I’ve always loved those American college movies with a happy ending, where the typical shy outcast ends up becoming popular and winning over the most sought-after girl on campus. What can I say, it’s my little weakness.
Websites and online stores are just like those typical Sunday-afternoon movies. Increasing your website’s popularity always brings more advantages and rewards (whether in visits or sales) than drawbacks. But,
What is your website’s popularity and how do you measure it?
Basically, we would define popularity by answering the question: how important is my site to the online community? Being popular means being known and relevant (or a benchmark) for users in our field. We achieve this by giving our online store or website greater visibility in search engines and on social networks, by having high traffic volumes and by making our products or posts highly viral.
The easiest way to measure our popularity is to check the number and, above all, the quality of links pointing to our website. A site nobody talks about online will hardly be found by users. To measure it, we have various tools and indexes that can give us an idea of how popular we are.
The most effective and popular tools are:
- Ahrefs: software that lets you see the links and keywords of any website, including your competitors’. One of its advantages is that it has its own database.
- Open site explorer: the tool from the renowned consultancy Moz, with its own metrics (pageauthority, domainauthority, mozrank and moztrust), which some experts say are more reliable than Google’s own.
As for indexes to measure our popularity, we can’t overlook:
- Google’s PageRank
- Amazon’s Alexa ranking
Now that we know what it is and how we can measure our online visibility, let’s look at:
How can we increase our popularity?
Building popularity is easy to explain and not so easy to achieve. Still, here are four guidelines to increase the popularity of your website or online store, whether by earning quality links to your site or by increasing the number of visits.
1.- Videos, podcasts and ebooks: It’s hard to pin down what it takes to create a successful video, podcast or ebook that goes viral. Creating and distributing any of these can help us reach our much-desired popularity goals, and although there’s no formula that guarantees success, we can say that achieving exceptional reach requires meeting these three conditions:
- It must surprise: we need to surprise users to the point that they find it funny or interesting enough to pass on to their friends and/or acquaintances.
- It must stand out: every day we come across loads of surprising and highly interesting content online. Yet we do nothing with it, so it must not only be innovative but also stand out from the rest.
- It must reach a minimum level of exposure through influential people or media, from which point people start talking about it and its viral effect grows.
2.- Blogs: A blog is a space on the internet where its owners write, usually in an informal tone, about their concerns, feelings, things that surprised them, their opinions, and things they like or dislike. A blog is a great platform to captivate an audience with shared interests while enabling interaction. The most popular ones are like magazines, with great credibility and huge numbers of readers and followers eagerly awaiting new posts, which gives some bloggers a strong influence on public opinion. If we manage to build a popular blog (there’s plenty online on how to do it), or a successful blogger talks about us and links from their blog to our website or online store, our popularity will rise noticeably.
3.- Influencers: Influencers are the small group of people who, in theory, lead or will lead public opinion on a specific product or service. They’re the ones capable of setting the trends the rest of us follow anywhere in the world. In the past, being influential online meant having a successful blog. However, with the arrival of Twitter, the number of people capable of influencing others (those with a large number of followers, although that’s not a 100% reliable indicator) has grown. Reaching out to one of these influencers and getting them to share their (positive, we assume) opinion about our website or online store will boost our online visibility.
4.- Facebook Ads: Social networks in general, and Facebook in particular (with its 1.23 billion users), provide the space and tools for users to create and upload content and interact with each other. Popularity on Facebook is measured by the number of “friends” or “likes” your page has. The higher the number, the greater the reach of your posts and the easier it is to spread your “messages”. You can grow your circle of friends naturally, just like in real life: by being sociable. Facebook gives us a great tool that, with minimal investment and prior research into the audience we want to target, lets us, among other things, increase the number of likes or friends on our page. The higher the number, the more relevance, the better rankings and the more popularity our website will have.
If, like me, you enjoy movies with a happy ending, I’d be grateful if you helped this shy, humble post become more popular (by sharing it or giving it a +1 or a like) so it can enjoy a little success.
