I’m Walash and I’ve been thinking about a way to help people at ForumCoin as this is an awesome community. As I promised last week, I’m going to share a method to drive lots of real, converting, valuable traffic to your website, blog, landing page or squeeze page.
The main goal here is to drive social traffic to your website. This guide is really simple and every step shared here is completely free, even though I will post some optional tools and softwares you can buy to automate the process or improve the method. Keep in mind that I’m not affiliated to any of them.
@Fergal and @Cyberfreak, I didn't know if this was the right section to post this guide, but as we don't have a Method/Guide section, I thought this was the best section to post it.
For this method we will be using the following channels:
Facebook;
Twitter;
Pinterest;
Tumblr;
Niche related/general forums;
E-mail Newsletter
First things first
Before doing anything we have to be sure you have all the tools below:
1 - A website/blog/squeeze page/landing page working properly: Make sure your website is working as it should, check if your theme is responsive (access it from a smartphone or tablet). Review your content on a daily basis and update it constantly. Remember that if your content is good enough you will not only receive a new visitor - you will get a recurring one. Setup a newsletter box with https://wordpress.org/plugins/newsletter/ (if you are using WordPress) and use http://mailchimp.com to manage your e-mail list.
2 - Google Analytics: GA is the best way to measure and analyze your traffic. Really useful and free. If you don’t have it yet, see how to set it up here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1008080?hl=en
3 - A brand new e-mail account: this if for account creation on social websites. The account will be fake, of course. I find Hotmail the best email provider for that since they don’t care a lot about security, just be sure to Phone Verify your account in case hotmail blocks it.
Social Media
Okay, now that you have everything set and ready, let’s start setting our accounts to drive traffic.
Facebook:
1 - Create a new facebook account (if you already have an aged one, way better. Remember not to use your personal account since you will be posting a lot, don’t mix things up!). Look for pictures of people on Google Images and get one that shows a lot of people together for your avatar, that way Facebook won’t be able to use their Face Recognition software and won’t ban you for fake profiling. You can always use pictures from parties with a lot of people as well, but this way looks a lot more natural. Locally famous people are also a picture of choice. It’s really easy to find pictures like that on Google Images, just type “Josh’s Party”, “Sam’s Birthday” or “John and friends”. Remember to rename the picture and resize it on Paint Tool before posting it! This is an example of how the picture should look like:
http://imgur.com/QLGPzEl
2 - *If you are using an aged fake profile, you can ignore this step.
Make some posts and let the account age for at least two weeks. Make regular posts and like some pages during that time and fill up the profile info like school, birthday and interests. Add some people, not more than 10 people a day, since it could make you get flagged. Stop adding people when you reach 50 friends. Add a phone number to your account in case FB blocks it. Take a screenshot from your friend tab with all the names and pictures and save it on your computer, if FB asks for picture recognition at some point, you will know exactly who those people are!
3 - Okay, now your account is two weeks old, you will start looking for potential groups to post on. Facebook has millions of groups from every single topic.
Let’s say you own a review blog about mattresses. You will most likely search groups about mattresses’ reviews, but you can go way beyond that: ask yourself, who else would be interested on your website? People with sleep disorders? Back pain? People redecorating their homes? Yes, all of those and so many others. Use the search box on Facebook and join at least 10 groups per day until you have at least 100. Do not underestimate small groups (500 - 5k people) as I’ve made some of my biggest sales on small groups!
4 - Your account is already working and it looks pretty organic, now you should start posting. You can do it two ways: a link from a post to your Facebook Page (if you have one) leading to your website or a link directly to your website. Both ways will work, but the first will also increase the number of REAL LIKES on your Facebook Page as well.
Don’t just throw the raw URL to your homepage there. Contribute to the group, post something related that will help people there to find what they want. This way you will have a lot more authority and mods will allow you to promote freely.
DO NOT SPAM! You can post twice or three times a day to each group, more than that will be considered spam and the group mods will kick you out.
5 - Keep adding more groups to your profile and create other accounts. You don’t want all your eggs in the same basket.
*Optional: You can use http://ninjablaster.com/ for managing several accounts and thousands of groups. This software has really useful functions such as auto posting, auto group joining, page scraping and several others for $9.95/month. They also offer a 10-day trial.
1 - Create an account and use the same profiling method as facebook, except you can choose a niche related picture, like a car, a doctor or a dollar bill. Remember to verify your account with a phone number and enter your website URL on your profile page.
2 - Look for people interested on your niche by looking the follower tab on high authoritative niche related twitters. For example, your website is about Basketball. Then, you wanna go to NBA’s official Twitter, open the “Followers” tab and you will see millions of people who are interested in basketball content.
