Top Three Ways to Link a Blog to Your Social Media Profiles

12 May 2010

Day 28: Linking Your Blog to Your Social Media Profile

Author: Jim | Filed under: 30-Day Blogging

Yesterday, we talked about signing up for social media websites… which is a very important step to getting your name out there on the blogosphere. In order to run a successful blog, however, you cannot simply bank on traffic coming from social media to your site — you also must capitalize on the reciprocal traffic that your blog can send to your social media profiles!

One of the biggest mistakes that people make when trying to pump traffic to their blogs is paying no attention to the traffic sent to your social media sites, only focusing on the traffic that goes from social media to your blog. The thought process is rather simple: “if I can get fast traffic to my blog by setting up a few social media accounts, why would I bother sending traffic back to my social networking profiles?”

I must admit, this is one of the harder things to do because the rewards aren’t as immediate. However, I can say without a doubt that you are literally cheating yourself out of long-term growth if you ignore your community. It is imperative that we not only have all of these social media accounts, but that we get them all interlinked with our websites so that we can form a following online… we’re talking about a business, not just a blog.

Top Three Methods to Sync a Blog to Social Media

1. Place Social Media Icons on Your Website
2. Insert Social Media Links at the End of Blog Posts
3. Hold Contests to Boost Your Social Media Exposure

1. Place Social Media Icons on Your Website
Putting strategically-placed icons to link up to your social media accounts is one of the best strategies that I know of to beef up your social media profiles. This practice has been growing in popularity, and is now the cornerstone of most websites that we see in the blogging arena. There are literally tons of different ways that you can incorporate social media icons into your website, as an example… take a look at what I have done:

You’ll want to hire a designer to make this work well for your website (if you don’t have the technical knowledge of web design), but assuming you know what you are doing… check out these links for great looking social media icons:

2. Insert Social Media Links at the End of Blog Posts
Write good content? Then it would be in your best interest to dish out a mean helping of social media every time you wrap up a blog post. This is a highly effective method of converting your readers into followers by strategically positioning links to social media sharing networks right after your blog posts.

This is one of the easiest ways to gain great additions to your social media profiles, as there are literally a ton of great WordPress plugins that can help you achieve it in an instant. I use a plugin called “SexyBookmarks” as you can see pictured below:

My favorite Social Media “In-Post” WordPress Plugins:

1. SexyBookmarks
2. AddToAny
3. ShareThis
4. Socialize This
5. Sociable

3. Hold Contests to Boost Your Social Media Exposure
Our final technique to sync your blog to your social media accounts is to simply add social networking as an entry method to any contests that you hold. Many bloggers, myself included, have used this method with great success in the past to make sure that their social media networks are alive and kicking… so the next time you are hosting a contest start to think about how you can use it to benefit your bookmarking.

One of the first and strongest attempts at this that I remember seeing was over at JohnCow.com for the “COWpetition” he held two years ago. The blog owner, Jason, added following his Twitter account & tweeting about the contest (excuse me… the cowpetition) as a method to gain entries to the event… and it worked out very well (Jason has over 12k followers).

Bottom Line: The social media tsunami has finally arrived, and as bloggers jump on board it is important to know how to stay ahead of the pack. Turn your blog into a virtual social factory with the three key techniques above… and you’ll be sure to dominate for years to come!

-Jimvesting dot com