The Reciprocal Consulting Blog

A discussion with another Internet marketer about the growing popularity of Pinterest led to a disagreement over the value of its traffic. The other Internet marketer exclaimed, “You can’t get any traffic from it and if you do it won’t be valuable traffic.” I disagree.

Evidently, I’m not the only one.

A WebProNews article indicates that Pinterest traffic is up 3.6% from December last year. Not only that, but the guide also tells you how to make the most of your Pinterest social networking activities.

Pinterest is a unique service in that it relies mostly on graphic content, unlike other social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Google+ comes close, however, Google+ also provides benefit for video marketers and textual content publishers. Pinterest is almost exclusively graphic in nature. But it is social. You could say it’s more like Flickr or Photobucket except that the social features are much more enhanced.

Because it is social in nature, one of the most important parts about Pinterest to keep in mind is to make friends. That means follow other people’s Pinboards and connect with them over your tastes in graphics. But you should be careful not to violate anyone’s intellectual rights, and you should spend considerable time sharing your own graphic content as opposed to just pinning others’ graphics. Mix it up, in other words.

Perhaps the most important part of Pinterest is your ability to group images by category. If your categories are interesting, then you’ll stand a much better chance of gaining new followers and by doing so you’ll get the referral traffic you are seeking. Like any social network, be interesting and people will follow.

Now that Google Knol is dead, is there an alternative that you can use for your articles?

Yes, there is. It’s called Blogger. That’s Google’s free blog service.

You can use Blogger as your own article directory and there are two ways to do it.

First, you can start one blog and periodically post your articles there and link back to your company branded blog or website. The second way to use Blogger as an article directory is to upload each article you want to post to its own blog utilizing your primary keyword as the blog subdomain.

Both strategies work well.

Blogger has been listed as the second most trafficked social media website, ahead of Twitter by more than twice the traffic.

Of course, this Nielsen report doesn’t consider YouTube. Still, that puts Blogger into the high traffic arena, and it’s good for SEO as well. Being owned by Google, you’d expect no less, right?

The key to using Blogger as your own article directory is to not overdo it. You don’t want to draw undue attention to yourself as a link spammer, but you do want to use the tools at your disposal to build good inbound links. Blogger is great as a link building tool, and it could send you some additional traffic as well.

When you think of social media, what do you think about in terms of benefits? Most people are wrapped up in the idea of engagement, and that certainly is a benefit. But is it the only one?

Here are 4 of the most important benefits to using social media starting with audience engagement.

1. Audience engagement – When you participate in social media – whether it be Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or something else – audience engagement is one of the most important benefits. Done correctly, you can have your audience hang on your every word.
2. Reputation Management – Another benefit is the increase in your social stature. Reputation management can cut both ways so you should watch you Ps and Qs.
3. Link Building - Many social media websites are do-follow, but beyond that even you can build links through social media just by being interesting. Some people will link to your content through their blog if they like what you are doing.
4. Traffic - Finally, traffic. If you don’t have enough traffic to your website, then engage in social media. If you are effective, you’ll see your traffic go up in great numbers.

These are just a few of the benefits to social media marketing, but they are important benefits. If you are ready to take advantage of them, get involved right now.

WebProNews reports that Google+ is beating LinkedIn for referral traffic on several websites. But it’s still trailing Twitter and Facebook.

That’s pretty astounding when you consider that Google+ has only been rolled out for a month or so and then as a limited beta test. Not everyone is using it yet.

When it finally goes public, what will the statistics be then?

One important point to consider was made by a commenter on the WebProNews article:

If the second trendline is significantly higher than the first then you have internal synergy and true growth in social media exposure. If the second trendline is equal to or lower than the first, then all you have is Google Plus siphoning off referral numbers from other sources.

That’s an important point and I think even the folks who conducted the initial study on this probably didn’t gather enough data to make a conclusion regarding that point. If Google+ only takes away referral numbers from other social networks, that’s not enough to say it’s a worth the effort. But if your Google+ traffic increases while your other social network traffic remains the same, then it could very well be a force to reckon with.

Then, of course, there’s the increase in spam that going public will likely draw. That will be a force as well. Bottom line: The jury’s still out on Google+.

Internet businesses have become their own entity. Even if your online presence is an extension of your real world business, it would be wise to consider a separate business plan for your website. Here are 5 key things to think about before starting your Internet business.

