Curate, Snip, Score Introduction Free Traffic is one of those things that everybody wants, but very few are exactly sure how to go about it without spamming. The method I’m showing you here will allow you to use the popularity of many famous sites and merely add a discrete link to a link of your choice. It is not black hat or spammy and is genuinely useful because you will be sharing great content. It also provides people with useful information from around the web. Once set up, it can take up as much or a little time as you wish – around 15-20 minutes per day maximum is fine. Apart from your time, it does not have to take up any of your money at all, although there are cost options to increase your reach if you wish. And so we begin…
Content Curation and The Art of Sharing Social media is a sharing environment. People love to share snippets of entertainment and information that they have found elsewhere. I have found a great way to profit from this information sharing, using some of the biggest sites on the web. What’s more, what you share, others can share as well and multiply the reach of your findings and therefore the links you choose to share. I will explain the basic outline although it can be used with almost any news, story, curation or blog site. Anything that provides a stream of changing and useful information in your chosen niche. This last bit is important if you want to get useful traffic from these sources. You will need the following: Firefox or Chrome web browser Snip.ly - free account Buffer – free account optional – free Hootsuite account Scoop.it – is a good curation source but many others are usable. A free account will do to start with. 3 or 4 social media accounts with good followings / friends. I suggest Facebook, Twitter at least. I haven’t tried this with Pinterest or Instagram but if Buffer and / or Hootsuite support them, I don’t see a problem provided they allow links. The process is quite simple. We are going to use a curation source (scoop.it) to find good content. Snip.ly enables us to shorten the link and at the same time add a button or text link to the bottom of the page. Buffer and Hootsuite allow us to share the snip.ly link at times of our choosing. Here’s the detailed story. Start by creating your Buffer account and link up your social media accounts to it. I could spell it out for you, but you’re an intelligent person and you don’t need me to tell you in nauseating detail. One of the options if you’re using Firefox or Chrome is to have the site install apps inside the browser. Take these options. Link up your social accounts.
Also, while you’re at Buffer, set up the timings for your posts to go out for each of your social accounts. They don’t all have to be a t the same times or frequencies. For instance, I post 10 tweets per day but only 5 each to Facebook and LinkedIn. Do the same for Hootsuite if you want to. There is a reason you might and I will explain later why. Again, install the browser add-on. Go to snip.ly and create a free account there too. Also install the browser add-on (that little S in the blue square will become your best friend) and integrate Buffer and Hootsuite at the same time. You may also need to add your social accounts into this site too. While in you’re in snip.ly you can also set up some links, which will be where you want to send traffic. I suggest squeeze pages, but there is nothing to stop your links being to your blog, to a CPA offer or direct to an affiliate offer, if that’s your wish. A free snip.ly account does limit how your links will look, especially in the color department. If you want red buttons, you’re going to need to have a paid account. If you can accept the standard blue button, you’ll be fine. You can add an image and one of yourself will engender more trust or at least, a brand or logo. You only have a limited space for your message so make good use of it. A good call to action on the button is also a requirement. Finally, head on over to scoop.it and create an account there. With a free account you are only allowed one keyword phrase so try to make it niche related. Of course, if you have other sources you wish to use then scoop.it is optional, but it’s a good place to start. Now down to business…
The Business End of the Deal For this to work best, you really need a page where there is a single article, so the page will have a longer URL than the home page of a site. The length of the URL is not a problem as our first action will be to shorten it. When you’re on the page you require (if you’re using scoop.it, right click the headline and open it in a new tab to make it easy) simply click the snip.ly button at the top of your browser. This brings up the snip.ly pop-up with the page URL already snipped for you and allows you to select which CTA you want to use. By default, the last one you used will be ready, but you can use others or create a new one. Click the blue SNIP button at the bottom of the pop up to go onto page 2. You will now see, at the bottom of the page, what your CTA will look like to people that you send to your snipped link. You are also given the option to copy your link and to post it to various social sites. The important one as far as we’re concerned in the Buffer icon. Clicking on that icon brings up the Buffer pop up where you can add your snipped link to your queue as well as selecting which of your social sites you want the link posted to. By default, all the sites are selected. If you have Facebook as one of your social accounts, you will need to copy and paste the info from the top box into the Facebook one or write some additional information. You will be reminded if the Facebook block is empty. Buffer will overwrite your snip.ly link but don’t worry. It will still work OK. And that’s it. Just repeat this for other interesting articles that you find, but bear in mind the following limitations of ‘free’. A free snip.ly account only allows 1000 pop ups (not clicks). If an article you share goes really viral, you could miss out. A free Buffer account only lets you queue up 10 posts at a time per social account and 4 social accounts (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+). This is when having the Hootsuite account (with 3 more accounts or the same ones) can be useful as you can now use the timing feature there or select ‘best time’ and let Hootsuite decide when
to send it. You could also put up a different set of social accounts on Hootsuite and have more coverage again. A paid Buffer account will also let you have a 100 links (so you can do 4 updates an hour, if you wish) at a time and add an RSS feed so if you update your blog, it will automatically be fed into your Buffer stack. However, using IFTTT (If This Then That) is a better site and more versatile as to where you can send your blog feed. Now occasionally, a snip.ly link on the pop up there will be a warning that the site you’re snipping does not support iframes and that your snip will work but the CTA will not show. Whether you carry on at this point is up to you. The snip link is still good, but your pop up with your link on it won’t appear. You may well find, if you are promoting interesting comment that your friends/followers list will start to grow with interested people (my Twitter followers went from 1500 to over 5000 in a few weeks after I started sharing content). Now I won’t say that the click-through rate is very high but all this is free apart from 10 to 20 minutes of your time each day. Once you get used to doing this you will be able to fill up Buffer very quickly for a day. If you set up Buffer to do 10 posts over 24 hours to each of your social media accounts, you can make this procedure part of your daily routine. Should you need more help, please feel free to contact me: Steven Lucas http://stevenlucasmarketing.com admin@stevenlucasmarketing.com
Resource Area Buffer.com Hootsuite.com Snip.ly Scoop.it IFTTT.com
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