Ok… so a few days ago I published a post poking fun at the dysfunctional nature of the Sphinn family. It was far from the most intellectual piece I’ve ever written. In fact, it’s probably one of the dumbest posts I’ve ever put my name to. So why publish it? Here’s the thing… I knew it was going to be a social media hit (particularly within Sphinn). The ranting nature combined with a touch of humour meant it was always likely to resonate with social media crowd, even a professional one such as Sphinn. It was a classic case of chasing eyeballs (ie. a traffic spike). Which ain’t such a bad thing every now and then…

You see, for the last few months I haven’t been chasing eyeballs. At all. In fact, I’ve spent most of my time sending eyeballs to fellow industry bloggers. During my guest blogging world tour, I have effectively donated traffic to my hosts. Almost all of my guest posts hit the front page Sphinn, which generally equates to at least a couple of hundred visitors. Combine that with a handful of Stumbles and I’d estimate most of my guest posts generated at least 500 pairs of eyeballs. Hell… I even helped Tad lift his subscriber count by 100 overnight.

And what did I get out of the whole exercise…? Not a hell of a lot. At least if you measure in terms of eyeballs… In each case I would have been lucky to generate one tenth the number of the eyeballs that my host received. But that’s cool. Because I wasn’t chasing eyeballs. I was chasing brains. Rather than targeting the generic social media user, I was targeting the readers of respected industry blogs (aka the brains). Quality over quantity. Because I suspected that they were far more likely to turn into loyal readers of my work.

And you know what? I was right. Even when traffic to my blog plateaued (due to reduced publishing frequency), my subscriber base continued to steadily grow… because I was targeting the right people… the brains.

But… losing traffic is never a good thing if you can avoid it. In particular, the social proof attached to my blog started to decline. Sure… people claim that that Alexa Rank, Compete Rank & Technorati Rank are a crock. But at the end of the day, if you’re not Darren Rowse or Seth Godin, people look for signals to judge the strength of your blog (and your authority). And one of the primary measures is your traffic rank. And as you can see… mine was nosediving.

So… I did what any normal online marketing blogger would do in this situation. I wrote some Sphinn bait. I got some eyeballs back. And I started to reinvigorate my traffic rankings and social proof. Because at the end of the day, it’s a fine balancing act. Getting yourself in front of the right audience is a great first step. But it doesn’t seal the deal. Just ask Miss South Carolina. There’s no point nailing the swimsuit competition if you botch up the judge’s question (if anyone can tell me what she’s trying to say I’d like to hear it by the way…).

So I went chasing some eyeballs. Because sometimes they come in handy too…

How many dead blogs do you think exist in the blogosphere today? Take a guess… A couple of million perhaps…? Try again. According to Technorati and PC Mag, in 2007 the number stood at 200 million! Yes, 200 million! Which means blogs are now officially abandoned more often than red headed step children. More research from Perseus on blogging abandonment behaviour found that 66% of blogs hadn’t been updated for two months. So why is it that the blogosphere represents a mass graveyard of unfulfilled intentions?

The low barrier of entry to the blogosphere is without question a key reason for the high abandonment rate. Anyone can create a free blog within minutes following the emergence of blogging platforms such as WordPress & Blogger. And I mean anyone… even Mr Mullet (I just love making fun of mullets!). As a result, there is very little consequence in the decision to abandon an unloved and unread blog. Easy come… easy go. Indeed, Steve Rubel even went as far to say that he trusted blogs created on paid platforms more because the author had shown a higher level of commitment to the medium.

The biggest reason for the abandonment behaviour however, dawned on me as I perused my blog stats for the year to date. And it was the amount of patience required to get a blog off the ground. Because despite what the ‘Make Money Online‘ and other get rich quick blogs may tell you, it’s not friggen easy to get people to read your blog!

