MarketingTheory.net

This is a bit of a tip AND an example, but it’s not the traditional example where I show you by doing. Instead, this is an example of how someone tried to exchange links with by other blog and why I turned him down. There’s no reason for me to identify the site, but here’s the email I received:

Hey-

I’ve got a website targeted towards the keyword Voip Modem and I’m looking for link exchanges.

Would you be interested? If so, please reply and I’m sure we can work something out.

Have a nice day!

[his name was here]

[his number was here]

I sent this response to him, which covers most of my advice about link exchange requests:

The primary reason I said no to your link exchange request is the site comparison. While it certainly doesn’t hurt to ask a site with a lot of traffic for a link exchange, you’re better off asking sites with similar (or a little more) traffic than you. This is because you’re more likely to have success, the site is not going to dump your link weeks later, and you can truly use the phrase “mutually beneficial” in your pitch.

The pitch, itself is pretty important. In your email, be sure to include a link to your site. If someone has to do any bit of extra work to take a look, you could miss out on a good partnership. Additionally, it helps to offer some reasons why I want your site to link to me. Some key things to mention (but only if they’re good enough to bring up) are Google Page Rank, unique monthly visitors, type of content, and if you know it, some demographics about your visitors. Of course, you should also let them know where you plan to put their link and where you would like your link placed and the target words for your link and ask that it be a “follow” link if possible.

Finally, the best link exchange is with sites that closely compliment yours and that yours closely compliment. Try to stay within your industry and the cross traffic will be better for everyone.

Of course, I forgot about one other thing. Many of us have more than one site and sometimes have everything going to one email. I often get requests for link exchanges, but the sender never identifies what site they want a link on. If I have 15 sites, I may not know which one you visited, so include it in your link exchange request.

Do you have any tips or success (or failure) stories. Share them in the comments below.

You may not fly United or care about guitars, but that’s not the point of this article. There’s a lesson to be learned about customer service and brand management that we can all learn from what hit the net this week.

Three days ago, Dave Carroll, a musician I had never heard of before, dropped a bomb on YouTube. It’s a music video for a song titled United Breaks Guitars and it tells the story of a man who’s guitar was broken and who was subsequently given the run around for months before finally deciding to take his plight to the all powerful voice of the Internet. The video immediately became a viral hit with it’s catchy tune and pretty decent production value, mopping up a cool 700,000+ views on YouTube in just a few days. As a result, United Airlines has been doing a lot of apologizing and damage control.

Here’s the summary of what happened, according to Dave Carroll:

In the spring of 2008, Sons of Maxwell were traveling to Nebraska for a one-week tour and my Taylor guitar was witnessed being thrown by United Airlines baggage handlers in Chicago. I discovered later that the $3500 guitar was severely damaged. They didn’t deny the experience occurred but for nine months the various people I communicated with put the responsibility for dealing with the damage on everyone other than themselves and finally said they would do nothing to compensate me for my loss. So I promised the last person to finally say “no” to compensation (Ms. Irlweg) that I would write and produce three songs about my experience with United Airlines and make videos for each to be viewed online by anyone in the world. United: Song 1 is the first of those songs. United: Song 2 has been written and video production is underway. United: Song 3 is coming. I promise.

And the video:

And Dave’s not done. You see, he promised the last unhelpful person he talked to at United that he would write and release three songs about the event to let the world know how badly he was treated. The first two are done and Dave said it himself: “United: Song 3 is coming. I promise.” With all this attention, I’m sure United is by now clamoring to work with Dave and hopefully put an end to all the interviews and press he’s getting about this. Sadly, though, the damage is done and it could have all been avoided. If United Airlines employees had not (allegedly) banded together to basically try and brush the problem under the rug, Dave might be quietly sitting at home, wondering what he might write the next song about. Instead, they’ve (according to Dave’s side of the story) basically dared him to try and tell the world. Bad move, United.

