Jan 25
Jan 08
Chitika Insights has covered the heavily publicized launch of Google+ amidst a variety of reported statistics, some which stated that Google+ hosted a user base comprised of over 40 Million people, others which described the fledgling social network as nothing more than a ghost town. Initially, traffic on Google+ saw a rapid rate of growth, [...]
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Jan 06
When you are looking to build links and drive traffic, one of the time tested methods that continues to work is creating “how to” style posts. In this article, we’ll look at some examples and discuss how to get the most out of the tactic, how to take advantage of seasonal search/traffic volume, and some potential trouble spots to watch out for.
From the earliest days of the internet, people have turned to search engines to find information and to solve problems. When you create “how to” posts, you fill this “information vacuum.” If your posts are good, interesting, funny, informative or otherwise noteworthy, you will be rewarded with links and/or Facebook likes, Twitter mentions or other social signals. While you will have to do a little promotion to “prime the pump” and start the sharing and exposure, people will share it on their own if your piece is good enough.
But enough theory. Let’s look at some “how to” examples. First up is from the Huffington Post: “How to Tell When Chocolate Goes Bad”
How to tell When Chocolate Goes Bad
We’ve all picked up the old Valentine’s, Halloween, or Christmas chocolate and wondered if it was safe to eat. This post answers that questions and lets you know what that white stuff on an old piece of chocolate really is. This post could have been improved with some picture examples, but it’s fine as it stands. This kind of post would work in a food-related website, gift-related website, or mom/family website.
Next up: “How to Tile a Bathroom”
How to Tile a Bathroom
Tiling a bathroom is project that requires some skill, but it is within the reach of most DIY weekend warriors with some technical abilities. It’s also something that’s highly bookmark-able and shareable if it’s easy to understand. This type of content would work on DIY sites, home repair websites, building material websites, or tile stores. That article had good picture use. Adding a video or two could help, but it’s something that could be done down the road.
The previous two “how to” articles are examples of evergreen content (ie content that doesn’t need to change or be updated often). Next, I’d like to take a look at “how to” posts that will change over time. Take a look at “[How to setup a wireless network]“.
If you look at the SERP you’ll see three of the results don’t have a date and one post that does–and it’s an old date, in this case 2003. If I’m looking to solve a computer problem, I probably don’t want information from 2003; I want something from within the last 12-18 months (for more information on how Google determines page dates, see How Google is Reverse Engineering Page Dates). If you are writing a “how to” post and it has a limited shelf life, having a dated post isn’t a bad thing (ie how to format a Windows XP hard drive). However, in most cases, you will want your “how to” posts to rank for longer periods of time, so either don’t show the date on the page or update the information and update the publication date. If you choose to update the post, use a living URL implementation to preserve your existing links and social proof.
Unless you are running a news website, it’s very likely that there are plenty of opportunities to take advantage of “how to” posts. If you run an eCommerce website, you should start with your most popular products and create “how to” guides for each of them. If you think you are going to have a large library of “how to” posts, you may want to put them in specific directory. I’d also suggest using a slightly less commercial template: people tend to link and share posts that don’t look overly commercial more often. I’d also avoid numbers in your URLs to avoid the problem of search engines mis-interpreting dates. Doing so also doesn’t box you into an editorial mismatch if you change numbers/steps in the future. I’d also look for ways to maximize seasonal search volume by updating your seasonal content. For example, a “how to” post on carving a turkey will get more traction, links, and traffic if you publish it in the beginning of November instead of the middle of March. Lastly, try to phrase your “how to” posts to match the queries users are actually typing into a search engine. For example “How to Save Some Sheckels When Getting Hitched” is not going to drive the same amount of traffic as “How to Save Money When You Are Planning a Wedding.”
So what are the takeaways from this post:
- Look to create “how to” posts for your most popular products or search terms
- Use natural language that matches what consumers will use
- Be careful of dates on evergreen posts
- Decide if archiving old information or updating them with living URLs is better for your situation
- Avoid using numbers and dates in URLs
- Time your posts/updates to tie in with peak search volume or interest
- Have a separate template for informational posts to increase linking and sharing
photo credit: Shutterstock/Dmitry Suzdalev
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Building Links & Driving Traffic with How To Posts
Dec 16
Last week I was digging around in my Google Analytics stats and drilling down to look particularly at sources of traffic to my photography tips site.
I noticed a new source of readers that has been creeping up in terms of how much traffic it sends. Here’s the chart from the last few months.
