Driving Traffic To Your Site With Facebook

Facebook is the 5th most popular site in the world (according to Alexa) and you’d think it’d be a great way to drive traffic to your website right?

Well not exactly.

You have to remember that the people on your Facebook account are technically meant to be your ‘friends’ and most of the time most of them are your friends, people you know.

So if you start a niche site about shoe polish… do you think ALL your friends deserve to know about it? Is this your target audience that you are trying to push an affiliate product to?

I wager it’s not.

But if you’re starting a site that means something to you, such as a personal blog, a food blog or maybe an Internet marketing blog like this one, I’d say you could market to your group of friends.

It might be something they can relate to and hence come and visit your site.

So if you think your friends ARE your target audience, here’s a good way of getting some traffic and exposure.

1) Login to your facebook account.

2) Click on your name on the top right hand side of your facebook page.

3) Click ‘post link’

4) Paste the complete link to your article. NOT just your homepage. The reason is if you post your article link, Facebook will try and find an image from the article to use and add it to your link.

5) Click ‘Preview’ and let it load. If a little summary like what you see above doesn’t display, you have to remove the trailing ‘/’ from your URL and try again. (NB: Sometimes it doesn’t work even when you do that. In that case, I have no idea what to do… sorry.)

Choose a picture from the available options and if you’re fine with everything, click ‘post’.

6) If it posted correctly, you should see it show on your wall like this.

7) Facebook will then decide which of your friends would like to know this information and post it on their Facebook ‘newsfeed’ on their home page. And more often than not, the people that Facebook think would like to know what you are up to are your closer friends or who view alot of your pictures.

These people are likely to click your site, pay a visit and who knows, maybe even tell a friend?

8 ) I’ve been doing this for one of my other sites since the day it launched (about 5 months ago) and here is the proof of the traffic. It is easily in my top 5 sources of traffic.

Petalingstreet.org is a Malaysian blog aggregator that I use for that site because its targeted audience is Malaysia.

So why not give it a try? You may get 10, 20, 50 or even 100 visitors almost immediately to your site. But remember that these people are your friends, please don’t SPAM them with useless information ok?

Add me to Facebook! (or click on my picture in the sidebar)

-William Lee