Fantastic website not getting the traffic it deserves? Before paying Google to attract visitors for you, consider a focused, effective social media marketing strategy.

Given that your website is already pretty awesome and has up to date, quality content, a little time investment in a few social media platforms will go a long way. What’s that? There are more social media sites out there than you’ve got time left in your life to investigate? Quite right, fortunately I’ve already done the homework for you out of pure love of the industry- and plenty of free time. Here are my suggestions for increasing traffic to your site:

Bookmark your site with specific and general tags so others can find it. There are easily over 100 sites out there that allow you to bookmark and tag your own website to make it easier to find, don’t try to use all of them. I personally find delicious to be the best investment of time, or Mister Wong for European markets. Both of these sites are worthy tools, but if you really want to open the floodgates of site traffic then you should also invest in StumbleUpon. When bookmarking your site in StumbleUpon it’s best to leave a review, and since you are only afforded five tags, make them as broad as possible.

Blogs are trendy but they do actually work quite well. Integrating a blog into your website is an easy way to bring fresh content and visitors to your site. The real trick with blogs is to always provide the internet with quality content, in a semi-consistent manner. If blogging is a foreign science to you I would suggest following a few other blogs that interest you for a couple of weeks until you are comfortable with a particular style of writing.

Once you start cranking out high quality articles on your blog, make sure you spend some time promoting your hard work! Submit your posts to a few general social news sites, I recommend digg, reddit, and mixx. Now depending on the content of your website and blog, I would also suggest submitting your posts to more specific social news sites. For instance, Tip’d is a niche social news site for all things related to money and investing, NewsHeat is specific to political news, and so on and so on.

Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networking sites are also a smart places to submit your blog posts to, as all of your connections will see your submitted link in their personal mini-feed. Twitter is a another platform I recommend sharing your recent post on, it’s sort of a cross between blogging and instant messaging that is wildly popular at the moment for both business and personal use.

Additionally, make sure that your blog has RSS and email subscription options displayed prominently on your site. It’s important to have a means of communicating with your visitors once they leave. While they are on your site, make sure it’s easy for them to share your website and blog posts on a social media platform of their choosing. There are a number of plugins out there that do this, I personally prefer Share This because of it’s clean appearance.

Hopefully you’ve gleaned a few ideas on how to increase traffic to your website by use of social media marketing. With a focused approach, a little time investment can yield commanding traffic flows to your site. Feel free to share your own tricks and techniques in the comment section below. Good luck to you!