money. They want to feel some connection to the other blog owners with whom they interact.

This doesn’t mean that you will have to write long tomes in response to every inquiry or comment. A quick line to acknowledge what they’ve written will do the trick. Just that one line will mean a world of difference to your potential customers.

Of course, you may find people posting inappropriate comments on your page. These don’t need to be acknowledged and should be removed as quickly as possible. If you feel that others might have seen the post, you can make a quick comment about the rudeness of others and leave it at that.

Don’t Oversell

As mentioned, it can be tempting to oversell your products and your business. Resist the temptation. As a blog owner, you want as many people to know about your blog, and even if you have a hundred products, it doesn’t mean you should post a hundred comments about them every day.

Limit yourself to five posts per day, at the most. One to two is ideal and will give the people who are following you just enough information to keep your blog in the front of their mind. Sharing information is also key.

Analyze Comments

Look at the comments that you receive. Do they tend to be positive or negative? When you begin to focus on these comments, you’ll be able to fine-tune your message about your blog, making it even stronger.

Also be on the lookout for people trying to poach customers away from you. Users will add links to their business and your customers might not realize that they’re being redirected away from you. Maintain control of your page every day.

Be Selfless

When it comes to success through Facebook, selflessness goes a long way. If you have some friends or fans on Facebook who are trying to spread the word about a good cause, share it for them. This will pay dividends.

Using Facebook to get more traffic and sales is simple when you follow these basic tenets and use common sense.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There’s a lot to cover here and we don’t want to overwhelm you, so we’ll keep it simple. Here are five SEO tips to get more visitors to your site.

SEO / Keywords

Make sure that your website and its content are optimized for the keyword phrases you are targeting. SEO means Search Engine Optimization; it’s a huge topic that people spent enormous amount of time mastering. Since it’s not the focus of this article, we’re not going into it in too much detail.

The point is that you need to learn about it and understand keywords & how to use them in your content. Always start with the end in mind. In otherwise be clear which keywords you want to rank on top of the search engines and then build your website and articles around those keywords.

Many amateur bloggers write aimlessly on various different topics without focus. Their efforts get watered down in many different directions. You want to make money. Concentrate and be clear!

Backlinks

A backlink is a link from somewhere else to your site. Usually this is from another website with a similar niche as yours. That audience, which may not know about your site will see the link, click on it and check out your blog.

You can do this yourself by leaving well thought out, insightful comments on other websites, blogs, and social media sites (and then linking back to your site in the comment). Note the key here is “well thought out, insightful.” If you just start writing something like “Love your blog! Now check out mine which also has a lot of fresh and interesting content!” That is not cool!

It’s actually called comment spam. There are already a lot of shady online marketers who do that. Don’t be that way! Not only is it bad manner, current blog plugins catch many of these spams automatically. And even if you do get through the filter, links in comments are usually tagged with a piece of code called rel=”nofollow” which negates any SEO benefit you might get with that link.

It’s very important that you network with people in your niche. They’re not simply competition to be ignored. Instead they’re “comp-friends.” You can work together with them, because the pie is big enough for everybody.

What you really want is to build relationships with the owners of other blogs, and hope eventually that they will link back to you site. The downside of this strategy is that it might take a while.

So if you’re not patient, you can also contact other people in your niche and outright ask them to link to your site from their blogroll. But you need to answer the question “why they should do that?” What benefits are you offering? If they agree, you will get a lot of traffic & maybe a jump in SEO! The likelihood though is somewhat low. So it’s basically a numbers game.

Even better is to offer to do a guest article or blog post for them. (make sure it’s good so that people will want more from you). Again remember to include the link to your website in the articles. This will have the added benefit of potentially increasing you page rank in the search engines.

Register With Online Directories

There are directories for various blogs and websites. For example you want to make sure you get listed in major directories like DMOZ, BlogCatalog and Yahoo Directory, so people know who you are and how to find you. There are some hoops to jump through to be accepted by them, but it’s definitely worth the effort both for the search engine optimization and traffic.

Use Social Networking

Get a Facebook page for your website, and tell your friends about it, and get them to refer other people. Get on Twitter, and be consistent about your tweeting. Get a YouTube channel and posts videos there. All these require you to interact with others on a regular basis!!! It’s not enough to just BE there.

You have to be a member of the community by having ongoing conversations. Become a recognized expert, not a spammer.

Create High Quality, Targeted Content

Make sure you have a site that people who are into your niche would actually want to visit. Many publishers have content mainly for the search engines and not really for reading by actual human beings. Don’t do it!

Companies like Google have spent billions of dollars to weed out that type of crap. You don’t want to have your effort wasted and your website penalized. We have a saying, “You can do all the marketing you want, but you can’t polish a turd.” Make sure your site is a great one or all your hard work is for nothing.

Avoid article generating software like the plague! You get what you paid for. In the long run, it’s just not worth it! It’s not going to be in your voice or your style.

We also learned the hard way that if you’re going to hire someone to write for you, make sure that they speak your native language. Otherwise, the euphemisms and the phrases just don’t quite click.