The (very) gradual evolution of a blog readership

Mega successful blogs have two core ingredients that drive their continued growth (aside from great content):

1. A loyal base of devoted readers
2. Great search engine rankings

These two elements work together to drive the blog to greater heights. Loyal readers return, share and refer the blog to others. And search engines ensure a constant stream of new visitors discover the blog. The new blogger of course, has neither loyal readers nor rankings on his side. Both need to be built from the ground up by earning the trust of search engines and readers alike. And as you can see from the graph below, neither comes easily…

The graph illustrates the modest growth in both reader loyalty and search engine traffic over the 7 month lifespan of this blog. A few interesting points to note are:

• Search engines sent practically no traffic to my new blog in its first 3-4 months
• After 7 months, search engines still barely account for 10% of site traffic
• After 7 months, 80% of readers still don’t bother to return after their first visit

How many people have the determination and patience to work through the lean times? Evidently… not many… Naturally, each blog is unique and other newbies will undoubtedly have achieved drastically better results than what I’ve reported above (particularly if they post more regularly). But most wouldn’t. Which is why we’ve got 200 million quitters in the blogosphere.

Ironically, the emergence of social media has made it easier than ever for new bloggers to find an audience. StumbleUpon, Digg and Co. mean that with a little luck, good new authors can get the attention of hundreds/thousands of readers almost overnight. I had over a hundred visits to my blog on its second day thanks to StumbleUpon. Makes you respect the early blogging pioneers just that little bit more doesn’t it. Because there weren’t any short cuts in the early days…

Just a lot of patience and earned trust!

Have we just seen the first truly successful money.co.uk/Ralph Hardy copycat case of deceitful linkbaiting? Quite possibly. If you follow web based news sources it’s likely you came across the ‘bigfoot discovery’ last week. A press release was published on searchingforbigfoot.com claiming that a bigfoot corpse had been discovered by two hikers in the woods of Georgia. The ensuing media circus was almost as predictable as the results of the DNA tests, which confirmed the story was a hoax. However, this didn’t stop reports of the discovery reaching respected news sources around the globe including Reuters, The Age and The New York Times. Once again… the web had been used to spread deliberately falsified news for commercial gain.

Undoubtedly, the stunt was a deliberate attempt to deceive the public and generate publicity. A range of tactics were employed to make the press release appear as genuine as a bigfoot discovery can be:

1. A range of ‘facts’ were presented about the corpse including height, weight & gender
2. Readers were advised that a DNA test would be completed shortly, creating an impression that valid scientific evidence would verify the discovery.
3. A photo of the corpse was included, although how anyone ever believed that photo was genuine I will never know.

While I find it hard to believe that many people actually bought the story, it didn’t stop the press release from gaining global attention. Naturally, Digg was a key catalyst in providing the story the mainstream attention it needed to take off. Three bigfoot related stories hit the front page of Digg in three days, with the most popular attracting over 1,500 votes (and the other two generating almost a thousand votes). As awareness of the story snowballed online, mainstream newspapers began to run the story, sending even more links and traffic to the bigfoot site.

The overall effect of the media circus was a massive traffic spike for the bigfoot site.

Alexa stats reveal just how much of an impact the hoax created:

• Prior to the stunt the site failed to rank within the top half million globally
• The traffic volume from the subsequent spike in interest catapulted the site into the top 1,100 sites on the web

There is no question that the hoax was an outrageously successful marketing stunt, just as the money.co.uk story was. The sheer scale of the traffic spike is proof of that. Unfortunately, we’ll never know whether that traffic translated into merchandise sales, which was clearly the objective of the whole saga (although a public admission is about as likely as actually finding bigfoot himself).

However, the benefits of a marketing campaign based on public deceit are extremely short term in nature. Where do the bigfoot hunters go from here? They have now been labeled as frauds with the DNA samples matching an opossum. Will anyone take notice of their next press release? Not bloody likely (aside from the inner circle of bigfoot fanatics). If it’s possible to have any credibility as a bigfoot hunter, they’ve lost it. One things for sure, no mainstream newspaper is ever likely to print a story linked to them again. They got their 15 minutes in the spotlight… but the light is very unlikely to shine on them ever again.

