So here’s the rub. When it comes to search engine optimization backlinks do still work.

But, whether they work for you to increase your ranking, or against you to send your site in to search engine abyss depends on your ability to acquire high value backlinks.

In the modern day of SEO link building is tough. No more can website owners spam their site’s from article directories, link farms or automation tools and expect to get results. In the present day links must be earned, mainly via hard graft and outreach or by creating content so awesome people actually want to link to it. Most people opt for the latter and are disappointed by the results.

To get good links to your site it’s helpful to have some backlink strategies up your sleeve. Brian Dean has several and he shares his 3 very best on this episode.

Listen in as we discuss how to acquire powerful backlinks using email outreach, Brian’s skyscraper technique, plus the step-by-step process that grew Backlinko’s search traffic 110% in 14 days.

OUR GUEST:

Brian Dean is an well-recognised entrepreneur and SEO specialist and the founder of Backlinko.com. Backlinko, under Brian’s watchful eye, sets out to provide practical SEO techniques to marketing professionals and entrepreneurs.

Everything Brain publishes on his blog is actionable and carefully crafted to help readers get more traffic, leads and customers. Aside from blogging at Backlinko.com he’s also contributed to Hubspot, Entrepreneur, QuickSprout and Moz.

Since February of 2010 Brian has built a growing internet marketing company while traveling to 25 countries including Thailand, Japan, Spain, and Turkey. He currently lives in Berlin, Germany.

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Welcome back listener! This is Traffic Jam show #45 and what a great show we’ve got lined up for you. Now before I tell you about today’s guests, I want to say hi to some Traffic Jam listeners who have been getting in on the discussion for episode #44. In no particular order, Denver Profit Jr., Robert McGovern, Ian Tong, and Veravo’s very own Freya Jones. Thank you for stopping by the episode page and commenting. To join the chats on this episode, head on over to TrafficJamCast.com/45 where you can also get the extra bonuses I put together to help you implement the strategies on today’s show. So at that appropriate junction, let me introduce our guest today. His name is Brian Green and he’s got a great website called backlinko.com where he teaches very practical advice that you can use to get more traffic. so you know this is a conversation that I am going to be very excited about and you should be as well, and that is because Brian is one of these new breed of SEOs who get where SEO is going and he is able to deliver actionable results driven tactics that work in the modern day of search, which is actually easier to say than to do sometimes. And what he teaches really does work. My approach and Brian’s approach are similar in many regards but still I have been able to learn a hell of a lot from Brian and I know you will too, which is exactly why I have invited him to the show, so without any further ado, here on Traffic Jam, is Brian Dean from Backlinko.com.

James: So welcome back listener! This is episode #45 and joining us today in the hot seat is Brian Dean. Brian, how are you?

Brian: I am well. How is it going James?

James: It’s doing, doing good. Glad to have you on the show. Now you of course have this website called Backlinco and I think we should appropriately start the discussion talking about backlinks perhaps and how they affect search engine optimization. Despite all of the recent turmoil, I think any SEO will tell you that backlinks do still work, but what is the difference between the backlinks that will work for you and one that works against you?

Brian: Well, there’s a couple things that go in to backlinks that actually increases your rankings, there’s kind of a third category of those that don’t do anything and then there is the one that you mentioned that could hurt you and basically the difference is that the ones that you want are links from related sites that someone has put there, they are usually called editorial links and here’s the nice description of what they are. Basically someone saw your site or a piece of content on your site and say hey, that is pretty cool, I want to link to that, and they either link to that from a blog post or a news site or a resource page, whatever page that links out to different sources, you end up there based on the fact that someone else says that’s cool I want to link out to it. That’s very different on how it used to work when it was basically a sandblast and you just basically get links anywhere, and basically a good rule of thumb is if your competition can easily just get the same link that you get, it’s probably not a good link because it is going to be devalued at some point so any sort of mass link building, it can work for short term. I am not going to lie and say that it won’t work at all, but it definitely puts you on the danger zone.

James: Yeah, absolutely! I think some of those links that are most effective are those that you don’t really know are coming, right? There’s just those that land up to you because your content is good and because people generally and editorially want to link out to you –

Brian: Definitely, but I don’t think you necessarily have to wait for that to happen, it is kind of a mistake a lot of people make – they just publish great content and hope the links roll in but in my experience the best links that I get are from direct outreach and I’d be happy to talk about how to do that but of course I do get those natural links and they are the best that you can get because they are super editorial and you don’t have to do any extra work to get them.

James: Yeah, absolutely! Well, let’s talk about that a little bit because, rightly said, you can just wait and hope and perhaps cross your fingers that people are going to start linking to you, or you can go out and find them. Now you’ve published a post called The 17 Untapped Back Links Sources, I’d love to get your insights on that and perhaps to ask you to do a condensed version and perhaps name your top three untapped link sources because I think that would make pretty good listening.

Brian: Sure. So in that post, one of the best is the aforementioned resource page so in that post I talk about just resource pages that or .edu sites so .edu sites are in the States, University sites, right? They’re very hard links to get. Some people in SEO feel that they have some special ranking power in Google if you can get a link from them, I don’t personally believe that but the point is that without exception, they are all very powerful, highly trusted domains. I mean, we are talking about household names like Harvard, Yale, Princeton – these are institutions that you have heard of that are highly trusted sites. But it is really hard to get a link from them, harder than your average site but one of the easiest ways to get your foot in the door and actually get a link is the fact that a lot of them have resource pages which are just links to great resources. They have resources about nutrition, about email marketing, they even have resource pages about SEO. So what you want to do is find those resource pages in edu sites or on other sites and get your links on them and the easiest way is to really just create something that would be a good fit for that page and then email that person and let them know. You can easily find resource pages and another nice thing about them is that they are super easy to find on Google you only have to put something in like in url: resources + keyword. So you put +nutrition, +gardening, + cooking and see what comes up. And if you want to specify edu sites, you can put site:.edu and we can have the search engine in the show notes because they are a bit hard to sound out.

James: Man, you’re doing a great job!

Brian: I have never done that before but they are super easy to find. You have maybe two or three search terms to find more than you even know to do it and then it’s just a matter of grinding out, finding that person who runs that section of the site and emailing them a non-pushy pitch that’s basically saying, “hey I found your list of resources really great I have something that I just published about gardening and it might be a great fit. Either way, keep up the great work.” And you’ll find that you’ll have about a 10% conversion rate if you find the right person and have a great piece of content. It is hard to find a specific conversion rate. A lot of people are like – well, if I email a hundred people, how many people will link? It really is hard to say because it depends how great your content is, right? If you have something like the meaning of life, it is a lot easier to get links than if you have a 500-word article for 5 tips for gardening. It’s going to be a lot harder. So I guess some links, it is somewhat a numbers game. The more people you email your content to give them a heads up, the more links you get.

James: Yeah, so have you got any tips for crafting an effective email that may get the attention of someone that is managing a resource page?

Brian: Definitely! The first thing is to find the right person. That’s where a lot of people skip over and what they’ll do for example an edu site, any large institution site, not a blog run by one guy, you’ll need to find whoever is in charge of that particular section because if you email the general email or the general contact form, your email is going to end up in the black hole, right? It’s not going to be forwarded to the right person because it doesn’t seem like a very urgent email to send to someone. So your first job is to find out who curates that area. A lot of times you’ll find clues on the page; they’ll have a name and an email address, or if you look at the category in the urls say for example the url is like trafficjam/webinar/resources and you’ll have a list of webinar resources what we want to do is just look at trafficjam/webinar and then see who runs that section. A lot of times you’ll have a person that will be in charge specifically for that section. So that is the first thing. Once you found it, it really is not rocket science. A lot of people overthink email outreach. I really want to put in the subject line something like – A quick question about your resource page and then I just put their name and then the pitch that I basically outlined – found your resource page, it is really great, I have something that might be a good fit, here’s the link, it might make a good addition to the page, if not, that’s cool. That’s basically all you need to do.

James: Fantastic! Cool! Well that I think is a super easy and actionable thing that our listeners can go out and do. that’s #1, what’s #2 on the list?

Brian: #2 would be broken link building which is kind of like that strategy souped up a little bit so if you’re serious about link building and you want to get more links than your emails, this is the strategy that you have to do. So broken link building is basically the same approach. Look at these resource pages and what you do instead of just begging for a link. I just told you it works, it can work, but what you need to do is you look for broken links on that page so what you’re doing is when you find a broken link, reach out to that person and instead of just asking for something straight up, you kind of getting your foot to the door with helping them and say you found some broken links on a page, and especially when your page is a nice replacement for that broken link, you can recommend that it’s not easy to get a replacement. Now if that was a broken link that used to link to an article about gardening, and you have an article about gardening that’s really similar and you email that person, it’s really a no-brainer for them to replace your broken link so in a sense you are doing them a little bit of a favor by identifying broken links on their page and then you have a great resource that is a great fit and then the conversion rate is double or triple that straight up of link begging and it doesn’t really take a lot of extra work. You can use a great extension for Chrome called Check My Links and when you click a little button on your Chrome browser, it finds broken links in like 10 seconds, super easy.

James: Nice! Nice! I guess the process there is then going and finding appropriate websites in your niche or market and then hitting send and getting in contact with those people responsible, right?

Brian: Exactly!

James: Simple! Love it. Okay, so, #3? This is the Top 3 list.

Brian: Okay, so #3, this is a little bit more involved. You can’t just pages that you know people. It’s infographics. For me, infographics is like one of the most untapped content marketing strategies, period. Link building, SEO, content. The problem with infographics is that they’ve become so commonplace and they’ve become so saturated that a guest in your show, Neil Patel, told me that when he started Kissmetrics, one of the reasons it did so well was that they published a lot of infographics, they published a weekly infographics for a year, and this was before infographics are really big. Regardless of whether infographics was great or good or mediocre, they would still get a ton of traffic and links from it. Today, it doesn’t really work like that. There are so many infographics out there. That being said, the right infographics can still do really well especially when it comes to link building. What I like to do is look at the site Visual.ly and that is basically a community of infographic designers and you can find infographics that people have submitted there and what you want to do is find one in your space that is already done well, you can sort them by views, by likes and by comments and you can see which ones are done well, take bits and pieces that you like and create a sort of a Frankenstein infographics of all the things that you found that you liked and minus the things that you did not like and create an awesome infographic. From that point, it’s a matter of the outreach. Outreach for infographics is very different than with resource pages link building or broken link building which we went over. With infographics, what you want to do is basically find people that publish content about your topic. So again, if you have a nice gardening infographic that is ready to go, you want to email people that wrote about gardening and say, hey you write about gardening, and if you want to give it an edge and say write an infographic about growing tomatoes, then you’d want to find people who write about growing tomatoes quite often and email those people and say, hey, you write about tomatoes and I just published an infographic about growing tomatoes – here you go. That’s what you really want to do, at that point I don’t ask them to do anything, I don’t even send them the link, I just say, do you want to see the infographic? And when their reply says yes, I say here you go and then I say if you ever want to republish this on your site, I’d be happy to write a unique introduction for you. And that really increases the wheels because if someone is going to publish the infographics on someone else’s site, it’s nice because they don’t have to write content that day. But the bad thing is that you do have to write content because you have to write at least the introduction. You don’t just slap an infographic on a blog post and call it a day. So when you write an intro for them, you’re really saying, hey once you’ve got a nice infographic to share with your audience, I’ll write you a unique introduction just for you. And if you are doing that, you can get tons of great links for your infographic.

James: And this is the concept you call guest-o-graphics, is that right?

Brian: Exactly.

James: Love it! I was going to ask you about that. We kind of had these infographic terms pop up on Traffic Jam over the weeks. Neil’s was the gif-o-graphics which is kind of getting popular, now we’ve got guest-o-graphics so we’re really mixing this thing up with infographics.

Brian: Well, that’s the thing. Like I said, there’s so many now.

James: You have to innovate, right?

Brian: Yeah, you have to.

James: Now, one of the most successful posts on your site in terms of referring domains, which is the number of other websites linking to your post about Google ranking factors. What was it about that post specifically that garnered so much attention and links to your site?

Brian: I think one of them was the fact that it’s the most comprehensive resource on that topic online. It is very hard to say that it is bar none the most comprehensive resource about that topic. I think, once you have that in hand, the job of link building is a lot easier. The number two thing is that it did a ton of outreach. I did a lot of broken link building, resource page link building to get the word out because when I published that, I think the week after I published it, we had 8 tweets, 2 comments and 3 Facebook likes. So even though it was a really great piece of content, just publishing it wasn’t nearly enough.

James: Yeah, I want to ask you a little bit about your content style. If I was to compare you to say Seth Godin, it would kind of like be comparing chalk and cheese. He’s got the style that’s very short and precise but your content, typically five pages long, and very detailed style, what is it about your content style that bought it about to be what it is? I am sure you are going to tell me it is by design, right?

Brian: Well, it is by design. There has been a lot of research about what content tends to get shared most often so Jonah Berger who is a researcher and author, he did a study on what content made the New York Times best seller list most often and he did a content that made it to that list versus those that didn’t and he found out that what that content had but not really that not shared content did not have and he found a bunch of different things but one of the most important was content length. So the longer that content was, the most likely it was to make the most emailed list. Another study by these guys called SERP IQ; they looked at what content tended to rank on the first page of Google and they found the average first page result for a piece of content was at least 2,000 words to make Google first page and as you get to the top three, it gets higher and it’s like 2500 words. And then more recently, Buzz Sumo and OK Dork did a case study where they looked at content length and social shares and they found that content that was more than 2000 words or 3000 words got shared more often than shorter styles and from my personal experience, I found that longer content quashes shorter content every single time. And a lot of people try to go the Seth Godin route. I love Seth Godin, he’s a smart guy, but if you try to recreate his strategy today in 2014, it’s not going to work. He’s got a huge start – he started blogging in 2006, you’re not. The world is totally different. Back then, if you updated your blog every day that was enough to get you assigned a position. If you want to do that same strategy today, it would not work. I prefer to publish much as often, and when I publish content, it is really long and in depth. It has worked for me and the data really doesn’t lie on that topic.

James: It is interesting because it is kind of counter intuitive, right? First of all I could see how it could work for search having long form content because the content is more detailed it would give a more in depth search results but in terms of share worthy content you might think that a more consumable content might get consumed more and shared more but that is clearly not the case.

Brian: Yeah, you would. I think two reasons for that is that in another study found that basically people don’t read stuff that they shared. So people, when they share something in social media, nine times out of ten, they have not even read the thing and I know that I am guilty of that sometimes, I don’t want to point fingers but I know I am, I don’t want to point fingers.

James: I wasn’t always, but I have started using Buffer App a lot more and it makes some really nice suggestions, I’ll scan the post if it looks real nice then I’ll share it. You didn’t hear that here.

Brian: But you know what I am saying, right? I would not say they have not looked at it, but they have not read it and one of the other factors that Jonah Berger looked at for what content tended to go viral and get to share on this New York Times most email list was a sense of awe. So if the content has the sense of awe, it was much more likely to get shared, so if you have a long three- thousand words post with screenshots or images and videos. It instills so much awe that it compels someone to share it and I think it is one of the reasons that it gets shared most often.

James: Yeah, perhaps it’s something we should link to in the resource section of this post because Jonah Berger’s got some contagiousness and how stuff really captures on and catches fire and it is really, really interesting especially for us content creators so I’ll make sure that’s included. Now I want to ask you about a little case study you had because in the age of search where it is very much kind of this long term game now where there are not really any short term wins, you’re pretty much able to do the remarkable, right? You are able to have a 110% increase in traffic in about 14 days using the technique and I believe you thus coined the skyscraper technique. Tell us a little bit about that.

Brian: Sure. So the skyscraper technique is basically a strategy of content marketing and SEO for now, so really it’s what you said James, it does work for the short term but it really is a long term play. Basically, there are three steps. The first step is you find content that is already done well in your space, in your niche. So in my case, the Google ranking factors post that you mentioned earlier, I had found a few other posts about Google’s ranking factors that weren’t really thorough and a bit out of date and they had still done really well, so Google a couple of years ago came out and said they had 200 ranking factors, so all these people tried to come up with these 200 to figure out what they were. No one even came close. The closest guy came up with 140 something and the page he listed was very ugly, it was out of date, but it had tones of referring domains and even a lot of social shares even though it came out of because of the age of Twitter and stuff because if people find it now, it is really helpful. The next thing you want to do is improve on that content. So in my case, that piece of content did not have all 200 so it was a no brainer to list all 200, now of course a lot of them are probably totally irrelevant and way outdated but I try to find a resourceful for at least all of them, if not all of them, some basis and not things that I totally made up. And that was basically saying we have all 200 here, that alone will help us stand out but I also made it more thorough. The other ones are just like lists of the ranking factors, I described each one, I added images, basically trying to make something a lot better and basically that is why it is called the skyscraper technique because they had the tall skyscraper and you’re basically creating something taller and stand out and then the third step is to reach out to people that linked to the older content and give them the heads up about mine. And a lot of times, it is similar to broken link building, the link is not really broken right? In this case it’s just linking to something outdated but the idea is instead of just saying, hey you’re linking to this so it’s either I have something that is more up to date or more thorough, you might want to consider adding my link as well and in 0% of the cases has anyone removed the link to the older piece of content but that in mind. So there is nothing malicious going on there like stealing their links. I never ask them because I don’t want them to do that but they add their links as well, it is also a no-brainer. They’re linking to something superior, you have something better, it is a no brainer.

James: Yeah, absolutely! It’s positioning again, isn’t it? It’s like the broken link approach, you’re helping them and offering up something that is potentially more valuable to their readers which they shouldn’t turn a blind eye to. So I’m guessing this whole outreach thing is pretty important but you don’t just do post outreach, you do something called pre-outreach which you mentioned to me earlier. Tell me a little bit how that works and how you go about connecting with influencers before your content is posted.

Brian: Sure. So this is something that I am experimenting with recently because what I would do after I publish a post to sort of build a buzz before I get any link building is that I will email people after it came out, just to give them a heads up, and again I learned this from obviously, Neil, who’s obviously influenced a lot of people cause we talk about him all the time, and I remember he mentioned on a podcast that when he publishes a blog on to SEO, after he published it, he emailed 200 people about it. And he said that made a huge difference in terms of the shares, and the activity around that piece of content and it got me thinking, I mean getting that from Neil who has a hundred thousand Twitter followers, his email list is massive, and he gets absurd amount of traffic, if he is going to do email outreach and that helped him, imagine how much it would help me, someone who has less of all that stuff so I decided to try it out and it worked really well. But it got me thinking that people want sort of an insider scoop, they want to know when something is going to happen before hand so I decided experimenting with emailing people before it came out so about a week before the post comes out, I email a bunch of people and basically say- I’ll just break it down step by step, it is a lot easier. So the first step is to use this tool called Buzz Sumo, I don’t know if you know about this James –

James: I don’t know so –

Brian: It’s awesome. It is called Buzz Sumo and basically what it is, is a way to find content that’s been shared a lot. So you go to Buzz Sumo and you put in a keyword like podcasting and it will show you over what times you choose, content about podcasting that has been shared a whole lot on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest and you can sort by each share on social network or the total number of shares. So what I do is I find content about whatever is my post about that’s done well in the last couple of weeks and another cool feature about that is you can see who shared that on Twitter. So you click a few shares in Buzz Sumo and it shows you all the people that shared that on Twitter, so what I do is I download that list and then I hire a freelancer to find all the email addresses of all these people and then I email them and say hey, basically you tweeted out this piece of content about podcasting last week, I have another piece of content about podcasting coming out in a couple of days, do you want to check it out? And for all the people that say yes, I email it to them, it’s as simple as that. It’s a total numbers game, I usually email around 200 people and from that I get maybe 40 tweets.

James: Nice! Very nice! Well this is kind of in line with the Jonah Berger stuff as well, right? It is getting those people that inside scoop which instantaneously more pre-inclined to share it because they feel like they are delivering value and ahead of the curve on this stuff so I can see how that works extremely well. I am going to check out that, the app is called what? Buzz -?

Brian: Buzz Sumo.

James: Perfect! Buzz Sumo. That will be in the show notes for sure. Now we talked a lot about great content and distribution, what are the other activities that we could be doing in SEO that would yield a high activity that you suggest our listeners invest in?

Brian: I would invest more in keyword research. Back when I used to do client work with SEO, there is this frustrating thing that basically everyone who does client work can understand. You take on a new client and he basically says, I have 5 keywords that I want to rank for, here they are, go do it. And a lot of times, those keywords are just not a good fit for those guy’s business or that woman’s business. The keywords that that person comes up with, they are not only usually insanely competitive, but they won’t even bring customers because they are so broad and general. So for example, if you were selling shoes online, someone searching for red heels is going to convert better for you than someone searching for shoes, right? Shoes make up a lot more searches, it is also much more competitive. But the specificity of the keyword – forget about competitiveness, that person is going to convert and much more likely become a customer. It is like insurance, you sell life insurance and someone searching for life insurance for a 65 year old is going to convert a lot better than someone searching for life insurance that could be a student doing a term paper, right? That could be not your customer. So for me the number 1 high value thing for keyword research. For me that is more important than link building and SEO, for me that is more important thing that you can do because that is sort of the compass that guides the rest of SEO. If you don’t have keywords, you don’t know where you’re going, you don’t know if you are making progress and you don’t know if you are optimizing the right words. If you don’t have the keyword in line, just kind of write this content and hope people search for whatever it is you put out as opposed to creating content about what people already searched for which is a much smarter strategy.

James: Yeah, so where does keyword research fit in your sort of content development program? Does it come pre-content idea or do you come up with a suitable piece of content and then see what keyword terms are going to be relevant for that particular piece of content?

Brian: I go both directions. So usually I let the keywords sort of guide my thinking, so that is the strategy that I recommend most people do because you don’t really have to wonder the demand for what you are writing if you have keywords that has a lot of search volume. The beautiful thing about keyword research is that even if there was not an SEO I’d still use it because it gives you objective data about what people are searching for online. Not just people but your customers are searching for online so there is really not any reason even if you don’t care about SEO, if you look at keywords, you can see how many people search for the keywords, the trend, whether it is becoming more popular or less popular over time. It is awesome data that you can get anywhere. It is really market research.

James: Yeah, and it guides conversions as well, right? If you understand the psychology and the language patterns of your prospects, you can adapt your content style to fit the wording that they are using themselves.

Brian: Yeah, absolutely! That is a good point. That doesn’t have anything to do with SEO but that’s where keyword research can help, the reason is I’m saying it’s such a high value thing, not just for SEO but sometimes I get a constant idea or a case study will come up, and then I have to go the other way, right? So when I have the case study on hand, and then I look at the keywords and see okay, if someone is looking for information on a topic or a case study, what keyword would they use in Google? And that’s where I go the other direction. So it can go both ways, I don’t think one is right or wrong, it kind of depends. If you have no ideas, you have your keywords, but if you already have a list of stuff, then you can form it around the keywords that are already out there.

James: Yeah, well, let us finish up with a non-SEO related question because I have seen you doing something that’s fairly innovative that I too have been getting good results with, and that is the content upgrade. I think you have been getting pretty good conversions with it recently. Tell us a bit about that.

Brian: Amazing! So this strategy alone has basically tripled the conversions on my site and for months I struggled. I mean, I have a guy working for me and all he does is split testing. And we’ve had some tiny improvements but nothing compared to the content upgrade and I noticed that you are using it and you are using it the exact same way I use it on backlinko. And basically what you do is, for every piece of content that you publish, whether it is a podcast interview or a blog post, you create a resource specific to that post. So what I used to do was at the end of the post, I’d be like, do you like that content? Then sign up for my newsletter. And Neil says it’s not really an enticing offer, like no one is going to wake up in the morning and say oh, I can’t wait to sign up in someone’s newsletter. Fact is, no one cares about your newsletter and no one cared about mine. So I noticed some people doing this and I decided to give this try and it was just an absolutely astronomical increase in conversions when I did and it did not take that much time. I would say it takes and extra 20 minutes to set up this post related resource and using it on the site but I am sure you’ve seen James the conversion difference is insane.

James: Yeah, absolutely astronomical. Completely different! We had Tim Paige as well from Lead Pages a few episodes ago and he was sharing the stats across their site and I think they had somewhere a threefold increase in terms of opt ins per day when they created this post specific opt in bribes so the difference is astronomical.

Brian: Yeah, it is awesome. And I actually use Lead Pages too for the content upgrade and that’s what I recommend because it works really well together like peanut butter and jelly.

James: Perfect! Let’s leave things on peanut butter and jelly and share with our listeners where they can go to find out a little bit more about you Brian, backlinko would be one place, where else can we send people off to?

Brian: Well, that’s definitely the best place to go and then sign up for the newsletter which is good, it’s just that no one is signing up for content upgrade. The other place to check out is Twitter which is @backlinko.

James: Perfect! Well I found you as a result of a referral from Neil and I signed up to your newsletter and I have to say it is valuable stuff so I am going to suggest to you the listener, head on over to backlinko.com, why don’t you try opting in via the content upgrade and then get a hold of Brian’s newsletter. I am sure it will be well worth your time. So thank you for your time today Brian, it has been invaluable and perhaps we can do it all again sometime in the future.

Brian: Sounds good James. Thanks for having me!

So there you go, that was Brian Dean from Backlinko.com. Now to help you get the most from backlinks and guest-o-graphics outreach strategy mentioned by Brian in today’s show, I put together for you a swipe file containing instructions and the exact email copy used by Brian in his own outreach program. Plus as a very special extra bonus, I am also including the email copy that I have used to land regular guest post contributions with the likes of Gulf Business News Magazine and Entrepreneur Middle East. To download these special bonuses plus the MP3 full transcript, and episode artwork for today’s show, go to TrafficJamCast.com/45 where you can also join the discussion from today’s episode.

Thank you for listening in to the show, I will be back again for another episode real soon! Be sure not to miss out on any of the future updates by subscribing via iTunes and Stitcher radio which you can do by going to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes and TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher. Remember to also head on over to the main website, Veravo.com for more traffic tips and training and to learn how I can help you get more leads and sales with a range of done for you traffic services.

We end this week’s show with a Traffic Jam chosen by our guest today and he’s gone for the track titled Welcome to the Jungle and it is by Guns N’ Roses. See you soon!

RESOURCES:

MENTIONS:

THE TRAFFIC JAM:

The Traffic Jam is a musical ‘jam’ chosen by our guest. Brian Dean has selected Welcome to the Jungle by Guns N’ Roses. The track Welcome to the Jungle was featured on the band’s debut solo album Appetite for Destruction which reached number seven on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and number twenty-four on the UK Singles Chart. The track was released on October 3, 1987.

Guns N’ Roses – Welcome to the Jungle

HERE’S WHAT TO DO NEXT:

So you can get started with implementing the backlink grabbing strategies featured in todays show, I’ve put together a special bonus bundle for you.

This free bonus includes:

Click the link below for instant access to your free bonus material:

Generating consistently profitable traffic is hard work. The hours spent developing content, building distribution relationships, doing outreach and establishing a genuine audience online can be countless before you begin to see a return on your investment. What if it didn’t have to be so difficult?

What if you could market only to those people looking for what you offer? What if you could show them your marketing for free, and only pay when someone clicks to your website, and you decide the maximum amount that click costs? What if people could start seeing your marketing today, not just one or two, but hundreds or thousands of people? This is all possible with Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Marketing.

On this episode we explore the intricacies of Paid Search Engine Marketing (PPC) with Larry Kim from WordStream.

We discuss what to do, and what not to do when it comes to PPC, the most effective PPC strategies of today, plus exactly how Larry generates the bulk of his website traffic. (Hint: It’s not using Paid Search)

OUR GUEST:

Larry Kim is the CTO of WordStream, a search engine marketing services and software company he founded in 2007. WordStream are well-known for developing and selling software that automates search engine marketing processes. Their suite of tools include a keyword tool, keyword niche finder and a Adwords campaign grader.

Undoubtedly one of the most respected authorities on all things Pay-Per-Click (PPC) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Larry Kim is a regular contributor to Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Watch, Forbes, Inc Magazine and HubSpot. Larry is the most influential PPC expert in 2014 and 2013 according to the PPC Hero Blog and won a spot in the coveted ClickZ Digital Marketing Hall of Fame and Small Business Influencer Award in 2013.

Whilst a voice for the Paid Search industry, Larry is a big advocate for Organic Search (SEO), Content Marketing and Social Media.

At the time of recording Larry Kim became a first time Dad to a little boy called Julian.

SUBSCRIBE TO TRAFFIC JAM: iTunes | Stitcher

A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST:

Here are some of the highlights from this episode of the Traffic Jam Podcast…

TWEETABLE MOMENTS:

If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page, or click to tweet my favourite quotes from this show.

You can also download these quotes as exclusive illustrated artwork along with other episode bonuses: Click Here To Get The Bonuses.

“Write stories so compelling that everyone is covering your stuff.” @LarryKim
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“Writing is like giving blood, you can only do so much before you pass out.” @LarryKim
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To see the full transcript of this episode in-page click show/hide transcript:

Hi welcome back listener! This is Traffic Jam episode #44, I am your host James Reynolds and you of course are tuned in to the podcast show that teaches you how to build and grow a profitable audience online.

A quick shout out at the top of the show to Viveka Von Rosen who was our guest here on episode #38 of Traffic Jam talking all about LinkedIn Marketing. Viveka made some really nice comments during the week about how much she has been enjoying the show as a subscriber so I want to thank you for that Viveka. But also mention her because her content which she spoke about at episode #38 is a very nice precursor to some of the content that we talk about with today’s guest.

So let me introduce him, he’s Larry Kim, and he’s the founder of Word Stream, a technology and services company that helps you get the most from your paid search marketing. Larry really is one of the pre-eminent authorities on paid search. He blogs on pretty much all of the big search engine blogs Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch, Search Engine Journal and Moz among others. He’s also been named the leading expert in paid search both in 2013 and 2014 by PPC Heroes so he really knows his stuff on paid search and it would therefore be stupid of us not to really dig dip on that topic in today’s show. But we don’t stop there, we also go deep on content marketing, SEO and social media so we cover a whole bunch of topics on today’s episode. Before we get to that, I want to tell you about some special bonuses I have put together for today’s episode which you can get by going to TrafficJamCast.com/44 where I put together the MP3 as a downloadable file for you, a full transcript of today’s show, plus my very own notes from this episode put together in mind map format so head to the URL TrafficJamCast.com/44, grab yourself the download and then sit back and enjoy today’s episode.

James: So welcome back listener this is episode#44 of Traffic Jam and joining me today is Larry Kim from Word Stream. Larry, how are you?

Larry: Doing great! How are you James? Thanks for having me.

James: Absolutely awesome to have you on the call. Now, right as we speak I am actually browsing around WordStream.com and I read that your company’s purpose, really exactly as stated, is to bring the power of search marketing to businesses of all sizes. So first question, should all businesses engage in paid search? And if so, how?

Larry: I think so. I am not saying that you have to allocate 50% of your budget to paid search but at the very minimum I think that any company doing web marketing must have at least a component of their marketing budget being allocated to paid search aimed to discovering the keywords that are exactly relevant to the business that you are operating.

James: So what are some of the aspects of doing paid search effectively? Because this is really your thing, right? Your background yourself, you’re very much the paid search guy. Your business produces software that helps people with the process of doing paid and you manage, to my knowledge, over a million dollars’ worth of your own spend on paid search. You’ve got to have a few lessons up your sleeves I am sure. What are some of the key points to doing this thing effectively?

Larry: So the first point would be kind of along the lines of what I was just talking about of being really kind of picky. On Google, there’s like three billion searches every day and the point is, maybe a lot of small businesses get tripped up, the point is not to buy all the searches but rather be very, very picky. If you are a web development consulting firm in Boston, you should not be bidding on the words web development because that could mean anything – that could mean that they are looking to learn web development, it could be that they are looking for a job, right? Who knows what the intent is behind that search. The key is to be super, super picky, like Web Development consulting firm Boston or something like very, very specific search terms that are highly relevant to exactly what you are doing because you have to pay for these clicks, you want to be reasonably sure that when you do pay for it that it is somebody that is able and willing to buy the product and services. So just being very, very picky and not trying to go after a lot of keywords but rather a narrow set of keywords that are precisely relevant to your business is I would say kind of #1 most important thing. A second thing has to do with ad copy, most of the ads that you do search for anything, like big data solutions, what you’ll find is the vast majority of these advertisers on AdWords for whatever reason. 98% of them have no creativity, they just write about the same ad, more or less for 4 different companies or for 10 different companies. So the idea is to come up with something really compelling and creative angles just like how in content marketing how you have these really ridiculous titles that really compel people to click on articles. Those emotions like awe, and anxiety and fear, and curiosity – you should be employing those same kinds of tactics that you do to your content in your ads so that you’re getting the clicks and you’re standing out in the audience. Just a last tip that I also want to throw out there is just to be active, where a lot of businesses fall down is kind of set it and forget. They do this one time account set up and they just leave it on autopilot and that is really not a great formula for success. You really need to be in the account once a week, looking at what worked, what did not work, and make necessary adjustments. So really one of the main take a ways is to be relevant to your business and that is through keyword matching. But then also extremely relevant to your relevance, understanding as you said, paying for points and what keeps them up at night and what big these fears and anxieties, how do you uncover that though, I mean I guess there is a skill set and a talent in writing good copy for your ads but what processes might we go through to kind of really understand what the paying points are for our potential customers.

