[This is a follow up to: Blackhole SEO: Has Googleâ€s Hegemony Spilled into Twitter?]

So the sticking point in recent days (originating from discussions last year) was why Twitter nofollows links from your profile page and your tweets.

Is it because you could be potentially linking to “bad neighborhoods”? Or social spamming links like what some marketers have been doing on MySpace, Squidoo and HubPages and potentially Google Knol?

Here is the thing: the social space and social networks in particular will need some degree of human intervention/curation. That’s why Squidoo has a staff of moderators/volunteers to review lenses, article directories have human editors. The best content review algorithmn still has a couple of years to catch up with user-generated content.

So some human intervention is needed to review content.

And if users are spending 1-2 hours each day on sites like Digg, Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, shouldn’t they gain some outbound link benefit from their efforts? Your users are building a big ball of indexable content that appears in the SEs and brings customers to your social network.

Granted, there will be organic clickthrough on resource links, especially if you post great content, but I don’t understand why the nofollows are there.

Argument #1: Prevent links to bad neighborhood which could deteriorate the originating site’s authority status. -> evolving rules-based content filters + spidering destination sites + some manual review will address this.

Argument #2: Prevent PR leakage – so why aren’t you nofollowing links to Amazon Web Services? If you’re paying AWS and not users, shouldn’t you no-follow AWS and follow users?

Argument #3: Want to build up authority status and PR by keeping PR circulating with the network, using nofollows/redirects to other sites, instead of direct links and minimizing/eliminating leakage. Which is probably the worst un-social message that you’re sending out, especially in a social network context.

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Does anyone see the irony in writing a review about a new product or service then pointing to an internal page? Am I the only one who see an overall positive review being undermined by a “but I don’t trust you enough to link direct to you”.

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So it seems like there is some old school thinking when it comes to DoFollowing and NoFollowing.

And if Web 2’s big boys become the “Man” where the priority is on maxing out the analytics/stats to boost your branding/visibility/ad rates, it’s just a matter of time before users head over to another hub where users and content are a priority.

Here is the long answer:

Social media (I would consider this as “blogging and the other stuff that goes with it”) is more than just a tool in my business. Up till now, it is the foundation of my business.

If HTML websites are billboards filled with information waiting for people to stumble upon them and read them, then blogs are like aggressive ticket scalpers running up to you and shouting in-your-face, in a direct manner. (this is a good thing).

And if you’re new to the social traffic, social networking game, here are some pointers:

• Go out and try everything: The best and worst part of social marketing is that it’s usually free to sign up and participate in. (Although if you forget to factor in the value of your time invested, you could be losing out in a great deal of opportunity cost). Heard about LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, Plurk, FriendFeed, Friendster, Orkut, Plurk, Hi5, Flickr, Craigslist, YouTube, Twitter? Why not sign up for an account. If you’re concerned about it (and you probably should be), make sure you register your personal name, your business, your brand, and get your related domain or account name before someone else does. Sure, you can go after “social network domain/account name squatters” after the fact, but it’s going to take time and resources to do that, so why not spare yourself the trouble now.
• Learn to specialize: I don’t think it’s worth being a “jack-of-all-trades” and spread yourself across all the social networks and have merely superficial relationships with the people in those communities. Instead, I’d suggest focusing on specializing in one or two social networks and “embedding” yourself in them. Learn the social rituals, get to know the influencers, build YOUR own social influence within those circles. Some wannabe “gurus” would have you believe that your social influence is dictated by the number of followers or friends you have. In my opinion, that is utter nonsense and is at best a simpleton’s scare tactic. Just like wine, it’s quality than counts, not quantity.
• Stay away from the Dark Side: Yes, the medium is a free one, but does that mean you should keep taking away from it (see: How NOT to be a tool on Twitter and How NOT to be a tool on Twitter part 2)? Believe or not, there’s a better course of action, that’s to build your goodwill bank.

Being “successful” with your social marketing efforts has a lot to do with your social influence and ability to shape opinions and behavior. And that’s going to take more than just a simple follower count to resolve.

how not to be a tool on twitter

In the case of MySpace, it’s become the hotbed of unmoderated bulletin spam and private message spam for ringtones, free ipod/xbox360/nintendo WII email/zip submit offers. I bet it’s going to take some doing to clear all that muck.

