Martin Shervington knows more than a thing or two about Google Plus. Referenced by Guy Kawasaki as “one of the most clever people in social media” and by Chris Brogan, author of Google Plus for Business as his go to guy, you know this Brit has got this Google+ thing sussed. With more than 340,000 Google+ followers and engagement levels that place him in the top 500 of all 500 million Google+ users Martin Shervington also has the stats to back it up.

Listen in to episode 35 and learn how Martin leverages some little known circle strategies to steadily increase his following and engagement levels and how this has helped him increase traffic and revenue for PlusYourBusiness.com.

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“Your followers don’t want to be a number on Google+. Engage, make them feel special” @MartinSherv
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Hey what’s up there listener? Welcome back to Traffic Jam, the podcast show that teaches you how to get more traffic, leads and sales and build a profitable audience online. I am your host James Reynolds and this is episode#35. Jamming with me on today’s episode is Martin Shervington from PlusYourBusiness.com for surprisingly, a conversation all about Google+. Following of course Martin’s interview we’ll have all of the regular segments: this week’s news in traffic, the one minute traffic tip, and of course, to play out the show, the Traffic Jam jam chosen by Martin.

So what have we got in the agenda in today’s interview? We’re going to be talking about Google+ etiquette, effective content creation for Google+, using Google+ communities, personalized search, building an engaged Google+ following, some super ninja Google+ circle tricks and a whole lot more.

There will be no fancy introduction from me this week. I am going to instead leave it to Chris Brogan who was our guest on episode#10 of Traffic Jam and of course the author of the book Google+ for Business. Here’s what he says for Martin and why you should absolutely listen in to everything that Martin says on this interview. He says, “I love that Martin Shervington fellow. Follow him to know a lot more about Google+. Between him and Mark Traphagen, I have no interest on telling anyone a single thing about the platform. They have got it handled.” When that comes from Chris Brogan, you know that Martin knows his stuff. So on that note, let’s move in to today’s interview and warmly welcome Martin Shervington.

James: So welcome listeners! You’re tuned in to episode#35 of Traffic Jam. This is of course the interview section and joining me across the airwaves in sunny San Diego today is Martin Shervington. Martin, welcome!

Martin: Thanks for having me James! It’s great to be here and it’s good to be talking to another Brit who’s not even in his own country.

James: Yeah, well us Brits we tend to escape, right? We’re trying to find a warmer, hotter, more interesting environment we seek it out, I think like you and I have done.

Martin: We’re doing okay.

James: We’re doing okay. Martin, you’re a pretty big deal on Google+ and you’ve got a significantly larger following than most – I think currently somewhere around the 340 thousand mark as of today. And not only that, you have a very high level of engagement on the platform. I think according to a report that I saw you are somewhere in the top 500 of five hundred million Google+ users in terms of post engagement. What would you have to say to those critics who say Google+ is a ghost town only used by Google employees?

Martin: It’s been a miss for a while, other platforms are getting so much more engagement and Google+ is almost like the poor relation and having just been in the social media marketing world and heard Mike Stelsna who’s the event organizer stand up there and say, if you think this still, then why don’t you go on Google+ and find out for yourself because what people tend to do James is they go to Google+ and they tend to post there, and they go, nobody +1’ed it, nobody commented, nobody shared. This place is quiet. Okay, you don’t understand what’s going on. What happens is that as your network builds, more people start to see your content. And when more people see your content, more people can engage and get the opportunity to engage because they see that content in their streams. If you just turn up your posts and not building your network, then you’ll find that it’s a very quiet place. So to reverse the thinking and give first before you start moving your content in to your profiles and in to your pages, you’ve got to go and build your engagement through your network with other people. It’s a busy old place to get started but people have to understand it is slightly different from the other platforms.

James: Yeah, that’s good! I don’t want to talk too much today about getting started on getting on the platform and setting up the profile because we have covered that pretty well with the likes of Chris Brogan and Ryan Hanley on past episodes but I am very keen in talking to your about this topic of building an engaged following on the platform. What do you think are the biggest mistakes people make in creating content on Google+ other than what you just said of just putting something out there and hoping that people react to it? What mistakes do people make on Google+?

