How To Drive Traffic To Your Website With Social Media

We've all heard the question, if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it...you can probably finish that sentence.  Well, if we have a great website, but no one visits, does it exist? It may, but it's not doing much good.  Social media is great for interacting with, engaging with, and sharing helpful information with our target audiences. What a lot of business owners do not realize is that it's also great for driving traffic to their websites.  After all, chances are you are on my website right now as a result of clicking on a link from one of my social media profiles (unless you're one of my email subscribers. Thank you by the way). In a perfect world, people would just type in a keyword phrase into a search engine like Google, and we would be the 1st option on page 1 and we would get tons of traffic that way.  Let's face it...not everyone can be on page 1. So do we just give up on getting people to our websites? Nope! Here are some tips to get them there via social media.



1. Fill out profiles: Most social media profiles have a spot for our website URLs.  Be sure to complete all profiles completely.  Sometimes as people are clicking through our pages, they come across our websites and we get a bonus visit.


2. Link directly to your site from your profiles:  Here is a real example of how I drive traffic to my website via Twitter.  Basically, I have a headline leading to a blog post (if you don't have an active blog, you can guide them to a certain page on your website.  Here is the tweet:

Want people to comment on your posts? Try these 4 things: http://t.co/oUiepPveZV #mckinney pic.twitter.com/lJWd7zUz2g
— Market With Mario (@Marketwithmario) July 31, 2014

The key is to shorten the link. This makes it look cleaner.  Tip: Use a tool like goo.gl or bitly as those are the most trustworthy for people to click on.  Once someone clicks the link, they're on our website! Boom! This is how it looks on Facebook:

This is how it looks on Google Plus:

3. YouTube Description and Video:  Here's a neat little trick. When creating a YouTube video, add your URL to the beginning of your video description (pictured with the arrow). This is a clickable link and people will get curious and click, I promise.

You can also add text to your video and have a call to action to have people visit your website. Just be sure to give a selfish reason such as, "visit our website for tips on..."


4. Pinterest: Pinterest is an amazing tool to use to drive traffic directly to your website (especially if you have pictures of products or projects on your site). This is what it looks like as a pin:

Now here's what's cool: Once someone clicks on this pin while on Pinterest, it will take them directly to our website!  Edit your pin and check its website source to be sure your URL is included (you can also direct them to a certain page of your site).  Here's what I mean:

5. Include on business cards and email signature:  When designing business cards and creating email signatures, be sure to include your website (you'd be surprised how many times this is overlooked). Most people today will check us out before calling for a quote or even before a coffee meeting.




Search Engine Optimization is an important tool in marketing, but businesses that do not have the budget to outrank their competition (clean, effective SEO is not cheap), on Google then these tips above will help accomplish the goal of getting potential buyers and clients to your websites.  Please feel free to leave a comment and share with a friend that this may help. Thanks!