You have an existing business, and you want to make, say $10,000 a month with it, with an average $100 sale. About 100 sales. For easy math we’ll say between follow-up and first time visitors, 2 percent of the people who visit your site end up becoming buyers by the end of the month.

So to get to your goal, you need 5000 targeted visitors a month — not to the site, to the sales pages. To make it even harder, we’ll pretend that only half of the visitors to the site will even look at a sales page by the end of the month, though if we set up our sites, email newsletters, and blogging strategy correctly, we know that’s not true.

Which means that regardless of how often they come back, we need to have 10,000 unique visitors a month. Let’s round that up to 334 unique visitors a day.

Where can we come up with 334 unique visitors a day, starting from zero?

One place is the Mini-Viral Success Formula.

You see, most people are banking on this huge response from social media and the rest of their traffic generation projects. And if they miss the mark, they go home with nothing.

But what they don’t know is that, it’s fairly easy to get several low to medium viral success programs working. And this is usually how the huge viral effect is achieved, over time.

No one expects to prepare a perfect dinner their first time cooking, on their quest to become a great chef. But you expect your 50th meal to be better than your 2nd, though hopefully not as good as your 1000th. And over time, more and more that you cook for may enjoy your food.

And if it gets, in practice, from good to spectacular, people will start coming back for more.

Then they start bringing their friends. And one day your preparing your 1000th feast, and it seems like you’re suddenly famous for your signature dish. But actually it’s just been building so slowly and naturally that it feels like forever.

This is what you want to do with social media, in particular with blogging. That’s the Mini-Viral Success Formula — it’s a plan to build several small successes in a way that builds momentum towards the goal of continually becoming a mini-sensation.

The goal, after all, with a business blog isn’t to become famous. It’s to make money. Most of us would rather have our 100 monthly customers than 10,000 visitors than turn into 100 leads. And that’s what the system is designed for — to help you make money with your blog, to turn your browsers into customers.

This is where the change in strategy should be — this is the kind of thinking that can revive the state of blogging, never mind social media. This is why the connection is so important, and forming real relationship beginnings that mature offline.

Social media to amass hundreds and thousand followers as an end in itself, with the hopes of making a quick buck is for people who are building fan clubs, not businesses. They’re for movie and media stars, not business people.

Of course, you may yet end up with several hundred thousand subscribers, followers or monthly web visitors after a few months or years.

And if you lay out a good strategy now, it may well be worth it.

Really soon, we’ll talk about the shortcuts you can safely use in social media and blogging.

Last week, we were talking about one of the reasons business blogging growth is slowing.

Part of the reason growth is slowing is that the instant fame model of blogging is proving to be hollow. You can’t be an instant success blogger. It just doesn’t happen.

It may look like this blogger was an overnight success or that company got instant social media attention. But there’s always a huge amount of work coupled with a huge amount of work behind it.

And yet. There is a way that business blogging can greatly enhance your visibility day after day, if you’re willing to forgo the Hyper-Viral model.

What if I told you that there is a way to get the same overall effects and the same amount of traffic as being on the front page of Digg, with better results? Would you want to know how to do that?

What if you saw the results over a couple of weeks or months, instead of days — BUT you could make it keep happening over and over again with a regularity that you just can’t guarantee with Digg?

Some people are saying yes, what’s the difference when I get the traffic and publicity as long as I get it? Especially if I can repeat it?

But some people are thinking, no, I want a big burst of success.

So I’ll present another part of the reality. Let’s say you have a choice between these two scenarios.

I can get you on front page result with Digg, and in time and labor, it would cost you $4000, but I could only pull it off once a year. In that one time, you still have to pay me whether you’re on the page for five minutes or 15 hours. And I can’t sell you votes or any of that stuff — you have to do the work involved, and know that after many, many times, it will eventually happen, but not be sure when, and not really be able to control it.

OR.

I can get you the same amount of traffic, the same amount of links, from the same number of weeks or months of work but over the time you’ll be working.

In other words, that traffic will be spread out over several weeks or months, starting in a few weeks.

Your internal time and labor costs are around $1000., then there’s $2000 in set up and fees. BUT. Once you learn how to do it this one time, you can do it over and again, as often as you like.

Now. It’s front page of Digg, one time shot, take whatever results you get for $4000. Or spend $3000 and get the same results, but over, say, a month’s time, then repeat that result as many times as you like for free after that.

Option Two looks better now, doesn’t it? In the days to come, we’ll be talking about letting go of that shortcut mentality of getting one quick Digg front page vs spreading your traffic — and risk — out over multiple social media properties, including your own blog.