Best Traffic Tips

Archive for February 16th, 2010

Athletes are a dedicated bunch of folk. They have to be disciplined and focused, not to mention talented. The Winter Olympic Games shows us the best of the best. People who have trained their entire lives for this moment of glory, or defeat since whenever someone wins, someone else has to lose. But they all have a goal – the gold medal. And they all know exactly what they need to do to get it. Each sport has its requirements for the perfect performance. Training for the Olympics is a lot like planning a internet marketing campaign.

Let’s pick a winter Olympic sport – figure skating. Each skater wears a fantastic outfit and picks soulful music for their routine, but that doesn’t figure into the final score of the performance. Figure skating routines are judged on various aspects, all of which apply to the success of marketing campaigns as well. Let’s discuss a few of those aspects.

technical difficulty

Flash, CSS, javascript, all those bells and whistles that can make your web site stand out. Not so much an issue unless you are trying to do something that you have absolutely no experience in and have no back up. We all need to branch out and test our limits, but unless you know what you are doing, leave the programming to the experts.

performance/execution

The best written ad can go to heck with a single minor typo. We can all forgive typos since they are so easy to make, but sometimes they can have humorous or disastrous results. You can change the meaning of a sentence by leaving out the word “not.” That could cost you some serious money too. Or a time-sensitive message about your affiliate marketing campaign goes out to your list a day too late. What can go wrong usually does, so plan to avoid it.

choreography/composition

How often have we seen a big buildup for a program launch only to have the server crash five minutes after opening? Plan ahead, and plan BIG. Expect huge traffic and prepare for it. Get reliable hosting. Get a dedicated server if you have to for the expected traffic. Have your programmer on call on the day of the launch to put out fires. Have extra help at the support desk. Better to be overprepared than underprepared.

interpretation

The most important part. You can’t please all of the people all of the time, yet you don’t want your words to be misinterpreted or twisted into something inappropriate or even downright ugly either. It is very hard to have tone come across in print. What is considered funny in the United States may not be so funny in the United Kingdom. You want to be clever and memorable, but be careful with your slogans. The internet is a global stage so you need to be mindful of cultural differences.

So do marketers have to train like Olympic athletes to be successful? Well, it probably wouldn’t hurt to put some of that enthusiasm and dedication into the planning of the perfect internet marketing campaign. I mean, we are going for the gold, too, aren’t we?

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Have you ever been confused about how to use your website analytics and how to maximize the value you get from them? You’re not alone, as many Internet marketers are often baffled about how to best utilize the data they glean from their analytics.

Sure, you’re looking at traffic and hopefully seeing those numbers go up as much as possible. Still, I wanted to point out some other very practical things you can be doing with your analytics that don’t take very much effort and can greatly benefit your inbound marketing strategy. 

1. Determine how you’re getting found through organic search.

These analytics are incredibly helpful in terms of seeing how effective your SEO strategies have been. For the keywords that you’re targeting for your site, measure and determine how your efforts are actually working. You can also use this data to make specific decisions on exactly which keywords to target to improve your rankings moving forward.

You should also add the keywords that are getting you found onto your keyword list and add some sort of relevance to them that works for you. If you want to improve on a particular keyword, create more content, optimize it around that keyword and try to get that content linked to.

2. Check out your landing page analytics and work on your conversion paths.

If Internet marketers were really honest with themselves, the one statistic that would always be on their mind is the conversion rates of their landing pages. If you’re not measuring how effective your offers, calls to action and landing pages are at converting your website visitors into leads, then you’re not giving yourself a knowledgeable way of improving.

Conversion rate analytics take into account two major stats: 1) landing page views, and 2) form submissions. Typically, the general rules of thumb around these stats have to do with monitoring your landing page views first. If you’re not getting as many landing page views as you think you should be getting, then most likely your offers need to be revised or further developed. If it’s your conversion rates that are down (below say 5%), then perhaps optimizing your landing pages is the route to take. Either way, these stats merit constant monitoring.

