There’s an easy way to get more traffic to your blog posts that’s often ignored.

It’s those social media buttons that are staring you in the face.

If you haven’t got many followers, using the buttons won’t get you much extra traffic at first.

You may even ask yourself whether it’s worth even spending a few seconds clicking them.

But slowly – which is usually the best way of growing an internet marketing business – you’ll get a few more followers and a few more visitors.

This is the usual internet numbers game

By that, I mean that the more often you do something, so long as it’s a fairly good “something”, the more it works.

10 followers on Twitter won’t get you very far because the chance of even one of them seeing the Tweet you place before it falls off their front page is low.

A few more followers (I’ve got an absolutely massive 74 people following me at the moment!) and the chance increases,

The more followers – numbers – you’ve got, the more traffic – numbers – you’ll get.

You can also tip the odds a bit more in your favour with hashtags.

I’m still learning about all this social media stuff (yes, I’m old fashioned like that) so I’ll tend to just put the tag #internetmarketing at the front of my Tweets and Google+ posts.

That works.

Maybe not as well as getting fancy with the tags.

But what seems to be happening is that I’m getting the occasional new follower most times I Tweet.

And I’m also getting mentioned in what I can best call aggregator sites like this one and this one.

They look for relevant hash tags (I don’t know whether they do it by hand or computer program) and then publish excerpts which, in turn, link to my site.

Again, nothing fancy and I’m not doing anything other than pressing the Tweet button, adding the tag #internetmarketing and pressing Tweet.

I probably should take the time to amend the automatically created text (usually just the article title) but i don’t.

Google+ forces you to write your own text

Which is why – being lazy – I don’t use it quite as often.

But I do use it occasionally and I add that same hashtag at the start.

And – hey presto – the occasional extra follower.

Not as often as Twitter but then Google+ is still a bit of a graveyard in terms of number of people.

LinkedIn if it’s relevant to your profile

Yes, one of the social media buttons is LinkedIn, so if you’ve got a profile and the post you’ve just made is relevant to your profile, click that button as well.

You’ve got a bit more text on LinkedIn than you have on Twitter and your followers there will be notified that you’ve just put up the link.

The whole thing is like a dripping pipe

If you’ve ever had a water leak and put a bucket underneath it, you’ll know that individually those drips are insignificant.

And you’ll also know that when you come back to the bucket the following morning there’s a surprising amount of water in it.

Much more than you’d ever expect from those tiny drips.

Social media seems to be the exact same principle.

Lots and lots of small, almost totally insignifcant, drips (Tweets, etc) that, over time, account for something.

Try it.

Next time you post an item on your blog or a video on YouTube or content elsewhere, spend an extra few seconds to add it to a few different social media sites.

If you’d like to know more about using social media, take a look here.

And if you’d like to find out more about using affiliate marketing to increase your internet marketing income, watch this free video.