Larry: Sure I would suggest to bring in outside people. A lot of times, when you are working within your own company seven days a week for the last five years, whatever it is, it is hard to really see the paying points from the point of view of someone who is not familiar with your services, so the external point of view always helps. One process that seems to work really well is to just map out these personas like who your target customer is and what are their fears, what are their best friends and what are the emotional triggers associated with those different actors and then just try to draw a bridge from those paying points to your solution, you know in a 120 characters or less. It’s really an art form like paid search analysts and people who do paid search, they tend to be more data oriented. What is that – left side brain kind of people like spreadsheets and stuff like these? You really need to team up with one of these copywriters for like a newspaper like the New York Post or whatever, like the crazy headlines that they come up with.- you should be thinking more along those lines.

James: Yeah, I am sure that character limit, that constraint of having only a few characters to work with actually forces kind a bit of creativity in your ad copy, right? Because you can’t be very long-winded and descriptive. You have to get to the point very, very quickly, right?

Larry: Right! But you know what, the bar is very, very low like most ads, they are very unimaginative so if you were to write a Haiku or a poem in a three-line format of an ad that would really stand out and people would be very, very curious so let’s see what that was and that would allow you to gain more clicks and having less position in the page.

James: Yeah, well you mentioned that to be inside the accounts, almost daily, monitoring the activity, what are some of the key numbers or metrics or things within an AdWords account that we should keep our eyes most closely on?

Larry: Sure. Maybe a daily is a little bit over-active, I would suggest maybe once a week would do it for the small typical business, even that, if you can do once a week is to be pretty ahead of your game in terms of your achievement and effort level but one of the key metrics that I like to look at is something called quality score and it is a lot more complicated – Google makes it a lot more complicated than it actually is, it has to do with just how good the click through rate of your ads, relative the expected click through rate for a given ad position so obviously if you’re on the first spot, you’re going to get a higher click through rate if you’re on average or if you’re on the fifth spot. The quality where it just says how high is your click through rate relative to the rate for your ads and the reason why is because Google has this very neutral pricing policy where like the ads that get clicked on are ridiculously cheap and they get this 50% discount of your minimum click bid. Conversely, if you have these really bad ads that nobody is clicking on, they get taxed for like 400% increases in monetary engineering for relative cost per click so this kind of rolls up this notion of the click through rates of your ads as a measure of quality and basically it impacts every single thing in your account.

James: Yeah, and what are some of the measures that we can take then to improve quality score? I am sure again it’s becoming more relevant with our ads and our targeting but again I guess it would also be down to just writing an effective ad copy, would it?

Larry: Yeah, those are two staples, the main ways that has to do with the keyword targeting, eliminating keywords that have nothing to do with content, and meaning that it’s not that web development is not important to that possum it’s a web firm and they’re less likely to click on ads on searches that have either navigational or informational intent so meaning like if people are just looking to navigate to some brand asking some question about the technology, they are less likely to buy the product and less likely to click on your ad than if you have a very high commercial intent query where it’s like best web development firm Boston. Now you’re looking through a comparison orientation so they’re really close to buying someone’s website development. A lot of it has to do with the nature of the keywords and beyond that there’s all sorts of crazy technology that you can leverage. One of the ones that you can kind of guarantee the double the clicks of your ads is this notion of RLSA (Remarketing list for search ads) It’s a relatively new technology and what it allows you to do is you can tag people who visited your website in the last X number of days and then you can show ads just to people who just visited your site recently. And just because they have both the query intentions that they are searching for a keyword added to the fact that they were in the market for your services recently, because previous browsing history is a strong indicator for future purchasing intent, when you add those two signals together, that tends to produce ridiculously high – double click through rates, for those types of ads, which then generates the higher quality score which gives you all the neat great benefits of better ad positioning or cost per click higher impression share, lower cost conversion, etc.

James: Yeah, listeners to Traffic Jam will know that I am a huge fan of doing remarketing. We’ve had various sessions on the show talking about how it can be used across the display network and using some other platforms as well, I’d be interested to gain your insights Larry, as to what the strategy might be with paid search and potentially what sort of messaging that we might serve up to someone who has visited our site already compared to what we’d show a first time searcher within Google.

Larry: You know, we found that even running the same ads, just running it to a more selective audience – to people who recently viewed your site that alone is good enough to significantly increase the click through rates of your ads. If you want it to be really, really cute, you could say things like finish your purchase and save 10% off the items on your cart because you can take people who presumably take things in their cart but did not check out or whatever, you can be very precise about the audience definitions but really James, one of the most effective strategies for remarketing for search as is for display, is going after broader keywords. Remember how in the beginning I was saying be very, very picky and go after very, very specific keywords, the exception to that rule is if you are using remarketing search and you happen to know that here is a person who was recently on the site searching for products and solutions that you offer and they look for a competitor name which could be very broad and unspecific. The fact that they are looking for that competitor term plus the fact that they were on your site would lead me to believe that they’re doing some kind of comparison shopping, so that would be the exception to the rule. Now this is the exception where you can go after broader terms and still get decent conversion metrics.

James: Love it! Love it! That is some fantastic insight. Well, we’ve looked at some of the positive and some of the effective measures we can take, what are about the flip side? I am sure from your experience from pulling data from your own software, you’ve seen plenty of people throw away a ton of money with PPC, what are some of the biggest mistakes that you see others make?

Larry: Well, a lot of it has to do kind of the opposites of what we are talking about before; failure to be very specific with the keywords, we find sometimes we’ll do these audits and then companies will be spending tens of thousands a month on keywords that have nothing to do with the business, it’s like oops, that was a mistake. Google makes it really easy to spend a lot of money, there are no safeguards in place. It’s like going to a casino and you really need to know the rules, otherwise you’ll just get taken. Other than that, it’s just this notion of people not optimizing their accounts on a weekly basis because that is kind of giving away a lot of the benefits of this challenge where paid search is different from advertising on the yellow pages or on the billboards that you get all this nice feedback on how these different keywords on this different ads are resonating with your audience and then you’re throwing a lot of the value away if you are not going to take that data and kind of double down what is working and what’s not working.

James: Yeah, good. Well, let us move the conversation on a little bit from there, maybe perhaps ironically, of the 650,000 visitors or so that you get to your site per month, about 400,000 of them to my knowledge come from organic search, what in your opinion does it take to succeed right now with SEO?

Larry: Well, we’re very fortunate. I started blogging six or seven years ago, so that was definitely a strong demand that was very old and trusted and has gained links over time. Some of the things that we do to get this tremendous amount of tremendous traffic. The blogging that we do tends to generate tons of links on its own so meaning like we tend to blog about studies about how Google makes their money, just interesting things about what are the most interesting keywords in AdWords and these stories then get picked up by companies like the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times it just generates tens of thousands – actually, the link profile of the site has something like one and half million links from something like a hundred thousand domains. So it is not manual link building where you’re just link begging. It has something to do with coming up with these compelling stories, like if any reporting is doing their job in that space, they should be covering your stuff. You know what I mean? And then leveraging that power, like all the trust that has been flown in to this domain just by publishing these evergreen information or content that ranks very highly for content like if you would do a search right now for what is Google AdWords? You’ll find like a nice content from Word Stream that will explain what that is, and in fact we kind of did it so that in anything at all, if anything from Word Stream should show up on the first page, like quality score or negative keywords or pay per click or PPC or your keyword tool. You should find a Word Stream content somewhere.

James: Yeah, and it’s not that you’re just blogging to WordStream.com right? You’ve also got columns for INC and you do stuff for Search Engine Journal, Forbes, Search Engine Land and a bunch of others I see. How on earth do you produce so much content? If I scroll down on your own About Page on your own website, there is almost 4 or 5 content pieces per day that in some way you had a contribution towards. How on earth do you maintain such a high frequency of content?

Larry: Well, first of all, it is doable. I mean there are journalists and professional writers and their job is to produce 6-8 pieces of content per day and it is pretty typical for those types of reporters. So for myself, I kind of get annoyed with myself if I don’t do maybe 2-3 articles a day in terms of either contributing them myself or working with my thousands of industry contacts on helping them with their pieces because you don’t have to originate everything. You can just be the expert side in one of those other articles and that works out just as well from a PR perspective. It sounds even better if you are not the one originating everything. You know what I mean?

James: Yes, absolutely! I guess if we can just dig a tiny way in to this it would be great listening. How on earth do you keep the stream of relevant content ideas kind of at your fingertips ready to share with the world because 2 or 3 content pieces is a fair amount of content even for the most seasoned writers to produce, right?

Larry: Well, there is a lot of benefits here like I have such a nice perch here working on paid search company, I have like 2000 customers that we help with paid search and I am kind of like the go to guy for difficult problems so if an unusual situation bubbles up from one of our clients as managers and they need a second opinion, it kind of bubbles up to me so I get a lot of exposure to a lot of interesting case study data because you are either originating new stuff or you’re rehashing generic tips or whatever so just having a lot of customers and then having the most interesting case bubble up to me is kind of a tactical advantage and then we’ve got so many thousands of customers that you can do case studies like what’s the average quality score across all these different accounts? You can do some nice research and it is kind of like an endless pool of interesting ideas to draw from. I understand not everyone would have that but ideally, you should create your business in such a way that you have a wealth of topics that can bubble up from beneath.

James: Yeah, and I guess the result that people would expect as you create more content you run out of content ideas, but I guess the reverse happens because when you are putting more stuff out there you are getting more interaction with your audience which then surfaces other questions and other topic matters that you can learn from and understand that they’d be more interested to learn more about that, right?

Larry: Yeah, another interesting thing is that a lot of the stuff that I am writing about is just first person experience because I am still actively involved with the marketing of our content on our site and I’ll discover new tricks and new hacks and a lot of people would keep it to themselves but I am happy to just write it up and share them with the audience.

James: Yeah, absolutely! Well I believe you’re reported to have created the most shared PPC article of all time. What was that about that article specifically that created so much buzz?

Larry: If you are a paid search practitioner, the one tool that all of us has used is the keyword tool. Last year, I discovered that the keyword tool was being retired and being replaced by the new keyword tool called the keyword planner and I discovered that maybe two months before anyone else did and so I blogged about it and provided a detailed review of what it was and how it was different and that ended up generating several hundred thousand reviews on Search Engine Land where the typical article may be just three or four thousand views and that was the most shared article ever. It was also the most read article in Search Engine Land of 2013 because it was quite a scoop. And it is so funny James that the way that I found out about it wasn’t because of special connections with Google, it was just that we have so many account managers like I have got like 30 account managers working in Google AdWords every day and then one of them found this weird tool and it was the keyword planner. We just stumbled upon it and what we had done, they had this beta where they had enabled it for 1% of the accounts so one of us stumbled upon it and it kind of bubbled its way up to the top and I was like, holy crap! This is something totally different and that was how we were able to write the scoop like two months before anyone else.

James: It’s like newspapers, right? It’s finding that one story that is relevant for the market that everyone is interested in and just getting it ahead of time over everyone else, right? I can just see how that blew up. Amazing, right?

Larry: I have to confess, I have a quite an unfair advantage here just sitting on a billion dollars of paid search data, two thousand customers, 30 people working those accounts and it just becomes more and more unfair as more customers sign up.

James: So anyone looking to get in to the market of blogging about pay per click and paid search, I would retire early. I don’t think you’re going to gain an advantage by Larry and his team by the sounds of it.

Larry: Or just we can be friends where can just promote each other’s stuff, so many paid search companies that we work with there are many types of paid search right? We specialize in small-medium companies and there are many other types of businesses working with different companies like Kissmetrics or perhaps PPC Hero where they like to produce content and then we give them something like that because it gives them a lot of exposure.

James: Yeah, well let’s talk a little bit about that because you do create a lot of content for other people’s audiences and not just your own, how do you go about identifying the right partnerships and the right guest blogging opportunities because I am sure you have plenty of available to you?

Larry: I am mostly looking for, just like you said, other people’s audiences so I am looking at the size of their following in their social channels and check if the content that they share are actually being shared or not, or is it just counting just five tweets, you know what I mean? You kind of do a subjective analysis of that and try to see like will this substantially move the needle? Writing is a little bit like giving blood and there is only so much you can do before you pass out. You want to make sure that the venues that you are choosing, they are going to produce a return on investment that is greater than just you blogging on your own blog. So that is kind of the thought process, any thoughts on that?

James: I think those are valid points. I know Neil Patel, we mentioned Kissmetrics just now so I guess it is relevant, we were just talking I think on a post I read the other week about really identifying audiences also based very much on relevancy. He’s done a lot of stuff for Huffington Post for instance but got far less return on that than some of his stuff for Search Engine Land or one of those more trafficked and orientated websites so reach is I think extremely important but I guess getting that target market just right for your own business is also important, don’t you think?

Larry: Yeah, absolutely! And we do this stuff about two or three times a year.

James: Yeah, good stuff. Well I want to wrap things up by observing some of the stuff that you are doing with LinkedIn is quite innovative. The first thing that I observed myself is that you seem to be repurposing your own blog content and posting that to LinkedIn, how is that working out for you?

Larry: It’s amazing leverage for your content. LinkedIn is a really funny social media network, it is kind of like – it is not quite Facebook and it is not quite Twitter. In Facebook you’ve got all your friends and families and Twitter it’s just pretty much open networking. You can just connect with Britney Spears or whoever you want to follow. LinkedIn is kind of in between where you are supposed to connect with people you know through work but not necessarily friends. My take here is that with LinkedIn blogging, it changes everything. So what it does is to me it suggests that you should be doing LinkedIn blogging and that you should be doing LinkedIn much more like Twitter. You know what I mean, like accepting much more openly of people who you don’t know, and also sending out actions to people who you’d like to know as opposed to just the people that you know. The benefit for this has to something to do for the blogging. When I repurpose the content, some of the articles have over 50 or a hundred thousand views in just a few days and the way that that works, it is kind of there is an edge rank and algorithm for LinkedIn blogs where my blog content will show up on people’s timelines and that is based on the engagement and topical relevancy of the post so if a lot of people are liking and commenting and favoriting it on LinkedIn and re-sharing it on LinkedIn then it kind of snowballs and it is kind of the square of the engagement and so there is a decisive advantage then of having a large number of connections because then you are more likely to generate the likes and the shares and the comments that you need to get this content to snowball and it is just remarkable, I mean I posted and re-posted 50 or so articles in the last 60 days and geez, like some of these articles they get featured on Wired Magazine or the Wall Street Journal just because they generate so much, like the ones that do well, they just do well so much. It’s a way to amplify the reach of the content that you’ve already produced.

James: So if we’ve got a listener out there who’s sitting on a large volume of blog posts they perhaps produced over the last year of two, I quite can imagine going back to that content and finding the stuff that’s worked best perhaps on their site and then right away re-purposing that on LinkedIn, perhaps freshening it up a little bit and posting it again to get even more traction.

Larry: Yes, but like what I was saying earlier, you just post that to LinkedIn and you only have like 300 connections or whatever, and it’s really just those 300 connections that get the notifications, so even if you get like 5% or 10% of that people to engage in that content, it’s still a very small amount of likes and shares and so you might end up with 50 or 200 page views which might be a lot but it is not very interesting from my vantage point so the trick is you first ball up your connection counts by opening networking, importing your Gmail contacts and stuff like these, and then having like once you have a few thousand connections, like ideally, 5, 10 or 15,000 connections. You can then start doing some blogging and then you’ll see that you’ll rely that you’ll get 15 thousand page views per blog post because you have so many connections.

James: Yup, absolutely! I love that. That is an awesome thing there to wrap the show up Larry. Let’s give some advice to our listener, let’s tell them where they can go to connect with you, I am sure WordStream.com is one place, where else should our listeners connect with you out there in the internet?

Larry: The one that I am checking like every 20 minutes or 10 minutes is Twitter. That is the quickest way to do it. You can also shoot me an email at [email protected].

James: There you go, I guess that is where the first time we also connected, at Twitter. We’ll make sure that Larry’s Twitter handle is included in the show notes of episode#44 which you’ll get to by going to TrafficJamCast.com/44. So Larry, thank you for your time and expertise. I thoroughly enjoyed this today got a ton out of it, I am sure my listeners also have as well. Thank you once again, Larry.

Larry: Thanks again for the opportunity James.

Hey welcome back listener, so that was Larry Kim from WordStream.com. Totally loved Larry’s innovative approach to LinkedIn that we ended the show with and there is really no doubt that if you are a business to business company that LinkedIn should absolutely be in your marketing mix and if you are ready to step up to the plate and put yourself and your business to the forefront then publishing to LinkedIn offers one of the best marketing opportunities for sure.

So thank you for listening in to this episode #44, we’d be back with another show in about seven days from now. Remember, subscribe via iTunes and Stitcher radio which you can do by going to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes and TraffficJamCast.com/Stitcher. For a direct link to all of the bonuses that we’ve got coming with today’s episode, including a downloadable MP3, full transcript of today’s show, plus a very special bonus which I put together just for this episode which is my very own notes in today’s show put in to mind map format. You can get all of that by going to TrafficJamCast.com/44 where you’ll instantly download those bonuses plus of course you can join the discussion on today’s episode. Also head on over to the main website, veravo.com for more traffic tips and to learn how I can help you get more traffic, leads and sales from the search engines.

We end this week’s show with a track of course chosen by Larry Kim. He’s chosen a track titled Safe and Sound and it is by the band Capital City so enjoy the Traffic Jam to play out the show and I’ll see you back here in about seven days from now. See you then!

As usual a number of special resources and people were mentioned on this show. To make finding those resources easy, I’ve collated a list which you’ll find immediately below.

Special Note – I highly recommend you check out episode 38 with Viveka von Rosen for more insights on growing your LinkedIn connections, and of course you visit WordStream and connect with Larry on Twitter.

RESOURCES:

MENTIONS:

THE TRAFFIC JAM:

The Traffic Jam is a musical ‘jam’ chosen by our guest. Larry Kim has chosen a track by American indie pop duo Capital Cities. The duo of Ryan Merchant and Sebu Simonian formed in Los Angeles, California in 2008, and this track called ‘Safe and Sound’ is the lead single from their debut EP.  

HERE’S WHAT TO DO NEXT:

To help you get the most out of this training, I have taken my own personal notes from the episode and created a mindmap for you.

The mindmap summarises the best bits from the interview, including exactly how Larry Kim uses SEO, PPC and Content Marketing to drive 650,000 visits to WordStream.com, plus the unusual connection strategy that’s netted him 100’s of thousands of views on his LinkedIn posts.

Click the link below to download the free mindmap plus exclusive episode artwork, mp3 and PDF transcript:

After spending more than ten years as a “Dead Broke Standup Comic” Kevin Rogers discovered a simple (but effective) joke formula that worked for him and others with repeated success.

This simple rapport building joke formula, to Kevin’s discovery, also works in marketing to build an instant bond with prospects.

The 60-Second Sales Hook as Kevin calls it, is fast and easy to create, and every business should have one. Listen in to Traffic Jam 43 and you’ll know all you need to create one too.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

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“There’s no greater calling card than somebody trying your formula & it working.” @KevinRogers
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Hey there listener! Welcome back to Traffic Jam. Thanks for joining me today on episode 43 where we’ll be welcoming who’s going to share his simple 60 seconds sales hook formula that will help you create an instant bond with your prospects. So we’re continuing the discussion not just around traffic but how to convert more of that traffic into leads and sales for your business.

Now, one quick announcement at the top of the show and that’s that on the 20th of August, 2014, I am going to be holding a webinar called the most important elements of a high ranking website and how to optimize them to double your traffic in the next six months. It’s going to be an SEO seminar and I’d love to see you there. To go and claim your spot, head on over to veravo.com/webinar where you can claim your seat as well as download my Fast Ranking Mind Map. If you are listening to this past the 20th of August, 2014, you will of course have missed this webinar but by following that link you will get details of the next upcoming online event.

So let’s introduce our guest today. He’s a former dead-broke night club comic that is now one of the most in demand copy writers working with the network’s biggest info-marketers. Now, I got to meet Kevin because we’re both part of a mastermind group and behind closed doors I have seen what Kevin’s been up to and I thought it would be great and fun to have him on the show to share some of that stuff along with his very interesting back story, so without any further ado, let’s introduce Kevin Rogers for episode 43.

James: Welcome back listeners! This is episode 43 of Traffic Jam and joining me today is Kevin Rogers. Kevin how are you?

Kevin: Doing excellent! Thanks James.

James: Awesome! Well, I rarely, if ever, ask my guest to share their back story on Traffic Jam but I think in the context of today’s discussion, it will set things up pretty nicely. So Kevin, the mic is yours. How did you become a direct response copywriter?

Kevin: Well, it is a long and winding road – I’d give you the highlights. I’d give you the interesting piece on my resume is that I did standup comedy. I was a standup comic for about a decade, and I started doing that out of high school. I was 18 years old the first time I walked in to a stage at a comedy club for an open mic night – sort of a dare and push from my friends. I was the skinny awkward kid who could not get girls to talk to him so I decided to make them laugh instead.

James: You probably offered them a beer while you’re on that opening night?

Kevin: Ah, I was 18 and so the legal drinking age is 21. It’s is actually funny you bring that up. I remember I called the club and I asked them, do you have to be 21 to do the open mic. And the guy goes, nah, just don’t drink. And I said alright, how long do I get? Like 20 minutes? He goes, 20 minutes? Have you ever been on stage before? I go no. You’ll be lucky to get five! I go five minutes? What am I going to do with five minutes? So I am negotiating you know, my time slot already, and of course, I go on stage, and I am off in three and a half, just plowing through material, blinded by the light and praying that I’d remember my jokes. It went fairly well and it was very fortuitous to get up ending the house emcee gig there so I was doing about 8 shows a week for a year and a half. That was it man. Went on the road from there, traveled all over and what I did not realize then, because I had zero business sense or thoughts of becoming even 30, let alone he ripe old 44 that I am now that I was doing really deep in the trenches market research on how to compel and how to sell and get and keep attention. So I have been able to draw on all those things now as a direct response copy writer.

James: Awesome! And is that how you would describe yourself? A direct response copy writer? Is that what you sort of term yourself as doing today?

Kevin: Yeah, I’d say that’s about the cleanest description of it.

James: Okay, cool. I think when we talk about copywriters, especially when we talk about sales people, there is a huge amount of distrust associated with them and I had a good conversation incidentally with Jay Baer a few weeks ago when he came on the show and we talked about this concept – this currency of forming trust. How do we as sales people as storytellers move past distrust with what we do as marketers with these people because it is always a challenge, right?

Kevin: It is, yeah. Well, I guess there are two ways to approach it but the result is the same. When I say to ways, one is if it’s your product and you want to present yourself to gain trust for your own brand, or if you don’t want to be in front out of your brand, then you would tell the story of your customers. But ultimately, what makes both effective is sharing a struggle. When you come on, particularly on videos, they are extra powerful. But even in text, if you do the opposite of your typical corporate mission statement does and you actually speak a human language and admit that you are a human being who’s had some struggles, and learn to overcome those struggles, that is the great first step in gaining trust with people.

James: Yeah. So why is it that that’s so effective? I mean why does it work so well? We’re telling sort of stories all the time but why are they so useful for the human behavior and forming connection not just on sales but on any level?

Kevin: Yeah, I think for the reason you just said, because we’ve been – that’s our natural instinct, human instinct. If you crack open a newly discovered cave dwelling from any period in time, what you’ll typically find is some story telling inside carved in to the walls. I don’t know, it’s just a basic human need and when you learn to do it well and don’t bore and don’t elaborate the wrong things and are willing to reveal the right things, then people will lean in just like in a good live conversation and begin to nod their head and feel like they can relate to you and if you think about the people you buy from you’ll realize, that when given the chance, you will buy from the person that you know, like and trust whether it be the salesman you just met in the furniture store or someone that you follow online.

James: Yeah. So how do we do this well? I think you’ve got a formula for doing this, right? Leading you to the point of this questioning – you’ve worked out a formula that kind of effectively gets the story across and build some trust with your prospects.

Kevin: Yeah, I call it the KLT – The Know, Like and Trust sales talk and I sort of stole the formula from my days as a stand up and I began to recognize some patterns in some joke formulas and the deeper I look in to some of these particular formula, I realized that this is the one that advertisers use when the stakes are high and it is also the one that comedians use when the stakes are highest for them, which for a comic, there is no higher stake than when you do your first national television set and so when they do that, the formula that they rely on goes like this – it is a four-part formula and it is Identity, Struggle, Discovery, Surprise! Of course every great joke ends with a surprise at the end, a little twist that makes us laugh. So would you like to hear an example of that joke formula?

James: We would love to hear an example of that joke formula. Yeah, go for it.

Kevin: Okay, a great one is a woman named Karen Rontowski and when she came on to Late Night with David Letterman, her first time, her opening joke was – My kids were so bad in Walmart today that I pulled a fly swatter off the shelf that I smacked them with it. And the second the fly swatter hit their ass, I realized, I don’t have kids. It’s a funny joke, it’s got a nice surprise in the end, and if you think about the formula – identity, struggle, discover, result – she’s just shown there an amazing amount of details about herself with us and we feel like we know this person and can relate to this person, whether we are the parents of kids like that or just someone without kids that get very annoyed with crazy kids. So in marketing, what I did was I started to take that formula and use it to present myself and other clients to a new audience and it worked out wonderfully. This formula that I am talking about now, this KLT Hook, works particularly well on landing pages, like a lead page, and it is not meant to close a deal, you’re not going to sell a $2000 course with this but it is meant to be a very simple, clean 60-second or less of who you are and why you are particularly qualified on the problem that your prospect needs solved. So for marketers, rather than have surprise in the end, because obviously we don’t want to be creating funny twists for every given opt in all the time, and anyway that is not what people are looking for from you. You don’t have to be funny of course to do this, you just have to be honest. So we replaced that surprise with result because that is obviously what people are looking for because identity, struggle, discovery, result is the difference and when you follow that formula, say, hi, here’s who I am, here’s what I struggled with, here’s what I discovered for me to solve it, and here’s how it’s worked out for me since I implemented that discovery and then of course your call to action – if you’d like to see this for yourself or use it yourself, I’d give it to you right now for free, just opt in. And it is the most effective formula that I have seen to get opt-ins.

James: Awesome! Well give us an example in business and marketing terms, how does the struggle-discovery-result as supposed to surprise sound, perhaps Kevin, maybe even sharing your own if you’ve got one for yourself.

Kevin: Sure. I’ll do it from memory but for mine, and what is interesting is I have a few different ones in different markets as an example but mine as a consultant is this – Hi! I am Kevin Rogers and I spent years traveling the country as a dead-broke standup comedian until I discovered how a simple joke formula can be used as an irresistible sales hook and began teaching marketers how to use it in increasing their conversions and grow their businesses. Today I am one of the most in demand sales consultants online and earning up to $50,000 per session and enjoying the privilege with working with some of the greatest marketers in the world. If you’d like to discover how the same formula can increase your sales and grow your business, simply opt in, enter your email below and click the button marked show me the hook and I’ll see you on the next page!

James: Love it! Love it! Well, that’s kind of framed things pretty well. It’s told your own story, position what we’ve talked about and it’s wrapped it up in one nice big wrapper. I love it and it is a simple, easy to follow formula right? We could almost go through this as business owners, as marketers and literally just fill in the blanks.

Kevin: Yeah, there is two ends of this spectrum here. One is I see this formula used all the time by marketers who have no idea they are using it. It is a good indication that somebody is sort of a natural sales person or that really believes in their product because they naturally default to some version of this formula. On the other end, I see people submit them to me and hire me to polish them all the time, and the most common mistake is that people just go off the rails and they feel like they need to tell everything. I’d say that is the hardest instinct to fight when following this formula, its feeling like oh, I’ve got to mention this thing and I have got to mention that and the discovery also should cover this. What you want to do is just take the bare essence of what people are after and say, let me just solve this one problem for you and it is a hard instinct because we work so hard on our businesses and we try to be the best and we try to solve many things for our clients but the best tip I can give people who just want to get an opt in and begin a conversation is to focus on prospects that solve a specific problem for them and let it be actionable for them right to the point if you can frame it on a formula or a short exercise or something that they can actually physically do to see a difference like this formula does for them, then it is amazing feedback that you’ll get because people actually – there is no greater calling card for you than having somebody actually try out your widget or your device or your formula, and have it work for them and have light bulbs go off in their head. And so it is hard to do that if you are trying to show somebody everything you do. Somebody walks in to the furniture store and say really, I need a desk chair and you say, great, let us start over here by the sofas and you show them the sofas and they’re like I don’t care and the next thing you are feeling confused and pressured and just want to leave, so simplicity really is the key.

James: Yeah, and I guess in your own scenario if you can deliver that result and show someone how they can just implement one small strategy from your repertoire to get an amazing result, then they’ll go, wait a second, what else can Kevin do for me? If this is just one tiny thing out of all that he does, I am sure the paid stuff or his bigger programs or whatever is you’re selling to them is going to be pretty valuable, it’s that trust element again, right?

Kevin: That’s exactly the results in advance and yeah it is more powerful when they come to that discovery on their own. When they come to you and say, what else can you do for me or here’s something else I struggle with, is this in your area? And that is something more powerful than you trying to beat people over the head with it.

James: Yeah, totally. So does this formula work for everyone Kevin? Is there a scenario when telling a story, showing people how to identify with you, showing the struggle, discovery in what you can actually do for them – is there any time it doesn’t work?

Kevin: I have not found one yet. I had people say I am not sure this would work for me or hey, I am a brick and mortar business or I am an accountant and it is pretty obvious why people need to come to me. I think the mistake people make thinking who would want to hear my story. Again, we respond viscerally to story and if not you then the story of your customers. The people that you solve problems for. The struggle is inherently interesting. I don’t know if everybody knows about WWE wrestling all over the world.

James: Yeah, well I am familiar with it and I am sure people in this neck of the woods would know what it is so yeah, it is a good example if you can use it.

Kevin: Yeah, so my son just got into wrestling and he’s dragged me in to it with him and I am fascinated with how I cannot look away from these things as they are happening. It really is like the worst of the soap opera storyline you can imagine plus a bar fight that you would not want to be involved in. It’s like the basic, obviously manipulative tricks to get you to look up and take interest but they’re amazingly effective. And again you’ll see this identity struggle discovery results over and over and over and wrestlers come in and they quickly relate to the audience and have this different fights and inter-conflicts and it is a fascinating example of what people react to. Its story is just the most basic story line in the world. The other key and the thing I take from the wrestling is it’s so easy to talk about at the water cooler. I think it is the reason why people are so drawn to sports, right? Again if you watch US Football, or international football or any great sports, why do we tune in for an hour before the match? It is because we want to her the big story. What is the latest, who’s injured, who said who about what? Twitter- why does the news constantly put up tweets of people you think? My god, is there nothing else to talk about? They do it because it’s some inflammatory remark, something that somebody made. These are all things that we want to keep up and as much as we want to look away sometimes, it is our instinct to find out who said what and where it’s going to lead to. So you can never discount the effectiveness on story in any situation and the great thing about what we do now in our ability to market ourselves online is that we get to control that story if we decide to.

James: Yeah, absolutely. You are going to suggest, I am sure, that everyone create their own 60-second sales hook story. Everyone should have that in their armory, should they?

Kevin: I really think so, yeah. I can’t imagine a situation where it wouldn’t be a benefit, or at least a supplement to what you have now. A great place to look for an example if this can help you is your about page. This is another great place to use this. Go to your About page and think how many I’s compared to You’s are you using because even your About page should be about your customers. Of course you want to tell your own story but what is great with the 60-second sales hook is that you are only telling about so that people can relate and see themselves in you and know that suddenly they have a new source that is going to help them solve their problems.

James: Yeah, absolutely. Well we talked about a couple of great applications for this. Once the lead generation page, the squeeze page where we’re driving a particular action. We talked about our own About Pages. Where else can we or should we insert this in to our marketing mix?

Kevin: Another great place is testimonials or your customer case studies. For instance, even when you go out requesting testimonials from people, a lot of times people are happy to give you a positive testimonial but they will hesitate because they’re not sure what to say, or they’re write back to you to say sure, what do you want me to write about in particular? So what I find effective is if you just give them this formula and sort of outline it for them. You can say, just tell me what your problem was, sort of what life was dealing with that problem, how you found out about me, which would be the discovery part, and now what life is since I’ve helped you solve that problem. And so you give people that context and suddenly you’ve got that amazing story- based testimonial from them and it’s great!