Martin: For you James we’ll make it an intermediate-advanced session so I will step it up. We’re going to have to start with 30 seconds of basics; the first stage that people need to do ahead and engage with other people before they even consider themselves. And to do that, you +1, you comment, you share other people’s content. When you do that, other people start to engage with you and they start to add you back in. that’s the first thing. The next thing is you want to add in some circles and you want to join some communities and start interacting with people and their content there as well. Okay, that’s the basic stuff. Then, and this is a technique I have used for about two years, start thinking about building your own circles based upon the way people are interacting with you. What I mean by that is that if people are engaging, then start to put them in to your circle where you recognize they are the one that are engaging with you. And I tend to do a step up process where the more people that engage with me, so the more that that individual is engaging with me, the more then that I start paying attention to them because if their content is relevant, I want to build a relationship, I want to be on the radar. So I have three circles set up. I have a new engages circle – they have not engaged before, I have an increased engagement circle. So that’s when somebody who’s a new engager historically, they then keep on engaging and I say wow this person really wants to connect with me, so I put them up a circle and then, once I find over a period of time that somebody is now really engaged and really evangelizing the content that I put in to, then I move them in to the grand evangelist circle, in relation to a page, everybody is going to have their own system, they are going to work it out themselves but essentially, what I am doing is I want to find the hundred people, who when I post content, are running around telling everybody that this content is awesome. So the first stage is engage with other people, start to get them to know that you are interested in them, the next stage is start to build these circles so that when you put your content out, the stuff that is really important to you, whether it is videos or whether it is blog posts, whether you are doing hangouts on air, then it is far more likely that the people that you’ve been engaging with, will see that content, engage around it, and bit by bit, start to get these evangelists. And it is a case of reciprocation. This is the thing on Google+. Unless people feel that you’re reciprocating, their attention moves elsewhere. We’ll pause there, because I can take this a little further as we discuss James, but that is a system that I use and that is one of the reasons why I get good engagement.

James: Now, is that all you’ve literally got set up? Is your basic profile set up in terms of circles, literally three circles or have you got it a little bit filtered down a little bit more than that?

Martin: Not quite. I mean I don’t know if I can show it through an article that I have done and if it will be useful –

James: Absolutely! And what we’ll do is we’ll do more than that we’ll link off in the show notes especially since it is relevant content so the link will be in the episode page itself.

Martin: Wonderful! There’s an article on Social Media Examiner which I gave step by step on how to find your hundred biggest fans on Google+ and that gives you that aspect on how I do my circles.  I have quite a lot of circles that have different purposes and I am going to give you more detail around that because it will help people to understand the process, but it is the foundation of it and yeah, let’s just say that this is one aspect. Do you want to go more in to my circles and how to get that set up James?

James: Yeah, I think that would be great, I mean, the nugget that you’ve just laid down there about the levels of connection is something that I have not heard of for and I am sure it is getting a few ears pricked up from Traffic Jam listeners, so yeah, let us dive a little deeper in to it.

Martin: Okay, so this is all within the context of how I get the engagement that I get and I think you’re going to like this one because the next one is I build opt in many email lists using Google circles. The way that I do it is ask people would they like to be in a circle in relation to a subject matter. I have lots of different branches but let me give you one example, and this isn’t to be done as a beginner’s thing, this is to be when they are further along but let’s say you want to build two lists because you have 2 types of content, I might have personal development content and I have Google+ hints and tips. On the personal development content, I might say, who wants to join my notification circle, where I will give you some special content and notify you that on a weekly basis? And people opt in to that and I then build a circle, and when I have that special content – let’s say a blog post, an email video and what that, I can then share to public and notify that circle because they have agreed by email and you do that by checking the box when it is available as long as it is not too big and a few other factors that appears when you have the option on the share in box having added that circle in alongside public. As it happens in the article I mentioned it’s got a little bit more information on that particular feature but what this does is move your content, not just the notifications, you don’t just see the notifications in Google+, it moves that in to Gmail or email, and they can then receive it in a way which is likely to punctuate their attention because often notifications is a busy old thing and might get missed so this is a mini opt in list and I use that regularly. So I’ve got two different approaches, one personal development and one Google+ hints and tips. It means it can be different people receiving that as opposed to clumping them all in to one place. There is another thing that I do with circles if you probably want to take it to the next level up which is I build circles for campaigns. And I say to people – who wants to be in a circle for – and I did this for a rubics cube campaign because I have become friendly online with the rubics cube called earn a rubic. And so we ran a campaign for a day and we have about 60 people that said they want to engage around that and would share images and the thing is, it becomes a seed in circle. By getting involved and putting out a post, other people then receive that post, they get in their email notification, and they say, hey I am going to join in quickly. They share the content, and because I use a political hashtag, they are propagating that hashtag across Google+ and that trend to that numbers 8 to number 5 for probably about nine hours a day. So this is when you start to take circles as a seed in method and bringing people together and again I do all of this very much in permission marketing where if you ask people’s permission and you keep to that promise, then people seem to be quite happy in receiving those notifications.

