If you are involved in any type of internet marketing, there is little chance you haven’t heard the hype about social media. From Digg to Reddit to Stumbleupon and twitter, everyone is touting these sites as the next great frontier in marketing yourself or your company online. The lure is the ability to reach great numbers of people, sometimes hundreds of thousands, not to mention that many stories that see social media popularity also attract mainstream media attention. Sounds pretty awesome right? Well, here’s the catch, the traffic is about as transient and hard to monetize as it gets. Converting with Adsense, affiliate programs, ore even getting RSS subscribers is incredibly inefficient. The problem is that the visitors from social media sites are among the most savvy users on the Internet. Large percentages of them use ad blocking, never click Adsense ads, or have developed ad blindness.
In my early days of social media marketing I had a very successful Digg story that generated 100,000 plus unique visitors over about a week. Naively I put some Adsense on the page thinking I was about to hit the jackpot. My grand total was $75.00…. 75 dollars for 100,000+ visitors is pathetic.
So if social media is nearly impossible to directly monetize, what is its value you ask? The value of social media stems from the same reason it is so difficult to monetize directly. The audience. The techies, bloggers, and Internet savvy users that make up these sites are the same people write blogs, post in forums, and generally spread information across the Internet. They are the leaders of thought, the influencers, and most importantly the people who can generate LINKS. As most of you know, links are the most important and influential factor in determining how well your site ranks in the search engines. The more links, the better your rankings, and the more targeted the anchor text of those links, the better your rankings.
Summed up: Great Content + Social Media = Lots of Links = Better Rankings = More Targeted Traffic = More Conversions = More Money.
Most internet marketers taking advantage of social media sites today write an article, submit it, and hope that people like the article enough to link back to it. The only incentive for linking is the persons desire to share the information gained through your content. This can work, but the linking quickly dies as the stories popularity diminishes on social media sites. There is nothing to keep it going.
Now, i’m going to clue you in to a secret most social media marketers have yet to learn. One that can lead to 10 or 100 times the number of links generated by a good article or content piece. Social media sites like Digg, Reddit,or Stumbleupon are just launching platforms, for beginning your own massive viral loop. A viral loop is generated when you create something that is self promoting where each user that adopts it, then passes it on to more than one person. This is done through the creation of the viral widget, quiz, or tool. By creating a viral widget, quiz or tool, each person who adds your widget, badge from your quiz, or adopts your tool, becomes one of your advertisers. One of the best examples of an Internet marketer taking advantage the viral loop effect to generate links is Matt Inman, who managed to rank his 6 month old site for keywords such as “online dating”, “free dating”, and many other super competitive terms using this method. Matt’s strategy was to create quizzes that present the user with a badge at the end giving them a score. Users then proudly display the badges on their blogs, or in forums, perpetuating the viral loop.
The key here is that each of the badges, also has embedded links, and these links have whatever anchor text Matt desired. Here are some examples of his quizzes http://www.oneplusyou.com/q Get the idea? You can create a self perpetuating viral loop that creates links with whatever anchor text you desire. With this method, ranking for even competitive terms becomes exceedingly easy.
Pick a niche, develop a relevant quiz or widget for it, promote the quiz on social media sites, watch it take off and the links start pouring in, watch your rankings increase, and then MONETIZE.
One word of caution, be careful and don’t get greedy. Try to create relevant quizzes to what you are promoting. Matt Inman got a pretty severe penalty from Google when he started using his already popular quizzes to start generating links for several different off topic, spam sector sites at once (payday loans,cash advance etc) Also, make sure you disclose to users that when they add the quiz badge, they are also adding your link.
Anyway, hope you all enjoyed this guest post, I’ve had some great success with this method of link building using social media sites, and I have no doubt many of you will as well. I wanted also to let everyone know about a new project I have going. It’s in beta right now, and I’m offering it free for the time being to readers of a few select sites. It would be perfect for an affiliate looking to do what I talked about in this post. The program can be found at amoremoney.com. It’s an adult toys affiliate program, but it is rather unique. We give you your own domain, several thousand pre-loaded products, a full featured back-end system, that lets you customize the site, analytics, a built in blog, and a lot of other great features. I’m going to be bumping up the price to around $800 soon to join the program, but I wanted to give some of my favorite blogs readers a first come, first serve opportunity. I have about 10 of these sites available. If you are interested please apply at Amoremoney.com. Oh, and I forgot the best part, 30% commissions on every sale. Seriously, you won’t find anything out there of this caliber for free. Thanks Everyone!
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Also essential is the content. Just as TV and video are redoing their marketing so as to embed the product and brand in interesting content (Sex and the City and product placement anyone?), creating worthwhile content online is how you publicise your subject now. The better the content (and the more dedicated the original distribution), the more links, the more attention, the more awareness, the more money…
That is a neat idea indeed. Worth giving a try.
Hey man im still interested in that Guitar Hero Picture if you still want to take one. I just made a post asking people for pics today. Let me know.
looks promising.. but i’ll work on my “splogs” first then work my ass on this concept..i’m interested on that adult thing..
It is a great way to get links, worth a try sometime. It runs a lot like myspace sites…
I agree, that links are the biggest long term benefits from the social networking crowd. But they are quite monetize-able as well. They have needs, just like anyone else. The key phrase to remember is RELEVANCE. You can’t just say I’m going to target StumbleUpon users for selling my blue widgets. You need to target StumbleUpon users that are desperate for a blue widgets. That’s what works.
I love this.
“Summed up: Great Content + Social Media = Lots of Links = Better Rankings = More Targeted Traffic = More Conversions = More Money.”
Will be using it if you dont mind to explain to clients.
This is my first time here and I like your style.