Hey gang -
Social traffic is a false idol? Pure heresy in the world of blogging. Thousands of bloggers have dedicated tens of thousands of blog posts to “how to get a rush of 20,000 visitors in three hours from Stumbleupon.”
From experience we can tell you it’s a great feeling to see hundreds (or thousands) of people hit your site over the course of a few minutes. In fact we used to gauge the success of a blog post by whether it attracted a lot of social traffic. There was only one problem. The social traffic never led to anything (like…money…for example).
Let’s put it this way. If social traffic were a food it would be cotton candy. Really sweet, but no substance whatsoever. If by hard work or good luck you happen to receive a big surge of traffic from Stumbleupon or Digg one day, you’ll find that it feels (tastes?) great, but it leaves you just as hungry as before it happened.
Why? Social visitors bounce off your site as quickly as they found it. They don’t click ads, they rarely subscribe to your blog, and they rarely link to you.
All Sales Begin With The “Pain” of the Prospect
Let’s think about social traffic from a marketer’s perspective. All transactions – all sales – begin with the same core emotion: the pain of the prospect. By pain, of course I mean some dissatisfaction or problem a person is facing in her life.
People will take action – as in pay for something or click an ad – when they believe it’s going to remove that pain. The pain coming from a problem or a question is the foundation of all business relationships. Your goal is to identify some “pain” in your target market and provide them with a solution. No pain? No sale.
If pain is the core element of a transaction, can you see why social websites don’t create profitable transactions? What is a person’s goal when they surf around a social website looking for interesting stories and funny videos?
Elimination of…boredom.
Trust me. If you want to make money online you can’t afford to cater your business to people whose primary goal is to kill time at their boring job.
For that reason you probably won’t see social websites or social traffic mentioned much on this blog. Social traffic does not play a meaningful role in the creation of a passive income.
So what does?
Search Traffic is the Solution
The key to passive income is a passive marketing system. You need an automated way to ask people to buy your product or services (or click your ads) all day, every day.
Friend, let me introduce you to the search engines. They’re the answer to the passive income problem.
The search engines have a lot of detractors, especially Google. People don’t like the fact that Google rules the web traffic universe – the fact that they have a lot more control over your business than you’ll ever be comfortable with. Heck, I spend as much time cursing the big G as I do praising them. But it doesn’t mean they’re not the answer.
If you want to make money online while you sip umbrella drinks in the Bahamas, you need Google. Accept it, deal with it, get over it. You need Google.
*I will say this: if you build your business right, the day will come that you don’t need Google as much anymore. But there’s no getting around the fact that you’ll need them to get started.
Search traffic (and especially traffic from Google) has two main characteristics that make it essential to your passive income:
Search traffic is mostly passive traffic. Yes, you have to do the work of achieving your rankings. Once you have them, you can maintain them pretty easily. Once you’re sitting near the top of the search listings the traffic is yours 24 hours per day, 7 days per week without much additional work on your part. Create a great resource (in the form of a high ranking web page) once, and it sends you money over and over again.
The core emotion of a searcher is pain – not in the literal sense but in the marketing sense. They have a problem or a question, and they’re looking for a solution. The very act of searching out a solution on Google is proof that a person is headed toward a transaction of some sort.
When your site’s primary traffic source is Google, you can expect a nice percentage of the visitors to give you money (whether that means clicking your ad or buying your product). It’s that simple. And it gets even better than that. When most of your traffic comes from Google, you have multiple ways to provide them with a profitable solution.
You can show them a Google ad, and when they click it you’ll be paid a commission. You can offer them a product developed by someone else and earn an affiliate commission, or you can put in a little extra work and develop a product of your own, which ends up being the most profitable method of all. The point is search visitors are much more likely to actually DO something than other types of visitors.
Yes, if you want passive income on the internet, the first key is having passive traffic. And best source of passive traffic is Google.
Now go build links.
- Mark
Tags: google, search traffic, social traffic
Social media traffic is absolutely a killer. Sure it is nice to see all his people come to your blog but it really is pointless. They are unlikely to become one your readers or subscribers. I would go for traffic coming from Google or commenting on other blogs.
