REAL BLOGGING TIPS (RBT RSS)

Technorati Tags: Fact, Fiction, First, google, Page, Rankings

During the few years I was running CrankyAds, an advertising management tool for bloggers, I spent quite a bit of time researching the online advertising space.

One of my primary goals for this research was to find a way to deal with two issues -

1. Banner advertising sucks, and…
2. There has to be a better way of doing online

… Read the rest of this entry »

The post Why Facebook Might Beat Google At The Online Advertising Game appeared first on Entrepreneurs-Journey.com.

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

Technorati Tags: advertising, Beat, Facebook, Game, google, Might, online

“How do you motivate yourself to grow your blog traffic from day to day?”

We’ve covered a whole heap of techniques for growing the amount of traffic you attract to your blog in our Blog Promotion category (also check out this ‘how to find readers page‘ and listen to my recent finding reader webinar) but one thing that has helped me on the ‘motivation’ front lately is the report below in Google Analytics (click to enlarge).

What you’re looking at is the traffic so far today (the blue line) on Digital Photography School compared to the traffic on the site one week ago (the orange line) – arranged by the hour.

I’ll tell you how to get this report below but first, the reason I love this report is that it tells me whether I’m on track to get as much traffic to my site today as I had this time last week.

Having something to compare traffic keeps me motivated to better the previous week’s result.

Note: I always choose to compare traffic from exactly 1 week previous because on our site we see quite distinct rises and falls in traffic on different days of the week.

In the chart above you can see the day’s traffic started well, with the first 4 hours between 1.7% and 18.1% higher than the previous week.

This all happened while I was asleep so when I checked in at 9am I was pleased! However, I also saw that from 6am-8am that we were beginning to slip behind.

Knowing this gave me a little bit of motivation to find some ways to drive more traffic to the site today.

I took a look at the schedule of Facebook updates that I had planned for the day and decided to move a status update I thought would drive some traffic to be earlier in the day.

That status update went live at 9am and resulted in a nice bump in traffic to get the blue line trending up above the orange again.

I also identified some older posts from my archives that I then scheduled to be tweeted throughout the next 24 hours (based upon my advice from last month to promote old content), which I thought would help us to keep nudging the traffic up higher for the rest of the day.

Having this report open is a great little source of motivation to keep working not only at writing great content but also driving traffic to it.

I also find that having this comparison open during the day (and watching ‘real time’ stats) helps me to spot anomalies in traffic. It helps me to quickly spot if there’s a problem (server issues) or on the flip side it shows me when a post might have been shared on a big blog or social media account.

Knowing this information helps me to react quickly to fix a problem or leverage a traffic event.

UPDATE: here’s how the traffic looked at the end of the day in the comparison view:

Things slipped for the last hour or two but over the full day visitor numbers were up by 4.22%.

While a 4% increase in traffic isn’t the most spectacular result I see it is a small step in a larger race I’m running. I know if I can see even a 1% increase in traffic each week that over a year or longer that it’ll significantly grow the site over time.

How to Get This Report

For those of you new to Google Analytics here’s the easy process to get this report (it will only take you a couple of minutes).

1. Login to your Google Analytics Account

2. In the menu click on the ‘Overview’ link under ‘Audience’

3. By default you’ll be looking at the last months traffic. You want to drill down now to today so in the top right corner click on the date range and a calendar will open up like this:

4. Select today’s date.

5. Check the ‘compare to’ box and then in the new date field that opens up underneath you can put in last weeks date by clicking on the day you want to compare it to. Once you have – click ‘Apply’.

6. You’re almost done now. You should be looking at a report that compares the two days but by default it’ll be showing you the total of the days in the chart as two dots. You want to view this now as ‘hourly’ so hit the ‘hourly’ tab.

You now should be looking at the comparison of today’s traffic with the same day last week (note: your current days report won’t yet be complete unless the day is almost over and it does run an hour behind).

Variations on this report to check out

This comparison tool is really useful for a while heap of reports.

