Did you finish creating your great website? Or do you have a website already? Bravo! Now take the next step: getting people to visit your page. For many small business owners, a web page is an extension of their own business and for others (online stores, for example) it is the business itself. So, the work does not end with the creation of the perfect website. You have to get down to work and start directing traffic (visitors) to it.

Let’s talk about “generating traffic,” “directing traffic,” and “carrying traffic.” It is likely that you have heard some of these expressions before, especially if you have researched a little about web pages. For newcomers in this world, the number of options can seem overwhelming and give the impression that only a genius can get good results. Do not despair, everyone is a genius in their own way!

Directing traffic successfully to your website can take time and effort, but anyone can get the results eventually. Tools such as social networks are effective ways to attract traffic to your website. Social media marketing works very well, especially for online stores and online businesses that need to be able to increase traffic to their website quickly in order to build sales.

Quick facts:

• Social networks can contribute about 31% of the traffic to your website.
• Facebook is the network with the highest number of visits, the “Number 1 of the Top 10” of social networks.
• Other social networks such as Pinterest, Twitter, and even Google Plus, also generate a large volume of traffic to your website. Some even provide a special value within your web positioning.

Converting traffic to your website:

Create valuable content

Good social marketing forces you to go further and see what your community and your target audience really want. If you want to increase visits to your website through social networks, think about the following:

• Provide photographs and quality images that allow you to play with emotions, not only with your company. If you manage to awaken a smile or a special feeling, you will be winning a fan.
• Videos, multimedia, SlideShare presentations, manuals, tutorials, guides, podcasts, etc. are all becoming more and more important for marketing every day.
• Link to as many other companies and sites that you can when publishing content.
• Marketing on Facebook is not just about you. For companies, Facebook involves sharing, collaborating, and co-creating information.
• Generate interaction within your community. Leave your page and go to other fan pages to engage more people.

Promote your blog content

You put tons of effort into writing content for your blog, and you want the world to see your latest masterpiece. But before you know it, two months have passed and only a few people have feasted their eyes on it.

What point is there for creating great content if people aren’t going to read it? You can fix this by promoting your posts on social media.

It’s been found that brands who create 15 blog posts per month (and share that content through social media) average 1,200 new leads per month – proving it’s not impossible to get your content seen by ideal customers.

Of course, you don’t have to create 15 blog posts per month before you can share your content on social media and start seeing tangible results. You can start promoting at any point, with any piece of content.

After all, you’re always building your profile, and recent followers might have missed content you published weeks ago.

Make your content easy to share

What’s better than knowing people that are reading your blog content? Seeing they they’ve shared it with their friends and coworkers!

Chances are you’ve spent part of your lunch break or evening browsing Facebook. You’ve seen a friend share an interesting link or video, and you’ve clicked-through to learn more.

That’s the same degree of sharing you should be fostering for your content.

Allow – and encourage – existing site visitors to share content hosted on your blog by embedding a social sharing tool. Some will even show the number of shares earned by each post.

Use hashtags for greater reach

Hashtags are on most social platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Instagram, etc. Hashtags can help you do research to see what people are discussing in connection with your brand and products and can be used to make your content easily found by interested parties.

All you have to do is include relevant hashtags that rank high in traffic as part of your social posts. Just like in everything else, too much can spoil the broth.

Never share the same message twice

This is a very important step in the process that truly will separate you from the unruly spammers. For most of us, when we share a blog post on social media, we include the title of the post, a link and a few hashtags. This is fine. Once! But, it can get pretty monotonous for your followers if you aren’t careful.

The better strategy is to add some simple variety by asking questions or including pull-quotes from the post itself.

In this example, you can see each tweet was unique in its own way and alternated between asking questions and sharing the headlines of the post itself. This simple trick takes time to execute but adds a lot of variety to the final stream. It is a great way to engage your audience with your content without looking like someone who just wants to promote their own stuff. There are a number of message types you can use as needed. Here are a few of our favorites:

• Straight and Easy: Post title + link
• The Question: Ask an engaging question to stir conversation
• Cite a Fact: Share a fact or figure that is included in your post
• Share a Quote: Grab a pull-quote from your article and turn it into a social message
• Add Intrigue: Write a teaser message that grabs the attention of your readers

This tactic provides an excellent way to try out new ideas on your followers. For example, does asking questions increase reader engagement?

Also, it is worth nothing that this process gives you a great opportunity to test alternate headlines.