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What’s the Secret to Monetizing Social Media?

Posted By Guest Blogger 20th of January 2012 Social Media 0 Comments

This guest post is by Neil Patel of KISSmetrics.

Have you been able to make money from social media? Has your effort and time on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and your own blog paid off?

If you’re like most bloggers, you probably realize it’s not so easy. However, no matter how difficult it seems, it’s not impossible.

Just like Darren Rowse of Problogger, there are people and companies out there who are turning a profit with social media. Let me introduce them to you and show you how they do it.

Step 1: Build brand awareness and traffic

I love what Gary Vaynerchuk says in this interview when asked, “How do you monetize social media?” His answer: the same way you monetize any other media.

Vaynerchuk says that from newspapers to magazines, to blogs and commercials, advertising has been the backbone of social media monetization. However, he points out that you shouldn’t even be thinking about monetization until you’ve built up traffic and brand awareness.

Fortunately, when it comes to traffic and sales, the news is good for you. In a study done earlier this year by HubSpot, they discovered that blogs with at least 51 posts see 53% more traffic than blogs with fewer than 50, but more than 20 posts.

Furthermore, you’ll see three times the traffic if your blog has over 100 posts. Two hundred or more posts? You’ll see almost 4.5 times the result.

What's the Secret to Monetizing Social Media?

So, your first step to monetizing your blog is to drive adequate traffic to it, which as the HubSpot report showed comes down to consistently producing good content, whether it is interviews, podcasts or useful copy on a daily basis.

Step 2: Build audience engagement

Social media is all about conversation. Companies who think that the conversation is one-sided and do nothing but pump out sales promotions tend to look at social media as a necessary evil. In addition, they don’t tend to be as profitable, which just re-enforces their bad attitudes about social media.

But running an effective social media campaign is all about creating engagement with your audience. If you don’t have that engagement, then trying to monetize it will not work.

One company who is doing social media right is PETCO. They have a really strong presence on the social web with their Facebook page and YouTube Channel. Both these channels generate a lot of comments and discussions.

PETCO is generating all of this engagement by asking their audience specific questions about their pets, their pets’ diets and other concerns pet owners might have. Why are they going through all this effort to engage their audience?

Well, as you get to know your audience, you can start to give them more of the content they care about. As you give them the content they want they become more engaged. And it’s a whole lot easier to promote a product to an audience that is engaged.

Step 3: Monetize with online advertising

Once you’ve built consistent traffic to social media sites and built up your brand and credibility through meaningful conversations, you can start thinking about making money with advertising.

The most basic form of advertising is simply to put ads on your website. According to the 2011 Technorati State of the Blogosphere, of the bloggers who put advertising on their blogs, 60% use self-serve tools, while 50% have affiliate advertising links on their site.

Want an example of what this looks like? This is the Problogger sidebar:
What's the Secret to Monetizing Social Media?

If you don’t like the idea of displaying an ad across your website or blog, you could offer an advertiser a page devoted to their product or service.

Still another way you could make money is to charge for a membership into a teaching series, club or software, like SEOMoz and Copyblogger do.

Or do it like Darren Rowse does and create information products that people buy, like his popular 31 Days to Build a Better Blog.

Of course these options only work if you have highly engaged, consistent traffic coming to your site, so don’t jump the gun. Get the traffic first, the trust second, and then sell your audience something.

Step 4: Monetize with applications

Another monetization, traffic-building trick is to offer apps.

Some people generate income through their social sites by building software apps to sell. But if you think about, providing free apps is a great way to drive traffic to your blog or Facebook page.

The best apps are those that have a purpose or solve a need. For example, ROI calculators and keyword research tools are popular apps that solve meaningful problems. People will come to your site to use them.

A lot of well-known companies use apps to interact with their loyal customers. For instance, through Gucci Connect loyal customers used their smart phones and tablets to see a Milan fashion show from the comfort of their homes. They could watch runway footage live and behind-the-scenes videos. Live chats were included through Facebook and Twitter. Throughout these experiences Gucci exposed its audience to offers, making money off of all that traffic.

Wordstream uses its AdWords Performance Grader application to drive traffic to their site and capture leads. This app promises a week’s worth of analysis in less than 60 seconds. The goal is to get you to come to their site, use the free tool and then consider buying their PPC management software.

You can also give away basic plans for applications to drive traffic and capture leads, like Survey Monkey and KISSinsights do. These limited plans drive traffic to their sites through social media, leading to future sales as they send promotions to these users.

So whether you give away the app to build traffic that can lead to sales from other products or sell the app itself, software applications offer you the opportunity to monetize your social media. Let’s look at another example.

Step 5: Offer special promotions

Some companies monetize social media traffic by tweeting deals to their audience. An operator of luxury hotels in California called Joie De Vivre  tweets exclusive deals every week to their Twitter. These followers only have a few hours to act on these deals. How well does Joie De Vivre do with this strategy? They typically books about 1,000 rooms that might remain vacant.

