townsend.bunksite.com

Category: Industry Insights

  • Linkedin and Twitter Post Split: The Best Decision for Both

    From the time Twitter uttered those dreaded words to Linkedin — “I want my (API) keys back” — fast forward one month. In its wake, the separation has left the intended higher ad revenues for both, as well as better user engagement for Linkedin.

    An odd couple indeed.

    It was an odd pairing to begin with, a one-off that was a bit out of left field even when Linkedin and Twitter joined forces in late 2009. It was much like that couple in your friends group with different values and nothing in common, but who work… for a time. Linkedin is a B2B paradise with a focus on member engagement, lead generation and advertising. Twitter, on the other hand, is B2C utopia due to the brand awareness and engagement-driving “promoted tweets” feature.

    Linkedin is now being used for what it was initially intended: to build engagement, drive leads and sell their advertising product for companies and job openings. Twitter is now “working on themselves” — and no, this doesn’t mean a yoga membership and a few dates to get over Linkedin. They’re back to the lab and focused on growing their applications.

    All Linkedin posts that were synced to Twitter in the past automatically optimized each post specifically for Twitter. Now, they are completely standard if you share to Twitter. These changes come from Twitter creating more uniform guidelines around API sharing and a more in-depth focus on their own applications and tools. Raven Tool’s Courtney Sieter (who was one of the most engaging and educational speakers of Search Exchange this year) came out with 10 Linkedin Shortcuts for a Post-Twitter World which I found extremely helpful.

    You can still share your Linkedin updates on Twitter, but not the other way around. For some, this is a tragic loss; for other tweeple whose feed represents a birds-eye view of Texts From Last Night’s “Best Ever” category, it’s a hidden blessing (seriously, just un-link your accounts at that point). This severance has also greatly reduced the amount of frivolous and ill-suited posts that used to clog the Linkedin feed.

     

    Pre-breakup Linkedin Engagement Level:

    Now: Chock-full of Goodness!

    Like that one mismatched couple who had their good years, this split seemed sudden at the time; however, they’re just better off doing their own thing. Both companies made the best move possible to not only grow their own revenue and product, but to separately work on custom initiatives important to their users. Since the split Linkedin has had a facelift, redesigning their look and feel to engage users by keeping them on the page longer. Conversely, Twitter makes 90 percent of its revenue in advertising, and it’s time to focus on themselves. Historically, they were giving too much of themselves through third party applications and at the end they had a smaller piece of the pie. For Twitter, it’s time to stop self-sacrificing and be a little selfish for more lucrative results.

  • 5 For Friday – Links, Stories, & Posts For Your Weekend

    I’ve actually been working at Search Influence for almost 3 years now and in that time I have never done a Five for Friday. Supposedly they should be about search engine optimization “news stories, blogs and recommendations from across the web!” So I recalled anything I read this week that had even the vaguest connection to innertube marquetry and came up with what I am calling… 

    • Dogshaming Goes Social – Huffington Post

    Finally someone has decided to make berating your dog into an enjoyable and public sport. Gone are the days of being upset over pilfered panties and tussled trash. Now we can regale the world with the bad habits of our best friends as we make witty captions and snap photos for strangers on Tumblr. I personally can’t wait until we start doing this with old people and toddlers – that is going to be SO FUNNY!

    • FAKEGRIMLOCK. BECAUSE AWESOME! – Copyblogger

    Do you like Dinobots? Do you like content marketing strategies? Then this is the article for you! In an undeniably hilarious look at the content marketing, FAKEGRIMLOCK points how “Me Grimlock no bozo! Me CONTENT KING!” and other insightful Transformer tidbits.

    • Don’t Leave Your Child Alone with the Hamburglar – NY Times

    Hey parents! McDonald’s is collecting your child’s email to advertise McGangbangs (LOOK IT UP) to them! That’s not completely true, but according to NY Times, some stay-at-home moms are pissed that some kid-friendly websites are encouraging pre-teens to give up their email addresses in-exchange for terrible Flash games. This breaks some act that no one without children really cares about, but my real question is where was these kids’ mammies at in the first place? Also, WHY do these children have email addresses?!

