Just back from Loral Langemeier’s Alumni conference in San Diego. While not specifically focused on internet marketing, there were several internet marketing sessions there, including a panel that included Geoff Zimpfer from Infusionsoft. Infusionsoft if you are not aware of it, is the uber online customer management system. It’s a CRM (customer relationship management), EMail Marketing and eCommerce system all in one. It’s pricey, but a quite a nice system and surprisingly intuitive.
Geoff said something interesting that I wrote down. I think we all can agree that with email marketing it needs to be a balance between providing value and selling. But what’s that balance? Geoff proposes a point system. For each email you send out that delivers value to your audience you get a point. An email that is a sales pitch, you deduct 7 points. So he’s recommending you strike a 7 to 1 balance here.
I think he is right that a balance needs to be struck, however I’m not sure I agree with the math. Why would 5 to 1 be less effective? If you deliver great value and it in general is more frequent than the sales pitches, does the 7 to 1 ratio need to be rigorously adhered to? My suspicion is that he based the comment on statistics that Infusionsoft has available to it, so I don’t think we can dismiss the comment lightly.
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Just got an email from Murray Newlands, who runs a monthly San Francisco Blogging meetup that I go to, announcing the World Media Awards and Event for October 26th. The purpose? To celebrate the best in blogging and media creation as well as to exchange publishing best practices. The event is for bloggers, authors, media creators and PR folks.
It’s not clear exactly where it is yet (mentions both an address in San Jose and San Francisco) but either way I’m planning on going. There will be series of workshops hosted by some of the world’s leading publishing experts.
Murray says that “We are pleased to have eBay as lead sponsors of the event. eBay is keen to support the publishing community.” Other sponsors include Growmap, VigLink and Trancos.
World Media Award judges include Steve Hall, Sarah Austin, Chang Kim, Pierre Zarokian, Cheryl Contee, Krystyl Baldwin, Adrian Harris, Jeremy Wright, Rob Bloggeries, Dave Duarte, Tanya Alvarez and Dana Oshiro
Media partners include Adrants, The Affiliate Marketing Awards, Read Write Web, mediavisioninteractive.com and Bloggeries.
Tickets to attend the event go on sale today for $50 and entries to the Media Awards are $45. The first 100 bloggers to blog about the event will receive a free ticket and/or entry to the awards for posting about the event. Space is limited to 500 attendees. Contact event organizer Murray Newlands for full information or see www.themediaawards.com.
This year I got serious about increasing the traffic to my blog. The result? Over three months I saw traffic double. For the month of June I got 1200 visitors, 1000 of that was organic traffic. Here’s the five things that I did:
- Blogged twice a week. Used to be I would sporadically and inconsistently blog. Knowing that search engines love frequent and unique content. I started blogging twice a week. There have been weeks when it’s been once a week, like recently; but on the whole I’ve kept the discipline. Additionally for most posts I researched the best keywords to use in my page title and URL using the these Google Keyword Tool tips. I found that if I could blog on something relatively new, like my Pagemodo review and avoid “me too” content, those posts did well in traffic.
- Be social To engage in the online community, most posts I tweeted. I also wrote a guest post on Panda that brought in some traffic and even some email signups and of course created a new backlink. Occasionally I would also comment on other blogs. I’m getting more comments and questions on my posts and I would respond to those. It’s great when the interaction gives you ideas for new posts. Special mention should go to Ann Evanston’s Blogger Monday, although that was more of a factor in traffic for me last year than this year. Who says no follow links from guest blog commenting don’t matter?
- More linkbuilding. I submitted my blog to several Blog Directories.
- Addressed duplicate content Google had more than 100 of my tag pages indexed, which was diffusing my good unique content with duplicate low value pages. So I noindexed my tag pages.
- Improved bounce rate User engagement with your website is now a signal the search engines pay attention to. My blog had a high bounce rate (84% for the first three months of the year). So I installed two plugins: Yet Another Related Posts and Random Posts which suggest other posts a visitor might want to read. I also added a few nav bar items. My bounce rate is still high, but has come down to 73% for the last 30 days.
GAME OVER
Perhaps I was just plain stupid in deciding to advertise via my Clickbank affiliate link. I had heard that most affiliates had abandoned Google PPC due to the strict quality guidelines and that it was very hard to get an ad approved. But I didn’t have a suitable landing page to advertise. And for my learning purposes, if none of my ads were approved I could live with that. Just the exercise in setting up a campaign would be useful. Apparently this was a fatal mistake.
We’ve all been told that only followed links matter for the SEO of your website. As the conventional wisdom goes, links tagged with the nofollow tag prevents page rank from flowing to the target website and doesn’t help that website to rank better in the organic search engine listings.
Or does it?
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The All in One SEO WordPress plugin is a very popular plugin. Many install it so that they have the ability to customize their post’s page title. This is very useful to do from the SEO perspective. Your post title should be written for your reader and be catchy, your page title for your post should be more oriented towards keywords.
But the plugin has other settings that require attention. Out of the box the plugin configuration will noindex your category pages but not your tag pages. This isn’t necessarily what you want and I’ve had to fix a couple of blogs that had the default settings.
I wasn’t looking to implement a way for people to Like my posts. That’s already there, although I need to make it more visible. What Like usually means is that a link to the post is posted to your wall and shared with your Facebook friends. Some websites have also made it so that clicking on Like means that you are actually “Liking” their fan page. On the one hand this is what I wanted as feature, but on the other hand I think using the Like button for this can be misleading, as you might be thinking you are Liking an article but are actually Liking the fan page which is unfortunately not straightforward to undo. So I was looking for a similar concept but wanted it to be clear to the user what was happening.
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I’ve been working with Eric Enge on his interview series. The topics vary, but he has recently interviewed a number of SEO industry thought leaders including Rand Fishkin and Bill Slawski on the February Google algorithm change known as Panda. The interviews are lengthy reading but full of interesting insights into what Panda actually was and how it might shape our online activities now and in the future.
Bill Slawski, who writes the frequently referenced SEO by the Sea blog, gleans insights on what the search engines might be up to by studying the whitepapers and patents published by Google’s and Microsoft’s engineers. In the interview, he theorizes that “Panda may be a filter … where some web sites are promoted and other web sites are demoted based upon some type of quality signal score” that was placed on top of the existing algorithm.
Rand Fishkin, co-founder of seomoz.org, thinks this quality score was based on work done by human quality raters, and “in combination with machine learning algorithms, Google is using the aggregated opinions to filter and reorder the results for a better user experience”.
At this point, some of you might be putting your hands up and saying “umm, translation please”.
