The Reciprocal Consulting Blog

If you publish your videos to YouTube, you should tie those videos to your Google Analytics account. Doing so will allow you to track important metrics for your videos and see what’s working and what’s not with regard to your video marketing efforts.

To add YouTube to your Google Analytics account, all you have to do is go to YouTube and click on My Channel in your profile settings area (HINT: Click the down arrow in the upper right corner near your avatar). Next, click on one of your videos. Under the video title you’ll see a small box labeled “Channel settings.” Click on that button. Scroll down to where you see “Google Analytics account ID.” There should be a text box next to that label. Copy and paste your Google Analytics account ID into that box and click the blue Save button.

Adding your YouTube videos to your Google Analytics account allows you to see how many visitors, unique visitors, and page views each of your videos gets on a regular basis. If you perform any marketing campaigns to drive traffic to your YouTube videos, that will be a very important metric for you.

Video marketing is getting better all the time. YouTube and Google Analytics are two reasons why.

301 redirects are probably used much too often. They’re not bad in and of themselves, but if you employ them incorrectly, then it can hurt your SEO efforts. Do it right, however, and you won’t see any fall out.

Here are 3 popular redirect practices that I recommend you give up on right now:

1. Redirecting To The Home Page – Webmasters often think that if they delete a page from their website, then they can just implement a 301 redirect of that page to the home page and all will be fine. It is likely, however, that the search engines will simply delete that page from their indexes and not pass any link juice as a result of that redirect. You are much better off redirecting to a related page or a category page.
2. Redirecting To Non-relevant Pages – If you have a web page about changing spark plugs and you redirect to a page about oil changes, that’s less desirable than redirecting to a page about tune ups. As much as you can, you should redirect pages to similar pages or pages that can match content relevance as closely as possible.
3. Redirecting To Another Domain – Cross-domain redirects are not as good as same-domain redirects. If you move your website to a new domain, try your best to redirect each page to the corresponding page on the new domain. Don’t redirect the entire site to the new domain’s home page.

Implementing 301 redirects is not rocket science, but you should do it with some preplanning and make sure you are redirecting pages to relevant pages on the right domain.

This is perhaps the greatest social media blunder in history.

MySpace decided to change directions – again – and when they did they closed off some features to users and deleted all of their old information. And what did they apologize for? A MySpace with limited features.

I don’t know about you, but that just doesn’t seem right.

Imagine going to Facebook and being told that all the posts, comments, photos, videos, and everything you’ve ever done on Facebook is gone. Kaput. Finis. You can’t get access to it, and you don’t know if you’ll ever be able to get it back. But Facebook apologizes for redesigning the site so you can’t create groups any more. Would that tick you off?

This little social experiment by MySpace should tell you one thing: You need to start saving all of your Facebook data.

In fact, you should backup all of your social media data every so often just in case your favorite social media website decides to follow MySpace’s lead. I think Cynthia Boris makes a valid point when she says

we don’t own our space in social media, we’re only renting.

If you thought otherwise, sorry to disappoint you. The social media services may claim that you own your own data, but if they can delete it at any time and not give you access to it, then does it do you any good to own it? Take some good advice. Do your own backups.

Last year Twitter introduced its advertising program, rolling it out to businesses first then to everyone. We learned that recently they also rolled out their analytics tool publicly.

Obviously, this is a way that Twitter hopes to encourage more users to buy sponsored tweets. I hope it works.

The analytics tool is a part of Twitter’s advertising platform. But you don’t have to be an advertiser to view your stats. You just login and get the data. But be forewarned, it doesn’t tell you much – yet.

What it will tell you, however, is helpful. For instance, you can see how many mentions you’ve had on any given day. And you can also see how many followers you picked up and how many followers you lost. In addition, Twitter will tell you how many faves and retweets each of your tweets have received to date. If your links have been clicked, it will tell you how many times. And particularly helpful is a notification when a particular tweet has been getting more attention than your normal tweets. You’ll get a message akin to this:

15x NORMAL REACH

Twitter analytics is still in its infancy. I expect it to get better. Meanwhile, to start using it, go to Twitter’s advertising platform and log in.

How many times have you said, “Facebook doesn’t support hashtags?” Probably a lot because a lot of people have been using hashtags on Facebook for at least a year now, and Facebook hasn’t supported them. Now, however, if you say Facebook doesn’t support hashtags, you’ll be wrong.

They started supporting hashtags yesterday.