    • My Whole Entire (Google+) Circle is Dangerous – SEOMoz

    Turns out not only can Yelp reviewers ruin your dreams of financial success, the five people on Google+ can as well. In this (admittedly “ridiculous”) article, we learn how Google+ users can wreak havoc on your former Google Local reviews. This knowledge is “Most Helpful” indeed.

    • Ain’t Nobody Got Time for Landing Pages – SEM Booty Blog

    We were all taught as young SEOs that if you want to convert traffic, you create a focused landing page. It turns out having a website with good user experience, regardless of entrance source, can do the same thing. Who knew? The point you should take from this article is using a random SES San Fran attendee’s tweet gives every thing you blog about +∞ validity.

    And so you have the first (and possibly last) Fantastic Five for Friday! Now get outta here, you’re bothering me.

  • Out of Site, Out of Mind? The Benefits of Remarketing Campaigns

    In advertising, the Rule of Seven states that a potential consumer must see or hear your ad at least seven times before taking action and actually purchasing your product. While this rule is not set in stone, it establishes that you cannot simply engage your target market a single time and expect to stick in their minds. With the sheer volume of ads we see daily, people have adapted to an “out of sight, out of mind” mentality with products and brands.  In order for you to obtain optimal results, the Rule of Seven asserts that your marketing campaign must include continual efforts towards staying in the forefront of people’s minds.

    To best apply the Rule of Seven to Internet advertising, I recommend a remarketing campaign.  Whether your goal is to drive sales, promote brand awareness, or increase the number of leads you receive (phone calls or forms filled out on your site), remarketing—if done correctly—offers an innovative way to convince those fair-weather consumers to return to your site.

    According to Google, “Remarketing is a feature that lets you reach people who have previously visited your site and show them relevant ads when they visit other sites on the Google Display Network.” By implementing remarketing code on specific pages of your website, all visitors to these pages are given a specific cookie ID which is added to your remarketing lists. Once you receive 50 cookie’d users per a given page, you can stay in touch with these visitors by showing them ads across the Google Display Network, which includes any sites that run Google ads.

    Remarketing most benefits Ecommerce retailers because advertisers can market individuals who may have gotten as far as adding products to their shopping cart before abandoning the sales funnel. Ecommerce sites can also direct special offers and promotions straight to their remarketing lists as well.

    Keep in mind that remarketing campaigns are not meant to initiate sales, but they are fantastic for closing them.  For the most effective campaign, advertisers should combine a display campaign dedicated to branding with a remarketing campaign. A strong display campaign will drive new traffic to your site based on their keyword searches. Once these individuals are introduced to your brand and added to your remarketing list, you will appear to them across the Display Network. Your ads will serve to remind your visitors that, at some point, they were interested in a product on your site, thus eventually leading them back to the site to complete the sale.
    By analyzing your remarketing lists, you can better deconstruct the demographics of your target audience. These demographics can later be used for other marketing campaigns. Specifically for Internet marketing, demographic research can influence the style of ads, the placements for your display campaigns, and the keyword research you conduct. You can also attribute your demographic research to Facebook campaigns,

    So now, even when your viewers are out of site, you can keep your brand on their minds!

  • One Link To Rule Them All: The Canonical URL and You


    “I will take the Link,” [Frodo] said, “though I do not know the way.”

    When the Internet was a wild frontier in the ’90s, URLs appeared to me magical glyphs that television advertisers and producers revealed only to the worthy. What secrets would be revealed if I, a ten year-old, borrowed my aunt’s computer to type in “trojan condoms” as the commercial on MTV requested? What hidden jokes would I learn if that same “net surf sesh” eventually took me to “http://comcentral.com/“, the URL appearing in the end credits of Dr. Katz?

