Blog Profits Adviser

There’s been a lot of discussion about the role that social media plays for business. As people are learning to use social media in new ways lead generation has become a hot topic that we’ve been wanting to address.

First, let’s just get this out in the open. Yes, it works. And it works well. What’s even better is that social media is cheap. There’s no real investment involved other than the time you spend to generate buzz and drive traffic to your links.

Don’t believe us? That’s fine. Consider the following mini case study. In the beginning of January we started promoting an IT related offer. The offer paid out $125.00 per sale.

Of course our company does a lot of PPC, but it’s becoming more expensive and overly competitive. We thought we’d put our new intern to work and see if he could pay for himself over thirty days. Being a Junkie in training he jumped at the challenge, thinking he would churn out a few PPC campaigns and call it day. WRONG!

Here was the deal. Our intern Jeff had thirty days to use only web 2.0 techniques to make more money than the total cost of his monthly salary (we told him we’d fire him if he didn’t but that was just a joke. Sorry Jeff).

So, Being a Millenial or whatever they call young people these days, he reached into his social media tool kit and went to work. Here’s what he did, and what you can do too to make extra money without having to spend more than a few dollars.

1) Get Hosting – We already had hosting but want to include this for anyone just getting into internet marketing. You really need to get yourself a hosting plan. We recommend Blue Host. Getting hosting will allow you to easily get up hosted blogs on your own domains with relative ease and is pretty much the first step in getting things going.

2) Pick up a domain name(s) – Once you have your hosting get a good name to put your blog up on. Try to get one with keywords related to the offer or product you are trying to sell. You can pick up domain names for around ten bucks on GoDaddy.

3) Get your blogs up – Blue Host will set it up for you for free if you’ve never set one up, but getting a wordpress blog up is pretty simple. Once it’s up Find a snazzy template you like and get some good content up about your offer.

4) Build a bunch of social media profiles – build them up and out. Use tweetdeck and search.twitter.com to target market to your users. The more targeted your marketing the better. If you’ve ever been on Twitter or Facebook and wondered how people get thousands upon thousands of followers see our article on how to build a massive social media following.

5) Promote your Offers – Start talking about it like it’s going out of style. If you’ve never heard of Link Bait, now would be a good to learn. Promote your blog content through your social media profiles. And remember, just because you don’t have a million followers doesn’t mean people aren’t seeing your links. A lot of social media tools pick up on keywords (see tweetdeck).

One final note on this. The more valuable your content, the better the response will be from people. Find some good how to articles, or top ten ways to do save money using the product your selling. It helps..

The Results?!

Our intern sourced over 3,407 unique hits (props to him!) to the landing page he created. Of those 3,407 he was able to get 679 to click through to the affiliate offer he was promoting (That’s a 20% click through!). When sourcing traffic through social media click through’s seem to be much higher, which is likely because users have more trust for what they see in their networks from peers.
Of the 679 views who clicked through to the offer 23 people made a purchase, a sales conversion of 3.2%.

Total Sales (23) X Commission/Sale ($125) = $2,875

It turns out not only did Jeff win the bet, he paid for his salary and made a profit (we let him keep the extra cash but made him buy us a round after work).

Think about that for a second. The total amount spent was about ten bucks. Ten dollars to make $2,875? Hello social media!

According to Jeff he did run a couple split tests on the call to action (as he should have!) but other than that the pages were virtually left alone.

The point is, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist or computer genius to make some cash online. We’re currently testing and tweaking this offer to see how much better we can get it to convert. We’ll post the results next month.

The Bottom Line:

Social Media is a powerful and relatively untapped lead generation tool. It’s very inexpensive, there are an abundant amount of resources available if your new to it, and it’s fun. While the rest of your friends are out there updating their status with sappy song lyrics, you can be out there making money.

Conversion Junkies is a performance based internet marketing firm with offices in Jacksonville and Miami, Florida. For more information visit them online at www.conversionjunkies.com