Even large companies like Virgin use social media effectively. For example, the fourth-highest sales day for Virgin America came when they tweeted, “$5 donated to KIPP Schools for every flight booked today.”

Offering special discounts is really easy to do. Here are some ideas:

  • Post on Twitter and Facebook that you’ve dropped the price on your ebook to 99 cents for the weekend.
  • Go on a guest posting spree teaching people how to use web analytics … offering half your consultations fee in your byline.
  • Build an email newsletter list that promises special discounts on the products that you sell to subscribers.

Can you think of any other ways to share special promotions via social media?

Step 6: Retain customers through social media

Finally, while social media is really easy to monetize once you’ve got the engaged audience, don’t forget that you should also use social media as a customer service tool. Just because you’ve closed the deal doesn’t mean your job selling is done.

See, it’s also about keeping all those people who are buying your products happy after the purchase. It’s about keeping them loyal … and you do that by retaining and increasing mind share of your brand through good customer service.

In fact, notice the top three interactions users want from social media are incentives, solutions to their product problems and to give their feedback on your business:
What's the Secret to Monetizing Social Media?

In other words, people expect you to use social media to answer customer service questions.  In fact, according to Debbie Hemley and Heidi Cohen, you can actually enhance your customer service through social media in 12 ways:

  1. give business a human face
  2. listen to what customers are saying
  3. proactively engage with prospects and customers
  4. provide additional product-related content
  5. answer product-related questions
  6. supply alternative contact channel
  7. give customers a channel to talk to each other
  8. share customer feedback
  9. celebrate your customers
  10. show customers behind the scenes
  11. make special offers
  12. create new purchase options

When you provide an excellent customer service experience through social media, you will continue to build traffic to those sites as people go from being prospects to customers to rabid fans. Monetizing your social media will only get easier.

Conclusion

In the end, you can make money from social media when you have an integrated strategy that includes building traffic to your site, developing your brand, choosing the right products and advertising channels, offering promotions and enhancing your customer service.

What methods and tools are you using to make money with social media?

Neil Patel is the co-founder of KISSmetrics and blogs at Quick Sprout.

About Guest Blogger
This post was written by a guest contributor. Please see their details in the post above.
Comments
  1. Seriously, this is another awesome post by Neil Patel. Way to go! :D

  2. Neil Patel always has it on point. He seems to put a lot of effort into his posts, making them eternally valuable.

    • I would have to disagree with the posting the “more” aspect of things. Its more ot less about the content of what you post, and your readers. It shouldn’t be about strictly monetization or statistic graphs, but more about the depth of your “unique” message, what you are saying, and the points that you make. I believe this makes readers come back more than ever…

  3. Hi Darren and Neil,
    I’m really stunned by the step 1 because I just turn the 51th post this monday and you know what ?
    I hitted 1000 visitors the same day and I’m over 1000 since then
    My search traffic increased as well ! I’ll remember that if I launch new blogs (and I certainly will).

    Thanks to the both of you for everything I learned !
    Alex

  4. This is great post and I think one of the things that the post generally speaks of, but doesn’t come out right and say is to be careful of where you place your advertising.

    Your primary means of monetization are website-centric (ads, product, membership, coaching, etc.). The external tools (fb, twitter, etc.) are generally used as support and engagement mechanism, not directly monetized. That is how I’ve approached them.

  5. What a great post! I think people’s constant demand for an ROI for social media makes them blind to its real potential. Monetizing social media isn’t about dollar signs, its about connecting with potential customers and establishing trust. Thanks for the tips.

  6. Again one of the awesome post. Thanks for sharing with us.

  7. Very informative post. I like the part where traffic comes on first place and relation with number of posts.
    Thanks for sharing this post with us.

  8. It is really essential to be able to get started on learning which streams and sources of income are actually able to provide that traffic to be able to use towards getting those people to be engaged. For me, I think getting people to show up first is essential and then trying to get them to be engaged. That has helped me some on the blogs in the past.

  9. I think the hardest bit is getting going! The first lot of visitors/ followers/ likes once you have a regular flow the steps become easier!

    Great post as per usual and a good read!

  10. I think Step 1 was pretty interesting of course everyone hears about having great content, it’s interesting that traffic rises with the increase in posts as well.

  11. “Get the traffic first, the trust second, and then sell your audience something.” That’s great advice I needed to hear…I tend to want to do everything at once!

  12. Planning is the key, think about your goals, and work backwards, and then plan what you need to do, and follow it every day. Work for the long term not just the quick buck, no matter how social media changes, your reputation will help you make more money, so don’t ruin it.

  13. thanks for your great job from turkey,I think getting people to show up first is essential and then trying to get them to be engaged. It shouldn’t be about strictly monetization or statistic graphs, but more about the depth of your “unique” message, what you are saying, and the points that you make.

  14. I think content is very important in building a name for yourself. Does step1 make that much of a difference? Anyone else experience a big surge in traffic once they added more articles?

  15. Great post! Thaks for sharing, Neil.

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