James: Yeah, I guess at that point if your particular prospect has not resonated with your own story, there is a good chance they are going to resonate around your product. I love that! It’s a super simple way to build around it. What about traffic sources? I’m sure we’re going to have a bunch of people listening in who are driving traffic for their own business or perhaps someone else’s. Maybe they’re driving someone now to a squeeze page that delivers this story. Can we precede the landing page with some form of smaller version of the story as some way of drawing people in before they visit that page?

Kevin: Yeah, one great way could be a Facebook ad, you can just focus on the struggle as sort of a attention getter because obviously in any traffic channel you want the conversation to evolve naturally and pay off so let’s say you have my situation, my struggle, and you notice in my example I gave, my identity and struggle happen in the first sentence. I don’t need to belabor the struggle; dead broke standup comic. You have a pretty clear vision of my dilemma and I have some photos to back that up pretty well but let’s just say that I wanted to promote that story as the landing page might say what a dead broke standup comic discovered how to sell millions of dollars of product online or something like that and it has that curiosity factor so I’d say the best way to do this, whatever your struggle is, and make your struggle as dramatic as you can without belaboring the point or embellishing obviously but even if you don’t feel like you have a great struggle or a great story, ask the people who were there when you were building your business and what kind of sacrifices you made. It may just have felt like another day for you but, get help if you need it from outside sources. A spouse is a great one, they are very aware of our struggles because they go through them with us. Take that struggle as the attention-getter and try using that and pan your ads using news feed ads.

James: Nice! Good. I know you are working on some interesting things right now. I’ve seen you developing project inside James Schramko’s Silver Circle, which is the mastermind both you and I are involved with. Tell us a little bit about that project you’ve got going on.

Kevin: Yeah, thanks! I am really excited about this. It is called Copy Chief and that is a term we use in direct response to mean I am the person who works with the writers to sort of get the best side of everybody. I discovered in my career as a copy writer that me sitting and typing on to a word document was the bottleneck in my business; sort of the self-tortured writer and so what I do is I work with writers who are better and faster than me and I really enjoy working with clients to find their story, to really find new ways to celebrate the benefit of their product and then I bring them together as a team to get the best work out of everyone. I am good at incubating the writer so he’s not pressured by the client, I am good at making sure that the client knows that the work is being done at the highest level. So that is the copy chief, this is what I do, and this copy forum creating this membership for is going to be a safe place for people to come and post up copy that they are working on, or copy that they are stuck on and they want to get professional and experienced eyeballs giving them feedback about new ways to position the hook, to find the hook, to see the hook, to tell their story, all the things that’s very hard to do when we’re sort of on our own little bubble as many entrepreneurs are; we all work in vacuums and it is hard to trust. That’s why I like the idea of it being a paid form rather than everybody’s got some sort of disclosed Facebook groups and everything now and those are good for some pieces of feedback but I find they’re very difficult to get high quality feedback about your copy and your positioning because you have to be a little vulnerable to go out there and lay it all on the line, and so I am creating a safe place for business owners to come and get help to professionalize their copy and I am also using it as a place to nurture and develop copy writing talent which is something I do on a one to one scale now so one of the best that I do one on one in one of many format.

James: Nice! Is that live now Kevin? Could we go check that out?

Kevin: You could go to copy-chief.com and it should have a big orange cone; I don’t know when this will air but I am only a couple of weeks from developing it but I will be very soon inviting my founders in to the group so that is going to be a massively discounted, more than 50% off offer that will be grandfathered in at $47, it is ultimately going to go up at $97 a month and I am all about over-delivering and the hugest way which is why I am taking so long to create the site James is a bit mean of flagging me from within the group but I appreciate that, I am a bit of a perfectionist and I want to make sure everything’s in place before I invite people in to make sure that they have the greatest experience so I am really excited about it.

James: Well I can tell by the way that you’re talking about it that the weight will be well worth it. You’re obviously talking about it with a lot of excitement so I am sure there’s great things coming when it does go live. If this episode happens to perhaps fall before you may officially be live and accepting the general public, and if it is, I will make sure that we announce it in a future episode trying to get people back there to Copy Chief.

Kevin: Oh, great! Thank you!

James: So, Kevin, let’s wrap things up. You’ve been generous of your time and expertise. I think I’ve personally got a great amount of insight out of today’s conversation. I’m sure our listeners will too. Outside of copy-chief.com, where should our listeners go to to connect with you further on the interwebs?

Kevin: Well, I would love for everyone to go download the book for free, 60 second saleshook.com and you’ll see a free digital download, it is available on Amazon, it actually reached best seller status. If you really love a hard cover it is available it is available for only $5 there, or paperback rather. But yeah, go grab the free digital download of Sixty Seconds sales hook, it is only about 50 pages long, the formula is right in there and you’ll receive an email from me with an invitation to register for bonuses and you can see the live presentation that book is based on if you like video.

James: Awesome! I’ll make sure that the links to those resources are included in the show notes page for episode 43 of Traffic Jam so head on over to TrafficJamCast.com for that. Just leaves me to thank you again Kevin for coming on the show, it’s been an absolute pleasure.

Kevin: My pleasure. Thanks for having me James!

So there you go, that was Kevin Rogers with his know-like- trust formula and I’ve got to say one of my favorite episodes to date and that is simply because we went so deep just on one single topic and a huge amount of actionable content came out of that discussion. I thoroughly enjoyed that episode, I hope you did too!

Next step for you is to now go off and action your own sixty-second sales hook and we’ve got some templates and of course the transcript from today’s episode along with an MP3 for you to download over at TrafficJamCast.com/43 so make sure you head on over there where you can also join the discussion on today’s episode and if you have any particular questions about the content that we’ve covered, post it over there and I’m sure Kevin will be back to answer those for you.

I also just want to mention his own podcast that did not come up during the episode but he has a great show that he does with John Colton called Site Insights For Modern Marketers and if you are not subscribe to that podcast, look it out in iTunes, it is a really great listen. And if you are in to this sort of stuff, you’re really going to get a lot of value out of that as well so I’ll include that along with links to Kevin’s social media profile plus of course the download page for the 60 Second Hook up e-book copy chief and all of the other resources mentioned in today’s show on the episode page for episode 43 which as I just mentioned you can navigate to by going to TrafficJamCast.com/43. Remember of course I’ll be back again next week with another episode and in the meantime make sure you subscribe via iTunes and Stitcher radio by going to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes and TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher. Also, head on over to the main website, Veravo.com where you can get more traffic tips and training and to learn how I can help you get more traffic to your own website so head on over there. I’ll be back again in about seven days from now but not before we’ve played out with a tune chosen by Kevin. He gave me in fact a few options for today’s show and the one that I’ve picked is a Rolling Stones track and that’s just because we’ve gone nearly 50 episodes and Rolling Stones hasn’t made it in to the playlist just yet so today is the day. The track is called Give Me Shelter and as I mentioned the band is the Rolling Stones. Enjoy the song and I’ll see you back here next week.

RESOURCES

MENTIONS

THE TRAFFIC JAM

What’s your own 60 second sales hook? Post in the comments below.

It is not enough to get more traffic to your website, you need to build an audience.

It’s touted a lot, and rightly so; the profitability of your online business is a direct effect of the size, and relationship you have with your email list. Want more profit? Then you better get good at building an email list.

Lucky for you, conversion educator Tim Paige from LeadPages.net joins me on TrafficJam and shares his top conversion tips –  including the one single mechanism that’s getting LeadPages (and others) a 70% plus conversion rate right now. That stat’s so phenomenal I’d be inclined not to believe it, if I wasn’t getting the same result myself.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

SUBSCRIBE TO TRAFFIC JAM : iTunes | Stitcher

“Have mechanisms for marketing so you don’t live and die by promotion.”@TimThePaige
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Hey, what’s up there listeners? Welcome back to Traffic Jam, the podcast show that teaches you how to get more traffic and build a profitable audience online. I am of course your host James Reynolds, you’re tuned in to show #42 and we’re mixing things up a little bit this week – decide to go lean and mean on this episode so no One Minute Traffic Tip this week, no This Week’s News in Traffic. Just an intro, a content packed episode and then a Traffic Jam to play out the show.

A couple of shout outs to open up this episode. First of all, Mohit Jean. He sent me an email this week and said, “I just love Traffic Jam and I love the selection of people that you bring on board. Just amazing! You’re doing a fabulous job and the content you share is outstanding,” so a hat tip to you Mohit and I appreciate that.

The second shout out is to Paul Hatton who left me a Speak Pipe message asking all about duplicate content and how it affects SEO. If you like to hear my answer to that question, head on over to SEOSherpa.com, the home to my SEO agency and you’ll get to hear my response. You may just find it useful.

So let us introduce today’s guest. He is Tim Paige and he’s the conversion educator at LeadPages.net which is a piece of software that helps you not just build traffic but build an audience. Does that sound familiar? I think you are going to resonate with today’s episode hugely. A lot of great tips shared by Tim whose hobbies and interest extend to marketing and business according to his pre-questionnaire which he filled out for me which is kind of useful really because that is also what he does for a job as well. So let us get him on. This is Tim Paige the Lead Pages conversion educator, Traffic Jam episode 42.

James: So this is episode #42 and joining me right across, right over there is Tim Paige from Lead Pages and he’s the conversion educator. Tim, welcome!

Tim: What’s going on James? Thank you so much for having me today.

James: Yeah, I am super stoked you can be here. I am going to be a fun chat, let me open up with a question around Lead Pages itself. I am a Lead Pages customer and today I logged in to my account and I could sort by conversion rate by the feature that you have there and I found that 8/10 pages that are performing best in Lead Pages right now are webinar registration pages. Now does that leave us some clues? Are webinars the #1 activity in lead generation right now?

Tim: Yes, I will say yes – but with a caveat. I am absolutely obsessed with webinars and I do almost – I would say I do all of our webinars here at Lead Pages and I would say that they are probably one of the best vehicles for building your business in the world. However, I think that they should only come on the backend of having a great auto-responder sequence because it is really difficult to live by the onetime promotion like the webinar or the sales and the bonuses and the one time price increase all those kind of stuff. Those things are all fantastic and they are great tools to be used but I really believe they should only be used after you have some sort of automated follow up sequence in place that’s making sure that there is marketing happening even when you are not working.

James: Yeah, got it. So what you’re saying is that webinars work best when there is some form of warm up marketing, some authority building on the front end and that it is pretty hard to build traffic to build webinars. Would that be the case?

Tim: Yes and no. Yes, we do drive a lot of traffic through webinars and we do have a lot of success with that but I just think that what happens is that a lot of people will see, they’ll see Lead Pages doing webinars. They’ll see all of these Fortune 500 and these upward companies doing webinars and then they’ll see all of these great information product marketers doing webinars and all these stuff and it all looks so sexy and so cool and we style all these tactics; I mean we have a webinar registration page that is converting at 70% right now and we are getting 30% – 50% closing to sales on webinars and stuff like that. You here these amazing numbers and they’re awesome but the problem is depending on where you’re adding your business, there is a certain point where it only makes sense to do that if you have other mechanisms in place that are taking care of marketing for you so that you don’t live and die by the promotion because again in order to grow and scale in business you have to have some sort of evergreen marketing process in place.

James: Yeah, absolutely! I’d certainly vouch for that. Let’s talk real quick about Lead Pages as a software, perhaps you can just tell us a brief overview of what it does and perhaps how the system came about.

Tim: Yeah, sure. So Lead Pages is a software that just takes the latest and greatest of what has been tested and proven in marketing and does it for you. The thing that we are probably most well-known for is our landing page template. So we have templates for just regular squeeze page landing pages that have been proven to convert incredibly well. We have great webinar registration pages, we have sales pages, and with all kinds of these web pages – we have launch pages and all that, we have this amazing builder that allows you to go in and kind of click on something and change it so if you want to change the headline, great. Click it. If you want to change the image and the background and all that stuff, you can do all of that but they are already laid out and tested and proven to work. But the things that I think I get most excited about are – we have this thing called Lead Boxes and what Lead Boxes are basically it allows you to have an opt in form appear whenever somebody takes an action like clicking on a link or button. So one thing that we found that has been absolutely great to build our list and tons of people using Lead Pages is that if you get rid of that kind of sidebar opt in that everybody’s had forever- you know, we’ve all had this side bar opt in where it says subscribe to get updates and then there is a form for name and a form for email and then click to get updates and everybody has always believed that the key idea there is that if you give people as few steps as possible then you are going to get a higher conversion rate. That might be true under most circumstances, however we found that if you remove that side bar opt in and replace it with something we call a Lead Box, so we just maybe put a banner there or a button, no forms – just a button where somebody clicks it. You know where it says Click Here to Download Our Free Guide – or for updates or whatever that is, and then when somebody clicks it, and then an opt in form appears. So it’s like a pop up box but it only appears when somebody asks for it. We found an increase in conversion rate of about 30% when people do that and it’s really been huge for our business and for a lot of our customers as well. That’s another of our feature. We have been doing everything that we could do to continue improving this process of getting website visitors to take action.

James: Yeah, let me ask you about those Lead Boxes, I mean, that’s a pretty significant increase in performance. Why do you think, that whole active – essentially hiding the whole opt in form behind an action results in so much better conversion increase?

Tim: Yeah, so we kind of refer to this as a two-step opt in so I really believe that the reason why the two-step opt in works better than one-step opt in which is the standard opt in form, there’s three main reasons that we found, and this is not theory by the way. I am kind of behind this practice of I don’t like to spout of theories and concepts and I don’t like to share something that has only been split tested two or three times. I really believe in things that have been tested and proven and we have over a billion points of data to back up anything that I am going to share with you today. So I just want to get that out there – so three reasons. One is we found that when people come to our site, subconsciously, they make that immediate determination whether that page is a giving page or a taking page. And we found that when an opt in page is immediately visible when somebody comes to a site, they look at that as a taking page. And so they go there and they go to your site and they see that there is an opt in form that has an opt in form in the side bar and an opt in form in the middle of the post and then they just go kind of sub-consciously think that they’re here to take something from me. But when you only give them the opt in form when they say hi I’d like to opt in in obviously much better terms, then they look at that like a giving page, right? It’s like saying I have clicked this button saying that I would love to give you my email address so that you can send me this thing. That’s the first reason. The second reason is that everybody – well, not everybody, and I am working on this process of not generalizing, but so many people believe that the most important thing that you need to do, the most important action as a business, is to get people to buy something. And then a lot of people think that the main action is to get people to opt in, and those are the two fantastic things but really the most important thing that you can do as a business is to get your visitors to make a decision, okay? And that can be a decision about buying, opting and clicking whatever that is. And so the two-step opt in forces people to make a decision. Because if the opt in box is visible right on the page, so they go that page, click around just leave. But the minute they click that button or click that link, that makes that opt in form appear, they are forced to make a decision about whether or not they want to opt in. They can only do one of two things, they can either say no and click the X on the form or they can enter their email address. And the reality is, 100% of the people who don’t make a decision of whether to opt in or not on their site, will not opt in on your site. Right? So I have to say that again because it is confusing. 100% of people who don’t make a decision about whether or not to opt in on your site will not opt in on your site. But some percentages who do make the decision to opt in to your site about whether or not to opt in to your site will opt in on your site. So, this is super interesting. If you got 100% of the people in the world to make some decision about whether or not to opt in to your site, you can have the world’s worst conversion rate and still have the biggest mailing list of anybody in the universe because you would have done that magical thing which is getting people to make that decision. So that is kind of the second reason. And the third reason is that two-step opt in creates something called behavioral inertia. If you could get somebody to commit at a low level of commitment, which clicking on a link or clicking on a button is a very low level of commitment- we’ve been doing that, we do it all day long, right? So if you can get somebody to make a low level of commitment by clicking on a link or a button, the likelihood that you’ll get them to commit at a higher level of commitment by opting in increases significantly because again they are in this pattern of compliance; they have already clicked the button, they might as well opt in. And I have an extensive sales background, I was in sales for years and years and the thing about that is that one of the first techniques that you ever learn in sales is something called the Yes Ladder. So you get people to say yes to a bunch of little things that don’t really mean much, that are so easy to say yes to, that you know people are going to say yes to, and then when you ask them to buy, since they already are in this pattern of saying yes, yes, yes, yes, it is much easier to ask them if they are going to buy. But if you are in a pattern of yes, yes, yes, yes and then you want to switch to no, it is actually much more difficult and requires a lot of thought. So that is kind of the whole thing of how or why our Lead Boxes work so well.

James: Yeah, well, I am going to add testament to this almost with kind of version 1.0 of what you are taking about. I guess if we can refer our listeners to the episode page of Traffic Jam, what they’ll find at the bottom of the show notes, they’ll find a button that says Subscribe and Download MP3 & Transcript of This Episode – or something to that extent, and that just leads people to a Lead Page, not actually a Lead Box in this instance but that page, because as you said, someone compliantly led to someone once they’ve taken that action to a decision head to head either to close the page or go to opt in, I think we are getting around somewhere 70%-80% conversion rate on average on those pages which is absolutely crazy numbers! So for that exact reasons there’s no other way for those yes I want it and no I don’t – most are going yes I want it.

Tim: Yeah, you know what I love about that is that is something that when we implemented something very similar to that in Lead Pages, we found that we took our site wide opt in rate from half a percent to 10% which is unbelievable and the only way that we did that and it only took a month, and the way that we did that is by doing specific lead magnets, specific give aways at a bottom of each blog post, just like what you’re mentioning, the specific transcript. And one way to take that even further James is I would encourage you, we were just like you, we were getting around 70% conversion when at the bottom of the blog post we were linking to a landing page. We switched it to Lead Boxes at the bottom of each blog post, and it went up relatively 30% so we had about 90% – 95% conversion rate with the Lead Boxes so I would encourage giving that a shot.

James: So what other lessons are there other than drawing people to a decision building compliance? Was there another reason that that’s been successful for me and it was so successful for you is that the offer is extremely relevant to the piece of content that they are viewing on that page?

Tim: Yeah! That is exactly right. So what we do with Conversion Cast, which is our podcast at Lead Pages, what we do is at every episode is that each episode is kind of one tactic. So you expanded and we talked about a different other things- I am a simpleton. So for our podcast, I only can talk about one tactic before my brain shuts off so what we do is at the bottom of the blog post and actually about seven different times throughout the blog post, there is a link to a Lead Box and we give away something. Sometimes it is a screenshot of that tactic if it is a really, really cool split test like with James Schramko, he was a guest at our show and he had a split test between two landing pages – one had a background with an image of him, one had plain, nothing on it background, and they converted exactly the same which is really interesting but they converted at 76% from his list which is unbelievable. Just screenshots of that and a quick breakdown that my assistant wrote. Right, so she wrote just a breakdown of the episode. It’s not even a transcript, it’s just here’s what it was, who the guest is, what the task was, what the results were and what you should take away from it. And we give it away and what we’re getting is in between 70% – 98% conversion rate. So yes, specific give away to what you are giving. And you can really give away anything. So think about this, so for example let’s say you have a blog where you teach people how to build stuff or your business is tools or something like that. Well what you can do is you can have a blog post like how to build a picnic table and then at the bottom of the blog post have people opt in to download a pdf checklist that they can print out and take to the hardware store with them to make sure they get all the right supplies. Right? Or you could do like what you are doing, a transcript, that is a great one! People are always like, it takes me another hour to build this lead give away. First off, if it takes you an hour to get a 70% conversion rate, then you are doing something wrong. Second off, instead of doing a transcript, if you’re not doing a podcast and just a blog, just take that blog post, put it in to a pdf and give away that pdf in exchange for people to give in their email addresses. And people say to me all the time, why would people want to email their email address to download if they’ve already read the blog post because it is right there? Yes, but people love to possess things so people want something they can download and put on their hard drive so you can do something like that. You could do a questionnaire, you could do a quiz – I mean there are so many different things that you can do but when you do something specific for the blog post instead of just your generic give away, your conversion rate will be unbelievable!

James: Yeah, that’s nuts! I mean, again, going back to the example I gave, that transcript that people download, it’s also embedded in the post. It’s there for people to view and I guess this is a strong lesson to listeners out there, you don’t need to go and create this 25- series video sequence or a 60- page e-book guide. This stuff can be simple and easy. It doesn’t need to take a huge amount of effort, right?

Tim: Yeah, that is right. The highest converting landing page that we have ever done at Lead Pages – the giveaway, the Lead Magnet as we call it- is a one page pdf and it was a list of 4 or 5 tools that we use to make all of our videos. So it had maybe 200 words of actual text on it and it had one picture of each of the tools which were like a Logitech webcam and all these stuff. It was as simple as the tools and that has out converted a free video course that took us a month to give away, it outperformed an e-book that took us 2 weeks to give away and the one that just still drives me crazy, Clay Collins, who is the CEO of Lead Pages, he once gave away an hour of his time, so an hour of coaching with the CEO of a 7-figure business was giving away an hour of his time and we’ve got a higher conversion rate for a one page pdf list of tools.

James: Now that is absolutely insane! And I guess people now are faced with so many offers in front of them on websites, I mean there is opportunity to opt in and consume all over the place but when you make that decision to opt in you’re also making that commitment yourself to consume something so it is almost like I have to give up 20 hours of my time to get my way to that video sequence whereas it is instantaneous and can get to it quickly, there is a lot less resistance there for someone looking to opt in, right?

Tim: Yeah that is exactly it. It’ simple and you can consume it very quickly, and the other thing is, we talked about that decision. If you have a landing page to give away a list of five tools, you can’t write a long form sales letter to give that away and you can’t have a 25-minute video to give it away. You almost have to have your landing page to be very simple and so a landing page for a list of five tools can be something like free report reveals five tools that I use to create my videos including my $80 HD Video Camera and then the button just simply says, send me the list of tools. And it makes it so easy to make a decision. They don’t have to read the whole page or watch the whole video, they just have to go, well, and “do I want the list of five tools?” And then suddenly that decision becomes easy and they make it and then of course more apt to make the decision they make.

James: Yeah. Got it. I think you run a webinar, right Tim? It’s called The Foremost Important Pages in Your Business? We’ve perhaps mentioned a couple already. Outside those that we have mentioned already, what other pages can we kind of optimize in our business for lead generation?

Tim: Sure. So the one that I was just talking about we called the resource guide landing page and we give away a list of tools- and I am going to encourage everybody, no matter what your business is, to give away a list of five tools, four tools, or eight tools or whatever you want. It will outperform whatever you are doing right now and you can set it up seriously within minutes. So that is the first one. The third one that we talked about is the webinar registration page which again, has been the highest thing that we have ever seen ever. I mean it outperforms everything. But the second one, that we have not mentioned yet, is the lesson page, and this is the page that we use for our auto-responder sequence right now. If you view opt in, if you go to leadpages.net for example and you go to the top there is a link that says free tutorial and you opt in, we send you a video and we send you one every three days and I think it is 7 videos, I am not a 100% sure, but I recommend a minimum of six and here is how it works. If somebody opts in, right away they get that resource, right? And we all know how to do it – Infusionsoft, Aweber, or whatever you are using. So that happens that way, but then three days after they opt in, they are going to get an email from you, and the email doesn’t have to be complex. It could be very simple. It could be something within the lines of, “hey, we hope you enjoyed that list of tools (obviously call whatever it actually is – don’t call it that list of tools) but – we hope you enjoyed the list of five tools that we use to create all of our videos. We want to give you something else fantastic to help you create your journey of creating free videos so we created this awesome course that is 7 parts and part 1 is going to teach you how to do XY&Z, click here to check out Part 1.” And then in the PS you go “don’t worry Part 2 will be coming in just a few days.” That’s it! And then you link to this Lessons Page. What the Lesson page is, and obviously we eat our own dog food – so we have a template inside of Lead Pages and you could hire a developer to create it if you wanted to – or you could just use Lead Pages and what that does is so simple. On the page, the four main elements that are important, or actually I am going to tell you five, one is it should say right on the page what part they are on and how many parts there are in the course. So for example if you’ve got a 7-part course, the first lesson should say Part 1 of 7. And that is important because you want people to know that you are not going to send them 700 thousand parts, right? They need to know there are seven parts, they’re going to get all of them, and they are on Part 1. The second thing is that it should have a progress bar. And the thing about the progress bar is that human psychology tends not to like things that are incomplete and so if there is a progress bar on that page and people open these emails and they will want to open all of the emails and watch all of the videos because they want to feel that they have completed it. And that progress bar will help them feel like they have completed it so that is really important. The next thing is that social sharing buttons on it. But you don’t want your social sharing buttons to link to that lesson because if somebody is on Part 3 and they click like on Facebook, you don’t want all of their friends to just be able to hop in and watch Part 3, right? You want them to (1) opt in, and (2) watch the entire course. So, our lesson pages have those social sharing buttons that link to the landing page itself so all of their friends have to opt in so it grows your list and it makes sure that people consume all of your content. The fourth thing is that comments below the video so that people can leave comments from Facebook. And again, those comments show up like people are commenting on your landing page but they also, if someone leaves a comment on video two, they’ve got the same comment on all of the videos. So that is super powerful. And the fifth part is a combination of a video and a buy now button. So what you are going to do is have a video lesson, so if you have seven of them, you’re going to have seven different video lessons and in each lesson spend about three minutes, giving some kind of high quality lesson that stands alone. This would be easy to do in any business because you’re the expert so don’t feel like you are not sure what content to do. Just about anything that you can give away that is specific, that is going to help solve one specific problem, that video needs to solve one specific problem, not a whole bunch of them, but just one specific problem. Do that in the first two minutes and then on the last minute tell people what they would get by buying your product or whatever it is that you do, tell them what they would get by buying your product or hiring you or whatever it is that you do, tell them if they click the button below the video that they are going to take XY&Z. and it will only take a minute and don’t make it a long pitch – just a simple pitch and then below the video they’ll be sent to your sales page and your shopping cart or your PayPal or whatever it is and that kind of auto-responder sequence that we have is bringing our business in over ten thousands of dollars per day in revenue, just from one channel. And so that’s why at the beginning of this discussion I said I think webinars are important and they are absolutely something that you need to be doing but first, you should have your auto responder sequence in place because if you are bringing in ten thousand dollars of revenue per day every single day then what you can do is with peace of mind knowing that your automated sequence that you don’t have to do anything for anymore is always working for you and now you can try different webinars. I am doing anywhere between 1-10 webinars every single day and most of them are different and we can do that knowing confidently that we always have a consistent revenue stream that is always working. So that is kind of the second page that I encourage people to work on.

James: Nice! For someone who’s a bit over awed by the thought of creating video content right now or putting content together, could you use a pre-existing content to load up to that sequence at least initially?

Tim: Absolutely! What I would encourage you to do though is make sure that each video has some kind of a small sales pitch at the end of it and people will tell you no, don’t do that. Run it like a launch, only have people buying from the 4th sequence but we get so many people that buy on video 1 on video 2 or video 3 that I would definitely encourage it. The way to do that is take your existing content, it can be something that you already have, and I don’t care what it is. Take existing content, have it in there, and use something that we call the magic buy button, I mean, it is to do with Lead Pages, it is not as easy to do without but you can find a developer that can do it but make it so that let’s say if you don’t want to do videos, you want to do like an existing blog post thing, that would be okay, just make sure that you figure out how long it takes for somebody to read a certain part of the blog post and then when there is a little pitch for your product, you set it up so that a buy now button will then appear on the page at that point. So what we do is we know our videos have three minutes of content and then right at that three- minute mark the pitch comes in so we’ve got it set up so that when somebody gets to the video, the buy now mark then appears and the reason why that works is that it makes it so your content just looks like a regular content, it does not look like a sales page so that means people will consume all of your content, they will sit there, they will read your blog post or they will watch your video or listen to your podcast or whatever that is, and they are not clicking around prejudging the clicking process. They are consuming your content, you are doing a good job of giving them value and then you make your pitch at the end and your pitch is really good and strong and then that magic buy button appears like oh there it is I might as well buy from here.

James: Yeah, well I guess that is the giving versus the receiving page in action again, right? There is nothing sales-y about the content in some page which is another form of content other than a video when you first come to it so it is certainly comforting to do that. Tim, I want to ask you about conversion optimization, something that you’ve got a deep knowledge in, what sort of elements of a webpage do you recommend that people look at first because so many can of course alter the conversion rates, what sort of elements should we get started with testing first of all?

Tim: Yeah, I am going to tell you the number one element that you should be testing right away and probably on every one of your pages, obviously focus on your money pages like your landing pages, and your sales pages and your webinar registration pages but the number one element that we have found that has the most immediate and quick and just powerful impact is button copy. We’ve done an extensive testing on button copy and a lot of the old faithfuls are not working as they used to so we found a bunch of different examples of what works so here’s kind of the first one that has really proven to be valuable is point of view. So we found that – here’s an example, let’s say on the button you found one that says you know – give me the guide or something like that. Here’s another example, create my account versus a button that says create your account and I love studying copywriting, I think it is fascinating and there is an amazing copywriter named Eugene Schwartz and he said that you need to enter the conversation that the prospect is having in his own mind. So when somebody is looking at a button, they’re not going I want to create your account, they’re going I want to create my account. And so, when you are writing button copy, I would encourage you to test something like point of view. Have it as if they were saying it. And there are a lot of different ways to do this. We are now in the middle of testing a webinar registration page to see if it works the same and I am very confident that it will. Another example is if you were to do something along the lines of start your 30 day trial versus my free 30 day trial. Again we did a split test with this one with one of our customers and they got 90% more sign ups with start my 30 day trial than start your 30 day trial. So that was really big. Another one was immediacy. A lot of people, if you are launching a new product or you are launching a new website is they will put up a coming soon page but what a lot of people would do is they’ll say, you know, enter your email address to be notified and you’ll know when our page is live or when this new product comes out. That probably works great for apple and that probably works great for really established brands that people get really excited about but the reality is, for most companies and most brands, people are not sitting around waiting for your launch. People are not like, “oh my god, please notify me about the next time you are going to launch a new info-product.” Right? I mean, they are just not doing it even for fairly well established brands that is still not the case. We found that having a button text that says notify me actually doesn’t work well because it is kind of like I don’t know when it is out, I don’t know I am getting an email but Tell me more is immediate. Tell me more means I am going to find out something new right now, I am getting new information. So we tested that, and with a lot of traffic actually we found out that tell me more got 30% more sign ups and kind of the third element of button copy that we found that works really well is concreteness. For a long time the reigning champion of kind of the button copy for kind of the free giveaway like a download was free instant access and you’ll still see that in a lot of places. We’ve done a ridiculous amount of split testing free instant access versus download now and across the board we are seeing download now get 90% higher conversion rate than free instant access because I don’t know what free instant access is. What is free instant access? What am I getting access to? When I get it, what am I going to see? What am I going to get? But download now is very clear. When I click that I am getting to download now. So that is kind of the first element of testing button copy. The other copy I would encourage you to test, one would be, obviously the headline on your landing page or your sales page. We found that to have a significant impact on conversions. And then the other one, which I go back and forth and between is the background. So if you have a page that the background is relevant then that would be it, or if not, if you don’t have a background then you can get a lot of other elements. The other thing would be kind of be the floating element, that would be either the video, if you’ve got a video page or an image of the giveaway or an image of you and what we found to be important there is that either it is a very enticing, compelling image, or it is something that directs people to the call to action. So one thing that we have been testing a lot is, and I have found this to work every single time, is instead of having an image of the lead magnet, we’ve tested the image, like the cover of the lead magnet versus the image of the lead magnet kind of grayed out and grayed out in the background with clear copy that says download and an arrow pointing to the button and we have found that to convert incredibly well because it drives the eye to the call to action.

James: Yeah, well that would make total sense, I am sure there’s plenty of examples of these pages with these actions so I am going to encourage customers to head on over to LeadPages.net to check those out. But Tim, I don’t want to leave this conversation without asking you about traffic because we are of course a traffic jam podcast. If peek right now inside the analytics for LeadPages.net, what would I find being your top traffic source right now?

Tim: I would probably say, and this is tough for me because I don’t do a lot with our traffic, but if I were to guess, I would say our number 1 traffic source would be probably from SEO, so we are really crushing it in on SEO. All of the top keywords, we are on the front page of Google and very close to the top. Maybe that’s it but I will share with you something that might be valuable in terms of traffic is that we have found, right now we’ve done a lot of Facebook ads to Facebook tabs. So we have landing pages inside of Facebook pages and the conversion with that traffic coming from Facebook ads to a Facebook page is just unbelievable! It crushes any other kind of paid traffic that we’ve been doing.

James: Yeah, well that would make sense completely, keeping people within an environment that they have come from certainly builds trust which I am sure would affect conversions so a good lesson there to learn to leave us. Tim, I want to close things out now, you have been extremely generous with your time and your expertise. Where can people find out a little bit more about you and connect with you on the inter-webs?

Tim: Absolutely! Well the best place I would say LeadPages.net but if you want a bit more of training and we’re going to be doing that webinar that you mentioned, we are going to be indepth and I am going to break down those pages. We are going to be doing a live training coming up on Thursday so if you want to check that out, go to LeadPages.net/ webinar and you’ll get a chance to check out that live training with yours truly and I do a Q&A and answer questions all throughout the webinar so it is going to be a lot of fun.

