In the land of misfit experiments I wanted to see just how measurable results from the social web (Web2.0) were measurable. The short answer… not so much.
But in the words of the great Billy Mays – “But Wait, There’s More”
I took one of the local niche sites I built in the Building an Affiliate Marketing Powerhouse series and applied some of the techniques of Affiliate Marketing Strategery with RSS with the site. In short, I built online accounts for the site at Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, appropriate Ning communities, etc. and fed each of those accounts with RSS from the site itself. So every update to the site, microblogpost, news update, special sale, etc. was automatically posted to all those accounts via RSS. Totally Hands Off.
I used Twitterfeed to feed twitter, then used the twitter RSS to feed everything else. The advantage is that Twitterfeed is using bit.ly and they provide linking data (i.e. clickthru) for each link shortened. And I didn’t have to write any new code! Now, if this were for real production, I would have gotten a bit.ly API key and bought or written a little code. But for testing this worked out great.
The funny thing is… everything Google Analytics didn’t track… bit.ly did. And I can see the source of the clicks based on the shortened URL’s statistics. And here’s what I found.
Twitter is WAY more powerful than you think. With only 400 followers at the end of the test the AVERAGE clickthru on a twitter post was 8. Eight clickthrus on a twitter post with only 400 followers?
Facebook sucks in the beginning and kicks butt with time. I took out an ad to get fans on Facebook. Had 200+ Fans within four weeks. For the first three weeks… Nothing. The last week resulted in 14 clicks per posting average.
Everybody else was floating from 2-12 clicks per linkout. All from RSS feeds automatically posting.
Here’s the kicker… In the last week I started spending time on all the Web2.0 sites. Making comments, clicking the Like button on Facebook, ReTweeting posts I liked on Twitter, etc. In general, participating as a human being. It takes about 2 minutes per day per site. I split it up between late morning and again around 6pm. I just loaded each of the sites into a browser tab and went for it. I NEVER waited for a screen to reload, I would simply multitask and bebop around the tabs til I’d done a couple actions on each site. And the results went up dramatically.
And so did sales… That particular sites sales went up 200% in the last week of the test period. And it was already making some decent returns. So, what can we get out of this little experiement? An action list that you can all use to strengthen your existing sites. And here’s what you need to do.
- Every Site Needs it’s Own Social Accounts – You can use KnowEm which is a service to mass build Web2.0 logins
- Update Your Site News Promos etc. Daily – Use your PR skills and make newsworthy posts
- Use RSS to Autofeed Your Updates – Twitterfeed and other services will do this for you.
- Take 2-4 Minutes per Site per Day to Socialize – Don’t Waste Time, You can be Social and Reap the Benefits without getting lost in Facebook and wasting your day.
For the entire network of sites we built in Building an Affiliate Marketing Powerhouse it would take about 100 minutes per day (let’s just call it 2 hours) if we implemented this strategy for every site. It sounds like a ton of work (well, it is work), but the returns are quite high. In SEO, SALES, and overall profitability I’m thinking I can at least double the income the network of sites is bringing in. I’m expanding the efforts here and will report back how it goes in a month or so.
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