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.

A lot of people just don’t seem to be able to figure out the whole social media thing. I hear a lot of folks tell me that they just cannot understand why their blog posts only get one Digg or why nobody retweets them. It seems to be a common problem. But there are often recurring issues with how they are going about it. Here are the ones that pop up most and should be rectified if you really want to get traction online via social networking sites.

1) You Don’t Have Any Friends – The first clue should be that “social media” has the word “social” in it. If you don’t have friends on Digg, then who is going to digg your stuff? If you don’t have friends on Twitter, then who is going to see your stuff to retweet it? On Twitter you need lots of friends. On Digg and Stumbleupon you need the right type of friends (more on that later).

2) You Are a Bad Friend – Do you just jump on Digg and submit every post you make? Is your Twitter account simply an auto-generated list of your latest blog posts? If so then you are probably a bad friend. You need to be actively HELPING other people with their stuff. You need to be actively Digging, thumbing and retweeting the stuff that your friends are submitting. That is what a friend does. Remember the “social” part of social media. I have a few friends who vote for every single thing I submit on Twitter, Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit and Propeller without fail. I love those guys and look after them in return.

3) You Are a Hermit – Hermits are not social. To be good at social media you need to be social (spotting a theme here yet?). A big tip here is to sign up with AIM, MSN and GTalk (Organise them all with Pidgin or Adium) and then list your IMs on your social media accounts. Most people who are good at social media are big IMers. Make it easy to contact you this way and you will start to make friends with other folks who are going the social media route and can offer (and need) help. Help each other out on IM.

4) You Don’t Have the Right Type of Friends – Are you retweeting, thumbing up or digging every single thing your friends are sending into the social media landscape but they never do the same thing for you? If that continues on longer than about a month, then drop them. It’s that simple. They don’t know how the game is played (ie. you help each other) and there are plenty of people out there who do and who want to be friends with others who know how to play. Your job is to find those people.

5) You Submit Rubbish – Content is KING. You just cannot get around that fact. The most popular social media user in the world cannot get crap to go popular. Be honest with yourself – is your content up to scratch? Is it the best it can be? Have you used great titles? Is it easily scannable? Have you used bullet points and lists? How about sub-headings? Is there an awesome graphical element to your posts or page? If not, then go back to the drawing board and get your content right.

None of this is particularly easy – in fact, if you’re doing it well then it’s probably a hell of a lot of hard work. Competition is tough, but it also makes you better at what you do in both producing content and promoting it. And that will mean that you beat out the competition.

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.

A lot of people seem to think that social media influence is gained in a vacuum. That it’s some geek trickery that can only be emulated by fat guys wearing tin foil hats. The truth about promoting link bait or any website is far less awful, but the first clue on how to gain traction on the social web is in the name itself.

Be social!

Now in an online context, that means making friends and there are a few ways to do that and organise it well. Here are the tools we use on a daily basis.

Pidgin – You are going to need a chat client to organise your IM accounts. We are on AIM, MSN and GTalk and they are essential parts of being social. Be available, help people and be friendly and they will be the same for you. It’s really that simple. If you’re on a mac, then Adium does the same thing.

Skype – In line with the above advice, Skype lets you do much the same, but with voice and video if that is required.

Twitter - A great way to get on people’s radar is by interacting with them. Say something useful and keep saying it, and people will start to take notice. Use it to help people and the good karma will come back around.

Gmail – You can use gmail to receive and send email from ALL of your email account. All in the one spot! It is so easy, and it’s free. If you don’t have an account, then get one and do away with logging into and out of all of your email accounts separately. Email is the primary means of communication any website promoter will use for larger projects, so make sure it’s easy to use!

Active Social Accounts – You don’t need to be a power user, but it is generally well advised to keep your social media accounts in good standing. It shows others that you are active in their world and are not some spammer who expects favours from others but won’t do your bit to help them out by having solid accounts yourself.

The social web isn’t rocket science, but it takes a bit of organisation. Having the above tools at your disposal makes it that little bit easier.

When you’re writing viral content there are a lot of things that can go wrong. Here are a few of the most common problems. While it isn’t an exhaustive list by any means, it will get you familiar with obvious errors to avoid.

1) Your Title Sucked – The title is going to be what pulls in interested readers from other sites. If it sucks then people are not going to click on it. It really is that simple.

What You Can Do About It – Use tried and tested headline formulas. These can be applied to any niche or content and have been successfully used before so you know they work. Use one of CopyBlogger’s free headline swipe files or head over to Jay Abrahams list of the greatest headlines ever written.

2) The Idea Was Simply Not up to Scratch – Sometimes ideas just don’t work on the social web. Now, usually they are ideas dreamed up by incompetent marketing department executives who feel that ideas centered around “buy my product” will somehow go viral, but sometimes ideas that seem great just don’t take with a crowd either.

What You Can Do About It – Research, research, research! Before you commit to an idea, go and see what other ideas have already worked in your niche. Head over to Digg and use the search function. Use tags in StumbleUpon to see what has got a lot of votes and likes. See what has worked on Reddit. When it comes to viral content, don’t reinvent the wheel – emulate the successful campaigns that came before you and put your own slant on them.