With Facebook, they’re taken the opposite tack of placing a cap on the number of private messages you can send out, limiting the ability of popular group owners to communicate with their members – forcing some to set up off-site bulletin boards to send broadcast messages out.

With MyBlogLog, the platform has a built a good userbase with its blog widget (though guys like Shoemoney had showed that it was pretty easy to abuse the “recent visitors” feature of it). The major sticking point is that Yahoo! doesn’t seem to have a concrete social media strategy (or at least an integrated one in place). I’m still hoping to see some of its community features like it’s Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Shopping, Mash social platform and MyBlogLog properties come together. And in my book, come together means more than a single unified Yahoo! login to tie the pieces together.

Even a 1-2 page weekly or bi-weekly updates or “What’s Hawt!” newsletter would serve to bring some of the pieces together…

So what’s the deal with Twitter’s sputtering and throttling down the flow of data?

With Twitter, I suspect it’s the “Twitter gamers” – the guys who follow 5,000 others and have like 50 followers who are contributing to the overhead. Somewhere out there, someone had the genius idea that if you followed 10,000 people and 100 followed you back, you would have built up a community of 100 followers, the resource overhead resulting from the other 9,900 other members pinging you their updates be damned.

So assuming 10% of twitter users are using this social gaming tactic and 90% of their updates are coming from users who don’t follow them back, they could be contributing 50% of the resource load on Twitter’s server farm. In my book, no amount of distributed computing or load balancing is going to protect you from this.

The net effect is that Twitter has scaled down features like private messages and pagination (keeping logs of twitter conversations beyond the first page. How’s that for shutting down your social platform?

If platform developers were to create two parallel platforms – one dedicated to IM-like one-to-one communication, and another community-like BBS type infrastructure, perhaps some of the resource could be balanced.

But the issue is more systemic and a rule-based social fix is in order.

With most established community sites, there is the concept of ratios, or advancing through the hierarchy to earn your social due.

On a popular forum like ABestWeb, you need to log in 200 posts before you gain the ability to private message other members. With other forums like Digital Point, you need to clock in a number of quality posts before you earn the right to post a forum signature.

I’m not sure about the guys who follow 10,000 other twitter users, but I’m guessing that unless they’re chained to their computer 24-7, they’re not likely to be reading more than 10% of the updates from people they’re following. And if you’re not doing that, what’s the point?

The bedrock of community-based interaction (or if you prefer the buzzword social media) is the concept of conversations – you talk, they reply, you reply back. If the system breaks down, then “the internets iz broken”…

What if you were to introduce a basic rule like a 10:1 ratio of “followed twitter users” vs “followers” in your posse? That would significantly up the signal-to-noise ratio wouldn’t it?

…and I would actually be able to use twitter again…

Over the past weekend, the microblogging platform seems to have had a major bout of traffic/resource overload and indigestion and went offline for 48 hours or more.

When she came back, she came back sans direct messaging and pagination (I believe it refers to a backlog beyond your first page of tweets).

In addition to conserve resources, third party apps like Twhirl, can’t seem to do API calls more than once every 5 minutes.

This should take a number of steps to increase scalability and stability, although it will take quite a bit away from the “real time” nature of the hybrid IM/blogging type service.

Beyond being a juicy piece of M&A bait for one of the Google-Yahoo-Microsoft tirumvirate, I’m not sure if Twitter has a viable business model, beyond grabbing marketshare and mindshare for the microblogging space.

If you’ve thoughts on the issue, post your comments below:

With the change, MyBlogLog has moved from being a blog aggregator to being a Web 2.0 content aggregator of sorts. It’s supposed to be able to pull in updates from twitter, myspace, jaiku, flikr, linkedin, etc (a total of 43 services) and present them in a “New With Me” tab.

Oh yeah…where all the information used to be presented in a simple screen with all content visible above the fold:

(An old MyBlogLog screen), the new interface means you’ll need to scroll down to look at the content…

There’s a chorus of “I hate it, can I switch to the classic (ie original) interface” and that reasonates with me somewhat.

