Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
In today’s podcast we’re going to talk about 3 ways to use social media to get more traffic to your website.
We’ve gotten a lot of great feedback after last weeks episode and wanted to come back and share 3 more tips on driving traffic with social media.
Our last tip revolves around paid advertising which is helping us turn $5 into $25 over and over again, which we’ll be talking about in detail next week.
You will learn
- What social media is all about and how to make it a 2 way conversation.
- Ideas for what to post and how to make it “timely”.
- What to focus on when trying to create more sales.
- The value of using paid advertising.
- Why advertising is an investment in yourself.
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
Shane and Jocelyn, before Flip Your Life, I was working my 11th year in the same, nine-to-five CPA job. Fast forward a few months later after Flip Your Life and I have quit my job and officially flipped my life
Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air!
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.
You can connect with S&J on social media too!
Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show!
If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week!
Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!
JOCELYN: Hey ya’ll! On today’s podcast, we’re going to give you three more tips for getting 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? All right, let’s get started.
JOCELYN: Hey guys, welcome to the podcast; today we are going to get back into our Tips for Using Social Media to Get More Traffic to Your Website. In Podcast 34, we told you about three tips about using social media and those were how to target your audience, how to schedule post on social media and how to always get people to come back to your website and if you missed any of those tips and you’d like to go back and listen, you can check those out at Flippedlifestyle.com/Podcast34 and you can listen to that and find out exactly what we had to say about all those. Today we are going to tell you about three more tips for using social media to get more traffic on your website but before we do that, we are going to share a success story with you.
SHANE: All right, today’s success story comes from Brad Berry; you may recognize that name because Brad was actually on the podcast on one of our Flipped podcast episodes where we do a live consulting call and play it for you guys so everybody can kind of learn from the answers that we give for people’s questions. Brad and Laura were on our podcast in episode 23 and they were also one of our original members for the first ever Flip Your Life e-course. And we got an amazing email from Brad not long ago that said, “Shane and Jocelyn, before Flip Your Life, I was working my 11th year in the same, nine-to-five CPA job. Fast forward a few months later after Flip Your Life and I have quit my job and officially flipped my life.”
JOCELYN: Great job, Brad!
SHANE: That’s awesome! “Now, every day, I get one of those can’t-miss moments when my daughter gets off the bus and leaps up and hugs me yelling “Daddy!” That is what life is all about.” When we got that email the other day, Jocelyn and I just were like dancing and hi-fiving and so excited for Brad because Brad’s worked really hard and he really started turning the corner back around November of last year and to know that we were a part of his journey to be able to quit his job, start his own online business, and move forward with his family. I mean, they have flipped their lives. His kid’s lives will never be the same. His marriage will never be the same, nothing will ever be the same for them because now they can focus on their life, their family and just that freedom that online business has. And it’s just so amazing to hear a success story like that and know that the trajectory of that family’s life has changed forever. So, if you guys have a success story, if we’ve helped you in any way, maybe you’ve quit your job, maybe you took Flip Your Life and you’ve started selling digital products or maybe we just helped you get started, we just guided you in the right direction to get a good logo built, anything really, we would love to hear your success story so that we can read them on the air. You can reach out to us at Twitter; our Twitter handle is @Flippedls or you can leave us a message over on our Facebook page at Facebook.com/FlippedLifestyle and we would love to hear how we are helping you with our online business. We have a goal to help a thousand families this year get started online or if they already have an online business, take it to the next level and flip their life like Brad and Laura Barry did by quitting their job and going out on their own and making enough money to make their living completely on the Internet. So if you have got a story to tell us, we would love to hear it.
JOCELYN: All right, way to go, Brad and Laura, we are so proud of you; so glad that we could help in some small way. So, thanks for your awesome message. We love getting those every single day. All right, last week we talked to you guys about using social media to get more traffic to your website and we hope that these tips can help you just like we have helped Brad and Laura. So let’s get into it.
