In this podcast, I covered 3 principles that will help you better plan and generate income from your social marketing campaigns.

The principles are:

• Pre-qualification
• Building a sales funnel
• Following up with your leads, especially using non-traditional communication channels

Check out the Friday Podcast:

You can be sure that more than a few viewers will be typing Thoof.com into their browsers after viewing this clip.

• Blogging
• Affiliate Marketing
• Social Traffic Generation

I get lots of feedback on general posts, but here’s a chance for you to pose questions and get answers in a future post.

To make things a little easier, here’re some of the foundation between each of the areas I cover, so you can better “get” me and pose a question which might best help you:

Blogging

I see blogging as the next generation of web publishing. It certainly beats the HTML I was bashing out on a text editor in 1997 when I was managing web portals.

The introduction of RSS and Social Networking/Bookmarking widgets means you can easily get a blog from the starting point to more than 10,000 uniques in less than 6 months after starting.

Someone might say, “Sure, I can do that in a single day by getting my post listed on Digg or one of the other big bookmarking sites”, but what I’m refering to is a consistent stream of traffic, as in a consistent 1,500-2,000 page views per day. Not 50,000 page views today, and 200 page views tomorrow.

The underlying philosophy here is that I am (and I hope you are) building a solid business. Although it’s based in the online world, and by definition virtual and intangible. The business I’m building here is as solid as any brick-and-mortar equivalent out there.

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Affiliate Marketing

My approach is different from many affiliates out there.

I adopt a customer-centric point of view, thinking about questions like “Why should I submit my email/zip code/buy this product/service”.

Value creation is a key here. And the law of fair trade applies.(well, somewhat).

If I spend $1 and get “value” worth $2, I’m certainly a happy camper.

If I spend $1 and get “value” worth $0.10, I’m going to be a very unhappy camper.

The specific mechanics of this will be covered in a product I’m currently developing.

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Social Traffic Generation

The fundamentals of traffic generation I subscribe to is based on “human relationships” more than search engine alogrithmns.

Coming from a social/organizational psychology background, it’s quite easy to see how relationships still form the basis of interaction on the Internet.

If I like you, I will visit your blog/website, leave comments, buy your products/service, do joint ventures with you.

But the virtual world being vastly different from the physical one, there is a huge difference in how you accomplish this goal to get people to ‘like’ you.

That’s where my whole social traffic generation system comes about.

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Now that I’ve laid out the foundation of the systems I practise, go ahead and list topics or questions you might have in the comments below.

But increasingly, spam marketers have been bombarding the social networking site, such that there is a toggle to view messages only from members of your social network (and cut out messages from non-members (potentially spammers).

MyBlogLog obviously views the matter seriously enough to take further measures.

Witness the latest salvo:

I was in the midst of posting messages to PepperJam’s Kris “Mr Pepperjam” Jones and Robyn Martin‘s MyBlogLog profiles. [To comment on the latest Meet the PepperJam Team video]

There’s now a daily message cap of about 20 messages sent per day.

[Check out the MBL blog post “Spam-a-lama-dama” for details]

In my opinion, MyBlogLog is one of the most, if not THE site, for white hat social marketers.

Having a quota on messages you send out will hurt you if you’ve:

• A large network
• Used MBL as your mode of communication with your community

On the other hand, will this anti-spam measure hamper spam marketers?

Well, they might create multiple profiles, and multiply the 20 messages by the number of profiles they create.

So it would eventually hurt legitimate users more than spammers.

I think the key here is looking beyond just the technology.

For social traffic strategies to work effectively, there has to be a human governance element involved. Which is the major pitfall of the “web2.0” traffic products out there now.

If your answer to create traffic is just to game Digg, del.icio.us, MBL is just to bank on technology alone, you’re doomed to fail. Or occasionally create blips of ultra bursts on your traffic charts.

Does that necessarily build a community? Or build a list of prospects?

Possibly, but I’d think that incorporating the human element will create a complete system, rather just give a 50% equation (based on technology only…).

[And to prove my point, I’m in the process of developing a social traffic system incorporating organic elements. Being holistic is important because there are just too many ‘incomplete’ products out there!]

For MyBlogLog and similar sites to succeed, the developers need to look further to incorporate a trust, credibility, or some form of reputation, that eventually ties into your message or posting quota.

If nothing else, take a page from the reputation systems incorporated into many of the forums across the net.

Matt Coddington over at NetBusinessBlog is masterful at this technique.