From the announcement:

Starting today, hashtags will be clickable on Facebook. Similar to other services like Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, or Pinterest, hashtags on Facebook allow you to add context to a post or indicate that it is part of a larger discussion. When you click on a hashtag in Facebook, you’ll see a feed of what other people and Pages are saying about that event or topic.

Whether you’ve wanted Facebook to support hashtags or not, you can now do some of the things that you’ve been able to do on Twitter, Google+, and other social media sites, such as:

• Search for a specific hashtag from your search bar.
• Click on hashtags that originate on other services.
• Compose posts directly from the hashtag feed and search results.

So, will this make your Facebook experience any richer? I’m guessing, if you like hashtags, then it very well could. One feature I like is being able to click a hashtag that originated elsewhere and seeing the stream. I did this just to test it and was able to click the results and go to all sorts of places – Amazon, personal blogs, Q&A sites, and more. I guess it works.

One of the latest developments for website design is responsive design. This is a term that is used to describe a website that is accessible from any device and allows the user to experience the website whether viewing it from a desktop machine, a laptop, a mobile phone, a tablet, or some other device. The website responds to the device it is being viewed from.

Responsive web design is about more than simple accessibility. It also has some SEO benefits.

For instance, responsive websites eliminate the duplicate content issue. If you have a website in HTML that was designed for computers and a separate website that was designed for mobile devices, you’ll either have to rewrite the content for the second site or potentially deal with duplicate content issues in the search engines. There’s no way around it. Even if your mobile site is a subdomain of your main site, you’ll have to face the duplicate content monster.

You also only have to do SEO on one site. If you have two sites, that’s twice the SEO work.

Thirdly, if you have a traditional website and a mobile website, then you’ll have to build links to both sites. Link building is a time consuming activity. You will most certainly duplicate your efforts in social media promotion and other link building activities if you have a dedicated mobile website.

Going forward, responsive website design is going to be one of the most important trends for website development.

If you’re not on Google+ yet, you are likely well behind the eight ball. If you’re not on Google+ by the end of next year, then you may not exist. Products like Google+ Dashboard are the reason why.

The Dashboard was just introduced yesterday, but the features are incredible. I would say they fall into the “must-have” category.

• The ability to update all of your business’s contact information (website URLs, store hours, phone numbers, etc.) across Maps, Search and Google+ – all from one central location called Overview Tab.
• One place to monitor Google+ notifications, assign page managers, share photos and videos, and start Hangouts with followers.
• At-a-glance access to AdWords Express and Offers campaigns for local businesses.
• Awesome analytics data such as top searches for your business, top locations requesting driving directions, and performance data for your Google+ posts.

It looks like Google is trying to push businesses to use Google+ more, which is a good thing. If you aren’t using it already, you should. I can see a day where your business will be invisible if it doesn’t have a Google+ presence, and that day may not be far off.

Do your business a favor and join Google+ today. Improve your visibility online.

If you use Pinterest, you probably want to know what kind of images get repinned the most. This article discusses that.

In summary, images that get repinned the most at Pinterest include:

• Reddish-orange images. In fact, they are repinned twice as often as blue images.
• Multiple dominant colors. Images with multiple dominant colors get repinned 3.25 times more often than single dominant color images.
• Medium light images. These images are repinned 20 times more than very dark images. I have no doubt. A quick look at the two images on display should tell you why.
• Vertical images. Here’s an interesting one not related to color. Vertical images between a 2.3 and 4.5 ratio get repinned 60% more than very tall images.
• Images without background. Images with less than 10% background get repinned 2-4 times more than images with more than 40% background.
• Brand images without faces. This one is the most surprising statistic of all: Brand images without faces are repinned 23% more often than images with faces. How often have you heard that faces in photos is a good thing? Evidently, not on Pinterest.

If you’re going to use a social media site – any social media site – then it helps to understand what works and what doesn’t work there. This article should give you some insight into what Pinterest users like.

You’ve spent hours upon hours of time pushing your content through social media channels and analyzing the results. You get lots of traffic to your website only to see it bounce and go somewhere else. Is this how social media is suppose to work, or are you doing something wrong?

Traffic generation is good. I’m glad you are able to attract visitors to your website, but is your traffic targeted?

It’s better to get 100 highly targeted users to your website than to attract 1,000 non-targeted users. The targeted users are more likely to stick around and check out your content, maybe even buy something. Non-targeted users are more likely to go somewhere else.

It’s important to realize that just because you have a social media presence doesn’t obligate anyone to show up at your business website. People aren’t going to do that. But they will visit your website, and even buy something, if you have what they need.