    Luckily, my youthful precociousness was maintained as I never visited the former, but for a time, the latter URL stuck out in my mind as an oddity. Where was the www in that URL? Did I need to type in the http:// portion? Shouldn’t their website be at http://www.comedycentral.com/ since it’s, you know, the channel’s name? Also, why the heck are two websites I’m visiting the same thing?

    To this day, visiting http://comcentral.com/ will redirect you to the logical URL for their branding. In terms germane to our company, http://www.comedycentral.com/ is the canonical URL for Comedy Central, or the TRUE URL that Comedy Central wants you to access their site by.

    Multiple benefits exist for canonizing a URL, especially in relation to Google’s Analytics and Webmaster Tools. A preferred domain can be set, and data will be formatted to represent the canonical URL. If an accessed subdomain on a site (For example, http://www.xyz.com) presents the exact same content as the domain alone (http://xyz.com/), but each URL exists on its own without redirects, it’s important to canonize one of the two by setting up 301 redirects.

    In relation to the Google tools mentioned above, you might miss out on potential data related to traffic unless you set a preferred domain and ensure that it’s the exact URL served up to site visitors. If a Webmaster Tools account is setup for http://www.xyz.com/ but not http://xyz.com, incoming links for http://xyz.com/ will not be tracked in Webmaster Tools. This is because the www version is treated as a subdomain, and is therefore a different site in the same way that http://mail.google.com/ differs from http://www.google.com/. As the horse says above, setting a preferred domain in Webmaster Tools and setting up a 301 redirect will allow incoming links for either version of the site to appear.

    Another problem averted by setting a canonical URL popped up in a task I received recently. Google Analytics has a neat “In-Page Analytics” feature that provides some interesting metrics on user behavior directly on your site. My task was to determine why this wasn’t working for the client. The error message provided basically asked me to verify that the tracking code was installed on the page, and I found that it was. Digging further, I found that setting the “Website URL” in Analytics to the proper canonical URL (which didn’t have the “www” in it as was set in Analytics) cleared up that issue, and we could see the compiled user data on the In-Page Analytics viewer.

    In general, consistency in the presentation of a website is good practice, be it in a site’s graphical layout, or, as this blog post dances around, in sitewide URL structure. It’s commonly known, but setting your URLs up in a clean, uniformed fashion may result in a smile of good fortune from Old Man Google for your humble homestead in this cyber frontier.

  • Read This! — August 2012

    We’re back with another edition of Read This!, our monthly series exploring the DIY tips and tricks you can use to succeed online today.

    • The SMB Guide To Changing Business Names & SEO — Search Engine Land

    Recently found yourself changing your business’s name and hemorrhaging precious web traffic? A shift in title doesn’t have to mean the end of your Internet edge. Check out these strategies to get all of your ducks in a row and preserve your web presence before, during and after the shift.

    • How Amazon Grew My Audience By More Than 24,000 Readers in Three Days — Copyblogger

    Amazon is a superb content marketing platform; if you’re ready to spread your knowledge to the world, it can be perfect place to both get publicity and increase your own sales. Check out this story of an experimental voyage into Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing program and how giving away stuff for free can net your personal brand big returns.

    • Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP): What makes you different then the rest? — Nifty Marketing

    Your business is unique, offering advantages distinct from everyone else in your industry. When you start working on marketing strategy, why not focus on that? Here are several examples from the industry that highlight the importance of knowing thyself and a practical guide to creating your own unique selling proposition.

    •  How To Merge Google+ Business Page With Google+ Local — Search Engine Roundtable

    Exciting news for Google+ For Business users: you can now combine your business’s page with your Google+ Local page to get the best of both worlds! This how-to gives you all the information you need to position your local data right next to your social posts in a heartbeat.

    • How to Conduct a PPC Audit in 5 Minutes — Search Engine Watch

    PPC, or point-per-click, advertising is a source of mystery to many — and interpreting the results can be even trickier. In this clear and concise guide, Search Engine Watch’s Noran El-Shinnawy lays out the steps to doing a basic check of your PPC stats and demystifies the meaning behind the figures.

  • Internet Form Response Times — Does A Quick Reply Really Matter?

