Best Traffic Tips

Archive for March 4th, 2010

You’ve seen the ads on the traffic exchanges. Those products that promise you will have thousands of followers within 1 week of purchase. The services that will make you $1,021 in seven days. Splash pages that scream, “Pay just 5 bucks and get your own ready-made business.” No one would make promises like that unless they can deliver, right? No one in their right mind would believe such outlandish claims, would they?

Traffic exchange owners agonize over banning specific ads. We want the best for our members, no doubt about that. But is it really our decision to make for you?

Banning sites open traffic exchange owners to claims of libel and slander from the owners of the banned products and services. If we ban some sites, but not the one that cheated you, our member, then we can could be found liable for your loss. Traffic exchanges have members from all over the world. Some business practices and models are legal in some places, but not legal in others. Banning specific ads also smacks of censorship.

Traffic exchanges have hundreds to thousands of members, each with at least one site submitted for rotation. Traffic exchange owners do not have the time to investigate every single program and product submitted to them. Traffic exchange owners do not have the resources to determine which practices are legal where in the world. Traffic exchanges are advertising venues, not filters.

Traffic exchange owners agreed as a whole to ban investment auto surfs because we watched one suck in thousands of members, take their money, then collapse and disappear. We could not, in good conscience, let that happen again if we could help it. As for other services and products, we usually go by how “traffic-exchange-friendly” their web sites are. The framebreakers, the Live Agent sites, all the things that interrupt surfing, it’s a no-brainer to kick those web pages out. But something that we might think is a really bad idea, you might think is a golden opportunity.

So what does that mean for traffic exchange members? You, as the CEO of your business, the captain of your life, must do your own due diligence.

When you consider a new opportunity, do some digging. Who is behind the program? What is their track record? Do you have the resources that you need to make a success of the opportunity for you? How does it fit into your overall business? Do you have the time needed to put into using the product? Do you understand how the program works? Is support available? Does the payment structure make sense to you?

Seriously, you don’t really want me to decide what you can and cannot join, do you?

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Gentle Reader;

Social media is now part of every area of life, like it or not. Once the domain of the young, the idle, and the insufficiently modest, it is now a world with which every seasoned professional is expected to be conversant.

But, once entered, this new world can often bewilder. We might find that the words we use and the deeds we accomplish online are misconstrued, our meanings twisted, and our best intentions for naught.

Sense and Sociability is your guide to etiquette and manners on the social web. Let your good breeding shine through as you bravely enter the world of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Navigate the shoals of new technologies with confidence that your dignity and good sense will remain intact. Kindly send in your own delicate inquiries at sense@hubspot.com.
 
And call me Miss Jane.

Dear Miss Jane,

A reader posted a snarky comment on my blog.  I want to respond pleasantly and non-combatively, maintaining my stance while acknowledging his/her point of view.  I don’t want it to escalate, but I also don’t want to ignore something that might add value to the conversation.  What should I do?

–KK, Austin, TX

KK,
 
You should respond to the snarky commenter on your blog. The comment section of your blog is there to encourage discussion, and not all discussion will be to the author’s liking, alas.  Nor do all commenters fully understand how to modulate their tone when dissenting with a blog post’s point of view. You can set a better example by responding in a moderate, respectful tone to your reader. If they respond with increased bile and a continued lack of command of their “inside voice,” you should feel free to ignore them.
 
If this is a regular occurrence, consider posting a blanket comment policy on your business blog. A simple, sensible declaration in the sidebar that your reserve your right to moderate comments that are abusive, defamatory, or rude will alert readers to the behavior you expect from them. Some bloggers stipulate that commenters say nothing they wouldn’t say in front of their mothers, which seems sensible to this writer.
 

Dear Miss Jane,

An old friend from high school recently “discovered” Facebook and is now busily scanning in and posting old pictures of our gang on Facebook — and tagging them with our names! What should I do? 

–MA, West Barnstable, MA

Facebook privacy controls are a vast and ever-changing landscape. You can control who sees images that have been tagged with your name in your permissions control panel, limiting it to only friends, only certain lists of friends, or restrict access to only yourself.  However, recall that anyone who is friends of the person who tagged you might be able to see those pictures, and your associated name.
 
If the pictures are not ones that you enjoy having associated with your good name – for whatever reason – you are well within your rights to remove the tag. Simply view the image and click on the link in the caption that reads “remove tag.”  You might then send a message to the person who tagged you, explaining your action. Explain that you maintain a broad network of friends on Facebook, some personal, some professional, and you strive to maintain an image that fits you across both social spheres. Images of your 15-year-old self in a Duran Duran tour shirt and little else are best left in the shoebox.

Sense and Sociability is written by Beth Dunn, a member of the Inbound Marketing Consultant team at HubSpot. Beth also blogs at www.bethdunn.org.

Image by Jim Hill.