For example you can choose to compare one week with another:

In fact, any period of time can be compared with any other period.

Also, with a date range locked in you can drill down into many other metrics.

For example, earlier today I was doing some analysis comparing this last week with the corresponding week in September, which was just before we did our new redesign on Digital Photography School.

A day by day comparison showed a great improvement in overall traffic.

Drilling down further, and viewing the two weeks by the hour, was also fascinating and showed that the two weeks had remarkably similar patterns in traffic from hour to hour – so the increase in traffic was very even across the week.

Under that chart was some interesting data:

Not only were Visits and Page views well up – but being able to see that bounce rate was slightly down and that average visitor duration was up was encouraging. Seeing Pages Viewed Per Visit was down showed we have an area to improve on (we’re already working on this) and seeing that we had a good rise in ‘new’ visitors was something that should be investigated further.

To investigate the rise in ‘new’ visitors I moved into the ‘Acquisition’ menu on Google analytics. The same date range and comparison is still selected so now I’m able to compare the two periods when it comes to different sources of traffic and see why we’ve had rises in traffic:

It turns out we’ve seen increases in a few area:

Search Traffic is up:

Facebook Traffic is up (due to my recent experiments):

But interestingly Feed traffic is down (giving us something to investigate).

There are many other areas you can drill down into with the comparison tool – almost anything that Google Analytics has a report for you can compare from period to period and get a great overview of how that stat compares very quickly.

Have a go yourself – do some comparisons and let me know what you find in comments below!

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

How I use Google Analytics ‘Compare’ Feature to Motivate Me to Grow My Blog

@ProBlogger

Technorati Tags: ‘Compare’, Analytics, Blog, Feature, google, Grow, Motivate

During the few years I was running CrankyAds, an advertising management tool for bloggers, I spent quite a bit of time researching the online advertising space.

One of my primary goals for this research was to find a way to deal with two issues -

1. Banner advertising sucks, and…
2. There has to be a better way of doing online

… Read the rest of this entry »

The post Why Facebook Might Beat Google At The Online Advertising Game appeared first on Entrepreneurs-Journey.com.

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

Technorati Tags: advertising, Beat, Facebook, Game, google, Might, online

I’ll write more about why we made the shift and how it was different from what we were doing previously, in my … Read the rest of this entry »

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

Technorati Tags: Adsense, CrankyAds, google, Manage

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Real Blogging Tips

Technorati Tags: Away…., Give, google, Invites, Wave

On March 30th, Google announced the release of its latest addition to the search engine, a small button called the +1. As with any Google announcement, there are always going to be implications—both great and not so great—for the average and professional blogger. Understanding the potential effect of Google’s new +1 feature can better help you prepare for the next six to twelve months of your blog.

What is Google’s +1?

In essence, Google’s +1 is a way for people to vote up the results in Google without making it appear like a Digg setup.

In other words, if someone likes the result that they found on Google, they hit the +1 button, then go on with their lives. When someone makes the same search that person made, they’ll see that there’s a +1 attached to the particular search result, and that, at least in Google’s eyes, will encourage them to click on that result.

Should you decide to allow your name to appear, people within your network will see that you, specifically, liked this result. But this last aspect is voluntary.

Why is Google’s +1 important?

For some time now, Google has been talking about how social media and social networking is going to directly tie in with search engine optimization. It used to be that we just built a bunch of links to rank for keywords. But, what I’ve noticed as a SEO is that other aspects are becoming increasingly important, including how a site deals with social media.

We can tie this increased reliance on social media to Google’s quest to provide the absolute best results possible. Here’s an example.

Darren Rowse runs this site about how to make money blogging. He’s got 173,000 readers via RSS, 128,000 Twitter followers, and nearly 23,000 people who like his Facebook group. In other words, he has a ton of readers.

Now, you’re Google and you’re trying to figure out who to position as the top results for the keyword “Professional Blogger.” Sure, someone might have a ton of backlinks, all containing that anchor text, to back up the claim that they deserve the number one result.