James: Tim, it’s been a pleasure having you on the show. Listeners, to find out more about Tim and to links to all of the resources mentioned in today’s show. Head on over to Traffic JamCast.com and select episode page 42.

So that was Tim Paige with conversion lessons galore in that interview, I am sure you would agree. If you did manage to take away one thing from the show that could potentially lift your business 25% – 50% over the next six months or so, then I think you were listening with your fingers in your ears. Thank you guys as always for listening in to this episode. I’ll be back again with another show in about seven days from now where I think we can have copywriting on the agenda so make sure you tune back in for that one. In the meantime subscribe via iTunes and Stitcher radio and you can do that by heading on to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes or TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher. For a direct link for all Traffic Jam episodes go to TrafficJamCast.com where you can join the discussion on this episode, get links to all the resources mentioned today and download a full transcript of the show. Also, head on over to the main website, Veravo.com for more traffic tips and training and to learn how I can help you get more traffic to your website. We of course end this week’s show with the Traffic Jam and it’s the track chosen of course this week by Tim Paige. He’s picked a track by the Ataris and the track title is called In This Diary so enjoy the track to play out the show and I’ll see you back here again real soon!

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Creation and consumption of video content is at an all time high. Over 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and 6 billion hours of video are watched each month on the site according to YouTube—that’s almost an hour for every person on Earth. There is no doubt that YouTube is a source of entertainment for a huge number of people, but is it really effective in driving serious business? Gideon Shalwick says it is.  

Gideon has been building a business on YouTube for more than 5 years. He’s grown a large subscriber base in the niche of magic and marketing (amongst others), and has learned how to leverage that audience to drive traffic away from YouTube to an asset he controls. Listen in and learn how to use YouTube advertising and content to get more traffic to your own website.

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Hi there listener! I am James Reynolds, this is Traffic Jam and you are tuned in to episode 41 of the podcast show that teaches you how to get more traffic and build a profitable audience online. We are going to learn how to become a more profitable on the internet today using video marketing, everything from video blogging to video advertising and a whole lot more in between that’s coming all in our feature interview coming up first but don’t go anywhere after that because we will have our regular segments, this week’s news in traffic, the one minute traffic tip, and then the traffic jam, a musical jam chosen by our guest today to play out the show.

Our special guest today is Gideon Shalwick whom I had a first run in with about 3 years ago I think in a conference in Australia where funnily enough I won a copy of his rapid video blogging online course. I very much enjoyed the course when I went through it and I have been keeping a watchful eye on Gideon ever since and he’s got interesting things happening both now and in the works for the future which I thought would be very interesting to share with you today so here we go with that interview, we’ll be talking about video blogging, we’ll be talking about YouTube video advertising and a whole lot more in between; it is a really open and honest discussion that I think you are really going to enjoy so welcome to Traffic Jam, Gideon Shalwick.

James: So this is Traffic Jam Episode #41 and joining me right there is Gideon Shalwick. Gideon, welcome!

Gideon: Hey James! Thanks for having me.

James: This is going to be a blast! You of course teach a course to video marketing you call Rapid Video Blogging where you leverage the audience on YouTube and then drive those users from YouTube to your own site. YouTube as you all know is a pretty large audience so I think it is going to be pretty interesting for the Traffic Jam audience with business to learn how to reach more of that audience and get them to their own site and some other relevant place online so with your permission Gideon let’s talk a little bit about today on how to increase audience share on YouTube and then how to drive on that audience share to your own site. Sounds good?

Gideon: Sounds good! I am ready.

James: Awesome! Cool! So you’ve got a pretty popular channel yourself I think some of your videos have an excess of half a million views so I guess you have worked out a thing or two about getting more views on YouTube, what tips can you share?

Gideon: Yeah, sure. There are nice numbers within the niche of operating in that. When you look at the bigger scope of the whole of YouTube, those numbers are actually really small. The biggest YouTube views is pretty high, I think there are 23 million subscribers in this channel so the numbers are just phenomenal, those are the mainstream channel, these are the channels and videos that really get the mainstream viewers. I think my channel’s a little bit more niche – just focusing on video marketing for business and so it’s a much smaller pond but I mean within the pond it’s nice to have those views.

James: Well, just try creating videos on SEO then you’ll find how hard it is to gain traction.

Gideon: Yes, that’s a really interesting point James because I have been doing this, specifically teaching people how to do video marketing, since 2010, that’s when I launched Reputable Blogging and at that time I was the only one doing it on YouTube. A lot of people were doing it, but I was the only one teaching it, and back then I noticed there definitely was a lag for businesses in particular and some categories or niches to get on to YouTube. Back then, there were a lot of industries not on YouTube yet and my prediction back then was that it’s just a matter of time for all these other businesses, especially the business community to get on there. And that’s exactly what’s happening is really exciting. Over the last few years, I’ve definitely seen a much bigger increase in businesses in YouTube and it is very evident now when you look at people teaching other people about video marketing on YouTube and obviously I am not the only one anymore, there are people doing even much better than I am but I mean it is encouraging to see because it means that finally the business community has woken up to this idea of using YouTube to drive tons of attention and directing that attention to your own web assets.

James: So what do you think brought about the change? Did YouTube just become a more serious platform or do you think it’s just the businesses having seen the possibilities with video marketing until recent times?

Gideon: You know, I think with any new technology you have a product opt in life cycle where you get your early adopters, they jump on it or the innovators, they jump on it first, then the early adopters, and then normally there is a bit of a gap, and I think what has happened with the business community is that in general a business, they want to see from their peers strategies that are working and when they see that their peers are using these strategies. And I think there was a time where everybody at the business community was looking at YouTube and thinking, hey, this is just for teenagers or cowboys or whatever, this is not for us. And I think what happened was that back then, we saw that the innovators and the early adopters where getting started on YouTube and most of them were young ones. They were tech savvy, good with video, and don’t mind being on the video and so they jump on board and got there first. But I think of the time now the chasm has gone big enough group of people to show that you can have success for your business on YouTube to have gone to so to speak the main stream of business which is there which is exciting. I think we’re really just at the beginning for business for mainstream when it comes to YouTube marketing.

James: Yeah, good. You of course have shown some success with this, you’ve built a reputable channel with a good following. What have been some of the best strategies for growing your audience and growing your own channel?

Gideon: Well, yeah, things have changed over the years. Things that changed back when I was getting started doesn’t work today anymore and even certain features in YouTube doesn’t exist anymore. For example, being able to leave video replies, you can’t do that anymore, and that used to be a fantastic strategy for SEO and for getting traffic back to your channel as well. So things have changed, but it has changed in our favor. A few years back, it was really easy to gain the system and a lot of people gained the system unfortunately and what happened was when you do a search on YouTube and it comes up with a bunch of really crappy results, unrelated stuff and because people gained the system. They buy views or they buy the comments or whatever it is and move up in the rankings. Those things don’t work anymore. Anything that you can gain – views, likes, comments, shares – anything that you can gain on YouTube does not really count towards ranking your videos too much on YouTube. And so the key words today, and I think this ought to have been the key words from the beginning because this is what I have been teaching all these years as well, is that it all comes back to great content –great content that captivates your audience, and gets them absorbing and watching your content and spreading it for you. That’s really the backbone and you get that wrong and really there is not much point in anything else. I have just gone through the YouTube certification program, I passed the exams – it was quite a grueling exam, I hadn’t expected it to be so difficult especially with me being in the industry for so long.

James: Wow! So what do you have to do for a YouTube certification? I’m interested. Do you just have to watch monkeys falling out of trees or?

Gideon: There’s a course. There is a whole course that you go through and then you’ll have to set a live exam. You get 2 hours to finish the exam and if you pass you become certified and you are allowed to use a certification badge on your website and you can do this for personal and also for business – there are different requirements but basically that is it. I am not sure if anybody can do it but I am anybody and I did it so it’s open to others as well. It’s just a nice little badge that you can put on your name to give you some credibility. But anyway, what I learned from that, and this is straight from horse’s mouth and it makes so much sense is that the things that YouTube are looking at right now when it comes to ranking and getting traffic as a result is that YouTube looks at two things. They look at what’s known as watch time and also session time. Those two things. Now watch time, it is a little bit unclear how they define it because I think it’s tied in with the algorithm so they don’t want to be as clear as they can be for obvious reasons but watch time is basically how engaged people are when they watch your video and how long they watch your video for. The percentage, the minutes, it all works together to work out the watch time for when people watch your video. Now that is important all in itself, but what has even more weight in from my understanding and going through this course is decision time which is how much longer someone stays in YouTube as a result of watching your video. So in other words, if someone watches your video and at the end of your video you have that little annotation that links back to another one of your videos, they click on that and they watch it, that increases decision time which then increases the original video’s chance of getting ranked for the keyword that you’re trying to optimize for. So that is pretty cool and so these are all the cool things that you can do – instead of just linking with an annotation to one of your videos, you can link to a playlist at the end of your videos, which means, people don’t just watch one of your videos. If you link to a playlist, they’ll probably watch more than one video as a result of that. So there are lots of little things that you can do like that to increase watch time and decision time but once again that comes right back down to the backbone of all of these which is great content. Without a great well- thought out content, it is very difficult to get watch time and decision time.

James: Yes, they are really moving the way that Google search has moved I guess. They look at less table factors like keyword placement or even links to a piece of content online. They are looking far more at engagement level which in the SEO world would be the time on the page and then they are looking at almost like time on site. Where else do they go in that website as a result of watching that or looking at that first piece of content they see. So it all kind of makes sense with Google behind this so I guess they would follow the same thought pattern as they do for Google search in to YouTube.

Gideon: Yeah and it just makes logical sense, so there’s two videos and both are trying to rank for the same keyword phrase. If one of the videos are very engaging and the other one is not, of course YouTube would want to rank that engaging one because it is going to create a much better customer experience and keep people coming back, and of course, ultimately, the more people who come back and watch videos and spend time on YouTube, the more money they can make from advertising so it makes so much sense. I think if you just stick to just playing the game of YouTube or Google, you’ll be alright. A lot of people have tried funny things, have tried little tricks, for me basically, just to get it out, whenever there is some kind of suggestion that you’re trying to in the system, stay away from it, when in doubt, leave it out. That’s my philosophy when it comes to YouTube and Google property. Play their game, give them what they want and you’ll be rewarded back as a result.

James: Absolutely! So how worried do we have to be now Gideon about keyword choice? I mean in SEO again, it is not so much as a concern now as long as you title your content with a relevant title that may perhaps include a key phrase that you want to appear in the results for. Is YouTube the same now? Do you need to worry too much about doing keyword research to determine how your video should be titled or what the description should say? Does any of that stuff matter anymore?

Gideon: I think it is still important but once again as you write your titles and your description and your tags, think in terms of the user first, the viewer and then SEO second. So write your headlines for write your titles for human beings and your description for human beings; don’t write it for machines or for the algorithms. And same goes for your tags. It’s actually quite interesting! For the tags, from what I understand when I studied with this course, is that you get rewarded better for tags that are more relevant and descriptive of your actual content than trying to grab tags and keywords that are not as relevant. They have this example which is really interesting about a parody of Gangnam style. So they showed to examples, one had parody Gangnam style as a keyword phrase and the other one just had Gangnam style. And you’d think that having the Gangnam style keyword phrase would help you get seen with the Gangnam style video but what they were saying was that’s apparently not a good thing to do because you are deceiving the viewer in a way because they are thinking they are getting Gangnam style but they end up getting a parody. So that was a very interesting thing as well to look at so when you look at your tags, certainly make them accurate and descriptive of your actual content as opposed to just trying to rank for a whole bunch of related keywords that does not really describe your actual content and this plays as a roll over time as well as your video grows older. To me there’s a few key things. There’s getting the content right, that is number one. And that is really a function of a much bigger picture which is who you are trying to target, what problems they have and how you can solve it. That’ really where the content is driven from. But apart from that, this one big strategy, it’s like the A20, your sweet spot or that kind of thing that highly leveraged strategy that you can follow, and that is known as collaborations on YouTube.

James: Yeah, it’s kind of referral type of traffic, is that how you’d describe it?

Gideon: Yeah, so basically where you team up with another YouTuber and they happen to have a big audience and a nice list of subscribers and they share their audience with you. We did this back in 2010 in the magic niche, I teamed up with a magician here in Brisbane, Australia and we did a search for all the magic channels, we started from 0 and we found all these Magic channels in YouTube back then. There was this guy called Eric he had about 30,000 subscribers on his channel and we had 0 or 10 but certainly very insignificant.

James: That relationship worked very nicely in your favor right?

Gideon: It really did, so what happened was we made friends with them, we did an interview with them, and then he recorded videos as well and he posted it on his channel and had an annotation linking back to our channel, so instantly, we had access to his 30,000 subscribers just like that, and I don’t know any better strategy than that for driving views and driving subscribers. It really is amazing. Given that you have a reason for people to come visit your channel which is your great content. So that’s huge – finding other players in your market and then teaming up with them and one strategy, instead of going for the big players, you start off with people that are your peers, you start off with people who are similar sized to you in the same industry and you share your audience. You introduce them to your audience and then they introduce you to your audience and then just keep on doing that over and over until you get sick of getting subscribers.

James: Well this is kind of like the video version of what we are doing here on audio right? I am interviewing you. Hopefully, the Traffic Jam listeners will like that topics that you talk about and then I am sure we are going to mention somewhere to go and find you later on Gideon so I am sure some of the Traffic Jam audience will bleed over to you so it is a great strategy, and it really benefits every party involved, right? You’ve got some nice content to talk about, I’ve got some great content to produce and everyone’s a winner really.

Gideon: Oh, yeah. It is a strategy that is proven over and over in many different industries. The music industry is a really, really good example. I am trying to think of the guy’s name – Guetta?

James: David Guetta, the DJ, is that it? Well the judgment will be out on whether that is considered as music but I will let you off on that one.

Gideon: Okay, I like his music. The reason I like it is because it is I like the beat. For productivity I listen to vocal trance so it is kind of like in the same genre so it really helps me focus and get stuff done but that’s a good example. I am not sure where he started from but it almost seemed like he came out of nowhere. Sure, perhaps he was popular in the trance world but if I look at the difference between him and say one of those Dutch guys, Yurin but the difference is that David teamed up with mainstream performers and as a result got access to the mainstream, which is huge.

James: Yep, all of his stuff was early collaboration so it is a very good point you’re making, looking at what other people are doing in other industries and adopting some of the other industries in your own market can be great stuff. If you look at that same scenario and bring it to the marketing world is very useful indeed. Let’s talk about some other stuff which I know you’ve got going on right now. What about YouTube advertising? If you start experiment anything along the lines of the YouTube ad formats or any of the other advertising formats available on YouTube?

Gideon: Yes, certainly. I think that is certainly a space to watch, it is quite a new thing it is almost like the repeat of Google adwords so we are almost going back in time so what we’re seeing there is a lot of really cheap views, very cheap traffic that’s to be had there, if you know how to get it. I have been playing around with it and at the start I must admit I was a little overwhelmed and did not know what to do but as I started digging in further I realized that it is really simple. It is simpler to me than getting traffic in Adwords for example so I had been doing some test there and it is looking very promising, let’s look at it that way, so I think it is a space to want to watch. Some of the bigger companies and the bigger brands jumped on it but I am not quite sure if they get it. I am not sure if a lot of people actually get it. They don’t understand how to leverage all this traffic and all these views and using preview ads to actually drive traffic. That’s the whole point of it right? But it is certainly a space to watch, that’s for sure.

James: Yeah, some of the mistakes I see people make as a relative lay person will in terms of video marketing are doing these preview ads but they are actually failing to get people to actually do anything, there is no call to action anywhere in the video. They are paying for the impression and the view which is fine for branding but hey why don’t you try to get people to do something as a result of seeing the video?

Gideon: Exactly! And I think you’ve hit the melon in the head that’s clearly one massive problem. As the video ads itself. Some of them are very pretty.

James: Far prettier than I would probably be able to make.

Gideon: Right! And they spend thousands of dollars with these ads, then the question is do they get clicks back to their website? And I think in a lot of cases, the answer is no so saying this, there is a lot to be learned from these companies to drive traffic to the site. That is one thing, and the other thing that I see is that the tricky thing on YouTube to get right is get targeting. How often do you watch a video in YouTube and then there is an ad in front of it, totally unrelated to the content of the video? And you sort of think, where the heck did this ad come from? It does not speak to me at all, it is totally irrelevant. And so I think what is happening is that people businesses don’t really know how to target properly on YouTube. And when you think about it, it is getting close Facebook in terms of how accurate or how granular you can target things on YouTube. You can target a specific video on YouTube and only show your ad for viewers on that video or you could target a group of videos. You can say, only for these videos I want to run an ad on and similarly you can do the channels say for example, last week I had a chat with my brother last night, he is a Katy Perry fan and he watched that Katy Perry happy birthday song and part of our conversation was I told him about a trivia and I said to him if you say you were selling Katy Perry t-shirts and you wanted to access all the Katy Perry fans, all you had to do was create a little video ad that talks about something like Hey Katy Perry fans I know you love Katy Perry but guess what, you’ll love my t-shirt even more or something like that and only advertise on Katy Perry’s channels so all of a sudden you’ve got a very target audience, you’ve got an extremely well-crafted video ad that speaks to that audience and as a result of that your view rate goes up and means that there are more people who actually watch your video and then if you have a good video it can actually increase your click through rate so people actually click on it and visit your website.

James: And I guess you actually spin off of that in the same way AdWords does itself that your cost per click will also go down as a result of those metrics going up, right?

Gideon: Oh, tremendously! We’ve had some crazy improvements. We had run a split test recently where all we did we just changed the video. All the targeting was the same, these two ads ran in parallel. Everything was the same except for the video. And we managed to get a three times improvement so it was at 300% improvement on a third of the cost for the clicks. Or conversely, we got three times as many clicks for the same amount of money and all we did was change the video so that was very interesting and that shows you can optimize a lot once you get to play around it a little bit.

James: Nice! Very good and what types of videos are you getting most success with when it comes to video ads because I am sure there are a few listeners out there who have got their interest peaked by it right now but they are probably thinking, why am I going to spend hundreds and thousands of dollars in a video production company and all that pretty stuff, how can you do this in more kind of quick and dirty and more economical easy way this video is made?

Gideon: I guess it’s a few principles. You can figure it out yourself as well a bit. When you look at the structure of these ads it should be the trivial ones or the ones that you see at the front of the video are the ones that are skippable. You get five seconds basically, you get five seconds before your time is up, and you know, if you have not grabbed their attention within five seconds, you’ve lost that viewer. I’ve seen so many ads, you are ten seconds in, and then you go, what the hell is this about? Nothing has happened yet, and what are they thinking? They obviously are not thinking they’re not thinking it through properly or they just don’t care about throwing money down the drain. So you’ve got give seconds to grab their interests so the first five seconds is the most important. The other key thing is that if you have not tried preview yet, and this is pretty cool, and this is like adwords is that you only pay for a view if people watch 30 seconds or more of your video or if your video is the whole 30 seconds of your video then obviously so that is kind of interesting. So you can use that information to craft a pretty clear little video and obviously you want to get people back to your site. So you should get on early to drive people to your site and that is very, very important.

James: And does that make that traffic free if you can get a call to action in after 15 seconds and people don’t watch the video, is that essentially free traffic?

Gideon: Well, I think so but I probably have not run enough tests to confirm it, maybe you have James or maybe some friends. I know there are some people teaching that you can get free clicks like that but it’s a little bit difficult to measure because I think there are a few interesting things happening in YouTube which makes it a little bit more difficult to see what is going on but it does make sense you know that if people are clicking on your ad before that 30 seconds are up, then perhaps that click is free. Who knows? It would seem to make sense. But then again, sometimes, people click on your ad and if they come back then you’d still pay for that view. Or sometimes people just notice an ad and they just let us run without actually viewing it so you pay for that view even though they are not really watching it, so that’s one of the variables there I think but perhaps those are free. I guess I’ve got to do a bit more testing on that.

James: Well let’s get a bit more research, I’ll put it on my to do list to find out what exactly is there because it seems this is one of those hacky things that could change history so we’ll go check that out. Anyway, I want to try and bring things almost to a close Gideon. Perhaps I think I’d like to close a loop on a question we asked early on, and that is talking about the call to action at the end of your own piece of the video content and you talked a little bit about increasing the engagement in your videos and getting people to watch more videos is now a good thing in YouTube, has your strategy changed now in terms of what you ask people to do at the end of the piece of the video content?

Gideon: Yes, certainly. When I was doing this in the beginning, the main emphasis was to get people off YouTube and on to my life and the way that it has changed now is that I try to get people to stay on YouTube a bit longer so I have sort of a mixed strategy now where sometimes I ask people to go watch another video or subscribe to my channel and my YouTube channel and in keeping traffic there, and I know some people might cringe to hear that on some online business people but the thought behind that is that you are building an authority channel and as a result of that dramatically increase your chances of ranking and getting a lot of reviews, it’s not just ranking for people when do a search, it’s also appearing on the watched page, appearing on the suggested videos, related videos – the whole bunch of places where you appear aside from the search so that is really important nowadays to make sure you have some emphasis on that but then I can’t say I’ve done it 50% of the time but I will probably recommend maybe 50% of the times you drop people back to your site so one video you’d ask them to subscribe or ask another video, the next video you take them straight to your site or you do both in one video. In general in direct marketing approach or just simple psychology, when you give people too many options then take too many action so normally I try to give people just one option and normally I give people the best result from it but it is up to you, mix and match it, taste and see what gives you the best result.

James: Fantastic! Well great advice Gideon, let’s wrap things there. We’ve got a fair amount with 30 minutes or so of talking. I know you’ve got a few things in the pipeline and some bits you are working on right now, is there anything you’d like to mention to Traffic Jam listeners right now?

Gideon: I guess there is a couple of businesses that I have just started up but first of all, if people want to follow what I am doing, they can just go to my blog or my channel, gideonshalwick.com or if you go to YouTube and look for Gideon Shalwick on YouTube you’ll find it, and what I do there is I basically report on my experiments that I am on. So for example I did the experiment with Jay-jay the magician, we took that channel from 0 he is now sitting on close to 200,000 subscribers, I think something like 24 million views on the channel, that was an experiment that I ran and so from those experiments I share what I have been much more involved in the startup space, still in the video arena but about two years ago I started up a business called Splashio and that business focuses on little video clips and enhance your own video content so things like logos, logo animations, outros with automatic call to actions and that sort of stuff you can get at Splashio.com. There is also a report on there that is 20 pages long and that talks about how to create compelling content, it gives you a formula for creating really compelling content so you can grab that for free at splashio.com and very, very recent, like in the fast few months, we’ve been working on this, we have not released this yet, we are about to release it, so by the time you are listening to this podcast, you’ll probably see it. It’s a new business where we focus on helping people in the video advertising space to give much better results. That business is called veeroll.com, it’s almost like viral but just veeroll you know, just a play on words there. There are also free stuff you can get on there,

James: Love it! Fantastic! Gideon thanks for your time and expertise, the links that Gideon’s mentioned in today’s show, gideonshalwick.com, splashio.com and veeroll.com will of course be mentioned there along with Gideon’s social media profile and anything else we’ve mentioned in today’s show so I urge you listeners to go check those out. Gideon just to wrap things up, thanks again for your time, I personally got a lot out of it, I am sure the traffic jam listeners have too so thank you!

Gideon: You are very welcome!

This Week’s News in Traffic

Okay, so a pretty quiet news this week, just two stories to share with you. The first one is from Facebook who have improved their embedded posts both with a new design and also with a faster load time. Posts that include media content such as photos and videos usually get far more engagement on Facebook. As a result, Facebook have updated their embedded posts to display images and videos above the post text and other content. According to Facebook the new embedded post now load up to twice as fast as before. Improved performance make it easier to embed multiple Facebook posts in your story without having to worry about delays. If you are a regular Facebook post embedder, I don’t know if that’s a real term or I just made it up, Facebook have made it a little easier for you by saving the dimensions in the embed plug in when you go back to embed a future post so you don’t have to go back and reconfigure the size if you are regularly posting the same size to your blog for instance. So just a small update from Facebook. If you are using a lot of social content and embedding posts in to your blog posts then this might be a helpful update for you.

The second story is a social media story attached to Snickers and it is very topical because right around World Cup time and we are still amidst, at least at the time of recording, in the FIFA World Cup and if you have been following the world cup you’d be very familiar I am sure with the incident involving Luis Suarez who actually bit in to the shoulder of an opposing player creating a huge amount of uproar and conversation across social media. Now, Snickers, they put out some real time content right around the incident and they put out a tweet, I will actually read it out to you, it says, hey, @luis16suarez next time you’re hungry just grab a Snickers #worldcup #luissuarez #eatSnickers. They also at the same time put out a Facebook post and here are the interesting statistics: The tweet got a total of 39,000 retweets and 17,000 favorites whereas the Facebook post which was pretty similar, it says next time you’re hungry grab a Sneakers – World Cup. That fell completely and utterly flat with only 5,000 likes, shares and comments so far more amplification happened because of the tweet so a lot of people are using this data to say that Facebook news feed content is totally dead, organic ratio has just totally fallen flat. I don’t think that is quite the case, I think Twitter is more of a real time platform but certainly an interesting statistic, as I said, 39,000 retweets, 17,000 favorites versus just 5,000 likes on Facebook. Anyway to get more on that story and a nice interesting graphic of Luis Suarez biting his opponent, you can check out the episode page of TrafficJamCast 41.

If you are a seasoned listener to Traffic Jam or you are a new listener and enjoying what you have learned so far I would appreciate it if you left a review for the show and to find the review pages you go to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes for iTunes and TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher for Stitcher and when you’re there you’ll see a review and a rating option and also the ability to add a comment so please go ahead and do that, it helps us get the show out to more people and it gives you a bit of a chance for some exposure to the Traffic Jam audience so when you’re there if you are sneaky enough to add your website address or a little bit about your business, I’ll include that in a future show episode so as I said the places to go to leave a review, TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes for iTunes and TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher for Stitcher.

The One Minute Traffic Tip

If you want to get more organic traffic when people share your content via their social media channel, then you need to put a lot of attention in to the headline for your post and also the image. If you have seen sites like Buzz Feed that continuously pop up in your Facebook feed, you’ll know that they put a huge amount of time in to crafting a reeling, enticing and curiosity-driven lines along with eye-catching images that entice you to click so if you want to get more traffic yourself from Facebook and other social channels then you need to do the same. So a few quick tips, use a curiosity driven title that is below 90 characters so that it shows in full in the Facebook news feed. And then your image in your post should also be in the same format it will fit nicely within the new format within Facebook so that by the 270×245 format. That means when people share your content from your site across to Facebook you’ll have a very appealing, enticing headline and image that will encourage people to click through to your website.

A big thank you for listening in to episode 41 of Traffic Jam, I really do appreciate the time that you’ve taken out of your day to listen in and I sincerely hope you get a lot of value out of it and it is helping you grow your business online because that is the aim of the show. We’ll be doing it all again where we’ll be digging deep in to another area of traffic to help you grow your presence online and to make sure you don’t miss out on that episode or any future episodes remember to subscribe via iTunes and Stitcher radio and for direct links to all Traffic Jam episodes, go to TrafficJamCast.com where you can join the discussion on this episode and get links to all of the resources mentioned in today’s show. Also head on over to Veravo.com for more traffic tips and training and to learn how I can help you get more traffic via the search engines.

We end this week’s show with a track chosen by our guest today, Gideon Shalwick. It is a 1991 track from the band Red Hot Chilli Peppers and the title is called Under the Bridge. We’ll play out and I will see you back here next week with another show.

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THIS WEEKS NEWS IN TRAFFIC

ONE MINUTE TRAFFIC TIP

THE TRAFFIC JAM

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Joel Comm is a pioneer of the digital world. Responsible for one of the first 18,000 website on the internet, an early Apple app store success story with his best selling iFart app, and the leader in the make money online with Adsense model.

Add to that list 9 books which include The Adsense Code, Twitter Power and Kaching, there is no doubt that Joel Comm has an impressive credo.

On the show Joel and I discuss content marketing, the role of a book in building authority online, Google Helpouts and much more.

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“Do what you love and the money will follow.” @JoelComm
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Hey there listener! Welcome back to Traffic Jam. I am your host James Reynolds, and super stoked as always to have you here with me on today’s episode. We’re episode #40 and we’re back after a short hiatus in recording; we did take a break for a week or two. Glad you could be back here and what an episode I’ve got in store for you; we’ve got pretty much everything covered on today’s show. Everything from ad sense to content marketing and from apps to entrepreneurship and that’s because my guest today has a wealth of experience online. Now, get this – he got his first computer way back in 1980 which is the same year incidentally I was born. He had one of the first 18,000 websites on the World Wide Web way back in 1995 before many of us have even found the internet! This guy has done deal sites, AdSense sites, gaming sites, applications. He has been blogging since 2003 and he’s written 9 books no least, including The AdSense Code, Twitter Power, and Ka-ching! So that probably gives you a few clues as to who today’s guest is. But, you are not going to get that interview just yet, I am going to tell you what is coming up. We have of course the one minute traffic tip, we have this week’s news in traffic, and then of course we play out Traffic Jam with the traffic jam, a musical jam chosen by my guests today.

My guest today is Joel Comm, he doesn’t need much of an introduction really because he is a very well-known name in the online space, he’s been around for some time and certainly achieved a lot, and pioneered much during that time, he’s going to be sharing much of that on today’s interview which I know you are going to love. Joel and I first met back in December of last year where both of us are speaking on an event that I co-organized called the Middle Ease internet summit and ever since then I have been trying to track Joel down to get him on the show but he has a very, very busy travel schedule that it has taken us a long time to slot it in but anyway, super happy that we can make the time to put this interview together. I am going to leave the interview at that and here’s Joel Comm for today’s interview. Hope you enjoy it!

James: So this is Traffic Jam episode #40 and joining me and you of course, today, is the one and only, the man, the myth, and practical internet legend, Joel Comm. Joel, how are you?

Joel: I’m a myth? I’m not real apparently.

James: There you go, you evade people. You work in mysterious ways.

Joel: It’s just mythic and it is kind of funny but hey, thanks and I am glad to be here.

James: Awesome! I am going to ask you to lift the lid with my first question, if I were to take a sneak peek inside your Google analytics and look at the traffic going in to all of your websites, what would I find as the #1 traffic source for Joel Comm right now?

Joel: You know what, it is very organic really. I have always been very organic, I don’t buy a lot of traffic. if I am promoting a product and bringing affiliates onboard, and certainly they’ll drive a lot of traffic but you’ll be interested to know that I sold of my largest content sites a few years ago and most of what I am doing now is not pure content. I mean there is my blog that I create content for but that aspect of my business is something that is not a strong part right now.

James: So you are talking about the AdSense sites that you have become famous for?

Joel: Yeah, finally I sold those and the sum that I sold them for was nothing to sneeze at so it was very much worth moving on from that aspect, I still teach AdSense, I’ve got a new edition of my e-book that’s just about ready to launch so there is plenty still to say about it It’s just personally I have made my money there and I have moved on to some other things.

James: Well, perhaps we’ll talk about some of that upcoming but of course the premise of Traffic Jam is to get the top experts in their fields to reveal the very best traffic getting secrets. You of course did the same with your book Click Here to Order, where you gathered 40 of the very best marketers and ask them to reveal the secrets to their success be it all which a few years ago now I guess but what did you gain from that process of writing that book and you have been able to apply and learn lessons from in your own business and in recent years?

Joel: What I loved about that book so much is that the opportunity just to sit down and talk to my peers and discover just like myself, we all kind of ended up making money online just figuring it out. There weren’t e-books to read or teachers to train us. We jumped in because we thought this World Wide Web thing was cool and we discovered ways to make money and then we wrote books and we began training and it was like pioneering the Wild West and discover the stories of John Reese – he was deeply in debt before he discovered the traffic secrets. Jeff Walker created a product in the financial sector that was his first product launch where he learned and honed the skills on the product launch formula. Armand Morin was a vacuum cleaner salesman before he became an internet marketing guru with so many successful products and seminars. We are all just regular people that are willing to take risks. And that’s what entrepreneurs do. We take risks, we try things and we are okay with them failing sometimes because the more failures you have the more likely you have that huge success, and that’s why I do so many things at one time. I just love to play in a lot of different sandboxes and build things and sometimes they fall flat and there is nothing there and other times we build a castle and it’s a lot of fun.

James: Yeah, well let me ask you a little bit about that because you are very much an earlier doctor online, I think according to your bio you are one of the first 25 thousand people in the world to have a website, you’ve got some early success with the iPhone app that reached #1 in the iStore worldwide and you’ve pioneered the whole make money online with the AdSense thing so you’ve clearly got a good eye for an opportunity and you prepare to take a few risks but what kind of method or frameworks do you use to analyze perhaps a market, a business opportunity, or maybe even a traffic source that has kind of enabled you to get that success so consistently?

