I talk often about how social networks are a great source of quality traffic for my niche sites, and every time I do it seems someone is waiting in the wings to jump out and challenge my claims.

The most frequent opposition I hear is “that traffic is easy, but it’s garbage that won’t convert”.

Well, that’s absolutely true if you pull in the wrong people with your efforts, and unfortunately because it’s so easy to get an instant traffic bump of the wrong people and then assume all of the traffic from social networks will be equally poor this conclusion is prevalent among Internet marketers.

But here’s the deal, there are people of all ages and all walks of life on nearly every social network you can think of. From MySpace to Facebook, from YouTube to StumbleUpon… every demographic you can imagine is there.

How can having instant free access to virtually every known demographic be anything but good?

It’s not the traffic that’s bad, it’s the methods for targeting it and the content they target that traffic with that people get wrong.

Recently I’ve been following my online friend, Caroline Middlebrook’s free course on using StumbleUpon effectively that she calls Stumble Rush with a close eye because Caroline is someone who does very well with traffic from social networks.

She does well with it because she understands the networks and how they work, she understands the traffic and she doesn’t abuse either. She gives people what they want and in the way they want it served up.

If you doubt the effectiveness of social traffic, or you’re just starting to get your feet wet with social network marketing I’d suggest checking out Caroline’s free course. It’s focused on the StumbleUpon network, but much of what she’s included (that I’ve seen so far) can be applied across other networks too. In other words, once you understand the network and traffic at one place you’ll be able to see it properly in others too.

The free course is available at www.stumblerush.com, check it out, follow through with it and then come and tell me what you think of social traffic.

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Technorati Tags: social marketing, stumbleupon

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