Think I’m joking with that title? Well, I’m not! What I’m about to type out here is powerful stuff for Internet Marketing. It’s the “Big Juice” as my partner Chrissy says. And… it’s downplayed and/or dismissed by almost everybody out there. Can you believe that? Yet, it really works, and I’m providing personal proof just for you. But seriously, don’t tell anyone else about it, let’s keep it all to ourselves for as long as possible.

Alright, with the fun build-up of suspense out of the way, here’s the deal. Almost every day I hear or read some online marketer complaining over the useless, non-converting nature of social traffic and I’m really exhausted from constantly trying to show them that they’re absolutely wrong about social traffic.

They’re wrong about its nature, and more importantly, they’re wrong in their approaches to capitalizing on it… which leads to unresponsive in-fluxes of social traffic for them, and in turn to their wrong opinions on the traffic in general.

So, instead of continuing to try clarifying all this on forums and in discussions over and over, I’m just going to post it here once and for all and then let those who “don’t get it” continue running into their own brick walls.

Social traffic is not ANY specific demographic of people. That’s the first thing you have to understand. No matter what site you’re talking about, from MySpace to Digg there’s a vast dynamic of user demographics online using the services.

Why is understanding that so important? Because if you have your head set that you’re marketing to only 1 type of persons you’re going to slant your efforts towards them, and then it becomes a self-fulfilling non-reactive campaign effort. In other words, if you believe your social marketing efforts will only be seen by non-converting teens, you’re bound to slant your efforts to attract non-converting teens… see what I mean? The results will be you get a ton of non-converting teen traffic–but it’s because you targeted that.

But the truth is there are folks from all walks of life on all of these huge social networks, and if you target the right audience for your products or services you can do very well.

I said I was going to provide proof of this, and I meant it. I have a web site (yes, I have many, but I’m talking about a specific one here) that isn’t anything special. It isn’t one of my niche mini-sites, and it isn’t targeted to young people by any means.

It is an affiliate store site, where the entire catalog is taken directly from affiliate datafeeds and the products are aimed at adults, primarily women between the ages of 25 and 40.

I’ve had this site for several years and it always gets a nice bump in the fall. Halloween is actually the best period for this particular site.

This year, just before the Halloween rush the site took a giant hit from Google. Of its 5,000+ pages all but about a dozen fell from the index. I went from 200+ daily visitors in August to under 10 each of the first 4 days in September. All of that organic search traffic instantly gone… a major catastrophe.

We hadn’t budgeted for any marketing for this site, there hadn’t been any warnings to concern us that the seasonal sales would dip. So, I met with Chrissy to discuss the sudden drop on September 5th, and we talked about various things we could do.

In the end we decided to see if we could salvage some seasonal sales through straight social marketing. We quickly put together some videos and other content which we distributed across various publishing platforms, then went to work promoting that content across various social networks. Nothing black-hat or spammy, just straight forward quality content being submitted and shared on community networking sites.

Here is an image displaying the results, you’ll notice that September turned around slowly for us as it took a little time to create our content and get the ball rolling, but October turned out great (better than last year in fact) and then the Christmas shopping season slowed down but still went fairly well for us:

In that image, the numbers for each month show total checkouts (not the number of items sold, but the number of completed checkouts made–some checkouts could be for a single item while others could be for 50 items), and total commissions earned.

We backed off the promotions after Halloween for several reasons. The main being time. This isn’t a priority site so we had to pay attention to others during the Christmas rush, but I do always look for the pre-Christmas bump this site provides with Halloween sales so there was a little panic attached to the instant drop from Google in September.

Slowly pages from the site have begun showing up in Google again, about half of them are in there now, but the point of this post isn’t to talk about my site. I just wanted to show how profitable a single social marketing campaign can be when done right to put to rest those silly rumors that social marketing and traffic doesn’t convert.

I think the biggest problem a lot of marketers have when they approach social marketing–forgetting the fact that they typically don’t fully comprehend the demographics of social networks–is that they approach it as a sales venue.

You really can’t enter a social community and lay out a sales pitch. Well, you can but you shouldn’t expect results from that. People don’t like it and are fast to ignore on community networks.

What you have to do is engage people with social marketing. Don’t tell them your product will do something, show them the results without the sales pitch. Leave them wanting more and guess what? They’ll seek you out craving the gratification that they’ve convinced themselves your product or service will provide.

You can show the results of anything using video, or even with text content. Don’t write cold, informative specs and sales pitches for social network traffic, write descriptive narrative (”show, don’t tell”, remember that from English/Grammar class?) that engages the reader. Let their own imagination do the selling for you. Then just be sure you’ve provided a clear path to the satisfaction/gratification they’re craving and stay out of the way.

I’ve typed out some of my own ideas on why a lot of marketers don’t seem to get it with social traffic. Maybe I’m completely wrong about that, but I honestly do think they just get in their own way trying too hard to “make the sale” when with social traffic it’s really about “making the connection”.

Don’t tell, show.
Don’t sell, engage.

If you plan your next social marketing effort around those two simple notions I’m willing to bet you’ll see a completely different outcome than you’ve ever had before.

If you don’t then just comment here about what a fool I am to continue wasting my time with all that social traffic that doesn’t convert.

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