Joel: The first thing that I do is I look at what interests me personally. If there are a lot of ways you make money online and I have had people tell me here you should do this you should try this, and they may well be right and they’re great means of making money but if they don’t interest me personally, if there’s not something that ignites a passion and the desire to pursue it, then the money is not going to be enough to do that and I won’t pursue it. The first thing for me is – is this something that’s cool? When I built my first website to create content and do game reviews and put this thing on the internet. When I filmed the reality show it was because I enjoyed reality TV and I knew YouTube was on the rise and I thought it would be great to do apprentice me in YouTube, let’s create this reality show. When the iPhone came out, I had to buy one. I was one of those people that bought the iPhone and paid $600 for it and it was fun and I did not gripe when they lowered the price to $400 because I paid what I thought it was worth and when they said we can make apps, I said we have to make an app! This is cool! Though it really starts there, and then I evaluate it and say, do we have an idea that is feasible? Can I do this? And can this be profitable? Or, will this just be a whole lot of fun? Because not everything I do is there for profit, many things I do is there because I enjoy doing them and what those usually do is that they reinforce my brand as as you say, a pioneer and somebody who things of new and creative ways to do things. That to me, I enjoy that designation more than hey he made a million bucks on you know that app or whatever.

James: Yeah, and that kind of thought what might be non-profitable ventures or some of those passion projects turned out to be some of the most money?

Joel: That is true! You never know when you are going to hit – I think when you take your eye off; as an entrepreneur, when it is not all about the money, you are more likely to be engaged in what you are doing and it is going to be important to you, and you know the adage to some degree is true. If you do what you love, the money will follow.

James: And you follow through, yeah. We were first introduced I think on the Middle East internet, an event that I was co- organizing and of course where we both spoke at, I seem to remember from that conference that you spoke and presented on a topic which I think was on how to become a recognized expert from memory and you talked a lot about publishing and you encouraged others to write their own book; you’ve written nine or more books so I am guessing the whole book thing worked out pretty well for you.

Joel: I am a big fan of books. I think the book is the single greatest thing you can do to elevate your credibility in the market.

James: Yeah, and you’ve had a few that are very well recognized – The AdSense Code, Twitter Power. Do you think that has really been responsible for really positioning you online Joel and giving you the kind of profile that you have been able to achieve?

Joel: Yeah, I do. I think it’s just one more thing. It is a stack of bricks where each one is a different accomplishment because I have done so many varied things and even my books, from book to book, they’re such variety; one’s teaching people how to make money on AdSense and the other one is training how to use Twitter for business and another’s about five ways to make money online. We’ve got the biography, you mentioned Click Here to Order and my more recent book So What Do You Do? is inspirational and entrepreneurial stories from over 40 co-authors so there is a lot of variety and that allows me to position myself in a lot of different arenas.

James: Yeah, well let me ask you about that book which you spoke about the five general writing tips that gets revenue online, I think it was called Ka-ching! and I guess that was a few years ago now, would you still have the same five methods of generating revenue online as you would today or has your viewpoint on some of those things changed a little bit?

Joel: Well, what I did with this book, while there are many ways to make money online, I tried to focus on the content that somebody would generate based on their own knowledge, passion, talent, skills, abilities or personalities. So what can you do for a business based on who you are and so the five ways that I elaborate on are creating content sites; they can be monetized with advertisements and in-text links like AdSense and doing affiliate programs where you sell other people’s stuff through your content sites, creating your own information products which can take a variety of formats, creating membership programs that generate ongoing revenue stream and then the highest level is having a mentoring program where you can have people pay you to share your knowledge and expertise. Now there are a lot of ways to make money online but those five are still a time-tested and proven model for monetizing your content and who you are and they all lead to Ka-ching!

James: I was waiting for the Ka-ching button, I think I even had that, did you have an app with the same sound a few years ago?

Joel: I do. Ka-ching! app is out there, there is a great story in that whole thing itself, did you know that our own app initially got rejected by the iTunes app store and in 2010 they said it had minimal user functionality. If you go to YouTube and just search for Joel Comm Steve Jobs, you’ll see a video appeal that I made to Steve who was then the acting CEO of Apple. It was a very humorous video appeal on the way that they are reviewing and approving apps in to the store and it got a whole bunch of attention and got me published on TechCrunch and the app actually got approved in a few weeks as a result so it is kind of fun to go back and see how taking a risk by going right to the top worked.

James: Yeah, and this was – was it the iThought app? Is it the one?

Joel: No, no.

James: The ka-ching app itself? AH, because you also got rejected, or you thought you might get rejected right? With the one that made the big bucks, right?

Joel: Right, we thought we might get rejected when we heard that a competitors apps which got registered before ours was rejected and so we waited and then we ended up submitting it, it took a couple of months but one day we were pleasantly surprised when it got approved and of course the rest there is history.

James: Yeah! It kind of worked out alright for you! Now, listening to one of your own recent podcasts, you talked a little bit about Google Help Outs which you held as the big new opportunity online, I think I’d like you to explain a little bit about what Help Outs are because it might be an alien concept to some, then perhaps you can explain why they’re the next big opportunity on Google and potentially how our listeners can leverage it themselves.

Joel: Sure! Well, you know Help Outs is really is really Google’s attempt to monetize Google Hangouts functionality that they have created. Everybody has pretty much done Hangouts right now and if you haven’t, hangouts.google.com allows you to video conference with up to 10 people at one time using their live video streaming technology and there is a lot of cool features that you can use their including sharing whiteboards and a chatroom where you can type text and share links as well as talk and you can wear funny hats, it is kind of gimmicky but a lot of people are now using Hangouts to do webinars and tell a seminar and be able to share a screenshare and so what they have done with Help Outs is they’ve wrapped this interface around it that allows people who are experts in a field to give help to real people in real time using their e-commerce interface. You can go to helpouts.google.com and you’ll see there’s a number of categories and maybe you want to know how to cook a certain chicken dish for dinner, and you can go on and you can see there are experts in cooking and if there is someone that is available, they might be willing to give you a free Help Out, or it might be paid where it is metered by the minute or perhaps it’s $10 for 30 minutes. Whatever it is, the person giving the Help Out sets it and this gives you the opportunity to put yourself out in front of people who need help right now. And to charge them for that Google processes everything through Google Wallet and the person giving the Help Out keeps 80% of whatever the fee is. If you don’t want to charge and if you just want to give free ones, that’s great lead gen because we all know if you give yourself away for 5-10 minutes you share your expertise with somebody, they are more likely to buy something from you in the future so whether you do the lead gen to brand yourself or whether you just charge outright for the Help Outs that you give, it is a great opportunity. In this day and age, we want help on a subject matter and we want it now and Help Outs lets you do it on demand and we’ve actually created the first course on it, it’s called the paid expert so if anybody goes thepaidexpert.com, they can take a look at our course there that tells you everything you need to do about how you monetize and get started with Google Help Outs.

James: Nice! I will make sure that the link to The Paid Expert is included in the show notes but it is pretty easy to find. You have been trying this yourself of course, I think Joel. What sort of success have you got with Help Outs?

Joel: I tied it for a couple of weeks and probably did about 15 of them and people were very happy with it and I charged $500 an hour for consultation and one on ones with people but for the sake of testing Help Outs I charged $40 for 15-20 minutes Help Outs and I did a number of them, recorded some of them and really help people out, well worth their time to get some tips from me.

James: Another thing you have been putting a bit of your time recently is the Joel Comm Show which is of course your podcast. What seems to be your online personality so to speak, are planning their own show or about to launch their own show? What have you done to always get your podcast to stand out and kind of be a bit different?

Joel: Well, you know, I am no stranger to podcast, I have been broadcasting back in 2007 and I’ve had a number of different shows and the current show you mentioned is actually in hiatus right now, I have not done since January this year because of all the travels. It was taking too much time and so one of the things I have been doing is trying to figure out what I really want to do with the podcast because I really enjoy doing them and what format would allow me the greatest freedom to be able to do it regularly and bring the greatest value and so I kind of put it on pause for the moment although there is a bunch of episodes on iTunes that many are evergreens so if people want to look the Joel Comm show they can go and pull those down and learn some pretty cool stuff.

James: Yeah, well one thing I certainly noticed about your podcast is you seem to have very high production values and the show format really felt like a full blown radio show with music interludes and sections, it was well structured and probably beats most of the pre-ambling voice style podcast that you hear from so many but I guess the flip side of that is it takes a bit longer, right?

Joel: It does, and I produce it all myself. I am a former disc jockey and I worked in production before and so I chose the music and wrote the scripting and hired the talent for the voice overs and actually edit it all myself – every episode, and that’s what takes so much time and to continue doing it this way, I am not sure I have the bandwidth for it but I will be back, there will be a show, it might be a different name but I have got some ideas and I am formulating them right now.

James: Good, well keep us up to speed with that, we’ll certainly make Traffic Jam listeners aware of that once you put the shows out again so that would be awesome but I guess you have done some pretty good things in your time but I am sure the roads have not always been paved with gold and you’ve made some mistakes along the way, Joel, what is your biggest failure up online?

Joel: Wow! There’s so many! But if we talk in terms of monetary, just to categorize it, year ago, probably starting 2008, I put lots of money and had staff create a mobile marketing platform that was ahead of its time using SMS messaging and put a lot of effort in to it, a good six figures. And because I was distracted with so many projects, it never got the attention that it deserved. And I tried to sell it after I realized I wasn’t going to market it and I was not able to do that and finally, one day, I just shut it down. I just said, that’s it. I am going to stop paying for this and I am just going to shut it down and let it go. What’s really interesting, instead of grieving the end of this dream, of the product that I thought would be widely successful, I felt free because I stopped paying for it and it felt like in that moment, I stopped failing. I wasn’t a failure anymore, it was done. I think there’s a quote there, maybe a tweet that I need to make around there.

James: I am sure many of our listeners can resonate with that. It’s like the pain in the bum client who pays really good but just demands your time and you feel like you did not want to let go of them because financially they are potentially good or maybe are good but when you let them go you get that freeing feeling and that sense of release just to move on to other stuff certainly resonate with that. Good! So you have been online for some time, you’ve built your first website way back I think before even many of us have discovered the internet so I guess Joel it would be fair to say that you’ve got a broader perspective than most, what advice would you give a new business owner starting out online right now?

Joel: Don’t chase the money! Figure out where you bring the greatest value to the world around you. What is that thing that you’ve got a firm grasp on this topic, I know something that you don’t know and when I share this with them it is going to make an impact on their lives, it is going to make a difference, maybe it will inspire them, maybe it will train them to be better at what they do, maybe it will entertain them. Whatever it is, figure out that thing that will makes your heartbeat, which drives you and then you want to figure out how I bring this to the world. Is it through a podcast? Is it through a video? Is it through content that I am going to write? Is it through social media? What am I going to create? Is it a digital product? Is it a physical product? What can I do that can make a difference? And I think that is the always obvious choice to pursue.

James: Yeah absolutely! What’s really making you tick right now? What are the passion projects for Joel Comm at the moment?

Joel: I’ve actually got a number of things in the works apart from what I just shared with you, I am not really prepared to release them, they are all in the stage where they are all seedlings or they are getting ready to come up to be full oak trees and I am kind of holding on to my cards until I am ready to announce them.

James: We’re not going to get a Traffic Jam exclusive then Joel?

Joel: There is no exclusive with you. Some of them are really significant if I can pull them off. My To Do list is incredibly long and I try to work with smart joint venture partners that can really get things done because I am just one guy, I used to have a team of 38 people, I am now a solo-preneur again which I love. I work at home, I am enrolled in what I call a 12 step program and that it’s 12 steps down from my bedroom to my office downstairs and I love it! I love the lifestyle, I loved the staff, they were very talented and we did so many amazing things but the season of life I am in right now, I really enjoy the free lifestyle that I have working at home once again.

James: Nice! I guess I have kind of a hybrid model of that, I work twelve steps from my bedroom as well but I’ve got a reasonably sizeable team as well but I enjoy the freedom so anyway, I appreciate your time today Joel, and of course your expertise, where should our listeners go to find out more about you and perhaps connect with you online?

Joel: I am the easiest guy to find because apparently I am the only Joel Comm in the world, so JoelComm.com and in any of the social sites I am that guy.

James: Awesome! Thank you Joel, and to you the listener, to get links to all of these resources mentioned in today’s show along with links mentioned in Joel’s social media profiles and of course his website, visit TrafficJamCast.com. So Joel, thanks once again!

Joel: You bet James, take care!

This Week’s News in Traffic

So to the first story this week, we go to the news item I picked up from Tech Crunch and all about Facebook who have come under quite a lot of scrutiny recently from marketers complaining that Facebook page posts are just no longer appearing in news feeds. It is a story that we have spoken about too in the recent weeks. Well, Facebook’s vice presidents of ads product and marketing Bryan Boland has come back with a bit of a rally saying this is really promotion happening because there is an increase in users on Facebook and a huge increase in the number of pages those users like. He said those have grown 50% in the last year resulting in more competition in the news feed. He also pointed out that several other online platforms just use a real time feed, meaning you are far less likely to show up in those types of scenarios, so he’s really saying that there is not much you can do about it really, this is just the way with Facebook now – out there it is just really harder and harder to show up. So check that story out, you’ll get a little bit more context by reading the post itself and it will of course be linked off to within the news section of today’s show so check that out.

The nest story comes from LinkedIn who are following suit where Facebook and Twitter have gone and that is to add a large cover photo to LinkedIn profiles. This feature is only available right now to premium options but LinkedIn are saying that it will be available to all LinkedIn profiles in the coming months. LinkedIn have also announced a few additional features for premium users, the first of which is a keyword suggestion unit which is aiming to improve your profile and optimizing it to be found on LinkedIn searches. The second update they’ve made is to open your profile and fully visible to all LinkedIn members. And the last one is the ability to see a full 90-day list of all people who have viewed your profile and accessed the top 100 votes for how your rank versus your connections and company peers. A few updates happening to LinkedIn, these are, as I said, only available to premium LinkedIn users which incidentally starts about $10 per month so if some of these features sound like they might interest you then it might be the time to go look at premium LinkedIn membership. Otherwise, wait on a bit, they will be released to other members in the coming months.

The third story this week comes from Google who have announced a new programmatic market place for premium video ad inventory called Google Partner Select. There have only been a few companies invited so far, Time Inc. being one of them and it allows publishers to sign on to sell their premium video inventory through the new exchange. Google has also announced the launch of a new direct exchange for premium video inventory through double click to allow advertisers to make reservation-based buys with specific publishers in a more streamlined fashion than the traditional process of negotiations and insertion orders. So head on over to TrafficJamCast.com and the current episode page for more details on that story.

In other news from the web, Pinterest releases a self-service dashboard for promoted pins. There is a story out that Facebook and LinkedIn may have to implement the EU’s Right to be Forgotten just like Google are having to and also, Google have made some updates to end to end email privacy which will hopefully protect you a little bit more in email exchanges so there are a few other stories, they will of course be linked off to in the episode page of today’ show.

Thank you to all the iTunes and Stitcher reviews that just keep coming in, thank you to all of you who have submitted one either iTunes or Stitcher. If you have not done so already, I’d love it if you did. Please head on over to iTunes.com or Stitcher.com and leave a review and rating for the show and if while you are over there, if you haven’t yet subscribed to Traffic Jam, hit the subscribe button so you’re the first to get the upcoming episodes.

The One Minute Traffic Tip

So a super quick tip this week that may be so quick it may just take about 30 seconds. Let’s see how fast we can do it. It relates to email marketing and the name of the game with emails of course is to get your emails delivered and then opened an to ensure that happens you want to ensure that your email broadcast software account is in good standing so it is marked as safe and your emails get delivered more often. To ensure that happens, you want to delete from your account anyone who is not opening your emails. You also want to delete from your account anyone who has their email status set to No that will ensure you have a higher percentage of email going through, and of course you want to ensure that only people that have requested to be on your email list get signed up and that can be done with double opt in or just by asking people before you add them to the list. That will ensure you have a high delivery rate and you avoid those email spam filters.

Thank you listener for listening in to episode #40 of Traffic Jam, I will be back next week with another content packed episode where I will be diving deep in to the topic of video blogging so stay tuned for that one. In the coming weekend, if you haven’t done so already, remember to subscribe via iTunes and Stitcher radio and for a direct link to all episodes, go to TrafficJamCast.com where you can find past episodes as well as join the discussion on this episode and of course get all of the links and resources mentioned in today’s show. Also, head on over to veravo.com which is the home for all of my traffic tips and training where you can also learn how I can help you get more traffic via the search engines.

Now we end this week’ show as we do every show with the traffic jam chosen by my guest today Joel Comm, so this is the track that Joel has chosen, it is a piece of classic Genesis from 1973 and the track title is called Firth of Fifth, so here it is and enjoy the track play out and I’ll see you back here in about seven days from now. Bye!

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THIS WEEKS NEWS IN TRAFFIC

ONE MINUTE TRAFFIC TIP

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Why do all the hard graft manually when you can automate? Getting some of those marketing tasks off your plate might just be what you need to free up your business for the next level of growth.

Todays guest helps companies uses automation and email marketing  as a “high-yield business builder to drive, consistent engagement and sales.”

Dan Faggella from CLV Boost joins for a dive in to marketing automation as we discuss the what, how and when to doing automation right.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

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“Automation isn’t to give you time for margaritas but to set up marketing that scales with your…
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Hey there! What’s up listener? Welcome back to Traffic Jam! This is episode 39 of the podcast show that teach you how to get more traffic, leads and grow a profitable audience online.

I am your host, James Reynolds, and as always I am super stoked that you can be with me here today. I’ve got another content packed episode. If all of the recent episodes have been getting a little bit too much for you because we’ve been covering so many strategies, today is the opportunity to step back a little bit and talk about marketing automation; how to take some of those manual tasks and automate them using software or programs. So that’s the expert interview today, but don’t go anywhere after that, as we will of course have the regular segments – this week’s news in traffic, the one minute traffic tip, and of course to end the show, the traffic jam, which today, will be chosen by my guest, Dan Fagella. So let’s introduce Dan, he’s the owner of CLV Boost, an agency that specializes in helping you boost the value of your customers using marketing and automation, he’s a black belt in jujitsu and also a writer of poetry, which may leave some clues as to why he is effective in writing email copy.  I was introduced to Dan by Justin Brooke who presented Dan to me as an e-mail marketing and automation ninja so on that note, let’s introduce Dan and welcome in the interview section of Traffic Jam 39.

James: So welcome listener to the interview section of the show. Jamming with me today, I have Dan Fagella from CLVBoost.com. Dan, a big warm Traffic Jam welcome!

Dan: Hey James, thanks for having me here, happy to be here. James: Well, it’s awesome to have you on the call. I guess we should start by explaining what the acronym CLV stands for and then a little bit perhaps about what you do over at CLVBoost.com.

Dan: Sure, yeah. CLV is customer lifetime value and CLV Boost is our consultancy which is focused on email marketing and marketing automation, all around, essentially the customer lifetime value, for some people that’s e-commerce purchases, email sales and appointments for sales people, for higher ticket or more consultative stuff, or maybe engagement if it’s an app or website where we need a lot of users in, but anyway, customer lifetime value ties to something and we’re all about automation, email and how I drive that stuff so that’s the world I’m in with CLV and the stuff that we do here.

James: Awesome! I think we should start by talking a little bit about the automation aspect and I’d like to start with the big stuff, what could I automate if I really wanted to live that kind of Tim Ferris 4-hour work lifestyle? I mean, I guess most Traffic Jam listeners are probably familiar with email follow up, I probably will ask you that later and they may also know things about webinar automation and post card automation but what are the cooler, less commonly talked about things that can be automated, should I wish?

Dan: Yeah, totally! First and foremost, as a sidebar, I have respected Tim Ferris, he has done his thing and that’s made clear. However, automation for me does not mean more time for margaritas, it really involves finding a way to set up marketing that can scale with your business. I am in Cambridge in Boston and a lot of these guys aren’t really here to drink more margaritas, they’re here to take companies public and they’re here to really come up in the game. The work that we are doing at that time, which is automation, is setting up marketing follow up and follow up related tasks and activities that can really help a service, an e-commerce, a company really scale so they don’t need a guy copying and pasting templates. They don’t need a guy to put sticky notes on your computer to remember to call people. So when we talk about automation at a higher level, some of it will involve the very simple when you opt in this course, you have 36 straight emails about this topic so that’s relatively common, I think everybody at Traffic Jam has this idea. I mean a lot of these guys drive paid traffic and they’re down to pumping people in to posts. To be automated is based on a number of factors based off of simple triggers like that so if somebody enters their name and information for a white paper, we cannot only trigger off a sequence of automated emails but there’s behavioral calibrations that we can make so for example, let’s say, someone opts in for this white paper and they enter their name, email and phone number, there can be a task that can be kicked off to a dashboard of a sales guy, and that task will stay there until he calls that person. And then, once he calls that person, he can record what the result was – set appointment, or voicemail and then he can select what happened on that call. I set a second appointment, I failed to set up a second appointment, or I just left a voicemail. Based off which of those three that happened, the rest of the email sequence can then move forward so if he calls the guy on day 2 and he leaves a voicemail, he can then adjust the sequence and calibrate the sequence so it says something like – hey, Jim here, gave you a call yesterday, I just wanted to make sure I reached out, I saw you got our white paper on …. If he talked to the guy and the guy did not buy, he might scale back the communication, not annoy him as though they never talked but scale down the communication so now maybe 2, 3, 4 weeks later, he gets a couple trickled email from that same sales guy which are all automated, and are more like – hey I thought this other white paper might be helpful, this is just to educate you, hey I know this might not be right time but I thought these might be some great resources you might learn from, hey I am still here for you if you need help. So those are scaled on a monthly or bi-monthly basis for about 12 months if we don’t get the sale. If we do get the sale, we might have an automatic sequence that triggers to the next appointment. So based on what happens on the phone, we can calibrate all sorts of great automated fun things, and that’s just the beginning of the pipeline. That’s outside of email and how email and non-digital marketing so to speak, to kind of interact to build an automated system. They’re really calibrated to relevance, it calibrates the right kind of communication to drive a scale whether that is slow and we are at nurture mode or whether that it’s fast and we have to get the guy’s attention. Hopefully that makes sense.

James: Absolutely! Let’s roll back a little bit and start at the beginning, what marketing or sales function, if any, do recommend a business get started with when it comes to automation?

Dan: When you’re talking about basic automation, a lot of people will have mail chimp or something. Mail chimp will only get you so far, it’s kind of like the go cart. I am not bashing on mail chimp, so many people use them here in Cambridge because they have a free trail but then so many people also really want to make money with email and they really can’t do it without more functionality so if you want to get started in the end that’s where mail chimp can actually be very helpful. And of course they do serve a good roll and they are a good company. A basic functionality would be your basic follow up sequences and the really essential ones are – what is your new prospect and your new customer sequence. So someone opts in through form A, now you might have B and C and D but we’re just talking about A. What kind of communication are you going to consistently deliver to them? And then next question, when they buy product A, what now is the communication that we need to drift out? And all of those things are geared towards what would be like their next step to be and how we can optimally entice that with a mixture of education, testimonials and calls to action so if they opt in for a thing, we might want to educated them, show them other successful smiling people showing them what we want them to do and then present our offer, whether that’s setting up an appointment or whatever the case may be. When they buy that thing, we might want to retain them on a monthly retainer so we might want to consistently give them helpful tips. We might want to send them other testimonials, we want to encourage them to call support and understand the functionality of the software that they just bought or encourage them to repurchase; they bought a pair of sandals and we want to offer them other summer fun gear so the basic automation sequence James, if there is anything at all is, what happens after they opt in, what is the ideal string of communication, and what happens after they purchase, what’s that ideal string? Those basic steps are probably more than what an online store have and it is very, very helpful to have those in place.

James: Yeah, and I guess this is where the CLV element comes in right? You being able to bring a prospect closer to a sale or you are moving a customer closer back to a sale hopefully just by nurturing them again and offering them other stuff and getting them back in to the purchase cycle. I guess my next question would be, what shouldn’t be automated?

Dan: This is pretty interesting. I like to think about automating as much as we can. I’ll talk about some automation blunders maybe here James. One thing that I don’t generally prefer to be automated is like newsletter type content. If it’s a business that you’re not planning to scaling on some bigger level or you kind of want it on the side and not think about it, that’s okay, but generally, any kind of weekly or monthly news or newsletter type ought not be automated because a lot of the pull of those emails which are going to encourage your long term click through rates and ultimately your long term conversions and now we are talking about CLV again, ultimately, a lot of that there is going to tie to relevance. It’s going to tie to what just happened, what happened in the news that we can use in the subject line that gets opened? What happened recently to the client when they got featured in this big press release that’s going to want to make all your clients want to be successful too? That newsletter type continuous education, continuous testimonial more light stuff nurture stuff, if possible and if it’s business you care about and for some of you out there, I think I can put myself in this category sometimes, you have some side businesses, there’s funnels that are pumping and you just sort of like say one day I’ll sell that thing but right now I’ll just make money from it. Great! I mean, who cares about your newsletter in that business. If it is a business that you really want to take care of and you really want to build a rich database that very attuned and pay attention to you, make your newsletters not prescheduled six months in advance but make that something you actually take the time to calibrate right then and there. At least that week, what is going to get the open, what is most relevant, what is most exciting? What’s most timely and what’s going to do the job right here now. So that’s one thing I would recommend not automating along the time out.

James: And I guess it is getting that balance, right? I mean let’s use the example of this website that the Traffic Jam podcast sits on that the Traffic Jam episodes, they get broadcast. They go out when the episode gets published, the conversations, and the things that you and I are talking about and perhaps they are timely and relevant to a certain moment in time, that’s when they want to be going out. But there’s other information that might move prospects closer to a sale that’s going to remain pretty standardized over the course of a lifetime and I guess those are things that perhaps go in to a sequence and be automated if and when someone opts in, right?

Dan: Yup! Exactly! So there’s your yellow brick road type stuff and there’s the sort of the moment to be very relevant type stuff. So yellow brick road as you’re obviously well familiar, is when someone does X we should give them S, T, U, V in a direct row, in a direct line, in a direct sequence in this amount of time to make sure they take the step Z or whatever the case may be, right? We’re really enticing a particular action, in that case, like your Facebook fan page, when someone likes your page, you don’t automatically see the post in order that you want. Facebook is always like a broadcast. The benefit of email is your initial relationship, it can be the look, smell, feel and the experience a certain way for everyone. And that’s something that when you get a dial down system and when you actually know how to test these things you can have a front end sequence that converts 25% higher than your front end sequence and you can be testing it but you can have all your people running through a very, very efficient funnel so yes you are correct. Some things, obviously we want a yellow brick road so to speak, other things of course we want that relevance, we want that time line and it’s not really like we want to keep that relationship alive. James: Yeah, well, you’re obviously at the core phase with all of this stuff Dan, what’s the most impressive use of automation you have created yourself or you’ve seen out there in the market place?

Dan: I think the really well done stuff here – there’s plenty of people in the bigger technology they are using this; there are a lot of great case studies with Infusion Soft. I think the best example, there is a business called hearandplay.com and it’s all about how to play music by ear, it is an interesting business with 12 million bucks a year their leveraging in marketing automation is significantly better than the vast majority of companies like when you opt in on these email funnels that they have set up, a lot of it is based in calibrated behavior. So the higher level and the interesting things set up really what I think is a big direction for the future of marketing information is calibrating communication based on behavior of a prospect so if we know that we send them away paper but they did not click it to download it, it is worthwhile to at least test so we should not necessarily calibrate everything because it does not necessarily make sense but if we know that assumption of a white paper is an essential factor to the sales guy closing the deal right? We need an educated client, we need an educated person who’ll say well, you sent me a bunch of stuff so I am going to get back to read it. So if we know that that’s a critical step of how they book their appointment or even calibrating to their note to the sales guy to let them know that this guy has not read the white paper. Those kinds of functionality is based on behavior. Very, very interesting and I think that in terms of the future of marketing automation, there is a lot of big companies getting a lot of funding at dawn and silver pop just got bought out and Infusion Soft is hopefully going to go public soon, they’re all thinking about how they can all be a step ahead and really that’s not just the level of pre-scheduled automation but that’s a level of calibration to the behavior of the prospect. That’s the cool stuff in the future. And an example with the phone appointment and you can send them an e-book first which means clicking a link. That’s just one example. We might remind that person two days later, hey I noticed you did not download the e-book yet, I just want to make sure you saw this before you talk to Frank on the phone on Wednesday at 5:30, thanks so much. That’s totally automatable and that’s a great way to make that sales guy’s not wasting his time.

James: Yeah, we’ll I’ve got some pretty good results with I guess a very low level of what you are talking about. On my SEO Agency we have something that gets triggered if someone goes on to the package pages, the deeper internal content of the site where they really looking at the sales material and if they don’t go on to place an order, there’ll be a message that follows them up a couple of days later that literally just says hey, saw you checking out our packages, have you got any other questions or would you like to hop on the phone to ask a bit more. Here’s the telephone number, here’s to go about it and you’ll be surprised how many people actually respond to those which actually could seem a little bit intrusive or a bit stalker style to think that someone is sending a message just based on an action on a website but they’re really, really relevant and some people just forget to do stuff so if you can help them do stuff they are planning and maybe a little bit further then it is well worth your time, right?

Dan: Totally, and ultimately, I like to pay attention to the people that are at the head of the curves, they guy at hear and play, that’s one example but I like to look at how marketing animation software companies actually leverage their own software or leverage marketing animation so if you go to Hub Spot for example or you go to Marketo or you go to Power Dot, they have higher price points and all that but their follow up is very much not like hey, here’s Whiz Bang tip#3. It is very much like, hey this is Stephanie with Hub Spot I saw you got in on this white paper I’d be happy to help you and be your point person here. Here’s my phone number, when is a great time that we can chat? That’s the kind of automated messaging that they have. It just seems professional, they know what you’ve done, they know what you’ve grabbed but it is automated. But their follow up is exactly just like you have mentioned. So it’s not all like here’s funky video #6 like in your everyday email sequence. It’s a lot of the time that B2B kind of higher touch, higher personalization and like you said you’re getting responses in those kinds of email and it doesn’t surprise me one bit.

James: Yeah, and I mean that’s the thing. Some of the best results in the business are actually based on real manual actions, it’s sending a hand written thank you card, it’s taking a customer out to lunch, all that sort of stuff but still you can use automation to actually facilitate the reminders that want you to go out and do that stuff so it’s not just all about a blanket email with no name on it. You really can personalize it to make it really engaging even for a high touch point business like that right?

Dan: All day long, just like you said. I mean here’s some great examples. Let’s talk about taking a client out to lunch, let’s talk about writing a personal card. People would say that’s all that new age business mumbo jumbo. Back in my day we have to go pull off some goodness. Personal cards still work right? I do it , you do it, we do it. But the thing is, if you have to remind a reminder from yourself how and when to send those cards, that’s a little bit annoying. If directly after XYZ type of transaction happens in your system, you can have something pop up in your dashboard and or email that will say this is going to keep annoying you until it’s done and it’s all about sending that postcard, that will actually facilitate the “non-automated stuff’. Similarly James, something that we’ve done in international martial arts online business, which is a niche that we’re in in addition to the consulting world is that when somebody spends a certain amount, what’s the thing that we now want to happen so if their lifetime value just hits $500. Maybe for you James, maybe whatever your threshold is, that’s the – hey James it’s time to call this person and take them out to lunch now if they live too far away, you’re going to go to this website and the link is already in the email, and you’re going to buy them brownies and send it to them. You know I mean, like boom – that email as soon as somebody within your CLV hits a certain point within your CRM, you can automatically kick off a trigger to make you call them and do an explicit action like taking them out to lunch which of course you don’t have any robots to take them out to lunch yet, if we wait more years we’ll see how that goes but with that stuff being aside, that can actually be a facilitator and note that those little reminders can kick off in places that you don’t want to have to comb your eyeballs on all the time. I don’t want to look to 25,000 martial arts contacts and figure out in a weekly report coming through 1C 2C, hey who hit the $500 threshold to send a personal letter? Heck no, see you later. How about sending me an email when that happens? That guy gets a personal note, he knows he’s cared about, and now the non-automated stuff becomes automated.

James: Yeah! It’s kind of funny actually, I’ve got a whole box of books, I’ve got Joe Pulizzi’s epic content marketing, a big huge box sitting by my side here and I have a sequence that runs out of Ontroport, they system I use, which just prompts me at about five and a half months, once the client has been onboard for that period, at that point, they’re a pretty decent customer, they’ve got high value to me, I get a little note that says send them a gift and at the moment the gift and at the moment the gift that is going out is the book from Joe Pulizzi and it just takes nothing but the return that I get from that is fantastic, I mean, the emails, the comments, it’s all great!

Dan: Oh, yeah. And again, you want that reminder to happen automatically, you don’t want your brain to run through those things over and over and over. You just want to see it pop to your inbox, you write a note on the inside cover, you send it with a card, and now that person is delighted and that’s something that you can set up with your automated system.

