A lot of people are confused about social media, especially when it pertains to using it for business. I just finished reading Crush It!, by Gary Vaynerchuk and the bottom line is we need to be creating a community around our expertise, content, etc. The monetization will happen as we get advertisers/sponsors, create products, promote affiliate products, etc. He also recommends patience as we build this community.

Most of us want to get more web traffic to our website. But do you know what keywords are converting for you before you write lots of blog posts, articles and web pages? Have you had minimal results with the usual SEO methods? I’ve had the same problems. I spent a lot of time posting in forums, on blogs, writing content and not seeing huge increases in traffic.

So after studying lots of great internet marketing material, I’ve recently come up with a plan of attack or system for getting traffic. The basic steps are:

• Create a test offer (if you don’t have one)
• Determine the keywords for this offer
• Create a targeted landing page for this product using those keywords
• Set up a short-term Google adwords campaign for testing keywords sending them to that specific landing page
• Track conversions (sales or opt-ins) by adding a snippet of google code to the thank you page
• Using the keywords that convert, expand into SEO – blogs, articles, videos, etc with these successful keywords

If you’re like me, you don’t like spending too much money on Adwords pay per click advertising, especially when you’re not getting sales. But having a plan and using Adwords as a short-term test is very useful. After years of using SEO and not seeing huge traffic results, as soon as I started using Adwords I got instant traffic and my Google analytics graphs increased right away.

You can still get pretty cheap clicks by using highly targeted keywords and also the often-shunned content network.

To really dive into this systematic approach have a look at this Web Traffic Course.