Selling Websites for a Living

Social traffic doesn’t convert. It never has and I doubt it ever will. Folk who are browsing Facebook, news stories on Digg or rock bands on MySpace are doing nothing more than killing time.

It’s the type of thing you might do when the boss is out of the office and you want a break for 10 minutes. You drift from page to page, occasionally voting for a story or adding a new friend etc.

Rarely would you even notice the ads and if you did you may make a mental note to ‘check it out later’ before quickly forgetting about it.

Search engine traffic on the other hand is looking for something specific. It might be a product or it might be information. Either way it can easily be converted by the site the search traffic decides to visit.

They can either provide the product, sell an answer to the question or sell the traffic on to a site that provides the answer/product/information sought.

Social traffic can often come in spikes. Submitted stories to Digg which take off and attract a lot of votes have been known to crash the site hosting the story due to high amounts of traffic.

Search engine traffic tends to level off and generally will only increase as the site climbs the search results. It’s worth noting position 1 gets as much as 4 times the traffic number 2 spot gets and 10 times the traffic of the number 6 result.

As a business you want search engine traffic to be visiting your site. Almost all of your sales will come from people arriving from Google, either from your PPC campaign or as a result of your position in the organic results (SEO campaign).

Social media on the other hand is your friend when it comes to link building, building brand awareness, creating buzz about a product launch and monitoring the likes and dislikes of potential customers in your market place.