Using Social Media to Grow Your Blog + Business

One of the first steps to take when you set up your website or blog is to begin downloading plugins.

If you don’t have a WordPress based website then this first part of the article won’t apply to you so feel free to skip down to creating social media profiles in part 2.

WordPress Plugins are basically add on features that make your website better and allow you to do different things that you wouldn’t be able to do without a plugin. It’s extra software that makes your website more functional than the out of the box template you start with.

One plugin you must download is a social sharing plugin. I recommend checking out Mash Share Social Buttons which looks like this at the end of your articles.

This plugin places big share buttons on your web page so that you give your audience an opportunity to share the post or page if they enjoy it and find it helpful.

Mash Share comes free but has paid upgrades you can buy to allow you to do more with it, such as add share buttons for more social media platforms. I’m content, however, with the free version and using just Facebook and Twitter share buttons.

A cool feature of this plugin is it shows you next to the buttons how many times your post has been shared on social media, giving social proof to visitors who come to your website that your content is popular and highly valued by the audience reading it.

With that being said, I want to get to part 2 which discusses the importance of taking your business to social media.

Why Your Business Needs Social Media

Let’s run through an example scenario. Let’s say you own a dog babysitting business and have recently created a website so that people searching for dog sitters in your city on Google will likely come across your website and learn about your services.

Now let’s say you decided to post a funny and cute dog video of a compilation of dogs doing stupid but funny things. You spent a half hour writing up a short intro to your article and then embedded a YouTube video into your article and hit publish.

Immediately after publishing, you copied the link to your article and pasted it into a new tweet on Twitter. You hit post and now your tweet went live to your followers.

John, one of your followers, saw your tweet and watched the video and found it hilarious so he decided to retweet your post and now his 2,000 followers have access to viewing your video. Let’s say a few people click the link and check out the video and they also retweet it. Before you know it, your article has been retweeted 10+ times and has reached thousands of people online due to people retweeting it to their followers and then their followers retweeting it to their followers and so on.

This is the power of social media. Your post can quickly go viral and reach the eyes of thousands of people. This can in turn drive lots of new traffic to your website as people are checking out your viral article and many will stick around to learn more about your website and see what other amazing content you have. This is where your start here and about page are important to capturing this traffic and making sure they become a recurring visitor, not a one time visitor.

Which Social Media Platforms Should You Be On?

There are 5 major power house social media platforms you should be on if you have a business you are trying to grow:

• You should create a Facebook fan page.
• You should create a Twitter profile.
• You should create an Instagram account.
• You should create a Periscope account.
• You should create a Pinterest account.

Video is becoming the medium of the future that people are consuming the most content from.

Therefore, we’ve seen a recent emergence of Snapchat, Periscope, and Facebook video broadcasting. YouTube is also a huge platform to be on if you decide to start a YouTube channel and can publish a series of How To videos to your channel on a product or service.

When creating content and posting it to your social media, it’s very important to have a great title on your blog post to get higher engagement and clicks to your post.

People scrolling social media won’t even notice your post if it doesn’t have a catchy and interesting title. Catchy and interesting titles will make people curious about your article and they won’t be able to resist not knowing, thus they’ll click on your article.

Your title better be at least somewhat related though to the content you are sharing in the article or else these people will be upset and blacklist your website. For example, it’s common for marketers to link bait people into clicking articles by making false titles just to get clicks.

Last but not least, make sure you optimize your blog post to capture the visitors email address. In other words, have a call to action link asking them to subscribe to your email newsletter as well as an optin box within the article. I recommend using ConvertKit as your email marketing service and I’ve written some detailed tutorial on how to use Convertkit you can read below:

• The Ultimate Guide to Using ConvertKit for Email Marketing
• The Ultimate Guide to Starting an Email Newsletter and Building Your Email List
• What Types of Emails to Include in Your Newsletter

The whole point of driving all of this traffic to your website from social media is to capture it and turn them into leads that eventually convert into customers.

Lastly, don’t miss out on new articles I publish each week to the Ask Nick Foy Blog. Be sure to subscribe to my email list to stay up to speed with what I’m doing in my online businesses and you’ll receive exclusive weekly tips, lessons, and resources as a member of my email community. You can subscribe to my email community here or fill out the opt-in form below.

Work hard, play harder.

Nick.