I’ve never tried to build traffic through commenting – people seem to like it strikes me as awfully time consuming.
If you go popular on a social site and you don’t get links, it’s because you haven’t planned your content well enough.
Bloggers seem to think going popular is the goal. It is not. The goal is to go popular and then get links due to that popularity.
Your content must be attractive to BOTH social media AND the “linkerati”
I know of no other way to get several hundred links from a couple of hours work than social media.
Hi Rob -
I definitely agree with you about bloggers pursuing popularity without understanding that links should be the goal. I think a big part of that misunderstanding stems from the fact that none of their “blogging idols” say much about links – they draw a mysterious line that ties social traffic to RSS subscribers to income. That relationship doesn’t make sense to me.
I’m all for people writing great link bait. I don’t think it’s a skill I have. The closest I ever came to “linkbait” was when I wrote a post about how ridiculous I think twitter is – it got all kinds of links. Unfortunately, I didn’t do it on purpose and I don’t think I could replicate it if I tried.
The only steady success Court and I have had with using content to attract links is trying to produce content that consistently educates people and solves their problems.
Thanks for your input.
A lot of linkbait is nothing more than writing compelling or useful content. Content that educates or solves their problems falls into that same category, and it can be just as useful for linkbait as anything controversial.
It’s all about how you write it, and promote it.
You are right about the giant social traffic sites, they really do nothing but bounce off your sight and leave you with an excited, if empty feeling afterward.
However, I believe, though I have not proved, that very soon niche social media sites are going to become quite popular. As more and more spam keeps showing up on the SE’s people are probably going to turn to these niche sites like Sphinn for Internet Marketing and the new Globetrott for travel related info and others for quality user generated information.
The trick is though to keep the sites niche and small enough to manage, not let them get huge and all encompassing like Digg and others as that just leads to more spamming and gaming of the system.
Don’t get me wrong, Google is and always will play a huge part, but I really think we shouldn’t be neglecting the smaller social media sites in our niche. I believe they just might be the future. And at worst they will drive some actual quality social traffic your way.
Mark,
You’re obviously attacking something you don’t really understand. Yes, social traffic doesn’t usually convert into sales well.
However, you have to do something to get that social traffic and THAT is where the value is. As Rob says, a good performance on the social media sites will often garner hundreds of links and can result in a big boost in the SERPs.
Also, if the content that led to your social traffic is viral enough, believe it or not you don’t have to use Google… ever. Look at BlendTec blenders or Zappos shoes. They are making money and would still even if Google kicked them out of the index.
Now I’ll grant you that those are the exceptions, not the rule, but leveraging social media for your sites can compact several months worth of link building and marketing into a MUCH shorter time frame, not to mention build your reputation as an authority in your niche which also results in more inbound links.
By essentially recommending that people ignore social media for their sites, you’re missing out on the bigger picture and I think being somewhat short sighted. Just because you haven’t had success with it doesn’t mean it’s any less valuable.
Ben! You’re back. Great to hear from you man. I like the look of the new site.
This post sort of reads like linkbait.
I guess we’ll see.
What about utilizing internet marketing tools along with social sites to build quality links to your site?
There’s a tool called Bookmarking Demon which helps you quickly create multiple accounts per site across dozens of bookmarking sites, then another tool called RSS Bookmarker which slowly posts to your different accounts on all these sites.
It sounds awfully spammy to me and the combination of the two is a bit expensive, but I still find it tempting.
Multiple votes on multiple high PR social bookmarking sites seem like a nice way to build both quantity & quality in links (as long as they’re not nofollowed… I think RSS Bookmarker emphasizes sites which still distribute PageRank).
Would you consider using Social bookmarking sites in this way or would you still doubt the usefulness of backlinks from these sites? Would you stay clear of these methods and tools for “ethical” reasons?
The links built through tools like Bookmarking Demon do have some value, but not a lot. I haven’t actually heard of RSS Bookmarker. Anybody else?
Mark you hit the nail on the head with the customer pain metaphor. I have been thinking for quite a while about what the customer is really looking for and it is the alleviation of a pain. Perfect. If I can be the pain reliever I can make money.
