Tweeting For Clicks

Like any other business or marketing tool, Twitter works well only when it’s used properly. But what does that mean? If you’re using it to drive traffic to your site, it means using some simple, specific techniques to improve Twitter’s effectiveness. Overall, the key is to stand out from the crowd. The problem is, Twitter’s greatest attraction can be its greatest flaw – it’s free. So it is flooded with millions upon millions of people, all screaming, “Look at me! Look at me!” With just a couple of simple guidelines though, you can stand out from the crowd. With patience and the right approach, people will not just follow your tweets, but click through when you post a link – and better yet, re-tweet it.

Offer value

Take a look at the screen shots of two Twitter timelines below. Both post links in pretty much every update, but with very different results. The user on the left probably wonders why his/her Twitter marketing efforts aren’t paying off, while on the right, Guy Kawasaki (@GuyKawasaki), with over 200,000 followers, gets thousands of click-throughs every day. The big difference is that the person on the left posts links that are entirely self-serving. In other words, however cleverly disguised, there is little doubt that when you click on one of those links, he/she is getting something out of it. On the other hand, Guy posts links to useful information. Yes, the information lies primarily on his site, so he benefits from your clicks, but he’s not trying to sell you something at every turn. He has set the expectation of his followers that he’s a resource, not a snake oil salesman.

The lesson to learn is that when you have a reputation for helping, people will respond favorably to what you have to offer. That of course is true everywhere, not just Twitter, but with all the scammers and spammers on Twitter, it’s especially applicable. We don’t recommend posting a link every time you post, and when you do, link to a helpful article, funny video, or cool new site more often than you post to what you sell. That way when you do direct followers to your own site, people will gladly click away!

Mix it up

Social Media is all about building relationships. It is a great opportunity for your prospects, readers, and customers to get to know you better. Even online, people do business with people, and even more so with people they like. So regardless of your industry, don’t make your Twitter feed all about business. A combination of personal posts about yourself, posts about your business, informational or general-interest posts, and re-tweets keeps your feed interesting and therefore worth following. Pam Moore (@PamMktgNut) with FruitZoom, Inc., a Florida-based marketing and Social Media consulting firm, does a great job of this. Her last 24 hours of posts, as of the time of this writing, included a link to a poll she created using PollDaddy, a few re-tweets, some @-replies, a link to a useful Social Media guide (on a site other than hers), a link to a blog post on her company’s site, and a post that she accidentally left her Blackberry at home today. Her 15,000+ followers know Pam’s feed is going to offer a variety of usefulness, entertainment, and personalization. So when she posts that link to her own site, her followers gladly click through.

Using Twitter effectively is part art and part science, and it takes time and patience to perfect it, but if your aim is to drive traffic to your site, we hope these tips will help. If you’ve got other advice, join in the conversation by leaving a comment below. We’d love to hear what’s worked well for you!

Understand Your Traffic Streams

If there is one thing that we would like you to take away from this blog post, it is that you cannot use generalizations when it comes to tracking and testing your marketing efforts. You really need to understand where your traffic streams are coming from and micromanage each stream, effectively, if you want to make an overall improvement in your performance. It makes little sense to try and establish averages over a number of different initiatives, just so that you can see how you are doing in overall terms.

We always seem under pressure to come up with statistics, to show that we are being productive with our time or initiatives or to prove that the money truly is “well spent.” The truth is that any analytics program worth its salt will enable you to drill down and really analyze every single visitor.

If you favor Google Analytics, you may have one of those plug-ins added to your blog to show you how you are doing through a summarized form, complete with miniature graph over the last 30 days. You will see your average “bounce rate,” and this may send you running for the hills, but after all what use are these figures by themselves?

The whole purpose of tracking and testing is to make changes. For sure, you could be the smartest marketer in creation or just plain lucky, find that your promotional and advertising methods work right out of the box and you need to do little to modify. We all know marketing a business is about trial and error and even the most educated and successful among us make mistakes and need to make changes. Be prepared to understand that you need to track each initiative before you put it in place, associate results with that particular track and you must be able to differentiate those results from any other concurrent initiative.

It is important to develop separate landing pages and associated anchor text, crucial reference points to enable you to quickly see where consummated sales originate. Remember also that a good proportion of visitors to your site will be poorly qualified and these will certainly help to skew your conversion rates.

If you are lucky enough to have a very highly trafficked site and have not taken steps to differentiate your sources, you will find it very difficult to move forward with any confidence. Whatever you may do to try and increase conversion rates in one particular area will be difficult to quantify as your average conversion rate, bounce rate or simple visitor rate will tend to absorb your efforts.

If you have not set up a trackable, definable list of goals and events and your landing pages are insufficiently identified, then it may be time for you to start afresh, redefine your objectives, come up with a plan and a means to track it and set a future date to start understanding and manipulating your traffic streams correctly.

Are all your traffic streams profitable - if not which ones are dragging you down?

Adam Toren

Ask the Right Questions and Get The Most From Google Analytics

Google Analytics is arguably one of the company’s most beneficial tools (and they have many) for Internet marketers. Yet the majority of users hardly scratch the surface when it comes to exploring the true functionality of the tool. It seems that many are just put off by its apparent complexity. This is a great shame as you do not need to be a logistician, data technician or a Google insider to reap great benefits from the information contained therein.