The popular nature of sensational stories on mainstream social media means that savvy web marketers can game the medium for commercial gain. Yet to me, fabricating outrageous stories for the sake of short term traffic is not real marketing. Real marketing is about understanding your audience and giving them something that they want. Hoaxes are designed to deceive the audience into believing something that’s untrue. False advertising is not good marketing. Ultimately, a deliberate deception is never likely to go down well with your audience. Just ask Milli Vanilli…

Howdy folks. Just a quick note to say I’m guest posting on my buddy Dave Harry’s blog today – Huomah. Dave is an SEO and social media guru and one of the more amusing, friendly and interesting bloggers I’ve met in my travels. If you haven’t checked his blog out I’d highly recommend it. My post, entitled ‘Do you have blog insurance‘ addresses the dangers of relying too heavily on social media as a traffic generation strategy. The post was inspired by Dave’s personal misfortune after he broke his hand and was unable to type/blog for weeks… Yargh! What a nightmare.

Read the full story here

I’ve tried a lot of traffic generation tactics since creating this blog. Some, like StumbleUpon, have been instant hits. Others have generated dismal results. Commenting on other digital marketing blogs was initially a tactic I’d discarded to the ‘dismal’ category. It was time consuming and rarely brought in more than the tiniest trickle of traffic. In order to comment, I needed to read a range of articles and develop intelligent thoughts to add to the conversation (not bad things really when you think about it…). I found I was spending up to an hour of my time in order to contribute just 5 or so comments to the blogosphere. It was so much easier to just press the magical ‘Thumbs Up’ button… Talk about lazy! It was only a couple of months later that I realised my attitude sucked and that commenting was one of the productive activities a blogger can partake in…

This epiphany arose at around the same time I finally cottoned on to the fact that relationships within the blogosphere were actually really important (Duh!). I’d been observing behaviour within my favourite social media networks for a while and noticed that those who were generating awesome results had legions of followers & friends. Hmmm…. time to get me some virtual friends I thought to myself. But how to go about it…

I didn’t want to try to start the relationship building process by social media spamming other bloggers I respected. Bad first impression! I was pretty sure they’d receive tonnes of emails a day. So email was likely to get caught in the clutter (especially when it’s just a social media inbox). At that point a little light bulb flashed up in my ming – blog commenting. I knew I read and respond to every comment I receive, and most other serious bloggers do as well. What better way to introduce myself than to join their conversation and add some productive thoughts…?

So after initially writing blog commenting off as a futile exercise I returned once more. The important difference however was that this time round my primary objective had evolved (matured you might even say…). I was no longer concerned with the quantity of traffic it generated. Sure… it would be nice if a few people clicked through as a result of a comment I’d left, but relationship building was now the key objective. I needed to build my personal network and blog commenting was the best option available (considering my longstanding boycott of Twitter).

Fast forward a couple of months and in the words of Borat… it’s been a great success. I’ve established relationships with a range of recognised bloggers in the industry. Regular commenting has opened a dialogue that often extends beyond their blog into email, my blog and other social media networks (and probably Twitter if you’re that way inclined). We’re not the best of buddies… but they know who I am and they tend to support my work within social media via submissions and votes, which was the objective after all. And they also tend to become subscribers and semi-regular commenters on my own blog, which helps the perception and social proof associated with Online Marketing Banter.

Ironically, it was only once I stopped caring about the traffic that I realised its true value. Analysis of my traffic stats revealed that visitors coming from blogs on which I commented were far more engaged with my work. I’ve spoken previously about the trade off between quantity and quality in a publishing frequency context. But the issue is of real relevance in traffic generation as well. It’s easy to become addicted to the StumbleUpon traffic spike. And that certainly has its benefits… but quantity isn’t everything. Who do you really want reading your blog… drive-by browsers or loyal subscribers? The figures below indicate that people coming from blogs I comment on are far more likely to convert into subscribers:

StumbleUpon visitor engagement

A little underwhelming you might say… StumbleUpon visitors stay for 13 seconds and almost 92% leave without visiting another page. This may well say something about my (in)ability to hook new readers with a punchy headline and opening paragraph. Food for thought… Now let’s look at the stats from three blogs I comment on regularly.

Visitor engagement from blogs I regularly comment on

Now that’s more like it! Visitors are viewing more pages & hanging around far longer. Which isn’t surprising I suppose. They’ve already had a sneak preview of my thoughts and decided to come looking for more. The three blogs listed above bring in about one tenth the traffic of StumbleUpon. But I’d be willing to bet a steak dinner that I’ve generated more subscribers from them than from StumbleUpon.

