Pinterest – Speaking of imagery, here it is, the upstart social network that everyone is falling over themselves trying to find a way to incorporate it into their marketing efforts. So you are probably thinking- “I am not a fashion designer, interior decorator or chef. Why should I care about Pinterest?” Easy, Pinterest, at its core, is about sharing images. You can share content on Pinterest and generate traffic to your site if your imagery is compelling enough. I don’t share every bit of content I generate on Pinterest, but I do share content. I look for items with good images that I think the target Pinterest demo (Women 25-44) might like or find interesting and pin them. I always include a description in my pin that is descriptive, but a bit of a tease to get users to not only look at my pin, but click-through to my site. Email Blast – Email is still a major component of any digital marketing campaign and good content is hard to come by, so why not reuse your site content for your email blasts? Shameless plug time- wedü’s proprietary üSend system makes it really easy to pull content from your website database and place it in an email template. It is as easy as dragging and dropping on a dashboard. You can also increase your blog subscriptions by including a call to action button in your email blasts that brings a reader to a subscription form. This is something that has worked very well for me on a number of occasions. Aggregators- Finally, depending on the nature of your content, you may want to submit your site to news aggregators. Sites like Alltop are great places to drive qualified, interested traffic . These sites essentially segment the RSS feeds of the sites submitted to them by categories. For example, if I submitted my blog to Alltop and categorized it as “marketing,” and they approved the submission, my new content would show up in Alltop’s marketing section.

Build Your Networks

As always in social media, the bigger and more engaged your following is on each of these networks, the more traffic you will receive to your site when you submit a link. You should be constantly connecting on each of these social networks and finding new evangelists or interested readers of your content. Many of the smaller networks listed above have friend import tools that allow you to find your Facebook/Twitter/Google/Email contacts that have profiles on that network. This is a good place to start. After that, browse the networks and look for posts that contain content similar to yours. Connect with the users that submit similar content. These are the users most likely to care about your content when you submit it.

Let Others Share Your Content

Make sure that wherever you post your content, there are buttons for each of the tools above, so that your readers will be able to submit your content to their social networks. If you use a blogging platform like WordPress or Blogger, there is a number of plug-ins that offer sharing on most of these networks. Many of the networks also have official buttons that are easy to install by just grabbing a quick code snippet and adding it to your site.

Measure Effectiveness

Keep an eye on your analytics. Look at where your traffic for each submission is coming from. You will start to see patterns of what is and isn’t working. Embrace the networks that are working and tweak the ones that aren’t. Odds are, you won’t successfully generate traffic from each of these tools immediately, but, much like everything else in digital marketing, it’s all about monitoring and tweaking until each tool works for you the way you’d like it to.   Image Credit: Guudmorning! Randy Landicho