Pinterest. Facebook. Twitter. Our most common places to get blog referral links.

If you use them.

I recently started using a new (to me) platform called Triberr.  I dove in headlong by participating in a campaign, joining current tribes and even creating my own tribes.  I wasn’t sure if it would work . .

For the life of my blog my biggest referral link has always been Facebook. Follow that up with twitter and things were good. I had never really figured out the Pinterest Platform and the stuff I had “pinned” never seemed to get any love. I mean, I was on there, pinning cool projects… why wasn’t it working?

So this fall, I decided to leap into these two platforms and see what i could do to improve my results.

Firs thing I did was start taking better pictures. If I wanted to use Pinterest, my cool instagram pics just weren’t going to cut it. As well, I found “my way” to do recipes and create re-usable content. This was another big step for me as I never fancied myself a food blogger, or a pretty blogger (for goodness sake, my first food category was “Ugly food that tastes great!”

And I pinned.  Not a lot, but enough.   And it worked.

In a pinterest sorta way.

And this is what I learned about referral platforms.

You have immediate referral sites (like Facebook and twitter) The link life on there is short, but gets you that immediate blast of traffic.  These are also platforms you can re-post on frequently to continue to drive traffic.

Then you have delayed referral sites- like triberr (Linking to twitter of course) and face books groups.  These platforms will share your content tomorrow.  . or maybe the next day, but probably no longer than the end of the week.  But- how nice to have someone else doing the work for you?

Then you have the extended delay – sites like Pinterest and SU. On both of these platforms you will “suddenly” get traffic from an organic sharing of your content.  It is there, just waiting to go viral (or even mini viral works!)  And seriously, do you know how GREAT it feels to wake up on a Sunday morning after having a no fresh content on your site for 3 days and see hundreds of hits from a pinterest recipe you posted a month ago? Beautiful!

When you actually start pinning content and information and participating in tribes, and supporting my tribe mates, your analytics will take  leap. Your referral system will create a world of its own, a naturally supporting eco-system. The leap in my analytics didn’t take hours of time or effort, it is just a change in focus. It is about thinking about the immediate, short term and long term options available for sharing my content.

Now, hop to it.