SEO Crunch

StumbleUpon

By merit, I mean something that has value to your target audience and catches their attention long enough for them to actually read the text, view the images or watch and listen to the video content.

However, you will quickly find that mentions of your web site article or blog post will not make much money from the traffic that StumbleUpon and other social sites generate.

Why is it that you can generate huge traffic and little revenue from this seemingly great media of promotion?

The answer to the first part of this question is easy to answer. Social networks like StumbleUpon, Digg, Technorati and others hold huge latent traffic for content that appeals to their users. Write an article that appeals to the right audience on one of the social networking sites and lo and behold, you can see huge traffic spikes if somebody mentions your blog post on one of these behemoths!

And if traffic is your primary goal, this can become like a holy grail to your web site or blog! But, if monetary gain is at least one of your blogging objectives, then you likely will not find a pot of gold at the end of the social rainbow unfortunately.

I cannot say exactly why the traffic generated by social networking sites is unprofitable, but I can tell you from direct experience that, regardless whether your niche is home and garden, cars, nature or Webmaster and SEO content, you are likely to see very little direct revenue from the traffic spikes generated from mentions on the social network sites.

For whatever reasons, these users seem to ignore advertisements when they visit a web site. That might make a profit-oriented web publisher think twice about the value of these traffic sources, but experience has taught me otherwise; while direct revenue may be low, there is considerable benefit from these traffic sources!

When you are able to get the traffic spikes generated by mentioning your own blog post, or, more hopefully, from the mention of another StumbleUpon, Technorati or other social network user, you will watch your page views go up and your click through rates (CTR) go down!

I do not understand yet why, but I have observed this phenomenon over and over again across the portfolio of web sites I own and operate.

So, you might wonder; what is the benefit of traffic without users who will click on your Google Adsense, cost per action or other advertising banners or links?

The answer lies in the fact that building traffic and attention is paramount to the commercial success of any advertising-supported web site:

• Build traffic and you are bound to get attention
• Build attention and you are bound to get backlinks
• Build backlinks an you are on your way to higher search results
• Build higher search results and you are on your way to even higher traffic
• And traffic is the only way to make profits on your website or blog!

So, even though you likely will not see direct profits from the traffic your web site or blog garners from the social networks, they are critical to driving your success, even if indirectly.

Try this experiment:

• Write a unique, compelling article or blog post of about 1,000 words on your web site. If you can’t write something interesting and relevant, then don’t bother; just go to StumbleUpon and stumble mine please!
• Stumble, Digg or otherwise mention your post or article on any of the major social networks; better yet, use as many of them as possible. Ask your friends and contacts to add stumbles, digs, etc. to your article
• Watch the traffic to that web page multiply like rabbits!
• Now, as the traffic increases, be sure to also watch the CTR and other revenue details for that web page to monitor the results

You’ll be amazed by the traffic you can generate using this technique and, while the immediate revenue results may be less than stellar, your long term financial success rests upon building an audience and enormous, regular flow of traffic.

Social networking is certainly one technique you need to master if you want to make money on the Internet!