I was going to call this new post "Just Because You Build It Doesn’t Mean They Will Come" but I went with "StumbleUpon Traffic Sucks" instead because that was exactly what I said when I launched my new site http://www.SleepWinks.com just over a week ago.

I did a pretty quiet launch… Did a couple of blog posts (one here and one at My Mind Shift Blog ) and then posted it at a few social bookmarking sites.

No emails, no affiliates.

And the results were disappointing to say the least.

Approximately 30 sign ups and no viralness (will update you on this one in the next week or so).

Did I get traffic? Yes I did… I got some. I got over 150 hits from StumbleUpon… Guess how many signed up? Maybe 2 maximum… could be less.

That was when I said… "StumbleUpon Traffic Sucks"

I know what you are thinking… "Your squeeze page just isn’t converting, Paul"

And you are absolutely right. For non-targeted, ’self improvement’ stumbleuponers my site does not convert at all, maybe 1% if I was lucky.

But this is where I get excited.

I went away for the weekend and enjoyed a nice camping trip… The End ;).

Kidding… Well actually I did go, and had a fantastic long weekend, perfect weather, cold enough for a fire, but warm enough to swim. Friend brought his speed boat as well… yeah it was great, thanks for asking ;).

Anyway this week when I got home, actually just 2 days ago now… I sent out an email to my MyMindShift affiliates saying I had a new affiliate program. A few of them signed up.

When I woke up the next morning (3am… yep I’m still doing it)… I discovered that my email exploded with notifications from Aweber saying people had signed up to my list.

Within 42 minutes of one affiliate signing up to my affiliate page (http://www.sleepwinks.com/affiliates ), I had the first subscriber sign up to the optin via his affiliate link (I can tell because his Id is automatically embedded for lifetime commissions) and when I woke up 4 hours later he had already sent over 140 subscribers and they are still coming in every few minutes 2 days later. I loved watching it.

So far he has sent over 370 subscribers with a conversion rate of over 68.5% (didn’t you just say this page didn’t convert… WRONG! ).

Moral of the story…

Affiliates 2 | Social Networking 0

All the best to your online success,

Sincerely,

Paul Kleinmeulman
Australia

P. S. Challenge repeat. Give me a list of how many viral/traffic multiplying methods am I using at http://www.SleepWinks.com Hint it is more than 3.

Now I’m the first to admit that I am definitely not a social marketer. I have very little experience and basically I am just using the shotgun method and hoping something sticks.

In my previous post I tried a little experiment asking for volunteers to digg and stumble my site.

I got 19 diggs all up (from 250+ people who read the post… OUCH!) and basically it was nowhere near the momentum I needed to reach a page one ranking (you need at least 150 in a few hours to get that). Side Note - today I dugg another post at my new blog and it got 4 diggs in less than an hour (I don’t know where these people come from, but I didn’t ask).

Ok let me share with you the traffic that I got from these social marketing sites.

Results for Social Marketing

Stumbleupon = 8 (main page) + 57 (blog)
Digg = 3 (main page) + 16 (blog)
Total Fark = 3 (main page) + 14 (blog) <- I’m really annoyed by this one… I can’t even read the comments they are making because you have to pay for a subscription (And I’m too cheap ).

Results are hard to track but there is 1 sale without affiliate and there maybe a couple of sales via my affiliate link so I can’t be 100% sure.

Results For Affiliate Marketing

Compare that to a 5 minute email I sent to somebody I found via Google promoting a competitors product. She immediately said yes and sent a message to her contacts.

63 hits & 10+ confirmed sales = 15.8% conversion rate.

And another affiliate, I don’t know where this one came from 92 hits and 5 sales = 5.4% conversion rate.

That is 15 confirmed sales from just 2 affiliates. That’s money in my pocket for just send one email (and a few back and forths)

PLUS there are 53 affiliates who brought 1 hit or more resulting in 3 confirmed sales .

And that was before I sent it to my list of 2576 affiliates.

So at the moment I am going to continue to dabble in social marketing but really there is no way to beat good old affiliate marketing.

It brings in the bacon.

Sincerely,

Paul Kleinmeulman
Australia

P.S Who says you can’t get traffic via Google in just a couple of days. Google Organic = 29 (mainpage) + 7 (blog)