About a month ago I went to a social media seminar put on by a local  company Web Marketing Therapy.

The seminar was great and Lorrie Thomas is an excellent speaker but after thinking about it for a minute I realized that what I listened to only scratched the surface.

Hype and buzz are definitely important when it comes to creating a brand persona and building a following. Being authentic and providing value is also important and I talk more about that in the last post 10 Ways of Making Social Media Work for You.

See, getting a bunch of friends and followers to your business is one thing but monetizing that traffic is another story.

Of course, each business is different and will have different monetization strategies and tactics but here is a list of ways your business might consider.

I would like to claim I thought of these but I didn’t. I got these ideas from the now unavailable Social Media Money System by Perry Belcher and Ryan Deiss. I highly recommend picking this course up if you can find it because it kicks ass on anything else I’ve found on social media.

Anyhow…back to why you’re reading this post in the first place. Five ways to monetize your social media traffic.

• Get people over to your email list. This may seem obvious but what may not be so obvious is how to do this. Here are a few techniques you can use:
  1. Send a message to your followers offering them an ethical bribe and ask them to send you an email  and you’ll send them one back on how to get the item you’re giving away. Now, don’t confuse this with the spammy type of messages you see on Twitter that say “Hi nice to meet you. Want a free ebook?” no. Here’s a couple of good examples I saw the other day.  A Facebook friend was offering free invites to Google Wave. All anyone had to do was just send him an email. Not via optin or squeeze page though. Another friend did the same thing with an important video on the new FTC laws.
  2. Blog post optins. This is something I used to do but somehow forgot. You can direct your followers to a blog post but instead of having the optin just positioned somewhere like the one next to my video on this blog put the optin form in the post.
  3. Twitter special offers. Make an exclusive offer to your Twitter followers for instance, offer to sell your $100 dollar product to them for $5 if they also agree to give $5 to a charity of your choice. Something along those lines. Remember, these are your followers so you have to really treat them well. If you’re concerned about giving your product away for such little money think of it like this. You are building a list your building trust with your list, you’re also getting distribution, and you prequalified the list as buyers.
• Another tactic you can use to monetize your social media network is with by pre selling customers on affiliate offers. Here’s how this works.Say you find a great product you think your followers would benefit from but may not be aware of or need some education on the subject to alert them to why they might be interested in such a product. So, what you do is create a short, sweet educational video explaining the overall concept.After you have explained the concept you say something like if you really want to find out more on this topic you should checkout so-and-so’s because he is the expert. Go ahead and click that link to the right, or go to this URL and redirect from one of your URLs to the affiliate site.
• Here’s another excellent tactic. Help people out by pointing them towards a free trial offer for a piece of software or web service. There is loads of great software out there for people in almost any niche. You may even have software you use that would help people.Once you have found some good free trial’s  signup for the vendor’s affiliate program and send people to your affiliate link or redirect. You can also use this to build your list by asking people to email you if they want a free trial.
• Speaking gigs - There are so many opportunities to move people from your social media to live events. People are curious to find ways of solving their problems; many are more than willing to attend a live event.  You can monetize the event in any number of ways including charging admission, selling goods and services,  promoting affiliate products, and more. You also want to make sure you collect registrant information for future marketing.
• Another interesting tactic worth noting is partnering with others. This sounds obvious, but using social media gives you the opportunity to see who’s in your peer group. You can find others with roughly the same numbers of followers. Once you have identified a few people whose content and personalities you like and respect connect with those people and offer to help them build and monetize their following in exchange for them doing the same for you.

These are by no means the only ways of monetizing social media traffic but they are good. Please weigh in with your comments and retweet this information. I am pretty sure you won’t find this anywhere else online.

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