Granted, MyBlogLog’s Ian Kennedy and the MBL development team have spent some time working on this, but I’m wondering if MBL users had been sufficiently polled to the changes…

Is it a case of Yahoo! developing what it THINKS its users want, or are the changes what MBL users have been clamoring for?

As one of the earlier MBL users, I’d looked at the service as a blogging service. I ignored the other add on stuff and the most useful elements were the “recent visitors” widget I’d put on my blog and the Pro Stats (a sort of lite analytics package for your blog).

So here is my wishlist:

• Let me fix my own space!: Give MBL users the ability to customize their profile, have it like a Squidoo lens where you can drag-and-drop modules.  If the Web 2.0 widgets are not popular, just drop them. I hate digital clutter as much as the next users…
• Evangelize Before Conversion: This is something that Steve Jobs has done a smashing job with the iPods and iPhones. If you want to get something out there, go beyond just a mandatory install on the user’s interface, it will just p*ss people off… Why not do a series of tutorials, do an online launch, recruit internet celebs like iJustine AKA Justine Ezarik to promote the thing?
• Solicit Feedback: Although it’s great to have a corporate MyBlogLog blog, I don’t think a blog comments section is the best way to conduct a dialogue with your users, especially since Web 2.0 services live and die by their consumers (it’s social marketing, isn’t it?) Put up a vBulletin forum somewhere, conduct a focus group, make active use of your existing advisory group or set up a new one…

When I was interviewing dotcoms earlier in my journalism career, I was pretty shocked at the amount of navel gazing that many of these dotcoms were engaged in, their eyes weren’t on the road ahead at all. So while, it’s great to want to change the world with the latest and greatest…sometimes users just want something simple (like an easy to use spam reporting system, MyBlogLog, without having to go through the hoops of logging in and filling in multiple forms… A web usability study or focus group would take care of this…) and they’d be happy.

Yahoo! was and is one of the web’s pioneers in my eyes and part of their existing predicament has to do with failing to listen to it’s users feedback and a slowdown in innovation in the last couple of years.

I’ve switched to using facebook since late last year, but I think MBL still has a chance to capture mindshare if it takes active efforts to put it’s ears to the ground and move in the same direction as its users.

A lot of people think “money” is the big thing that will give you freedom in life.

That’s not the case.

Think “social influence”.

The most powerful man in the free world, the President of the United States, makes about $200,000 a year from what I’ve heard…yet he’s able to invade other countries, cut off the oil supply to countries he doesn’t like. I’d say that this social influence is way out of proportion to his salary.

Although guys like Richard Branson, Donald Trump and Warren Buffett are probably making about a thousand times more than George W Bush, their social influence is much less. Their ability to shape reality is much more limited.

Let’s look at another example of “social power”, Steve Jobs isn’t in the same category as some of the tycoons, but his social cachet in dreaming up the iMac and the iPods give him unprecedented social power in shaping popular tastes (About 9 out of every 10 MP3 players sold is now an iPod).

On the Internet Marketing arena, you’ve heard me bandy the terms “social traffic” and “social networking” about. Is it the same as Web 2.0? some have asked.

On the surface of it, it looks similar, the Web 2.0 (or social media guys) use Digg, MySpace, Facebook, Craigslist, forums – these are the same tools I use.

Where we differ however, is my focus on the “inner game” of Internet Marketing.

Social power can be simplified in the following manner: You are either an influencer OR a follower.

Influencers tell you to do something, and you’re likely to do it.

Is this the same as power and authority?

Not quite – authority is something that’s given to you because you’re a police officer or a judge or a senator, social power is conferred, it’s informal, and at the same time it can be more powerful than formal power.

Are you lost yet?

A lot of people think they understand social marketing/social power, and they think it has to do with email or site spamming, but it’s actually a whole lot more than that.

I’m planning to get a speaking slot at Affiliate Summit West, where I’ll talk more about the inner game of Internet Marketing.

Solution 1: Write to them

You could locate an email address or look up their domain whois information and contact them directly to remove the link to the file on your webhost. If they’re linking to copyrighted content, you might get your legal department to send them the appropriate legal response.

This generally takes some time.

Solution 2: Remove/Delete the file

If you remove the file from your server, the file they’re linking to will show up as a broken link (generally a “404 Error – File Not Found”). This means you’ll need to put up another version of your file and link to that instead.

