To start with, Grizzly wrote an excellent post (as always) on making money online with social traffic. In this post he explains something that I fear most entrepreneurs attempting to delve into the internet marketing world don't know, and that's that social media traffic doesn't covert as well as search engine traffic. This is essentially the missing link of the chain that prevents the monetizing blogger from becoming a proper internet marketer. Casual bloggers somehow believe that traffic from Digg, Stumbleupon, Facebook and other social media services is of a higher caliber than search engine traffic. In actual fact however, the reverse is true, and understanding this is the first step to turning a blog into a money making machine.
You see, whilst social media traffic may have a more 'personal connection' to it (which is of course of great importance for a well executed marketing campaign), it doesn't contain a great percentage of people that have problems that need solving here and now. People that browse social media sites are looking for random news articles, new blog posts within a certain category, and generally are more savy internet users than your average bear. They know about affiliate marketing schemes, and most of the time they're quite simply not interested in whatever product or service it is you have to offer them. Search engine traffic on the other hand consists of people who have a problem, here and now, that needs immediate solving. Someone typing into google 'how do I make money online' is obviously in need of a way to monetize his or her time on the internet and is more likely to sign-up to a product or service that you may be offering. Your average user from Digg on the other hand wouldn't be using Digg if they had a dire question that needed immediate answering, they'd be using Google instead.
So the first step to making money from social media is to understand the difference between social media traffic, and search engine traffic. Now it may seem that I've cast social media traffic into some dark corner like an ugly child and named it Worthless, however I want you to understand that you can make money from social media, and a lot of it, but the approach you take to monetize social media traffic must be different to the one you take with monetizing search engine traffic, as they're both two completely different crowds that require two completely different marketing strategies.
To begin with, social media traffic loves viral campaigns. If you can create a good piece of viral marketing, then forget about obtaining external links to your site for search engine optimization purposes, because you're going to receive a plethora of good quality backlinks from thousands of blogs that you wouldn't have otherwise been able to achieve by any means (be it blackhat or whitehat).
What about the lolcat phenomenon? Do a Google trends on lolcat and see that spike in traffic from 0 searches a month to 200k+ within the space of a few months of viral marketing. Suddenly the word lolcat becomes something you can monetize. How you might ask? Well lolcat sayz attempted to give it a go, but it's all in the marketing strategy, and if you can convert social media viral phenomena into something lucrative, then the potential is astronomical.
The thing is, as I explained in my previous post, you must connect with your target audience. It does you absolutely no good to design an Adwords landing page and submit it to Mister Wong and then say that Social Media sucks because nothing happens. Social media traffic wants to connect with something, and you must provide that to people that use those social sites if you want them to start emptying their pockets.
What about the Sensible marketing campaign from Spring Valley Juice? Simply genius. Want to know how to convert the most unlikely product you could incorporate into online marketing and make it a massive hit? Follow
So just how does a company safely connect with the social media crowd in a positive sense? This precise question was raised during the Mima Summit of October 2008, and I recommend you check out Valeria's post to understand the considerations a larger company must make before breaking into the social media field. One thing is for sure: those companies that establish an online presence with something unique, and of course display transparency, are going to have one hell of a powerful viral marketing campaign thanks purely to the social medium of the internet.
So to summarize, yes, social media isn't going to cut it for your average run of the mill traffic, and anyone that thinks this is only setting themselves up for failure in any online marketing campaign. If however you establish some brand and add an element of nostalgia, humour, or human connection of some form to it, then your hits and backlinks are going to be a lot higher than you anticipated thanks purely to your social audience linking to the source. This in turn will of course guaranatee you a higher SERP ranking and conversions will increase exponentially.
Social media will make you money through a successful viral marketing campaign, but don't rely on social media traffic alone as your income source. Think of social media traffic as your free advertising superstars, not as your consumers, and you will be geared towards success.
Good luck.