Observe his traffic:

One of his Dugg posts is: Building a Niche Minisite (Part 1)

One of the reason why your webhost might crash is due to the processing required in compiling the PHP code and serving up the page for each visitor.

This could literally kill the server resources during peak periods.

So Ricardo Galli’s WP Cache provides a workaround, by caching your blog posts as static pages, enabling you to serve hundreds of times more pages per second.

In fact, the plugin serves to “reduce the response time from several tenths of seconds to less than a millisecond.”

The plugin is WordPress 2.1.x compliant and pages have been whizzing during peak periods.

There’s a toggle to determine the cache expiry period, so you’ll want to adjust it, so you continue to serve up pages quickly and yet display updated content, like comments. (Else the new comments will not display till the expiry of the cached page).

To download, get it from: WP-Cache plugin.

For more information, visit Ricardo’s WP-Cache page.

And the major problem is that many new bloggers have a “more is better” mentality.

Their blogs up as a dumping ground for too many unnessary plugins, icons, and “Top Blog site” tags.

You are a “Top Blog” because your readers come back constantly to check the content.

You are a “Top Dog” when other bloggers point at your blog posts as a resource for their readers to check out.

So if you’re guilty of abusing the social WordPress plugin (which allows readers to bookmark your post at popular social bookmarking sites) in the following manner:

or even:

So if you choose it, don’t go hog wild and display 20 services. Plug 3 services, or a maximum of 5 if you have to.

StumbleUpon is good, so’s Digg and Reddit.

There’re even worse things you can do however, and that’s to icon dump to services like blog reader services in the following manner:

OR:

OR:

OR:

If your mission was to annoy your readers with garish icons, it only serves to cheapen the look of your blog.

It’s fine to go overboard for the first month or so, but if you look at your blog statistics, you’ll have a fair idea of the profile of your blog traffic and refine your blog accordingly.

Leaving everything on your blog and not making the necessary adjustments reminds me of my visits to my bank’s cash withdrawl machine. It prompt me to select from the offered languages of “English, Mandarin Chinese, Tamil (an Indian dialect) and Malay” every time I insert my bank card.

You’re think that after withdrawing cash at least 1,000 times in the last 10 years, the machine would’ve learned a thing or two.

So the lesson is to increase the usability and blog design to optimize traffic, and as a result up your monetization efforts.

Leaving your blog in its ‘status quo’ position is easier in the short term, but it’s bound to hurt you in the long run.

If you’re new to blogging and eager to enhance your skills, be sure to check out this tool.

Darren Rowse – ProBlogger.net

In How to Generate High Quantities of Content for Your Blog, he backtracks to a post in his early days.

Bloggers should have both post quantity and quality.

As a DigitalKeiretsu blogging mentor, I’m ask my guys who’re keen to build their blogging cred to generate 3-4 quality posts daily.

Imagine my…shock? when Darren says he used to put out “20-30 posts per day” !

It can be a dicey issue balancing quality and quantity.

But I think a lot of people just don’t get it.

The writing process.

It doesn’t have to be a painful 1 hour process to put out 400 words!

As a journalist I used to put out up to 4-5 solid articles each day.

Some of them hit 800 words. All necessary, no fluff. Just the facts or opinion.
I know if you’re a disciplined writer, quality AND quantity should will not be an issue.

If you take a look at some of the content at my content sites BizExcellerator.com and InternetMarketingCookbook.com, I’ve done my best to practise what I preach.

In an earlier ‘experiment’, I generated 58 pages of original content in a 24 hour period.

That would be an easy 80 blog posts?

And there’s a method to this writing madness.

If you plan your writing methodically, and employ a few accelerated learning techniques, you’ll find you easily break a lot of mental barriers.

These barriers are ones we set upon ourselves.

During my reporter days, I could easily write an 800 word article in the space of an hour.

Many such articles were subsequently syndicated by Bloomberg, Cnet and the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation).

Should blogging be any different?

Checking out the conversation at Digg regarding Darren’s post:

How to Generate High Quantities of Content for Your Blog

It’s generated quite a firestorm of discussion. (274 diggs at the time of this writing)
I’ve dugg it and will go through it.

On a sidenote: I was asking the ProBlogger about the next writing project. (I got a whole bunch of traffic from that!) and I got some insider info.

Here’re the words from the man himself:

Darren Rowse says:
yeah – sometime in December or late November

Stay tuned!