Social signals are a big part of SEO and establishing authority for a website, but it’s difficult for newbies to reap the benefits of them because the likes and +1′s are coming in at a trickle. A great way to kick start social activity on your site is to get some artificial social signals showing, in other words people are more likely to click Like if they see that you already have a few Likes as opposed to if you had none. Luckily there are many ways to bulk up your initial social numbers, some of which are free.

I recently stumbled across a social media exchange network called Reloader.me. The idea is very similar to Twiends- you can follow, like, and +1 other people’s pages to get credit, and then that credit can be used to get the same things for your own pages from other members (you decide the cost per click, not the provider). You can also just purchase credit and buy social interactions outright, but the appeal of this site is more for beginners who don’t have a big budget for this sort of thing.

The reason this is superior to service providers on places like Fiverr who offer a certain amount of likes/followers for money is that these appear much more natural and often people use their real profiles on Reloader.me instead of robots (it’s recommended that you make separate accounts to dish out likes/+1′s). It’s also a very fast and streamlined process, you don’t need to actually visit people’s pages individually because Reloader.me puts all the buttons on one page so you can just click away, like this:

Overall, Reloader.me is looking to be a promising method for beginners to jump start social activity on their site without spending any money.

Just remember, fake likes and followers won’t do you any good on their own- the idea is to use their perceived value to entice people to organically engage your site socially.