James: Yeah, and I guess this is all down to segmentation as well. I mean as you so rightly said, making sure that you do divide up your audience into relevant circles and then making sure those people only get the relevant message to the topic they are interested in as you’re likely to do with email I guess. I have got a follow up question which you kind of glided over so I am interested to get the exact strategy. How do you go about approaching those people for their permission? Is it literally a one to one message once you see people starting to engage with your content a little more?

Martin: There are several options, I can tell you how I do it, but this is only one method, in fact, I am going to give you several different versions of this. When I started, what I used to do is have a new engagers circle and then there are about 50 people in it, so these people are interacting with me and particularly sharing my content. I would then send them a private message saying thanks so much I am going to share a public circle and I would like to know privately, would you like to receive notifications from me in the future? They would then opt in at that point so this certain percentage of people, let’s say 10 to 15 people would opt in out of 50, and I would keep doing that process to build up the lists. So that was one method that I used. When I am like that publicly, people do not realize that I had that conversation with people essentially. Does that make sense? That was one method I used. Another method might just to publicly say, who wants in? and people will opt in directly on the thread. I know that other people do the one to one, would you like to be a public circle conversation. I happen not to have used that it’s a good way to do it, it’s just a slower way to do it, it’s just a slower way potentially but if it works then it is the right thing to do.

James: Yeah, I think since you have a sizeable audience, it makes more sense for you to do a broadcast approach where you publicly give the people the option to that.

Martin: I can do that now, and I think there is a certain point where you can do that in the early days. People don’t want to be a number on Google+. They want to feel that you are engaging with them and I make sure that I give things to the circle that is special. I have private conversations with them. They may get advanced content and if there is a new video collection they may get it a week ahead of everyone else and that sort of approach makes them feel special, makes them feel respected and boost the relationship. Everything has a phase in Google+. I actually have a course around this because there’s tremendous amounts in the system about what I think is ultimately we’re using the system in Google+ circles in a way that allows people to think and feel special,. And everybody has to find their way on it. This is the great thing. There is not going to be one restaurant marketing approach. What I am hoping is that the methods that I am using, the methods that I am communicating and showing people, I am hoping that they can be rolled out across the board. And this is why I give so much content, because I want Google+ to work for marketers as well as just the general persons there just to have fun.

James: Yeah, good. And there are similarities between Google+ as a platform and what you can do with it is very much aligned to what you can do with a very sophisticated contact management or email management system where you can tag segment people with the tags that are relevant to what they are interested and to give them special information that is going to build rapport and build that connection with your audience and it is all available on Google+! Wonderful Martin! Now a little bit around content just to dive in to that a little bit more now. I think Google+ as a platform is a little bit more business orientated than other social networks. However, I have observed you quite a bit and I noticed that you are putting out a lot of non-business content; pictures of sunsets, cats sliding around on wooden floors. Is it important especially in this kind of people driven semantic web that our friend David Amerland who talked about so much to bring a kind of a balance to your content on Google+?

Martin: Is it important? My content strategy is to build relationships using the content and if I just post business stuff all day long, I know a large segment of my audience all around the Google+ are going to get turned off. Because some people want all the Google+ tips and they don’t want to see how to use it in business. So I have to understand, my content represents me to the whole of my audience when I post it publicly. So let me give a show around to how I approach it. I will post something in the morning to start the day and I will post something in the evening to end the day. That means that its caps. Everyone knows that I have done that and I have left, and it’s usually early, usually 7 in the morning and 9 o’clock at night. Everything else in between is just whatever I do, whatever campaign I am running, whether it is Google+ tips, social media, whether it is a little bit comedy, whether it’s a tutorial, all of that is contained within that and it means that if people are following me, that’s what they get from me. If I just post business stuff all that time, the people in to personal development, the people who want me to be vaguely amusing, they will just go elsewhere. They certainly won’t have me on notify and they may not have my content on full blast in their screen either. So my approach has been formed by the network. There is a lot more to how I run the campaigns and when I am trying to build community engagement around content that will then run on that, there’s a lot more to that. David Amerland is a great friend and we talk about it and he knows i’ve got to keep it human otherwise it gets a little bit tacky and we’ve got to be a little bit broader than that. So that’s why we get cat clips on weekends.

James: Yeah, and I certainly picked up that Rubics campaign posts a few weeks ago and enjoyed watching the videos there and I think that too is testament that the more fun content certainly puts together all of the business related stuff and certainly builds rapport that otherwise would be very difficult posting business content day in day out right?

