Social media and internet communities provide you a unique opportunity to directly and instantly communicate with your target audience. 
These platforms let you create engagement, attract an audience and keep them hooked, given that you can manage your community well.
In fact, communities can drive serious traffic to your blog and web pages, if you have the right outreach tactics to locate potential readers and the content to catch their attention.
This blog post gives you the exact ideas you need to pique interest of your target readers and drive a steady stream of traffic back to your blog pages.
1. Leverage LinkedIn groups
LinkedIn is an important way for employees to connect with employers, but there is no reason why it shouldn’t help you connect with potential consumers or blog readers.
LinkedIn groups are a great example of deep communities, where people come together to share ideas and have conversations around shared interests or passions. These groups are great for conversions, or in other words, to get specific people to act according to your plans.
To draw visitors from LinkedIn groups, you first need to optimize your LinkedIn profile page –
- Targeting entrepreneurs? List ‘entrepreneurship expert’ or ‘expert-entrepreneur’ in your summary (provided that it is true, of course)
- Share fresh, top-notch content that entrepreneurs might be interested in on your page, on a regular basis (you could use a social media management dashboard like DrumUp to source content suggestions and schedule/post them to your accounts)
You could either build your own LinkedIn group or nurture existing groups relevant to your area of expertise. To build your own group,
- Build a list of potential targets using LinkedIn advanced. If you’re targeting entrepreneurs, you’ll have to search to find entrepreneurs
- Connect to each entrepreneur with a carefully crafted message to make a great first impression
- Invite each connection to your group
- Share blog post updates on the group, along with a mix of excellent, curated content from other top sources
You will see an increase in your traffic after consistently following the practice over a period of time.
2. Get popular on Quora
I’m going to tell you the story of a certain somebody, who was nobody before September 2012 – Oliver Emberton. He’d consistently post on Quora, but it was his answer to “What would a modern day evil genius have to do to take over the world” that exploded his visibility overnight.
Oliver answered the question in a different manner than everyone else. He used a controversial slug, a popular image and an elaborate answer highlighting his interesting and unique perspective to shoot to fame. The answer got him over 20k upvotes and a book deal.
Quora has serious potential to drive traffic back to your web pages, but you have to follow certain rules to achieve that result –
- Be unique – Do something that nobody else is doing and ensure that you standout
- Elaborate – Longer answers are generally favored on Quora. Short and brief answers are often overlooked or collapsed by Quora
- Be consistent – One answer won’t get you much traction. 10 consistent, standout, original and elaborate answers can earn you serious respect in your area of expertise and help you build an audience
- Be generous – Don’t make it all about you. Don’t link back to your blog posts unless they really belong to that answer or sentence. All your answers don’t need to have back-links in them
3. Craft your comments well
The logic behind this tactic is simple. You find top blogs in your niche, comment on their posts and drive some of that blog’s traffic back to your own. However, there’s a right and a wrong way to practice this tactic.
The idea here is to stand out and catch people’s attention, but you can’t go overboard and write spam-like content. You need to make an effort, be transparent and focus on providing value with your comments. When crafting your comments, ensure that you –
- Read the post
- Avoid writing generic comments that might get lost among the rest (For instance, “Great post” or “I really enjoyed the article”
- Don’t be sloppy. Write a grammatically correct, properly punctuated comment
- Try and add value to the article. Add a little case study or an extra tactic that worked for you but the author missed in the article. If you prove consistently that you have unique insights and ideas to offer, people will want to check you out and possibly, follow you
- Try and be the first to comment on a post. The first comment usually gets the most views and interactions (you could use a keyword alert tool like TalkWalker Alerts or use Buzzsumo alerts to be notified each time a new blog post related to your area is published)
- Validate your efforts with Google Analytics. Check if you’re getting traffic from a particular site. It you are, continue to comment on their articles, and if you aren’t, invest your time elsewhere
This is the latest comment I made on a post.
4. Add Twitter chats to your routine
One of the major reasons why bloggers don’t see enough traction via social networks, is because they don’t target their content. Random, inconsistent and irrelevant posting will get you nowhere.
Your goal should be to find niche communities and attract an audience from there. A Twitter chat is a great example of a niche community. When you regularly participate in Twitter chats, you begin to recognize important members of your community to connect with. Here is how to build a massive audience by participating in Twitter chats.
- List all the chats that are related to your niche
- Prepare your tweets beforehand – most Twitter chats follow the same format. The guest host and participants are asked 5-6 questions about a previously decided topic, one after another, and everyone answers them, views everyone else’s answers and interacts with each other. By preparing your answers beforehand you can share more valuable information, find the right places to refer to your blog posts and give yourself the freedom to actually engage with other participants during the actual chat
- Connect with influencers and experts who participate post-chat, and initiate relationships with them (you could even create Twitter lists to make it easy for you to follow their activity on Twitter)
- Make an impression – people are likely to follow you and check you out if you consistently make an impression with your insights and ideas
Your Community Management Goals
I've shared several tips to help you use community management to build your traffic to your blog. Just remember that it's very important to establish your goals before you dive in!
I'd love to hear from you and learn about your experience. Good or bad, please share with us in the comments!