SHANE: All right, the first tip in today’s episode and actually our fourth of six tips for using social media to get more traffic back to your website is that social media is not all about you. This is a common mistake that I think people make when they first start their Twitter accounts, their Facebook pages; all they want to do is to share things about themselves. They want to share their blog post, they want to share and say what they are thinking and that is not what social media is all about. Social media in any platform, is a two-way conversation between people; between an audience member and your brand. So, you have to make sure that you are making it a two-way conversation. Don’t just constantly be spitting out information about your website; don’t constantly be saying things like ‘Come to see my stuff’ or don’t constantly sell. And actually, I would say, almost never sell on your social media accounts. You cannot sell on social media, you have to draw people back to your website and sell to them there once you have built a relationship. So make sure that you are using social media to build relationships. You do that by following other people, you do that by sharing other people’s content and don’t just like follow and share the big names. You know, if you are into Internet marketing, don’t just follow Pat Flynn, don’t just follow John Lee Dumas, don’t just follow Entrepreneur.com Magazine. You have to share other people’s stuff. We make it a point to retweet on Twitter everything we can. If someone says something nice to us, or someone gives us a great tip, or somebody shares something that’s interesting, I retweet it. I go out and we make sure that we share that with all of our followers that way we can kind of share the love and it’s not just the big names, the influencers. Whether someone has 50 followers or 50,000 followers, if they share valuable content, I want to help them spread their message as well. We try to reply to everybody that follows us, we try to shoot everyone a message that favorite something we do or retweet or shares it on Facebook. Make sure that you are having that two-way conversation because if you start making everything about you and it’s always your opinion and it’s always what you want to say, then people are going to tune that out because you really don’t want those people in your real life. So why would you want to have them in your virtual life?
JOCELYN: You just have to think about the way that you would use social media. You don’t want to get on Facebook for instance and only share things about you and not ever comment on anybody else’s stuff. If you do, then you probably don’t have a lot of friends on there [Laughs]
SHANE: Narcissism.
JOCELYN: So, just think about that in your business as well; what do you want to see in your news feed or on Twitter or on Pinterest? What are the kinds of things that you are drawn to assuming that you are a member of your target audience? Just think about that as you post things on social media and that can really right a lot of wrongs.
SHANE: Also, don’t be afraid to share your “competition’s work” Just because someone is in the same space or even sells the exact same products that you want to sell, you actually should be reaching out and making those relationships and you should be helping them and cooperating with them to spread their message because the Internet is a big place. There are billions of people on the internet, there’s ‘plenty of pie to go around’ so to speak. You’ve got to build relationships so those people will also help you. I’ve got a friend, I talk about him all the time, his name is Joe Daniel at Joedanielfootball.com; he shares my stuff, I share his stuff, we sell the exact same stuff but there’s a lot of coaches that listen to him, there’s a lot of coaches that listen to me and we help each other grow our brands together because we are in the same space and we cooperate with each other and it’s like a mutually beneficial relationship. So just remember that social media is not all about you, it’s not all about your brand, don’t build it that way. Build those relationships with the big dogs and the puppies and everybody in between to make sure that you have a good network of people that want to help you, that want to share your stuff when you come out with good content too.
JOCELYN: Okay, our next tip is to provide value for your audience. Solve a problem that they have and this is something that we do very often. I specially do this on my Elementary Librarian page. It’s really important that you create timely post on your social media. Help your audience to solve problems as they come up and a lot of times, this might be a seasonal thing, it might be some kind of problem that you know is coming up just because –
SHANE: Some kind of current event too.
JOCELYN: Yeah.
SHANE: It could be something like that.
JOCELYN: Anything that might have some kind of timeliness to it; that is a great opportunity to take advantage of that in social media and one of the ways that I do this for librarians is by seasonal post. So, like if it’s the beginning of school, I’ll post things about open house; like tips to have a better open house in your library. If it is book-fair time, I’ll post tips for the book-fair and I actually just missed a really good opportunity this week. This is Dr. Seuss’ birthday week and I have a really pretty decent post about Dr. Seuss that I did not put on social media for whatever reason. So that goes back to last week’s tip about scheduling things. I should have had that scheduled and ready to go and I missed that opportunity. So, just be sure that you are aware of things like that as you are scheduling your social media. Just know about upcoming events or things that are going on in the news at that time.
SHANE: And you can also use your old content to do this. Like, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every single time something comes up. Dr. Seuss’ birthday is once a year so, Jocelyn – did you have a product or was it a post?
JOCELYN: It was just a post about some ideas.
SHANE: So Jocelyn has that post that she can just basically use every year at that time because she’s going to have a lot of new audience members, a huge majority of her audience probably didn’t see the Dr. Seuss post in the past so you can reuse your old content once you solve these timely problems during the year.
JOCELYN: Yeah, and even if I did see them, chances are, if they are anything like me, they probably don’t remember it.
SHANE: [Laughs] Right.
JOCELYN: So, it’s totally okay to post that again. People are going to react to their pains and problems; we do this too. If we’re having something that’s going on, what are we going to do? We are going to get online and say, ‘Oh I’m having this problem, somebody please help me.’ Well, people are looking for that kind of information. So if you are right there in their news feed or in their – what’s it called, Twitter timeline or whatever it is, if you are there to solve the problem with some amazing content that you have, then that is really awesome for the audience and it also gets shared a lot. My stuff that I post, like if I have tips that are timely for different types – or different times of the year on Elementary Librarian, those get shared all the time. People wanting to share them with their colleagues and there’s no strings attached. I mean, it’s just an article that I have written but ultimately it gets them back to my website and we talked about that a little bit last week.