    In the search engine marketing world, one of the main tools for generating leads is the use of an online form. Forms can be an invaluable tool for generating leads and increasing revenue. They also provide a metric for classifying return on investment. We are all familiar with the usage of forms, but are we ignoring their full potential by underutilizing leads? As a business management major and online marketing enthusiast, I couldn’t help but wonder how these leads are handled by the staff at the many business for which we work, so I did some research.

    I found a number of great sources on how the timeliness of a response affects the outcome of the lead. One study on lead responses went a little further then the rest. The level of detail in the study is fantastic, but I don’t want it to distract from the most important figures.

    The study was conducted by the team at LeadResponseManagement.org with a sample size of over fifteen thousand leads over a three year span. The purpose of the study was to find out how the time of day, day of the week, and the time to respond to a online lead affected the rate of contact. While the conversion rates were not discussed, we can project standard conversion rates on to the study to get a basic idea of its overall impact.

    Lets get to the meat of the study.

    • The best day of the week to contact a lead is a Thursday, best by 50% compared to the worst day.
    • The best time to contact a lead is between 4-5pm, best by 109% when compared to the worst time.
    • 69% of leads that were contacted initially within the first hour became qualified. (In the study, qualified had a few meanings including setting an appointment.)

    Okay, we all get it. The time when we contact the lead matters. Let’s dive deeper.

    • The odds of contacting a lead decreased by over 10 times in the first hour.
    • The odds of qualifying a lead decreased by over 6 times in the first hour.

    These statistics may seem a bit extreme. Just think for a second about your personal behavior. After submitting a form, there is a reasonable expectation that someone will be in touch with you soon — but how soon? Are you going to wait around all day to be contacted, or are you going to continue your search? Personally, I continue my search until I find someone that will sell me the product or service that I am looking for at the price I’m willing to pay.

    Now for the most important piece of data in the entire survey.

    • The odds of qualifying a lead in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drops by 21 times.
    • The odds of qualifying a lead in 5 minutes versus 10 minutes drops by 4 times.

    Think about the logic behind why a quick response rate is so important. If you can manage to respond within 5 minutes, the potential customer is most likely still interacting with your website or brand. You are still at the top of their mind. With all of the psychological benefits of quick contact, the ability to get back to a potential customer before they move on to another business is invaluable.

    The bottom line is responding to online leads within five minutes results in a 900% increase in contact rates!

    While this kind of dedicated effort may not be possible for all businesses, the numbers seem to suggest it’s worth the effort. You could work 900% harder or just respond a bit faster — which do you prefer?

    Do you use forms on your business’s website? What kind of response times do you usually stick to?

  • How To Twitter: Using Hashtags at San Diego Comic-Con

    Since I’m an Level 9000 bona fide nerd, I traveled to San Diego last weekend to celebrate Comic-Con. Of course, I took lots of pictures of what was going on when I was there. If you don’t already know, you can join the Twitter party of any major event by using the hashtag associated with it. This year’s Comic-Con used #SDCC — by hashtagging all of my related tweets, I was able to add my feedback to the public conversation about the convention, which anyone looking for the hashtag can read. If one of the people that reads one of my tweets wants to know more about me (or my business!), they might just follow me. What a neat way to network, right? (Don’t forget to check the “wrong” hashtags, too. It’s definitely not called “San Diego Comiccon“, but a lot of people searching the internet think it is.)

    Another key to getting involved in hashtags is trending. On Twitter’s Discover page, you can always see a list of the most popular hashtags for any given day. If you can get enough people talking about your topic, it will trend. While this is no small feat, it does mean TONS of exposure for you … not to mention for your business. If you have a strong Twitter following, it’s well worth it to engage your user base and ask them to use the hashtag if you are trying to promote an event. The best part about promotion like this is that it’s completely free, and you’re using one of the most popular social platforms out there today. What a deal!

    Of course, hashtags aren’t the only way to show your participation in an event. In the last few years, Tweetups have been popular, which are basically in-person meetups of your Twitter followers. It’s a great way to unify people and allow internet friends to meet in real life. It’s also an excellent way to meet business contacts.

