When you start a new pro blog or business website, it can take a while before your SEO efforts begin to pay off. Taking advantage of social knock-on effects (a mathematical look at viral marketing) can help give you a kick start.

that chart in the doctors office … a basic pyramid scheme where if you’ve been with 10 people … you’ve actually slept with 428,000

So what can I do before my SEO strategy takes effect?

Building a long term SEO strategy involves the creation of a solid base of content and some smart link building. While you do this, there are 2 simple techniques you can use to bring traffic to your blog, right from day 1.

1. Take Advantage of Your Friends – The Knock-On Effect

I remember being in the doctors office as a 20yr old student and seeing a chart that pointed out how many people I’d ACTUALLY slept with… mathematically speaking. It was a basic pyramid scheme, where – if you’ve been with 10 people, they’ve each been with 10 more and so on and so forth – you’ve actually slept with 428,000 members of the opposite sex, most of whom probably had poor hygiene.

Nothing to worry about right? Well, you’re still here so let’s assume you survived your carnal excursions. What does this have to do with internet marketing? It’s strikingly similar actually. Let’s paint a short scenario:

• You’ve written an epic 300-word blog post that is a sure-thing to sell your product, convert the masses into frothing rabid consumers of your wares, and make you a millionaire…
• Your blog is only 1 day old, so nobody knows about it yet.
• You have a Twitter account with 100 people following you (you can do this quite easily in anything from a day to a few weeks depending on your quality vs quantity strategy).
• You tweet about your latest blog post, with it’s super catchy title.
• You have 5 “real” friends on Twitter who have a collective network of 1,200 followers and you ask them to Re-Tweet your blog post.
• 1 person in your original network Re-Tweets it to their network of 400 people.
• 3 people in your friends network of 1,200 Re-Tweet to their collective network of 800 people.
• Suddenly 2,100 people have been exposed to your message.

Now this isn’t all glitter and gold. In fact the majority of people won’t see your tweet because they’re swamped in the mass of notifications from their networks. But you can see how 1 little message can quickly multiply into a potential exposure in the thousands – IF you can write interesting tweets and have great content.

The lesson here is to build a network slowly but steadily, and to write things that are useful AND entertaining. If you do that, you can take advantage of simple sexual mathematics – which brings a whole new meaning to taking advantage of your friends.

And on that note, don’t be afraid to lean on your friends when you are starting out. Ask nicely and see where it takes you. There are usually a few nice surprises if you go about it in the right way.

2. Spread the Word on Social News Sites

In Step 5 – Create Social Networking Profiles we asked you to create profiles at the major social networking and news sites; Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Mixx and Yahoo Buzz. This is the simplest way to gain some brand exposure for your new blog.

How do You Share Your Blog Posts on Social Networking Sites?

It’s pretty simple really. You go to the site in question and find the “Submit a URL” link (or something similar). Then you put in your link and a description (more on some sites) and off it goes.

However, there’s a lot more to being really successful on these types of site; entire books have been written on the subject, so don’t expect miracles. Just accept that to begin with you’ll get a few new visitors.

Also, make sure you follow the rules and don’t just start throwing crappy content up thinking it’s a silver bullet. A catchy title and great, entertaining content is always the best recipe for success.

This technique will help you in 2 ways:

1. You’ll get traffic from people browsing those sites.
2. You’ll start getting some organic search traffic from people searching on your topic, as your post will appear in the search results via the site you posted it on (as they already carry a great deal of weight with Google etc.).

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