Over the past few months I’ve been searching for a solution to automate social SEO for one of my sites to ensure a solid baseline of social and SEO activity throughout 2012. The solution must benefit readers, encourage social sharing and grow the site’s backlink & social profile.

To clarify, I’m not talking about any spammy automation tricks. I’m talking about setting up a system of triggers that will encourage shares and links naturally throughout the year, whilst positively serving the readers.

Sure, scheduling social updates and producing cool content that naturally gains links is a good start to ‘automating’ social SEO, but here’s a far more effective solution that I came up with…

Use email auto responders to send readers incentives to tweet, +1, share, link and help grow the site once a month, for a year.

Here’s how it works:

• Readers subscribe to a newsletter dubbed as a challenge – I send them a challenge each month (such as adding a badge to their site or +1ing the website) and once completed the challenge they are redirected to a URL containing a prize (e.g. a free ebook). The whole process of them completing the challenge and receiving the gift is fully automated using services like PayWithaTweet and URL link checking scripts.
• From the day they subscribe, they receive an e-mail once a month for the next ten months, each e-mail providing them with awesome information and gifts, in return for some kind of social vote of my site or a link.

How this looks setup in Mailchimp for TheMusiciansGuide.co.uk

Sure, some people won’t open the e-mails and some people may not complete the challenge, but most do. The value of the gift is great enough to ensure that a simple tweet is a no brainer.

An example of one of the e-mails

What I really like about this strategy is that it’s relatively simple to implement and it simply raises the baseline of activity – I can still produce content throughout the year to create spikes in traffic and SEO value, but this simply complements that and encourages steady growth.

In order to implement this you’ll need:

• Ten or so things you can offer your readers that they will love (discounts, freebies, advice etc.)
• Ten things you want your readers to do for you that you can track in an automated way (contact me on Twitter if you would like recommendations on this).
• An e-mail management system with auto responders. I’ve used Aweber, Mailchimp and ConstantContact before and I’ve found Mailchimp to be the most flexible and cost-effective for this type of work, although it’s a matter of opinion.
• A means to encourage readers to join the newsletter (I decided to partner with a few other companies offering discounts of their services in return for them blogging about the newsletter or e-mailing their mailing list about it.)

I’m going to be trialing this for a few different sites in 2012 so I’ll be sure to write-up the results as they come. I’d be keen to hear from anyone who has done something similar to understand some of the challenges or to compare results.

Feel free to keep in touch with me on Twitter (@MarcusATaylor) if you have any questions or want to hear more about the results of the strategy.