[andrewwee]

One way to think about social networking is to avoid thinking of it as some way to trick or game traffic to your site.

Conversion into affiliate sales totally depends on how well the traffic is suited to your site profile or your offers.

If you get 100,000 high school kids to your payday loans site, you're very likely to end up with 0 conversions.

If you got the same traffic to an xbox360 or iphone fan site, you'd do very much better.

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The hallmark of successful social networking has to do with understanding the core audience/customer for your product and going out to the relevant social networks to find them.

BTW, although there're new-fangled networks like digg, plurk, twitter, friendfeed, etc, I find that old "social network 1.0" sites like forums, yahoo groups, google groups, newsgroups and blogs work just as powerfully.

For example, a large part of my success has been my success in blogging. Not just from generating affiliate sales, but also establishing partnerships with other marketers in the field, becoming a trust advisor to affiliate networks (the super affiliates payouts don't hurt too...!), and being brought in to look at and test products and services before they're launched to the mass market.

The bottomline with social networks/social bookmarking: It's really not about how new or shiny the tool is...It's how you use the tool.