As a guy who works really hard on brand building, this astonishes me. For $3,500, a huge company could have averted a PR nightmare. Instead, they’ve created one by shirking their responsibility to reimburse a customer for losses that were a result of their employees’ mishandling of luggage. Building a brand and making money isn’t enough. You need to manage your brand and look for and properly handle any problems before they become the next musical hit on YouTube. I hope United isn’t the only company taking notes this week.

This is going to be a short post because while this traffic earner is often forgotten or overlooked, it’s a great way to get easy repeat traffic every year. It’s so simple that it’s a little bit funny. Just dedicate a good amount of time and effort to making a solid holiday-related post right before the holiday in question and watch as people return to the post year after year.

Last night, well-known blogger and photography tipster, Problogger tweeted about how he loves all the residual traffic that flows in this time every year from a single post, How to Photograph Fireworks Displays. The graph above shows that traffic and it really drives home what I wrote about last month, Discuss Topics That Create Magnetic Traffic. While you have to work hard to create a solid, useful post that people will want to come back to every year, the rewards are worth it and you’ll be reminded of that every time that holiday rolls back around.

Your homework: Think about the next major holiday (I’m thinking about Halloween already) and start planning a post for it now. Take the time to perfect that post and then publish just before the holiday for the best results.

Happy 4th of July, everyone.

In the past three years as a technology blogger for JoeTech.com, I have noticed some trends in the kinds of posts that get return traffic over and over. Before saying what those are, though, I want to talk about why this is important to pay attention to.

Why should my posts be magnetic?
One of the first rules of blogging is to blog about your passion or something you can enjoy talking about a lot. Still, running a blog is a lot of work. While you should still try to post frequently, magnetic articles will keep even more new people coming to your blog every day. Even on days you don’t get a chance to post a new article, your old articles should continue to bring in new readers. And lets face it… Readers turn into profit and we all want to make some money where we can. Write magnetic posts now and enjoy larger profits with less work later.

How can I make my posts magnetic?
Making a post magnetic is mostly in the topic, but factors like the title, keywords and other aspects of SEO come into play as well. Let’s start with the topic. The easiest way to come up with a magnetic topic is to think of something that is or will be a hot topic or very useful to a large enough demographic. On my tech blog, I’ve written a few posts about how to fix a digital camera or a laptop. My two laptop repair posts bring about 60 new readers to the site every day. It helps if the topic is always popular, but the next best thing is a topic that will come up again and again. One example might be a an article on the Internet’s role on the presidential election. In America, that topic will see search traffic every four years. In my case, I wrote a post about a working proton pack on ebay. The device is from the popular Ghost Busters movies which hadn’t been in the news until recently with the June 16th release of the Ghost Busters video game. All the new game buzz is bringing 25 new readers to that two year old post every day. Working from my experience (and my Google Analytics stats), here’s some ideas for magnetic posts:

- Share opinions about a movie series that could go on forever like Friday the 13th did. Every time a sequel comes out, it’s free traffic.
- Write an instructional post on how to do something. It should be something not entirely obvious but not so daunting that few would dare to do it. Be sure to include lots of photos or video where it will help. (As a bonus, you can give short answers to questions on Yahoo! Answers and link to your post as the source)
- Review a hot product. I review a lot of products, and some of the more popular ones generate a lot of daily traffic from consumers. Take note, too, that this is valuable targeted traffic.
- Share thoughts on a long-running debate. You can make a lot of people angry if you’re not careful, but the more touchy the topic, the more traffic you’ll end up with. Just be sure you’re willing to back up your debate.
- Provide something fun or useful for a holiday. Every year, people flock to my “5 Geeky Ways to Say “I Love You” on Valentines Day” on Valentines day.

Once you have your topic settled, come up with a solid title that will not only be appropriate a year from now, but makes people want to read your post. Title crafting is a post for another time, as is general SEO, but they’re both important. Whatever you choose to write about, be sure to use appropriate keywords, etc. The more you pay attention to these details, the more traffic you’ll see coming in from all the search engines.

