How I Suddenly Increased My Link Clicks by 700%

“Social” media

8 min readJul 20, 2014

For a long time I’ve had steady follower growth, which at first I was happy with. As many people would be, it was a nice thought to think that all of these people liked what I was sharing, and may even become clients of mine.

Although the problem was, I was getting a minimal amount of shares on my posts, and hardly anyone was clicking on any of my links (which can be checked with hootsuite or twitter analytics). And to be honest as you can imagine this kind of sucked, I had over 1,500 followers and none of them would click on a link, let alone look at my blog.

Why was this happening? What was the point of having all of these followers then? How could I change this?

Then I came to the realization why would they? Most of my content was just the most recent entrepreneur.com or inc.com articles. When I favourited tweets they were a targeted hashtag, and I barely looked over my news feed. On occasion I would look at my followers tweets, favouriting a bunch in hope the same would be given in return. I was solely focused on efficiency and getting the largest return in the shortest amount of time.

But no relationship was developed, and most of my content was mediocre. So why would they look at my links?

What I failed to realize until recently is that its better to spend more time dedicated to few than less time dedicated to many.

That’s when I decided to imply these three simple things to my social media strategy (twitter and google+) that completely changed my network.

1. Only share the best content,
2. Develop relationships,
3. Engage in discussions,
if all of these are done on a regular basis your number of shares, clicks, retweets, impressions will all substantially increase.

How can you find the best content, develop relationships, and regularly engage in discussions?

Share only the best content with your followers

This is not always a simple task, and finding superb content on a regular basis can be rather tedious but there are a few tricks to make it easier.

Forums/Communities

Search on forums that are dedicated towards your target market, and ones with a dedicated rating system on each post. Reddit is an excellent example, with many subreddits dedicated to countless different categories you’re sure to find one relevant to your target market. Google+ communities can be an excellent resource as well, just make sure you find an interactive community, that has a moderator eliminating the sub-par content. You should continually search for better forums/content providers suited towards your target market. Here are a few of my favourites (for startups or small businesses).

http://www.growthhackers.com/ — great for startups, or companies looking to grow.

http://inbound.org/ — inbound marketing

https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/101621465785193745131/communities/109232418125793730353 — google small business community

http://www.blogengage.com/ — everything

http://www.bizsugar.com — businesses

In these forums search for posts with a large amount of up votes or likes, to show their popularity, like a free survey for you to take advantage of. Search through and you will find an immense amount of excellent content, your followers would love to know about.

Rarer the Better

The more unique and less known the better, continually posting the same things from a major magazine in your field will not have the same impact of finding new content that your users would not have found on their own.

Once you’ve found some excellent, reliable, content providers be sure to have a way to regularly be informed when they post new blogs. Whether it be add them to lists in twitter, add them into specific circles in Google+, or subscribe to their blog through email. This way you’ll have regular streams of amazing content to share with your amazing followers.

If you’re sharing your own content I would recommend only one in five posts be your own content. And be sure that it’s quality matches that of the rest of your posts. Nate Desmond wrote an excellent blog on how to ensure the quality of your blog posts click here to see.

Developing Relationships

Developing relationships with people is the most important part of social media, many people forget the “social” part far too often and focus on the number of followers or favourites. Gaining a small following for yourself or company of dedicated fans who are interested in what you have to say is much more valuable than a large sum of followers who don’t know who you are. To do this you have to connect with these people.

With Potential Clients (Followers)

If you have a large amount of followers it can difficult to develop a relationship with each and every one of them. What I recommend and what has worked best for me is to develop a target market within those followers, instead of attempting to develop a relationship with all of them specify to a smaller group.

But how do you know which followers you should be targeting?

You need to “cock the shotgun” as Perry Marshall refers to it, which means you need to identify a common similarity between potential clients or followers. A certain similarity that increases their chances of being interested in your content, and in turn more likely to share it with their own audience.

Now there are a couple ways to do this, for example you could look at people who have favourited/plus one/liked your content. But many people will search a certain hashtag and spam everyone who’s tweeting that hash tag with a favourite or its equivalent, not to mention they have nothing to lose by favouriting a tweet, very few people will be searching through their favourites. Although if someone were to reshare a post to their own audience they would be supporting your content enough to share it with their own audience, so one would think they like it quite a bit. But watch for people with their last 20 posts reposts, they may have just spammed to hope to get the same in return, without actually looking at your content.

Once you’ve identified your followers that are most likely to reshare group them into lists, or circles, so you can better monitor what their sharing, search for excellent content and reshare it with your audience. Develop a relationship with these people, share their content, reply to their posts, give and you shall receive. And this regular persistence and contact will substantially increase the number of shares your getting, as well as your chances of obtaining them as clients.

Persistence is key, people rarely take note of one reshare but if you do it continually as well as reply and validate their content choices they will surely take note of you.

This same principle can be applied to social media, if you want to develop clients, or develop relationships with people who trust you enough to look at your content and then share it. One reply to one of their tweets is not going to do it, and to reply more than once to all of your followers is a rather difficult task, but when narrowed down to make your efforts have a greater return it becomes much more tangible.

“Social media is not about the exploitation of technology but service to community.” — Simon Mainwaring

With Influences

This is an excellent way to get your message out to many potential clients at once, but is a more difficult task. The goal is to get influences in your field, who your target market trusts and likes to share your content. And when an influence of many people endorses you it really increases your credibility and likelihood for someone to look at your amazing content. Then in turn hopefully your target market also trusts and likes you.

But like I said this won’t be easy, and will take more follow ups than the previous method. An influence of thousands does not get to where they are by posting anything mediocre, your content will have to be phenomenal. Yet one relationship can have a more effective and lasting effect, than one with a potential client.

How can you do this? How can you get a major influencer to back you?

“I was thinking I’d launch it, and then email the link to as many important people as I can.”
My friend looked up from his iPhone and raised his eyebrows. If expressions could talk, his was saying “Dude. Are you kidding me right now?”
— Alex Turnbull (http://ow.ly/zgOHX)

Persistence and quality content are key. And you can work on both at the same time, you’ll have to regularly comment their blogs, reply to their social media posts regularly. With relevant and corresponding comments, complimenting specific aspects, and relating to certain parts that specifically helped you.

To do so, subscribe to their blogs, create a separate list/circle for “influences” or “phenomenal content”, name it what you will. And use this to keep track of their social media activity as well as any recent blogs they’ve posted. So that you can comment and like and share and favourite all of their best stuff, and further build your relationship.

You need to help them a lot, fully endorse them, and hopefully they will help you as well. This section was actually inspired by the article here by (Alex Turnbull) where he speak about he obtained 1000+ subscribers on their first blog post in 24 hours. And this is how they did it.

So far since implying this method I’ve received over 100,000 more impressions on my tweets, from retweets and replies from big accounts. As well as found many excellent content resources.
Find some great writers and when they post another excellent blog share it and tag them in the share. Everyone likes to have reassurance what they’re what they’re doing is quality. More often then not, they’ll reply, or retweet, and then you’re visible to their entire audience.

A good way to ease into them sharing your blog is to ask for feedback from them, (on your excellent article you’ve spent weeks creating) and then apply their feedback. Then before you share it let them know, and ask them if they wouldn’t mind sharing it for you.

Discuss

Actively taking part in discussions with both your influencers and your potential clients have many upsides. They better your relationship with the individual, but it does much more as well. By them responding to you via blog comment or social media in particular, this exposes you to all of their followers as well. Not to mention you can express and further develop your in depth understanding in front of all of their followers.