Nailing the First Million - Traffic the First Day

The Secret:  Social Media. Lots of people are talking about how to cache in on the traffic of social media these days, I’d like to share with you my experience.

Setup:

In my last Nailing the First Million blog post we set up a Feedburner feed for the blog.  You can either use that feed or the one from your blog to feed into applications that take rss as input.

Places that will use your rss feed (either the one straight out of the blog or the Feedburner feed):

• into a Twitter account
• into a Facebook account
• into a viral widget from Widgetbox (or elsewhere) - these are great to put on a related website or blog or anywhere that you may already have a stream of related traffic

There are more, but this will get you a good start, and as I said above, you will get traffic just with Twitter, everything else is gravy.

Marketing in a Social Sphere:

Remember that social media is for sharing, not marketing.  So to “market” there you have to be offering information.  This is a trust building arena.  You want to give your potential customers the information they need to be able to make an informed decision.  You want to let them know what is going on with you and your company.  You want to establish a CONVERSATION, because that is what social media is really all about.  You want to show them you CARE.

Things to consider when writing a blog title:

A title needs a hook - an emotional element that will push a button with the reader and cause them to click on the link to see what your article is about.  You can talk about exactly the same topic, in fact you can say exactly the same thing in either a ‘boring’ way or in an ‘attention getting’ way.  This is called positioning.  Russ talks about positioning in his 4 million-dollar questions video.

Second thing to consider is the keyword.  This is what gets you in the middle of a conversation - especially when you are brand new to twitter and have few or no followers.  Folks do searches in twitter (and now on Bing) for keywords exactly the same way you do searches in a search engine.  These search results come back ordered by time; with the newest tweets on top.  So if you are targeting a hot topic, let’s say you have a product you are promoting, you’ll want to twitter about it often.  However in twitter you should not spam, or use the same tweet over and over again, so you need to figure out different ways to say the same thing or to say similar and related things.

This is where synonyms and highly related terms become gold.  The Last Keyword Tool’s has several filters that will really help you out.  ‘Golden Niches, ‘Interesting Long Tails’ and ‘Supporting Keywords’ filters would all return excellent keywords for exactly this purpose.  They will give you great ideas for ways to talk about your product using a variety of jargon that will effectively attract a larger audience to your website.

Alternatively, if you are working with Krakken to build out a website, all of the supporting keywords as well as the synonymic set for a particular page are ideal candidates for using in tweets that link to that page on the website OR a blog post that supports that page.

In this way you can create killer titles for your blog post that automatically updates your twitter with a link to your blog post.

This is the theory - now let’s take it and put it into practice, because that’s what these posts are all about.  Here are my thoughts about that:

Twitter has proven to be my #1 favorite “split testing” scene.

My evil twin and I get together to try different one liners in twitter to see where the social pulse is.  In other words, you can tweak the tweet and put out a couple of different messages that say roughly the same thing to see what gets the most click throughs.  Use bit.ly, or an equivalent utility, for your links so you can keep track of your stats - you might need a couple of bit.ly accounts to make sure you have unique links for different posts that target the same page.   Try keeping your main keyword consistent but change the hook.  Then try keeping the hook the same but change the keyword.

In this way I can do some pretty heavy duty testing and understand better what the pop culture wants and is looking for without spending an adsense dime.   After a couple of dozen tweets, I had honed my title writing abilities significantly and it showed in the results of my blog post traffic - both through twitter, my subscribers and natural search.  Traffic was up across the board.

What you really want is a large difference in the number of click throughs - twitter is volatile enough that you can’t go by a few percentage points - you are looking for 20-40% difference in click throughs - then you know you have improved your writing skills and that you are hitting hot points within your market.  You’ll probably start to see your follows increase, too, without having to do any following yourself.  You can see how the ball starts to roll with a momentum all of it’s own.

And so we come to the end of our First Million series.  It’s been fun to share these ideas with you.  If you liked this series, you might want to consider attending our next Theme Zoom Certification.

–Sue & the Theme Zoom Team

Theme Zoom Krakken is an integrated application suite that radically combines Market Analysis, Competitive Analysis, Keyword DNA Creation, Automated Silo Structured Blueprint and Website Development.

For more information about Krakken or to sign up with The Last Keyword Tool Free Trial visit Theme Zoom.

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