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The disadvantage of these solutions are either:

• Can take time and the owners might drag their feet about taking action
• Causes inconvenience because your tech support will need to take time out to fix it

I like Solution 3 – Use the opportunity to generate traffic to your site.

Here’s one of my original posts “WhoIsAndrewWee forum launched”

Here’s an image hotlinker:

How do I know they’re hotlinking?

The address for the image points to my blog.

So to deal with the hotlinker, I can create a file with the same filename and create a link to my blog.

Take a look at:

And once it’s uploaded to my server, the hotlinker will still grab the file and…

You can then track your stats and see how many visitors flow over to your site.

It’s a simple and elegant solution. (and can bring decent social traffic too).

The new tagging feature allows you, as well as other MyBlogLog members to issue tags to your personal and community profile.

For example, someone could tag you as “SEO Expert”, making you easier to find.

As a set of common tags proliferate, I can see tagging as the basis of creating another level of connection within the community.

Here’s what MyBlogLog founder Eric Marcoullier’s tagging profile looks like:

I created a fictious “mamalemon” tag on my personal profile and entered that keyword into the MyBlogLog search engine. It didn’t find my profile (it reported zero results).

Would tags show up in the MBL search results?

I’d think it makes for a more intutive and engaging experience for users.

Perhaps the tags don’t update in real time. Maybe MBL’s Robyn Tippins or Eric Marcoullier could shed some insight on this.

MyBlogLog’s Tagging Anti-Spam Features

Along with the ability to better organize your friends (especially when you get above 200 contacts), is the ability to label people with the schmoe tag.

The schmoe (social media optimizer) tag may be deleted by the user, but will still show up in MBL’s logs. And Eric has mentioned they’d take appropriate action.

Are You Hot or Not?

Additionally, the inclusion of a “Hot Members” tag (sounds vaguely suggestive…maybe MBL might like to of a different term?) is the equivalent of a social community popularity contest.

Will the best bloggers win?

Maybe. Maybe not, but I’m fairly certain that an attractive avatar will give you a leg-up in the competition stakes.

MBL has certainly taken steps to bump up their service development efforts and it’s be interesting to see if they look into incorporating trust or reputation ratings into their system.

If they do, MBL could be a stepping stone towards a personal commerce platform, especially if there’re plans to link the service up to Yahoo! shopping or other Yahoo! transaction related sites in the near future.

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington mentions:

“MyBlogLog continues to expand. Marcoullier says they are tracking 100 million monthly visitors to sites that have the MyBlogLog widget, and have 140,000 registered users. Just recently, he said, more people without blogs (readers only) started registering than users with blogs.”

That’s certainly a lot of unique visitors which could be converted into customers.

Will MBL take the next big step to go beyond just social interactions into financial ones?

It would make for an interesting development and I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

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More references:

• All About Tags (MyBlogLog blog)
• MyBlogLog Gets Into Tagging (TechCrunch)
• MyBlogLog Is Tagging (SleepyBlogger)

Lesson 1: Your site needs to mature

This is probably one of the harder lessons for new marketers to absorb, or mentally comprehend. You need to achieve critical content mass and have it indexed to attract either search engine traffic or social traffic.

It could be as fast as 24 hours, or as long as a month before your traffic hits ‘acceptable’ levels. [Acceptable levels could be 1,000 uniques or 10,000 or 100,000 uniques depending on your personal goal and strategies]

Lesson 2: It’s not just purely a numbers game

Traffic quantity is as important as traffic quality alone. What’s the point if you’re going to get 50,000 uniques in a day if they aren’t interested in your content? Perhaps someone inadvertedly did a redirect to your page.

Metrics like traffic quality and traffic ‘stickiness’ (measured by their repeat visits) are more indicative of your success in building a community.

Lesson 3: Search Engines – General Traffic, Social Traffic – Targeted Traffic

I admit there’s some degree of generalization here.

But when I’m new to a specific topic, I’ll google it and check out the results that come up. I’m more inclined to be a browser. My average time on a search result is probably about 30 seconds to 5 minutes.

On the other hand, when I surf through a relevant social site like an affiliate portal, my time on site is likely in the 3 minute to 30 minute range.

What’s the magic pill?

