Description

A lot of marketers have all sorts of wrong ideas about social media marketing. Some think that you only need to post “viral content” to get tons of traffic overnight. They actually believe that if you are able to pump that much traffic to your target website, a large chunk of those people will buy whatever it is that you are selling.

Maybe you’re selling services, maybe you’re selling an event, or maybe you are selling products from an online store, it doesn’t matter. According to this idea, you just need to have a lot of traffic; courtesy of viral content on social media, and you will get the conversions you’re looking for.

There is an assumption that social traffic, regardless of which platform it comes from and regardless of how you qualify that traffic, converts to sales readily.

Sadly, none of these assumptions are true. In fact, all of them are tragically mistaken.

If you believe in any of these, don’t be surprised if you spend a lot of time, effort and money only to end up with a whole lot of nothing. Welcome to the club.

Effective social media marketing can be reduced to one metaphor. Master this metaphor and you probably will make money on autopilot with social media traffic. Screw up this metaphor or remain clueless to it, and you’ll continue to struggle; you’ll continue to believe that social media traffic can easily be generated through viral content. You might keep running after that unicorn only to get tired and frustrated.

It doesn’t have to be this way. You just have to have the right metaphor or the right conceptual model to make social media marketing work for you. Best of all, you can make it work on autopilot.

You probably have heard of all sorts of “set it and forget it” systems. You probably bought at least one of these products. Well, they’re definitely on the right track as far as their label. Social media marketing can be automated. It can be mastered to the point where it can produce income after you’ve set it. But getting there is another matter entirely. And that’s the price people have to pay.

And unfortunately, most people are not willing to pay that. They’re excited about shortcuts, but they’re not willing to take the stairs to get to the top. At the back of their minds, they’re thinking that there has to be some sort of elevator.

There is no shortcut. You have to work with this metaphor

What am I getting at? Well, the secret to effective social media marketing is an inverted pyramid. It looks like a funnel. That is the metaphor you should have in your mind when thinking of ways to get traffic from social networks and social media platforms and turning that into cold, hard cash in your bank account.