So what matters to you?

If you’re like me when I first starting blogging you may have already written blog commenting off based on the numbers (or lack thereof). But quantity isn’t everything. It’s important to remember what’s important in the long term… Drive-by visitors aren’t. A solid network of online friends and a loyal base of readers/subscribers are important. Start talking to your fellow bloggers today…

April has been a tough month. Aside from falling ill, I’ve also been busy keeping my personal life in order. As a result, my ability to blog regularly has been affected. Just three posts in 20+ days in April is evidence of that… hardly the quantity of work likely to maintain an engaged audience in a hyper crowded market. My struggle got me thinking about the issue of quantity vs quality, and whether it’s ok to publish a few crappy posts when you’re starved for time…?

The question made me think back to earlier this year. Shortly before I began my blogging adventures, I consulted with a number of friends who were already actively blogging. Frequency was one of the issues I addressed with each of them. How often should I blog? Naturally, there’s no right answer to this question; it will differ for everyone. But I was pretty sure that I heard a wrong answer…

“James… you need to post all the time. It doesn’t matter if some of your posts aren’t good. Only 1 in 3 needs to be quality. For every great post you can submit two lower quality posts”.

Hmmm… that didn’t sit too well with me. To me, each post is a product. It is a product we want others to consume, and if we’re lucky… share with their friends & colleagues. We’re not asking people to pay a monetary price for our product. But we are asking them to give us their time. And with millions of blogs competing for readers’ attention, time may indeed be a resource more scarce than money.

How many businesses would be happy with a production line with a 33% hit rate? Not many. In fact, most would be out of business. How many customers would continue to consume a product that sucked 67% of the time…? Why should blogging be any different? Readers are our customers… if we give them crap can we really expect them to be loyal?

It’s not about quantity – It’s about expectations

Ultimately, it’s my suspicion that reader loyalty is driven by expectations:

1. Expectations of frequency – Readers don’t hold you accountable to an agreed number of posts each week. But they do form expectations after learning your blogging habits (aka frequency). For instance, my readers wouldn’t think twice if I failed to post for two days (nor would they probably care…). But if Tech Crunch failed to post for two days people would wonder what the story was. It all comes down to the expectations you have set.
2. Expectations of quality – Readers don’t subscribe because you publish three articles a week. They subscribe because the content you provide is of a certain quality. They subscribe because you create value for them. What do you think is more likely to cause them unsubscribe – a temporary drop in publishing frequency or a consistent drop in quality of the content you provide?

In the end the proof is in the pudding. Traffic has certainly been down in April. And that’s makes sense… with less posts there is less material to read, and fewer social media visitors. But my subscriber count has remained rock solid. I might not be reaching as many new readers, but I am managing to retain my loyal followers. And I’d take one of them over 25 drive-by visitors in a second…

Guest blogging rules. No shit Sherlock… I hear you saying. There are literally tonnes of articles out there already promoting the benefits of guest blogging. Glen Allsopp and Skellie are just a few of the many to openly write about their guest blog love. Wayne Smallman is another interesting contributor to the topic, due to his coverage of both the positives and negatives of guest blogging (yes… there are negatives). Yet despite all the guest blogging banter, I am yet to come across a case that provides tangible results. So on that note… welcome to my personal guest blogging story (particularly useful for blogging newbie’s).

To set the scene, I’ll provide a background on the origins of my humble little blog. I started Online Marketing Banter in January 2008. So I am most definitely still a newbie. In January I kept myself busy simply attempting to lay the technical foundations. Yes… I am a technical noob! Content was relatively light and no real effort was made to promote it. Thus, it goes without saying that I had very few readers (apart from my mum and the evil Dr Jekyll). However, by February, I was confident I had my house in order and could begin laying the promotional seeds.

Guest blogging was something I’d read a little about, and seemed an obvious way to attract new readers. In late February I was lucky enough to land a guest post gig on SEO Scoop. The Scoop is a well respected SEO blog with over 2,400 subscribers and Dazzlin’ Donna was kind enough to accept my submission – SEO isn’t just for the big boys.