Social media marketing is not about attracting the highest number of website visitors. It’s about attracting the right website visitors. If you aren’t doing that, maybe it’s time to re-evaluate your social content and see if it’s doing the job you want it to do. You’ll get a higher click-through rate and more conversions if you focus on the traffic you want rather than the traffic you can scrounge.

So many SEOs and Internet marketers spend a lot of time chasing links and then end up with their web pages losing Web rankings. You might get more mileage if you focused on driving traffic to your website instead.

Internet marketing has always consisted of a balance between writing great content and performing solid SEO analysis. God links and great SEO techniques are useless unless they generate a long-term benefit. The best benefit, of course, is an increase in traffic that leads to conversions.

I’m going to share three ways you can increase your website traffic relatively easily.

1. Becoming a columnist – Everyone wants to be a guest blogger, but you’ll get a lot further if you become a columnist instead. A columnist is a person who writes regularly for a Web property they don’t own. Find a website related to your niche where you can develop a relationship with an editor who will give you a chance to write daily, weekly, or monthly columns on a specific topic.
2. Paid tweets – Find a Twitter user who posts items related to your niche and who has a lot of followers. Find out their optimal price for paid tweets and ask them to tweet something for you. Twitter is one of the best traffic generation tools online.
3. Sponsored posts – The thing you have to remember about sponsored posts is you want to disclose the sponsorship openly. If people know you are sponsoring content on another website, they’ll be more responsive to what you have to say. It’s not a guarantee, but people respect openness and honesty.

Not everyone is going to be warm to these ideas, but if you employ them properly and respectfully, they can lead to good website traffic.

Businesses invariably go through many changes over their shelf life. That includes search engines. Yahoo! recently changed how its search engine results pages look. But the question is, does that equate to improvement in the product, and if so, will it improve SEO and your chances of ranking better in Yahoo!’s search results?

I say, not so fast. Slow down. Let’s get a handle on this here emotional ride.

All they did was change the look. If you look at the actual search results, they appear to be in the same positions in both the before and the after image. That tells me that the algorithm hasn’t changed. The page might have a redesign, but the SEO results are the same.

That’s a big distinction. I’m not saying Yahoo!’s search results need improvement, but I am saying that just because the company changed the design of its search results pages, it doesn’t mean that you are going to start ranking higher or lower.

Of course, I think it’s reasonable to expect that Yahoo! will continue to improve its product. And I mean beyond design.

The big question for Yahoo! at this point is, How can the company ensure that it becomes more competitive in search while increasing its revenues? Anyone care to tackle that question?

Not long ago, Pinterest introduced what it’s calling Rich Pins. There are three types of such pins currently: Product Pins, Recipe Pins, and Movie Pins. Each type of pin adds specific types of information to the pin that could benefit your customers and ultimately lead to more sales for you.

Product Pins include information such as product name, price, and availability. That way, customers know before they ever visit your site what they are looking at and the potential investment on their part. As a result, you’ll likely see an increase in your conversions-to-referrals ratio.

Recipe Pins include the title of your recipe, ingredients, serving size, and preparation time.

Movie Pins show title, rating, director, cast, release date, and run time.

I have to say, if you run an e-commerce store, then you should add Rich Pins to your website. If you run a restaurant or share recipes, then Rich Pins would benefit you and your customers. In the movie business? They’ll help you too.

There are three ways to add Product Pins to your website: Embed, Schema.org, and RSS feed. You can add Recipe Pins in two ways: Schema.org or hRecipe tag. Movie Pins can be added using Schema tags, then you show them how your Movie Pins look through Pinterest for Developers and wait for e-mail verification.

Learn more about Rich Pins from Pinterest’s help pages.

It seems that some business owners see the value in e-mail marketing. Are you one of them?

This sentence really jumped out at me:

Small businesses realize that any customer interaction has the potential to develop into a more consistent, ongoing relationship.

Just like any marketing endeavor, you want to engage in e-mail marketing because it is effective relationship building. If you conduct an e-mail marketing campaign because you think it will lead to more business or you want to keep your customers on a string, then you are doing it wrong. You won’t produce e-mails worth reading. Instead, send out e-mails that help you build solid relationships with your customers.

If you do it that way, you’ll keep your customers and prospects in the loop. They’ll want to visit your website again and take advantage of your offers.

On the other hand, if all you do is send out offer after offer after offer and you never take the time to build relationships with your readers, then you’ll likely start seeing a lot of unsubscribe notices. Or you may experience a low open rate on your e-mails. Neither of those is going to move you closer to your goals.

