Two Critical Components of Successful Social Media Marketing That We Often Overlook

Building and Sustaining Momentum.

Monday was the biggest traffic day for this blog in over a month with almost 1,000 visitors.  I really wanted to write a killer post yesterday that would build off the momentum created on Monday, and maybe even result in a bigger day on Tuesday.

But I couldn’t do it.  I hit a bit of a writer’s block, and instead wrote a bit of a ranty post based around the rumors that CNN might by Mashable.  While that’s a topic that was interesting to me, I knew it wasn’t going to be an incredibly successful post, and it wasn’t.

Yet the interesting part is this: Traffic on Tuesday was up about 33% over the previous Tuesday.  Why?  Because of the momentum I had built here on Saturday, Sunday and Monday.

Here’s the Top 10 posts here yesterday, ranked by pageviews:

Note that Monday’s post accounted for 21.6% of the pageviews here on Tuesday.  Also note that the TWO posts I wrote here yesterday didn’t have a third of the pageviews of Monday’s post.

Thankfully, Monday’s post on optimizing your blog posts for search engines AND social media sites was still popular yesterday, so much so that it was the most popular post here for the 2nd day in a row.  And it might make it 3 days in a row today.  But the point is that the momentum created by the popularity of Monday’s post was able to carry this blog yesterday, when neither of the posts I published were very popular, based on pageviews.

There is something to be said for building and sustaining momentum with your social media efforts.  I think this is probably more evident on our blogs than anywhere else.  Most of us know what it’s like to go a few days, or maybe even a few weeks without posting regularly.  Life gets in the way, business gets in the way.  We lose interest and inspiration.

Then we get to a point where we are ready to ‘get back in the saddle’.  The problem is, we’ve lost our momentum.  3 months ago when we were blogging 3 times a week like clockwork, we were getting comments on every post and traffic was steady or increasing every day.

Now, our audience has left us.  We’ve lost the momentum our blog had, and it really is like starting all over.  But that’s ok, because we’ll get it back.  For the next two weeks we’ll again post 3 new posts a week, on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Heading into that 3rd week, our traffic will be up sharply, and our commenters will be back.  We’re starting to get several emails a day about our products again, whereas for the past few weeks they had fallen to 1 or 2 a week.  Hmmmm….

My problem in the past has always been that I build momentum here, and then I reach a point where I tell myself ‘Ok, now the blog is humming along, I need to turn my attention to something else…’  And that’s when the wheels fall off.  Race your winners, and rest your losers.

Are you building momentum with your social media efforts? And if you are, how are you going to sustain that momentum?