traffic – Online Marketing Juice

Average Order for Pinterest Users $50

The average order value of sales that come from Pinterest is $50. This is currently higher than any other social platform. Pinterest is a popular and valuable channel for almost any small business.

Pinterest is designed to store ideas and inspiration in a way other social media sites aren’t. Users are encouraged to organize what they find into different board names for easy navigation, and most pinners are primarily on Pinterest seeking and saving what they want to see; they generally don’t care if other people see what they’ve tagged or archived, because it’s just not about generating discussion or exchanging information.

Many businesses have the potential to get meaningful results from Pinterest, especially online stores selling physical goods that can be photographed. Business-to-consumer (B2C) companies in general have a much easier time on Pinterest than business-to-business (B2B) companies, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible for the latter to get traction on the platform. Ultimately, whether or not Pinterest is a good fit for your business will depend heavily on whether or not your target audience overlaps with their existing user base.

Your ultimate goal with Pinterest marketing should be to bring people to your website instead of giving them a sea of content that they will follow redundantly. A well-constructed Pinterest traffic sharable strategy should be in place to be able to achieve that. Pinterest has a great feature through which you can link your website address with the content that you publish via your account. You can share written as well as visual content to get people excited and driven towards your website. This feature can be highly instrumental in boosting your online sales and implementing your Pinterest traffic strategy. Pinterest is not just another social media platform. It acts more like a search engine, which means people on Pinterest are actively looking for content and you’re missing out on potential website traffic, followers and customers by not putting your content on Pinterest. There are over 2 billion searches on Pinterest every month. That is a lot of opportunities for your Pins to show up in a search and drive traffic back to your website!

Drive Website Traffic Home with Content

My best advice for new website owners: Just write!

It doesn’t matter how much content. Long form or short micro form (1-3 quick sentences and a great image to go along with the article). Complete your thought process before publishing. Don’t over stuff it with keywords and spam. Just write good, quality, sticky content. Write ideas down on paper & pad when creativity and new ideas hit you. You can always go back to the content you wrote down on paper and flesh them out when creating a blog post.

Content is king, especially when first starting out. Don’t get overwhelmed by all the SEO tricks and page optimization guidelines. Fresh content increases search engine rankings (SERPs) and traffic as well as getting quality links from other sites. If there’s not enough relevant content for your brand or business, it pretty much defeats the purpose of having a website in the first place.

Write the content first, grab a solid image that will go around the content theme. Once its up in “draft” mode and completed, pick the SEO low hanging fruit and edit:

- Add a few keywords that sum up your article theme and target audience. Don’t spam keywords.
- Make sure your images are catchy, contextual, and load fast.
- Add basic Meta tags like Title Tag, and Meta Description Tag. You can go back and add more fine tune the other type of tags such as Meta Keywords Attribute, rel=”canonical” Link Tag, etc., when you get time.

The basic purpose is to create content and try to post at least 2-3 times per week. Keep iterating. Keep in mind that as you build this habit, the more easier it becomes as well as the quality of the article post. Once a new article post is published, make sure to “share” on on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Why Responsive Web Design Matters

Can You Increase Traffic Without SEO ?

Yes, but it takes a lot of creativity, ingenuity and content creation.

First off, create a constant flow of good, quality content. Update your website content everyday. Include links to outside sources and use high quality graphics (.png). New revolving content is CRUCIAL. Content is king. New content updated daily will catch the search engine’s attention. You must do one thing: provide a daily flow of content.

More traffic without SEO tips also include:

Search for an aggregator within your vertical and see if they will pick up your content. Contact the editor. Get a conversation going through email. If your selling something (retail), try and get a coupon aggregator to pick you up.

Make sure you have an RSS feed subscription. Make it easy for visitors to get your daily updates.

If your using a WordPress (publishing platform) site, download and install a SEO plugin at the WordPress Plugin Directory. Let the plugin do all the work. You don’t need to know a damn thing about SEO to install one of these plugins. This is easy and will help get you that low hanging traffic fruit. Good WordPress SEO plugins include: Meta SEO Pack, SEO Ultimate, SEO Tools, Platinum SEO Pack.

Get users to comment and engage in some sort of discussion on your site. This generates more content and more search engine juice. If your starting out and don’t have any users, create numerous dummy email accounts and post comments thru these accounts. Make sure you add/post a DIGG, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Delicious, and Tweet your website and every content post.

Submitted a site map to Google Webmaster Tools.

Pay for online ads (Google, Twitter, Facebook). This is good if your selling a product, but bad if your just promoting a content site that isn’t selling anything but click-through ads. SPAM tends to gravitate towards paid online ads promoting content while trying to get paid through google ads or banner advertisement clicks so be careful. Go with PPC (if your budget permits) if you have an actual product or service to sell.

Why Your Website Needs Social Referral Traffic

As Social Media continues to rise as the new dominant communication platform. Its crucial that Digital + Social Marketing teams must pay attention to this valuable referral firehouse (Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, etc). Directing traffic back to your website (think sales) or online media publication is essential. Its a huge traffic opportunity. Newer users and demographics are starting to bypass search engines for this more “social” interaction to find new content and websites. Referrals are more legitimate and more trusted coming from a social media feed than most search engines nowadays.

What makes this platform (Social Media) effective is that its free and very interactive.

Lets take a look at the latest compelling sadistics (as one of my Economics professors use to say)….I mean statistics.

Pinterest drives twice the website referral traffic of Twitter, LinkedIn and Google + combined (Shareaholic image) via: Danny Wong @ Shareaholic

Its crucial now more than ever to integrate Social Media into your traditional marketing activities.

