While the major­ity of traf­fic still comes through search engines, that’s all poised to change with these three trends:

1. Con­nect your con­tent to exist­ing social networks

Almost every Web 2.0 appli­ca­tion and com­mu­nity requires users to sign up and reg­is­ter. If you want to leave a com­ment on a blog, you need to reg­is­ter, some­times every sin­gle time you leave a com­ment. With all the times you’ve reg­is­tered on sites, you prob­a­bly have hun­dreds of accounts that you’ve com­pletely for­got­ten. Instead of cre­at­ing your own com­mu­nity, sim­ply latch on to exist­ing communities.

Social net­works such as Google, Face­book, and Twit­ter began reach­ing out­side of their four walls and let­ting any site or con­tent provider use a con­duit tool to con­nect their con­tent to their social net­works. Exam­ples include Google Friend Con­nect (video), Face­book Con­nect (video), and Sign in with Twit­ter.

These con­duit tools offer quick authen­ti­ca­tion, com­ment­ing, and other con­ver­sa­tional fea­tures. More impor­tantly, once these con­nect tools are installed, every inter­ac­tion a per­son has with your site can be broad­cast to that individual’s entire social net­work, giv­ing you access to their audience.

2. Dis­trib­ute con­tent through adver­tis­ing networks

With frac­tions of a per­cent­age click-through, ban­ner ads are on the verge of being com­pletely use­less. Some com­pa­nies have tried to attract more atten­tion with pop-ups and ani­ma­tion. In those cases, click-throughs may increase, but that may be by acci­dent. Ever try to close out a win­dow and miss? Peo­ple do want to click, but not on sta­tic adver­tis­ing. They want to click on information.

Adver­tis­ing net­works have the dis­tri­b­u­tion. Prob­lem is the major­ity of the data being dis­trib­uted are ads. Instead of cre­at­ing a sta­tic ban­ner ad and call­ing it a day, dis­trib­ute your com­pany story or infor­ma­tion that you know your audi­ence would appre­ci­ate through the adver­tis­ing net­work. Make the same ad buy, but replace the JPGs with con­tent wid­gets fed by RSS feeds. Once you’ve done that, you now have the power to con­stantly update the con­tent and make it rel­e­vant to the hosted sites, and there­fore rel­e­vant to the audi­ence, thus increas­ing your indus­try voice and click-through.

3. Build rela­tion­ships with contests

Con­tests are tra­di­tion­ally about a one-time value exchange for the user. Give me your con­tact infor­ma­tion and in return I’ll give you a chance to win a prize. Com­pa­nies then take your con­tact infor­ma­tion and instead of cre­at­ing a cus­tomer rela­tion­ship, they sim­ply push offers to you for months if not years after that sin­gle contest.

Social net­works allow you to fos­ter ongo­ing rela­tion­ships. With each rela­tion­ship cre­ated, the cost of addi­tional impres­sions decreases. For your next con­test, instead of ask­ing for con­tact infor­ma­tion as a qual­i­fi­ca­tion for entry, require the per­son to join your social net­work (e.g., fol­low on Twit­ter or join a Face­book fan page) to ini­ti­ate a rela­tion­ship. When peo­ple sign up to any­thing via social net­works, their activ­ity can be announced to their friends, plus the ongo­ing con­ver­sa­tion acts as an amaz­ing research and feed­back loop for you to respond and grow your busi­ness.David Spark helps busi­nesses grow by devel­op­ing thought lead­er­ship through sto­ry­telling and cov­er­ing live events at Spark Media Solu­tions. He blogs at The Spark Minute and can be heard and seen reg­u­larly on ABC Radio, Cranky Geeks with John C. Dvo­rak, and KQED in San Fran­cisco. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact David, or leave a com­ment below.

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