Tired of getting traffic to your website?  Frustrated when you see your URL or name pop up on Facebook or Twitter?

Never fear!  I can solve this problem for you!

Here’s how to make sure it’s difficult for people to share your website.

After all, if they want to share it they should have to work hard to do that, since we’ve all got extra time on our hands.

1.  Don’t Give Them Anything to Share

Make sure that your best content is either hard to find or nowhere to be found on your website.  If there’s nothing worth sharing, no one will share.  Now you don’t even need to read the other 5 tips!  :)

Bonus suggestion: Don’t create things that people want to share — like free ebooks, tip lists, brainstorming ideas, or anything helpful in general.  Because we need to stay focused on ourselves and not our readers.

2.  Avoid Those Annoying Share Buttons

No share buttons.  None.  Don’t use any of the plugins like ShareBar, TweetMeme, Sociable, SexyBookmarks, FBLikeButton, ShareThis, or AddtoAny.

3.  Don’t Invite Readers to Share Your Content

The power of suggestion can be a great strategy so be sure never to invite your visitors to share your content.  And don’t tell them not too, either, since some might be susceptible to reverse psychology.

4.  Pretend No One Shares Via Email Anymore

Everyone’s on Facebook and no one uses email anymore — it’s so 2000.  So don’t even consider offering options that let users email your content to their friends, like RSS subscribe by email (because it’s easy to forward a great post if you’ve already got it in your email box), or email to a friend buttons in SexyBookmarks.

5.  No Reprinting or Licensing Info On Your Site

It would be terrible if someone wanted to take your blog post and reprint it with credit to you on their own site!!  So make sure you don’t create a “Free Articles” page or offer a license like Creative Commons attribution on your blog.

6.  Never Share Your Own Content on Social Networks

It’s too easy to re-tweet a tweet someone else has posted, hit like on someone’s Facebook status, or click thumbs up on a stumbled page.  Don’t put your content out there like that!

Besides, someone might think you’re tooting your own horn.  And that could be the end of the world, right?

Now you’re ready!

With these tips you’re well on your way to keeping your content in prision on your own website where it will stay, happily alone and unshared.  Success!

P.S.  If you actually WANT people to share your content just click the links inside each of these backwards tips to find out how to implement the opposite and encourage your readers to share.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 24th, 2011 at 10:30 pm and is filed under Internet Marketing, Marketing Essentials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.