This month George Carter – our VP Marketing gives us this month’s tip on how you can use social media to generate more traffic to your website using certain methods and how this can help your dating website in the long run.

 

Start by writing a great profile

When you create your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ or other social media site accounts, start by spending some time in creating a good profile for your dating site. Keep your personal life separate if you want by creating a new profile just for your dating business. Make it genuine and interesting. A good profile will create trust and authority. It is the basis from which you will create relationships so people out there must be able to feel confident and safe to interact with you. Use your real name, include your photo and convey a passion about the subject you are trying to promote.
Make sure you include a link to your niche dating sites on your profile page and that you link all your social media accounts and blogs too. You will be surprised at how many people click on these links. It will also establish your credential as an expert on the subject.
If you have some free or interesting offers on your dating and other sites make sure to promote them on your profile page. For example you have a free e-book that you are giving away or keeping with our theme, some vegetarian recipes or vegetarian restaurant reviews will make people come back to you page again and again. Stay focused, for example if you are posting recipes keep it in theme with your dating site, something like romantic vegetarian meals to impress your partner or great vegetarian restaurants to take your date to.

The more you interact the higher your traffic will be

Getting free traffic from social networks requires interacting with people and being social. Never just post content and then move on. Spend a few minutes, maybe even a half hour or so each day interacting.
Social media isn’t totally about networking, it also includes sharing information. If you can share your best information with your network and followers, you’ll be building trust and respect as well establishing yourself as expert in your niche.
Try posting a few encouraging or inspiring things that people appreciate related to your dating niche. For example success stories of happy couples meeting through your site.

Grow Your Network Daily

Try and spend 15 to 20 minutes daily growing your network. In the beginning it’s frustrating and it seems unrewarding work but if you do spend the time it adds up and at the end of a month you will be amazed at actually how big your network has become.

Advertise on Facebook and other social networks.

As we have said before free traffic doesn’t just come to your site, you have to work at it. The alternative is to pay for your traffic. You can run PPC ad campaigns on Facebook and other networks but make sure your campaigns are very targeted, otherwise you will be paying for clicks that will never convert into paying customers.

Optimize your content for Getting Traffic

Social sites like Squidoo and Yahoo! Answers are regularly indexed and crawled by the search engines. So optimize your content for the search engines by using relevant keywords and on page optimization strategies. Your content will make your dating sites not only more interesting to followers but will help your rankings in the search engines. Search engines also use social media to determine how popular and well liked websites are, and social media also gives webmasters a fantastic platform to establish themselves and generate a large following.

Start and join Groups

There are many groups on Facebook and it is quite possible that there is a niche group you can join. Otherwise start your own group related to your dating business and invite people to join it. The advantage of this approach is that you are getting targeted users – i.e. people, who are interested in you, your product, your ideas, etc.
Work your group, post interesting stuff, read other comments and generally participate intelligently. This will add to your credibility. Make sure you sign your posts with a link with an explanatory tagline.

Summary

In conclusion – social networks are a great way to promote your dating site and can generate a lot of free dating traffic.
My tip is to keep it focused; you want good traffic so concentrate on quality of followers, not quantity. It is easy to get mixed up in all sorts of discussions and posts that deviate from your goals. Spend your time wisely and you will be successful.