LinkedIn Can Be One of your Greatest Traffic Sources

LinkedIn is often mentioned as a powerful social networking tool and a significant tool for enterprise professionals, employers, and job seekers. What isn’t often mentioned is the site’s capability to easily drive traffic to your site.

LinkedIn can be a powerful source for driving visitors to your blog and therefore should be part of your strategy in building out your “Social Networking Spider Web”.

In some respects, LinkedIn visitors might even be more precious than visitors from other social networks and sites. That is simply because of the generally professional nature of LinkedIn itself.

If you contemplate that LinkedIn could possibly be one of your biggest traffic sources you should you put enough effort into cultivating it as such.

Once you register, put together a complete profile following the steps listed below (you can come back and do some of them as your time permits.)

1. Complete your profile
2. Improve and grow your personal connections
3. Add and Customize your web site links
4. Answer questions
5. Update your status on a regular basis
6. Join area of interest groups
7. Put up feedback in groups
8. Add RSS feeds to groups
9. Create a group
10. Add the LinkedIn weblog software to your profile
11. Put your LinkedIn profile badge and links on your other Social Network sites, e.g. your Google Profile

LinkedIn is also now offering integration with Microsoft Outlook.  So if you use Outlook I suggest taking a look at getting that set up as it will make doing things on LinkedIn easier in some areas.

The thing I like most about LinkedIn, are the groups. Go to the top where it says Groups and click there…go to “find a group” at the top right and do a key word search for groups that interest you. Hint – set up daily updates so you don’t get overwhelmed with email messages.

With Linked In, you’ll be able to promote merchandise, find new customers, build your brand and yourself and continue to build your Social Networking Spider Web.

MORE ON SOCIAL BOOKMARKING

Today we are covering How to use “Social Bookmarking” to Build Your Social Networking Spider Web and get massive traffic to your business.

This topic is on how to get a lot of sites to link back to your website or blog and to create a lot of targeted traffic by using “social bookmarking”!

Social bookmarking is very popular with marketers in every business, hobby or personal niche.  Social bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon, Digg, Del.icio.us, and Technorati let users add links to sites they like and make those links public so that other visitors can grab those links and add them to their own lists.  This makes your URLs (website links) go viral.

Social bookmarking sites are a great way to get traffic to your own websites and blogs.  What you do is bookmark your sites and then hope others will share the links.  On some social bookmarking sites like Digg, viewers can vote for your entries and make them even more popular.

If enough people vote for your particular link (that has an article or blog posting associated with it), it might make it to the front page of that bookmarking site.  A front-page listing can yield thousands of visitors a day to your site. However, because of the very nature of social bookmarking sites, if you want to get tons of traffic from the bookmarking sites, you need to make sure that the links you submit are interesting – and not just your sales pitch page.

Take a look at current events to use as a source of information to write about – and then bookmark.  For example – let’s say your blog is in the interior design niche and you have a site on high end interior design.  A simple how-to site may not get shared a lot.

But let’s say you read an article about using simple products from Ikea or KMart for making high-end interior design work on a limited budget.  With this type of topic you’d have a pretty decent shot at having a lot of home owners or interior designers share your links with others.

If your blog tends to be less newsworthy and more general, then you don’t need to worry about how many people vote for your story or share your links.  In this situation, just concentrate on using the social bookmarking sites to build back links to your sites, which will increase your search engine popularity.

Concentrate on bookmarking the index page (home or main page) of each of your sites first.

The key to social bookmarking is to become a participant in a community that shares interesting information. Create a good, personal profile that tells a little about you.  Make sure to add some photos, and if the site offers it, start building a friends or fans list.

Be careful not to add too many links each day. Don’t go crazy and add 100 links a day. Try to keep it to 10 or less per day and you will be okay.

After you’ve been a participant for a few weeks, you might be able to get away with up to 50 per day.  And…. make sure to keep bookmarking stories on other websites and vote for a few of the popular stories that made it onto the first page.  This will help to make your profile look a lot more legitimate in the eyes of the community.