1. Branding – There is a lot that goes into branding a business. Even an online business. Should your domain name be keyword-based? Many branded online businesses aren’t (Google, Yahoo!, Bing, just to name a few). Nevertheless, it is important to think about how you will brand yourself online.
2. Search engine marketing – This includes search engine optimization as well as your paid search options. How will you ensure your website receives its just deserts at the search engine table?
3. Social media – You’ll have to think about incorporating social media into any new business you start online. That includes which social media websites you’ll use and how you’ll use them.
4. Traffic conversion – Traffic conversion is more than simply driving traffic to your website, though it does include that. You must think about how you will drive traffic, what methods and techniques you’ll use to perform that function, including possibly video marketing techniques, and how you will convert that traffic once you get it to your website.
5. Web design – Central to any Web business is your website design. In truth, all of the above considerations will be integrated into your website design. You might as well consider how each of the above initiatives will be included in your web design right from Day One.

Every business is unique. By the same token, every Web business is unique. You must consider each of these five initiatives for your business right from the start. Don’t settle for any cookie-cutter plans because your business is not a cookie.

One of the most useful website analytics tools is a heat map.

A heat map measures your traffic and its actions by showing you a colorful representation of that traffic. For instance, the hottest part of your website – the part where most of your traffic is navigating toward – will appear in red. Still hot parts of your website, but less hot than the red, will appear in yellow. It gets cooler from there.

Let’s say you decide to use a heat map and discover that you have a page on your website that shows the hottest part of the page to be on the top right, but a link that you really want your visitors to click on is on the top left side of that page. Based on the information you see on the heat map, you should move that link over to the top right side of your page so that you can increase the number of visitors who click on it. More than likely, after you move the link, you’ll see that click-throughs have gone up.

Heat maps are an essential tool of metrics that any website owner can use for improving website development. You simply watch your visitors, see what they do, then tweak your website to match their expectations. Pretty simple.

It’s no secret now that social media is a huge traffic driver these days. Both Facebook and Twitter drive loads of traffic to websites that use them well. And now that Facebook has surpassed Google as the most trafficked website online, I think it’s just a matter of time before Facebook also becomes the biggest traffic source for most websites online.

SEOs and Internet marketers are accustomed to saying that 80% of website traffic comes from search engines, although that hasn’t been true for probably about a year now. Social media has picked up a lot of steam – obviously. YouTube has long been considered the No. 2 search engine. As previously noted, Facebook is now the most trafficked website online. Hey, things change.

So my question to you is, when will Facebook surpass Google in terms of being the website that pushes the most traffic to webmasters? Do you think it will happen this year? Next year? Never?

My personal prediction is that it will happen some time in the next year or two. By 2014, Facebook will be the biggest source of traffic for most websites. It won’t be Google any more. But that doesn’t mean that Google will be irrelevant. It will just mean we’ve entered a new phase of Internet marketing.

A lot of pay per click marketers place too much important on click-through rates. Yes, it’s true, click-throughs (CTR) are important and you want to measure your CTR, but at the end of the day what is really important is ROI.

Let’s assume that you spend $1 per click on a PPC campaign. In one day you get 10 clicks so you’ve spent $10. How many of those resulted in a sale? If you got no sales then you had no ROI. You’ve spent $10 and made no money.

But let’s suppose that you are paying $2 per click and you got the same number of clicks. Now you’ve spent $20; but suppose that one of those clicks resulted in the sale of a widget that resulted in a net profit of $22. Now you’ve got an ROI of $2.

That’s not much, I know, but it’s better than $0, right?

It’s great that you’ve got an ad that can draw clicks, but you have to look beyond your ad and see your landing page for what it is. If it isn’t converting your traffic then you’re just throwing good money after bad. We’ve discovered that sometimes a simple tweak of a landing page can result in more conversions.

Now imagine in that second scenario above that you got 2 conversions instead of 1. Your ROI moved from $2 to $24. Now imagine doing that every day. Isn’t ROI a lot more attractive then CTR now?

The first step to increasing sales is increasing traffic. Bottom line, that’s what social media does for you. It increases your traffic – if you do it right.

Actually, there are three primary benefits to social media marketing:

• Increased traffic to your website
• Reputation management
• Audience engagement and relationship building

Each of these benefits is very distinctive, but they all lead to the same end road. If you manage your reputation online well then it will lead to more traffic going to your website and inevitably to more sales. Building relationships and engaging with your audience likewise will deliver more traffic to your website, leading to more sales.

As you can see, multiple benefits often lead to a positive end result. When it comes to online marketing you cannot afford to sit idle. Be proactive, don’t be afraid to venture out from your virtual doorstep, and meet the day.

On another note, by stepping outside of your comfort zone (and your own domain), you show potential customers that you are willing to meet them half way. You’ll certainly earn a lot more respect for that. And being social is a great way to drive traffic back to your website and increase your sales.

