When most people talk about social media platforms, the obvious names that appear several times in the discussion are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. In fact, most businesses focus a lot on promoting their brands through these popular social media platforms when it comes to digital marketing. What they often don’t realize is that LinkedIn, a social media platform for professionals, can also be a great place to promote their content.
You heard that right. LinkedIn, which is considered less fun than its more popular counterparts, can be a great place to drive traffic from for your blog. Whether you work for a company’s content marketing team or go solo as an individual blogger – you can leverage certain aspects of LinkedIn to drive traffic to your blog. If you are interested in doing so, here are a few things that you need to do.
1. Optimize your personal profile
Before we learn how to drive traffic to your blog through LinkedIn, it is important that you get the basics right. You need to develop a good headshot, a brief description of your work experience, and your experience as a professional. These fundamentals can make a lot of difference. Focus on these things while optimizing your profile on LinkedIn:
- Write a summary that clearly describes your job
- Make it simpler for people to get in touch with you via email or LinkedIn
- Write the profile information honestly and use numbers when possible
- Proofread the profile data well to make it look error-free
Furthermore, you can link to your blog posts, website and other digital media in your profile. When people view your profile, they will be redirected to your blog/website when they click on the link. The summary section allows you to add media like the blog posts. It is wiser to add a link to one of your best blog posts. This may inspire visitors to click-through and read.
2. Join Groups
Once you are done optimizing your LinkedIn profile, you need people to check it out. Joining and participating in groups can help you fulfill that goal. If you do not have many connections, joining these LinkedIn groups can offer you a bundle of opportunities to network with peers and potential readers of your blog.
Promotional posts in groups are often frowned upon. This is the reason why you need to engage with other members in group in discussions which may or may not result in immediate traffic to your site. The more you help people through discussion, the more profile visits you get on LinkedIn. And, if you have added the blog link in your profile summary, you have great chances of earning traffic.
3. Share your content frequently
Social sharing is one of the most effective ways to drive traffic to your blog. And just like you share the links to your blog posts on Facebook and Twitter, you should definitely share blog posts on LinkedIn as well. While that can drive a certain amount of traffic to your blog posts, you also need to realize that Linked is used primarily for professional networking. So, you need to share content that seems like it can solve certain problems your connections may have.
Apart from posting the links to your blog posts, you should also consider posting rich media – i.e. images, slideshows, videos, and embedded content – which drive more engagement than plain text. You will be glad to know that adding images in posts increases the comment rate by 98%.
However, don’t go overboard with sharing content on LinkedIn. According to studies, 20 posts per month can help a user reach 60% of his/her unique audience.
4. Add a LinkedIn share button on your website
You don’t always have to share the links to your blog posts on LinkedIn in order to drive traffic to your blog. You can also ask other people to do it for you. When you share links to your blog post using your LinkedIn profile, you are limited to your network of peers on the website. If you want to drive traffic from beyond your network on LinkedIn, you need to encourage others to share your blog posts on their LinkedIn profiles.
Nowadays, most websites have this social sharing button which visitors can use to share the content of the page on their respective social media accounts in just one click. Apart from integrating the share button for Facebook and Twitter, you should also use the share button for LinkedIn. If you have used WordPress to develop your blog, you can easily integrate the LinkedIn share button with the help of a specific WordPress plugin.
5. Pay for the traffic
While these aforementioned tips can help you garner organic traffic to your blog, you should also consider using the sponsored updates on LinkedIn. This will actually amplify your reach for posts. You can even target users based on all kinds of demographic data. Moreover, paying for traffic on LinkedIn can earn you followers along with the traffic.
A downside of paid traffic is that the post visits stop when the money runs out. However, the cost per lead generated decreases over time. This means that the content reaches more users for less money. It happens because the content reaches more people, which generates more followers, comments and likes, which in turn boosts organic reach.
It is important to mention that 60-65% of the leads generated through LinkedIn Sponsored Updates are of medium-high or high quality, while the same result for Google Adwords is limited to 20-30%.
In conclusion
If you are running a business and want to use LinkedIn traffic to generate revenue, you can consider all the 5 measures mentioned above. However, if you are just starting your journey as a blogger, you can use the 5th tip at a later date. In the meantime, you use the first four tips to generate organic traffic for your blog using your LinkedIn profile.
