One of the most frequently asked questions I hear is, “How do I get traffic to my website?” It’s a common concern. After all, you built a website and you want potential customers to see it.

An effective way to get traffic is by leveraging the power of social media. Use your social sites to talk to your audience and then refer them back.

Include Your Website Link

The simplest way to start getting traffic from social media is to make sure your business page or profile contains a link back to your website. While it sounds like an obvious thing to do, the number of businesses that forget do this you would surprise you.

If you are using social media correctly and writing posts that your audience finds useful, social users over time will go to your page to find out more about you. Having a complete “About” section that includes your business website is the first step to moving traffic back to your site.

Advertise on Social Media

Most social sites today have advertising that allow you to place an ad in front of users that gets them to click back to your website. Facebook’s Traffic ad is particularly good at this.

By targeting your target market appropriately and creating a compelling reason to click through, this ad can deliver hundred if not thousands of clicks to your website each month.

While you might be paying for these clicks, it is extremely affordable. A Facebook ad can be run for as little as $5.00 per day. Of course, the less you spend, the fewer people your ad will reach.

Promote Your Website Content

We all know that websites have pages that contain content about your business, your team, your products or services, your philosophy, your mission and many other aspects concerning your company. Some websites have a large number of pages while others only have a few. But this content can all be promoted using social media posts that link back to the specific page.

Try to share one page a week. Then, if you have ten pages of content, you will have one post each week for the next ten weeks that will link back to your website. If you write a compelling post that will get your audience to click, you’ll be driving traffic back to your site.

Promote Your Blog Content

Blogging has real benefits for your business. One of the most important is its ability to aid in driving traffic to your website. Blogs can open your website up to be found in a wider array of searches, thus bringing in traffic from Google, Yahoo and Bing. 

In terms of social media, though, blogging gives you another opportunity to promote different content that resides on your website. Assuming your blog is about a topic that your target audience will find helpful, a social media post that promotes and links to it will get clicks from your audience back to your website.

The very nature of a blog, being dynamic and changing with each new post, creates new opportunities for website clicks with every new article. Your blog can contain a variety of different topics that surround your core competency. The ability to promote these diverse themes gives you a better chance of pulling in different members from your target audience and getting them to click to your website. 

A Note About Target Markets

The idea of defining your target market is the first step in understanding how you will market your business. Once you have identified the characteristics of this group, you will know how to write in a way with which they will relate, what topics to write about, and where you can find this audience online.

Using social media to get clicks back to your website depends on your ability to identify with and create posts that will resonate with your target market.

The Wrap

Taking advantage of the opportunities that social media offers is an effective way to drive traffic to your website. Through social advertising and by crafting content that resonates with your target audience, you will begin to see your traffic numbers from social media climb. 

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Bob Turner is a Digital Marketing Consultant in Cincinnati, Ohio.