social baiting

Some BlogWorld speakers are inspirational, and you leave their sessions feeling motivated and good about yourself. Some BlogWorld speakers are entertaining, and their public speaking skills keep you engaged and interested. And then there are speakers like Syed Balkhi…where during their sessions, you are furiously writing/typing notes as you’re being punching in the face (in a good way) with tip after tip after tip.

Syed’s talk was on something called “social baiting” – essentially, using your social media friends/followers to grow your blog’s traffic. Says Syed, “The idea of social media baiting is turning your readers into ambassadors.”

If you want all of his awesome tips, you’ll need to pick up the virtual ticket (which also gives you access to all of the other sessions you may have missed). Here are some of the highlights:

• Use Twitter Search to find what people are asking about your niche. Send them answers directly or better yet, use their questions to create new content on your blog…and then send them the link.
• Syed things Chris Brogan is wrong about not asking for Retweets. “Ask and you shall receive” is his advice – your fans will respond when you ask for help promoting something. You just has to build your relationships first.
• The Tweet and Get It plugin is great for spreading your influence on social media sites. With this plugin, you give away something for free, but in order to get it, your followers have to retweet a specific message.
• Livefyre is the best commenting system for social interaction (I highly agree with this – we just integrated LF on the BlogWorld blog and I use it on my Blog Zombies blog as well).
• You can use the Facebook photostrip on  your page to offer coupons or push people to certain pages on your site. When a person clicks on it, the link is in the caption.
• Use Facebook questions and polls to keep readers interested and generate content ideas for your blog.
• Make sure to add the +1 button on your site if you don’t have it already. It will not only help with social sharing, but it will help for SEO as well.
• Test how people are using your buttons and which types of buttons work best. Sometimes just changing the type of button you’re using (like adding pictures on the Facebook button you choose or the tweet count on the Twitter button you use) can change your traffic significantly.

And the most important tip of all? Before he ended the session, Syed was very clear about one thing: “It will only work if you have compelling content.” If your content stinks, you can “social bait” all day long and it won’t really change anything. You have to actually write posts or do podcasts/videos that are helpful or entertaining to readers to keep them sharing.

Like I said, this post only scratches the surface when it comes to the information Syed gave us in his presentation. Check out the virtual ticket to hear the entire thing.