Martin: Absolutely! But there is another bit that people may not realize. For instance, when I run a campaign like the Rubics cube campaign, it is very structured. And that structure then gets written up and then the social analysis will happen by at least more than two promo decks and we will then publish that and this is how we did it so all of the campaigns have an intent which is yeah, let’s have fun, but I’ll then be writing that exactly how it happened so that is a business case study because you can understand that the levels of seed in required to getting trending in Google+ at this time without people – I can tell you exactly, I can show you the bottom of the post. So there is a lot of insight to be had from having fun sometimes and just playing and it brings the community together for that period of time. So there is a lot of intent to why I do things as I do it and I do enjoy those campaigns and I get more creative every time because you can’t just repeat the same thing again. We did a plus on that one and trended #1 for two hours and then #2 for about nine hours and that was about a month ago and that has three thousand people involved. So the air is fine and that is great but then the case studies are being looked at by pretty serious people because nobody else at the moment has taken this approach and that of course is great plus your business is getting the attention.

James: Active users in Google+ seem to be very respectful generally and there seems to be a few unwritten rules of etiquette like for instance always acknowledging the originating source of the content that you share. What Google+ etiquette should our listener can ready to double down on Google+ are you aware of?

Martin: I have never done a post on Google+ etiquette and now I get quoted for all the things so I think let’s look at the origination of the source. Very often, you’ll find that somebody shared you’ll want to share it and somebody will hashtag which just says that you found it via somebody that’s what that one is, and I think that is an important thing because it give a little shout tag that somebody else found the information and credits that one. The next one is communities. If people drop links without context in to a community, that’s more likely than not, based on the community guidelines, to be considered a sham. So that’s another one. Do you know what the big thing is? Google+ shapes you and essentially for people to think and to see that it is better to be nice than not. So when you tend to find the culture to be different on Twitter. I noticed on Twitter when events are going on, make comments and it’s just whatever thought that comes in to their head it’s got a hashtag and it’s becoming wild then. On Google+ you can edit comments after because there is no hurry; it’s not this fast running stream that is based in the moment in time; its post is a URL on their own. It lives in search potentially for a long time so people tend to be little more considerate and I think that’s something that when people arrive they are quite surprised about. There really is a different culture based around the system that Google have given us so I think just consideration to think that you want to build relationships, so what would be good in the situation? So I have another big one since we are talking about circles, don’t click that notify by email unless you have permission. That’s my biggest one. It really does wind people up to receive unsolicited email from people. There you go, there’s a few there James.

James: Fantastic! I’d like to expand a little bit on this concept of link dumping on Google+ because in along itself Google+ generally favors that longer form style of content just purely by its nature of design and I think since we are talking on a traffic show here called Traffic Jam, what advice would you have for moving people from Google+ to your website because for many people their intention will be to move people to their site itself that isn’t just involving dumping a link and then hoping that people will click on it.

Martin: Well, we’re going to bring the whole lot together in this bit so let us now look at the value of engagement on the content that allows it to circles in search. This is what it is all about, this is what the strategy I use with circles – building niche circles around topic areas, when those people engage on your content and the circles are just a way to make sure that it gets attention, when they engage on the content, if they have authority in that area in particular, then that authority starts to move towards you and your content. So that engagement can flick the content in to search in a way which no engagement is less likely to, so engagement will allow your content to surface in Google search in higher positions than no engagement. Now what this means is you can use this for social SEO which from a traffic point of view, is awesome. So I have done this in people search I can say but if people search for what is Google right now as a search engine, I think they’ll find that one post I have written has either the top spot or certainly within the first few for what is Google. That has brought me a hundred and twenty-three thousand links from that post so we are talking traffic and the methods that I used are built around getting engagement that will signal to Google search that this message here is important based on these people that are interacting with it that then turns in to the search position which leads to your traffic so the approach is social, search, site. Those are the things to be thinking about. And then the final is to press that one button so that people can share that back and the Google +1 sharing it back, allowing flow back in to Google+ which allows it to get back to this engagement. So that is the process, that is the model that I have been working on consistently and it is awesome!

James: And this also is affected by your connections right? I mean I’ll actually use an example here which I tested out prior to the interview, I logged in to Google search for Google+ for Business so your website is showing to me at #5 position I think because I am connected to you on Google+. But when I am logged out and I search in an incognito window, you appear I think at #10, clearly showing that the fact that we are connected on Google+ does influence where your results appear to me within the search results. That’s also what we’re talking about here right?

Martin: Yeah, that’s then another bit it, personalization is so effective which is why building your network is so important. Because, you are absolutely right, us being connected means that me and you influence search results.