The results of that guest post are discussed below. In particular, I investigate the results in context to the benefits most guest blogging articles spruik.

Benefit 1 – Traffic

While a StumbleUpon like traffic explosion didn’t eventuate following the post, SEO Scoop has been the second highest referrer of external visits following the guest post. A slow but steady stream of traffic has seen over 100 visitors come directly from SEO Scoop. In fact, in the first half of April (more than a month after it was published) the article has continued to drive over 20 visitors to the blog. Nice! I certainly wasn’t expecting a continuous trickle 45+ days after the event.

More importantly however, the engagement of the SEO Scoop readers has surpassed traffic from all other channels:

Here’s the important points:

• SEO Scoop visitors read almost twice as many pages
• They spent up to 4 times as much time on the site.
• The bounce rate is almost half most other sources.

Wow! SEO Scoop readers proved to be even more engaged than Sphinn users, long considered my own personal target market/holy grail. Without being too sensationalistic, I think there’s justification in saying that my 100+ SEO Scoop readers were more valuable than the 2,000+ StumbleUpon visitors. Interestingly, Sphinn and StumbleUpon both also outperform search engine optimisation in terms of reader engagement, which brings into question the assumption that organic traffic is better than social media traffic. Needless to say, I’m already planning my next guest post on The Scoop…

Benefit 2 – Subscribers

Unfortunately, subscriber growth is a difficult metric to track. Given the slow and steady nature of the guest blogging traffic, it’s impossible to attribute any subscriber growth directly to the guest post. What I do know is that on the day the article was published, the subscriber count increased by two. However, given the high levels of engagement displayed from SEO Scoop readers, it is reasonable to assume that a proportion of the 100+ readers converted into subscribers.

Benefit 3 – New Readers

The lure of new readers is perhaps the most obvious benefit guest bloggers chase. New readers potentially mean new subscribers. Yet I was staggered to see the proportion of Scoop visitors that were new to my blog.

Holy crap! Just 8% were new visitors. Hmmm… does that mean the guest post was a failure? If I failed to attract new users, was it all a big waste of time? Hell no! Just look at the engagement stats for the Scoop visitors again. They visited more pages and spent more time on the site than any other visitors. If they hadn’t already subscribed (which was likely given my low subscriber count at the time), it’s likely they were at least considering it afterwards.

And here’s another way to look at it… It gave me verification that the promotional techniques I was using were hitting my target market. I would never have guessed so many Scoop readers had visited my blog. Woo ha!

Benefit 4 – Inbound Links

One of the key detriments of guest blogging is that inbound links point towards your hosts domain. Subsequently, link love boosts traffic and organic ranking for your host, not you. But, in my short stint of blogging I’ve learned that new bloggers don’t generate bucket loads of inbound links. Even my most popular articles have failed to generate more than a handful of inbound links (despite going hot in social media). If I had hosted the article on my own domain, I probably would have failed to attract more than a handful of links. And most of them would have probably been from unknown sources.

Instead, I achieved a single link from an authoritative site within my niche. Which would you prefer?

Benefit 5 – Exposure

I subscribe to Search Engine Watch’s email newsletter. It’s one of the few email newsletters I still maintain a subscription for. In particular, I find the daily search marketing news helpful to stay in touch with industry news (especially when I haven’t had time to check my RSS reader). So can you imagine my reaction when I saw my article listed in their news of the day…

Whoa momma! I liken it to the first time an artist hears their own song on the radio. It almost brought a tear to my eye. There is no way the article would have been picked up by SEW if I had published it on my blog. Quite simply, no one would ever had found it. And along with the SEW mention, the story also made the front page of Sphinn.

Talk about gold medal exposure for a new blogger…

Conclusion

It doesn’t take a genius to determine that I’m a guest blogging advocate after the SEO Scoop experience. But before you start creating your own master plans, take note of the following points:

• I succeeded because I gained a position on a high traffic, high authority blog. This isn’t necessarily easy to do. I was lucky that Dazzlin’ Donna opened SEO Scoop with a guest blog invitation. I was in the right place at the right time.
• I attracted high quality traffic and high levels of user engagement because my content was closely aligned to that of SEO Scoop.
• The selection of blogs to target is of critical importance. Selecting a blog outside of your niche, or with a small readership isn’t likely to help you in any way. Be selective of those blogs you target.

