Alternative Social Media Marketing Tactics

“Social Media Marketing”, a very important, yet very broad phrase. Social Media Marketing (SMM) gets a blog more targeted traffic, in fact if handled properly it generates more traffic than all other tactics combined. However in recent times, some webmasters have overused and abused social network websites. As a result, white-hat webmasters have a hard time driving quality traffic from Social Networks. This is where alternative social media marketing comes in. Alternative SMM is getting more and more important now. Throughout this article, I’d like to touch base on some good, current, alternative social media marketing tactics.

Let’s kick-start things with Yahoo! Answers. Utilizing Yahoo! Answers a vast amount of targeted, regular visitors can be driven to a website or blog. The first step of using Yahoo! Answers to get traffic to your website is to make sure you have quality content to reference. Write a really good “Step-by-step” guide, create a video about it and post it on your website or blog. Then head on over to Yahoo! Answers, find a relevant question and answer it well. Make sure your answer is informative and useful, which will help make sure it gets selected as the best answer. Make sure you’re answers aren’t simply spamming your links, leave those for the source field.

Yahoo! Answers follows strict community guidelines, so make your answers follow them accordingly. Your account can be easily terminated for a small violation of their Community Guidelines. One important thing to take note of is that the links you post in the source field will not become active until you reach “Level 2.” This is due to the high amount of spam on the site. Once you’ve answered enough questions to reach “Level 2? then all your links will become active however.

Staying within the Questions & Answers bit – AOL Answers, and StackOverflow are also great communities you can utilize to build some targeted traffic to your website, and pass some link juice over to your website.

Moving on, YouTube can generate quite a good amount of traffic if it is utilized correctly. A good video, especially an instructional one that will help others, can easily drive a good stream of traffic to your website. Make an informative and helpful video, write a good description featuring a link to your website or blog. Use Youtube’s Enhancement features to add clickable sections within your video that point back to your website and help further explain certain key parts. If you’re videos are more entertaining or artistic than informative – you might want to also consider hosting them on Vimeo – which has a demographic more catered to those types of videos.

The one key thing you want to remember with all of these methods is to never post illegal content or spam. A slight violation will get you banned permanently, killing any future opportunity to build traffic and backlinks from these sources.