Many search engine marketers spend most of their time chasing the elusive search engine ranking, hoping that if they just SEO their website enough then it will magically appear in the No. 1 spot on Google for their target search term. Unfortunately, it rarely happens that way.

You can rank No. 1 for any search term if you work hard enough. But will you make any money from that ranking? Bottom line: If your web page does rank No. 1 for an important keyword or search term but doesn’t convert any visitors to traffic then you aren’t any better off than if your web page doesn’t rank anywhere at all. You’re still making no money.

Quite frankly, you’re better off with a Page 5 search result that converts at 50% than you are a No. 1 search result that converts at 0%.

You might want to read that sentence again.

Let’s put it into raw numbers. Let’s say your No. 1 search result delivers you 5,000 unique visitors per month but none of those visitors convert to customers. Either you’ve targeted the wrong keyword or your landing page isn’t written for conversions. That’s a problem.

On the other hand, let’s say your Page 5 search result sends you only 10 unique visitors per month but converts 50% of those visitors. Now you’re getting 5 new customers per month. Isn’t 5 better than 0?

Even if your No. 1 search result converts 1 percent of its traffic, 5 new customers from 5,000 visitors is nothing to get excited about. You’re still only converting 1% of your traffic, compared to 50% from the lower ranking page. It’s all in the numbers, man.

Instead of focusing on search results, you should be focusing on building landing pages that convert well. Optimize them for search traffic, sure. But if you are focused heavily on building links and optimizing for keywords and you forget to optimize for conversions then you’ve wasted a lot of time. And money.

Google is a great PPC provider. I wouldn’t knock ‘em. But they aren’t the only gig in town.

In fact, I’d say that there are some drawbacks to using Google alone. For starters, Google is expensive. It’s very competitive. And no matter what niche you are in you are likely to be paying good money for clicks. It will be targeted traffic, for sure. But you’ll pay.

Sometimes, small PPC providers can deliver targeted traffic for much, much less. You’ll get less traffic. But it will be good traffic. Where you’ll pay 50 cents for a keyword at Google, you might only pay a penny or a nickel at some of the other PPC providers, so it’s worth it to try to parlay those services into some cheap traffic.

The best way to win at PPC is to use a small PPC provider to test ads and landing pages where you can do it inexpensively then, when you find a combination that works, you migrate your ads to Google. You probably should also up your budget at the small PPC company. At any rate, don’t just stick with one provider. Google is good, but they’re not God.

One of the factors that Google considers when computing search rankings is traffic – quantity as well as quality. Indeed, quality is perhaps more important than quantity. Sure, a site that gets 100,000 visitors per day may be seen as better than one that gets 10,000 visits per day, but just because you get a lot of visitors doesn’t mean that those visitors value your site. It’s easy to game traffic counts.

Another aspect of traffic comparison is whether or not visitors return to your website. If you have a low percentage of visitors who are return visitors to your website then you may suffer from some quality marks that are hurting you in your rankings. But that’ s not all.

Other aspects of quality traffic include traffic source, time on site, time on page, and bounce rates. I think traffic source is important and will likely become more important and when I say traffic source I’m talking about specific websites and their authority. If you get high quality traffic from a website that is deemed authoritative in the eyes of Google then that counts in your favor. It is conceivable that 10,000 visitors per day where 80% of that traffic comes from high quality, authoritative sites like Google, Facebook, and Twitter versus 100,000 low quality visitors from low quality directories and such could give you more search mojo. Remember, quality counts. And I think Google is getting as sophisticated at judging quality traffic as they are at judging quality links.

The takeaway here is to seek quality traffic from high quality, authoritative social media sites, not rinky-dink startups with no reputation.

Search engine marketing (SEM) is a powerful method of making money. Unique to online marketing, it consists of more than building a website and watching them come. SEM involves testing, driving traffic, and closing sales by generating leads through pay per click advertising, search engine optimization, and paid inclusion forms of search engine marketing.

SEM is not new. Even before Google and pay per click advertising, online marketers were using search engines to build their businesses. But SEM has become more sophisticated. It is a science as much as an art.

At its most effective, SEM can build your business in a splash, but most businesses see their revenues climb steadily. The first step to effective SEM is to build a well optimized website with a good clean design and ready to convert traffic to sales. If your website isn’t ready to convert then it doesn’t matter how much traffic you drive to it. It will all be lost opportunities.

When it comes to SEM, the best place to start is with a plan. And if you have trouble coming up with a plan on your own, you might want to consider an SEM consultant.