Capture and retain the new readers
Getting lots of traffic from Google is great, but if they only read the one article Google dropped them on, you’re not taking full advantage of this easy traffic. There’s a few ways you can make the most of this foot traffic:

Watch your bounce rates. Google Analytics is a wonderful tool that shows you stuff like this. If your bounce rate for this search traffic is 99%, almost every search visitor is leaving just as quickly as they came in. You want to get the bounce rate as low as possible. This can be done in various ways such as internal cross-linking, prompts to subscribe to your RSS feed, or a “releated articles” list. My search traffic has a bounce rate of about 85%. This means that about 15% of the people who come from Google, etc. visit another page on my blog. I have room for improvement, but 15% retention is decent.

Land the social media conversion. If you use Twitter, Digg, FaceBook, etc. (even if you don’t, but you SHOULD), make sure to provide links for the reader to Tweet, Digg, Stumble, etc. your article. A single Digg or Stumble can become an avalanche of traffic all because you made it easy for the search visitor and that person liked what he or she read.

Convert for cash. One of my popular articles is earning me about $50 a month with modest traffic. I added a highly targeted add to the post, itself, but only after I had a server-crippling swarm of traffic. Had I targeted an ad to the demographic ahead of time, today’s post might have been titled, “How One Blog Post Paid Off My New Car”.

Blogging is about passion for many of us, and it should remain that way. The tips and ideas mentioned above are not intended for every post, but from time to time, you will form an idea for a post and remember how making it magnetic extends your passion well into the future. Feel free to share a link to your magnetic post in the comments.

In the past couple years, there’s been plenty of speculation about the value of StumbleUpon traffic. Some have argued strongly in favor while others disagree. While I’ve always been in favor of getting my posts stumbled, I’ve been on the ropes about its usefulness. Today, I was poking around my Google Analytics account, and immediately noticed a spike in traffic on my other blog, JoeTech.com from 12.21.2008. A couple clicks later, I found the source of the traffic to be StumbleUpon hits to a post from last March. Looking back further, I noticed a few more spikes from StumbleUpon in 2007 and 2008, resulting in almost 9,000 visits. I love unexpected traffic, but good marketing requires understanding of methods that seem to work so I wondered, is this traffic even valuable, why is it coming in months later, and how can I keep it up?

Why the sudden interest in an old post?
4mind4life “discovered” my post about a Swiss Mini Gun back on March 6th. A couple days later, someone else stumbled it and the post was viewed just over 200 times. Then it quickly faded into the darkness of my blog archives. More people stumbled it, but it takes someone with plenty of subscribers to get a burst of traffic to your post, so it sat silent until it got stumbled by another “power user” on April 9th, bringing me an additional 300+ views. Quietly, the post lay in the archives for months after that initial traffic, averaging about 5 views per day, from Google and other sources. In late November, it had a couple small traffic bumps, leading another power Stumbler to find the post and stumble it. That stumble resulted in a new 200+ views burst of traffic. These bursts of traffic from power users stumbling your content are why many social media experts tell you to invest time making connections with the right people on StumbleUpon and other social media sites, something I need to do more of, admittedly.

Is this traffic even valuable?
This is another point of contention when it comes to sites like StumbleUpon. Ultimately, any traffic that isn’t someone just trying to bury your web server is good traffic. When I look at the bounce rates below for my SU traffic, they’re not bad, but they’re not great, either. This means about 48% of the people who came to my site from StumbleUpon walked right back out. But I’m a “glass half full” type of guy, so I see that 52% of these new visitors decided to drop back in later and read other posts. This means StumbleUpon has brought me about 4,300 new readers that ended up coming back. That’s not too bad for free traffic.

I also see 1.73 pages per visit on average, which is great. It means that about 73% of these new visitors checked out another page on the site before they left. I’d love a much higher number, but once again, all I’ve done to get this free traffic is add a StumbleUpon link to my posts. Better still, I’m sure a couple of these visitors also stumbled the second post they read. StumbleUpon traffic, in my opinion, is very valuable. If you’re not taking advantage of it, you should.

