In this post I’d like to tell you about some of our social media sites and what we do to promote your content once it’s published.
As you know it is important to get eyeballs on your articles and to make sure they are indexed in Google and other search engines. Without doing so the links within are worthless.
What follows is a brief outline of what we do.
To make your articles work and to ensure they are indexed in Google we suggest you do a bit of self-promotion too. This could be in the form of tweets, Facebook shares, linking to your articles from websites you own, adding the URLs to social bookmarking sites like Delicious or news sharing sites like Digg, Reddit etc.
The more we can do between us to promote the pages the better chance there is of through traffic for you.
EverydayHowTo.net is connected to Twitter via Hootsuite and an RSS feed. Hootsuite checks the RSS feed once every hour and when it finds new content it automatically sends out a tweet. Once the tweet is sent we record the shortlink created by Hootsuite and add it to our records so we can tweet it again in the future.
If you are on Twitter, please follow us.
There is a tweet button on every page which you can use to tweet your own articles or others you like.
EverydayHowTo.net is also connected to Facebook via the RSS feed. Updates on Facebook are usually much quicker than Twitter as Facebook checks the feed more often.
Click here to view our Facebook page. We would appreciate if you could take a second or two to hit the Like button too. It helps expand our following and you can keep track of the new articles we add. When you see one you like please share it with your friends.
On each page of EverydayHowTo.net there is a Facebook share button.
Out of these two we think Facebook is the better platform for sharing your how to articles. Once shared there is more chance of your friends and their friends seeing the articles, depending how their accounts are set up, which could result in even more shares.
Google+
We’ve only recently set up our Google+ page. This is currently updated manually and does not contain every post we’ve published. We’re still experimenting with this one but we hope in the future it will be a good platform for us to promote your content.
Social Bookmarking
We have several social bookmarking accounts which we add your content to. We don’t go overboard with this as the benefit is quite small, but the links do help to get content indexed.
Linking
To make the site stronger and to provide an excellent user experience we often link from one article to another. We only do this when we think the reader may like to read an article on a similar topic.
We also encourage links out to external sources such as Wikipedia or government sites. This helps establish credibility for your article if you cite something of importance, especially in legal or health related articles.
At the editing stage, if you don’t add links out and we feel the article would benefit from them, we add them on your behalf.
Poor or Unread Content
It’s true that some articles fail. They don’t grab the attention of readers and become lost in all the digital text that makes up the internet.
We use Google Analytics to monitor pageviews and for seeing which articles work well and which don’t. Initially we try promoting those that are failing to see if the failure is just down to timing. We also do some additional SEO work to see if the pages can achieve better rankings in the search engines.
If all of this fails we then have to make a decision about deletion. To avoid this, we urge you to make your content as appealing and shareable as possible right from the outset.
