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In today’s podcast we’re going to talk about how to get more traffic by using social media.
Everyone knows they should be on social media, but what sites should be on and how should you be using it? Today we share our experiences from running our online businesses, everything from how to use Pinterest and why Twitter can work so well for driving traffic.
You will learn
- How to learn what social media channels you should use.
- Some of the tools we use to manage our social media accounts.
- The importance of scheduling out your posts.
- Why you should always bring people back to your site.
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!
Listen to what others are saying about Flipped Lifestyle
I have some exciting news to share. Yesterday I sold my first two copies of my eBook. It was a snow day where I live so I was lounging in my sweatpants at my computer all day and I made my first $14 online. What a cool feeling it is to make money from home and such a boost of confidence too. I am using this excitement to keep the momentum going and make more products and more sales so I can make money while working from home every day. Thank you. It’s a good reflection of how awesome your course is. My husband is doing really well with his product too. He has over 1200 likes on his Facebook page. Thanks Shane and Jocelyn.”
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Can’t Miss Moments
Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family.
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Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!
Jocelyn: Hey y’all. On today’s podcast, we’re going to show you how to get more traffic to your website using social media.
[spoiler]
Shane: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? Alright, let’s get started.
Shane: What’s up guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. Awesome to be back with you again this week. We have a great topic for you today. We are going to be talking traffic but specifically, we are not going to get in to like SEO or anything like that, actually writing your content, we’re going to talk about how everyone can use social media to drive more traffic back to your website, whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, whatever you like to use on social media. We’re going to show you how to use that as a vehicle to get people back to your site and of course to your digital products that you can sell to those people. But before we do that we are going to read a success story from a recent member of our Flip Your Life, e-course.
Jocelyn: Today’s success story come from Nikita Isle, she is one of our Flip Your Life alumni members and it says: “I have some exciting news to share. Yesterday I sold my first two copies of my eBook. It was a snow day where I live so I was lounging in my sweatpants at my computer all day and I made my first $14 online. What a cool feeling it is to make money from home and such a boost of confidence too. I am using this excitement to keep the momentum going and make more products and more sales so I can make money while working from home every day. Thank you. It’s a good reflection of how awesome your course is. My husband is doing really well with his product too. He has over 1200 likes on his Facebook page. Thanks Shane and Jocelyn.” So that was incredible. We were so excited to see that awesome success story.
Shane: We love hearing your success stories. We love hearing how we are helping you online. If we have helped you with your online business at any way we would love to hear from you too. Maybe we will read your success story on the air just like what we did with Nikita. You can leave us a success story on our Facebook page at Facebook.com/flippedlifestyle or you can hit us up on Twitter @flippedLS. We would love to hear how we are helping you with your online business. We have set a goal this year, to help a thousand people start their online business or take it to the next level through our Flip Your Life e-course and we would love to know if our content is helping you the same.
Jocelyn: Let’s go ahead and get into our content. We are going to be sharing with you some tips today about how to use social media to get more traffic on to your website. A lot of people are a little bit stressed out about social media and it can be a little bit intimidating. A lot of times people think that it is a major time suck and if you get involved in social media then you are never going to have time to work on anything else and all of these things aren’t necessarily true. It does take a little bit of time to set up but we always recommend that you only choose one or two social media platforms to get started with it first. And we’re just going to share some of the ways that we use different platforms and our marketing of the different sites that we have. The first of our six tips is to target your audience and what we mean by that is to look at your audience and see where they are connecting at. There is a variety of different ways to do this. I mean you can get on different platforms and see how many people follow you on Twitter, how many people like you on Facebook, how many people are following your Pinterest boards; that’s a good indication of how many people in your audience are on each one.
Shane: You can also look at if you don’t have a big audience like I know a lot of people starting out don’t have any likes, you don’t have many followers on Twitter, go to influencers in your space that people who you aspire to be like and see if they have got a lot of followers. You may find that one of your favorite personalities has 100,000 followers on Facebook but only 10,000 followers on Twitter that’s probably a good indication that your audience is over on Facebook and not on Twitter. So if you don’t have an audience there are still ways you can figure out where the people you want to target are.
