In the financial community, there is a saying that bulls make money, bears make money, but pigs get slaughtered. It refers to how money can be made in various markets, whether a bull market or a bear market. What often leads to destruction is greed or the hopes of making a quick financial killing.

If you are in business, the internet has many potential ways to make money using social media. Social Media’s strength is that it provides exposure to your product. Services like Digg, and StumbleUpon bring your product to the attention of the market. When you use these services, they will bring people. When the people arrive, you will need to have a product to sell. If you do not have a product or service for sale, then such social media sites are of limited usefulness in generating revenues.

Having a site that is ready for people is key to any financial success. Being ready for people means that there are not too many distractions, the links and pages work and they can easily find the buy button. This part of getting ready requires good and effective page layout. People will ignore pages they can not read, or have too much stimulation.

Besides good layout, the site will need some way to capture revenue. It does no one any good to sell something if you can not mash or push the buy button. If they buy button does not work, you do not obtain the sales.

Some people are creative, and find ways of selling advertising on their sites in the form of links or ads so that when traffic arrives, they will be presented with a product. Although people like surfing the net, they eventually grow tired of click here, then click here, then another click here.

You will need to be realistic concerning your expectations. Successful marketers know that in order to obtain sales, the public will need to be exposed to your product at least seven times. Exposure does not automatically equate to sales. You are doing well to achieve 2-5% sales rate for the traffic coming to your site. What this translates to is that if you have traffic of 1000 people, the expected rate may be 20-50 sales. Some companies are doing well with 1-2% sales, so selling 10-20 units of your product is still realistic. With this in mind, if you want to make major profits, you will need major exposure in order to bring traffic to your site. This is where a high Google ranking is important. The higher your ranking in Google, the greater the likelihood that the public will visit your site.

Higher Google rankings occur with good content, plenty of links, and good traffic to your site. If you wish to improve your ranking, it could be purchased for a limited time, or you could work on it by improving the page, number of links, etc.

Obtaining exposure on Digg is another way of driving traffic to your site. Digg has been known to melt servers due to the amount of traffic that can be generated. The catch is that in order to gain the attention of Digg, you will need something that catches people’s attention. If your product is boring, you will not generate the interest needed to capitalize on a Digg ‘wave’. There are some services where you can pay people to provide “Diggs” or “Stumbles” to your site. This will generate some spark, yet without excellent sales copy combined with good layout, sales will likely be dismal. One can also pay for higher rankings in Google, yet in order to maintain that position, you will have to continue paying.

Hubpages can also make you money provided you are selling a product that the public is interested in. Here it is helpful to remember that people like shopping, they don’t like to be sold. They like looking at things and asking questions, rather than using the hubpage as a blatant informercial. When the page is too heavy on sales copy, it will be reflected in the numbers of visitors.

Good product

Good content

Attractive page layout

Easy to use buy button

Traffic Counter/Monitoring device

Numerous legitimate links

Good sales copy