0The WordPress Guide

2.3 Get traffic from social network sites

Did you know that Face­book has over­taken Google to become the most vis­ited site on the Web?

2.3.1 Create a google+ page

Sign up for Google+ and then “cre­ate a google+ page” for your site. Link your site and your Google+ page with each oth­er. When you pub­lish a new art­icle share share it on Google+. At the moment there is no way to auto­mate this, but auto­mated tools are likely to arrive in the near future.

2.3.2 Create a facebook page

Face­book is now the most vis­ited site in the world. Many of your friends prob­ably think that Face­book IS the inter­net. To help your con­tent get noticed share it to Face­book auto­mat­ic­ally. You will need a Face­book “page”, and the SharePress plu­gin to auto­mate the process.

2.3.3 Create a twitter account

Whilst google+ and face­book are the main “social net­work­ing” sites you’ll want to focus on, you want people to dis­cov­er your con­tent in as many ways as pos­sible. If you set up a twit­ter account you can auto­mat­ic­ally tweet the excerpts of your art­icles to twit­ter. You can also auto­mate tweets for com­ments. The Simple Twit­ter Status Update plu­gin will sort this out for you.
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2.3.4 Get listed on blog catalogs

There are quite a few blog cata­logs out there which you should sign up and get lis­ted on. This is anoth­er way of get­ting incom­ing links and get­ting your site noticed. Tech­nor­ati is one of the biggest, so start there and add more when you have time.

2.3.5 Autoshare to other social sites

Whilst we’ve covered the main places you can pick up traffic, there are yet more social sites out there that might gen­er­ate you some traffic. You might, for example, want to share to Del.icio.us. As always there are vari­ous plu­gin options which can auto­mate this. We recom­mend start­ing with the plu­gin WPing.FM and the free ping.fm ser­vice. Tight­MixB­log has a detailed art­icle on using WPing and ping.fm to auto­share your con­tent to over 30 social sites!