Social Sharing
Your blog is only as good as it’s webmaster, and if you are not thinking about every single way you can get your visitors to both stay on your site AND share it, then you are doing something wrong. The ideal way to get your site all over the internet is to use the people who enjoy your content. By putting share icons on your site, such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg and many more, you are able to tap into lots of traffic that you would maybe never have reached.
There are lots of solutions, whether you have a blog or CMS, or even a HTML site. You can easily implement sharing within a few minutes.
Coming fully equipped with the most popular social sharing sites, Bookmarkify is a favourite among bloggers, along with Bookmark me. These neat little scripts will add a full range of social bookmarking and sharing devices/widgets so people can click and share instantly.
When you consider how popular Facebook is now, you would be a fool not to include a special little widget or tool to enable people to post their comments about your site on their wall. Viral bookmarking is something everyone wants to get involved in, and can start with pasting a few lines of code from Facebook’s Social Plugins page.
Along with Facebook, you should consider enabling a tweeting capability for Twitter users. One of the most popular tools for sites is TweetMeMe and their site will show you just how to get people to tweet their comments and simply link to your site (including a very handy URL shortener).
Now you have enabled all the sharing facilities on your site, you should look at finding plugins or code that will have your site doing this automatically every time you update the site.
Social Trending
Trends on search engines and social marketing websites can do wonders for your traffic. There are lots of ways you can find out the hot topic of the moment, or that latest breaking news which must be covered on your site to 
get traffic. The best way to get into ‘trending traffic’ is by using Twitter. There are a few sites that can tell you the most popular trends of that very minute, and you can immediately tweet about it – and link to an article on your site. You do not have to actually write a huge article on the trending subject either, you can just give highlights of the story, which will take you just a few minutes.
For example, you should use sites like the following:
Twitscoop (one of the best by far)
Trendistic (previously Flaptor Search)
Once you find a topic that is slightly related to your site, simply write a quick 4 – 5 line article on your blog, and then write a very quick tweet.
Two things will happen. You will firstly become part of a trend on Twitter, which means all the trending tools online will pick up your tweet, and possibly be published in front of thousands of people. Another great thing that happens, is your tweet is published on Google (under Updates, in the left menu on Google results page). Ensure your blog is set to have a ping sent to all the top blogs etc. once you publish a post, because this will help Google to get your page ranked for the trending topic fast. Your website will get some traffic from the tweet, from your followers and the viral nature of Twitter – and your blog will also get organic search traffic if you rank high enough for the topic.
How to ramp up your fans on your Facebook page!
If you really want to ramp up your Facebook page popularity, and have people Liking your page left, right and centre, you need a crafty little bit of code that will ensure you are getting people’s attention.
The problem with most Facebook pages, is that there is no incentive to actually ‘Like’ the page. Sure, it might look really nice, and of course it could have a few hundred fans already – and some of those might be the visitor’s friends… but what really holds people back is having no real incentive to ‘Like’ the page, and get involved. For example, if you were trying to get people to subscribe free to your website, you would offer an incentive, like a free ebook for example. You could also offer them a number of other things – like discounts on products etc. This is fine in the world of blogs and CMS websites, where you can make a page private or password protect an area of your website. The incentive is there, because they realize other people have got access to that area – and they want it too!
So, if you have a Facebook page, and you have hit a fan plateau, you will need the following bit of code, which you should paste into the FBML pages you have got set up:
<fb:fbml version="1.1"> <fb:visible-to-connection> Only your fans will see this content. <fb:else>If people are not fans, they will only see this content.</fb:else> </fb:visible-to-connection> </fb:fbml>
This is a very simple method, and works on FMBL very well. For example, you could just set two pages that are only visible to fans, and another which is visible to everyone, like the wall. They will be very keen to see what other content you have got, and all they need to do is click the ‘Like’ button!
Social Media Marketing
According to Facebook itself, more than 100 million people (and counting!) are logging onto the social media marketing platform at least once each and every day. Also, the website Twitter is said to have around 7 million active users in the United States alone. For those people who believe that social media marketing is a total waste of time and energy, look at the above statistics once again and maybe rethink your position? The simple fact is that 
social media marketing can help a business to grow and can help to build a good, sturdy reputation and a large following of clients and potential clients.
Many internet marketers are now implementing social media marketing into their search engine optimisation packages as they know what this service is capable of when it comes to quality, related traffic driven to their websites. The only way to get people buying your featured products is to get them to your website in the first place – and they are not going to land on it by accident. Any company at the top of Google’s first page is certainly not there by accident. People pay to have their websites sitting pretty up at the top; however others choose to use methods such as social media marketing and not put their hands in their pockets at all!
Utilising social media marketing is not nearly as daunting as you may think. Some people believe that unless they are a 17 year old girl then Facebook is of no use to them! However, if you do things in the right way, you and your business can benefit in a range of ways through social media marketing. Simply remember to keep lose the hard-sell tactics and keep your posts conversational and soon enough you will have all potential clients eating out of the palm of your hands!
