I’ve read about otherwise sane Internet Marketers targeting Digg.com (a social news site) comments as an attempt to direct traffic to a particular website. The first thing that came to mind was that running a campaign specifically to garner traffic from the comments of a techie social media site is probably not going to have a great ROI for may businesses.  Before fighting to win a battle like that, it is a good idea to pick the right battle.

There are  unlimited markets and communities that can be used (and exploited) in order to increase the traffic to a website. The cost to use them is either your own time and effort in comparison to the results that same time and effort would earn doing other things, and/or  or the cost to pay a professional to do the work for you.

What do visitors from a particular traffic source do when they get to your website? Do they buy a product or service, do they subscribe to your blog, or do they leave without doing anything?  Going back to my Digg.com traffic example:  In general,  Digg.com traffic has a high bounce rate – meaning that people who visit your site will leave quickly. Conversions and ROI can easily be tracked with Google Analytics and I recommend every website at least have Google Analytics installed so that they can begin looking at the ROI of each of their main traffic sources and marketing campaigns. Use this information when engaging in a long term campaign to figure out the particular value of investing time and money in different traffic sources.  Sometimes we cal this “picking a battle you can win.”

Another way to pick a battle you can win is to do Market Testing: see this being done live here:

http://activerain.com/blogsview/1401364/the-value-of-social-media-for-market-testing-this-is-a-test-

Send article as PDF to