Jocelyn: If it is fairly split like my on Elementary Librarian and audience, go with the one that you feel most comfortable with and that’s really what I do. My audiences is pretty much everywhere. I have lot of people on Facebook, a lot of people on Twitter, a lot of people on Pinterest and you know there are probably that are on to Google+ and you know LinkedIn things like that. But I don’t have time to do all of that so I mostly concentrate on two social networks. I usually work on Facebook and also on Pinterest. I do have a Twitter account also for Elementary Librarian but I am not a big fan of Twitter so basically I do in there is just set up automatic tweets and I let those roll out with my old blog post and that does drive some traffic to my site but I don’t really get on there and have a lot of conversations. But I do have a lot of conversations on Facebook. My audience is really into Facebook. I get a lot of good interaction there and what you had to remember on Facebook is that people want to connect with their friends and family on there. They are not necessarily opposed to connecting with brands too but they don’t want you in there trying to sell them stuff while they are trying to look at cute pictures of people’s babies. So try to make it a conversation on Facebook and that is what I try to do in my Elementary Librarian site. I put things on there, I ask them questions. I ask questions from the community that other people can respond too. People love to give an opinion on Facebook. They love to be asked questions, give them a choice about something. Do you like option A or option B? And even if you have a specific one in mind that you want to go with, people still like to give an opinion and just tell about what they think so that is a cool way to use Facebook also. I post pictures from time to time, just personal things that I am doing. If I see something cool at the public librarian, I might take a picture of it and put it on my Facebook and people respond to it that way.
Shane: I do use Twitter a lot from my coaching site because coaches, my audience, love Twitter. They just love to be on Twitter and scroll through there. But it’s a completely different vibe than on Facebook. On Twitter, it’s kind of like the news. People are kind of flipping through, looking for interesting things that other people are retweeting. They are looking to see what’s going on. It’s almost like they are flipping through on CNN or Fox News or something. They are just looking to see what’s happening at that moment. So Twitter is a lot more conducive, not necessarily for selling but it’s easier to just share a blog post, share a forum topics. It’s not as good for sharing like pictures about your personal life or what you had for dinner and things like Facebook is. And the moral of the story here is that every social network is a little different. So once you figure out where your people are, they are on Facebook or they are on Twitter or they are on Pinterest, you have got to figure out how the conversation flows on that social network. If it’s more personal in nature like Facebook, then you and your messaging has to be more personal that’s going to create more engagement that’s going to draw people back to your site and increase your traffic. If it’s more sharing, news, articles, blog post like Twitter that’s how you do approach Twitter. You can’t just make the same messages up here on Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn. You can’t just use the same comments on every one of them. You are not going to get good results that way. So once you figure out where your people are for this first tip, you also figure out how the conversation works on that social network and once you do, once you start talking in that way you will drive more people back to your site.
Jocelyn: And I want to mention also that I use Pinterest a lot on my Elementary Librarian site and people are on Pinterest to find good ideas. So they want to look and see what kind of ideas you have to offer and also that you do it in a beautiful way. Pinterest is very visually engaging so you need to make sure that your pins are very nice looking and also that they are informative. And another thing that I do is I also pin other people’s stuff so if you go to my Pinterest board for Elementary Librarian, you won’t see all my content. It’s my content but it’s also other content that I found that would be meaningful and helpful to the people who are coming on to my Pinterest board.
Shane: And even when you are sharing other people’s content, nothing wrong with that. That’s going to make your brand more valuable. I like to have ratios. So there is no real hard science on how we do this, but for or Twitter account, I’ll usually for every five tweets that we put out I might share somebody else’s. What would you say the ratio is for you on Pinterest do you think maybe?
Jocelyn: You know I see probably about 50-50 of my stuff and other people’s content.
Shane: Right because it’s hard to come up with a ton of good ideas so you are going have to share some other people’s stuff. Now Facebook, we do actually keep it extremely personal. On our Flipped Lifestyle Facebook page, I rarely share anybody else’s stuff because Facebook when you go to someone’s timeline, it’s about them and that’s kind of how Facebook works so we kind of keep that page flowing like that. So big tip for number one is just find your audience and when you do find them make sure that you know how they are talking and engaging on that social media platform and make sure that you engage with them in that way.
Jocelyn: The second tip that we have for you today is to schedule posts. And I talked about earlier how a lot of people think that social media is a big time suck and it can be if you allow it to be. But we do have some tips for you that will help you to be able to schedule posts and not be sitting there in real time to post everything. And Shane is going to tell you a little bit more about those.
