The more you engage your online communities and the more quality content you produce and syndicate, the more traffic you will be able to attract back to your website.

To explain how this all works together, I like to use the analogy of fishing…

Your Fishing Boat

When it comes to online marketing, your fishing boat is your website or blog. I recommend to new clients that they build their websites on WordPress so that you can have a website with built-in blog functionality. Having a blog is essential for all businesses.

If we think about fishing, the whole purpose is to get the fish into the boat. We do the same with our online marketing. We want to get the people from our online communities back to our hub or our home base which is our website (our primary goal).

Once we get them back to our website, the goal is to get them to opt-in to an ethical bribe or click Like on our Facebook Page Widget. This allows us to identify them (our secondary goal).

Your Fishing Nets

The fishing nets we use are the various social media networks we are engaged in. The key is to remember that different people hang out in different networks (kind of like different schools of fish swim together!)

Your Bait

In order to catch the right fish, you need to use the right bait. The bait that you use on the social networks is usually teaser copy for blog posts. You can post all different kinds of content in the social networks, but for the sake of getting people from our communities back to our website we want to focus on teaser copy for blog posts. When you post a new article, video or photo album to your blog, then you post a little blurb along with a link back to the content on your website into the various social media channels.

So let’s see an example of how this would look:

Let’s say I own a carpet cleaning company (my favorite example!) I just finished writing a blog article on the Top 5 Ways To Protect Your Carpets From Pet Stains and Odors (my bait) and now I want to go fishing and pull some new people from my online communities (the nets) back to my website (the boat).

I prepare a few short little messages that I can post to my social networks and a short one to send out to my email list as well. Here’s what they might look like:

“I’m constantly asked by people how to protect their carpets from pet accidents, stains and odors. Anyone you ask has a different suggestion, but I’ve prepared my list of the Top 5. You can read it here: http://www.mycarpetcleaningwebsite.com/top-5-ways”

I take this message and I post it to each of my social networks that I’m involved in, as well as send it out in a brief email message to my email list. The key here is that I’m not selling. I’m providing valuable information to my various communities. My intent is to get them back to my website to read my new article. I make sure at the end of the article to ask the readers to post their comments and share the article with their networks (remember people need to be told what to do next).

To make sure this process all flows smoothly together, I’ve made sure at the end of my article to make mention that not all of these Top 5 ways to remove pet stains will always do the trick and that they may need to call a professional carpet cleaner to come in and take care of the really bad ones (I haven’t directly sold my own services, I’ve simply dropped the hint that they might need to do that at some point.)

Lastly, at the end of my article I have a little blurb that encourages people to opt-in to my ethical bribe. In this case, I’ve written a short report that’s called “The 7 Ways That Carpet Cleaning Companies Rip You Off”. In order for people to download my free report, they have to opt-in to my email list. This is how I’m identifying my traffic and building my email list at the same time.

As you can see, social media plays an integral role in your online marketing strategy. The question remains, how does more traditional offline marketing fit into this strategy? The exact same way. All of your offline or traditional marketing should also drive people back to your website. Social media marketing and email marketing all cost next to nothing but do require an investment in time. When we can capture people on social media or in our email list, it reduces the amount of money we need to spend on traditional offline marketing and advertising.

Do you agree with this strategy? Please share your comments and share with your friends on your favourite social network.