Improving traffic to your site is like breathing. It is not something that you do once in a while when you find time. It has to be done all the time.
Of the several means of traffic to your site, Social media plays a very important role. Your popularity in Social Networking sites like Facebook, Twitter etc.
Image credits to http://gingerbread.marketing/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/08-Seo-content-marketing-social-media-gingerbread-marketing.jpg
There are huge number of Social Sharing plugins for WordPress based sites, blogs and several ‘Share’ related buttons for other sites, blogs.
http://www.shoutmeloud.com/best-social-sharing-wordpress-plugins.html
For Blogspot, you can refer to http://helplogger.blogspot.com/2014/02/share-blogger-posts-using-sharethis-buttons.html
All of these buttons/plugins allow users to share your content in their social networks. That is great but they don’t help you increase the number of people who are sharing your content.
Lets dig deep into what happens when a reader visits a page on your website.
- Reader starts reading the content in your page
- Takes a decision on the look and feel of the page unknowingly. Mostly decided by the theme of your page.
- Starts gathering information from what you have written. The essence of it not just words, lines or images.
- Could get distracted by Advertisements or links to other pages or articles that you had put and leave the page. Lets says that is not the case here.
- As the reader is still reading, his/her mind starts building a model from the essence that he/she gathered from your content.
- There may be instances that your reader agreed with what you mentioned and instances that your reader disagreed with you or felt neutral and kept reading on.
- The frequency of these instances of agreement is what it determines whether your reader will share your page to his social network or not.
Oh my God!
Yes, This is what we do knowingly or unknowingly when we read an article and we have to take a decision to share that article or not.
If you observe closely, a reader might have agreed upon most of the content in your article but he can end up not sharing your article as he didn’t like the last few paragraphs.
This means that you are loosing your social shares by asking your users to share an entire article rather than a specific section of your article.
We at ContextEra tried to solve this problem.
We built a tool that allows your readers to share content as and when they come across on your page. With this tool, a reader can highlight a specific section of your article or page and share it to his network. If your reader, liked multiple sections of your content he can share each section independently. With every share, the tool sends the link to the actual page there by increasing the number of times your link is shared with people.
See the below image, i tried to select a particular section of an article and my context linking icon showed up. The selected text is highlighted in Yellow color.
Clicking on the ContextEra icon will launch the Context Linking URL which your reader can share with his social network, bookmark or send it in an email.
Once a person in your readers social network clicks on the link generated, he/she will be taken to your page and the specific section highlighted. This will help the person in the network understand precisely why the reader shared this link. This is how, it will look like.
We call this “Context Linking”, as this allows users to not just share links but to mention the exact text that made them share that link.
You might decide to get rid of other social sharing tools once you integrate your site with “Context Linking” as this comes with two popular social networking share buttons Facebook and Twitter to make it easy for your readers to share content.
“How do I get to know what my readers are sharing ?”
Hmm! That’s an interesting question.
We soled that problem as well for you.
Once registered with ContextEra, it provides lot of analytics that allow you to see what your readers are sharing, how your traffic is increasing by other sites context linking to your site etc.
Its a double edged sword. It allows your readers to do context linking and as well provides analytics to you.
Now time for the ultimate question.
“How can I add ContextLinking to my site?”
Integrating Context Linking to your site is very easy.
Step 1 : Register your site in ContextEra and get the application id.
Step 2: Open your website template file or header file and add a <meta> tag with this app id in the <head> section. For example,
<meta property="clinks:appid" content="534243f633742bf17ac17494"/>
Step 3: Add a link to our context.min.js file to either the <head> section or the footer. For example,
<script src="http://www.contextera.com/context.min.js" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"/>
That’s it ! Your site is now ready to be context linked.
So simple right!
So, what are you waiting for, Announce to your users that your site now supports context linking and ask them to make use of it.
In case you need any assistance, feel free to drop an email to “contextera.help@gmail.com”
Happy Social Sharing!