Promotion

Am I right?

Anyway, so you have just made your website, and you’ve read all of the blogs that say social sharing is the dogs dangglies & the thing you should be concentrating on.

Google loves social shares, right?

Well yes and no.

If your idea of getting social means to make a shitty looking Facebook page and post your newest blog post it every now and then…you are in for a long, drawn out failure that involves lots of crying into your pillow.

OK maybe a bit harsh, especially seeing I am certainly no wizard in this department myself, but the point is that I am certain you are doing the same thing that I did when starting out…throwing up a page because someone told you to do that.

You check back every now and then to see how many thousands of people have liked your page and you check your stats to see which of your amazing posts have gone viral.

Well let me guess:

You have 0 new traffic, 0 new subscribers and none of your super, duper fragilistic content has not gone viral?

Does this sound right? I think it sounds familiar because my friend, I have been through that and still do have this problem if I am being honest

So what the hell can we do to get some serious social activity?

What you on about, Harry?

That is what you are asking, isn’t it. Don’t lie to me I know these things…I am an X-man. The one that can read minds, you know Professor Charles Francis Xavier AKA Professor X.

Well maybe not, but I know you are asking this because If This Then That (IFTTT) is a kind of obscure, but seriously powerful & useful tool.

I found out about it a long time ago, but never really got around to using it, until recently that it.

I am currently in the process of making a brand new authority niche site and have been testing a few things. 

One of which being utilizing social media as a method of traffic, both organic & paid.

There used to be a time when you could just blast Facebook with posts and remain on top of everyone’s news feed, but those days are over and now Facebook has a fully blown AI department and invests millions…MILLIONS into R&D to make sure that you have to either be super engaged with your audience i.e. full time, or use their advertising system.

Turns out there is and some super intelligent computer boffin/s developed this magnificent online software to help automate most online tasks.

Now,

I had never really used it before, apart from using their pre programmed  “recipes”, (more on those later) to change my wallpaper on my phone whenever Nasa updated their deep space images on their website. 

I know, I am that cool.

Anyway, since reading a blog post a while ago about how these viral websites such as ViralNova and the like got huge amounts of traffic via Facebook with constant posting and updates, I decided to give it a go with my new site.

OK so I will level with you right now, after you have spent about 3 minutes reading this far; that I used a special program called Buffer which is kind of essential for this method.

You can use a free version of it for this method and it will work just fine, but I highly recommend that you go for the paid option, (No Affiliate Link). I use the basic option at $10 per month paid in advance for 1 year and it is incredibly useful.

Anyway, these are the steps that I follow:

• Connect Buffer to my Facebook page
• Go to IFTTT and create a “recipe”
• Recipe involves:
  • IF Buzzfeed publishes a new article in the food category, (read my niche site case study to find out why food)
  • THEN publish to my Facebook page

Essentially engagement is what Facebook wants to see, and if your posts are getting seen, clicked and shared then chances are high that Facebook will slowly bump your posts to the top of people’s news feeds.

So why is it a good thing to promote other people’s posts?

Well we are only doing that for 1 reason…to get our content seen and shared.

What we are doing is using the big boys to help us out.

You see, Buzzfeed, New York Times, NPR and other like this spend lots of time and money finding the best titles to get people to engage with their content. We are using this to get Facebook to see how great our Facebook page is and that we are not using them for self promotion.

When we start to see some really great interaction with these posts, we can slip in our own posts every now and then to get the same results.

It also has another amazingly fantastic benefit: We can see which posts and post titles are getting the most shares.

If we copy what they are doing then post our own, optimized posts into our readers feed, then in theory we should be getting the same effect.

So far I have found that “Top 10” or Top …number lists tend to get the most engagement with this IFTTT method and so I am starting to make some more posts based around this post structure.

OK, so there you have it.

A nice, easy to follow (I hope) IFTTT method to help you increase engagement facebook page and hopefully boost traffic back your own site.

It does involve another application called Buffer, but as I said, you can use a free version of this until you are ready to pay for it.

I really hope that you find this interesting and useful. If you did then you can do me a favor and share it around and like on your Facebook page and all the rest of it:)

Also, if you have any questions, then please feel free to ask away in the comments section below and let’s start a discussion!

If you can’t read or see it properly, that is an image from a website that I had all but left to rot in the underbelly of the world wide web, but decided to do a test and see what happens.

The image you see there is showing how over the past…year or so, I have been receiving a slack handful of organic visitors from Google; around the 10-30 per day mark.

However since making a very popular and viral style post, I have suddenly received a 15460% increase in 1 day.

I can promise you that this is very exciting for me and I have never had any website that is getting that kind of traffic in 1 day.

My highest performing website gets about 6,500 visitors per month. At the rate that this site is going, I calculate that I will be getting around 60,000 visitors per month from it.

How did this happen?

I used a website called StumbleUpon, and if you have never heard of it before then it is basically a website where normal internet users recommend posts that they like and then StumbleUpon will figure out what you like based other peoples recommendations.

It works very well and since using it I have never used the thumbs down button and also found some really useful & interesting websites myself.

I found this website a while ago when I gave their paid advertising feature a go. I didn’t have much success with it because it turns out I was promoting the wrong kind of content.

