Making the most of Traffic from Social Media

It is one thing to get 10,000s of visitors from Digg, Stumbleupon e.t.c; it is another thing to keep and make them regular readers. These are some suggestions for making the most of any surge in traffic that may come your way.

Content Not Ads above the Fold.

If you really want to maximise the traffic from social media, it is best to sacrifice the optimal ad positions. Sometimes I am stumbling and the only thing I see on the screen is a logo and a 330*300 Google adsense block. Invariably I mark the content thumbs down, without even seeing the article. This is not to say you can’t have ads at the top of the screen, but, if the only thing that is seen by the viewer is ads, what impression does that give? It is helpful to view blog traffic as investment. The small return from short term advertising is worth much less than the potential benefit of attracting long term subscribers who will help grow the blog. If you really want to have ads dominating the top, you could at least remove them from articles that are targetted at high traffic.

Easy to Subscribe.

It is important that it is easy to subscribe. In my opinion this is the most significant benefit of getting traffic from social media. Visitors will not click on ads, most will never return. But, if you can get even 0.5% to subscribe then it’s all worth it. The obvious thing to do is to place an RSS subscriber link in a prominent place. Some people like to make a feature out of it and place it at the top of a blog post. This probably has a good conversion rate, although it does have the drawback that the content is pushed further down. Email subscription is also worth having.

Best Articles

I have found that on a strategically designed blog a stumble visitor can visit an average of 2.3 pages. (this may not sound a lot but, it does disprove a theory that stumble visitors have a high bounce rate. However, to get a low bounce rate requires an effort to keep readers. An excellent way to do that is highlight your most popular articles. You can do this with a plugin or manually add the articles. Recent articles are also good to highlight as long as they are not just average page fillers.

Make the Most of a small success.

Typically traffic surge’s will come to one post in particular. This can count for 80% of your traffic. If you start getting a good return on an article, this is an excellent incentive to make this page as good as possible. Remove any typos, and give people a reason to further explore the blog. For example, at the bottom offer 2-3 suggested links to other articles.

Promote Those That Are Doing Well.

Often the best articles to promote on social bookmarking sites are the ones that have already had some success. This indicates that it is likely to go down well. This is the time to ask for the odd favour from people you might now always ask; you don’t want to be asking friends for votes every single post. But, if a post has already achieved some success, pull out the stops to try and make it really big. It is better to have 1 real success, than 10 posts which get a medium return. Often I feel with social bookmarking sites, it is all or nothing.

Create Anticipation

Try give some impression of Forthcoming articles. If you have a really popular post, you could add at the bottom a note saying more similar articles will be coming soon. If you have a real success on one topic, why not make a series out of it? Future anticipation offers an excellent reason for people to subscribe.

What Does the Design say About the Blog?

I spend alot of time (probably too much) stumbling articles. From my own experience, I tend to give a very high weighting to the overall look of the blog. Maybe it is bad, but, I often vote things up or down without reading the whole article. My vote tends to be dominated, to a large extent by the overall look. This does not mean it has to be anything fancy. I often like quite simple, text based blogs. But, you can’t ignore the power of visual impact. In particular try to declutter as much as possible. Ask yourself how much value all those widgets and links really offer.

Related Posts

• The Stumbleupon Effect
• Why Stumbleupon is better than Digg
• Increasing Traffic through Search Engines
• 3 Ways social bookmarking is broken and how to fix it.