One of the easiest ways to promote your blog when starting out is social traffic – make a few friends on the social networks and you can easily start seeing hundreds of visitors a day if not more. The problem with social traffic… is that it’s not that great if you actually want to make money. Social visitors don’t tend to stay around for long and if they do, it’s pretty rare that they’ll buy something.

The ‘holy grail’ of social marketing is hitting the Digg frontpage – it guarantees you a truckload of exposure, with tens of thousands of visitors coming to your blog if you’re prepared. However, it’s quite likely that you’ll see none of them the next day.

My personal experience with Digg resulted in one of my other blog crashing multiple times as I was on shared hosting and someone decided to Digg a blog post of mine without me knowing – I lost all revenue I would have made that day. The blog crashing multiple times when on Digg probably did more bad than good.

As for retention, I did see some decent statistics – about fifty more subscribers than I had prior and comments on the post as well. However, as mentioned earlier – revenue made was nil.

Would I recommend social marketing? Yes. Despite my experience, I’ve recently followed up with more social marketing and you are putting your blog in front of eyeballs that had probably never heard of it before.

Make sure you’re prepared for the social traffic by installing plugins like WP-Cache and install a plugin like What Would Seth Godin too to increase conversion rates (visitors to subscribers). Remember that something like hitting the Digg frontpage increases your blog value as a whole, as traffic = exposure and you’ll likely get more advertisers interested after they’ve seen you hit the frontpage.

As for monetization – you could always try a CPM program (cost per mille / thousand impressions). Most CPM programs tend to range anywhere between $0.5 – $1+ per thousand impressions so although you will not get rich, you might just make enough to pay for next month’s hosting.

If your story does hit the frontpage it will likely rack up a lot of comments, especially on Digg – reply to as many as you possible to make sure that people know your blog is interactive; do not be rude even if you come across a few haters (as always exists on social networks).

Although it probably won’t make you money, going big on social networks is always an entertaining experience – especially if it’s your first time – and you should definitely try it out.

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