I was wondering if you know of resource that is concerned with buying keywords as opposed to information keywords? I have heard people talk about the words others use when they are ready to buy and I was wondering about targeting those words.
Thanks for the help
Andy the best tool on the planet to test for buying-type keywords is Google Adwords. Set up an account and buy traffic from the keywords (you don’t have to buy a large amount). You can use analytics to find out if they convert.
I couldn’t agree more. I’ve done the stumble thing, received 10,000+ hits in a few minutes, had my website go down and as fun and exciting as it is, the chances of any of those bouncers moving around or clicking adverts or whatever you’re targetting, is minimal. Bounce rates shoot up to 90% and the only thing you’ve really gained is a few days of high ranks on a ranking website, which I guess can lead to new visitors and what not, but the effort you put into hitting the front page of stumble, reddit or digg is not worth it.
I suppose if you’ve got an extremely niche website with a clever landing page, bouncers might explore further, but the chances are incredibly slim.
I’d say rather use to the time to work on a keyword strategy and get that organic traffic flowing
Nice article Mark.
Thanks, Chris. I agree with you. When I’ve had social traffic surges all it ends up doing is skewing all my analytics data – uniques, page views, bounce rates, and especially conversions. Throws the whole thing off…
I see that a couple people are talking about quick submission tools, one which is extremely good, if you’re into this, is Social Marker. You create all your accounts and then you’re able to quick submit an article across all the bookmarking websites. Here’s the URL: http://www.socialmarker.com/
Great post, Mark. With my niche I could never even attract social media traffic anyway, so I didn’t even try.
And since I now get over 50% of visitors from search, it really is a nice passive marketing stream.
I’ve tried a ton of different techniques for getting traffic to my sites, and only 2 have been effective:
1. SEO and time/persistence, along with targeting good keywords.
2. Message boards.
I realize message boards may not work for every niche, but they were wonderful for me. It took a lot of time at first, but now I have so many posts all over various sites linking back to me that it’s a form of passive traffic as well.
Plus, those on message boards usually have a pain point they are trying to solve, making it another effective way to market yourself.
Message boards and forums make sense – if someone is perusing a message board looking for answers the pain is obviously there.
Having a niche site getting between 96%-97% of it’s 1300+ daily visitors from Search Engines (and 96%-97% of those are from Google) i now know that organic is really the only way…. my sales have shot up tons (partly because of the holiday, but i was doing way better back in october too, than i ever had before)….
Nice work, Breakaway. If you play your cards right you can turn 1300 uniques per day into a very solid income. Congrats.
Interesting. I have really been using Twitter a lot and getting a substantial amount of traffic from it just by broadcasting my posts but I never see any money coming in. I always thought it was due to poor ad placement or poor ad choices but maybe my problem is much more than that. Maybe my problem is that the majority of my traffic comes from Twitter and not from Google. The problem is that it’s a brand new website and Twitter is giving me instant traffic. Google is taking their sweet time indexing my pages and providing me traffic. Is there any way to get Google to index your pages faster thus giving you a higher rank? Or do I continue the long dragging process of link building by commenting on Arrested Development related posts and link swapping with TV entertainment blogs?
You’re right Matt – twitter traffic won’t click ads. And yes, you can get Google to index and rank your pages higher by adding more inbound links to your site.
We’ll talk about this on our consult tomorrow morning. Talk to you then.
Based on our data at HubSpot, I do not entirely agree with this article.
Our data shows that direct traffic from social networking sites (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, etc) does not convert as well as search traffic directly into sales.
However, social media plays an extremely critical role at the very top of the marketing funnel, producing strong traffic, as well as low committment signups.
However, we’ve taken great pains to present our social media traffic with the right offers. To get these offers, it requires very low committment level, like sharing their email address. Using this approach, we’ve generated an email list of almost 100k subscribes in <1 year.
These subscribers then feed a significant part of our more qualified leads, opportunities and sales funnel. But, again, we nurture them with more free offers like webinars, white papers, etc.