3) Your Network Are Amateurs – You can have the best content in the world, but unless you have a solid online network of contacts with powerful social media accounts or websites, then the chances of your piece going viral is minimal.

What You Can Do About It – The best advice here is to start developing your own network of contacts from those sites. Start using internet messenger and contact folks from Digg or Reddit who are already doing well. Don’t ask for anything from them yet, but offer them assistance with their own stuff (like the occasional Digg or stumble). Make friends. Alternatively, you can hire people with an existing network to find submitters for you.

Final Thoughts

There is a LOT to think about when you are doing a viral or link bait campaign. All of the pegs have to be lined up and everything has to go more or less perfectly. Hopefully you won’t commit these mistakes for your next campaign though.

We’re always keen to create more link bait campaigns, so feel free to contact us to get the ball rolling.

As you’re probably already aware, good online viral content writers spend an inordinate amount of time working on getting a good title for any article they write. The simple fact is that the vast majority of users are lost at the moment when they finish reading the title of a piece.

The importance of a compelling title is therefore paramount to a successful piece of link bait. So much so that some link bait writers charge clients hundreds of dollars per month for access to link bait title ideas only. Nothing else.

Why Most Link Bait Title Advice is Wrong

Now, if you’ve spent much time online reading about writing or websites then you have probably come across quite a bit of information on link bait which stresses the importance of a title and gives a few ideas like list posts or how to articles.

And a lot of it was probably ok information… 3 years ago.

The fact is that list posts and how to articles can still work well, but the problem is that everyone is using them now. The online space is saturated with good titles for articles (and of course a lot of bad ones). You’re going up against a lot of others using the exact same formulas and so your odds of hitting the jackpot have decreased a little.

How to Improve Traditional Link Bait Title Formulas

The good news is that with a little thought, you can spruce up any tradition link bait headline.

The secret is the concept of contrast.  In this case it refers to a contrast of ideas.

For example, a list post about defence computers might be, “7 Critical Defence Networks that Were Hacked” – it’s a typical type of link bait title and would have an ok chance of doing well online.

But let’s look at how we can improve it with contrast.

When we think of defence computing, we think high tech, intelligent people, educated bosses,  experienced employees, complex systems. It is the epitome of bleeding edge technology.

Now think of the opposite. Contrast these ideas and you could come up with a headline like this:

7 Critical Defence Networks That Were Hacked by Barely Literate Teenagers on Home PCs

You simply take contrasting ideas. Barely literate teenagers on home PCs are the obvious contrast to a educated, experienced and career minded employee on state of the art networks.

Practice thinking of contrasting ideas or opposites and you will have a simple way to improve your tired old link bait headlines. Most people don’t take the time to do this and so your link bait will be ahead of the curve.

Writing successfully for the internet is a huge challenge if you want to do it consistently well. When a piece of writing can be judged in very concrete terms such as the traffic and links it attracts then there is not much wriggle room for making excuses for bad results either.

The fact is that writing for the web is a lot different to many other mediums. Just as writing for a newspaper differs to writing for an academic journal, so too does writing successfully for the internet require a slightly different skill set from writing most other types of content.

People Don’t Read Online

For starters, people do not read on the internet. They skim. This has been backed up by several eye-tracking studies. People will read a magazine or newspaper, but they will skim content on a computer screen.

An online writer needs to adapt to this. It’s not too difficult mind you – simply by making paragraphs short and including subheadings and bullet-point lists, you can catch the eye of a skimmer to make sure they take in what you are writing about.

People Have Infinite Choice Online

People are restricted in which newspapers they can buy at their local store and which books are stocked at their local bookseller. That means that offline newspapers and books have more control over what their market has the option of buying.

This doesn’t happen online. With the internet, if a reader doesn’t get hooked within a few seconds then they are almost certainly going to look elsewhere or hit the back button. Online writers need to combat that.

Which brings us to another point:

Headline Writing is Much More Important Online

When you need to grab somebody’s attention in a few seconds, you need a great headline. This is not so important for other forms of writing (although it certainly doesn’t hurt), but online it is a necessity if you want to capture readers and links.

Online, even the best content can get lost in the crowd if the headline is not up to scratch.

Final Thoughts

While it’s easy enough to transition between the different types of writing for people who have had experience, it may not be so easy for people who have not had the benefit of that experience or have not shown an inclination to at least study the differences. Plenty of writers will tell you that they can do any type of writing. That’s simply very unlikely.

What this really comes down to is horses for courses. Hire a specialist. If you need a magazine article, then hire a magazine writer. If you need a sales letter, then hire a copywriter. And if you need online content for traffic and links then hire a link bait writer.

So after a slight hacking disaster towards the end of 2009, we lost our old blog and everything on it!

In a fit of grumpiness, we moved to a single HTML landing page format to display our services and guess what happened? Our weekly enquiries really dried up! We suppose you want to see our writing before you hire us!

It also means that for us, a blog is simply going to make more sense.

So welcome back to the blog! We will pick up where we left off in showing the world how to write for the internet and attract viral traffic.