Web 2.0 Mar­ket­ing Tip #54: Turn So­cial Net­works into Money Generators

So­cial net­works like Face­book and Twit­ter is cre­at­ing a lot of buzz not only among reg­u­lar folks who love to keep in touch but also in the in­ter­net mar­ket­ing world. Well, it is un­avoid­able as these web­sites are teem­ing with mil­lions of our po­ten­tial cus­tomers. Are you us­ing these net­works to gain prof­its? If yes, are you re­ally mak­ing money?

Real Way to Make Money from So­cial Networks

A friend of mine built a Twit­ter fol­low­ing of more than 1 Mil­lion fol­low­ers. One day, I asked him if he was mak­ing money from it. Do you want to know what he said? He did­n’t re­ally give me an an­swer. It was some­thing like „go­ing to be soon.” But, how soon is soon?

That’s some­thing I see hap­pen­ing with pro­mo­tional and web traf­fic ef­forts a lot. It seems there is re­ally no goal, and that is why no achieve­ment is be­ing made. Sure, peo­ple put work into it, but at the end of the chain, there is­n’t re­ally a proper plan for monetization.

What does it mean? Sim­ple. It means you’re just wast­ing your time and money on some­thing you won’t get any­thing from: you’re work­ing on some­thing that’s not profitable.

So, what can you do about this? You have sev­eral choices:

  • One ob­vi­ous route is to use your so­cial net­work­ing ac­counts (Face­book, Twit­ter, My­Space, LinkedIn, etc.--whichever you pre­fer) to chan­nel traf­fic to your prod­ucts and ser­vices. You can lead vis­i­tors ei­ther to your web­site or to a spe­cific sales page. Of course, for this to suc­ceed, you have to try to make sure that your net­work­ing ef­forts were tar­geted at the very crowd that is in­ter­ested in what you have to offer.
  • An­other way to mon­e­tize your traf­fic is to gen­er­ate rev­enue by sell­ing ad space on your site. You can do this di­rectly by sell­ing ban­ner ads, text ads, and other ad space. This is a very lu­cra­tive thing once you’re re­ally get­ting big traf­fic. How do you use so­cial net­works for this? They will be your pro­mo­tional plat­forms. You can tweet and post up­dates about the ad spaces you of­fer, pos­si­ble prices, and so on.
  • With low or mediocre traf­fic, you’d bet­ter go for a sim­ple pay per click so­lu­tion, for ex­am­ple put Google Ad­Sense on your site. Once your ads are run­ning, you can start get­ting traf­fic from your cho­sen so­cial net­works to your site.

As­sum­ing you’re run­ning a busi­ness, what­ever you do, there is just one ques­tion you need to ask your­self: How will I mon­e­tize this busi­ness step I took?

If you can’t fig­ure out the an­swer to this ques­tion, then you might want to stop what you are do­ing for now, reeval­u­ate your po­si­tion, go over your goals, and then con­tinue once you find a good answer.