Google Analytics can seem to be quite daunting at first glance, but if you spend an hour or so just surfing around within the site it will start to make sense. Google makes it relatively easy to implement the necessary tracking code on your site and they have a number of question and answer resources available to help you ensure that it is all set up correctly. If you have a number of different sites, it is worth taking time to ensure that you set up your accounts well in the first instance, as this will certainly help you navigate down the road.

Many people seem to struggle to come to terms with what Google Analytics is really trying to tell them. You can get as much information out of this program as you could ever want, but don’t burden yourself with trying to analyze every conceivable area. Rather, focus on what is really important to you.

You can set up a number of goals and events, enabling you to follow what happens according to triggers that you set up on your website or elsewhere. If you have an ad campaign or article marketing campaign you will hopefully have distinct landing pages within your site, enabling you to categorize visitor arrival points. You need to be able to see what happens when visitors arrive at those pages, where they went from there or whether they moved through your shopping cart to your payment pages, for example. If you notice that they do not go anywhere else once they arrive at your landing page, but just leave, a phenomenon also known as a high bounce rate, then you need to consider whether the content of your landing page is truly appropriate to the trigger that sent them there in the first place.

The program will allow you to break down your visitors according to their geographic source, of great interest to you if you are geo-targeting your campaigns. You can see which keywords are being used most by visitors who arrive at your site, enabling you to create marketing campaigns accordingly.

Google Analytics should be your friend and not something to be scared of. You owe it to yourself to educate and use this remarkable and free intelligence to your benefit.

How do you get the most from Google Analytics?

Adam Toren

Top Hits on Microsoft’s Bing

In order of importance, here are the top Bing trending topics of the year:

1. Michael Jackson
2. Twitter
3. Swine Flu
4. Stock Market
5. Farrah Fawcett
6. Patrick Swayze
7. Cash for Clunkers
8. Jon and Kate Gosselin
9. Billy Mays
10. Jaycee Dugard

No real surprises for the number one, sad news which caused number two pick, Twitter to crash when it broke. It’s not clear whether these results are for the entire year or are just relevant to the Bing search engine, which didn’t essentially arrive until June.

In social media terms, the fact that Twitter was so heavily researched is once again testament to its meteoric rise within our ranks. No mention of Facebook – does this mean that everyone knows and accepts this medium, but is increasingly interested in just what that little blue bird is all about?

It is very interesting to note that Twitter came ahead of swine flu. Of all the terms referenced above, one can imagine a certain element of urgency or panic related to searches for swine flu, as it focused the attention of everyone around the country when it was declared a pandemic. Microsoft has not released its methodology, but we assume that they have correlated billions of longtail search queries to extrapolate these results.

Will 2010 be the year of Twitter? With a much-anticipated commercial platform about to roll out and Bing’s integration of real-time Twitter results now on board, people may finally “get” the micro-blogging platform and move it on to their right arm.

By the way, the number one searched celebrity this year, believe it or not – Perez Hilton.

Are you surprised by this list of Top Hits?

Adam Toren

Four Optimization Truths

Website optimization should be an ongoing process and should be the subject of attention for every webmaster, regardless of the size, authority or age of the site itself. From a business development perspective, optimization is a “must do” activity within the online marketing arena. Feedback and interaction are essential ingredients for any business and without it, it is difficult to change with the times and to grow. For an online initiative, interaction and feedback can be difficult to achieve without making a concerted effort to gather it. As such, even if your site is in the very early stages of development or growth, optimization should be embraced.

Truth number one: you have more to gain that you have to lose. It’s no good assuming that you can just tread water until such time as you might have “more information” to work with, on the assumption that relatively low levels of traffic do not provide you with enough material. With even a relatively small amount of information, you can attribute leads to certain sources or conversions to certain actions and while you might not have the luxury of multiple methods of testing to see whether your assertions may be backed up, you can nevertheless focus on your positive areas as you are feeding new growth and not waste money during your delicate formative times.

Truth number two: you cannot do business unless you optimize, one way or another. Any marketing action of any kind is a process of optimization. Just doing business by placing an ad in a particular format, in a particular place and waiting for results, you have a set strategy. If your traffic levels are really low at this point you still need to record the results of your individual initiatives and develop your ongoing strategy accordingly.

Truth number three: you have plenty of tools to help you at every traffic level. We have advocated before that Google’s Webmaster tools are quality products that every site operator should familiarize him or herself with. The analytics program has a wealth of information, allowing you to drill down to analyze your traffic sources or set up conversion goals. Their optimizer duration calculator allows you to input different scenarios and see how long you could expect to wait before you achieve realistic results, based on your data.

Truth number four: you can always analyze something. If you do not have a significant number of conversions yet for a particular campaign, be aware that you do not have to have an A to Z breadcrumb trail to enable you to make some assumptions about your overall business. You can, for example, take a look at the way that people interact with your site, the pages that they jump to, your entry pages, whether they are getting to a particular page during a checkout process and then bailing out. Just because you do not have a cash conversion does not mean that you cannot make any changes to your site infrastructure or its logistics to better prepare for those converting days ahead.

What Optimization Truths have you discovered?

Matthew Toren

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