Using social bookmarking sites like GrowthHackers or Inbound.org is a great way to boost your site's referral traffic. Unfortunately, this is a well known tactic and it is very difficult to achieve meaningful success with that alone.
Today's Quick Tip Tuesday is all about maximizing that effort and rising above all the noise to help drive real, qualified traffic to your site using Gmail Ads.
Enjoy!
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Social bookmarking sites like inbound.org, growthhackers.com, they can be a major source of target traffic for your site, but the challenge is to rise above the noise and get your content noticed.
So in today's quick tip Tuesday video, we're going to show you exactly how to accelerate that process without being a spammer, or without getting on the nerves of the people in that community.
Let's break this down into three easy steps:
First, choose the site that you're going to participate in and submit your article to that site. We're using GrowthHackers for this example.
Second, get the URL to your submission, not to your post, but to your submission, because this is where we're gonna be sending people.
Third, we need to get your submission seen by people who participate in this community.
We don't want to just promote it to anybody, we want to promote it to the people who already have an account, and have the ability to upload your content.
There's a couple ways to do this, but we really like using Gmail ads.
So as you can see, I'm setting up a Gmail ad that targets anybody who's received an email from growthhackers.com, and is using Gmail for their platform.
You can see it gives us roughly 50 to 100 thousand potential impressions a week. So growthhackers.com has a pretty good audience, and a lot of them are on Gmail.
The next step is to create a Gmail ad; the standard image template works great.
Now here's where your creativity will come into play.
You want to leverage the fact that you're targeting people who are used to getting emails from growthhackers.com.
So first things first, you want to make sure that you're sending people to your submissions so add the URL here, and you can see that the ad is starting to preview here on the right.
Now what would make this pop even more is if you had permission to use the logo of the community.
I wouldn't recommend doing that unless you have permission. You don't want to break any copyrights.
Write your ad creative, that's what will show up in people's inbox, and then you can add an image. I just did a screenshot of the post that people are going to see when they click the link.
You can experiment, you should split test, try a bunch of different things that could catch people's attention.
Now here's a pro tip for when you're writing your ad copy:
If any of these bookmarking sites have a regular email that they send, you may want to mimic that in some way.
So for instance, maybe GrowthHackers has top posts, colon, and then start listing your title there.
Now remember what we're trying to do is send people back to this site.
We're not trying to hijack their name and bring them to our site. We want to bring people to your submission so that they'll upvote it, read your content, and then share.
If your content is good, if you have a critical mass of people who are viewing it, you're going to be rewarded with upvotes.
Think of it as skipping the line and getting in front of the email list of all the people that subscribe to growthhackers.com.
You can repeat this process for Reddit, Hacker News, inbound.org, whichever bookmarking communities make the most sense for your audience.