How do I make it happen more?
I’ve already pointed out part of this above. If you want to succeed with social marketing, you should be social. These sites rely on people suggesting things for other people to view and read, so you need those first few stumbles to get the ball rolling. While I’ve been a horrible slacker on StumbleUpon, I tried some social participation on Digg, which works on a similar principal, with some degree of success. When you join the site, make sure your blog’s URL is in your profile and add an icon so you’ll be noticeable. Next, find a tag related to the type of content you regularly post. Pick a popular (more bold) one for better results.

Don’t stop there. Working to get those initial stumbles is just the door-opener. The real power behind StumbleUpon is the viral effect it can have. If each person who sees the initial stumbles stumbles the post themselves, the traffic momentum will continue to grow. There’s no way to make sure this happens, but you can certainly increase your odds. Put a StumbleUpon link at the bottom of your post, making it easy for anyone to stumble it. The easier you make it, the more success you’ll see.

If you want to really remind those stumblers to re-stumble your post, do like Saad Kamal did in this post and display a special message to people that came from stumbleupon.com, asking them to stumble your post.

Targeting a stumble request like this is a great way to take advantage of the ability to know where the reader is coming from. This works for other services like Digg, etc., too. Check out this plugin if you’re using WordPress.

Be worthy of stumbles
Just like Digg or any other social media traffic engine, StumbleUpon has users that generally promote specific types of stories, images, etc. over others. Most bloggers should write about what makes them happy and in a way they are comfortable with, but if you need a big traffic boost, take a look at what others are stumbling and gear a post to it. Digg, for example, loves lists like “10 reasons you should…” or “5 ways to get… for free”. Take a look at what the power users like and give it to them. Chances are, they’ll stumble it and you’ll have some instant traffic.

Remember the early days of MySpace? There was hardly any spam or people trying to steal your account, it was simple, and networking early didn’t seem all that important. Twitter is just getting out of the early phase and networking is more important than ever. So how do you succeed on Twitter? Be like Darth Vader.

Darth Vader has a death grip on Twitter

You read that right. Be like old Mr. Angry Deathstar, himself. I don’t mean you should throw on a big black helmet and talk like James Earl Jones. Instead, just take a look at his account and what he’s doing right. How did Darth Vader land almost 20,000 followers? Let’s take a look.

Be a Celebrity (stand-in)
Sure… Easy, right? OK.. Maybe you can’t do everything just like Darth, but think about it. Is it REALLY Darth Vader slinging tweets? My money says it’s just someone who got the right idea at the right time and has executed the plan perfectly. Are there any celebrities? If you decide to become a celebrity stand-in, use it as your second account and keep a primary account for the real you. Then let the success of the celebrity account help your “you” account.

Entertain
If you’re a celebrity stand-in, don’t just repeat some lines from a movie like @napoleondynamite does. That clearly does not work at all. Be original while staying in character like D.V. does. Not all of his tweets a hilarious, but enough are that I don’t want to miss one, so I follow, just like the other 19,000+ followers.

Don’t Be Afraid to Follow
You can’t just sit back and expect the love to flow one way. You are nurturing relationships to an extent and just like the real thing, you need to give if you expect to receive. On Twitter, this means following people. Even if it’s just people who sent you a tweet or who you find interesting, don’t be afraid to follow a lot of people. Even an A-Lister like Darth Vader follows over 4,000 people.

Brand Yourself
What does your twitter page look like? Do you have a background? You at least have an icon, right? Take a look at Darth Vader’s Twitter page. His icon is easily recognizable and his background is subtle, but brands the page well. If your blog or site already has a brand that people will recognize, weave that into your Twitter page. Often just a simple background and the right icon will do the trick.

Darth lands himself about 50 new minions a day and can easily drop a link to a blog, website, or product landing page that will automatically be sent to an audience of almost 20,000 people. That’s true marketing power and if it is used correctly (linking only to related things like a Star Wars ring tone affiliate link, for example), the Dark Sith could be on the receiving end of some easy affiliate earnings.