It started as a trickle, but as you can see, in the last month there have been days on which traffic from this source has spiked up to over 2000 unique visitors. Even on an average day we’re up over 1000.
While it’s not the biggest source of traffic to the site by any means, it was a bit of a surprise and made me realize that I’ve not been as diligent in checking referral traffic sources as I once was.
Referrers are key
Before I reveal the source I want to emphasize my point: keep a watch on your referral stats. The source of this traffic doesn’t really relate to many of you who are operating in different niches, but the principle does. Be diligent in watching where traffic is coming from because there are almost always ways of growing traffic from these unexpected sources.
- If the source is another blog, you can build the relationship with the other blogger.
- If the source is a social network, you can get more active in that network, consider putting sharing buttons on your site, and educate your current readers about how to use it.
- If the source is a search engine, you can look at what you’re doing right on that post SEO-wise and try to replicate it. You can also tweak the posts getting the traffic to make them rank even higher.
- Whatever the source, you can look at the content that’s working out and produce more of it.
There are any number of ways of exponentially increasing growing sources of traffic, but if you don’t know about them, you will never be able to take action!
So what was the source of the traffic?
I know some of you skipped down here without reading the above section. You really should go back and read over it … but I’ll tell you now if you promise you will!
The traffic is coming from Pinterest.
Pinterest is a growing social bookmarking/network site (they call themselves a Virtual Pin Board) that is particularly popular in some niches like home decoration, weddings, craft, fashion, food, and more.
The traffic has literally arrived without me doing anything at all. I didn’t have an active account on Pinterest until the last week or so when I set up an account (connect with me here). I haven’t promoted the site there, or used their buttons (until this last week when I put it on a few of our hotter articles). The growth has been purely organic. I guess photography is one of those niches that Pinterest users are interested in!
Since finding out about Pinterest I’ve begun to participate there a little more myself, and have added a few share buttons to some pages that have been doing well for us. I’m taking my time as I don’t want to do anything spammy, but even since I’ve known about it and participated on this low level, I’ve seen traffic rise from a spike of 2000 or so visits in a day to over 3000—lucky I checked my stats!
As I say, this isn’t about Pinterest (although I’m sure some of you will find it fun and useful)—it’s about being diligent about your metrics, always being on the lookout for what’s growing, and working out how you can position yourself to be able to leverage that.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
How I Overlooked a 1000 Visitor a Day Source of Traffic [And What I Did to Grow it to 3000 Visits a Day]
Tags: 1000, 3000, grow, Overlooked, source, Traffic, Visitor, visits
Oct 28
Yesterday I wrote a post titled Introduction to Autoresponders. It recommended them as a tool that bloggers should consider as a means of driving traffic, deepening reader engagement, and increasing profits. I also showed how to set up an autoresponder sequence of emails in just a few easy steps using Aweber’s service.
Today I want to suggest a number of practical strategies for actually using autoresponders alongside your blog.
Some of these I’ve used with success myself, and some are based upon the experience of other blogging friends. It should also be said that you could combine some of the following ideas into a single autoresponder sequence (more on this below).
1. Free mini-course
Set up a sequence of emails that walks readers through the teaching around some aspect of your niche. This is what I did when developing an early version of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog.
Back then 31DBBB wasn’t an ebook—it was a series of 31 emails that readers signed up for. Each day, readers received an email with some teaching and a task to do. This later evolved into the ebook with extra content.
2. Paid course or product
Numerous bloggers have set up autoresponders as central parts of paid products or courses. One of the best examples of this is Chris Guillebeau’s 365-part autoresponder, which forms part of a product. Chris’s product took a mammoth amount of work, but was hugely successful with those who bought it, and as a result, it would have been a very profitable endeavor.
3. Introduce readers to your archives
One of the challenges that many bloggers face is that new readers to your blog don’t ever see your old posts sitting in your archives. So why not showcase the best of your older posts by putting them together into an autoresponder sequence? Perhaps you could send one “classic” post per week. In doing so, you’ll be constantly driving readers to your archives for as long as new people keep signing up.
Another alternative is to do a compilation email on a particular theme. For example, on our photography blog autoresponder, one email that goes out in our sequence lists ten posts from our archives all on the theme of composition. It shoots readers deep into the site, and we often get emails from readers thanking us for it.
4. Affiliate promotions
Is there a product in your niche that you highly recommend your readers buy, and which has an affiliate program attached to it? You can easily add an affiliate promotion into your auto responder sequence. I recently put such a promotion into my photography blog’s autoresponder, and it has already driven thousands of dollars in sales (and will continue to do so). You can read about this concept more here.