James: Yeah, I got it. I think we’ll also link back to what is I think 2 episodes prior to this, an interview that I did with Mark Traphagen which was also around the topic of author rank and authorship using Google+ because this is very relevant to the conversation we are having here and I think will add a lot more value to listeners who have not checked out that episode yet. Now, for our conversation Martin, I’d like to leave and wrap things up asking you about tools because everyone loves a good tool that might help them improve productivity on Google+ and help manage their profiles a little better. What little tips have you got that might be a good add on for what people are doing in Google+.

Martin: I have got a few of these because this is one of my favorites is using our page, you can look at our profile at the moment so I love that and what I use that and then one called friends + me to distribute from the page directly to for instance LinkedIn. And if people are not using Buffer, then I can tell you it will transform how you manage your day because you’ve got content ready to rock and roll. Some people use Suite but I use Buffer. Now for my profile, the one that I say if you are looking for something slightly more advanced approach to things, then check out Nodex which is Nod3x.com. That’s a social network anlaysis tool which I mention that we use to rank campaigns. Now that is a step up. That is getting in to the advanced territories but if you want to know what reach there is on Google+ for everyone’s content or hashtags and far beyond, then that’s going to be all inside.

James: Fantastic! Well Martin, I am going to give you the floor back for one last time, is there any passing final tips or tricks that you’d like to pass on to Traffic Jam listeners just before we close out this episode. Any last comments from you?

Martin: Thanks James! I think let’s just return to that model – social builds your network. Find people that are the most important people for you to connect with that are potentially already influencers that you want to build a relationship with and in turn they will then start to see you as an influencer when they engage around your content and realize the value that you add to that. So that’s the social. Then, using the circles, think about getting the engagements up on your posts that will allow the search to indicate that you are an authority in this particular subject area. Then, when they come to your site, make sure that you’ve got that +1 button so it allows people to engage in the content directly in your site to float back in to social. And it really will transform how you view getting traffic when you use this kind of process.

James: Martin, that’s absolutely fantastic! Thank you so much for your time and your expertise I really have felt this is a thoroughly enjoyable episode and I am sure listeners out there are getting a huge amount of value from it so thank you for appearing on Traffic Jam. Hopefully sometime again in the future we can revisit this topic and bring you back on board again.

Martin: Absolutely! I’d love to come back James. Thank you!

James: Fantastic! So listeners that was episode #35 of Traffic Jam or at least the interview section of episode#35. You’ll find the links to all the resources and training that Martin mentioned in today’s interview in the show notes page of Traffic Jam episode#35 so head on over there to find that. We’ll now move in to the next section.

This Week’s News in Traffic

For the first story this week, we head on over to Twitter who’ve announced a new look for their web profile. This is actually a story I have picked out on today having checked out someone else’s Twitter timeline and seen a wide cover photo style picture at the top of their Twitter feed. According to Twitter, this new update allows for a larger profile photo, a customizable header section, and also a section where you can show off your best tweets. Here are some of the main features. Firstly, pinned tweets and this is the ability to pin one of your favorite tweets at the top of your page so it is easier for your followers to see what you are all about. The second sort of big update is best tweets and this is where tweets that received more engagement or interaction will actually appear slightly larger so your best content is always easy to find when someone checks out your profile. And the next major update is filtered tweets. This gives you the ability to change the view by which you look at someone else’s profile and you can select from these following options, tweet only, tweets and photos and videos, or tweets and replies. This kind of new look can certainly seem Facebook page-esqued. I don’t know if Twitter is trying to follow suite on what Facebook are doing but the look and feel certainly has some similarities. Go check it out on your own profile. I do believe the functionality is available already and perhaps post a comment in this week’s episode show notes page and let me know what you think.

Staying firmly in the Twitter table, Twitter UK has created an own-the-moment tool to create real time marketers. When you call it real time marketing, news jacking or joining the conversation in a marketing event, marketers are always looking for opportunities to insert their brands in to online banter out current events. To help with this task, Twitter’s United Kingdom and island small and medium business teams created an interactive creative tool called Own the Moment Planner. I’ll make sure that planner is linked off to in today’s show notes if you want to check it out. It is very much your own focus with reminders for things like world snooker championship coming up this Saturday and the Euro Vision song contest final on May 10th just in case you want to check it out. I don’t believe there is any US Version right now or a UAE version or for anywhere else in the world other than the United Kingdom but still worth checking out. Should you be looking to hijack new stories, that’s a question you might have to answer yourself? I would certainly recommend acting with caution there are some stories which are certainly inappropriate to jump on such as the Malaysian Airways missing flight which a company I saw sort of trying to promote at the back of a few weeks ago certainly did not do themselves any favors so be careful which stories you get up on. Certainly make sure that those stories are aligned to the target market that you want to attract to inject your own stories in to those events.