Submit your own questions to Sense and Sociability at sense@hubspot.com.

Video: How to Use Social Media to Manage Your Company Brand Online

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Posted by jennita

SMX West 2010 kicked off with quite a bang (or was that a yell?). Since Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer was the keynote, people arrived early to ensure good seats. The music playing before it started was amazing, it helped to create an excitement in the room that I really had never felt before a keynote before. I had attempted to save a seat for someone up front, but there was just too much demand and had to give it up. That’s the sort of thing that happens at a great concert, not a conference keynote.

There were quite a few live blogs of the event, but I had a few favorites from the interview that I wanted to call out.

1. He made it very clear that Microsoft is focused on the big picture and not just immediate goals. He spoke about continuing to move forward with a positive momentum and a differentiated point of view.
2. When the question came up of "Can you be #1 in the U.S.?" he essentially said "YES!" [and yes he said it with that exclamation] However he made it clear that it was a tricky question. If you say yes, you sound arrogant but if you say no you sound unsure of yourself. You don’t do things to come in second!
3. Danny asked "Is Yahoo! going to survive as a search player? You want to beat them aren’t you just going to kill them?" Ballmer could really only answer one way "No." He stated that they wanted Yahoo! to do a good job, that there was lots of flexibility written into their contract and there was advantage to having the power of 2 as opposed to the power of 1.
4. When asked whether he was going to get on Twitter he said "I’m more of a webpage than a bunch of short tweets." But then acknowledged that he did have a stealth Twitter account however only the people in his neighborhood followed him.
5. His favorite thing on Bing are the Bing maps. [completely agree here... the maps are amazing!]
6. What he thinks is the biggest opportunity in search: to "Help people get done what they’re trying to get done."
7. Oh! And he gave us all his personal email account. You’ll have to watch the video to get that though.

All in all it was quite enjoyable to watch, although I was a bit unprepared (although perhaps I shouldn’t have been) for the yelling. Ok, I don’t think in his mind he was yelling, he was just talking VERY LOUDLY. But sitting right up front, I think we all sat back in our chairs a bit when he got excited and started to get louder. You can see the full video of the keynote below.

Google’s Personalized Search Revolution

Now that personalization has become an opt-out rather than an opt-in, I was really interested in what this session had to offer. The only speaker, Brian Horling who works in Personalized Search at Google, first gave a very informative presentation, then fielded quite a few questions from the audience. I really enjoyed having just one speaker who was focused on the topic at hand. The top takeaways that I got were some of the differences between a logged out user who gets personalized search versus a logged in user. Let me break it down a bit.

First of all, both types of users are thought of as two different identities to Google. Let’s say you’re logged in, and then log out, they don’t view you as the same logged in person. At that point they do look at the cookies set on your computer which tell gives them information on what you’ve searched for previously, which results you’ve clicked on, etc. For signed in accounts, your web history is saved indefinitely, but your non-logged in identity is only saved for 180 days.

Every user using search has the potential of seeing personalized search in some way whether it’s geo-location, web history, social search, etc. Personalization occurs about 1 in 5 queries for a user and the changes tend to be restricted to only a few results.

How can you control the personalization of your searches?

• Use search details
• Disable it by appending &pws=0 on searchs (you can find the bookmarklet to do that here)
• Edit or disable your web history

If you haven’t looked at the "view customizations" link I highlight above before, you should definitely check it out. Pretty interesting what’s going on there.

One thing that came up in this session was how do you explain to a client that the results they’re seeing aren’t the same as what everyone else sees. Although in some cases that would probably be a good thing since they’re seeing better rankings since they search and click on their sites more often than the average user.

How do you feel about personalized search? After this presentation I found that I was much more open to the idea than I was previously. I think because I felt like I finally understood a bit better where the data was coming from and how to turn it off. But what about you?

And so on…

The other session I really loved was "Supercharging Your Descriptions With Sitelinks" but as I was putting this post together I realized that should really a be a post in and of itself. It was great to hear from a Google rep about how certain sitelinks show up and ways you can enhance your site to ensure proper sitelinks. I have tons of screenshots and examples, so I’ll put them into a full post. Plus I’d really like to get Jerry Dischler (the Google guy) to answer a few of my questions. So watch for that one!

The best swag of the conference goes to Yahoo! for not only giving away these awesome coffee mugs, but for setting up a full-on coffee shop with baristas to make us our much needed lattes!

I really wanted to show the videos from the SMX Ignite as that was one of my favorite parts of the day. But unfortunately the videos aren’t live yet. Here’s a link to where they should be. Maile Ohye’s "DateRank: PageRank for singles" was my personal favorite, although all the speakers were exceptional.

Dana Lookadoo and I interviewed a number of people in sort of a Jay Leno "man on the street" sort of way. We hope to have the interviews up tomorrow.

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