Keep these points at the top of your agenda and you’ll be on track for your own guest blogging success. Now… I’m off to write my next guest post for SEO Scoop. Stay tuned…

The war between good and evil continues. But in a significant development, Dr Jekyll has landed a major blow against the evil Mr Hyde. It seems the world was quite amused with my case of schizophrenia. And the social media community in particular rallied behind Dr Jekyll’s cause. The end result was a traffic spike that sent Dr Jekyll into orgasmic overload…

Whoa momma! Dr Jekyll hadn’t been this aroused since he first saw Basic Instinct as a horny teenager…

“Keep it in you pants!” snapped Mr Hyde. “It means nothing if your subscriber count remains stagnant”.

But much to Mr Hyde’s dismay, the subscriber count also produced a nice little spike:

“They’ll leave you…  just like your girlfriend will… because you’re a loser!” cries Mr Hyde desperately.

“Just wait until they read the next piece of drivel you produce…”

But for now Mr Hyde’s insults are water off a duck’s back. Buoyed by the traffic spike, subscriber spike & social media love from some of his favourite bloggers, Dr Jekyll feels untouchable.

Mark this one down as a win for the good guys…

Hey folks, just a quick note to let you know that I am guest posting on SEO Scoop today. My guest post investigates how one webmaster took his blog to the top 10 results of Google in just 4 months. What’s more amazing is that he competes in one of the most web’s competitive industries – SEO. Check out how he did it at SEO Scoop.

The article has been featured in Search Engine Watch‘s top search news for today (links are listed at the bottom of the page). It also went hot and made the front page of Sphinn, my fav internet marketing social community.

If you read my blog regularly enough, you’ll know I enjoy using social media. I owe a hell of a lot to it. In fact, I’d probably still be waiting for my first visitor if it weren’t for StumbleUpon & Sphinn. However… lately I have been pondering its applicability as a legitimate corporate marketing tactic. Sure, social media works beautifully in driving traffic to tech and marketing blogs, but can it really stand up as a genuine tactic in the marketing mix…?

It seems I’m not the only one considering the issue. Dave Harry wrote an excellent post a few days ago questioning the value of social media as a professional (and chargeable) service. He’s gathering feedback from some of the web’s most influential social marketing gurus to help understand measurement metrics used and the ROI of social media. Undoubtedly, their input will carry far more weight than mine, but I thought I’d chime in to the discussion nonetheless. After all, social media is the only medium I’ve utilised to drive my blog. So I think I can contribute a nice little case study.

So… let’s get down and dirty. While I’m not a web analytics guru, here’s what I consider important in measuring the value of the social media traffic I have generated:

• Engagement – How long are visitors spending on my web site? Are they going on to read other pages?
• Loyalty – Do the visitors return to my site after initially finding me via social media?
• Inbound links – Was the content considered valuable enough to draw links from other bloggers?
• Conversion – Do visitors subscribe to my blog? Not a perfect or typical measure of conversion as Dave points out (blogs aren’t structured with subscription as a primary action). But we have little else in terms of a transaction. So it will have to do.

Let’s have a look at the stats:

Engagement

Length of visit:

Page Views:

Hmmm…. it seems the social media folk are a fickle bunch. Wham, bam and thank you maam… online versions of the two minute man. Actually, most would be happy with two minutes. Three quarters of visitors don’t stay longer than a minute. Perhaps they need some of that nasal spray stuff…

But wait… I hear you ask. The page views are encouraging. Over 57% of visitors are going on to view a second or third page. Wrong! This is a strange StumbleUpon phenomenon I’ve never really been able to explain. It seems StumbleUpon users are particularly fond of the refresh button. A closer look at the navigational paths on a good traffic day reveals this trend. In the shot below I’ve analysed the traffic for one of the more popular posts ‘The importance of blogging frequency’.

Ho-hum… 39.91% of the 41.28% to ‘visit another page’ seem to have hit the refresh button. They actually haven’t gone anywhere. D’oh! I think it’s safe to say at this point that engagement isn’t a forte of my social media traffic.