5. Relaunch your own product every day
For those of you who have an ebook or some other kind of product that you’ve previously launched, building a mini-promotion of that product into an autoresponder sequence is a must. In our photography email list, we give new subscribers a discount on our portrait photography ebook 7 days after they join the list. That offer drives sales every single day.
6. Upselling
This is another one for those with your own products to sell. The idea is that when someone buys one of your products, you then follow up the purchase with an offer for a second product.The second product could be another of yours, or it could be an affiliate promotion.
For example, when people buy our travel photography ebook, they get an email a couple of weeks later with a discount offer on another travel photography ebook by the same author. The ebooks make good companions, the author is now familiar to readers, and as a result, these emails convert pretty well.
7. Showcase what you do
If you have an offline business that you’re promoting, use your an autoresponder sequence to showcase what you do. I know of one photographer who has a sequence of emails that goes to all clients (and potential clients that he meets to give quotes to). This sequence simply sends out an email every month with a couple of photos from another client shoot, and the story behind it. In sending these emails, he’s showing off the photography he does and positioning himself as a known photographer for them time when those who receive the emails are next looking to hire someone.
8. Tips
Another offline business that I heard of recently who uses an auto responder sequence is a butcher who collects email addresses from customers with the promise of sending them recipes for the meat that they’re buying. He gets their permission to email them and at the end of every day he sends each person that he sold meat to a recipe for the meat that they bought (he has a range of recipes for the different meats and tailors this first email to customers’ purchases).
Once the first email is sent the customer gets weekly emails (via an auto responder) for other recipes and tips for cooking with meat.
The butcher reported a sharp upswing in repeat business from the strategy—again, he was putting his name out there in front of people through his emails, building his brand, deepening personal relationships, and giving those subscribed a reason to keep coming back to him.
Multiple autoresponders, or one with mixed objectives?
The above array of uses for autoresponders is certainly not an exhaustive list. I’d love to hear how else you use them below.
It is also worth mentioning that some bloggers have multiple autoresponders running at once, while some mix a number of the points I mentioned above into the same autoresponder sequence. Personally, I do a bit of both.
At Digital Photography School I have a number of single-purpose autoresponders running in category #6 (upselling), where if someone buys an ebook they get a followup email/s with further recommendations.
However, my main autoresponder sequence on dPS is a real mix of the above, plus it also mixes in weekly newsletters, which are sent manually each week in addition to the automated emails. The sequence looks like this:
I’ve written more on how I combine a mix of weekly newsletters and autoresponders here.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
8 Ways to Use Autoresponders to Drive Traffic and Increase Your Blogging Income
Tags: Autoresponders, Blogging, Drive, Income, Increase, Traffic, Ways
Oct 27
A HighRankings Forum thread has an interesting post by a person who has a site that wants more traffic.
He made one statement that stood out to me, actually a few, but one more than others…
Oct 17
Just because you build it doesn’t mean they will come. Actually, they probably won’t come.
In addition to creating a quality site, you also have to dedicate time to driving traffic from a variety of sources.
In chapter seven of Extra Money Answer, my free online book for getting started as an affiliate, I go through my eleven key sources for driving traffic to affiliate sites.
- Site Scrapers and Syndicators
- NetworkedBlogs on Facebook
- Twitter Tools
- AWeber RSS to Email
- YouTube Descriptions
- Meetup.com Perks
- LinkedIn Applications
- Paper.li
- Flickr Links
- StumbleUpon
- Podcasting
- Facebook Ads
These are in no particular order, and I didn’t include organic traffic from Google, Yahoo, etc., as I would encourage you to focus on creating quality content, and the search engines will find you.
If you’re new to affiliate marketing, learn how to make money onlinestep-by-step with Extra Money Answer.
Oct 15
Over the past few days there has been a lot of buzz surrounding the coverage of Google+, particularly focusing on the measured 60% downward trend seen in the site’s traffic as reported by Chitika Insights. In further investigation of this matter, Chitika researched traffic patterns of the social network to determine whether the downward trend witnessed was a short term fluctuation as some proposed, or just the start of a longer term trend.
The data revealed that the trend seems to be continuing. Although Google+ saw a brief uptick in the sites traffic after it went public, Chitika Insights reported a prolonged and sustained downward trend in overall activity coming from the site. The new data reveals an even sharper drop in traffic from its peak of 70%.
