Social Marketing, Social Traffic…some people find it difficult to talk about, others find it difficult to do.

So, what is social marketing?

Basically it’s getting traffic from using “social techniques”! Sometimes called “Social Traffic” as well.

To answer the question fully, we need to look at a little bit of history. So, let’s go back in to the mists of time…back to the time of the dotcom bust!

We may all look at Web1.0 through rose tinted glasses nowadays, but it was a very flat place! The web was a one-way street at the time. As a website owner, you could tell people things, but there was no interaction, no “social thing” going on!

And, in my opinion that is where Web1.0 fell down and the reason so many “dotcom” companies went to the wall. They did a great job in creating a buzz surrounding the dotcom boom but, when it came around to delivery time…there was very little to deliver in terms of sales or benefits for the user.

In short, the technology hadn’t quite arrived and there was very little honest market research done in to what people wanted from the “world wide web”. So, the moneymen and technicians delivered a combination of what they thought people wanted and technical wizardry.

One thing, however, that the dotcom bubble did deliver was the new technologies needed for Web2.0. Sadly not in time to save the dotcom companies at the time though!

Many of the best technicians joined the dotcom boom and, when the dotcoms went bust, these technicians were left “high and dry”. Highly skilled and motivated by what they could do with technology (rather than make loads of money), something very interesting started to happen.

Many very small highly technical companies sprang up and started to deliver the truly interactive technology that we now rely on for Web2.0.

It started with Blogging and then social networking and more recently social bookmarking.

So, why is this so important now?

Well any web business needs traffic to survive. Think about it, more traffic = more sales = more profits! It’s what I believe is called a “no brainer”!

Indeed, for any business looking to maximise sales over the Internet, having a social traffic / social marketing strategy has become more and more important.

Why?

Well, have you looked at your PPC costs recently? Despite claims that PPC costs are falling, the costs for competitive keywords that return actual sales are increasing. PPC costs have rocketed over the last two years.

And, whilst basic SEO is relatively simple, a commitment to SEO as your only traffic source becomes more and more marginal the deeper into the rabbit warren you go.

That leaves social marketing and traffic generation as the only major viable alternative.

When the phrase “social traffic” is mentioned, it conjures up a whole plethora of images.

YouTube, Wikipedia, My Space, Technorati, Blogger, Digg, Squidoo and of course recent rising star “microblogger” Twitter.

Indeed, these are all “Social” properties (as they are called).

But what exactly is “social marketing” and how does it work?

Well there are a number of facets.

Firstly there is blogging. With great programs like Blogger and Wordpress it’s now very easy to to publish a blog in very little time.

What is a Blog? Basically it’s an online journal. Nothing new, people have been writing journals for years and a Blog is an online journal. It’s the merger of the words “Web”and “Log” = Blog!

It’s a place where you can air your views and sell your wares. Value is given by the interactivity of the platform. Your readers can add views and comment that help build value, similar to the comments on Hubpages.

Social bookmarking is the glue that holds all this together. A social bookmarking site is simply a way of creating lists of favourites. You then interact with other users with similar interests and let them have access to your bookmarked list of sites.

If your friends like the sites you bookmark, they pass them on to their other friends and so on and a momentum builds and your social traffic starts to flow.

Now, it does take an investment of time to set up all of your social marketing accounts. And, you do need to go broad in your social bookmarking. It’s no good setting yourself up with just one account at one property. You have to have an account at every social bookmarking site!

Sorry, yes you do have to do some work! But hey, it’s not exactly hard is it?

The final “strand” of social marketing is the video sharing sites. YouTube is clearly the most famous, but there are many others like Vimeo and also Google, Yahoo etc.

Video has become more and more important as a tool to sell online and you simply must employ video in your online sales arsenal if you want success today. I heard a figure that suggested a sales page including video is 85% more likely to result in a sale. Now that is a stat that it is worth stacking in your favour!

So, to generate a flood of social traffic you need to use the social networking sites to produce your content. Then link them to a related article on your blog and then socially bookmark both links whilst including video content.

You do this for a highly relevant keyword, then wash rinse and repeat for another closely related keyword. Again, I have to stress that you can’t just do one keyword and expect success. Yes, you can get on to page one of Google for any given keyword. However, to generate a real avalanche of free social traffic you have to present a series of pages on related keywords as well.

That is how social marketing works.

One final thing, remember you have to respect the duplicate content rules. I know you may be tempted to complain about the these rules as I did when I first started!

However, it is because properties like Hubpages keep these strict rules that Google treat them as an authority site and we, as users, get the benefit in terms of great listings (quickly)!

So, spend a little time setting up your social marketing and traffic infrastructure and you can expect long-term quality traffic for your pages. And, it’s an overnight almost instant flow of traffic – instant social traffic!

What are your experiences in using social marketing to generate traffic? What do you think of your traffic flow from Hubpages? Please make any relevant comments below.