Relevence. Finding content that answers my question, which solves a problem.

Social sites provide more relevant results than the SERPs (search engine results pages) 9 times out of 10.

Granted there are a number of niche search engines focused on affiliate marketing or Internet marketing, though they tend to be geared towards selling your something, rather than building a relationship the way a social site tends to do intuitively.

The general traffic picture in my mind now is:

• Search engines give huge torrents of traffic, stickiness tends to be lower
• Social sites give fewer visitors, though they tend to stick around.

Mixing the two will be essential to your online success.

David Dalka mentions that during SOBCon upcoming changes to the popular social networking site include:

• A rebranding (to reflect it’s acquistion by Yahoo!)
• Some MyBlogLog 2.0 upgrades – site redesign and a Web2.0-ish widget upgrade
• Anti-social spam features like avatar moderation and masking type features

Since Google rules the roost at the moment on the search engine front, there’s plenty of opportunity for Yahoo! and Microsoft to capture mindshare and market share on the non-search engine traffic fronts.

There’s opportunity to look at the hubs of highly targeted traffic clustered around social sites and forums.

So far we haven’t heard not many high profile forums being acquired have been reported in the mass media, even though transaction values for these deals can range from the hundreds of thousands to the millions.

Selective media focus? Perhaps. But as social traffic and social media continue to gain prominence, Yahoo! initiatives to rebrand and reinvent itself will be crucial.

It could be an interesting inflexion point for Yahoo!

Witness:

Whether you choose to see Yahoo! Auctions as ‘retiring’ or closing, it is indicative that Yahoo! is:

• Exiting the auction space, bowing down to eBay
• Channelling its resources into it’s Yahoo! Shopping channel

What US internet marketers may not realize that at least in Singapore, there are as many or possibly transactions done on Yahoo! Auctions Singapore compared to eBay Singapore.

How does that affect your business model if you’re using auctions as a distribution channel?

Either way, it doesn’t pay for the Google/Yahoo!/Microsoft behemoths to lay their eggs in every basket. As you heard and will continue to hear, the mantra is “focus, focus, focus” even if you’re a multi-billion dollar company.

Taking aim at an area of speciality, whether natural search, social traffic or another web 2.0 channel would be the way to go.

See: Robyn “Sleepyblogger” Tippins SOBCon blog links

I am the granddaughter of the General Abirudhdklf and recently $20 million has come into my possession…

A-ha! Had the MyBlogLog guardians fallen asleep?

Granted it’d fallen into my “Messages from Everyone” box (which is less filtered than regular messages).

And I’d been about to highlight this infiltrator which had slipped through the spam detection cracks when I noticed that the message has mysterious vanished when I checked the account.

I believe the profile has been deleted.

So kudos to Eric and the MyBlogLog development team.

I wonder though, clicking on the “Report Spam” button to report a spamming MyBlogLog user results in a “mailto:” command which pulls up your email client to send an email to MyBlogLog’s customer service.

This seems rather clunky. Wouldn’t it be easier to flag the user and have their username show up in a queue for user review?

Perhaps MyBlogLog could keep this in mind for their next incremental or version upgrade.

• It’s highly targeted
• It’s immediate
• It’s low cost and often free

The downside is because of it’s interactive nature (which contributes to it’s virality), spam marketers will always try to flood you, and drown out your message with their spam.

This includes, but is not limited to:

• Posting irrelevant images (usually a scantily-clad female) in their avatars [see: How Your Social Network Avatar Can Make Or Break Your Internet Marketing Efforts]
• Comment spam: “I like your site, come visit me at (website address)”
• Being generally obnoxious (use rules of social etiquette to figure this one out)

On social community sites like MyBlogLog, Eric and his team have instituted several measure like: limiting personal messages to 20 a day (with an innovative reciprocal message feature in place) , and eliminating animated GIF avatars in favor of single (static) image ones.

But that still doesn’t quite solve the problem of ‘widget spam’ where people with link baiting avatars feature on your sidebar widget that appears on the right of this blog.

Fortunately, MyBlogLog community manager Robyn Tippins informed me that MyBlogLog includes features to block both visitors to your site, and mask your presence on a sidebar widget with the ‘cloak of invisibility’ feature (the name I’ve given to it).