Shane: The first thing that we want to underline here before we get in to this tip is that you do need to actually live engage with your audience on all the social media platforms. Scheduling is kind of like a support and like a scaffold that holds up your brand on social media. It helps you communicate with people and do things when you’re not there but you do need at the beginning on every day and engaging with people, sending some messages, answering questions—things like that. We don’t want you to remove yourself from social media because people will see that. They’ll see right through it. And if you are not engaging on social media you have removed the social, so why would anyone actually follow you? But scheduling can be a great way to make sure that your message is being delivered on all the social media platforms that you use 24 hours a day. We use a couple of different tools for our scheduling. The first one is Buffer App is a new tool called Edgar, it’s actually at MeetEdgar.com. And we use these to basically say okay we can get online at the beginning of the month and we can schedule a bunch of tweets to make sure that are on those busy days when we’re working on podcast or working on other things that our social media accounts are constantly putting out content, putting out links that take people back to ur site. And also if I get on Facebook or I get on Twitter, I may only check that two times a day. Maybe I get on it at 9 am and 8 pm. So I only have time on my schedule to check twice a day. Well, maybe I share something on both of those times. The problem is people are only going to see what happened like in the last hour or two in any of social media channel, especially with something like twitter which is constantly just rolling off the screen. So if what happens to all my audience members that check Facebook at 10 o’clock or at 1 o’clock or at 3 o’clock? I am not on there I have shared something hours ago, they probably never going to see my message so it is critical that you take and schedule tweets and posts throughout the day that way all of your audience members are being engaged when they use the social media network. I have post that go out on Twitter on coachXO, every hour on the hour. It just shares all of the—I probably got 700 or 800 different posts on CoahXO.com because I actually share all of the forum topics and everything that other people discuss on the website. So it’s easy for me to be able to just fill that up and let those come out every hour. That way I know if I am not on CoachXO or on the Twitter account that other coaches who are logged in at that time are going to see something from me. And those always get favorites, retweets and things like that. I usually have about 100, 200 messages a day on Twitter or if something has shared or engaged on my content and they are clicking back to my site because I always include a link back o CoachXO with every tweet that I create. You don’t want to do that with Facebook. Think about yourself, how you use Facebook. You probably post two or three times a day so you might want to set your schedule a little bit lower. You have got to know what social media network you are using but it is so much easier to sit down one day a month and bulk all of your favorites and all of your tweets and all of your Facebook and get those scheduled out into the future so that you can make sure you have got content coming out every day and all of your social media posts or at least 90% of them should have some kind of link back to your website.
Jocelyn: Just remember that you do still need to respond to your audience in real time at some times. You
don’t have to be on the social media network 24 hours a day, waiting for people to write you. That is the perception that a lot of people have I think. And really you just have to do this a couple of times a day. Maybe log on once in the morning for about 15 minutes and about once in the evening for about 15 minutes and just respond to people. Somebody tweets something for you or if someone comments on Facebook posts, just write them a really quick message back and thanks for their message or if somebody has a question, answer their question—just those little things can really get your audience engage with you like conch at the next level.
Shane: and also to people are savvy. They know that you’re scheduling. Don’t ever try to set all of your social media up like this is really me, I’m just a robot who is here 24 hours a day and all I do is post on social because I am the social media expert or whatever. Don’t do that. Be very clear when you’re sharing things. Speak in language like when you are online and you’re actually there, make sure people know you‘re there but don’t try to write all of your tweets and all of your Facebook posts like you were sitting there, writing this. People know that it has been scheduled, they know that it’s coming out. Don’t overdo it. You don’t want to schedule something every 15 minutes. Twitter I find either ever hour or every two hours. On Facebook, we usually only post one thing a day on the schedule on Facebook because we usually go on Facebook at least once a day and post something real in real time. So you have to figure out how much information you’re going to put on there but don’t try to make it look like you’re always actually there because people do know that. They know that you’re scheduling and people don’t care if you’re scheduling as long as you’re sharing very valuable content. If you are just starting out and you don’t have a blog with a lot of content on it, you know I have said Coach XO I have hundreds of posts but it has been there for three years so you can go and curate things for other people, you can share other people’s stuff as you build up your own content. So you may start out with a lot more of other people’s stuff you’re sharing and kind of get to that 50-50, 75-25 of your stuff versus theirs but there is absolutely no reason that you should be doing that every single day. Get some kind of program, there are hundreds of them out there, HootSuite. What else is there? Buffer App, Meet Edgar—all the different things that they have got for sharing in different social media platforms, get something and making sure you are automating that process.
Jocelyn: The third tip that we have for you today is to always bring people back to your site. You only want to give them enough to get them interested and then to eventually click back to your site. You don’t want to give up all of our best information right there on a social media network because it’s great for them to engage with you there but ultimately, you want someone coming back to your website hopefully seeing an advertisement or some type of information for something that they could purchase. You definitely want to be giving away some good quality free information but the ultimate goal that we have an online business is to get eyeball on to our site and hopefully converting into a paid product that we have there on to our site.