This prolonged downhill trend is potentially impacted by the following reasons:
- Google may have focused too much on building a social network that would be able to compete with Facebook, rather than innovating and developing one which could outperform it.
- By failing to provide developers with an API, which would support a network of useful services for their users, Google created a hurdle for themselves as they continue to be out-developed by Facebook.
- Facebook also contributed to limiting the success of Google+ in taking precautionary measures to corral their users and prevent them from switching to the new social network. This effectively restricted users ease of transition and Google+’s ability to expand.
Over the next several months, pay close attention to Google+ as it makes its attempt to claw its way up through the ranks of social networks. If Google is able to implement a platform which supports the development of a network of services which promotes user activity and accessibility, they may be successful in reversing this downward trend. Or, perhaps not — but only time will tell . . .
If you are interested in how these figures were acquired, the methodology was posted in this recent Chitika Insights post.
Follow SEJ on Twitter @sejournal
Tags: Continues, Downward Trend, Google, Quick, Traffic
Oct 11
At the iPhone 4S launch last week Apple CEO Tim Cook projected a slide that showed Apple dominating Android in terms of mobile Internet usage. Upon seeing that slide, people tweeted remarks like: “Where is he getting his numbers?” Indeed, they seemed made up given Android’s surge over the past six…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Tags: @gsterling, Android, Apple’s, Market, more, Sends, Share, Traffic
Sep 27
Posted by Benjamin Estes
Recently I had a client who (generally for the enlightenment of their executive branch) wanted traffic information reported in an easy-to-digest format. The idea was that while they had consistently used Google Analytics for some time, there were people in the company who had an interest in knowing certain traffic data, but were too far from the day-to-day running of the website to be spending a lot of time sifting through Analytics reports.
Enter the Dashboard.
It sounded like the perfect solution: a screen full of nice, big numbers! Lines going up and to the right! Charting all the things!
But lo! my dream was short-lived. There were so many solutions to choose from, and each had different integrated services and custom data reporting methods. Most of them were explained quite well through documentation, but it was all so time consuming. I would have to trial services, only to determine one-by-one that they were somehow not a match for the client’s needs. So here I am to save you some time by letting you know some of the pros and cons of various services, as some insights I had along the way. There is probably a service out there that’s right for you, but it may or may not be the first one you look at.
I should point out that my concern here is with monitoring organic traffic data specifically. There are many services apart from those listed here which excel at reporting ranking data, and of course some services which walk a line between the two. There are several services which revolve primarily around ranking data instead of traffic, such as Authority Labs and Conductor Searchlight; I can say from experience that these are both great products (NB: Searchlight does provide Analytics integration but I’m not personally familiar with that aspect of their service). With services that revolve around tightly-integrated analytics data, the pain point is usually getting actual lists of keywords sending traffic reported back to you.
Google Analytics
For monitoring organic traffic data, my instinct is always to go straight to the source. For most of us, that means Google Analytics.
And indeed Google Analytics has built in dashboard functionality. The crucial factor which favors Analytics is that, unlike other solutions I have assessed there is no need to depend on a service providers integration of the Analytics API or to have your own dev team spend time building out a custom solution. I mentioned above that some solutions have problems reporting keywords sending traffic; obviously Analytics is not among these, because its dashboard will report just about anything you care to know. Breakdowns by country, for instance, are quite easy to set up in Analytics but are hard to come by outside of the proper Analytics interface.
If all you want is traffic data, you really can’t go wrong with sticking to Analytics. The only management issue I’ve run into is that you can’t share dashboards across user accounts at the moment. On the other hand this is a very robust service; there is never a concern about about whether or not a certain report can be integrated into your dashboard. All available traffic information is at your fingertips.
Plus, Analytics is free as in beer, which is the best kind of free.
PRO: It’s got all the traffic information EVER. CON: No other SEO related info…
SEOmoz PRO Campaigns
Disclaimer: This is being written on SEOmoz’s blog (duh). I don’t work for the ‘moz, but you could say we’re buds. Regardless, I promise the following represents only my own opinion.
Hopefully you’re all familiar with SEOmoz’s toolset. I’m usually using SEOmoz’s campaign tool anyway for clients, so it isn’t much of a stretch to start using their Analytics integration to look at traffic data.
The three metrics that SEOmoz’s Analytics integration reports are the three that I find myself lost without: Organic Visits, Number of Organic Landing Pages, Number of Organic Keywords. It’s a sparse set of metrics to be sure, but in my time at Distilled these metrics have been the three that we always return to and those that we most commonly report to clients as an indication of a site’s health.
