iGB Affiliate 43 Feb/March 2014 | Page 23

TRAFFIC most social media sites can act like feeds which followers either get via email, or on their Facebook wall (for example). All of these social media networks can rank within Google’s search engine, and these sites are also search engines themselves. The relevant platforms the site is focusing on are Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest. Receiving emails is probably the best bet, but this isn’t the safest means of acquiring followers as emails can end up in spam filters. When you add this all up, social media should be a good source of new traffic and return visitors. For a three-month period on the original site, social media represented one percent of the traffic and 16.5 percent of traffic was from referrals. The new site has six percent social media traffic and 16 percent referral traffic. This is despite barely making an effort with social media for the new site, as many campaigns are still to come, especially for Pinterest and YouTube. However, today it is becoming too difficult to have anonymous content and authors. Some webmasters are either creating fake Google Plus profiles or making them somewhat anonymous by using an alias, cartoon pictures and eve