Whether you’re a developer, a blogger, or a mom-and-pop store owner, you probably want to make your website popular. How do you make your website popular though? Websites become popular because they get people to go to them on a regular basis, and then those people link to that website and share it with their friends. The trick is to get people to enjoy being on your website enough to come again, and then to feel confident enough to share your site with their friends. This is why making your website social is such an important thing. You don’t think that your business site can be social? You’re wrong. This article is going to tell you some ways that you can make any website more social, and get your website to be more popular.

10 Simple Ways to Make Your Website Popular

1. Include commenting functionality. Page commenting has become ubiquitous on website these days, thanks to many CMS’s like WordPress that have popularized the concept even for simple websites. Commenting allows users to share their views about your content, and even gets readers more engaged. You may talk about one perspective of a topic, and a commenter may post the completely opposite idea, and argue for it! That stirs up some debate in your readers’ minds, which is exactly what you should be doing! Sites that do this well have strong loyalty – “stickability” – from their users. To enhance your comments, you can even get your comments to have avatars (a little picture of the commenter herself), which brings me to the next point…
2. Allow users to have to add a piece of themselves to your website. For example, make a page were users can upload photos of themselves to be displayed in a public collage, with links on each photo to the person’s website. You can call that page something intriguing like “A Place on my Website for You”. Not only does this add social value to your site (so that people can see that you actually have readers), but it’ll bring people back to your site after they have made this social investment. Readers will then connect with other readers that they think have interesting pictures.
3. Interact with your users. In posts and pages, ask users questions that will get them commenting, or at least feeling more involved. Use a chat popup plugin, or some kind of rapid chat application to speak to them personally. Write as if you are writing to someone specific, so that content on the site doesn’t become dull and generic. This is usually a tip that professional writers give.
4. Encourage users to share content. Use a service like CloudFlood, or Pay with a Tweet, or get your own service like this created, that allows users to receive a free product or service in exchange for sharing your site on social networks. This is a way to get a site that might not usually be shared on social networks to explode virally.
5. Link to your own social profiles. Although it’s very common, having your own website puts you into a place of authority. When you open people up to finding your personal profiles, that allows them to feel like they have intimate access to somebody important, which not only makes them come back to your website more, but also makes them feel more entitled to interact there. Think of your own personal experiences with this to validate it. Having a place for people to find you on a personal social platform like Facebook also makes you seem infinitely more personable, and people tend to link and interact more with people than with websites.
6. Display updates from your Twitter or Facebook sites. Maybe plugins will set this up for you, and allows the users to read some of your posts without having to go all the way to Twitter first. This way you can get them hooked on your content before they’ve even started following you! It also gets them engaged on your website at the same level that they are when they’re on Facebook or Twitter, which is a good association to make.
7. Display your site’s statistics. A good way to make your readers feel more included in your website is to display some of the statistics that they are contributing towards. It’s a fact that sites that show their monthly earnings and readership are far more engaging than sites that don’t; and on those sites, the posts where they share this data is almost always the most popular! Make your website popular by being transparent, and sharing your data with your readers.
8. Add share buttons on your pages. You can go a long way to making it easy for your users to share your content to their social networks. If you would like a really easy fix for this for WordPress, read this article on how to add social bookmarking buttons to WordPress.
9. Optimize your website for search engines. The best way to make your website popular in the long run is to make sure that people can find it on their own. Think of a major search engine as actually being a social network itself, referring websites to people when they mention a topic. That means that your site should show up in major search engines. For this to happen, those search engines need to know what your site is about, and also that it is worthwhile for people to go there. For both of those things, you need to get people to link to your site while talking about related topics. This is another reason to make your website personable and fun, so that people want to link to you.
10. Communicate with others in your industry. If you run a website that sells travel coupons, it may be worthwhile to get into contact with other people who are doing similar things. That way, they might link to you in their site and send traffic your way.

Why Make Your Website Popular?

If you follow these tips, I am sure that you can make your website popular in no time. Remember that traffic builds on traffic! The more people that go to your website, the most likely it is that they are referring it, linking to it, and that search engines are starting to notice it. Search engines follow people! That said, make sure that you can capitalize on traffic by having effective sales copy, or ways that you can profit on the new influx of readers or users. There is no point in spending the time to make your website popular if there is no benefit from it, is there?