Shane: One of the things that we do on Flip Your Life is we teach people how to set up all these social media channels so we create your digital product, we set it up where you can sell it, take payments and automatically deliver it. But then we show you how to set up the Facebook page, how to set up different social media accounts where you can go out and actually promote what you’ve got. One of our students was posting all of her blog posts in full text on her Facebook page and I said to myself that’s crazy she can’t do that so I basically shout her a message and said hey you need to just tease the people with like the first paragraph or with just a short summary what the article is about and then you said click here and take them back to your site because your products live on your site. The way you generate money in your online business is on your website. Facebook is not going to make you money, Twitter is not going to make you money, it’s going to bring people to your website where you will sell them something to make money. So that’s always the goal with anything that you put on any of your social media stuff is to bring people back to your site. It may not be immediate. If you are curating content and sharing other people’s things then you are just providing value in hopes that when you do share that link back to your site, people are used to you sharing really good stuff and clicking it. You don’t want to just share everything. So make sure that you are always including a link back to your site and try not to write epic huge 4000-word Facebook post or tweet a hundred different tweets with the links on them you want to train people to come back to your site at all times when I’m using social media.
Jocelyn: So for just an example, like on Twitter today we put out, I think it was yesterday, do you need more traffic here’s to get more people to come to your website, it has a link. and that link takes you back to the Q and A podcast that we did about how to get more traffic to come to your website.
Shane: So we didn’t say on the tweet, you get more traffic by doing this, this and this and we didn’t Facebook or something like that said here’s how exactly to get traffic. We don’t write this big post on Facebook because we don’t want to build Facebook’s brand, we want to build our brand. We just gave enough information about that specific podcast to pull people back to our website where they can see the whole article, listen to the whole podcast, they’d hang around for a little while and then over to the side, we have advertisings for things like Flip your Life, which is our course that we sell. So basically we don’t want to sell on Facebook we want to engage on Facebook but we always want to pull people back to our website by including a link in everything we do to get them back over to Flippedlifestyle.com, to elementarylibrarian.com, coach XO, wherever you want to send them as a part of our brand, we make sure we include that in the link. I see so many people post Twitter post after Twitter post that has drawn on and on they never link back to the website. Well nobody is going to click on your name and see your profile and click the link there you have got to be engaging with people with your content to get more traffic back to your website.
Jocelyn: Okay, so our three tips that we have gone over so far is to target your audience, to schedule post and to always bring people back to your site and unfortunately today we are all out of time but we are going to continue with our other three tips in next week’s podcast so make sure that you come back with us next week to hear the other three tips of how to use social media to get more traffic to your website. So next we are going to move one to Our Can’t Miss Moment Segment and that’s where we tell you about something that we have done this week that we might not have been able to do with our online business.
Shane: Our can’t miss moment this week is a pretty awesome one. We are in the middle of an epic blizzard in Kentucky. There are more snow in the ground than there has been in like 20 years or something. And our kids have been out of school for two weeks. Isaac has not been to kindergarten for two straight weeks and about a week ago we were just absolutely sick of the snow, school was out and there was no sign of it ever starting back and we just said we are out of here so we got online and we actually scheduled some airline tickets and we went and took a plane down to Fort Lauderdale, Florida because it was the only place in America where there was sunshine.
Jocelyn: We actually opened up the map and we’re like where is the warmest place in the United States and that’s where we went.
Shane: That’s where we went and we got on the airplane and we just took off, we took the kids, we spent four to five days in Fort Lauderdale, hung out on the beach, made sandcastles and just kind of hang out down there until the storm subsided and we actually just got back yesterday and we can actually see the grass now where most of the snow has melted so it wasn’t as depressing even though it was freezing cold. But that would even no way been possible when we were teaching, we wouldn’t have known if we have had school the next day, we wouldn’t have to be here to go to work, we definitely couldn’t afford a trip like that just a few years ago before we started our online business. So that’s our can’t miss moment this week, just running from the blizzard and spending a few days on the beach.
Jocelyn: It was great, we had a really good time and it was just a great break from the snow.
Shane: So if you want to see some pictures of our trip to Fort Lauderdale and check out the show notes of all the things that we mentioned and our links, you can do that at Flippedlifestyle.com/podcast34 and tune in next week to hear out three remaining tips for how to use social media to get more traffic to your website. Until then, we will catch you all on the flip side.
Jocelyn: See ya.
Shane: Thanks for listening.
Jocelyn: Bye.
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