Useful Tips: Social media traffic is at its best when you use more than one social network. Make sure you post the links back to your website + use #Hashtags. Always add sharing buttons to your websites blog posts. This make it much easier for your readers to share your posts to their own friends and followers. Understand your audiences and tailor content accordingly.

Always make sure you track your referrals thru the Google Analytics dashboard, Social Mention, or any analytic traffic service. Its critical to monitor your Social Media efforts and make adjustments on the fly.

The Best Digital Marketing Weapons (Tools)

Digital Marketing tools are constantly evolving and changing. They deliver benefits to any organization willing to build up a digital marketing team. Benefits include enhanced credibility, fast and easy access, increases customer relationships, feedback and reviews are easily tracked, cost effective, and can reach an enormous mass of people in a short amount of time. The below is a short list of digital tools in a ever changing digital marketing environment.

Google Analytics. Enough said on this one. Fundamentals of working with report data to advanced segmentation and analytics intelligence. Key for measuring and tweaking your marketing campaigns. Google keeps adding more and more functionality each year.

Google Keyword tool. You can extract valuable data about the demand and competition level of keywords you wish to target organically. The tool will also suggest similar keywords to the one in your query to give you alternative, relevant options for your keyword targeting. The Google Keyword Tool can come in handy whether you’re building your very first keyword list or looking to expand and/or switch directions in your keyword and content strategies.

SEO Doctor and/or ToolbarBrowser. This is a great Firefox extension. Toolbar pulls in many useful marketing data points to make it easy get a holistic view of the competitive landscape. Google PageRank, Links to Domain, Page links, Directory links, Site age, Monthly uniques, Est Traffic Value, and much much more. Great for competitive analysis.

Salesforce Radian6. A powerful tool that lets you monitor specific keywords and phrases that are dominating conversations across the social media sphere. You can also use Radian6 as a sentiment evaluation to aid brand management. Its very scalable from basic to Enterprise paid packages. Very worth the cost.

Traackr. This App helps you find the most important people and content on social media. Traackr includes dynamic influencer lists, automates metrics-driven influencer mapping so you can instantly identify the right people for your projects, real-time listening, sentiment analysis, geo-targeted searches, and shows you all of your influencers’ relevant content in one place so you never miss an opportunity to reach out to them and be part of the social conversation.

TweetDeck or HootSuite. Free tool lets you simultaneously manage all your social media accounts from a single interface. Although it excels with Twitter, you can also effectively manage your Facebook, LinkedIn, or Foursquare profiles.

Wildfire. Another go-to service / tool that will help grow , engage and monetize your social audience. A great paid service for running your social campaigns.

MailChimp. A really easy, dynamic email marketing platform. Your opt-in subscribers will be able to easily connect to social networking pages in order to share your email marketing campaigns. You’ll also be able to use social networking in conjunction with your email marketing. In one click, you’ll be able to send out an email campaign and update your social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Delicious, with your latest information. You can also see who has tweeted about or liked your business.

SurveyMonkey. I use this one a lot in my own projects. If you have questions about your products or services and you need immediate feedback, SurveyMonkey is THE best web-based survey solution.

SEOmoz. Anything SEO oriented, use this site. Analytics for all your in-bound marketing. There are a lot of free tools and paid ones as well. I use this site and tools daily for years. This site is an incredible value-add to your digital marketing efforts!

Wistia. Is video marketing part of your digital marketing strategy? If so, you may want to think about professional video hosting from a company like Wistia. Video is a great way to communicate with your subscribers, prospects and customers. Wistia provides your business with a ton of great tools that you can use to measure your video’s engagement as well as make your videos more interactive.

Pardot. Marketing Automation. Pardot allows you to provide your sales team with the tools they need, send automatic response emails to prospects interacting with your brand, measure campaign ROI, communicate relevant information to prospects, help you figure out which online efforts are working the best.

Why Businesses Should Utilize Social Media + How Do You Measure?

Why Businesses Should Utilize Social Media

Drives traffic
Discover new customers
Builds brands
Attracts customers and evangelists who can help spread the “message”
Creates positive associations with product or brand

How do you track social media ROI (metrics)?

Traffic data (uniques coming from social media pages/profile)
Fan/Follower data
Social interaction data
Social content performance (is the content produced on these social media sites driving traffic?)

Are there tools to help me track these metrics? Oh yeah! Just to name a few….

Radian6. Best known social media monitoring tool.
Social Mention. “Google Alerts” for Social Media.
TwentyFeet. Aggregation of metrics and a datastream from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
Klout. Measures influence online.
Viralheat. One of the best ways to measure social media (cheap for basic plan).

SEO Visual Guide to Success

SEO Visual Guide

I found this great SEO visual guide layout for anyone planning a campaign for the first time. Its also a handy guide to keep on hand at all times. You can drill down the tree limbs and get more detailed and plan out milestones, etc. The guide came from Dave Chaffey at e-consultancy.

Before you begin any SEO campaign (organic or paid) its imperative to know how search engines operate and how people interact with them. There are many guides out there where you can learn the “basics” of search engine friendly design and development (or you can hire a consultant). Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is arguably THE most cost-effective digital marketing technique, but also the most challenging to get right. It can get overwhelming with keyword research, link building, usability, and tweaking content. In the end, always keep measuring and tracking the data (success) and build off of whats working, and whats not working. If your site cannot be found by search engines or your content cannot be put into their databases, you miss out on the incredible opportunities available to websites provided via search – people who want what you have visiting your site. Always keep in mind not to go too overboard with content optimization or you will get labeled a “spammer” or a “content farmer” which will designate you as a low-quality website/publisher.