The Indirect Power of Social Traffic

Recently I discussed how you should match your monetization models to your traffic sources and in the comments to the post Leo, who runs his own Internet marketing blog, suggested that you cannot really generate income from social traffic. In this post I’ll explain where I believe the power in social traffic really lies.

Can You Make Money With Social Traffic?

Leo is not the only one who shares that opinion. There is a blogger called Grizzly who regularly makes over $100 a day purely in AdSense income solely from his MMO blog, and I’ll bet you’ve never heard of him! Why is that? Because he concentrates on one thing and one thing only – making money with AdSense. He doesn’t do the whole social media thing and regularly criticises the rest of us for chasing social traffic.

It’s from reading Grizzly’s blog for the last few months that I have learned more about SEO, the importance of backlinks and why I knew my AdSense experiment would not yield good results on this blog. The reason for that is that this blog is a social blog – I encourage subscriptions to my RSS feed and email lists, I encourage readers to comment and submit posts to social sites such as StumbleUpon. I tweet my posts, chat with other bloggers and do the whole social thing. My posts are geared towards readers and not towards Google and that is a massively critical element.

To make money with AdSense requires not just the optimisation of one post but of the whole site and if you’re building a social blog those two goals simply don’t mix. Sure you can still make money with AdSense but only pennies. However there are many people that want to build a social blog simply because they enjoy the social element and making money is a secondary factor. So, getting back to revenue, how can social traffic help you make money?

In my post I suggested that the best way to monetize social traffic was to give away free stuff as they are not at all receptive to ads or marketing hype. Of course, the free stuff has to be monetized in some way for that to work. However, that is a direct monetization strategy but if you look at what social media can do for you in general there is perhaps a stronger motivator at work.

Social Traffic Comes From People Who Like to Talk

Social traffic comes from social media websites and the whole point of social sites is that well, it’s social! This means that the users love to get together and discuss things, share things, comment on stuff, debate, and so on. Many bloggers due to their nature will be heavy social media users and so it follows that if you are active in the social media community around your niche you will find yourself connecting with other bloggers in your niche.

As a side effect of that, those other bloggers also tend to link as well as talk. A link with good anchor text from inside a blog post on a relevant topic can be very powerful, especially if the blog post it is coming from gains PR of it’s own over time. These can be some of the most powerful backlinks so in an indirect way, when other bloggers start linking to you it helps your blog build authority which in turn helps you get search engine traffic which gives you another monetization angle.

Relationships Are Key

In my earlier post I discussed three kinds of traffic – search engine, social and referral. I believe that referral traffic is the strongest for a blog or other website that is monetized with your own products because those products bring in the biggest revenue and the referral traffic often comes with an endorsement.

I have made about 95% of my revenue on this blog in one way or another due to the products I have developed – the WordPress ebook and 2 courses. Now here’s the interesting thing, the traffic which I have got by myself (search engines, my social media efforts etc) has not converted anywhere near as much as the traffic that other people have sent to me. All of my products have been heavily promoted by other people in the niche and this is when I have made the most money.

I talked recently about traffic strategies for a saturated niche and stated that I believe busy niches are good because there are lots of other people out there who you can work with rather than against and this is what I am talking about. Those other bloggers in your niche are not your competition – they can help you and when you are social and develop strong relationships with these people you start to get strong referral traffic that has a trust in you and your products.

Social Media Helps Build These Relationships

How do you develop relationships with other bloggers or website owners in your niche? Some people recommend just dropping an email and saying hi, or something to that effect. Personally I find that approach not to work. I know that when I get emails like that (I get a lot of them), I often simply don’t know what to say and just respond with a ‘thanks and hi’ or something to that effect and it goes nowhere.

Social media on the other hand can be a great entry point into the circle of influence of those other bloggers. When you begin to participate, join the discussion, contribute to the community and so on, other people get to know you and trust you and they start to see what kind of information you are sharing. Very often the social site itself provides a convenient medium for chatting (Twitter is superb for this) and so you can begin to build those relationships slowly without trying to force it unnaturally via email.

Coming Back to Revenue

So in case you’re missing the point here, whilst revenue streams such as AdSense may make good money from search engine traffic it’s not going to make you rich if you have a more traditional social blog. It’s much better suited to niche sites. If you want to blog about a topic you’re passionate about, and attract a large volume of readers and start getting lively conversations going on in your comments section then you’re into a whole different ball game which needs to be monetized differently.

You need to develop your own products to really make more than pennies. You don’t have to sell them (my WordPress ebook is free, to see how I made money with that read the posts in the ebook project) but you do need something. You also need to make sure that other people have a reason to recommend your stuff. Then you need to build relationships with other people in your niche and once the trust begins to form you will find yourself promoting each other’s stuff and the traffic that comes as a result will be far more receptive to your products.

Social traffic, or rather the social media sites that they come from can be the starting point for developing those relationships which will drive the more powerful referral traffic to your site and your products. So yes Leo it may be hard to monetize social traffic directly, but if social media is used correctly (and so many people do it wrong and abuse it!) then it can lead to good income in a more indirect way.

There is more I could say on this subject. If anybody is interested, I could write a follow up showing specific strategies that I would use in specific social media sites, or perhaps a more general guide to relationship building with social media the right way. Hmm, maybe I should write both of those!

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