SHANE: A good example of that is, any time there is a lot of snow on the ground, one of the things we always share is we always say something about like ‘Who has a snow-day today?’ or ‘I’m a teacher, I love a snow-day’ or something like that because that’s a very current, timely thing. A huge number of people are experiencing that and they share it. We’ve also got a funny post that we did on Flipped Lifestyle about that little doll, the elf on the shelf and I wrote that probably at least three years ago; didn’t I Jocelyn, something like that?
JOCELYN: Yeah, something like that.
SHANE: Yeah, and we share it every Christmas and it always get shared like crazy because you know, a lot of parents have these little elf-on-the-shelf dolls and play with their kids. So even though we wrote that in the past, you can use that to provide value and to solve problems in the future.
JOCELYN: Another thing I do on Elementary Librarian that helps people solve their problems is I actually post people’s questions. So people will write in and ask me a question that I quite frankly don’t know the answer to. So I will put it on my page and just let other people weigh in on that and that works especially well on Facebook because people love to give their opinion, to share their knowledge or their experience with other people and I would say it would probably would work on Twitter too but I’m just not a Twitter person. But it’s worked really well for me on Facebook.
SHANE: It’s amazing too because Jocelyn will ask those questions and she’ll get like 20-30 answers; she doesn’t even comment on the post but then the person who asked the question will go back and thank Jocelyn [Laughs] because Jocelyn posted their question and got the answer. So she provided the value and she didn’t even really have to do anything.
JOCELYN: Yeah, so that’s a really cool thing that we do on social media. People really love that one.
SHANE: All right, our third tip for the day and our sixth and final tip overall for how to get more traffic to your website using social media is to always remember that it is a numbers game. The more eyeballs that you can get on social media, you got a better chance of getting those people to click to your website and the more people you can get to your website, the more sales you are going to make. Studies show that maybe somewhere between 3% and 10% of people that actually make it to your website will actually convert into a sale. So, it’s not a huge percentage of people. So what you need, you need more people actually coming to your website. So you’ve to go out and find more followers. You got to get more likes. You’ve got to get more people paying attention to you on social media. The bigger that number is, the bigger the number of those people that will convert, click and come to your website and the more people you can get to come to your website, then the more people you are going to get to buy. Even if that 5%-10% 3%-10% ratio holds true, you know 5% of 100,000 people is a whole lot bigger than 5% of 1,000 people. So how do you get all of those people? How do you get more likes? How do you get more followers? How do you get more people paying attention to you on social media? You can totally do it organic, you can totally do it over time, that’s going to take you a while. But what we have learned recently especially is, 100% the best way that you can get people to click to your website to see more of yourself on social media is to pay for it. Paid advertising is the absolute, 100% best way to get more traffic to your website using social media. Now, you have to follow all those fundamentals; now, you know, if you are paying to show people crap, then they are not going to click your link and come to your website. But if you are providing value, if you are answering questions, if you are not making it all about you and you are sharing all the love with all the people in your space and you are getting people to retweet your stuff, if you are following those first five tips, then your paid ads are going to work much, much, much, better. But paid advertising by far is going to give you the best return on your investment.
JOCELYN: And paid advertising on social media has gotten kind of a bad name in the last little bit; people are really mad at all the social networks because they have to pay to reach their customers and –
SHANE: Heaven forbid.
JOCELYN: Yeah, and I mean, it is a big, hot-button issue but we have learnt recently that it’s really, really a great investment. We have done some test recently and we have been getting great, great returns from social media ads; especially Facebook is what we have really been concentrating on recently.
SHANE: Last week we spent, actually $150 in ads and we got a return of about $1800 on all the ads that we ran.
JOCELYN: In sales.
SHANE: In sales. So who is not going to trade $150 for $1800?
JOCELYN: Yeah, and we have really just scratched the surface of advertising on social media and we are really excited to share some of the things that we have learnt about that.