3. Monitor your brand in blogs and social media.

Whether you’re involved in it or not, the conversation is happening out there in the social mediasphere. How attuned are you to what’s being said not only about your company and brands, but about your industry in general? Ever wonder if you’ve missed a potential opportunity to generate a lead or even make a sale because you missed a tweet or LinkedIn group update? 

Get involved in social media by tracking buzz around your company, brands and industry in a manageable way. HubSpot has some great social media monitoring tools for this, or learn about how to use other social media monitoring tools such as Google Alerts (especially for blogs), HootSuite or TweetDeck.

4. Obsess over your inbound links and indexable pages count.

Two of the most important stats to monitor are your inbound links and indexable pages. If you don’t have some sort of way to determine whether you are getting inbound links, you should get one ASAP. Celebrate your new inbound links and try your best to provide some sort of value to the good people who give you link love. Develop rapport with them, which will enable you to generate more links in the future.

In terms of your indexable page count, the idea is to increase this number as quickly and efficiently as possible in order to give yourself more of a chance to get ranked in search engines for your targeted keywords. How do you accomplish this, you ask? Simple: blog often.  One of the biggest advantages of business blogging is its SEO benefit.

There are certainly times when understanding Web analytics can seem overwhelming and confusing.  But like anything else in inbound marketing, remember to take it slow, one step at a time.  If you do, you’ll find that your analytics will help lead you down the path to success.

@adrianmott

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Posted by RobOusbey

There are very few tactics which can guarantee success in linkbuilding. Executed correctly, giving something away is one that gets close to fulfilling that promise.

This post covers competitions and giveaways; I’ll share techniques and tactics you can use, and will include links to some interesting competitions seen online recently, and some that we’ve run for clients.

Running giveaways online typically offers a few different opportunities; of most immediate use to SEOs is that competitions can attract links from authoritative sites and a variety of domains. They can also be great for data collection – it’s fine to ask the entrants for their email address and whether they’d be happy for you to send them emails again in the future.

Furthermore, there’s a potential for increasing brand awareness amongst people who’ve not heard of you before.

Running a Giveaway

In the simplest competition users visit the website to fill out their details, possibly answer a simple question, and then a winner is picked out of the hat.

Competition Prizes

If you have high margin products, these can make attractive prizes without harming your bottom line too much (e.g.: giving away tickets for your theatre doesn’t cost anything if the show isn’t sold out.) You should also consider ‘money can’t buy’ prizes: a trip to watch a rugby match is cool, but spending the day working for a national team and getting a signed jersey is priceless.

Look out for partnerships: when Distilled recently ran a whisky giveaway (to create buzz around the brand prior to the launch of our US office) we were sent messages by Jura whisky and Master of Malt (neither of whom we knew beforehand) offering some quite exceptional additional prizes.

There’s potential to improve any competition by approaching suitable partners first, to offer some co-publicity and links. (I once emailed some contacts to ask for contributions to a competition, and ended up with £300 worth of books, £120 of CDs and DVDs, £50 of gift vouchers, two magazine subscriptions, a £120 digital camera, a wild animal adoption, a bottle of port and a towel that folded up into a beachbag.)

Of course, the flip side of this is that you could simply look out for people in industries related to you that are running competitions, and offer an additional prize for their promotion, in return for links, etc. You can use Google to find such opportunities: search for terms like ‘win’ and ‘competition’ alongside phrases used in relevant niches (eg: ‘win album’ for music prizes) and then filter down to results from the last week / month. For example: this Google search.

Get Listed

The ‘comping‘ community is a great place to seed your competitions to begin. Certainly in the UK, a listing on a few active sites will often send the first 2 – 5,000 entrants – and I’m sure it’s not just us limeys that love a freebie. Search around for sites to submit your competition to, but regional sites you could consider include:

• Loquax.co.uk (UK)
• ThePrizeFinder.com (UK)
• Compaholics (UK)
• CompetitionWinner.com.au (AU)

Each site may have specific restrictions, and can have a delay between a few days and few weeks before submissions are published, so submit your competition as early as possible.

Seeding

Send competition details directly to twitter users & bloggers who you either know well, or think would be interested in covering it. Remember that people can be less inclined to share a competition if it’s good enough (to give themselves better chances of winning.) There are various creative solutions to this issue, but you can just keep it simple and appeal to the blogger’s love of sharing cool stuff with their readers.

