Building Blog Traffic: Using Facebook

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

Loading ...

Email This Post

Written by Brandon on December 16, 2007 – 6:48 pm -

Facebook is yet another monster social networking site. This website allows you to market your blog in a vast number of ways, so I only intend to discuss a couple of the ways that are very traditional and straight ahead. And, maybe at the end of the article I will name a few more clever marketing techniques. But before we get into the details, we should discuss building your network first.

The simple fact is this is not rocket science to build up your network. First, you find friends you already have, then you look through all of your friends of friends to see who you know. Hopefully by this pint you may have 100 people you know. Next, you join as many groups as you can find on your topic of choice. Then, look through all of these people to find people who fit the demographic that you are seeking. I run a design website, so I’m always looking to make friends who are designers or architects.

Inviting more friends becomes very crucial. You need to write as personal invitation as you can without sounding too “marketing speak”. This is one of the toughest things to do to build traffic, quite frankly, but I think it’s worth it to create a bit richer social connection. In the invitation letter, write who you are, what your do, and why you’re contacting them. This may be enough to get them as your contact. (HINT) I like to write maybe a dozen short, well thought out invitations and keep them in a text file. Then I pull them out and customize them a bit.

Let’s say you’ve done this for a few hours each week for 4 months, and you now have a contact list of 8000 people (it’s possible, trust me). How do you get them to come to your site? You have to offer something they really want. You can’t just say, “hey, come look what I did!”. So, what do people really want? besides sex, there are three things that appeal to people:

Free Stuff. Run a contest with a great prize. You can show off this contest by first writing a post on your blog. This contest on your blog should require the person to give a valid name and email address with an opt out button to be included on your email newsletter. Next, post a link to your facebook account using Facebook’s awesome “share on Facebook” button that you can add to your Firefox tool bar. Make Sure you include an image of the prize or some attention getting image in your link. You really want people to notice because this image and writeup will show up in all of your contacts’ new feeds. This may manage to get a bunch of people to the site.
Challenge Your Audience... or, at least let them know about exciting challenges. As I’ve mentioned, I run a design site which covers architecture and product design. Young designers, including myself, can’t resist entering or at least reading about design competitions. It’s simple human competitive nature. If competitions don’t exist in your niche, then create your own competition, and offer a prize that would be really desirable. I would suggest that if you don’t have money for a prize, no problem! Just partner with a business who will give you a prize in return for some promotion on your blog. This may sound difficult, but it’s not. It’s as easy as asking. Again, use the Share on Facebook button to link to your site.
Appeal to People’s Vanity. I think the most highly effective form of marketing on Facebook is to start looking at your contacts and finding out which ones are doing something exciting and interesting in your niche, and then writing about those people doing things you’re interested in. The key here is to choose people that you like that also have large networks in the range of a few hundred or so. Make sure your post is extremely professional, cordial, and glowing. Send a personal note to the contact letting he know you are going to publish this, and ask him if he wouldn’t mind sending this profile out to all his contacts. Having him notify his contacts personally is key. You might also ask his contacts to leave comments on the blog about their thoughts on this person you’ve profiled.

by Jon Rawlinson: Appealing to people’s vanity must be lucrative.

Now, that you’ve built up your contacts, then you might want to try creating a group. I almost don’t think at this point you will even need a group, but you may want to make one just the same. The focus of the group should be completely on the site. You may even want to have several links on your site that brings people to your profile, your group, and your group discussion. You may even consider using the forums in your group as the main forum for your site. The advantage of this is gathering a larger and more focused audience is possible. The disadvantage is that you cannot add any advertising. You’re better off keeping a forum on your own site, for sure.

This has really been one way of marketing your site on Facebook, but the most powerful traffic building exercise is for the advanced Facebook marketer and goes into territories that I’m not even quite sure how to explore. That is developing your own Facebook application. For what I do which is run a design blog, an example of a potentially highly effective marketing tool would be to create a Hot or Not for design products. Based on which products people thought were hot this application might be able to help people narrow down style compatibility. For instance, people that really like stark, modern design of a certain kind could find each other. Of Course, the results of the hot or not could show up in a compelling way on your website. Although this has the possibility of driving tens if not hundreds of thousands of users to your site, you will first need to find a competent developer to make the software and come up with a specification that is fun for the users, but also exploits the virtues of your blog.

Please contact me if you want to share any thoughts on how to improve this article.