E-mail marketing is effective if you do it right. It’s not effective if you don’t. For the record, it is one of the most effective marketing channels online. Just be sure to do it with a purpose.

Google announced this week that they rolled out Penguin 2.0. The Internet is a-buzz with analyses ranging from OMG! to zzzzzz.

Our take? Wake up and go back to sleep.

Algorithm changes are serious business if you have an SEO problem. Or, to put it more succinctly, if you’re running afoul of the search engine guidelines, then you have cause for worry. That doesn’t apply to most of us.

There are certain industries, however, that should be on red alert. Porn, real estate, Viagra, and anything that is typically associated with spam. That doesn’t mean that if you work in these industries you’ll experience a drop in search engine rankings. It does mean that if you work in these industries and you do experience a drop in rankings, you’ll likely find Penguin 2.0 to be the culprit.

Here’s a simple solution for algorithm changes: Don’t sweat them unless you have a reason to.

Sometimes, websites lose rankings when there is no just cause. But keep in mind also that algorithm changes move things around temporarily. You may lose rankings for a short while before popping back up. If you do lose ground and you don’t see your sites rising again after a couple of weeks, then you should be alarmed. Right now, don’t panic.

When you enter into business and decide to compete against other companies in your niche, one of the most important activities you’ll have to engage in competitive analysis. But what should that entail?

There are three key areas that you should analyze your competition on today. This may change in ten years, but today I’d say you need to look at these three areas:

1. Inbound links – Where are inbound links to your competitors’ websites coming from, what anchor text are they using, and which pages are being linked to?
2. Social influence – Which social networks are your competition using, how active are they, and what kind of content are they posting on these social sites? Also, try to determine, if you can, the reach your competition has.
3. Content analysis – This is a very important piece of the competitive analysis puzzle. Look at your competition’s top content. What is it? Also, which pages are getting the most traffic? What kind of on-page optimization strategies are they using?

The idea behind competitive analysis is not to find things to copy from your competition. Rather, you are looking for opportunities they may have missed and looking to see what strategies you might capitalize on.

Competitive analysis is a big part of the overall picture when starting a new business. Don’t forget about it.

Social media has become the big gorilla of online marketing. Unfortunately, it isn’t the panacea that a lot of hype makes it out to be. It can, though, be very rewarding if you work it the right way.

I’m not going to tell you which social media websites to be on. Instead, I’m going to tell you how to make the most of the websites you are on, and what to do if you are posting to certain social media networks. Here are three ways to improve your social media marketing experience.

1. Be an authority and seek out relationships with other authorities. If you are not a highly respected authority, then you are second rate. That’s the taxonomy of the Web. So how do you do that? One very important way is to seek relationships with other authorities in your niche. If they follow you and share your content, then the search engines will like you better.
2. Implement Google Authorship. Just by adding the Rel=Author code, along with an image and your byline, to your content, you are telling Google that your content is trustworthy. Trust is very important online. If your content can’t be trusted, then it won’t be ranked by the search engines and no one will find it. Google Authorship helps you do that better.
3. Add A Twitter Card to your tweets. This is a fairly new tool for Twitter users. If you aren’t on Twitter, don’t worry about it (whether you should be on Twitter is another story). Twitter cards make your tweets more trustworthy. Untrustworthy content doesn’t get shared.

There you have it. Here are three ways to improve your social media marketing campaigns right now. Today.

I’m surprised that the number of small business owners who see value in Google is so low. But I think Frank Reed’s analysis is pretty sound. This is likely based on most small businesses having no clue what Google+ is.

Sadly though it goes even deeper because most don’t even have the knowledge of what Google+ is and why it can be valuable. Simply knowing what they are missing is the first step.

I disagree that Google+ is more valuable to large businesses than small businesses. That may not be what Frank Reed is saying, but it appears to be the case. This:

I would posit that Google+ is truly valuable to larger businesses. Why? Because they have the resources to take advantage of what Google+ offers a business in terms of its SEO efforts.

coupled with this:

But optimizing your Google+ presence requires the usual resources that most SMB’s struggle with which is people, time and money. SMB’s often don’t do what many see as what is best for them in marketing because they simply don’t have these resources.

is what I’m basing that on.

I do agree that Google needs to target agencies like Reciprocal Consulting. These agencies are the conduit between the small business owner and Google as search engine and Web portal. Google+ is a social network, but it is more than a social network. It isn’t Facebook or LinkedIn. There is an additional element of search that I think is lost on most small business owners.