To the third story of the day, I go to a report that I have picked up from Marketingland.com and that is that advertiser revenue from Facebook ads rose at 191% year on year versus a 21% increase from paid search. While page search does still dominate ad budgets, Facebook ads are growing faster than ever both on a quarterly and an annual basis. Spending on page search rose 10% versus the 37% increase on Facebook advertising year over year. So the story is here of course that both channels are still absolutely and if you are not utilizing one or both channels, you’re probably missing out on a lot of available traffic. Certainly look in to Facebook advertising if you’re not looking in to that yet because I do believe there is a lot of available opportunity still existing on Facebook.

A big tip of my hat and a general nod of appreciation in the direction of Ralph who’s left a quite awesome Stitcher review this week and he says James never ceases to amaze me with every episode. He’s got the top guns in the industry as his guests and he does his homework by doing the prep work really well.  I love the tiny tidbits about each guest. Marketers need not look further, James has got the most important topics covered on every episode. Well, thank you Ralph that is quite awesome. I really, really do appreciate you stopping by and leaving your support for the show and as I say, as always, the best way to show your support to Traffic Jam is by leaving a review on iTunes or Stitcher or indeed by leaving a speak pipe message over at TrafficJamCast.com if you want to leave an audio recording with your comments about the show and perhaps some suggestions for me as well, you can do so by heading over to TrafficJamCast.com, strolling to the base of the site and then clicking on the leave a voice message function. So there, or Stitcher or iTunes really is the best way to show your appreciation for Traffic Jam.

The One Minute Traffic Tip

I am going to call this week’s tip speed up your site and speed up the ranking. Sites that take many seconds to load make a bad experience for users and because of that Google demotes any website that is slow loading. So one of the easiest ways you can increase your website’s load speed and therefore it’s ranking is to get faster website hosting. If you are currently paying less than 200 Dirhams per month, about $50 or so, then you’re probably not paying enough to host your website. To get top rankings, you need performance hosting such as a dedicated server which will set you back probably a hundred and fifty dollars or perhaps a little bit more or better still, get a specialized hosting provider for WP Engine for Word Press which we use on the veravo.com website and that will set you back about $100 per month.  We went through this exercise recently and noticed about a 15% increase of search traffic as a result of faster web hosting.

Thank you for listening in to Episode#35 of Traffic Jam. I will of course be back in about seven days from now with episode #36 where I will be joined by Mr. Utility Himself from ConvinceAndConvert.com so another not to be missed episode. Remember to subscribe via iTunes and Stitcher radio and for a direct link for 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 try to see how I can help you get more traffic, leads and sales from the search engines.

We end this week’s show with a little bit of thievery corporation and it is chosen by the fantastic Martin Shervington.

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Eric Enge requires no sales force. His successful digital consultancy Stone Temple Consulting gets 100% of its customers from inbound marketing. No cold calling, no hard sales just a steady stream of prospects picking up the phone and asking “how do we get started?” How does Eric create such a predictable flow of sales enquiries with zero outbound sales? Content marketing!

Eric is undoubtedly a leading authority in the world of SEO. He is the co-author of The Art of SEO book, he writes for Forbes, Copyblogger, Search Engine Land and Search Engine Watch, all impressive feats. However these accolades are more than noteworthy listings on his CV, they are a strategic move to increase his authority and leverage other people’s audiences, resulting in wider exposure for him and his business and indirectly better search engine placement.

Tune in to episode 34 and learn the steps required to build a fully inbound sales system, plus exactly how you need to adapt your SEO strategy in the era of Google’s Hummingbird algorithm.

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Hey there listener! Welcome back to Traffic Jam! This is episode #34 of the podcast show that teaches you how to get more traffic and build a profitable audience online. I’m your host, James Reynolds, and really today, I just want to drive straight in to the content because I’m very excited for today’s guest and also for today’s topic. We’re joined today by Eric Enge, CEO of Stone Temple Consulting and if you have listened to episode#33 of Traffic Jam, you will be familiar with Stone Temple Consulting already because it is the same company that Mark Traphagen works for.

Eric Enge is doing some really great things in the area of inbound marketing in search and pioneering new ideas and pioneering a much needed change in approach to SEO so I really am super stoked to have him on the show. Alongside Rand Fishkin, guest on episode#22, he’s right up there as a leader in the SEO industry. He’s a contributor all over the web in some very well-known places like Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch and Copy Blogger and on today’s episode we will be talking about how he’s developed and nurtured those relationships with other people’s audiences.

