It is time to wrap up this social media series. To do this I’m going to squish how to tell if an alternative site is worth it and earning from social media into one post.

Alternative Social Media

There are many small social media websites out there. Maki over at DoshDosh has a great list that you can find here. With so many sites out there it is pointless to talk about each one individually. Instead I want to talk about how to find out if a social media website is worth it to you.

This concept is all relative to your websites traffic levels. If you have lots of traffic, and extra 10 visitors a day may not be worth working for, but if you only get say 100 unique a day, an extra 10 a day can go a long way to helping you out.

The way I test networks is I sign up to a bunch of them, and invest say 20 minutes into making my profile and submitting a few pieces of quality content that has done well on other networks. I then monitor the visitors I get from the network.

If I find that I get over 3% of my daily traffic from any one network, I put it on a list to keep an eye on. This means that the network may be worth testing out now or later for a stable source of social media traffic. Any networks that under perform get tossed immediately because it’s just not worth my effort to pursue them.

I then work on building up those networks and weeding out the weaker ones left in my “second” list. What this does in the end is leave me with a handful of social media websites that can drive some real traffic but are maybe not as mainstream as other websites.

Remember, a website doesn’t need to have hundreds of thousands of users to drive a lot of traffic!

Earning From Social Media

Finally, what you’ve all been waiting for. You now know how to get traffic from social media but how do you earn from it!

Well there are a few ways. One is CPA, or cost per action. I personally have found social media traffic has a horrible conversion rate for these offers, so I like to leave them alone unless the page is already optimized for them.

Your best bet for social media therefore falls into CPC or CPM. CPC is cost per click meaning you get paid per click and CPM is cost per 1000 impressions, meaning you get paid for every 1000 impressions you drive.

Which is now sounding better for social media? Well it all depends. If you know a lot about ad optimization, it will be worth it for you to invest some time into CPC. This in the end will pay out more due to the high payouts for some competitive keywords.

That being said, if you know nothing about CPC. CPM might be worth giving a try. Social media can drive mass pageviews, and for you that means money! There are a bunch of great CPM companies out there but many require a standard traffic level per day to get into.

The downside to these offers is that most CPM ads turn away visitors. The ones that don’t are held by the bigger companies that are more exclusive.

This all being said, I recommend split testing to see what works best. Try out all three methods and see which one you like, and which one earns for you. Each website is unique so its earning method is unique too.