    While hashtags like this are priceless way to be included in any event’s buzz, there’s no reason you can’t create your own as well. Geek goddess Felicia Day has put her own Twitter to work in this way, promoting several events, including her own @GeekandSundry project. Since Day has well over a million followers, plenty of people are listening.

    So how do you use Twitter hashtags on your own to best take advantage of the trend? If you’re at an event, make sure to find out what the hashtag is (and make sure its the right one!). Once you do, make a point of adding it to the end of all your tweets. That way, when people click the hashtag, they will see what you have to say along with everyone else.

    Want to create your own hashtag for an event? Make sure to keep it short. The easier it is to type, the more likely people will use it. Up to the date of your event, announce the hashtag and ask your followers to retweet it. That way, once your event begins, they will already know what to expect. If you’re lucky, they’ll use it too, and the more of them that do, the closer you are to that sweet high of a trending hashtag.

     

  • Read This! — July 2012

    We’re back with another edition of Read This!, our monthly series exploring the DIY tips and tricks you can use to succeed online today.

    Can eCommerce Thrive on Tumblr? One Company Says Yes

    Tumblr is a fast-growing network these days, promoting constantly evolving dialogue and trendy memes at a breakneck pace. But can a business separate the signal from the noise and promote their brand on such a buzz-heavy platform? It may be easier than you think.

    How to Prepare for the End of Facebook

    While Facebook hasn’t given up the ghost yet, a few notable missteps in recent months have had pundits publicly wondering if the grandaddy of all social media platforms is entering its twilight years. Even if the end isn’t nigh, it’s always good to have a contingency plan; check out this guide to find out the best ways to leverage non-‘book sources of publicity and turn temporary fans into longtime allies.

    Setting Up Your Twitter Account

    Is your small business just setting sail into the online world? While the process of creating accounts may seem basic for some, the intricacies of perfectly setting up your Twitter account are more subtle than you think. Check out this guide for a handy refresher!

    Secrets To Launching Successful Pinterest Marketing Campaigns – The Experts Weigh In

    Pinterest is a hot topic right now among social media gurus, and with its ever-expanding user base there’s never been a better time to get in on the action. So how do you go about nabbing customers and getting leads through a haze of lace-and-polka-dot social sharing? Read SEO.com’s exhaustive list to find out!

    3 Ways to Declare Your Independence From Tired Sales & Marketing Tactics

    Is the same old thing just not working for your business? Take a page from the Founding Fathers and declare your independence in favor of new ideas! TopRank gives you several common challenges of sticking to the business-as-usual routine and top-notch tips on how to bust through them.

  • Back to Basics: Tips for Applying for a Job in the Digital Age

    Applying for a job is something that we all have to do at one point or another in our careers – unless you won the lottery at 18, or are an heir to a billion dollar empire where you can lounge on a beach in Cabo while waiters bring you Mai Tai’s all day. For the rest of us, the job market is something we will become all too familiar with. From crafting that perfect cover email to making sure your online presence is spick-and-span, here are a few tips you can use.

    Now, there are probably a million and one tips on how to apply to a job correctly and that’s why they have an entire section at Barnes and Noble dedicated to it. However, there are a few particular mistakes that seem to pop up time and time again. A few of the following guidelines will help anyone out there in this Hunger Games-style job market, where every open position seems like a fight to the death.

    You want me to pay attention?

    All companies have different ways of accepting resumes/applications. Make sure that you apply for the position in the way they request, whether it’s via email, within the company’s website, or through a job search hub. You don’t want your potential future employer’s first impression to be of someone that can’t follow instructions.

    Polish your social media presence to a professional shine

    Your online image is important, and becoming increasingly more so in the 21st century. While being asked for your login information is unethical and potentially illegal, expect that anything you’ve left open for public viewing to be perused by potential employers and prune your profiles accordingly.

    That’s not how it was supposed to look!