But how does Google know that those backlinks are genuine and not, say, purchased? It doesn’t.

The only way for them to truly know if that website is considered an “authority” is to see what people believe. And what better way to do that than track how Darren is doing in the social media and networking world?

The implications of Google’s +1 for bloggers

I look at this update as a powerful move for bloggers. Because we are taught that we shouldn’t put all of our eggs in one basket, we’ve all been focusing on social media, search engine optimization, and other aspects to bring traffic to our blogs.

Now that social media is, in part, connecting to search engine optimization, the amount of work that we do now doubles for both social media growth and search engine growth. But, there is still more to it than that.

Google will be releasing a button similar to the Facebook Like button. And if you click the +1 button, you’ll have automatically given your vote to that search result. You are saying to Google, “Yes, I like this.” And the search engine will remember that.

What this means, as a blogger, is that you need to produce the highest level of quality that you can. If others are getting that +1 and you’re not, are you going to be missing out on potential search rank? I’d say that you are.

If Google believes that it is important enough to create a new button and include it on their SERPs, they are definitely going to take it into consideration when trying to decide which site to put as number one. And, if it’s a difference of +1s that determine who should be first, I’d wager everything that the person with more +1 votes will get the number one ranking.

Since 34% of people click the first result first, and the second to fourth results get less than 34% of the clicks, total, it’s very important to get that number one rank.

How to get ready

Since it was just announced on the 30th, this is obviously a component that will take some time to roll out. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be getting ready for its complete implementation. Here are a few steps to getting prepared.

1. First, ensure that you are publishing content that is high quality. No longer can you get away writing garbage content, or ripping content from other sites. Google’s Panda Update slammed people with this kind of content and no one will give you a +1 for it.
2. Second, play around with it yourself when you start seeing it pop up. If you head over to Google’s experimental page, you can join the experiment and be put into the program to start working with it.
3. Third, don’t start abusing it. One of the things that I think will play a major role in the success of +1 is who’s voting with it. If it’s the same few people, Google might not give those votes as much credit as other pages that get votes from random people. So, don’t start searching for every article you wrote to give it a +1.

Google’s +1 is not a social network, per se. However, it is a voting system that will give Google a better idea of what content people like and don’t like. And, when they release the button for inclusion on your web pages, you’ll have the chance to encourage your readers to +1 your site.

With Google’s love for social media growing, this is definitely an important step in your blog’s growth. How do you see +1 affecting your blog?

Jacob is a 22 year old SEO who works in Manhattan. When not managing SEO for a company, he works on his own network including BlogRevolter.com. He discusses topics such as link building and blog monetization. He is giving away a free ebook on how to get people to your website as well as how to keep them there. Be sure to follow him on Facbook.

Post from: ProBlogger Blog Tips

What is Google +1 … and What Does it Mean for Your Blog?

ProBlogger Blog Tips

Technorati Tags: Blog, google, Mean

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Real Blogging Tips

Technorati Tags: Fact, Fiction, First, google, Page, Rankings

I’m not one of those people who relies solely on search engine optimization to get me to the top of the heap. I am paid to write blogs for clients every week, and they focus on their SEO enough for the both of us.

Positioning has another meaning to me. It’s content-focused and deals only with how my content and expertise is positioned in my audience’s head.

You can’t get those results from a Google or Bing search. You can only get that from positioning yourself, either weakly or strongly. Either way, you’ll learn quickly.

Learning about this “mental positioning” may seem like it has no place in social media strategy. After all, it’s not exactly a social media tool per se. But there’s more to blog marketing than just loading content onto your Facebook and Twitter profiles. If you’re using social media to talk without giving any thought to who is listening, you’re not positioning yourself whatsoever.

What’s your story?

This is what you feel compelled to share, to write a blog about, to speak about, to share with others. What is the best way to communicate that story? Is it social media? (I always suggest yes, it is.) But what about other channels: public speaking, webinars, or teaching what you know to an entire company? Social media works well when you’re presenting ideas and links as teasers to your platform. Social media should point the way to you and your story.

