11. Double your traffic by automating your social media schedule— 30 Days Of Medium
Welcome back to 30 Days Of Medium.
The topic for today is doubling your traffic by embracing automation.
You can catch up on the first 9 days of my Medium challenge below if you missed them:
0. 30 Days Of Medium
1. What do you need to build your own website? — 30 Days Of Medium
2. How to find a business you love — 30 Days Of Medium
3. How to build your own website — 30 Days Of Medium
4. How to measure your website’s performance — 30 Days Of Medium
5. How to get more customers by answering their questions -30 Days Of Medium
6. The successful business website cheat sheet — 30 Days Of Medium
7. How to measure success — 30 Days Of Medium
8. Understanding the Online Sales Funnel — 30 Days Of Medium
9. What is traffic and why is it important? — 30 Days Of Medium
10. What is Google URL Builder and why should you use it? — 30 Days Of Medium
11. Double your traffic by automating your social media schedule — 30 Days Of Medium
12. How to tell what sells — 30 Days Of Medium
13. How I grew my Medium following 6,500% — 30 Days Of Medium
14. How you look at things matters — 30 Days Of Medium
15. How to SELL services to small businesses — 30 Days Of Medium
16. How to win more deals with effective proposals — 30 Days Of Medium
17. How to setup an online store in 10 minutes — 30 Days Of Medium
18. How to work from anywhere — 30 Days Of Medium
19. Why your website is sabotaging your sales — 30 Days Of Medium
20. Where does your traffic come from? — 30 Days Of Medium
21. How to actually recognise burnout — 30 Days Of Medium
22. How to hack your schedule and get twice as much done — 30 Days Of Medium
23. Don’t copy your competitors — 30 Days Of Medium
24. How to SEO optimise a blog post — 30 Days Of Medium
25. Be unique or be forgotten — 30 Days Of Medium
26. Going with your gut — 30 Days Of Medium
27. People don’t pay for average — 30 Days Of Medium
28. How to do keyword research — 30 Days Of Medium
29. Why The Pareto Principle is the world’s biggest hack — 30 Days Of Medium
30. Your content is more profitable than your telephone — 30 Days Of Medium
What is automation?
For those of you who don’t know, marketing automation refers to the practice of using software to schedule or automate routine marketing tasks.
Automation is important for two reasons:
- It saves time
- It generates better results for your business
How does automation drive growth?
Imagine you are having a very busy week.
You’ve just signed up a new client, or maybe there’s a fire to put out at home.
Spending 40 minutes on your social media platforms is no longer a priority.
Every time one of these fires or distractions pops up you are likely to sideline your dedicated social media time for that day or do it poorly.
Automation makes sure this doesn’t happen and helps you to remain consistent, which is by far the most important factor in achieving success online. Consistency = growth.
More free time = more growth
If you save yourself 30 minutes a day 5–6 days a week, you’ve saved yourself 3–4 extra hours per week.
What could you do with that time?
That’s quite a nice chunk of free time. Instead of spending it manually doing routine tasks, you could spend it improving your content strategy or looking at some new ways to grow your business.
Why do you think millionaires and billionaires have personal assistants, teams of people on their staff, drivers and personal shoppers?
Because these people help give them more knowledge time. Time they can spend on high value activities that will help them continue to grow their wealth.
Automation = consistency = growth
One thing I found when I embraced automation was my traffic began to creep up almost immediately, so did the rest of my performance metrics.
Because I was taking the time to batch my social media posting in advance, I was making sure I was religiously posting 4x per day.
Previously, I might not post for a week at a time when I got really busy, or try to overcompensate and post a load of stuff over a few days.
Turns out, the universe rewards consistency and incremental growth.
If you think someone is going to subscribe to your list or buy from you after seeing 1 or 2 tweets, or posts on LinkedIn, you’re wrong.
It can takes months, even years to nurture business relationships.
The upside is when you embrace automation, you are consistently posting everyday, making sure you are building thought leadership with your audience every single day.
Your audience will begin to trust you, rely on and refer to you as an authority in your field. Then if they ever do need help with a project, you will be the person they turn to.
How does it double your traffic?
A large chunk of my traffic comes from social referrals.
If you’re still figuring out a marketing strategy and only getting a tiny amount of traffic from social media platforms, say 10–20 visitors per month, it’s probably due to the fact that you aren’t consistent and aren’t delivering value.
If you are consistently creating new helpful, shareable content and focusing 90% of your time on giving away value for free, your traffic will grow.
The more free value you share, the more eyeballs your content gets, which means you get more referrals to your website which means a lot more traffic.
Automating your social media sharing ensures that the content you work so hard to create is seen by the right number of people at the right times. It doesn’t matter how great your content is if you don’t promote it.
It’s becoming harder and harder to get seen across all the social media platforms, so you need to ensure you have an intelligent schedule where you share valuable content multiple times across the week to give it the best chance of being seen.
Even the big guys like Richard Branson do it, and will often even repost the same article twice in one day at different times, with an altered status to accompany it.
If you’re worried about annoying people with your content don’t be. There are people who will complain about anything and everything especially on social media, and if they aren’t interested in free value, don’t be worried if they decide to unfollow and go elsewhere. It’s their loss! As long as you are delivering value and not trying to sell, you have nothing to worry about.
How to take action
Sign up for Buffer, which is free to start with.
Turn your 30–40 minute unproductive social media time each day into 5 minutes of focused scheduling.
Using Buffer, you can connect all of your social media platforms and schedule posts at predetermined times each day, across every platform.
Do this everyday for 30 days and watch your traffic double.
As you begin to settle into this routine, look at upgrading to the premium version of Buffer which lets you schedule more posts in advance, so you can really take advantage of batching and schedule all your posts at the start of the week.
Any questions on this topic? Let me know in the comments.
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