James: Good! Now, you were introduced to me as the email marketing badass by Justin Brooke so I have to ask you a few questions about email marketing automation especially kind of follow up sequences and segmentation and all that good stuff, the first question I have got is as marketers we always want the most relevant conversation possible of course with the prospect or customer, whoever it might be, with that in mind, what do you recommend the business do in terms of categorizing, tagging or segmenting their subscriber list so they can be sending the most relevant messaging possible?

Dan: I have spoken a lot on this and this is a really relevant topic and sometimes you probably have similar things James where it’s like when you go to a business and you get them to think of X problem like you can just walk away and send them a bill for a massive amount of money and totally feel justified because you just know like, wow! Like if you just implement that that is extremely valuable like in your SEO business there are businesses that you have worked with I am sure you turn the dial on XYZ keywords and you find how to make that sustainable and it’s like magic. Segmentation on the front is one of these strategic higher level thinking things that there’s research behind but really makes a business hum and click. When you can fill in your folks that are segmented and tagged in relevant ways, you are so well ahead of the curve of even large and sophisticated companies and it’s not even funny. So here’s what I really recommend James, really good take home stuff for anybody tuned in, is highly recommend segmenting on the front end and I recommend segmenting on the front end in the absolutely most relevant way so the question is if it’s a 3-7 option drop down menu, what one data point would we want to have about this person when they give us their name, email, phone number. We’re going to add a drop down to the front end forms. Normally, we’re going to see the same opt in rate by the way. Every now and again, you’ll see a drop down, lower it by a percentage. Every now and again, I have seen a drop down with an increase in a couple of percentage particularly in spaces where there is a little bit, I have not done a study across eight million companies or something but when all you see is just email, email, email and that’s what everybody is using, you’ll sometimes get higher opt ins when you add a drop down so a lot of people are afraid, oh my goodness, adding another data point, why I’ll get half the opt ins. Not true, test it. And here’s the thing, I even would say, even if you have a significant drop which I very rarely would see, almost never. And again, it’s almost insular, not 10 million companies tested here, but I encourage everybody to test it is that you won’t see a significant drop, even if it drops a little one, it pays for itself and so check this out, one of the small companies that we did work earlier on was a consultancy in the crowd funding space. So these guys do big consulting projects, five-figure type film and promotion and all the stuff for crowd funding projects and instead of having give us your email and we’ll tell you about what we do for crowd funding, I asked them the question which I am going to let the listeners run through their own brains right now, what is the one most relevant data point that if we could put on this person it would allow our messages to be optimally relevant. In other words, James, it would give us the best access to the magic buy button in their brain. So here is the magic question, we can do it in a bunch of different ways; we can do it by what is their major goal and objective? Goal and objective in the internet marketing space could be do you want to be super rich? Do you want to live off of your laptop and be super rich with your kids? Do you want to quit your job because you hate it so much? Those are like major goals, right? When its position for this crowd funding consultancy, it was –are you an entrepreneur? Are you a marketing agency or are you an independent creator that wants to crowd fund something that they’ve made? They found that the people coming to them fit in to those three categories. They decided to go that route. They could have also done, how big is your company? 1-10 people? 10-30 people? 30-100 people? 100-500? You know what I mean? But they decided to go with role. So role was entrepreneur, content creator, or marketing agency? Reason being, they determined that was the most relevant data point that would allow them to pinpoint target every single email they sent. Because, as you can imagine, if they are sort of white labeling their services, something that another agency is wrapping up in to a big project they are doing for a company, they need to market to an agency a completely different direction than they need to market to entrepreneurs and they need to do that completely differently to someone who doesn’t even know business and they just want to crowd fund their money and they just want to get their work. They don’t think about business and they talk about metrics. So now, what they did and this is what I recommend anybody out there do. All of their front end emails where not somewhat relevant. Let me explain where somewhat relevant email is. Somewhere relevant email is hey, you’re interested in doing a crowd funding project, here are some best practices. That’s okay right? We know they are interested in crowd funding and they might buy a service but if I know you are interested in crowd funding and you are an entrepreneur then guess what kind of education I am going to give you, how entrepreneurs can leverage crowd funding. I might give you something similar but that on the subject part get open rates at magnitudes higher than just best practices for crowd funding. You’ve used the words entrepreneur when they told you they are one, your open to new clicks are going to jump in every single substance unless you are screwing it up. So the other thing is here, every testimonial on the entrepreneur funnel, let’s say 12 emails long, where are all the testimonials from? Are they from marketing agencies that use you well? No, they are from entrepreneurs who succeeded in their entrepreneurial endeavors and made more money because of what you did. That’s what they want to see. With content creators, are you telling about entrepreneurs? No you are telling about people that love their craft and used you to help expand their heart and share something with the world with the desired benefits. Those are your testimonials. Your opens go higher, your clicks go higher. And now, let’s say you get the same percent of opt in on your desired site, because you’ve worked to them on their front end. Now every single email gets opened higher and every single gets click through higher. Even if we are talking about tiny percentages, that is a lot of money at the end of 12 months. So I recommend everybody with a bland opt in, allow it to be a drop down and segment those guys in the front end because three months later, you’ll thank me for it.

James: Yeah, that is fantastic stuff! And I guess the other thing that you could segment would be things like service category like – I will use the example of my business, we do SEO on one side and we deal with Adwords Management on the others so we are doing paid traffic and organic traffic. If someone comes to my site and lands on a page and interacts with content about SEO, it makes sense to tag them that they have joined the list via an SEO page right? So I can give them more SEO related content because that sort of stuff, they are interested in.

Dan: All day long, and if you go to Hub Spot again, I like to go there and look at people and they are eating dog food so some people might know, some people might not, like Hub Spot makes a lot of money, like most internet marketers they are probably going to go public and some marketers aren’t. I like to watch business. So if you look at them, they have a bunch of blogs about Facebook marketing, guess what the e-book is at the bottom of that? It’s about Facebook Marketing. Guess what the initial emails you get about are? They are about Facebook marketing and how entrepreneurs can use Facebook marketing, and you say the size of your company, they are going to call you already knowing that. They are already calibrating, so yeah, for you James, it could be the type of service. And you can even go deeper, maybe you do a lot of work. Maybe half of your SEO work is people making half your money in adsense site types. You know like SEO for product sites, right? And now the SEO adsense guy, the SEO email they get from you is about how you murdered it, guess who I am going to call? It’s all you, not captain generic oh I do SEO and I do design, if you were seating on beaches and you are doing half a million on banners, I am calling you really, really quick. So yes, type of service, totally a great pick there James.

James: Yeah, taking a little bit of side step now, what do you find is the most optimum contact frequency email and I ask this question because outside of this whole internet marketing space in the offline world almost every kind of business I talk to kind of pisses their pants if they send more two emails every six months or so, they just worry that they just are going to annoy their customers. What have you found to be the optimum frequency for driving sales?

Dan: You are absolutely right about that and there are a lot of really interesting things about that, you know particularly – and this is particularly when this is the case, right? I find that people that explicitly make money when they sell emails don’t care as much about getting opt outs, right? Because they make money. I believe that it’s truly the only the CMO or the entrepreneur who kind of get it kinder and they understand correlation of email and revenue and are compensated likewise, they are less fearful as you have said of pissing their pants and they respect having an opt out or having somebody email them back like I get too many emails from you. I have a 25,000 email list that I email pretty much every day and I don’t know, probably two of them a month gets freaking obscene. And at the end of the day, we are really monetizing at martial arts and all that is pretty hard to monetize, it’s a real crazy niche but yeah, the idea is this. I wish I had a simpler answer for you James, but like anything in business, that’s a pretty complex question. If I am working with a company with CLV Boost, ultimately, some of the front end testing will not only be about themes and hypothesis or subject lines, it’s also going to be about timing and testing so we might do once every two days, we might do once every day for the first two weeks and spread it out farther. Those are the things you need to do cohort testing with and really, really study. Most of the time people as you know James, there’s plenty of people listening to this call but if you hadn’t seen the same email sequence for 5 years, and they have never tested frequency one time. Never split tested it against a frequency that’s less frequent or more frequent. You make two or three tests and now you’re making 10% more money for every single human being that kind of goes through that in terms of fund and revenue. How do we let that run for years? Even if that is the bottom line but nobody does it so it is not a very simple thing and involves some testing. Here’s some best practices and this will be enough for people to have take aways James because I don’t want to say it’s complicated. And I would rather give something that is useful. So generally, if you are working in an infinity and or fun niche or space normally your frequency can go higher. When you are working with something that someone would not want to consume in terms of a semi- snackable content on a semi-regular basis, you have to be a little bit more tentative. So if you are a PR agency, I think it is very, very difficult to give PR advice every single day, maybe there is a sub-segment and you’ll want to select that frequency, but it usually really is not the case. One of the businesses that I am in, I still run my own internet marketing agency and we are growing in order to sell so that we can invest in one of the companies here in Cambridge, but we have to raise the box in however way we can so we are going to scale this in the marketing businesses is the martial arts niche and the jujitsu niche that’s where I got my black belt and did the national tournament thing and the martial arts gym which I sold a year ago and those people can get an email every day. Because it is an infinity thing, right? Because it is fun! Like, cool! Martial arts moves! And people like that. If you are in the pet niche, you can probably do the same thing. If you are selling face creams, although beauty might be something that you can be frequent about, no one wants to be reminded of face cream every single day. That by itself is not something that they want parted upon and shoved on their face on a regular basis. So you have to kind of calibrate it by the level of affinity and snack-ability and usefulness or fun-ness of the content. So if people are there and for that kind of fun-ness, then normally your frequency can go up and you really can stay in their radar by doing more of that and generally speaking again, anybody test is when you really are on the opposite end and you are on the utility or you are more of a onetime service or you are something that people do not want to be shoved in their faces, you start to begin more slightly on occasion. Not cutting dry James but I hope that was helpful for you.

James: Yeah absolutely! And I guess the other thing is if you’ve got the technology to support it you can also perhaps allow people to select their own frequency right? If they get too much email, instead of unsubscribing say hey, move from the daily option, would you prefer to have a weekly summary or something to that effect.

Dan: Big time! You are very much correct there and giving people the ability to modulate their own communication is a fantastic option and you use Ontraport if you’re familiar with, Infusion Soft is the same thing. Any of the more robust systems will let people do that.

James: Yeah, well let’s finish up with technology. We’ve mentioned a bunch of systems- you said Infusion Soft, Ontraport, we’ve talked about Hub Spot. There still are a bunch of options out there outweighing one another, what sort of feature should we be looking for in a system to kind of automate our marketing effectively. It is really going to depend on your needs so if you are a pretty simple internet marketing business and you don’t plan on doing a quarter of a million bucks for the next twelve months or whenever else, you can sort of get away with we sending people down one big funnel and when they buy product X they move on to the second tier of offers and when they buy our products on tier 2, we move them to tier 3 and they end up in a general nurture sequence or something. If your business is a very basic level where that is kind of the case, let’s say a newbie internet marketing business or a newbie e-commerce style business, then I kind of recommend to get responses of the world, get constant contact of the world, A weber as well, well Aweber is being pounded with endless DBS attacks. Anybody using that software knows that it is down half the time now because I could not tell you why, I don’t know why there is so much anger in Romania, it might have to do with living conditions or vodka or other factors but either way getting response to other factors, their interface in my opinion is nice. Anyway, short answer – simple business pure e-commerce and internet marketing I would recommend Get Response Recall your content. You want to get more robust, you are selling higher ticket and you’re involving sales guys and dashboards and things like that, stepping into Infusion Soft and Ontroport is usually a good move. If you are more of an enterprises she-bang and we are talking about 50 or more people or hundreds of people, you’ll probably going to need to scale up to a Par dot, an exact market and a heads up so in terms of the software that I at least am familiar with I would recommend, I am by no means and expert on them but I can speak their language so to speak, those are the recommendations I would give based on the level and the complexity of what you are doing. James: Fantastic! Well Dan, I think we should leave it there that has been absolutely been content packed and action packed episode, I’d like to make sure that our listeners can reach out and find you somewhere on the web wherever you are hiding out. Where should they go to to check you out?

Dan: I actually am hiding out right now, I am focusing so much on scaling and selling the XX Marketing that I am like dragging myself out for consulting sessions. In terms of learning a little bit more about CLVBoost.com, again CLV stands for customer lifetime value. We have a lot of white paper that basically goes on a lot of plug and boost which is what we talked about today and sorry if I talk fast, I drink a lot of coffee but I aim to be as positively useful as possible. We have a white paper on four or five case studies and very common mistake is that when your read through it once it is guaranteed like new ideas on holes that you can patch and you can at least get an idea of what we do as well in that way that will be very useful. We also at CLVBoost.com, people who want to reach out to me can go there but I definitely the way in paper in terms of getting an idea of what we do, CLV Boost is the place to go James.

James: Awesome! Well I am going to make this super easy for you listener, that resource and all of the others that Dan mentioned in today’s show, episode 39 of Traffic Jam will be on the episode page along with the full transcript, a link to CLV Boost and I guess a link off to Dan’s social media profiles as well so Dan, once again, thank you for coming in on Traffic Jam, it has been an absolute pleasure.

Dan: James, thank you for having me brother!

This Week’s News in Traffic                            

Okay, so to our first story this week, we head on over to Facebook and the story I picked up from Marketing Land and the story is that Facebook, back in March, announced a change to brand pages which was rolled out initially to a small section of brand pages on Facebook and it is about to get a wider release on June 6th. In this change to the page design, instead of news feed posts appearing in two side by side columns as they currently do, for brand pages on Facebook, they’ll now appear in one column. Additionally to that, there is also some changes to things like administrative tools and insights which have changed location. Most interestingly, they are adding a snapshot of engagement tricks displayed to the right of the cover photo showing details about ad campaigns, page likes, post reach and notification in one simple dashboard right at the top of the newsfeed for you to see. So if you want to go check out what those changes are I will of course keep a link to that post in this week’s episode page. Just head on over to the post show notes and you’ll find further details there.

To our second story this week, we head on over to Twitter who appear to be testing a feature to encourage more video sharing on their network. The test first reported by Peter Kafga in recode, apparently limited to the iOS app prompts users to post a trailer clip from Seth McFarlan’s upcoming A Million Ways to Die in the West movie when someone starts typing in the hashtag #aMillion. Twitter has long made it clear that tweets with visual elements like pictures or videos perform much, much better on their network. So to make it simpler to add videos to tweets certainly makes sense for Twitter. All of these follows a recent move by Twitter to display videos within the timeline of Twitter itself when you are logged in via the mobile application. So I think the movement towards a more mobile-centric and video-centric platform is certainly a good move by Twitter. For further information on that story, also head on over to the show notes page of Traffic Jam #39.

In other traffic news from elsewhere on the world, well, SEO, they are in disarray again with the roll out of Panda 4.0 on the 21st of May which apparently has affected some 7% of search results according to reports. If you have low grade content on your site, you may have experienced a drop in your rankings. Also from Google, some interesting developments with remarketing options. If you are retargeting people who have visited your site which may be a good idea, you may want to go out and check those options as well. All links to these stories will be in the episode page for Traffic Jam 39.

Wow! What can I say? Truly a heartfelt thank you to you if you’ve left a review for the show, I would love to get your comments and feedback, and it certainly is helping because this week, we climbed up to #3 in the media and marketing category on iTunes and that is just ahead of Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income so that is pretty cool. So a real heartfelt thank you to you, your comments and reviews have really helped the show additional exposure and that is exactly my aim. I want to get this content out to more people. So thank you to you if you have left a review, if you’d still like to do so, the places to go and do it are iTunes and Stitcher. In both places, you just log in, you select a star rating for the show and then you leave a comment for it and as you’ll know if you are a regular listener of the show, I tend to read those out on episodes so if you’d like to get yourself a bit of airtime, that is also pretty cool.

The One Minute Traffic Tip Have you ever wondered why you start to see advertising for a particular website immediately after visiting it and why those ads seem to follow you around the internet for weeks and weeks after? Well remarketing is the answer to that one, I conducted a whole interview on remarketing on episode 15 of Traffic Jam with Justin Brooke but remarketing is so powerful I wanted to mention it again. Here is how it works, using a service like Google Adwords, you can install a tracking cookie on your website and then follow up visitors to your site with tailored advertising as they browse around the internet. Now you can segment those visitors based on action they take on your site so as an example, as they visited a particular product page, you can follow them up with advertising showing the benefits of that particular product in the ad. If perhaps a visitor has added an item to their shopping cart but does not check out, you can entice them back to your site with a discount coupon in your advert. I absolutely love remarketing because it is so damn ninja for one but also it gives so much more leverage to your other traffic sources because it entices back to the site the people that are already interested in your products and services.

Thank you for listening in to Episode 39 of Traffic Jam, I will of course be back next week with another show, remember to subscribe via iTunes and Stitcher radio and for a direct link to all Traffic Jam episodes, go to TrafficJamCast.com where you can join the discussion on this episode and get the links to all the resources mentioned in today’s show. Also, head on over to veravo.com for more traffic tips and training and of course to learn how I can help you more traffic via the search engines. We end this week’s show with a track chosen by Dan and it’s called Show Me by Kid Ink. Enjoy!  

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THIS WEEKS NEWS IN TRAFFIC

ONE MINUTE TRAFFIC TIP

THE TRAFFIC JAM

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The social media site to build your professional connections, expand your network and grow your business is LinkedIn. Episode 38 brings LinkedIn specialist Viveka von Rosen from Linked In To Business to Traffic Jam as she shares some of her best strategies for engaging and growing a network using LinkedIn.

Viveka, known as the LinkedIn expert, is the author of LinkedIn Marketing An Hour A Day, a contributor to popular sites like Mashable.com and SocialMediaExaminer.com and a 3 time Forbes Top 20 Most Influential Woman in Social Media. When it comes to LinkedIn Viveka clearly knows her stuff and you are about to learn why.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

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“Attract your audience by writing your LinkedIn profile according to who your target market is.”…
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Hey! What’s up listener? You’re tuned in to Traffic Jam episode#38, I am your host, James Reynolds, and this is of course the podcast show that teaches you how to get more traffic, leads and sales to your website and build a profitable audience online. If you are a regular listener to the show, you’d be pretty familiar with the format by now; we start each show with a special expert interview and today will be no different because I have on the show, Viveka Von Rosen, for the session all about LinkedIn prospecting. We follow that with this week’s news in traffic, the one minute traffic tip, and then the musical jam to play out the show chosen by Viveka we call the traffic jam.

Now, as you’ll know, I’m not a fan of too much preamble before the interview so let me go right ahead and introduce our guest today. Her name is Viveka Von Rosen and she is from LinkedIn to Business. Viveka is the author of LinkedIn Marketing An Hour A Day. She is a contributor to Forbes, Money Magazine, Mashable.com, CNN, SocialMediaExaminer.com and a whole bunch of other popular places on the web I am sure you have heard of. She is a Forbes Top 20 Most Influential Women in Social Media not just once, but three times and get this, this should portray a little bit about her authority on LinkedIn. She’s got 29,000 first level connections on the platform and a network of over 31 million people. So there you go, I don’t think I need to give too much more of a build up because you’ll certainly portray her authority in the interview so without any further ado, here for a little chat all about LinkedIn prospecting, we have Viveka von Rosen.

James: So this is the interview section of Traffic Jam episode #38 and joining me on the hot seat today is Viveka von Rosen. Viveka, a very warm welcome to Traffic Jam!

Viveka: Thank you so much! It’s a pleasure to be here.

James: Super stoked to have you on the call! Now, of course we’re going to be talking today about LinkedIn. Tell us real quick how you got involved in LinkedIn marketing and why you like it so much.

Viveka: Sure. I was running a business at that time where I had done most of the marketing and we’ve created most of our growth just to face to face marketing and it was 2004, 2005, and 2006 and we brought in a speaker, it was a virtual office and I had a lot of entrepreneurs and small business owners office there and so I would bring in speakers and speak about what they really like to do and she just mentioned this thing called LinkedIn and for me it was kind of a no brainer for anyone in business that had a virtual aspect to it. There were only 12 million people on LinkedIn at that time but to me that was a huge number. It was before Facebook numbers, before Pinterest numbers and before Twitter numbers and so that was an obscenely large number to me of people that could become prospects for our business and I learned more about it and started taking courses there were on it which weren’t many and I think Jason Alba’s book was the only one available, You’re On LinkedIn, Now What? And yeah, just kind of went from there and entered it in to a training and consulting business in pretty short order.

James: Nice! Well, I am sure we’ll touch on some those things as we go deeper in to the interview but I want to start by asking first a little bit about connecting on LinkedIn. I think that’s probably one of the most valuable aspects of the platform. Now, I would assume, rightly or wrongly, that having a larger network on LinkedIn can probably be quite powerful, however, LinkedIn only allows you to send, if I am right, about three thousand invitations. Knowing that there is a limit to the number of invitations we can send, what advice would you have for strategically building a network on LinkedIn so that you get the most out of the connections that we have?

Viveka: Sure. Yes, you can only send out three thousand invitations so it doesn’t matter if you do it one at a time or if you upload your mailing list – one name, one email address equals one invitation and you can only accept up to 30,000 invitations which is actually where I am at right now so I am deleting people and adding people but quite frankly, yes it’s true that the bigger your network, the more visible you are, the more usable LinkedIn is, the more likely you are going to make money. That being said, there comes a point in LinkedIn, about five thousand connections, that LinkedIn stops being as usable. There is a lot of functionality I can’t use on LinkedIn because my network is too big! Drop down boxes don’t work, I can’t forward profiles anymore, I can’t send personal messages using the drop down, I have to actually find the person so there is some limitation having too big of a network so quite frankly, I think being able to send out three thousand invitations over time is enough and you can always ask LinkedIn for more especially if you use their tool and uploaded your .csv file with your 18,000 first level connections from your email list and now you’re stuck, LinkedIn will give you about a hundred to 200 more invitations per month so you can always do that but that being said, with 30,000 connections, I still have about 800 invitations left I can’t actually use so part of it is just creating a name. Now I am a LinkedIn expert who’s on LinkedIn, training on LinkedIn so I do get a lot of people inviting me to connect which is not as common. I do a lot of presentations and for people to invite me to connect after that, that’s not as common, but yeah absolutely, you can encourage people to invite you to connect, you can let people know that you are running short on invitations, would you invite me to connect or you could do that to people you actually know as opposed to prospects you are trying to land. Don’t make them do you the favor from out there, right?

James: It’s like – hey I want to sell something to you, would you just mind connecting to me so we can facilitate this better, right?

Viveka: Exactly! Exactly!

James: Well I do guess your situation is a little bit unique because you are the LinkedIn expert on the LinkedIn platform. I guess it’s a little bit like Martin Shervington we had on a week or two before for Google+. I mean he’s got extremely high numbers of followers but he’s the Google+ guy, right? So he’s going to be sought out in the platform.

Viveka: Exactly! Exactly!

James: So do you have any recommended protocol for what an invitation to connect might say because I am always getting invitations as I am sure other LinkedIn users do and they typically say – we know each other because we’ve done business together through this organization and seven times out of ten, that has not happened so what are the protocols? How do you recommend going about it?

Viveka: First of all, anytime you can customize an invitation, please do so. There are times when you can’t so you know people are like, I won’t accept invitation from someone who has not customized it. Well, if you’re in a conference and you’ve only got your mobile phone or whatever, you can’t customize those invitations which is I hope LinkedIn is working on that one. There are times when you absolutely can’t customize an invitation, you upload a mailing list, etc., but when all possible you need to customize it. It used to be a 300-character limit but I just got an invitation from someone not an in-mail or an introduction but an actual invitation from someone the other day that was almost a thousand characters. I wrote him back and said how did you do that but he never replied so I don’t know maybe they’ve loosened up that 300-character limit. Yeah, mention something in their profile and please make it true. If you’re not friends, you’re not colleagues, you’re not classmates, and you have a business together, groups is a great way to connect. I always tell people to choose groups. If you can’t and you choose, friends, classmates and colleagues and you’re not classmates, ‘fess up. You know, we’ve not done business together but I have been a fan for a long time or we have not done business together but I am strategically building my network with people in this type of industry or we did not work together but I heard about you and I was wondering if you’d be willing to connect. And if there is room, give them an out, just say if you feel you’ve received this invite in error, please feel free to ignore, but tell them ignore it as opposed to reporting me as a big fat spammer. And never, ever use an invitation to try and sell your wares. That just drives me up a wall. You know, Dear Viveka – I see that you’re a LinkedIn expert but your website sucks and I think we can get you better SEO. Want to connect? Uh, no!

James: Oh geez! That’s cringe worthy! Well there you go, that’s the out for not wanting to accept it right, in the same way where you go if it’s not appropriate, don’t connect. There you go, you’ve given them reason not to accept. Seriously! What about on the flip side, for receiving invitations to connect. Should we be selective on who we accept or is it kind of the case of accept all?

Viveka: No, not anymore. I used to be as a LION – a LinkedIn Open Network, you know when I first started out I just get anyone who invited me to connect to come on in because it is still true to a point that the more connections you have, the bigger your network, the more money you’ll make on LinkedIn. And there’s a bunch of spams out there now. When we first started, there was no social media the spammers have not discovered Facebook, or Twitter of LinkedIn. Now they have in a big way. So yeah, be selective. I have a list of criteria – my assistants do this for me now but I have a list of criteria of the type of person that I am willing to accept in to my network and if you fall in to that criteria or you send me a personal message. Any personal message, I’ll accept your invitation even if I don’t know you because spammers don’t tend to personalize messages and it’s really – is this person a great connection? Or does this person have a network that would be a great connection or have good connections in it for me? I am a little bit discerning. I like a picture. Again, if you personalize your invitation and you don’t have a picture, I might let that pass. Don’t throw up a photo stock photo or a logo and tell me that you are the senior recruiter of Apple and that you went to school on 2005-and 2008 and that you’ve also worked as senior recruiter over at IBM but you’re 12 years old in your photo and you’re hot! There’s a lot of those people out there so you’ll learn what to look for when you’re accepting invitations so be a little discerning. Absolutely accept invitations from people you don’t know if it makes sense but do be somewhat discerning.

James: Yeah, I guess you’ve got to have a pre-determined set of filters for you to understand who would indeed be a great connection and who’s going to add value to your network on the platform because there are certain people who aren’t going to be and I think that understanding and putting in the filters in advance to make those decisions easier would be a good thing, right?

Viveka: Well, it all rolls together with finding the right audience. When we back up and talk about creating a good LinkedIn profile, you’re going to write your profile according to who your target market is. You’re going to accept invitations according to who your target market is. You’re going to do searches and send invitations according to who your target market is and if you are not discerning enough, you know bigger is not necessarily always better. You can get more conversions if you are more targeted in who you’re speaking to so you really do need to know your audience, whether it is sending invitations or accepting invitations or even just creating copy in your profile.

James: Yeah, we’ll let’s talk about some of this stuff because then the next sort of questions I wanted to ask you are around getting found on LinkedIn. I am sure profile set up is integral to that but the first question I want to ask you is how important is the role of keywords in LinkedIn search and where in your profile, if anywhere, should those keywords be placed?

Viveka: It’s crucial. LinkedIn is like Google and you have to have the right keywords to be found. It’s not like Google and it’s much more simple than that. You don’t have to use meta tags and keyword phrases necessarily, you just need to say something about yourself enough times without it being hokey, without it looking like one of those scammy, nasty profiles that you find out there. What’s interesting is if you actually check the statistics on who’s viewed your profile and you look at how they found you, it will show you both how they found you – have they found you on LinkedIn, did they find you on Google, and did they find you under who’s viewed? It will tell you where on the web they have found you, but then it will also show you where in your profile they found you. And what was really interesting to me when they came out with these new analytics and new statistics is that it used to be that the more keywords you put in your title fields and people’s profiles could get ridiculous looking, including my own, the more likely it were to be found. Now, it has reverted down to really creating decent copy and decent contents so having your keywords naturally fall in to whatever copy you write. You don’t want to stuff it, you don’t want to just do keyword comma space keyword comma space keyword comma space keyword comma space. You want it naturally to fall in to your copy ad as you describe what you do and who you serve. At the summary section you’ve got 2,000 characters to work with there and to add some of your keywords, maybe the top 5 to 10. Your description sections of your experience is really important. Those are some of the two most important places for your keywords but also those are the two places most people skip. They might do a paragraph for the summary and one or two lines for the description section and their experience but that’s actually where LinkedIn goes to now. Unfortunately, endorsements count so make sure that you’ve listed so that you can get for those. There is a section at the bottom of your profile called interests and you can do a keyword dump there but that’s the only place that I would recommend where you can just put all your keywords, verb, noun, acronym, synonym; but really, just don’t force the issue. Have your list, keep it on your desktop or even on a sticky pad and just have it there where you can see it and then write your copy and add your projects and add your publications and add your summary and your experience and where it makes sense, plug those in. Don’t force the issue but yeah, you get more keywords in to your profile in a logical, readable, understandable customer phasing way and yeah you get found more.

James: In the same way that we might use a Google keyword tool to determine what people are searching for on Google, is there any way that we can do a similar process with LinkedIn or is it just really understanding what you do and then making sure that those kind of short tail, broader terms are mentioned somewhere on your LinkedIn profile?

Viveka: There used to be a really great tool in LinkedIn. I put out a product and immediately upon putting up a product, LinkedIn got rid of it, so what I tell people to do now is in skills, like when you start typing in a skill, there is a drop down. Just take a look at the drop down and make a note of everything- other skills/ keywords that might make sense. Look at your competition, look at their profiles, see what skills they have listed, see what kind of copy they have, see if they have listed their keywords in to their interest section. Looking at your competition and seeing what they are doing is not a bad thing. You can make yourself anonymous when you’re searching on your competition as well.

James: Oh, can you?

Viveka: Yeah, if you go in to settings, you can change your anonymity. But if you do that, it erases your history of who’s viewed your profile, those are leads, right? For anyone who looks at your profile there is a reason for it, they’re either a lead or a competition so you want to look at that first and then when you feel that you have seen everybody that you are interested in who’s viewed your profile, now you can make yourself anonymous and now I can go check out my competition to see what they are doing, what kind of media are they adding, what kind of keywords would they use if they do a basic search on LinkedIn. Are they showing up first? Am I showing up first? How are we placed against each other? Do all your competition research and then when you feel complete and you have the keywords for your search terms and ideas about your profile, then you can turn your visibility back on and again be able to see everyone who’s viewed your profile but that’s the only detriment to making yourself anonymous but I don’t even bother I just leave myself fully visible and have fun looking in. I was just on the phone with my exact competition, my friend Ivor, and he’s over in England and we’re really direct competition. We go after the same speaking gigs and even the same clients but we also a lot of partnership work together, in fact he was helping me with my sales message. He is awesome! So there is partnership capability to it with your competition so keep myself visible but it’s really dependent on what you’re doing for a living and how close you want to keep that to the vest.

James: Yeah, sure. I’d be interested to learn from you how you leverage, if at all, those people that have viewed your profile. Because I guess there would be a right and a wrong way to perhaps approach people if you know that they’ve been checking you out. I guess the wrong way would be, hey I saw you checking my profile, I am stalking you right back. Can we work together? I mean that type of approach but as you said they’ve identified themselves as potential leads. How do you transition that type of contact knowing that they have in to something that is more useful to you?

Viveka: It’s funny, you maybe don’t want to use that language but it is along those lines. I noticed you viewed my profile, want to connect? Or I noticed you viewed my profile and you worked at LinkedIn and I would love to connect with you. And the nice thing about who’s viewed your profile is you don’t have to jump to the usual hoops. If you hit the little person with the plus sign, you don’t have to say how you know the person. They’ve looked at you, they’re thinking that LinkedIn is going to let that pass so you can just go, hey James, I noticed that you’re also a trainer and if you ever need any LinkedIn help, just let me know. Do you want to connect? Thanks for the view, I noticed that you are the director for sales and marketing of such and such, let me know if I can be of service, want to connect? Want to be of service is fine. Of course if they already are a first level connection you can just send them a message, hey I noticed that you viewed my profile. Not that I was stalking you but I took a look at yours and I see that you have this new job, or you have this new position or you have this new book or I love this new post that you just published, I gave you a couple of endorsements or I am proud of your accomplishments – something like that. It takes a minute of two but I have to tell you, if you do this even a couple of minutes a day, it’s easier if you get a paid account because you can see everybody, for a free account you only see the last 5 people so you really want to stay on that daily. But it’s one of the best tools that I know for truly engaging and it does lead to work because you are top of mind with these folks. And it feels like synchronicity, it feels like coincidence but I cannot tell you how many people who have looked at my profile and I have said hi back and then all of a sudden they were like I was kinda thinking that we needed to brush up our LinkedIn so figuring that you wrote me back, forgetting that they looked at my profile in the first place because they needed someone to do their LinkedIn. It really is a powerful use of LinkedIn. If you just do it daily, it only takes a couple of minutes but the return on your couple of minute’s time investment. If you have a paid account, your $24 monetary investment per month is pretty significant.