As a result of not getting much back from it, I gave it up for a long time.

Before I tell you how to use StumbleUpon to promote your blog, I want to just give you a brief overview of why I decided to give them a go.

I started a viral site a while back and wanted to make a type of website that I thought would be popular. I developed it a bit but then stopped working on it because most of my time was taken up with my newest niche site case study, (which is going brilliantly and you should follow along with me!).

I wanted to monetize that site with AdSense, but then I recently read a post about 20 AdSense mistakes that could cost you your account and one of them was regarding inappropriate content.

Well suffice to say that the site I created was about as inappropriate as the come, so I promptly deleted all the AdSense code from it and will leave it in cryostasis for a while until I figure out what to do with it.

So…

OK, so now onto the StumbleUpon part.

I was scrolling through Facebook one day when I saw a post that my mum shared about 15 quotes to help with your life, or something along those lines.

I clicked it to check it out, and notice that it had 000’s of shares!

I read the entire post and it was basically a post that contained some nice looking images with quotes on them and a few lines of descriptions below.

That was it!

Now I already had a website that I haven’t really used in a long time, but has some pretty decent authority and loads of really unique posts about spirituality and mediation etc…exactly the kinds of things that people love to read and share.

So I thought, “bugger it, let’s make a simialr post and see what happens!”.

And that’s what I did, except instead of 15 quotes, I did a post about…16 quotes!!!

I checked Long Tail Pro for a nice long tail keyword to use and then went from there.

For me, this was actually the fun part!

I am genuinely interested in spirituality and other such things, and even more so since moving to the very Buddhist country of Laos nearly 3 years ago.

So what I did was to go to one of my favorite websites, (who I am sure are making a shit ton of cash by the way), and just chose 16 quotes that really shone out to me from people that I admire myself.

For the next step I moved over to a seriously useful online tool called Canva and chose a consistent size for each image. I decided on using the standard 800 pixel x 800 pixel social media square because most social media sites can display that without issue.

I then chose some nice looking free images, (Canva offers some for free and others are paid), then overlaid the quotes in a nice font.

All in all it took about 1 hour to get it how I liked it.

NOTE: I didn’t just throw this post together, but I did take time to choose quotes that spoke to me and really made it into something that I would read and share myself. This is super important because most people nowadays can see right through thin boring content and you will achieve nothing without putting some effort in.

You should be careful with this stage because these types of websites hate to be used for self promotion.

Whilst StumbleUpon isn’t quite as strict as Reddit is in terms of its users sniffing out any indiscretion; it still has its own rules about what you can & cannot do and you should make sure to follow those rules so you don’t ruin everyone else’s fun.

OK, that’s out of the way:

It is actually very simple to use so I won’t go into great detail. The best thing to do is to use it and play around with it. 

Don’t just use it as a tool, but use it like a normal person and you will greatly benefit from it, it really is quite brilliant and I think a little bit underrated.

Essentially, you just create an account, tick the boxes of topics that you are interested in then start adding pages you find.

A good rule of thumb is probably to make sure you add about 10 completely random – but interesting, pages for every 1 of your own pages you want to promote.

This way you are also giving back to the community and also people will be happier to click on your own posts if they think that you are proving value.

It really is the same old chestnut as everything is this game, just add value and promote – it really doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that!

Do you get it, that’s the song about the…ah never mind.

Anyway, so in order to get something out of this, I did 2 things:

1. Changed my theme based on recommendations from the RankXL blog – brilliant blog and great program you should definitely sign up to.
2. Added in some AdSense code to come high(ish) converting areas to the posts.

In terms of what I am making now from this promotion, it is more than I have ever made with an AdSense website before.

I will not go into details because that is not allowed in the AdSense agreement, but it isn’t life changing right now.

I am writing this post immediately after signing into my website and seeing the massive increase.

I also checked my AdSense account and found a pretty significant boost compared to the previous days this month and compared to the same day last month, so I am optimistic about where this might go.

Good question.

I will wait and see how this progresses and may even shift my focus from some other lesser performing websites to this one a bit more.

As of now, I have already scoured BuzzSumo for socially popular posts and found a dozzy that I have had rewritten on HireWriters for about $4 and will fiddle about with it and perhaps to the same with this post.

If this new post has the same viral effect, I may even start to dedicate even more time.

I reckon that if the site starts earning a decent amount per month, I will seriously consider selling it and getting some more money to put into my newest authority site.

Why would I do that?

Well I am really looking to create something that is sustainable and will grow in the long term.

My plan is to be able to focus solely on my online ventures and it is just not possible to depend on small affiliate style websites for this, it’s just too risky.

This was a short and sweet post about how to use StumbleUpon to promote your blog for several reasons:

• It isn’t actually that complicated to do it
• I have only had a small taste of its power and don’t want to blow my head up too much
• I am just in the testing stages right now so will have to report back with fresh long term information

As I said in that last point, I will update this post after a while, maybe about a month or so, to let you guys know about how it has been going and if it has been consistent or not.

I also want to let you know how the new post goes.

So that’s it…what do you guys think about this? Do you think I just got lucky, or do you think that this could be an interesting road forward?

Let me know in the comments below and as always, make sure to subscribe to receive loads of FREE, Printable eBooks to keep and use as and when you need to 🙂