If I wanted to share this information directly it might be awkward, but if I was advising the client on setting up their own monitoring solution I think that this would work out fairly neatly. And of course, there are any number of other benefits to using SEOmoz’s campaign tool (competitive analysis, rank tracking, etc.) but that’s a bit beyond what I’m looking at here. No custom data reporting like StatsMix and Geckoboard (below), but then again those services don’t hold a candle to SEOmoz in terms of ease-of-use and built-in analysis.
PRO: Super-relevant traffic data, awesome supplementary metrics. CON: No customization, no keyword specific Analytics integration.
StatsMix
StatsMix has the capacity to store data over time that you submit to it, which is unique amongst all of the dashboard solutions. This can be easily accomplished in any number of contexts; the service provides examples in various programming languages, but all that you need to do ultimately is make a POST request to their servers with the information you want to submit. It will be stored in a table that is even manually editable through the web interface.
This obviously requires a certain amount of dev commitment, but it really is pretty neat, and it allows you to do things that no other dashboard service does. External and internal metrics can be brought together. But the Analytics integration that your team would have to do to monitor organic search related metrics is non-trivial, so unless your company is going all the way, this service might be a little too much for SEO-related monitoring. Also, all metrics must be "number-over-time" in nature, so no keyword-based metrics!
I can also say that I’ve talked to the StatsMix support team and they’ve been exceedingly helpful in helping me with any questions I might have.
PRO: Awesome customization possibilities. CON: No intrinsically relevant SEO widgets, everything must be built ground-up. Metrics must fit number-over-time format.
Geckoboard
Unlike StatsMix, Geckoboard does not have the capacity to store your data over time; custom information that it retrieves from your data sources must be presented exactly how you want the information to be displayed. There are many built-in widgets that are very handy, including server monitoring and Analytics widgets, but some of the defaults are a wee bit underpowered when it comes to customization
I think Geckoboard’s strength lies in its powerful custom widgets. As I said, these require you to either locate or more likely build an API to deliver data. Distilled has done this internally and has been very pleased with the results. One consequence of this extensibility is that with the proper Analytics integration in your infrastructure it would be possible to report a list of top organic keywords or similar data, which is impossible with, for instance, StatsMix.
PRO: Great customizability in its own way, cool built-in widget set. CON: Not necessarily SEO monitoring friendly. Needs a custom API on user’s end to explore full potential.
GinzaMetrics
GinzaMetrics seems to strike a fairly good balance between keyword tracking and traffic assessment. There is definitely some cool stuff going on with funnel monitoring, especially as you can filter the data by tracked keywords. Ultimately I find that the data provided by the service is somewhat less useful than SEOmoz’s. GinzaMetrics’ graphs present a lot of information, but it isn’t necessarily actionable or diagnostic in the format in which it is presented. I mean, there are some freaky graphs you can find in here. They would give me data-nightmares, but I can see that they might turn some data-folk on.
I do appreciate that GinzaMetrics pulls in Analytics data for tracked keywords, but as I’ve been consistently lamenting throughout this post, I wish it were the other way around; that the service would discover keywords based on the traffic they were sending your site. Overall a good service, definitely SEO-centric without much customization outside of that.
PRO: Pretty OK mix of keyword tracking and analytics. CON: OMG numbers everywhere.
NB: After publishing this Ginzametrics brought to my attention that their service does provide for keyword discovery. Might be worth chatting with them if this is on your radar.
Closing Thoughts
I’m not going to declare a winner. I’m using one solution for a client today, and when another client comes along with their own needs, I’ll use one appropriate for them. But digging through the many alternatives and learning what is possible really helps me be flexible to respond to these requests when they are made.
I’ve mentioned that some of these services benefit from a certain level of customization. For anyone interested in building an "API" or automated tool to push data to a dashboard, I highly recommend brushing up on your Python skills and checking out Google App Engine or a Django-based solution (they function very similarly). App Engine probably isn’t the most secure solution, but it’s dead easy and ridiculously fast, as Will Critchlow demonstrated in his brilliant post on automated link building tools (which I inevitably cite in every blog post I publish).
This is hardly a comprehensive, just my meditations on the services I’ve run into. So, any of y’all have your own methods or tools? Dashboards? Generated reports? Let’s hear about it ‘em!
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Tags: Automated, Challenges, Reporting, Traffic
