Tips For Making More Money With Social Media (Michael Gray)
Monetizing social media traffic is harder to monetize than most types of traffic. Only try to monetize it after you have a really solid grasp of how it works.
Don’t break the rules: Understand the written and unwritten rules of the community. Know the communities tolerance for sales promotions.
Create a knowledge resource. Create valuable content that is helpful and solves a problem. Offer free solutions (directly or through links). Up-sell to premium products or services.
Use social media to promote reviews. Compare similar products from different vendors. Works best with new or leading edge products. Keep reviews honest. Be in-depth but avoid TLDR posts.
Use social media to build membership. User blogs, twitter, email to create a group of loyal followers. Feed them information with the occasional sales pitches. Examples: Seth Godin (Tribes), David Allen (Getting Things Done).
Twitter: Deals with a sense of urgency.
What works? Information resources, reviews, problem solving, deals, time sensitive offers. Doesn’t? Direct product links, hard sell, mass goods, no informational value add.
Montezing Digg Traffic (a case study) Alexander Barbara.
New site, not typical Digg, Targeted Campaign, female health site.
Can you handle Digg traffic? Most sites can’t handle it…server admins might shut you down.
Choices: Redirect traffic to static page, Redirect page to Google cache, Redirect page to Coral Cache (a big slower than Google Cache but immediate).
WP “Super Cache” Plugin
Leveraging Other Resources: Flickr, Youtube, Amazons3.
Strategize: Direct (Targeted Offers, Adsense, CPM Ads). Indirect: Subscribers, Links, Branding.
Quality of Traffic Varies. Digg (Lower Quality Traffic). StumbleUpon , Twitter, Niche Sites: More Targeted.
What we learned: Understand your audiences. Choose wisely. Be prepared (for the traffic).
Vanessa Fox: How to lose a lot of money with social media.
How search impacts social media: When campaign starts, tend to get a big spike in traffic. Most folks do a search when they see some “interesting” information. When it shows up in the search results, you can get more positive mentions & impact anchor text.
Coke Zero case study…good ideas but failure in viral execution.
Case Study: Will It Blend. Well-executed search strategy, increased search volume for their terms.
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.