So what’s that mean? I think it means that agencies also need to help small business owners understand the benefits of Google+. Those benefits are something akin to social + search. Even then, I’m not sure that gets to the heart of it.

If you want to win with content marketing strategies, then you’ve got to have the right idea about what content marketing is, what you can do with it, and how it can help your business grow. Unfortunately, a lot of business owners and managers haven’t thought about these questions.

In a word, content marketing is about using online content to discuss important concepts related to your business niche. It isn’t selling. It isn’t lead generation. And it isn’t here-today-gone-tomorrow news. Though it can be all of those. Content marketing is first and foremost about connecting with your audience.

So what can you do with it? Well, for starters, you should be publishing it. Regularly. Think of yourself as a publisher, not a marketer.

Thirdly, how can help your business grow? Try to think of your content as a way to attract eyeballs. You want to provide useful, insightful, and/or entertaining content. If you do that, you’ll attract eyeballs. The selling comes later.

So what are the three most important rules for content marketing? Glad you asked.

1. Do your homework/research – Find out what people want and deliver that. Plain and simple.
2. Write for your audience – Seriously. Know who your audience is and write for them. Don’t write for anyone else.
3. Make every link count – Don’t just add links to your content for the sake of adding links. Don’t do it for the SEO. Do it because the link fits the content. If your links are relevant, people will click them.

Content marketing is your business. See it the right way and you’ll get traffic and conversions.

You can’t hardly turn the TV on any more without hearing a tweet mentioned or see a Twitter account plugged. Major news outlets have Twitter accounts, and news is often first announced on Twitter. But that’s not enough for Twitter. They want to push further.

Twitter Amplify is Twitter’s advertising program, and they’ve announced some new partners:

• A&E (@AETV)
• theAudience
• Bloomberg TV (@BloombergTV)
• Clear Channel (@ClearChannel)
• Conde Nast (@CondeNastCorp)
• Discovery (@Discovery)
• Major League Baseball (@mlbdotcom)
• National Cinemedia (@NCMonline)
• New York Magazine (@NYMag)
• PGA Tour (@PGATOUR)
• PMC (@Variety)
• Time Inc. (@Time_Inc)
• VEVO (@VEVO)
• Warner Music (@warnermusic)
• WWE (@WWE)
• VICE (@VICE)

Twitter calls these partnerships two-screen partnerships. Brands promote themselves through Promoted Tweets to remind viewers to tune into their TVs at the appropriate times to view their favorite shows and programming. And then the shows often tweet during the airings as well as immediately before and after.

Everything from news programs to sports can be seen on Twitter’s new Amplify.

So how can you turn this into a marketing opportunity for your business? You could contact Twitter and ask how you can participate in the Twitter Amplify program. If it works out, you could expand your audience and reach new people through Twitter and your TV screen.

Google is no stranger to search tools. While we’ve been talking about Yahoo! lately, Google rolled out another search tool called Google Trends Top Charts.

Top Charts is a sort of monthly Zeitgeist. You can search the latest search trends by month and by region.

For instance, the top actor searched for in the United States in April 2013 was Selena Gomez. The top athlete for the same period in the U.S. was Michael Jordan. The top author was William Shakespeare.

If you change the month and year, you’ll see the top searches that month in the U.S. were for Ryan Dunn, LeBron James, and William Shakespeare, respectively.

Let’s go back to December 2004. The top searches in the three aforementioned categories were Lindsey Lohan, Michael Jordan, and, again, William Shakespeare. That Shakespeare guy is one popular fellow!

The list of categories on Top Charts is pretty long. Currently, you can search in the following categories: Actors, Animals, Athletes, Authors, Baseball Players, Baseball Teams, Basketball Players, Basketball Teams, Books, Business People, Car Companies, Cars, Chemical Elements, Cities, Cocktails, Colleges & Universities, Countries & Regions, DJs, Dog Breeds, Drinks, Energy Companies, Financial Brands, Financial Companies, Foods, Games, Government Bodies, Kids’ TV, Medications, Movies, Musical Artists, People, Politicians, Quick Service Restaurants, Reality Shows, Retail Companies, Scientists, Soccer Players, Soccer Teams, Software Technologies, Songs, Space Objects, Sports Cars, Sports Teams, TV Shows, Teen Pop Artists, US Governors, and Whiskeys.

Top Charts goes all the way back to January 2004. Currently, you can only search in the U.S., but other countries are on the way.

If you are running a business in any of these niches, or related niches, then Top Charts is a great search tool. You can use it to write relevant blog topics on current events or run your other promotions.