3 - Use the follow/unfollow technique here. It’s pretty simple: follow 80 people from those followers on the authority twitter so they will receive a notification you just followed them. Wait for two days. Some will follow you back and that’s what we want as those people are active and interested on your website. The ones that doesn’t followed you back are either inactive or don’t care about your site, so you will unfollow them. Repeat that everyday. Remember to stay under the radar - 80 is the number of choice here as following/unfollowing too many people will get your account flagged.
4 - Tweet! Post interesting gifs and images with little text, at least 15/day. Shorten your links with bit.ly or goo.gl. Call to action and inciting tweets work really well here, don’t forget to use hashtags! See an example: “You won’t believe what Lebron James said to his coach!! [your shortened link]” #lebron #wtf #basketball.
Use http://twuffer.com/ for tweet scheduling, it’s pretty easy and free! You can schedule tweets for a week within 2 hours and forget about it. Be active, rinse and repeat with other accounts.
*Optional: Once you have the budget and want to scale things up, you won’t be able to maintain several twitter accounts alone. http://twtdominator.com/ is a hell of a tool for automation starting from $4.99/month.
Tumblr
1 - Create an account. Set up a nice avatar/cover related to your niche. It has to catch people's eyes since this will be an invitation to your blog, mainly when people use the search feature on tumblr.
2 - Set up some posts into tumblr schedule feature (I use a custom bot for that but you can do it manually. It shouldn't take more than 2 hours to set up enough content for a week or so).
You want to set your tumblr to post at least 15 times a day: just avoid posting after midnight until 8 a.m. (server time) because traffic falls 80% during this time period.
Posts need to have your website's URL. Use an URL shortener if you are into affiliate marketing.
Remember to put as many tags related to your niche as you can, this will help you get more tumblr search traffic to your blog.
3 - Follow 100 blogs related to your niche everyday. After you do it, wait until the next day and if they haven't followed you back yet, unfollow them. After a few weeks you will have people sharing your posts and commenting your content.
4 - You will start getting traffic from tumblr search, other people's followers - since they are now sharing your content - and even from Google Images as several of your posts will start ranking there as well. Keep scheduling posts every week and don't let your blog run out of those because the most important thing on tumblr is to be active! Remember tumblr is all about visual media. Images and videos do pretty well but gifs are the best way to generate traffic from my experience. Use less text but write things that are significant to people in your niche.
1 - Create an account and setup 10 boards with niche related images (at least 3 per board). Add your website URL on the “about you” box.
2 - Follow 50-100 people per day, pin 50-100 niche related images and like 50-100 different ones. You don’t need to unfollow people here, it makes no difference at all. It’s pretty hard to be banned here, so you can easily follow, like and pin three times what I suggested.
3 - Post high quality images, as those are the best to catch people’s attention. Traffic from Pinterest is the best when it comes to conversion rates, they are also pretty active on the boards you post after they followed you.
4 - Link your account to Twitter and everything you add on Pinterest will be posted there, it’s awesome to generate content.
Forum Boards
1 - Google your main keyword or your website’s niche + forum. Look the first pages and select the most active forum boards, at least five to start with.
2 - Create an account and setup your personal info, remember to add your link to the signature.
3 - Start posting and replying to people on subjects you really understand to spread your website’s link. You will start building your authority and people will take a closer look on things you advertise on your profile and signature.
4 - Put a little “for rent” announcement on your signature (below your website’s link) and people should contact you to rent that spot if you are active and helpful enough. You will generate traffic AND make some extra money every month or week. Good, huh?
5 - Use your FC to advertise. Here on ForumCoin you can rent spaces for as little as 100FC a week!! That’s REALLY cheap for the amount of traffic the forum gets and if you are selling something or monetizing with AdSense, PM Fergal or Cyberfreak for a text link or ad spot RIGHT NOW!
E-mail Newsletter
Once you are doing fine with your traffic, you will notice people subscribing to your page. Follow your growth at MailChimp. Get your most successful posts and most interesting content, use the drag and drop feature and start sending weekly newsletter to your list, it will help you increase your traffic and it will give you returning visitors.
You can also use https://hootsuite.com to make social management easier.
I’m running an amazon affiliate website using this method and it’s been a huge success, I had 921 unique visitors yesterday. My traffic is 100% social and it’s converting really well.
Hope you guys find this guide useful and let me know if you have any doubts.
Are the steps listed here doable by all sites, regardless of niche, or there are just some of the lucky few?