The interview with Eric, that’s coming right up next but don’t go anywhere after that because we’ve got all of the regular segments of Traffic Jam, the ones that you’re used to if you’re a regular listener to the show, the one minute traffic tip, this week’s news in traffic, and then of course we end the show with a jam chosen by my guest today, that guest is of course Eric Enge and let’s hear from him right now.

James: So what’s up listener? You’re listening in to Traffic Jam episode#34 and jamming with me today on the topic of SEO and inbound marketing is the 1984 World Champion of Foosball. Eric, welcome to the call!

Eric: Thank you! And I am sure that 1984 World Champion is relevant to the topic of content marketing and SEO.

James: It’s right on topic! I couldn’t move past the intro without getting that little factoid in; I think it’s very fun and interesting so just before we get in to the serious stuff, tell me about how you’ve become world champion of foosball, but not only that, you’re a national champion of a sport called Goalie Wars too? Is that right?

Eric: Actually Goalie Wars is the particular event foosball that I was world champion in ’84 and I was national champion for that same event in 1985 so those are mainly different events and that was the one that I was particularly good at and really how it happened is that it kind of fit a funny role in my life and the funny role is that it was like many teenage boys I was not particularly focused and I discovered foosball and started enjoying it and started competing and I kind of get in to this mode of working to accomplish something for myself and it’s really like a key point in teenage life, that’s a whole kind of different conversation at length and when you find out you want to accomplish something, I focused on everything I need to do that and it’s kind of what happened. I just get in to it and started going to local tournaments all the time and eventually started going on the world tour and was ranked pro and all that kind of stuff.

James: It’s interesting stuff and it is a whole new topic of conversation entirely different to what we’ll be discussing today but there certainly is a lot of commonality to the guest that I have on the show, the people that I surround myself with; so many of them have been active sports people or athletes or had some form of competitive competition – that’s not really a great way to describe it but they have been involved in some sort of sporting activity or competition  as they were younger and it certainly builds up certain traits that are helpful and effective in business I think later on in life.

Eric: I agree.

James: Now let’s get to the serious introduction. You’re the co-author of The Art of SEO along with former Traffic Jam guest, Rand Fishkin, you’re the CEO of Stone Temple Consulting which is an SEO and digital marketing agency based out on Boston in the USA, and you’re a content contributor to many websites I think our guest will be familiar with such as Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Land amongst others. You’re certainly a well-known authority Eric in the topic of SEO and inbound marketing but do you practice what you preach? Are you doing all these stuff with Stone Temple Consulting itself?

Eric: Absolutely! In fact, we are a company that has no sales force, we make no phone calls to attempt to get new customers, and we don’t reach out to people and pitch our services. The only way to become a client is to reach out to us through the phone number listed on the site or the email address listed on the site or come and find me at a conference and it’s not actually something that we’re planning to change; in fact, we’ve doubled down on it. I think you’ve said this is episode 34. Episode 33 guest Mark Traphagen works with us and he’s joined us as of January 2nd so we’re actually increasing our content marketing efforts as a way of trying to build the business and its fun and it’s exciting. To be honest with you, I know I get energized by it because you always get your creative juices going and you’re trying to figure out what’s the new strategy that we can do and what’s this great new piece of content that we can come up with and it’s a great way to go about the whole thing.

James: Yeah, I think perhaps there’s still a scary concept to many businesses. I mean going without a sales force might seem to them that they’re doing away with some form of regular leads or putting themselves in a scenario where their flow of leads might be unpredictable because they are not reaching out. Do you think that would be the case?

Eric: I agree that it’s scary for people to do and in our case, we did have the luxury – I had a solo person consulting business when I first brought someone on to help me build and grow the company and a guy called John B who is an awesome SEO and content marketer in his own right but we were able to sit there and patiently build the business so we had some financial freedom basically working on our side, so it’s not necessarily easy for everyone to embrace it exactly the way we did it but if you have a business which has a strong component of all out sales to bring leads in that’s great! I am not proposing that you lay those people off or stop doing that, but you can actually supplement your sales to this inbound approach and use that sales channel to allow you to be patient like we could be at Stone Temple, and by the way, as you do more and more of that content marketing to drive inbound leads, you’re also building the authority online which makes those outbound sales efforts more effective because that sales person can say so and so from our company recently published an article exactly the topic you are talking about Mr. potential customer, let me send you the link to that and see what they wrote and such and such, it is a very powerful email if you do have an outbound sales component.

James: Yeah. Well it is certainly something that I would testify to in my own business. I mean the amount of content that we use in other areas of the business is huge and we’re forever pointing people to articles and post that we’ve written even if we get a question from a current customer about what processes we’re undertaking and why we are doing them. I mean it has in other effects other than just actually drawing people in right? This really transcends to the whole business.