This is hardly groundbreaking research. It’s fairly common knowledge that most social media consumers are drive-by readers. And I can hardly blame them. After all… that’s exactly the way I consume most social media aside from a handful of my favourite blogs. Pot meet kettle…

Loyalty

Number of times each unique visitor has viewed the blog:

Not good news here either I’m afraid. Almost 93% of visitors have failed to return. And three quarters of those stayed less than a minute. It’s a little sobering when you think of it like that…

Inbound Links

Ummm… do we have to discuss this…? Fine… it’s zero. Let’s never mention it again.

Conversion

At this point in time my humble little blog has 10 subscribers. Don’t snicker please… it is new after all ? You can laugh if this count is similar in July. My conversion rate looks something like this:

Unique visitors – 592
RSS Subscribers – 10
Conversion rate = 10 / 592 = 1.7%

Hmmm… are we on to something here…? A 1.7% conversion rate ain’t that bad right… particularly in the absence of a clear call-to-action. After all, most ecommerce sites convert at around 2-3%. Surely a little site optimisation could get me up to the standard conversion rate… That may well be true, but it all comes down to ROI.

I haven’t been tracking my hours, but I suspect I’ve invested well over 50 this year on the following tasks:

1. Setting up the WordPress platform
2. Organising a domain name and hosting
3. Writing and researching new articles
4. Reading other blogs and commenting on them
5. Contributing in Sphinn & StumbleUpon
6. Struggling through the various associated technical problems (and I mean really struggling!)

Now, I’m not a digital marketing consultant. So I don’t have an established hourly rate. But let’s just say for arguments sake that I charge $50 an hour (pretty damn cheap for an online marketer).

$50 x 50 hours = $2500
$2500 / 10 subscribers = $250 per acquisition

Ouch! I don’t know too many marketer’s who’d be happy with a cost per acquisition of $250. And if they did… they’d be out of business. Naturally, this equation will improve with the technical infrastructure now in place. I’d also like to think that participation in social media over time will bring economies of scale, whereby I work less for more traffic. But I’m a long way from that point…

So where does this leave social media?

By now it probably seems as if I’ve given up on social media. Nothing could be further from the truth. The reason is that I know it works in my niche. Social media delivers results (both traffic and authority) in the digital marketing industry if you are persistent enough to establish a real presence.

But…

That’s my personal decision. I’m not measuring ROI. All I’m investing is my own time… as valuable as it is. And I’m not in it for monetary gain.

Corporations are a different story. Social media participation is just a one more tactic in the overall marketing mix (albeit a tactic generating a lot of buzz). I tend to think my experiences are completely typical of anyone starting out with blogs and social media. How many marketeers will persist with it after those first 50 hours. Not many I would think… Why would they when they can set up a PPC or affiliate campaign that generates a similar conversion rate (if not better) and takes just a few hours to set up?

There’s also the question of how much traction social media can generate in industries with lower participation levels. We must remember that as digital marketers we are unique. Most people don’t Stumble and they don’t Digg… and they never will. How many people are going to vote for blue chip content addressing the latest developments in steel and iron ore? Not many… which is a shame because blue chip organisations are probably amongst the rare few with the budget to invest in social media.

In the end it will all comes down to reach. Can social media ever reach a saturation point when content voting and submission becomes a standard part of online behaviour for your average Joe? It’s only at this point that social media benefits will be transferable to a broad range of industries and truly become a genuine marketing tactic for the corporate world. I’m sceptical…

A final word

Aaron Wall wrote an interesting and provocative article on SEO Book this week comparing SEO with PPC. He chided most companies for focusing on short term tactics such as PPC at the expense of SEO, which delivers a true long term competitive advantage.

The same may be true for social media. Some corporations will undoubtedly make it work. Video in particular holds real potential. Those with the vision, dedication and customer focus have the potential to reap the long term benefits of traffic and authority. However, I suspect most will dabble, and write it off as a failure within months of inception…

For now I hold little hope for social media in the corporate marketing mix. But who knows what the future holds? After all, few would have predicted the rise and rise of corporate blogs at the turn of the millennium. Never say never…