James: Nice! Well, let’s expand on this and talk about prospecting and how we might move people in to kind of a sales type conversation once you’ve connected with them. How would you transition assuming you are connecting with a potential prospect from just literally introducing yourself and making the connection to then moving in to more of a business conversation because that I think can be a little bit icky if you don’t get it right, right?

Viveka: For sure. First of all, just like you don’t use the invitations as a sales pitch, you also don’t use the first message as a sales pitch. You don’t use your in-mails as sales pitches. I always tell people you can’t actually sell anything on LinkedIn and they’re like but what? You’ve got this program and this book, what do you mean you can’t sell anything on LinkedIn? If you just use it as a hard sales tool- it’s like going to a bar and saying hey, you want to come home with me without buying a drink or paying the money. You’ve got to warm up that relationship first and fortunately, LinkedIn gives you lots of tools. They even have an embedded serum system so maybe you’ll invite someone to connect and maybe you’ll do a little research on it and take notes, they can’t see them. You make notes about a person in your CRM in contacts, this internal serum system which is free. You tag them, just like Facebook lists you can tag your contact to keep your network in order. You can set reminders to follow up with them and in a day, a week or on a recurring basis, and then you take that information –so I am going to follow up with this person every two weeks or once a month, I know that they have these interests because I have either talked to them on the phone or at a conference or just on my research, I see what they are posting online in LinkedIn, so when I come across an article I think they are going to be interested in, I just send it to them. It’s about top of mind awareness – it’s not about buy my stuff, buy my stuff, buy my stuff. And in fact, I hardly do any hard sales other than join my webinar but it’s not really a hard sales pitch but it’s just but I am top of mind so people need someone to help them with LinkedIn, they tend to think of me and anyone can do that, it’s just a matter of getting the connections, segmenting by tagging your network, keeping notes on those people doing your research. It takes a little work. It’s not a quick fix scheme. But it is also very effective. Once or twice a month you send them a message, an email, a link, customize it, to something that they would be interested in, it might be your content, it might not be, and then maybe an 80/20 rule. Maybe once a month or once every other month you let them know about something that you’ve got coming up. But hopefully, and this is where the power is – you are top of mind. Whether they hire you or buy your product or service or whether if friends say, hey do you know anyone who does this and of course you’ve been helpful, useful and regularly sharing this content and they think of you. I would not do it more than 2 or 3 times a month otherwise you do come across as a stalker.

James: Yeah, I can imagine that would be the case. And the way the LinkedIn algorithm works, does that make you then more visible up in the LinkedIn feed when you are connecting with someone more often?

Viveka: It’s not supposed to but I know they just changed their LinkedIn algorithm so for a while it was really nice, it was something called relevance and it was a combination of everything – keywords and connections and interactivity and sharing and then that went away and it was strictly per level of relationships and then keywords and that’s changed again, thank goodness! I think it is moving backwards towards relevance and LinkedIn just released something – I have got the e-book on it but I haven’t been able to get anyone from LinkedIn and that particular marketer respond to me but in the marketing world, they actually have a content marketing score now and they’ve got trending topics now and that will probably at some point made available to everyone or at least the more basic paid accounts. But I think that means that LinkedIn is in fact adding communications connectivity and influence. How many people are liking your articles? How many people are reading your posts, how many people are sharing your updates? I think that lends itself to find-ability. I sure hope that’s the way they are moving.

James: Yeah, well it would sure make sense that that was the case right? In the same way that Google are moving towards a web of people where individuals build up authority in the way that websites do so it makes sense that the same would apply to LinkedIn which is very individual people centric and that’s the platform so it would certainly make sense. Now you mentioned real quick the CRM, it’s not something that I have heard of before, you said it was free, which I am sure everyone likes. Where do they find it in LinkedIn?

Viveka: It’s actually in, CRM is a customer relationship management tool, it’s the contacts feature so when you go to your profile and on the top menu you see Network and you come down to contacts, that’s actually the CRM system and what you’ll notice then is when you go to one of your connection’s profile and when you click on that little star underneath their picture that expands out to say relationship and that’s then where you’ll see the notes, the reminders, how you met, and the tagging. That’s all in that one spot.

James: Nice! We’ll make sure that that’s linked to directly if we can within the show notes, I think it will be useful for people. The next thing I want to ask you about is groups because I think that is one of the most useful aspects, at least for a sales or marketing type of persons because they of course allow us to message other members of the group even if we are not directly connected. What strategies do you recommend to leverage this functionality and are there any rules of etiquette in the same way as making an individual connection might be?

Viveka: Groups are amazing because they allow you to interact with other members of your network without having to be first member connections. You can send messages and invite people to connect in your group; you normally would have to jump more hoops or have to pay for it quite frankly, which gets abused. Don’t use your group membership to spam other members. In fact, LinkedIn has something called SWAM now (site wide auto moderation). If you use groups to spam your content, other group members and the managers and the moderators can flag you. You get enough flags and you can’t post anywhere. Like never mind that one group, you can’t post to any of your groups without it getting in to queue to get moderated. So that really inhibits your ability to build relationships on LinkedIn so you have got to be very, very careful with that. There are a lot of tools out there and I love them! Octopost, Hood Suite, LinkedIn’s own sharing bookmarklet where you can share content to a group but you have got to be careful to postion that content and if it’s promotional. You have to put it in the promotions tab, don’t just blast it on the main wall. But that being said, its like-minded others, it’s your industry, and it’s your client’s industry. You already have something in common with these folks and if you comment like share their comment and if you privately reply to them there, if you do a search with the type of person, it really helps with your interactivity with other members and again, that word, engagement but it really helps make your communications more effective and much easier and it’s what you’ve got to do if you have a free account because you don’t have the in-mails. There is no other way to access these people sometimes.

James: Interesting you mentioned about self- promotional link dumping in groups. Many, many of the groups I am a part of just seem to have that as the only level of conversation if you like on the discussions tab, it’s just people dropping by and dumping a link in to their own content. How much value do you feel there is on the discussions tab because based on the groups that I am in at least they seem to be pretty dormant places at least.

Viveka: Yeah, a lot of people join groups just to get access to their members. I am a member of some very, very good groups where it is conversation, it is people asking for advice. There are some promotion but if the other group members are strident in keeping down the noise, it does keep people from getting swamped and keeps people from posting crap and I think those noisy promotion groups are not as around as they used to be. You just have to look. There is a new user interface so you can see the kind of activity that’s going on. There is a new timeline feature within groups that shows you the biggest conversations and you can see there if there are conversations that you want to have or want to contribute to. I only get daily digests from about 10% of my groups, maybe even less than that because those are the only groups that interest me. The rest I really am just joining because I own them, I helped someone set it up or to get access to other members.

James: Interesting! Staying on the topic of posting on LinkedIn. Posting articles on LinkedIn is something relatively new, what do Traffic Jam listeners need to know about this functionality and is it available to all users in LinkedIn currently?

Viveka: Not currently available to everyone but you can apply for it. In fact if you go to specialedition.linkedin.com/publishing, you can apply for the publishing platform. You’ll have to give them you first and last name, your public profile URL, your email address, and two examples of content that you’ve written or links to them, whether it’s a blog post, an online article or a journal or something like that. They want to see examples of your work before they let you go crazy with the tool but it’s fantastic! It gets crazy views, great views, great interaction, it’s searchable signal. The  keywords in content is searchable within LinkedIn search engine so a better chance of you showing up in and people reading your content so it’s all content marketing but it’s a fantastic, easy to use, very, very powerful platform in my opinion.

James: Yeah, I have heard very good things about that. I mean those that I have interviewed the last few weeks I think have been using the platform and some of the reports back on the levels of comments and interactivity on them seem sky high and we’ve seem to have a great time to get involved right? If we are going to be doing this stuff?

Viveka: Yeah, apply for it, and if you’ve got it you can tell because you will have a little gray pen on your update box and Linkedin will send you an email but yeah if you have got that little gray pen, make use of it. Because of course, the more people who get it and use it, the more it will be flooded and the less likely your content is to be viewed but if you can get access to it right now that’s a good thing.

James: Awesome! Well we’ve gone for a little over 30 minutes or so, I do have a ton more questions but based on the number I have got I’d like to perhaps invite you back if you’d like to come back on sometime in the future to do another round, so I think it’s sort of a good point to leave it that. What sort of piece of parting advice do you have Viveka for those traffic jam listeners listening in that perhaps you have not shared so far?

Viveka: The thing is, like Twitter, like Facebook, like Pinterest, like Instgram and Google+, they are just platforms. You are still going to use the same business practices knowing who your audience is, you are still going to use the same business practices of showing off the benefits of your products not just features of it. You’re still going to use best practices for engagement. Heck, it’s the rules our mothers taught us, right? Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. You wouldn’t want to get a spammy letter, why would you send that to someone you did not know? Use those common sense business and marketing tools that you have always known in your business and just apply them to LinkedIn. I think that’s probably the best piece of advice and don’t let the website intimidate you, it’s just a platform with some different features and some different tools but there is no reason to avoid it, it is a very, very useful business social network.

James: Good! I am sure we’ve only just touched the surface of what’s possible with LinkedIn, so let’s give some links for people to check out to kind of further education and to find out a little bit more about you Viveka, linkedprospecting.com would be one I guess. Do you want to tell our listeners a little bit more about what that is?

Viveka: Yeah, if you want to see what we talked about today, if you go to our website, LinkedProspecting.com, we have a free video that actually kind of shows you a lot of what I talked about today, and it’s free. All that you have to pay is your name and your email address. I have got my blog site which is LinkedIntoBusiness.com so if you want the latest changes or you want to learn more about showcase pages or publisher, whatever, I have lots of articles in my blog there. We have a tweet chat for those of you in the US, I guess in England too, but you have to stay up really late or get up pretty early but it’s at 8PM Eastern on Twitter every Tuesday night so if you ever want to join up with a bunch of other LinkedIn experts, it’s not just me we’ve got fabulous guests on there and other chatters who are probably smarter than I am when it comes to LinkedIn, we are always sharing information, we’ve got a LinkedIn experts group in Google+. In fact, I think that’s my newest favorite platform – Martin got it first – but I love our community there, we’ve got a lot of experts in our community there and you are welcome to join our community. So there are lots of great places to get information on LinkedIn and I’m @LinkedInExpert on LinkedIn so please feel free to also ping me there as well.

This Week’s News in Traffic

The first story this week, it is an interesting one to say the least. I have picked this up from TechCrunch.com and the story’s that the European Union Court that Google must give individuals the right to be forgotten or essentially not to be found on Google. The European Court has ruled that Google must respect the right to be forgotten and at the request of private individuals, remove irrelevant or outdated information that contravenes an EU Privacy directive concerning the way personal data is processed. Of course, as you can imagine Google is furious about this and extremely disappointed about the court’s decision. For all intents and purposes, the EU regard Google now on par with or more responsible than the original publisher of the potentially privacy offending data and it can be made to remove content from its index even if it has been legally published by the originating site. I can imagine that complaints and requests for removal of content by individuals could get quite out of hand so it would be very interesting to see how this impacts the search engine going forward.

A new survey from Global Web index shows a slight reduction in usage for Facebook and Twitter for the past six months down 8% and 6% respectively. Also declining in monthly usage are YouTube, down 8% and Google+ down 1%. As usage shifts ever so slightly from the bigger networks, platforms like Instagram and Tumblr and mobile messaging apps like Snap Chat and WhatsApp, they’re gaining. Instagram showed an active usage increase at 25%, Tumblr at 22% and Pinterest at 7% – all showed healthy increases. So if you are considering where to spend your time and energy on social media going forward, that little report may give you some clues.

The third story this week is from Twitter that have rolled out a new feature that I think certainly at this point in time was definitely due and the feature is that you can now mute people that you follow while still retaining followership of them so that means that they’ll still show in your follower count but you won’t get updates from them. This feature update is being rolled out, however at this point in time I am not seeing it at my own Twitter account. When it is there, apparently you can access it by the little more section which you see next to each tweet and there will be an option then to mute that particular person. I should mention, whilst you are muting that particular individual, they won’t be aware that you are muting them so you can retain some courtesy towards them and not worry that you’ll offend them by turning off their update so I think it’s kind of a cool feature especially if you’ve got a large number of people on your account that you follow. It allows you to be a little bit more selective about who features in your feed.

Elsewhere on the web, there is a report out from Tube Mobile that states a 350% increase in video ad auctions last quarter. That’s certainly some evidence that video ads is certainly hot right now so perhaps something to consider for you.

I have one review to read out this week and it comes from Clint Lawton who left a review at Stitcher.com and he says my favorite pick of the marketing podcast. I love Traffic Jam; actionable traffic grabbing advice that is free from fluff and filler. One of the few podcasts I listen to every single week. Thank you to you Clint, I really appreciate you popping by to leave a comment. To you the listener, as always, there are two places that you can submit for a review on the show, one is at Stitcher.com as Clint left his review, and the other is iTunes. In both places, select a star rating for the show and then your comment and feedback along with that. I really, really would appreciate it. I know I say it every single week but it really is the best possible way that you can show support for the show because it helps move the show up the rankings on both platforms and gets the content on to more playlists which I know will mean that will help more people.

The One Minute Traffic Tip

Okay, so I have another SEO tip for you this week. Now I bet if I look at your traffic stats that 50% of your search engine traffic probably comes from people typing in long tail search terms. That’s phrases with three or four or even five words in them. But are you optimizing for this longer, more obscure terms? Well, you can if you follow this process. the first thing you need to do is identify the most popular short tail terms by logging in to your Google webmaster tools and then seeing which phrases get the most clicks for your website. Then, using Google search, enter those short terms into the search box and Google will suggest other associated phrases before you’ve even finished searching. This will happen in a little drop down box and is often known as Google Suggest or Google Instant. These phrases that appear in the drop down box Google deem as being related to the short tail term that you’ve typed in. Where appropriate, what you can do is use this associated phrases Google suggest to you and then see them in to your existing content in to your website. What will then happen over time is you’ll start to pick up search engine traffic for these associated phrases as well as the short tail terms too. This is not a quick fix. It does take a little bit of time but if you pick through the most popular phrase and the most popular pages on your website, over time you can get quite significant results.

Thank you for listening in to episode#38 of Traffic Jam, I really do appreciate the time that you take out of your day to listen in to the show and I hope you get as much enjoyment out of Traffic Jam as I do. I will be back with another episode next week where I will be talking to Dan Fagella about how to automate your online marketing so tune back in for the next episode. In the meantime, remember to subscribe via iTunes and Stitcher radio and for a direct link to all Traffic Jam episodes, go to TrafficJamCast.com where you can join the discussion on this episode as well as get the links to all the resources mentioned in today’s show. Also head on over to veravo.com for more traffic tips and training as well as checking out our Traffictoon series where we take a comical look for all things online marketing.

I’ll end this week’s show by a track by the Arctic Monkeys which are a band from Sheffield in the UK and a favorite band of Viveka’s and the track I am going to pick is I Bet You Look Good On The Dance Floor. It is from 2005, at which point I was still in the UK so I have quite got some fond memories of this track. I hope you enjoy it too and I’ll see you back here in about seven days from now, see you then!

RESOURCES

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THIS WEEKS NEWS IN TRAFFIC

ONE MINUTE TRAFFIC TIP

THE TRAFFIC JAM

Enjoy the episode? I’d LOVE to hear from you. Please post your comment below.

From owned media to earned media, from distribution to “shock” Traffic Jam 37 is packed full of all things content. Joining James on this week’s episode is inbound marketing specialist Chad Pollitt from content promotion agency Digital Relevance.

We discuss how to avoid content shock and where it’s problem really lies, how to get your content syndicated by others and much more. So tune in now and discover the keys to effective research, creative, promotion, and conversion using content.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

SUBSCRIBE TO TRAFFIC JAM : iTunes | Stitcher

“Produce content to drive business and create owned media to earn media.” @ChadPollitt
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Hey! What’s up listener? You’re tuned in to the Traffic Jam podcast I’m your host, James Reynolds, and this is episode #37. If you are a first time listener to the show, the podcast is all about building and growing a profitable audience for your website, and on today’s episode we’re going to be helping you do that using inbound marketing specifically, using content distribution to amplify the content on your website. Plus we’ll be talking a little known concept called content shock which you’ll hear all about the upcoming interview. But don’t go anywhere after the interview because we’ll have our regular segments which are the One Minute Traffic tip, This Week’s News in traffic and then to play out the show the traffic jam, which is a musical jam chosen by my guest today who is Chad Pollit.

Let me introduce Chad Pollit. He’s a former US Army commander and professional at foosball which is kind of incidental because Eric Enge is also a former champion foosball player. So I guess we should probably have a Traffic Jam foosball head to head right? Episode 37 vs. 34, it would be kind of fun! Anyway, aside from foosball, Chad Pollit is an authority on inbound marketing and has produced some really awesome content around the topic and specifically his 51 Things Your Mother Taught You About Inbound Marketing, which is an e-book available on Amazon and some real authoritative piece from Social Media Today, which he’s a contributor. He’s the director at Digital Relevance which is www.relevance.com and he’s a really sound guy as well so I’m going to leave it at that for the introduction and let’s get straight in to the content so without any further ado,  let’s welcome Chad Pollit from relevance.com.

James: So this is the interview for session#38 and at the end of several wires running underneath the ocean between Dubai and Indiana is Chad Pollit. Chad, welcome to Traffic Jam!

Chad: Thanks James! I appreciate it, it’s great to be here.

James: So I have asked you on today to talk a little bit about content marketing. Of course it’s been a topic that’s widely covered in this show and it’s an explosive trend and shows no signs of slowing down, at least imminently, how long Chad before this bubble bursts on content marketing?

Chad: Well, James, it is funny you say that because there is a lot of people with varying opinions on whether it will ever burst or what are some of the nuances around that concept of content shock, what those nuance are. I believe that we’re there now in some industries. I think that if you wanted to open a brand new marketing agency tomorrow and you started from scratch on a website and all you did was focus on owned media, and that’s your own blog and your infographics and things like that, it would take you years upon years if ever, to build a significant audience and to drive a massive business growth in your company. So I see that in our own industry today. In fact, Marcus Sheridan, many people know him as the sales lion, he developed a concept he calls digital sooners and he discussed a digital land grab and he attaches some dates to 2007 to about 2012 I believe, and what he said was in that time frame there was not a lot of industries publishing lots of helpful information so that the companies and the brands that did that in that time frame are the ones that ate being highly rewarded today with massive audiences. Brands like Moz and HubSpot. Now being very specific and talking about this niche but what we found there across other industries, this is happening as well. So for example, maybe HVAC, maybe they have not hit the red line yet on when they are going to experience this content edge but eventually they will, if they have not had already.

James: Well, it is interesting, we’ve had Marcus on the show, I’d have to dig back the episode number and he was a classic example himself of gaining real traction with content but you so rightly put it, he was doing it with river pools and spas in the very early days of content marketing when there was less competition and less people doing this stuff. It would be very interesting case study to see if he can achieve similar results now, right?

Chad: Yeah, exactly. And he may be able to, it depends on what’s happening content-wise in that particular industry, I don’t follow it regularly so I normally don’t have an input but I do know that content is being produced at a much faster clip than what it has in the past.

James: Yeah, good. Well of course I was in my opening question there usher towards the whole content of content shock and I think if I am right in saying, it was first coined by Mark Shaffer who guested on episode 18 and of course it is a concept that you have yourself talked about quite extensively. I think the idea is the best of my understanding is that sometimes my supply of content with outweigh demand and us marketers essentially are faced with a scenarios where, one, our content simply goes unconsumed, we lose the battle for attention as better content, perhaps more well-funded content emerges. Now what’s the answer, how do we actually battle against this ensuing scenario?

Chad: Well, that’s an excellent question and I think about this a little differently than most. Most people believe that this is apparently a content problem. I don’t believe it is. I believe it is an audience problem so that’s an important distinction to make between content and audience because this is why – audiences out there today, for the most part, they have their trusted sources for the information that they consume on a regular basis. Just look at your own habits. I have very specific websites that I go to, every morning, to consume my marketing content- the content that I need to read to stay up to date on what’s happening, and that does not waver very often. Occasionally I will see something on Twitter that I click on, but other than that, I go to LinkedIn today and I go to share blog to get a lot of my content. I also use Klout Now because Klout is now curating content. To get me away in the morning from those websites is going to be very, very, very difficult. But I say this, if you as a brand, can figure out how to get your content where I go already within the content that’s created and published, you have a much better chance and a higher likelihood of getting my attention. And what I mean specifically, is earned media. And that is earning coverage from an influencer or a journalist on one of those trusted websites that I go to on a regular basis.

James: Okay, this is good stuff, I guess we should perhaps explore how this might come about because I am sure there are listeners out there going right, I can establish a few sites in my market where my potential audience will be, I understand where those watering holes are. What’s the process of kind of approaching these sites, these journals, whatever they might be, to actually get your content placed there?

Chad: So we have a 4-step process that we use here. We earn media for clients on a regular basis since that’s what we do. We do some paid media but mostly earned. It all starts with research. In fact, I’ll spell out the process: research, creative, promotion, and conversion. Those are the four steps of our process. And before we even consider what e-book or what guide or what widget we want to create to pitch to the media, we do thorough, thorough research and we identify what our client’s personas online actually look like. Because they are going to look different, their digital signals will be different than their offsite signals or their offline signals for example. So it’s not – I am going to term up – traditional persona development. I am talking about what websites do they go to? How long do they stay there? Where were they before they went to that website? Where were we after they went to that website? Oh, and by the way, what articles and what types of content are the most shared and are the most popular on this particular website that your target demographic consumes on a regular basis? I want to know those questions, I want to know the answers to them. I want to do a media assessment. I want to do an influencer assessment. I want to know who those journalists are and those influencers who are creating this content that’s popular. I want to figure out what problems they’re solving on these online destinations. These are very, very important data points to gather. I am also going to do keyword research as well and figure out what buzz is happening on the search engines and how that relates to these particular websites and media outlets. And once I have all that, then I decide what guide, e-book, or widget I am going to build or create. It’s not until have that research because what I want to do, ultimately content marketers they want to create helpful content for the consumer of their content. But we approach it a little different. We want to create content for the media outlet. Ultimately, the media outlet prefers to launch or to publish content that their audience is going to love. But we focus more on the media because if we can pitch them appropriately, we can make this content say hey, would you cover this in an article? They are much more likely to do so.

James: Got it, and in reading up in our interview a few days ago, you’ve published a couple of articles which you’ve actually pinned on to me as resources and most of those had links off to a pdf guide or perhaps a downloadable e-book or something to that extent. For those particular content pieces in mind to what you actually want to send people off to afterwards?

Chad: Yes, yes. Those are what I call mini versions of what we do for our clients for example. It really is trying to – it’s distribution and promotion as an industry, it is very young, it is emerging. I’d say last year was the year of content marketing, this year is the year of distribution and promotion. And what I am trying to do is develop some thought leadership in bits and pieces, in cheat sheets and things like that and get them out there for people to consume so they can start thinking about content distribution and promotion. Because we all know that depending on – I think 2013’s state of B2B marketing study said that I think 64% of marketers were not confident that their content is delivering the results that it should. So that tells me right there that the industry is not embracing distribution and promotion like they should be.

James: Yeah, we’ll come back to that topic in a short while but I want to ask you a little bit about content creation itself and the life cycle of it. I mean, I know certainly in the past there was real benefits to producing regular content, it was something that Google rewarded in terms of its algorithms. That however, putting out consistently delivered content that perhaps isn’t of the highest quality level, probably doesn’t weigh up so well does it? With so much more content online. You probably have to raise the bar a little bit on the kind of quality that you put out. Where do you sit in that kind of whole seesaw between that quality content versus quality of content?

Chad: So that is another great question. I am going to say something that’s probably new to a lot of your listeners because a lot of people don’t talk about this. Ultimately, the reason why we’re producing this content is to drive business, right? But if you take a step back from that and ask yourself – why are we creating this content? Why do we create owned media? We create owned media to earn media. If you really think about it, that’s what we’re doing. We want to get covered. We want the media to cover our content, we want people talking about it, and we want people sharing it all throughout social media. We are creating it to earn media. So what I say is, the quality bar is established by those websites that we have audiences that we want to tap in to. For example, if you are in the PR industry, having your content featured on PR Daily, or syndicated on PR Daily, that’s a good place because there is an audience there that you might want to speak to. That being said, I would not say PR Daily publishes the highest quality content. They publish content that their audience likes. So if you take their content and pair it up against the Harvard Business Review, maybe the Harvard Business Review has “higher quality” content but the audience for PR Daily prefers their quality level of content so what I am saying is, we produce owned media to earn media and the quality bar is based on where you want to earn that media. So go to their website and look at the content that they publish and that should be your measuring stick.

James: Yeah and I guess this all comes back as well to understanding what that ideal person that you want your content to be consumed by because if you are not tailoring it to them which ultimately is the audience that exists on these places, you’re getting it all wrong, right?

Chad: Yeah, exactly. And that’s why that research phase in our process is critical. Lots of content marketers do some sort of research to write their piece or to create their video or whatever that is but it is the media assessment piece that most people don’t do because after all, we create owned media to gain media, that’s the real reason we’re doing it.

James: Yeah, so let’s talk now a little bit about promotion. In your opinion, what is the ideal balance between time and energy spent in creating content and time and energy spent promoting content?

Chad: That’s a great question. In fact, I had been doing a lot of research on this. I spoke to Ryan Forster over at skinner not too long ago about paid media specifically and he was leaning towards the 12-15% mark; that 12-15% of your time and your budget should be spent on promotion activities. And then I did some more research and I found a thought leader and I can’t remember his name, he’s in Ohio, if it pops in to my head, I will let you know, he recommended investing 45% of your marketing investment in to distribution and promotion so that’s a big, big gap between recommendations. So this is what I did. I went back to our client base and I went to our service side and I had them dig through and really pick apart our campaigns to see how much we are actually spending on promotion and distribution activities. And that number, when you include paid, came out to 29%. So that’s the rule of thumb or benchmark that we are sharing publicly now after doing that research.

James: Yeah, it’s interesting stuff. I mean I have heard numbers as high as 70% of your time, energy and budget should be spent of distribution. That kind of leaves a bit of a void for me; if so much of your budget is spent on distribution, I mean really what is left for creating stuff that is going to be consumed and shared in the first place? But it is an interesting conversation and I guess if we were to establish some numbers for more businesses out there I am sure they will be leaning far lower down in the scale in terms of time spent on creation as opposed to distribution.

Chad: Right, right. And Ryan Skinner for Forster for his own research showed that you can actually step down content creation and step up promotion and distribution and get much better results. One of the cool things about that is we always talk about quality content; what makes quality content is the feedback we get, right- that feedback loop. And what happens when you invest in content promotion and distribution, you accelerate loop so you are getting much more feedback because you are getting your content in front of thousands and thousands of eyeballs rather than the few hundred that you might get on your website in a day.

James: Yeah, well let’s talk a little bit more about distribution. We’ve spoken about this concept of earning distribution, but where else can our listeners potentially be distributing to that might not involve this earned sort of silo?

Chad: Okay, so well, first of all. When I say earned media, it could be news coverage, it could be editorial coverage, and it could be influencer coverage and one of the influencers write about something that you did. It could be a syndication relationships so for example I syndicate my content to LinkedIn and to the Huffington Post and to a couple other places like social media today. So syndication is a big one and curation is another form of earned media so if your content is being curated somewhere that’s another form. Now on the paid side, what I am really talking about is native advertising and that comes in several different flavors. So you’ve got your advertorials, so for example Forbes is a big name out there and they are making some decent revenue and selling basically contracts to companies and allowing to write articles within their paid promotion area. So it looks natural and native so to speak. There’s lots of other websites that offer advertorial contracts and relationships. There’s plenty of them out there. It’s kind of the wild, Wild West with prices all over the place from six figures down to a couple hundred dollars. So advertorials are one and then you have what I call more like your flat-line native advertising which are things like outbrain and adblade and taboola and companies like that where if you go to Huffington post and you scroll down to the bottom of the article, you’ll see there sponsored suggestions for other articles for you to read and if you click one of those it will go offsite to another website. That’s the native advertising that I am talking about in this example. So there are plenty of those opportunities as well. And then you could always do social promotion in the native feeds. That’s another big one. I have been experimenting with that a lot lately so that’s another opportunity for paid native promotion.

James: And what would you suggest is the right balance now and perhaps going forward as more competition starts to exist?

Chad: Well, on the paid side you really need to experiment because you can blow through a lot of money quickly if you’re not careful. So depending on the media research that you do, and the audience assessment that you do, depending on where they hang out what type of native relationships are established with the ad networks, you’re going to want to get your foot wet before you dive in. We spend about 5% of what we do in terms of time and budget on paid media to include social promotion as well as some of your native advertising. The advertorials that we focus on are more one offs. We establish those relationships in addition to the work that we do for our clients so that can really very. Like I said, advertorials are the wild, Wild West right now. Pricing is all over the map. You’ll have to determine if that value proposition is worth your budget.

James: Yeah! I know that you do a lot of different strategies in terms of syndication over at Digital Relevance, if you’d have to pick one from those that you’ve described, what’s been giving the biggest payoff for you recently?

Chad: I’d say the biggest payoff for me is the columns that I earn so for example, I have my own column at Social Media today. They do syndicate some of my content, but for the most part what I publish on Social Media today is original and exclusive to them. They go out of their way to promote that content. And their audience is the perfect audience for me to get my message out to so when we do our media assessment, they’re definitely one of those top websites! The content that we publish there tends to get a lot of traction and lots of conversions. I can get conversion rates over 30% from that website for one article when I link back to a landing page so it has been a great relationship with them. The other side of that is I also publish on Huffington post and LinkedIn. Those audiences are completely different than the audience over at Social Media today. Something that might go crazy at Social Media today might not get but 500 views on LinkedIn or on Huffington Post so where LinkedIn and Huffington Post have larger audiences, there is only a small subset of their audiences that are interested in the problem solving that we produce as a company.

James: Yeah, and I am sure you are tracking all of these. I’d be quite interested to know whether this content that you place especially to this social media site has diminishing returns because you’d expect that perhaps over time as that audience get used to you a little bit more that perhaps the return from that time invested there would be less fulfilling for. Has that been the case?

Chad: You know, I can’t say for certain that that’s the case because probably every four months the general topics of what I tend to write about change with the even flow nature of our industry so in that regard, as long as I am writing something that’s fresh on all of it, it tends to give the same conversion rate and the same amount of traffic back to our website. But I can see where if you are industry like maybe, nuclear engineering, that maybe you can only write so much about nuclear engineering without it getting boring, but I am sure there are some media outlets somewhere that love writing about nuclear engineering, but yeah, I can see that being an issue.

James: Well, if we can find any we’ll make sure we’ll link off to our show notes just to reference for our Traffic Jam listeners today. Now, a bit of a curve ball question as we kind of get towards closing out Chad, what has your m other told you about marketing?

Chad: Well I wrote a book about 51 Things Your Mother Taught You About Inbound Marketing and what I wanted to do – I wanted to have fun and really talk about some of those sayings that your mom used to say to you as a child like don’t jump on the bed or close the door you weren’t raised in a barn and really analogize those to principles of best practices in inbound marketing and I came up with 51 of them. The last one, spoiler alert – the last one is I love you. The idea is that if you get inbound marketing right and you create great content, your audience and your prospects and your customers and your community will show you brand love and will evangelize what you do and what you and what you produce. So that’s the moral of the story but I highly recommend giving it a download, I am sure there will be a link to it 27:29 and it’s a quick read, it’s just under a hundred pages.

James: Yeah, I had a quick check out of it earlier and I love the graphics and the imagery that comes with it. It is very cool! It is beautifully branded content as well which I am sure that Traffic Jam listeners thinking about their own stuff as well. So Chad, just before we close out, have you got any other parting pieces of advice for our traffic jam listeners that you’d like to share?

Chad: Yeah, I just want to reiterate, if you are just doing owned media and you don’t have a content distribution promotion planned, I highly recommend you do some research on it because it can give awesome returns. One link on Link Magazine last year has driven over nine thousand conversions on my website and we earned that mention and you can earn them too and you can get those leads and those conversions for your website.

James: Nice! Now if that’s not some inspiration to get traffic jam listeners going out there to do their own research, I don’t know what is. Chad, leave us with a few places that we can go to reach out and connect with you.

Chad: Certainly, I am easy to find, Chad Pollit on Google, there is a whole bunch of stuff there. I am accessible in LinkedIn, I love Twitter, and I am on Twitter every day. It’s just @ChadPollit, no weird characters there, and yeah, reach out, hit me up with questions. I love talking about this stuff and I look forward to connecting.

James: Fantastic! Thank you for your time and expertise today Chad. It has been thoroughly enjoyable chatting to you. To you the listeners, the show notes the transcript and all of the links and resources mentioned by Chad will be going on TrafficJamCast.com. Just look out for episode #37 and you’ll find all of the details there so just one last farewell and thank you Chad. You’ve been an absolute pleasure.

