10 Proven Tips to Use Social Networking Sites to Drive More Traffic to Your Website

Internet is a vast ocean and social networking sites are taking the internet by storm. They are getting more popular and creating more buzz each day.  And what more? These sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Hi5, Orkut, Tumbler, My Space are the cheapest and always accessible because of the smart phones which are used regularly by millions of people providing tons of business opportunities.

Internet marketers, large corporations and even television shows make use of them since they represent effective platform in propagation of their marketing message and in order to gain more traffic.

Let’s talk about some tips and techniques for some traffic generation strategies to promote product, services, brand, ideas, thoughts, pursuing clients and to woo the customers while driving tons of visitors and thousand of page views to your site.

1) Build a Complete Customized Profile:
Social networking sites often have common elements. Some have more features than others. In all cases you have to create an account and build a complete customized profile at popular sites like Facebook, Twitter, My Space that contains a link to your site and an RSS feed.

Network with people in your niche and get established on these sites. Facebook has become the most expensive social media to people with more than 2 million users. Sites such as MySpace allow you to fully customize your profile page using unique layout.

2) Grow your network, express and develop identities:
Twitter, the hottest star in social networking is an open messaging service that is part micro blog and part cell phone tool. You can do a lot with 140 characters by posting messages called “Tweets” to your friends or “Followers”.

3) Relationship:
Tell people about yourself and communicate effectively to garner trust and build relationships with other members. Express yourself with verve and wit.

4) Promote Yourself with Video:
Print articles, audio files, videos, promotions, post announcements are all a form of content. If you can use photo marketing to your advantage then you flickr.com as well. You can also make a video and broadcast using most popular video sharing site YouTube and post links on your profile. It is a great way to get more exposure to the website.

5) Be consistent and an active user:
Schedule your content regularly. You can do this manually or you can also use some scheduling services provided by many websites. Hootsuite, for example, lets you schedule Tweets, which you can also link to Facebook for double duty posting.

6) Valuable Content:
Your content should be valuable to the audience. It is very important for the biz owners and marketers to pander to their needs.

7) Refrain from spamming:
This is not the way to encourage people to join your network, instead it will tarnish your reputation and hamper the growth of your business.

8) Join and participate in groups, discussions and forums:
For example, if you have a beauty product related site, you can join other forums and groups in this area, post an introduction and get involved. You can also include your link as the resource or reference URL. This way you can get your website noticed and voila, more visitors.

9) Contests, Quizzes and Some Prizes:
You can also repost some of the posts to your target audience. On Facebook you can do this by clicking “Share” and on twitter you can do this by clicking “ReTweet”. Also attract visitors by contests, quizzes and some prizes so that they always stay hooked!

10) Conversation Rather than Business:
Also remember that social network sites are not business media sites. So keep it slow and promote your business gradually. Try to make conversation with people.

Becoming successful with an online business has never been easier. It has always been a Herculean task. But following these guidelines is the best recipe for success. You need to understand that as more and more people will get to know, a viral effect will take place and they will tell people they know and so on. In long run this will help you in your quest to drive more traffic to your website.