SHANE: The reason that social media, you know, paid advertising on social media has gotten a bad rap is it didn’t use to be that way. It used to – you could reach people for free but the problem is, companies like Facebook and Twitter are businesses and they have expenses and to have that free service, somebody has to pay for that. That’s where the paid advertising comes in. Even if someone likes your page, they also have liked a thousand other pages. So, basically who gets to show up in their news feed? You only see a couple of hundred things in your news feed a day. If they showed you every single brand that you ever liked on your news feed or in your Twitter feed, you would never see the stuff from your family and the stuff from your friends. So there has to be some kind of gate-keeping mechanism there to keep your news feed clean and paid advertising is a way that most people are shifting to do that. And always remember with social media, like when you are paying for ads on Google or Facebook or anywhere, that money is not money that’s going to disappear forever. That is an investment in yourself. You are putting down your money, you are betting on your brand, you are betting that you are going to be successful. You believe in what you are doing and you believe in it so much that you are going to put money down on it to compound that and get a return on that. If you are not willing to bet money on yourself, if you are not willing to spend money on your product, then why would anyone else spend money on your product if you won’t do it for yourself? You have to be willing to go out there and invest in your business and advertising is an investment. You know, newspapers don’t give away free advertising. McDonald’s doesn’t get to go up to the TV station and say, ‘Hey could you show my – there’s a lot of people in your audience that like McDonald’s hamburgers; so why don’t you show some free ads to them so that we can get more business?’ That’s not how the real world works. That is not how social media works. So, forget all the hype and all the anger and hatred about having to spend a little money. If you can start trading $5 for $25, if you can spend $5 on an ad and sell a $25 e-book, and you can do that over and over and over and over and over again, that is not spending $5. You shouldn’t be mad about spending $5, you should be happy that a system exists that you can trade $5 for $25. So make sure you are looking at this with an open mind as we talk about paid advertising and that you are not shutting it out just because people are raging about it on their blog posts.
JOCELYN: We really, really love paid advertising on social media. We think it’s one of the best investments that you can make for your business. It’s a great way to push ‘fast-forward’ on those results that you want and I wish that we would have started doing this a while back. We would have been so much further ahead –
SHANE: So much further ahead.
JOCELYN: – than we are right now but we hope that these tips that we are going to be giving you next week on paid advertising will help you to get further ahead than what we have so far. And I love the social media networks because then know so much about us which is kind of creepy but it’s also kind of cool if you are an advertiser because they can target and pinpoint people like you wouldn’t believe and it’s just so cool the different kinds of things that you can do.
SHANE: So make sure that you tune in to next week’s podcast. We are going to go over all of the strategies that we are using right now and having success with in our social media advertising. We are going to go over Facebook and Twitter and we are going to get into some of the other social media networks as well in our next episode of the podcast. That wraps up our three tips that we gave you today for getting more traffic to your website with social media; number one was, that it’s not all about you. You should be engaging and building relationships on your social media platforms to call your brand. Number two, was that you should provide value and solve problems and to be available on your social media networks to your audience to solve those problems for them and number three is that always remember it is a numbers game and this is a pay-to-play environment. The days of free social media millions are over and you are going to have to invest in yourself and invest in your product if you are going to be successful online. If you want to hear our other three tips for getting more traffic to your website using social media, you can do that at Flippedlifestyle.com/Podcast34 and that is part one of our six tips for doing that. Before we take off this week, we always close our show with our can’t-miss moments. These are moments that we got to experience this week or got to do recently in our life; the opportunities that would not have been possible if we had not started our online business three years ago and Jocelyn is going to go over the first can’t-miss moment today.
JOCELYN: My can’t-miss moment this week is a trip to Butterfly World when we were down in Florida and we got to go in and just check out all kinds of exotic butterflies and birds and it was just a really cool experience. It’s something we got to do this midweek; there were not a whole lot of people there and that’s our favorite time to go to places when it’s not super-crowded. Our kids loved it, they had some birds that would eat out of a cup in your hand and it was just a lot of fun.
SHANE: One landed on Isaac’s head and he got freaked out. [Laughs]
JOCELYN: Yeah, he was a little upset but it was a lot of fun; they loved it and we had a really good time too.
SHANE: My can’t-miss moment was just taking our kids on an airplane actually just to fly around with them. I had never even thought about flying on an airplane till I was in my twenties, I think, and it’s just awesome that our kids are able to be able to experience something like just going up into the sky, flying on an airplane. Our kids, I think, have had been on four airplane flights now and all four those have happened since our online business basically that we took them on these trips to go on airplanes because it’s really expensive to fly so we really could never do that before. It’s just awesome that our kids at six and four are already experiencing things like travelling all over the country and being able to go up into an airplane. I just know that none of those things would really be possible if we were not doing what we do now. So I’m just really grateful and thankful that our kids are getting to experience so many more things in life than maybe we did growing up.
JOCELYN: Thanks for listening, we hope you got some great tips on using social media to drive more traffic to your websites and we will see you next week.
SHANE: Catch you all on the flip side, see you later guys, bye.
[/spoiler]
Brittney says
I’m really looking forward to your podcast on paid advertising next week. So curious to hear the specific strategies you guys are using!
Michele says
These are great tips and ideas. I’d love to hear about some other ways that people can get their website and product out to their target audience beyond the use of social media. Thanks Shane & Jocelyn!
Julie Rains says
Jocelyn and Shane,
Loved the episode today. So excited to hear that Brad and Laura did it! It’s so easy to feel overwhelmed with trying to start an online business. You guys are great!
Blessings,
Julie Rains