One of the great myths that every idiot and his dog seems to repeat online is that social media traffic is worthless and not worth chasing.

Absolute rubbish.

The misapprehension is based on the false premise that the only way to measure the worth of social media traffic is to drive it to a page and see if you can get them to buy something, click on your ads or otherwise monetise them in an immediate fashion.

And if you measure it on that short sighted scale then it is absolutely going to be difficult to recoup your investment. Unfortunately it also means that you aren’t particularly imaginative with your website or marketing and possibly that you are also lazy.

You are not going to make immediate sales off a product from most social media traffic by driving folks to a sales pitch. You need to think of other ways to take advantage of the flood of real visitors that can be driven to your site. Here are a few things you should be thinking about.

Your Content – The following pieces of advance assume that your content is awesome. Don’t throw up any old rubbish and expect this to work for you. You need to be producing great stuff.

Email Signups – Stumbleupon traffic and, to a lesser extent, Twitter traffic will not usually get their wallets out to buy whatever it is you are selling. However, they sure as hell will sign up to your email list if you make your content good enough.

Warm them up with further good content a few more times by email so they get trained into expecting awesome stuff from you and then every now and then throw in a monetised offer.
They will buy from your list and they will buy repeatedly if you have done this properly.

Links - Digg traffic won’t sign up to your email list in big numbers, but they will link to your content from around the internet which is great for SEO. Are you encouraging them to do that? Do your graphical elements encourage hotlinking (with a backlink of course)? Have you made it easy to link to your post from forums and blogs by providing the code or tools that make it easy for linkers?

You can get lots of links here and you can get quality links, but your content has to be prepared in a way that makes it easy for people to do that for you.

Snowballing Social Traffic – The great thing about social traffic is that they are sharers and love sharing good stuff. This tends to snowball. If a few share it, then a bunch more a likely to if you can gain momentum with the traffic.

Your job is to encourage them and make it easy for them to take that step. Do you offer the tools that allow folks to share your content easily on the social networks? If you run a blog, there is a great little plugin called socialise which detects which social network a visitor came from and displays a unique message for them. For example, if somebody comes from StumbleUpon then it says something like, “Hey SU visitor. Hope you like the content! Feel free to give us a thumbs up!”

Make it easy to share your stuff and your traffic will increase. Then you start getting more share, more links and more signups. None of this is rocket science but it does require a little imagination and a good amount of hard work.

The best thing about the internet is that anyone can put up information. The worst thing about the internet is that anyone can put up information. Unfortunately, if you are into blogging, then there is a lot of rubbish information flying around that does more harm to aspiring bloggers than good. Let’s take a look at some fairly prominent ideas that are in the mainstream, but are complete and utter lies.

1) Write Consistently and People Will Come – I am sorry but it just doesn’t happen that way. Sure you might fluke a post that ranks number one for some golden keyword on Google or some random visitor might give you the occasional bit of StumbleUpon traffic, but chances are that this won’t happen. If you write a blog and you want traffic then you need to be prepared to go out and get it. There are plenty of blogs that have been updated consistently since the 90s that still get traffic in the tens rather than hundreds. You need to be writing with good SEO in mond and then promoting your posts by email, Twitter and other social sites. That is how people will find it!

2) Social Traffic is Useless - This is a big one I hear repeated ad nauseum by people who aren’t smart enough to figure out how to use social media traffic. Digg is incredible for bringing links, Stumbleupon is amazing for bringing page views and signups, Facebook is awesome for user engagement with your site and Twitter is superb for consistent traffic. The thing is you have to know how to use them properly. Plenty of big blogs that make a lot of money were built on the back of social traffic (Zen Habits, Copyblogger, John Chow, Cracked, Lifehacker etc etc)

3) Link Bait is Only Worthwhile Occasionally – If you are not considering ways to turn every post into a piece of link bait then you are losing out in so many ways. People love link bait. They never get sick of it. If every single post you write is done to the utmost of your ability then at the very least, more people will come back to your blog. You will get a steady collection of incoming links without trying. People will Tweet your posts. And occasionally something will hit the jackpot without you even trying. Every piece of content you write should be written like linkbait.

The blogging game wasn’t meant to be easy, but people who take the time to learn their craft will be rewarded.