Chad: Thanks James!

This Week’s News in Traffic

The first news today is from Facebook, who’ve introduce something new called Facebook Audience Network and this is basically a way for advertisers to extend their Facebook advertising beyond Facebook itself in to other mobile applications so this will allow you not just to have ads in the Facebook newsfeed but extend those Facebook ads in to other application fascia. According to Facebook the same features such as co-audiences, look alike audiences and custom audiences will still be available but with one click you can send that advertising across other platforms and mobile applications. The audience network is in its very early stages of development and at least at first they are only available to advertisers looking to drive app installs and app engagement. It is certainly directed at the app marketer right now however they do say they’ll extend it to other objectives in the near future. I think it would be quite interesting to give the audience network a try however the targeting options at least at this stage do seem to be quite limited so I do think you can expect results to vary quite a lot. However if you do want to give it a go, you are encouraged to reach out to your account rep or your client partner at Facebook.

Elsewhere on the internet, it’s been a pretty quiet week really for traffic news. The main stories being that Google analytics have reported some reporting options and foursquare has split its app in to two separate applications. The new one being called swarm which takes its inspiration from instant messenger where you can see which of your friends is online or offline, and the original application has actually been redesigned from the ground up and the biggest surprise being the removal of the check in all together because the new app will focus on discovery and exploration. So if you are using foursquare in your marketing mix, you might want to go and check out that story a little bit further.

In other updates, I want to tell you about an event happening in Dubai on the 20th and the 21st of May at the JW Marriot Marquis Hotel Sheik Said Rd. – it’s the Marketing Live event and it’s a two-day conference, the second day being the search exchange which is the first and only search engine marketing to be held in the Middle East. Not only will I be presenting on that day, but I have been asked to chair and compare the event which I am super excited to do so if you want to come and see me live that’s where you can do it next. I’ll be presenting and comparing as I say on the 21st of May. Further details can be found on Facebook, just do a search for Marketing Live and it is using the acronym MKTG Live and you’ll find all of the details of the event and all the pre-show hype, well worth checking out and if I do see you there make sure to say hi as well.

The awesome reviews keep on coming in and they are especially awesome this week because both Ageni from Australia and Kiwi Liz from the United States have left reviews not just on iTunes or Stitcher radio, they have left their review on both. So guys I really do appreciate that extra effort to leave two reviews, and not just one. Ageni from Australia says this is by far my favorite podcast about online marketing. James is super nice with a very elegant English accent. Well, I am not so sure about that Ageni but I guess I’ll take your word for it. He then goes on to say the podcast consists of interviews with smart and influential people in the industry, James is a really good host and asks great questions that is relevant and useful. The show is very entertaining and informative as well. Kiwi Liz from the United States says James has a great personality with excellent guests, topics are spot on with focus on how to truly build your traffic and find an engaged audience online. Not just giving lip service to these topics but adding real value. So once again guys, thanks for going the extra effort of leaving your review in two places, not just one. To you the listener, well, one is enough so I really would appreciate if you get the time this week to pop in to iTunes or Stitcher radio and leave a review or rating for the show, or you can pop by TrafficJamCast.com, scroll to the bottom of the site and find a leave a voice message link and you can talk in to your microphone and leave a voice recording for the show, that also would be awesome or head on over to the page of the episode and all others at TrafficJamCast.com and you can enter the conversation there.

The One Minute Traffic Tip

Now I’m always arguing the point that SEO is not always about ranking. With factors like Google Authorship and personalized search there are other ways that you can impact how much search engine traffic you get to your website that does not depend on what rank you get for your website for certain  keywords. In order to increase the amount of clicks that you get from your current rank, you want to optimize your page titles and page descriptions because this is the text that gets shown in the search results when your listing appears. By optimizing these two things you can make your listing more appealing and then therefore attract more clicks. To do this you can use Google analytics to first identify which pages on your site are most visited from search engines and then which search terms those pages get traffic for. Then by doing a search in Google yourself, you can see what the top rank adwords say in their ad copy. These ad copy rank top because they have the highest click through rate and by spying on their ad copy you can quickly assess what wording gets the highest clicks for those searches and use that to optimize your organic search results. So there you go, a real quick way to optimize your meta data to get more clicks from the search engines.

So thank you for listening in to episode 37 of traffic jam. I will be back in about seven days from now with a LinkedIn episode with Viveka von Rosen so tune back in for that one. Remember to subscribe via iTunes and Stitcher radio and for a direct link to all Traffic Jam episodes, go to TrafficJamCast.com where you can join the discussion on this episode and get links to all of the resources mentioned in today’s show. Also head on over to veravo.com for more traffic tips and training and to learn how I can help you get more traffic, leads and sales from the search engines.

We end this week’s show with a track chosen by my guest today Chad Pollit and the track is called Bodies by the band Drowning Pools. Enjoy, and I’ll see you again next week.

RESOURCES

MENTIONS

THIS WEEKS NEWS IN TRAFFIC

ONE MINUTE TRAFFIC TIP

THE TRAFFIC JAM

Enjoy the episode? I’d LOVE to hear from you. Please post your comment below.

Today’s guest is a 100% “hype free” marketer. On this episode Jay Baer from Convince and Convert explains why commanding attention on the web, and in the hearts and minds of your customers is created by helping not hyping up your customers.  Jay’s approach to marketing requires us to radically rethink old school practices focussed on buzz and virality, replacing them with an altogether more useful approach he calls Youtility!

Jay is an author, speaker and agency owner who’s advised more than 700 brands on their marketing strategy since 1994, including 31 of the Fortune 500. He’s been in the game a long time, and his strategy is a long-term play!

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

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“Trust is the most important thing in business, without it, everything else is irrelevant.” @JayBaer
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“Customer relationships are built over the long term, not one click.” @JayBaer
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Hey there listener! Welcome back to Traffic Jam, this is session #36 of the podcast show that teaches you how to get more traffic, leads and sales to your website and build a profitable audience online. I am of course your host James Reynolds and I am very excited to have you back with me today for another action-packed episode. Today we’ll be joined by Jay Bear from ConvinceandConvert.com and the author of the book You-tility to learn why smart marketing is about help and not hype. We also have the one minute traffic tip. This week’s news in traffic, then the part of the show that gives this show its name, the Traffic Jam, a musical jam chosen by my guest today to play out the show.

Before we start the interview, allow me to introduce my guest and co-host of today’s episode, Jay Baer is a tequila loving hype free strategist who’s advised more than 700 brands on their marketing strategy since 1994, including 31 no least, of the Fortune 500. He is officially the only licensed barbecue judge to be seated by the associated press, CBC, Forbes fast company and USA Today. He’s a podcast host, an agency founder, a spokesperson for the juvenile prison system, a brand marketer, political consultant and the author of 2 books, The New Revolution and recently You-tility. So here we go, here’s the interview with Jay.

James: Welcome listener to the interview section of the show and a big Traffic Jam welcome to my broadcast companion on episode 36, Jay Baer. Jay, how are you?

Jay: I am delighted to be here, thank you very much. I am fantastic and hello to everybody out there.

James: Awesome! You’ve got this book and a whole approach to marketing that you call You-tility where you say buzz marketers have got it all wrong and SEO and inbound marketing guys like me are missing half of the picture. What’s the other half?

Jay: Well, the other half in my estimation is to be just useful; that if you create You-tility, which I define in the book as marketing so useful that people would pay for it, that customers would keep you close. I love SEO, I love inbound marketing, I have been doing it for years and I have been a consultant for that side of the thing for a long, long time but the challenge in that is that it does not create demand, it just fulfills demand. Nobody goes to Google and says hey, I would like to buy something, I don’t really care what, just supply me. It does not really work like that. So you search when you are already in the funnel. You don’t add people to the funnel with inbound marketing that is why even though inbound and SEO are incredibly powerful and incredibly important, you should not try and only do that because you are missing out on some potential customers.

James: Yeah, and you’ve only got half of the picture as you clearly say. People don’t just go to first result and look no further. If they are in to a buying decision they’re going to spend a little bit more time researching and evaluating who, what, where before they actually make that decision, right?

Jay: Absolutely! I think the problem that we are all faced with right now in marketing, especially online marketing is that technology and the pace of change and mobile has conspired to make us think like hunters and nobody wants to think like a farmer. You have to recognize that not every customer is to go to Google, click the first result, land on your squeeze page and instantly give you money. Some will, but most won’t. We have to understand that marketing and customer relationships are typically built over the long term and not one click, and you have to be good at both.

James: Yeah, sure. Well, let’s put together perhaps some examples of You-tility marketing. The core of it is that you are useful and that the content or the marketing that you create is inherently valuable. Give us some examples at play of who might be using You-tility marketing and some of the best practices that you’ve seen out there.

Jay: One of the things that You-tility requires is courage. You have to have the courage to trust that your customers will reward you eventually. You have to be okay with eventually. And one of the examples which I talk about in the book is around Clorox. So Clorox makes a very popular cleaning product in the States and you use it to remove stains. They have a mobile app called the My Stain App which shows you what to do if you stain stuff on yourself which is very, very useful if you have in fact stained something on yourself and it is extremely useful because it breaks it down by what the material is, whether cotton or polyester or what have you and what the stain is. Is it wine, is it blood, is it ball point pen ink? And when they were developing this in the company they had two big fights in the organization. The first fight was well, should Clorox always be the answer? Should no matter what the stain was, should the answer always be Clorox? Some of the people on the marketing team said of course it should because we are trying to sell stuff here, and then somebody else said, well, yeah, but actually, we’re not always the right solution. Apparently, they told me this, if you put Clorox on butter, something terrible happens. I don’t know exactly what it is but don’t do that. So, but they are not always the right solution in truth, and also if they are always the right solution, doesn’t it change the very nature of this thing from a You-tility to a very, very complicated brochure? And the second fight that they had internally was that of course there should be a coupon in the middle of this right? Because you should be able to hold up your phone at your grocer and get a discount on Clorox because we are trying to move product eventually. And that sounds reasonable but then again, somebody said, well, yeah but if there is a coupon right in the middle of this, doesn’t it become not so much a utility that people will cherish but just a price promotion that they might tolerate? It changes the way this whole thing is perceived and what it means so in both cases they had the courage to hold the line, to produce content that was honest and authentic and produce content that was not trying to close the loop immediately. I think that is really commendable and that’s the way most good utilities are- it transcends the transaction.

James: Yeah, and this all builds trust right? If you’re not inherently promoting your own items and sometimes acknowledge that there’s actually other solutions out there that for your particular scenario might be a better fit. It certainly will build trust with the consumers and they’ll say hey, these guys are actually trying to help me, they’re not just trying to sell to me all the time.

Jay: Trust is the most important thing in business. Trust is the prism through which all business success must pass, and we don’t talk about it nearly enough. Because without trust, SEO is irrelevant. Without trust price is irrelevant, without trust marketing is irrelevant. Without trust, customer service is irrelevant. Without trust, everything we do as marketers is literally irrelevant. And one of the best ways to gain and keep trust is to be massively useful when you don’t have to be.

James: Yeah, and I guess transparency is also key to this, right? I think this is a concept that you also talk about in your book. Be overly transparent. Share everything, let people see the inside so that they can really see themselves what you are all about.

Jay: Yeah, it’s definitely the trend. I have read a few good books lately all about transparency and it is no doubt the best practice for companies now. Full transparency is very difficult to achieve especially in a corporate environment. In a smaller company environment though it is doable especially if you build your corporate culture around it. I am an investor in the company Buffer which you and some listeners may know; it is a social media sharing tool and they have a corporate culture which is 100% transparency. So they publish on their blog the salaries of everybody that works for them. They publish on their blog the same information that I get as an investor, all the financial details and everything else. That is the core principle of the organization and when you talk about something that gains trust, they literally have nothing to hide, and while that’s not a 100% doable for some companies, you can get there. There is an amazing example in Canada and also in Australia now where McDonald’s, the restaurant chain has this program where you can ask them questions about their food and they answer them in very, very honest ways. They shoot videos of the truths. Somebody asked them, hey, how come the food I get in the restaurant doesn’t look like the food I get in the commercial? And of course it doesn’t, and they said, well, here’s what happened. They upload an 8-minute video that showed everybody a commercial shoot and they showed the food stylist and how they plump up the bun and they make the ketchup as perfect and things like that. And so they sort of pulled up the curtain and say, yeah, we completely use artists to make this look perfect but here’s the thing, the food that they used in the commercial is the exact same thing. They get it from the closest restaurant. They make it look great but it’s still the same beef, it’s still the same bun, it’s all the same pickle- they just take the roundest pickle they can find.

James: Yeah, this is a great conversation. It’s actually one that I had with a mutual friend of ours, Joe Pulizzi back on an earlier episode and I guess the challenge that comes with this transparency approach is that businesses think that they have some form of intellectual property or trade secrets that may be disadvantageous for them to share openly on the market place where their competitors could find them. What do you say to that?

Jay: It is funny you mentioned Joe because he and I did a presentation together about that topic at a New Media conference a couple of years ago – it was called why you need to open the Kimono and he and I actually wore kimonos during the presentation – probably a low point in both of our careers really but it was a lot of fun and the pictures are out there. And the premise is exactly as you say; a lot of people are afraid to give away the “secret sauce” that somehow if they have a blog or videos, they kind of talk about the truth that their competitors will steal that. Here’s the reality. One, you probably actually do not have secret sauce. It’s a little bit I think egocentric to imagine that you have some sort of knowledge that your competitors don’t. Second, even if you have that secret knowledge, your competitors already know it, somebody who used to work for you now works for them, and somebody who was your customer is now their customer. Knowledge has a tendency to get passed around very, very quickly and the third thing, and this is sort of the thesis of Joe and I’s presentation and I talk to my clients about this all the time in the consulting side which is that a list of ingredients doesn’t make someone a chef. If you write a blog post or if you do a video as to what you really kind of do as a business, that does not necessarily mean that somebody can take those blog posts and replicate your whole business. That’s really undervaluing what you add to the equation as an individual and so I am not concerned at all about that sort of situation.

James: What’s your Utility over at Convince and Convert?

Jay: I think our premise is to be in the and, therefore business. And I call it the and, therefore business and I am speaking about the media side of our business and not the consulting side, because there are lots and lots and lots and lots of blogs out there that cover the news; here’s what happened today in social media, here’s what happened today in content marketing, here’s what happened today in SEO. We’re not that, and we don’t want to be that and we can’t compete with that so we are in the and, therefore business. So our job is to say this happened and therefore here’s what you should do to in your company. And we try to adhere to that philosophy both in our blog and in our daily email and in our weekly podcast. Try and bring people lessons and advice that they can’t find everywhere else.

James: Yeah, and I like that. I mean, if you become that kind of news reporter, you do become very vanilla, just regurgitating the same piece of news story that every other site is out there right? But people really want to know and understand what your actual opinion is on that news story or that particular piece of content, right? I am sure that your engagement is a lot higher as a result.

Jay: Well it also helps because we do so much corporate consulting that the things that we blog about are the things that we ask questions about from our clients so there is no synergy there. A lot of times when clients have a question about something we say, yeah we just wrote about that a couple of days ago, right? And so there is a lot of – some of them are cross pollination there, they may not be as it could or should be on the surface but behind the scenes there is a lot of similarity to what we do on the content side and what we do on the consulting side.

James: Yeah! You’ve got some great examples of utility over at Youtilitybook.com. Some are quite obvious like Cross Fit who publish all of their workouts for free on their website but others like Kleenex’s flu prediction tool or the billboard that creates water out of thin air, they are way more creative and of course far less obvious. What are the steps our listeners should go through to identify their utility?

Jay: My favorite new one which is not on the website yet because I just found out about it a week ago but I have already put it in to my presentations is called Tweet Pee and that is from the diaper company Huggies –

James: Ah, I love it already.

Jay: Only available in Asia, right? But the way it works is that it is a little plastic device that you attach to the diaper of your child and when it senses wetness it sends you a direct message that says, hey, the diaper is wet, here’s how wet it is. Does the baby need a change? And then it tracks your diaper usage and then recommends to you when you should go and buy more diapers.

James: Love it! That’s awesome.

Jay: It is really, really good. I like it because it actually closes the loop and it actually has a commerce play in there in giving you a calendar on when you should purchase. The most important James to create great utility is to understand your customers better than you understand them today. Because the whole premise here is to create marketing so useful that people will pay for it. To create marketing that people cherish, you really have to understand the bigger story. The example is use is that nobody really wants socks, what they want is warmer feet. And in almost every case, your product is not what they want. Your product is a means to an end, you have to understand the bigger story and the challenge that we are faced here today as marketers is that we have more data than ever; we are surrounded by data. But we are in many cases starved for insights and every time you think about your customers using a spreadsheet or report or an API, you are most definitely thinking of them as a number and you are removing from that equation the bigger story. So what I tell marketers now is that you really need to find a way to have conversations with your customers, whether that’s in person, whether that’s on the phone, whether that’s via email or Skype or something else, you need that intra personal feedback more than ever and in many cases we just don’t have it because that’s where the great ideas that utility will come from. That’s where the things that would only come from insight and not from data and that’s the most important first step and it’s often overlooked.

James: Yeah, and of course having a utility is only going to be effective if people find it. What are some of the most effective ways you’ve seen or used to get traffic to and engaging with your utility marketing?

Jay: Yeah, you nailed it. You see this all the time where people create cool utilities but they roll them out and then nothing happens; nobody visits it, nobody shares it, nobody clicks on it and in many cases it’s not because the thing was not any good, it’s just they did not put enough emphasis behind it. What I say in the book and in presentations is that you have to market your marketing. You have to treat your marketing assets like a product and you launch them the same way that you would launch a product. That’s where social media comes in, that’s where SEO comes in and that’s where seeding with influencers comes in; that’s where all of the sort of Traffic Jam concepts come in and what I say about social in particular is that content is fire and social media is gasoline. What you want to use social media for is an amplification device to get people aware of great content. And most people do the opposite, they still treat social media like the world’s shortest social media release which is not terribly effective.

James: Yeah, and in fact I had the same conversation in – just released actually – episode 34 with Eric Enge and we were talking about content and he rightly pointed out that his best content was all created when he started his blog, his first six posts were freaking awesome but no one ever read them because he kind of forgot to promote them and tell people they were there. I think it is a common mistake. People put a lot of effort in to their content and being useful but forget why it does not take off and become useful to them.

Jay: It’s a competitive landscape and it literally gets more competitive every day and that’s tough. Now, you just redesigned the Convince and Convert website Jay, what lessons of the past six years of the convince and convert agency have you managed to integrate in to the new design?

Jay: Well, as you say, we have been doing this for a while, I think our fourth design in that period and it is much more of a company now. There was a time when convince and convert was fundamentally me. And that’s definitely not the case now, there are eight of us and it functions much more like a corporation and we work with lots of big companies and I just needed to put a little more emphasis on the consulting side and the fact that this isn’t just a blog, it isn’t just a media company but it is a very successful consulting firm as well so we changed some of the messaging and we actually have a homepage now so for the entire history of the company the blog was the home page and now we actually have a real home page. We tried to also insert more organic ways for people to get on our email list and sort of put those in streams so that people are reading content and then it sort of nudges them to sing up for the email without using pop ups and so we have that going. It’s too early to make a call on the effectiveness of that. Also tried to increase not just traffic but time on site and pages per visit by encouraging people to read the blog post and then hey, I should read another blog post and another blog post. I don’t think we are quite there yet, I think we need to make more adjustments to get where we want to go there but the thing is you’re never done, you’re never ever, ever done; it is always in the testing process and the next step is we just redesigned our email but I don’t like it and it is not performing the way I want it to so now we’ve got to go back to the drawing board on that and we’ve got our email template again.

James: One element certainly that has drawn attention again and again in the content marketing space is the exclusion of dates on your blog posts. Your decision to do so was based on your claim that it increases traffic and this is something that I am certainly interested in, how is that so?

Jay: It is funny you talked about Joe, Joe and I debate this – and we took dates off the (21:26) blog last fall so it has probably been about eight months I would say since we took them off and we certainly did not have any plan there other than that there is a lot of posts that we have that are true other than their date of publish because we are in the and, therefore business. Because we are not in the news business and so a lot of our content has a longer shelf life than other blogs in the content in the social media space and we think that we might be artificially constraining the value of the content because we happen to put a date on it and so let’s just take it off and see what happens. And if it doesn’t work or people freak out, then we’ll put them back on. And within about 30 days we started to see significant traffic changes and there are other things that have driven this I am sure but what I can tell you is that traffic has doubled since the dates were taken off. Now, is that because of dates? I can’t say the correlation and the causation but the chances of me putting them back on now is 0. It’s not going to happen. Occasionally our people will probably get two emails a week who either email me personally or are used to contact us and say hey, I really like this post on Facebook statistics, I really don’t know when this was published though, is this still valid? I do get those emails on occasions and I am sympathetic to that so what I am thinking about doing is putting in to the actual content itself like hey this post was actually written on this date but not keeping it as part of the meta data in that way we continue to benefit from the traffic gains and also make it a little bit more useful for readers.

James: Yeah, that’s interesting. So for you, is it the organic search traffic that seems to have increased since the taking off of the –

Jay: Yes. Other traffic – referral traffic and email traffic and social traffic is going up but the organic search traffic in Google is a hundred and something percent since it came up.

James: It is very interesting, you’d think that based on the date that it was first indexed, Google would know when it’s from so the date should really not make a difference but –

Jay: Yeah, and again, I want to make sure people recognize I don’t and I cannot prove it. It could have been Google and we’ve just reached our tipping point when it happened when people have got enough traffic which gives you enough authority from the past five years and we’ve got a lot of links from a lot of other blogs, you just sort of get to that magic page all of a sudden. Also, I should say that that was essentially contemporaneous with Hummingbird too and we took dates off at about the same time Hummingbird rolled out and we do have great content, we have been doing it for a long time so I am sure there is multiple factors at play.

James: Yeah, sure. One other thing that I heard that you may be following suit on is copy blogger’s lead on potentially removing blog comments as well. What are your thoughts on that?

Jay: Yeah, it is tricky, in fact, I had a terrific conversation with Brian Clark from copy blogger in my podcast social pros about three weeks ago right after he announced that decision and we talked for about 45 minutes to an hour, quite a bit in depth, so if people are interested in his thinking there, kind of like our baseball conversation about it, they should listen to that episode or read that transcript but we sort of have the same situation that they have just a little bit smaller and if you need to convert a lot traffic now, the comments that we get are not always but largely insignificant in terms of number and also of quality, there’s tons and tons and tons of people either putting in dumb comments which usually gets removed automatically but it’s the pretend to spam comment, it’s the pretend comments that are actually spam. Those are the ones that we don’t really and those are the ones that Brian discourages as well, and like copy blogger what we find is that most of the best conversation around our content don’t take place on the blog; it takes place on Facebook, it takes place on LinkedIn, it takes place on Google+, and I am okay with that. To me that is good news, not bad news. So we have not pulled the comments off yet, and we may not, but I am certainly thinking about it.

James: Yeah, interesting. Well, we’ll make sure the link to that conversation is placed within the show notes of today’s episode. A whole section of your book YouTility discusses the various metrics by which your marketing can be measured, in this digital world where almost every action online can be recorded – clicks, paid views, time on site – all of that good stuff; what are the best ways to accurately keep score and know whether the marketing we are doing is effective.

Jay: It really depends on what you are executing and what your goals are in your business but the most important thing is you can now customize the content metrics to business outcomes. The goal is not to be good at content, the goal is to be good as business as a content. Those are not necessarily the same things, right? Just because somebody downloaded your slideshow presentation doesn’t mean shit. It doesn’t make you any money. And that assumption that this makes you money is wrong unless you can prove it, so in some cases, you can’t prove it right? You don’t sell online and you’re not a B2B company that you know that when somebody buys – you can’t necessarily prove it mathematically right? The trail goes cold. And if you are selling licorice and you are a licorice manufacturer, you can’t say this Facebook post manufactured this much licorice, all you know is you go to the store, there is lots of licorice there, and you have to restock the shelves. So in those cases you really have to rely on correlation; survey work is really important, there is really not enough survey work being done right now- do you buy from us? And by the way do you read our content? Do you watch our videos? Do you watch our social? And then compare the lifetime value of those people against the customers who are not connected with you in that way and then make some financial calculations there but in general, when I talk about the book, there is 4 categories of metrics. I think this is helpful for people; you have consumption metrics, so views and those kinds of things right? Then you have sharing metrics, so that’s what we usually call sharing or tweets and +1 what have you’s. Then you have lead metrics which is like, did they fill out a form or did they go to your pricing page, for example. Which in many cases you could consider a lead because no one is going to do that for fun. And they are only doing that because they are interested. And then of course you have sales metrics. In some cases you can actually track, did somebody actually buy something from you? Those are the four categories. All you need to do is have some representation in each of those categories that make sense for your business. If you can do that, you’d be better at content metrics than 98% of the companies out there.

James: Yeah, for sure. Cool! I think as we draw to a close Jay, let’s talk a little bit about your podcast. It’s called the social pros podcast. How effective a marketing channel has that been in your business because I think you have been investing a fair amount of time in it recently?

Jay: Yeah, I have been doing it for almost two and half hours taking time and we are now at episode 113 – 114, something like that, because I am going to record two shows this afternoon. It has been great, we each week interview somebody who is a social media marketer, or good at marketing manager, director and officers for typical companies. So we have had dozens, and dozens and dozens of Fortune 500 companies in the show and it is really a useful podcast because those stories don’t get told. It’s not like you’ve got a million places where you can go and figure out what the guy who manages content for Delta Faucet does every day, what’s their strategy, what software they use and what their KPIs are. Those stories just don’t get told and the reason we started the podcast and the reason for the show is real people doing real work in social media, and we are really dedicated to that, telling stories of people who are in trenches who are managing these programs in companies who never have an opportunity to tell their stories. So it has gone really well and it’s had a huge impact on the business because most of the people we’ve worked with in the consulting side, either end up on the show or have been on the show first or things like that and that’s a good thing. The kind of people that we want as clients or the kind of people that we want to listen to the show.

James: Yeah, and I can see that, I think this podcasting space is filled with kind of hobbyists who are just doing this to entertain themselves without any real thought as to how useful it might be for their business, it is very clear that your podcast is totally aligned with the target market that you want to reach.

Jay: Well. It is a tactic that many business can employ and we actually tell people this all the time. Create a podcast that interviews your future clients. That works in every business and it is not that hard, you just have to commit to it.

James: Yeah and what better way to connect to your potential customers than just connect them on your show and give them a bit of airtime and a bit of spotlight in the right channel right?

Jay: It is a lot easier to build those relationships when you say hey can you be on this very, very popular podcast as opposed to hey can we sell you something? Which of those is an easier email to send?

James: Yeah! No contest. Now let’s close up with a question on how you’ve built the podcast. From one podcast to another, what are the strategies that you have implemented that have been successful for you growing social pro’s audience?

Jay: we’ve always had very detailed show notes. We used to do full transcripts so each podcast has a blog post and it shows up on the blog and that definitely helps because getting found in Google and people sharing it in social and those kinds of things certainly encourage in people who are guests on the show to talk about the show. We actually have badges that we give each guest that they can put in their own blogs that says that they’ve been on the Social Pros podcast. We send each guest a very nice USB headset as well to make sure that the audio quality is strong and that is theirs to keep. We started doing a series of e-books, the first one rolled out last month called the Social Pros All Stars where we compound information about each guest and to make that in to a real focus on them and kind of gets people excited about it and we also do quite a bit of retargeted advertising so we have retarget pixels set up in the convince and convert blog, also specifically on the social pros podcast pages and so each week we change the creative of the banners that says who’s on the show this week so if you are kind of surfing around and you might see it on ESPN or who knows where you’re going to see it and say hey social pros this week’s guest is XYZ just to king of keep the show top of mind and that has been real helpful as well.

James: That is nice! It is actually something I have thought of myself but not yet implemented so I am glad to hear you are using it with great success Jay! Now if our listeners want to find out a little bit more about you and connect with you, where will you be hiding out on the web?

Jay: You can find me pretty easily, you can go to JayBaer.com and that’s coming from a page about me and speaking about our side of the business and then the ConvinceAndConvert.com contains our blog and our podcast, and out daily email and a bunch of e-books and all kinds of other stuff.

James: Fantastic! All of the resources mentioned by Jay can be found in the show notes for episode 36 on TrafficJamCast.com along with links to Jay’s various homes on the web and the full transcript of today’s episode. Just before we close out Jay, I want to thank you again for your time and expertise. I thoroughly enjoyed our session today and hopefully we’ll get to do it again sometime soon.

Jay: I would love to do that, great job and congratulations on the show, it’s a terrific podcast and we’ll see you down the road.

This Week’s News in Traffic

It’s quite a light week of news this week but I do have two stories both of which are coming out of Google, the first of which I picked up from TechCrunch.com and the story is here that Google are introducing some new products relating to the marketing of applications, so these are products for app marketers. Google seem to be very much following in the steps of Facebook and others with this new introduction and certainly realize that app marketing is driving new growth and they have got to be a little bit more nimble in producing products that better fit us marketers so I’ll give you a little run down on what they’ve added. The first product is an in-app install app and this will be displayed on the display network where advertisers can target users based on the apps that they have already installed and the usage patterns that they’ve got on those apps. Now as an example given by Google, someone that is marketing a calorie counting app, could target someone who’s already installed a running app.

The second addition for this suite of products for app marketers is the YouTube true view companion for apps. And this is where Google are trying to add some functionality to the True View ads that appear at the start of YouTube videos that as a consumer you can skip past, where they will be adding an additional app install call to action which will be shown just below the video.  As an example, I will link off to this in the show notes for episode 36 so you can go and look at what this might look like.

To promote re-engagement and app usage, Google have added for advertisers the option of deep links for search and display ads that can be shown to users who already have a related app installed. Advertisers can take user who have already had the app installed directly to the most relevant page within their app from their ads on the search or on the Google display network. This feature is essentially the same that exists for regular search and display ads where advertisers can add an extension and link to inner pages of their site. All of these features are expected to be rolled out in the next few months.

Going to our second and final story of the day but staying with the search giant, we can announce that Google+ post ads. Don’t be alarmed! We are not going to start seeing our Google+ feed fill up with ads. Instead this new ad format gives us the ability to turn our Google+ posts in to ads that feature in the Google+ display network. So it is a little like a Facebook page ad post that does not appear in Facebook itself but on the internet elsewhere. That is the concept. There are minimum requirements for these ads, I believe that you have to have a page with a certain size following or have a profile with a certain size following so you’re going to need to have a well-established Google+ account before you get hold of this ad but I certainly like the sound of a native install, very much the craze of where advertising is moving and well worth checking out.

It is normally at this point in the show where I thank those people who have left either an iTunes or a Stitcher rating but just as it happens this week, we’ve had no new reviews on either of those two platforms so I really just want to say thank you to everyone who’s either left a comment, a review, a rating, or any form of feedback for Traffic Jam so far. I really do appreciate every single one of your comments. If you are a regular listener and you haven’t left either a comment, a rating, or a review or any form of feedback for the show, I really appreciate if you leave a comment or a review on the two major platforms, iTunes or stitcher rating or just a review there or just leave a comment over at TrafficJamCast.com. Your comments help me better understand what’s good and not so good about the show so I can build a better show for you going forward so if you have a spare one or two minutes this week I really appreciate it. Head on over to iTunes or Stitcher, and leave your rating and feedback for the show.

The One Minute Traffic Tip

In the same way that I put my guests here on Traffic Jam in front of my audience, you can get more exposure to other people’s audiences by getting interviewed. But unless you are a real household name, interview requests can be few and far between. So in order to get more interviews, I found that by adding a PS in the footer of my email broadcast saying something like PS I am available for podcast interviews come and subscribe to ask. And as long as that person requesting has an established website or podcast show with at least a few episodes, I will accept because it puts me in front of a new audience and gets more traffic to my own site. So if you are knowledgeable to a particular topic or have an interesting story to tell, your action step this week is to add a PS to your email footer mentioning that you accept interviews.

Thank you listener for tuning in to this episode#36. I will of course be back in about seven days from now with episode 37. On the agenda is going to be a concept called content shock, tune in next week to find out what that is all about because I am going to be discussing that and how to better leverage content distribution by my guest next week, Mr. Chad Pollits so I look forward to welcoming you back for that episode, remember in the meantime to subscribe via iTunes and Stitcher radio and to get direct links to all Traffic Jam episodes, go to TrafficJamCast.com where you can join the discussion on this episode and get links to all of the resources and social media profiles and all of that good stuff mentioned today by Jay Baer. Also check out Veravo.com for more traffic tips and training and to learn how I can help you get more traffic, leads, and sales from the search engines and to help you take your business to the next level. We end this week’s show by Radio Head. The track title is 15 Steps and of course chosen by my guest today, Jay Baer. So enjoy the track, I look forward to welcoming you back in about seven days. See back here then.

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