Initially I had asked Robyn about killing the community visitors altogether. (which might seem extreme, until you consider that it creates a better user experience for your visitors)

Robyn responded:

If it’s on the [sidebar] widget you can hover over then and click the red x.

At this point there’s no way to kill visitors to your community page (but you can kill community members, I think).

I’m annoyed too by those avs. We are killing animated gifs this week, but the sexy graphics are a pet peeve of mine too (and I’m hard to offend).

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Here’s how you’d delete visitors (say if I wanted to remove my buddy Ryan Chua permanently from my sidebar widget:

And similarly if I wanted to ‘mask’ my presence on another blog:

Let me clear the air, I am personally not offended by these images, but if they affect the blog readers user experience, I will step in and moderate the blog.

I’ve gone one step further and made the recommendation that MyBlogLog could include a classification system that is moderated from a central node at MyBlogLog. Avatars could be flagged with a “G” or “R” rating like movies are. Or maybe it’d be easier to setup a NSFW (not suitable for work) rating (I’ve been told nude images have been used for some avatars).

True, it would reduce some traffic in the short term, but when you look at how this increases the longevity of the social networks (some of which have degenerated more into ‘spam networks’), it also makes the network a more legitimate and credible medium in the long term.

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.

True, social traffic is about building relationships.

And it’s also true, you can make your presence felt by establishing yourself as an authority on forums, blogs and social community sites by participating in ongoing conversations or starting new ones.

But where many stumble, and subsequently crash and burn is subscribing to the UFO mentality.

A UFO is flashy, appears for a brief moment, makes a lot of sound and noise, everyone looks up at it. And boom! It disappears!

Likewise, a new social marketer will find a forum, post 30 times a day for about a week. Fling their affiliate links in their signature and disappear.

Or they’ll join MyBlogLog, build up 500 friends in a week, then spam their friends with lots of link-laden, product promoting, likely irrelevant messages.

Will you get sales from these suspect tactics?

Likely.

Will it be anything to write home about?

Unlikely.

Instead of being a UFO, strive instead to be a monument.

A monument has a solid foundation, is respected, revered and more importantly, is there for the long haul.

By establishing your credibility, you build people up (rather than leave them feeling that they’re victims of a “hit-and-run” accident).

Rather than just become a part of a community…You become THE COMMUNITY.

If you’re new to all this, do realize it’s time to drop the link spamming tools and focus on building your fundamentals with tools like the Internet Millionaire Code.

The crowd has been expecting some blogging tips, but sadly I had to disappoint.

Instead, I’m getting a number of positive vibes about the traffic strategies I’ve developed over the past couple of months.

It has been a funny experience, just seeing the traffic surge every month by between 50% and 100%.

January was an especially good month with more than 7,500 unique visitors heading over.

This month looks like it’ll bust that fairly easily.

I think one major difference between what I’ve been doing with my Social Traffic Generation and the Spike/Surge strategies used by other Internet Marketers, is that the traffic I generate is very sticky and sustainable.

To be honest, I couldn’t really care about the effort to generate the “one off” traffic usually associated with a Digg spike.

Once I’ve established my traffic baseline:

At between Alexa’s 20,000 and 40,000 mark, it gives me flexibility to focus on marketing or branding efforts.

In addition to being free or low cost, my social traffic generation system brings traffic that is:

• Highly Targeted and Qualified
• Sustainable over a period of time
• “Sticky”

As you might have read in “Why 90% of Internet Marketers Fail“, failure can be attributed to not having a plan in place.

It’s got nothing to do with buying the latest “product du jour”, and everything to do with having a system in place that produces results.

In response to demand from the event’s participants, Jo Han and I will be offering a highly customized workshop geared at establishing your online presence and generating consistent and sustainable income. The takeup rate at the workshop was very encouraging and it’ll be in a small group setting, so you’ll get personalized attention.

Some of my blog readers have asked about workshops to accelerate their Internet income generation. I checked with Jo Han yesterday and we can take a limited number of participants. Applications will be strictly reviewed on a case-by-case basis.

The workshop will be held in Singapore in March and you’ll receive hands-on consultation from Jo Han and myself.

If you are serious and committed about your online income generation, you should drop me a message, including your contact number, at the Contact Form now.