Have you ever written something you really thought had a chance to go viral. Maybe it wasn't even linkbait--it was just something you thought was really original and thoughtprovoking, and if only the right handful of people, or a critical mass of your friends caught onto it, it would take off.
So what do you do?
You bite the bullet and you start asking for people to Digg it. Ugh. There's nothing worse than being a social media panhandler. It makes you feel stripped of your authenticity. You might as well be pushing Rolexes.
So, what if, instead of blowing so much social capital on Diggbegging, you could easly throw a few bucks towards it to get it in front of the right bloggers.
Feedburner had something a little bit like that--where you could figure out what the CPMs were on your blog and advertise your feed in the feeds of other people in order to try to get more users.
For businesses, easy tools like Clickable are really lowering the overhead it takes to have your own SEM strategy. What individual contributors need is a kind of mini-Clickable right at the point of creation. How great would it be if, right next to the publish button, there was another button that said, "Do you want to invest $10 in driving relevant traffic to this post?" The money could be used to not only do search placement, but sponsored placement as "Suggested sponsored links" in front of bloggers talking about the same things. They wouldn't get paid to reblog, so it wouldn't be like PayPerPost--you'd just be paying to get in front of people who are likely to reblog the idea.
Another aspect of this is a better way to actually get your friends to reblog, Digg, tweet, etc. on your behalf. What if I could sent one link around that gives people a menu with the minimum number of clicks necessary to spread it. They could have their blog id/password, twitter password, digg, etc. already saved, so all it would take are some checkmarks and some additional optional descriptive copy in a few places and press "spread". There are lots of times I would reblog something relevant that my friends send me, but I just don't have a lot of time to crack open the blog editor, do the appropriate cutting and pasting, etc. This would come in especially handy when people send me jobs to repost. I'd repost most of the jobs that people send my way, but it's kind of a pain in the ass. If I could create a trusted list of friends that are allowed to repost their job ads to my blog, and maybe even aggregate them, I'd pre-approve people to do it.
Because who really wants to be a social media panhandler?