Furthermore, look for opportunities to find partners who have email lists. Let’s take two companies with email marketing lists: BigHotel (a large, fictional hotel chain) whoc is running a competition, and GreenTour (a successful, fictional eco-tourism site) which is launching a new feature. They have similar audiences, but there’s no overlap between their products; BigHotel can mention the feature launch in their next newsletter and EcoTour can promote the competition to their subscribers. This just required finding a partner and making a gentleman’s agreement; as Bonytoad is fond of saying: "Win-Win, For Teh Win."

Use Your Affiliates

Make sure that your affiliates can add their tracking codes to the entry URL, and they’ll help to spread awareness of the competition pretty quickly and to places you might not be able to reach to otherwise.

Create a video primer

The Irish rugby competition mentioned above was launched with a 60 second video promoting the prize.

Videos are particularly shareable: embed codes can be copied from the Youtube page, and lots of social sites (including Tumblr, Facebook, Reddit) allow for easy importing of videos. Given that people might be watching the video anywhere, make sure to prominently display the URL for the entry page in the video, either on-screen or using video annotations.

Get Press

Lots of magazines and newspapers are happy to mention competitions and link to them from their websites. Find publications that target the geographic area or niche targetted by the competition. Pick up the phone and give them a call – ask to speak to someone who deals with promotions, or in the editorial department. A few minutes later you might have a decent link and some coverage that will be read by a very targeted group of people.

Maintain Momentum

When people have entered, it’s a waste to just show them a ‘thanks for entering’ message. Use this opportunity to give a call to action – typically to share the competition with other people. Consider having a secondary prize that encourages people to share the competition. For example:

Upsell the Competition

Have a successful competition, and want to take advantage of this get more entries? Take the email addresses of everyone who entered so far, and send them a message during the week before the competition finishes.

I’ve not done this, but I think it could work really well to add an extra 10% to your number of entries. To be honest, I’m considering not mentioning it here, and saving it for myself for a while, but I want to see what CTR & results anyone who tries it gets. Let me know if you have a chance.

Other Competition Structures

Outside of the basic ‘name-out-of-a-hat’ competitions, there’s potential for all sorts of interesting competition structures.

Competitions to Encourage Engagement

Ooh.com run a competition with two $100 prizes each week. The winners are picked from the new ‘OOHs’ which have been uploaded, and encourages people to not only add their content, but to make sure it is as ‘rich’ as possible.

Sites with user generated content (such as a forum, social networking or social media site) could use similar techniques to reward particular contributions.

Twitter Competitions

A competition where the only entry requirement is to tweet a message including a link to a site / account / hashtag has very low barriers to entry for Twitter users. Once up and running, such competitions excel at keeping momentum – the more people hear about the competition, the more people enter – and help to improve brand awareness for companies and products.

The tactic’s been used by a variety of organisations; the most famous execution was probably the competitions run by Moonfruit. This did well, but the concept already feels a little bit passé – plus you have to have an awesome product and spring for $10,000 of prizes to have the same impact that Moonfruit enjoyed.

Consider modifying this viral ’self-fullfilling prophecy’ competition for other formats or networks; Umbro had people upload photos on Facebook – the Facebook ‘News Feed’ then showed entrants’ friends that they’d submitted an entry. If you’re looking to find similar success for your sites, Google Buzz is still new & cool… I’m just saying…

Procedural Points

A couple of miscellaneous points about operating a competition:

Conversion Rate Optimisation

If you’ve attracted people to the competition entry page, you should hope to see a very good conversion rate to completed entries. Try using some CRO techniques on the entry page, to maximise the number of entries received and the amount of useful data collected.

Avoid Cheats

Log the IP address along with each entry – you can then investigate any IP addresses which submit a lot of entries to identify people who are trying to cheat the system.

OK; I hope that this has been useful, or at least inspired you to go through the back of the cupboards, and see if you have anything interesting to give away. Using tactics like this can be an iterative process – it doesn’t need to go exactly right first time, and people will never get bored if you run a few competitions to improve your process. Good luck!

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