Eric: It really does. And there is a little bit of a cultural aspect to it and the key point that I want to get to is that you can’t publish what I call BLATHER, right? It’s a technical term for you and I will highlight it this way; if you actually do high in the in title operator which basically requires the text string that you specify with it to be in its exact form in the title tag so let’s take a query in title: “how to make French toast”, you’ll get thousands of pages and I can tell you that I have not had French toast for 25 years because it does not fit what I do with my diet these days, I can still tell you how to make it. You get thousands of articles in response to the query I just tested and you don’t need thousands of answers for this, you need a few, maybe 4 or something and Google’s happy and now they have the definitive works of all the works to make French toast covered in 4 web pages and all these other people are kind of wasting their time and I know I have shared it like it is Google’s perspective but now think about it from a prospect’s perspectives, somebody who’s out there looking for articles. If you write blathers articles like a how to make French toast article, they’re never going to find you and if they do they’re not going to think that you’ve done anything in particular interest. So the big key now is what is your strategy for coming up with content which is going to attract people’s attention? How is it helping them solve their problem? How is it advancing a craft? What is it that makes you unique? What is it that triggers an emotional reaction so that they are laughing, or crying or connecting with you? These are the kinds of problems you need to solve if you are going to make a content marketing effective.

James: So how do you identify what those topics might be? Let’s get down to the nitty gritty of it, how do you determine that strategy and what type of content is going to be the right fit for your target market?

Eric: So there are a couple of ways to go about it and I think they are both important. So the first is really spend some time thinking about what makes your business and your expertise unique and different because in my opinion it really needs to come from your own passion and what makes you special because whatever business you’re in, hopefully there is something that makes you special because otherwise you have a very lifeless business in general. It is all about hustling you’re not special and that’s a hard way to live in my opinion. You know how they say that charity starts at home, it is the case that content marketing strategy start at home and you have to think about what it is that you can really put out there that might have some aspect of uniqueness perhaps just coming from your passion and your perspective and how you think about things. And then of course you can supplement that with research on what your competitors are doing and what other stuff is being written out there and that’s really important to do too. I really want to urge people to really start internally think about what makes you special. What are you expert at? So that when you put something out there and somebody makes some comments or they want to debate stuff with you, you can say wait a minute I disagree with you, here’s what I think about it. I am not talking about starting fights here but engaging and really getting in a real conversation have become really easy for you because it starts from what you know and what you are passionate about.

James: Now we’re talking really about this concept of content marketing, with the emphasis I think, at least on the point on marketing. You in your case, you’re not just publishing content to your site, you are doing that of course but you’re also leveraging perhaps other relationships, other websites that you are a contributor to, tell us about how that process has worked out for you.

Eric: Yeah, it has worked out great! The sites that I write on most often, you mentioned two of them, Search Engine Land and Search Engine Watch, those are great sites. I also write on Forbes, I write on Copy Blogger, and sometimes I will show up on other sites like Social Media Today or Marketing Land and things like that but I am a big fan of what you call OPA or other people’s audience. I can tell you when we first launched the Stone Temple Consulting blog which now has a pretty good readership, but when we first launched it, during the first two years, the best articles I ever wrote were the first six I wrote on the site, and no one ever read them.

James: Oh my gosh! I have heard many people say that. You’ve put all the effort upfront and no one comes by to read it. It’s self-destroying I think.

Eric: Yes, it can be very frustrating and very scary and this is a stage where a lot of people drop out. You really want to understand how to get access to other people’s audiences. There’s two major ways to do it. One category is engaging in social media because there’s communities and groups and there’s people influential there. You can start engaging in social media and that’s very much a content marketing strategy by the way, not just publishing articles; its publishing on social media sites – Facebook or Twitter, Google+ or what have you. And you can actually start by getting on these platforms, getting exposure to new audiences and building relationships which can lead to people coming to your site. So that’s one big part of what you need to do. The other big part of what you need to do is you need to think about let’s say, I want to write for Forbes and I haven’t been writing and I don’t have a lot of industry reputation, that might be a very tough and daunting target to think about coming out of the gate. So you don’t start by emailing them because they do not have any proof as to who you are. They are going to look for their own social proof that what you write is good stuff and that you have something special to add. So, you don’t necessary have to start at the top tier, but no matter what you’re doing but in the long term in my opinion, your objective needs to be top tier; but you don’t get to be there on day 1. Maybe you start two tiers down with some really high quality sites but they’re not as well-known and not as well established. Build a relationship with those people through social media, get to the point where they start to get willing to take content from you. