Let's say that you've managed to get the content piece working well, and your site statistics show a slow climb in unique visitors, as well as that all-important returning visitor metric. You're feeling pretty good about your growth, though it would be great if it would speed up a bit. This is particularly true if you are presenting a great deal of community oriented content, as you know that there is an audience out there if they just knew you existed.
Of course, you are putting your site domain name everywhere, in newspaper ads, on your car, on business cards and in your emails. All of this is important and effective over the long term. But, what can you do to help the process along? One little addition to your blog posts could make a huge difference in your traffic, and fast! Place a link at the bottom of every post that will help the reader to share it with someone else. This link should allow them to email the post or post link, but should also send the post to their favorite social networking sites.
There are a number of plugins and coding tools to make this happen in your WordPress, TypePad or other major blogging platforms. I've tried several. One out there is my current choice because it ties the email capability to the social networking, with a single button that opens a window with all the options right there. I found this better, as there is less clutter at the bottom of my posts, with my previous solution placing a row of social network icons in the post.
The solution is SiphsMail, and it also does something else that is very valuable. It keeps statistics of the number of times your content is shared and where. It also tells you what content is being shared. This is really valuable, as you may catch a trend and find that a certain type of article or post is always more popular than others. You can then do more of those posts.
Whatever you do, get some type of easy sharing tool into your posts, not just on the sidebar of your blog. One day you just may see a gigantic spike in your traffic, and a big increase into the future. People like to share, so make it easy for them to share what they like about your blog.