Over time, they subscribe to our blog and begin visiting our product page. Many self select into our sales process by requesting information about our product. Our sales team connects with many more and identifies problems, needs, pain and urgency.
Further, social media has a significant impact on our other marketing activities. It grows our blog subscribers. It increases our webinar attendance. And for SEO, it significantly increases the chances that another blogger will find us and link to us.
Social media, although not able to deliver direct traffic that immediately turns into sales, is a necessary part of a solid inbound internet marketing strategy.
Hey Peter-
Thanks for sharing your ideas and backing them with actual data from your own sites – very generous of you.
It’s hard to argue with Hubspot’s results.
Pete is right on. To build on his comment a bit, I think that one of the things to think about is what is the nurturing process and what is the right content to use to convert social traffic.
We have success converting “social” traffic into leads using a couple targeted techniques (two of which I will mention here).
First, we use our groups/friends on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to promote our free webinars. We actually get a lot of signups from that social traffic to our webinars. So, its not on the first social encounter, but if our activity in social media gets people to follow us, we then get conversions later when we send future messages. Just search around in Twitter for “hubspot webinar”.
Second, if you have the right content / offer for your social traffic, you can get better conversion rates. We built Twitter Grader as a free tool (http://Twitter.Grader.com) which gained a lot of traffic. To convert that traffic, we have two offers, one s to follow @grader and over 21,000 peope are now doing that. The second is to download our social media marketing kit, which is pretty targeted to that audience. For the people that have not become a lead, they get notifications through @grader on Twitter over time, some of which are for lead generating offers.
Great comment thread!
My earlier results with social traffic were similar to the point of the thread. However, I do see the merit in what Peter has to say, however it seems to be for a much more advance business model. Should I be planning the use of social traffic now because it will be harder to add ‘adhoc’ later or continuing to ignore it while I work through the bread and butter of starting my site?
Thanks,
BIll
You are definitely right about the stumble upon traffic. It gives me little to no money. I can honestly say after getting 3000 views I will not have one affilate sale. It kind of stinks but I guess that’s life with social marketing.
I still think that SEO is the way to go, but SMO helps you get up there.
Great comments Mark.
I agree that social media can certainly be used to great advantage for those that have the know how but it doesn’t do much for those struggling to get off the ground. It is true that you can gain several hundred links in a short time but the reality – in most cases – is that those links aren’t anchored for a useful search term. Most use the site owners name, url or post title in the link. In the end they gain serp ranking for those terms but not the keyword that would do them the most good as far as serp traffic goes.
Ironically, the same benefits subscribed to search traffic – niche authority, subscribers, attracting advertisers, branding etc can also apply to those of us who top the serp’s for our niches. Top social sites and top serp sites both attract the cream and tend to overlap at that level. I am a proponent of SEO over social media simply because it pays right from day one whereas it takes a longer time commitment to earn money through social strategies. However both do quite well once you achieve an authority status.
Mark/Court – is there a subscribe to comments button here that I just can’t find? Probably but I am getting old. Help? Lol
Just found a handy plugin that lets people to subscribe to comments whether they’ve left a comment or not. I love Wordpress…
Thanks for pointing it out Grizz, and thanks for your comments as always.
very cool plugin – what’s it called?
You can download it here:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/subscribe-to-comments/
Simple enough to install and configure (if I can do it…)
Thanks Mark – your a gent.
It’s entirely dependent on what you want to accomplish with your traffic if social media is worth the time. If you just want large numbers of visitors in order to impress potential advertisers it is great. But if you want people to actually read your blog, and become part of your community there’s not much of a point in it.
I agree that the best source for traffic is Google, but an important factor to get traffic from Google are links, lots of links and social web sites can give you incoming links besides the traffic.
Two great auto submissions to bookmarking sites are SocialMarker and Onlywire. They surely can build you a lot of backlinks in a short period of time. The big question is if google will value these links.
Take note that in using these auto submitters, you only type one description for all the submissions in your desire to shorten the amount of time spent for this task. Now this will eventually be detected by Google and slap your rankings. If a considerable frequency is detected, might even result in deindexing.
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