    I can’t tell you how many times I’ve opened a resume to only see it look as if the applicant fell asleep on their keyboard, with weird spacing and columns all out of whack. There is an easy fix for this: once you have formatted your resume the way you want it, save it as a PDF. This way anyone that opens it, on any software or platform, will see it exactly the way you intended it to look.

    I’ve seen this before…

    Generic cover letters are fairly obvious to spot and aren’t much cared for by the hiring managers. You want them to feel as if this is the only position you are interested in. This is why you want the letter to be customized. You can do this by mentioning the company and position, where you found the ad, and what qualifications you have that meet the mentioned requirements.

    What company is this for again?

    We all know applying for jobs isn’t fun and can be very time-consuming. But when you are sending an email applying to a post, DO NOT apply to every position you find in one email. When employers see this, they think that you are desperate and willing to take anything. This means send a separate email per company/position.

    Dear Madam or Sir

    Even if you are submitting via email, you still need a cover letter. And by cover letter, I don’t mean an autobiography. Keep it to about 3 paragraphs. This should be in the body of the email and formatted with correct grammar and spelling. Showing your excitement about the job and thanking them for their time can only make you look better.

    These tips may seem like common sense to some people, but the mistakes are frequently made and can lead to an immediate weed-out. By following these quick fixes, you can expect to more effectively and efficiently stand from to your competitors.

     

  • Hammer Time! Squishing Fonts Into Text With Base64

    Ah, fonts. This binary data increases page load time, file size, the number of HTTP requests. Fonts will also cause the page to jump from a basic font to the included one when the font takes longer to load than it does to display the markup. All these hindrances, coupled with having many images, will begin to deteriorate your page’s load times. However, there’s a way to transfer your page’s custom fonts as plain text to the browser and compile them into a single request. Merging the request for multiple files into one or two requests will decrease your page’s load time and efficiency. Naturally the next question is, “How can I do this?” It’s actually very simple. There is a method for converting binary data into plain text using Base64 conversion. To quote Wikipedia in how Base64 conversion works, you can use the word “Man” as an example:

    Man is TWFu. Encoded in ASCII, M, a, n are stored as the bytes 77, 97, 110, which are, in 8-bit quantities, 01001101, 01100001, 01101110 in base 2. These three bytes are joined together into a 24 bit buffer producing 010011010110000101101110. Packs of 6 bits (6 bits have a maximum of 64 different binary values) are converted into numbers (in this case, there are 4 numbers in this 24-bit string), which are then converted to their corresponding values in Base64.

    Now to a normal person (read: not a programmer) that is not very simple at all, but what it means to you is that you can use a service such as Simple64 and you will get a Base64 string in return. Now, what can you do with this seemingly random bunch of characters? You can use them to make your site load faster. For example: you would normally use @font-face src: url(); property to include a font, correct? You can do this exactly the same way using a tool such as base64fonts.com. Convert your font then include it in an @font-face like so:

    @font-face{
    font-family: "Font Name";
    src: url(data:application/x-font-tff;base64,add base64 here);
    }

    I suggest, for more than one font, using an @import with a CSS file that contains all of your fonts. By storing fonts this way, you don’t have to worry about a content “jump” — where the content is loaded, but then suddenly changes fonts when the font is finished downloading. However, problems do lie therein.

    If you have several fonts, you may appreciate this option: downloading many fonts via a CSS file will cause your content to not appear at all until all styles are downloaded, causing a significant delay in the time it takes for the browser to render the content. However, the topic of whether or not this actually brings any site speed improvements seems to be highly debated. If you have GZip enabled in Apache when the site is served, it is zipped and sent. This would easily improve font delivery, as the font CSS will be zipped along with the CSS it’s inside. However, it’s much harder to deliver a GZip font file faster. As far as I can tell, there is very little speed improvement over standard font files unless you have multiple fonts that you would rather all load at once. In this case, fonts.css file included via an @import would be more efficient.

    Thanks for reading, and go experiment on your site! No definitive benchmarks have been run — what are some of your favorite solutions?