What’s your audience?

Who you’re speaking to has a lot to do with how you will present your message. A lot of the younger generation may not use email, but if you speak to any other generation, you’ll want to use email. If you’re teaching people how to be Luddites and to stick to typewriters out of protest to the wasting of bandwidth whenever someone tweets about Britney Spears, then yes, you can stay off of social media quite easily. How does your audience use social media? What do they look at online? What kind of solutions are they looking for when they come looking for your story?

What’s your influence?

When you are positioned in your audience’s mind, your influence can reach quite far. How far? Your core audience shares you with their core audience, who in turn share you with theirs. Sometimes it’s who you know, but sometimes it’s not. Your goal is to be visible to many, but to attract a chosen few. Sure, we’d all love everyone to pay attention to us, but that’s just not going to happen. Let’s be realistic and focus on the audience we can influence toward our solution and our expertise.

What’s your engagement?

Positioning yourself online is mistakenly viewed as just about Twitter followers and just about retweeting what you find interesting. Successful positioning includes much more. As your story is communicated over and over and over, you’ll learn how to say it differently; you’ll also learn your audience’s lingo. As they interact with you, you’ll learn more from them. Engaging is not getting something or giving something more than the other: it’s about the even exchange, the leverage both parties give to make the other successful. As you learn what your audience wants from you, they learn more about your story and what you can give to them. Both parties benefit.

One last word: Even if you’ve been positioned or have positioned yourself weakly (notice I use the words weak and strong versus right and wrong; I hate for people to view this as being black and white, because the Internet is much more a gray area), it’s never too late to reposition. You can always strengthen your position by going back to these four questions. They are at the core of a strong position.

Let Google change algorithms every hour if they want to! Let Bing see the traffic coming to your site every day! You just keep right on strengthening your position. Have you positioned your blog strongly on social media?

Tricia Lawrence is an author, teacher, and speaker, helping the publishing industry, specifically authors, position their blogs and books to sell. Tricia’s book, The Social Network(s): A Field Guide for Writers will be out on Kindle in March and she’ll appear at several tech and writing conferences in 2011. Sign up for Tricia’s biweekly eZine, Please Write Like You Talk at http://www.realbrilliant.com. Tricia is on Twitter @realbrilliant.

Post from: ProBlogger Blog Tips

Between Google and Bing: Positioning a Blog Using Social Media

ProBlogger Blog Tips

Technorati Tags: Between, Bing, Blog, google, Media, Positioning, Social, Using

Instead of sending the user to a webpage when their phone is already out, you can instead prompt them to give you a call via the ad and allow them to do so with a simple click.

This little beauty of mobile advertising genius has been cooking since 2009. You may have already seen some of the ads yourself because of this, even though the feature was only in beta for the time. A CTC ad is basically the standard Google ad you’d find on your browser: Headline, two lines of body text, and a website, but with an additional line for a clickable phone number link that allows users to instantly call with a click instead of them having to go to the website and look around for the number.

With this, you can specifically focus your ad to get your potential customer call you ASAP instead of mulling it over or looking somewhere else with their search. Since a call costs the same as a click to your ad, you can completely focus on fostering phone interactions with your desired audience via your mobile campaigns.

Say for example that you were offering a special marketing seminar in Vegas. With these ads, you could target people on their mobiles and create a special deal that they can only get by calling your number, which gets them to book faster by getting them to speak to you (or most likely your sales associate in that case) right then and there, which gives them less time to mull the decision over.

With mobile advertising experiencing a huge percentage of growth in the past 2 years, I expect CTC ads to make a huge impact in the years to come.

Do you think CTC is something you can use in your business today, or would it be better suited for your local pizza parlor? Share your thoughts or prove me wrong in the comments below.

Simulated image provided by Google

Making Money Online

Technorati Tags: ‘ClickToCall’, google, Launches, Mobile, Phones