Your audience basically wants to read the writing the same way they speak. Put out good solid content that you’d be proud to stand behind. Don’t try to trick the search engines. Put your heart and effort into your work.

Build your brand! Have good quality content and links will result in more traffic and establish you as a recognized expert. That should be your long term strategy for making money on your blog.

What are these buttons? Usually they’re tiny logos representing a handful (or 20+) social media sharing sites.

But here’s the catch: for most people these social media buttons are confusing. At first glance the uninitiated (read: non-techie) reader has no darn idea what those buttons are. Once  you look closer you’ll see

Most people have just never heard of all those fancy social media sharing networks. But just about everybody and their dog has heard about Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter.

So should you really add these social media buttons to your site?

Absolutely! If you want people to bookmark your articles and share them with their friends, you have to give them a very easy way to do that.

But do it in a way that’s not confusing, focusing on just the top few sites that the readers of your site are likely to recognize.

Sadly we didn’t include these very visible buttons on our Ask Dan & Jennifer site or on our other sites… instead we opted for the “all social media buttons in one” Add-To-Any widget (more on this below). But ultimately it proved a little confusing and was too easy to ignore or just plain not notice.

So… we finally decided to add some social media buttons at the bottom of aritcles for our major sites: Ask Dan & Jennifer, Blog Success Journal, and our Personal Blog. Just to make it easy for people to share and bookmark stories they like on these sites.

What Social Media Buttons Should You Choose?

Ah, now to the rubber hitting the road… That’s a very fine line. Most people opt for showing every button available, to increase the odds that your visitor happens to have an account on one of those sites. In theory that’s a good startegy, but it can backfire.

Pretend you’re not a blogger, but a non-techie person who happened to stumble onto a great blog. Fact is, too many buttons can confuse non-techie readers. So you need to figure out what are your “big bang for the buck” sites… which sites best target your core readers base.

To find the rigth buttons for your site, Ask yourself these questions:

1. Do you have a techie readership that prefers Digg or Reddit?
2. Do you have a more mainstream (non-techie) readership that prefers non-techie sites like StumbleUpon, Yahoo Buzz?
3. How about Facebook and Twitter… would your readers know what those are?
4. What’s  the primary language for your audience… are you perhaps popular in places that speak other languages? Think “Meneame” for example, the Spanish-language Digg-like site.
5. Out of the answers above, which sites are most likely to drive more traffic to your site if bookmarks are shared there?

For us, after significant deliberation (probably too much, LOL), we came up with our top list, in this order: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Yahoo Buzz, Del.ici.ous,  Meneame, and StumbleUpon.

What’s the best way to install these buttons on your blog?

Probably the easiest way is to find a social media button service (such as AddToAny) that will give you a simple piece of Javascript you can add to your site.

If you’re running WordPress you can also choose from a myriad of plugins that will show these buttons. And there are LOTS of these types of plugins to choose from.

Which begs the question…

What are the best social media button plugins or services for your blog?

There are so many social media button options out there, it’s hard to even begin listing them. So we’re not going to. If you want to find all the options we didn’t choose after doing extensive research, you can search Google yourself for “social media button wordpress plugin” or something to that effect.

We’re just goint to tell you about the ones that we like enough to actually use ourselves.

AddToAny – A great one-size-fits-all social media button bar

AddToAny is a really cool, customizable, and easy to use widget that you can add to literally any blog. Oh, and it’s free too.

You just go to their site, customize how you want the button to look, etc. and they give you a piece of Javascript code to add to your site. It’s that simple.

Here’s what the AddToAny widget looks like:

 

And it works great, which is why we use it. We recommend AddToAny highly, you should definitely get it set up on your blog or website.

But here’s the question… is it enough? We used to think so, but no longer.

The problem with JUST having the AddToAny widget is that not everyone clicks on your pretty little “share or bookmark” button. Sure some will, but many won’t. They may not see it, or they may just not care.

SocioFluid – The first truly unique social bookmark button solution we’ve seen to date

So, we set out to find a good set of very pretty, polished, and unique social media buttons to add to the bottom of our posts… to make a facebook user say “hey, this was good, i’ll click on that facebook icon and share it with my friends”. Same for Twitter, etc.

When we started looking for the right social bookmark plugin / utility for our sites we were disappointed with all the blah, boring, all-the-same button options out there. And finally, finally we found one that is truly unique!

It’s called SocioFluid and it’s just plain and simply cool. It comes as a customizable WordPress plugin… and more recently, it’s also available as a simple javascript widget that you can add to any blog, even if it’s not WordPress (get that from SocioFluid.com).

Want to see this REALLY COOL tool in action? Just scroll down to the bottom of this article and hover over the nifty social bookmark icons… Facebook, Twitter!

OK, Now a question for you!

So what social bookmark / sharing plugins or widgets do you use for your blog? let us know in the comments below!

And be sure to Tweet this article or Share it on Facebook! Just click on one of the pretty sharing icons below!
Thanks! — Dan & Jennifer