For those who run free or free with registration websites, where advertising is the primary revenue driver, the daily objective is to drive traffic from qualified readers. That is, we really don't want curious consumers--our advertisers don't value them and there's very little in our product line that we can sell to them. We want professionals who care about our content, will spend time on our site and return in the future, and may click through to learn more about our advertisers' products or our own.

In earlier posts I have written about using Twitter and Facebook to build traffic, and there have been several interesting comments on those posts from our colleagues with success stories of their own.

Jennifer Stevens, law.com's Search Engine Marketing Manager, has been doing some work with another social media site--LinkedIn--and recently shared her strategy with me. Rather than starting up our own LinkedIn Group for law.com, Jennifer's strategy has been to seek out and join groups that already exist. Those groups are specifically targeted to lawyers, like the "e-Legal" Group and the "Leadership for Lawyers" Group. To date, Jennifer has joined 38 such groups.

LinkedIn Groups allow members to post links to articles of interest. So that's what Jennifer does. She identifies law.com articles that might interest particular groups, and then posts links to them for relevant groups to see. LinkedIn keeps count of the number of people who click through to read those articles, plus distributes daily or weekly email summaries from the Group Administrator to let members know about new postings. Articles with the most views will also be listed in the "Most Activity" column of the news section. And if a member likes and recommends an article, that shows up as well. So there are multiple ways in which links to an article can be seen by members.

Jen reports that between February (when she started this process) through May, she has posted 62 article links on 38 different groups, driving 3,473 article views during that period. When she started, LinkedIn referred almost no traffic to law.com and was #121 on our list of Top Referring Domains. By May, that social media site was #12 on the list of Top Referring Domains, ahead of Twitter and Facebook. The numbers are small compared to other sources--like direct links from people's bookmarks or links from the emails we send out--but the growth is significant and could become more important in the future.

We're all still experimenting with how to use social media sites to appropriately promote our brands, build relationships and drive traffic. If you have questions about what Jen has been doing on LinkedIn, please contact her directly. And if you have results of your own activities to share, please put them in the comments section below or drop me a note--I'd love to hear more about them.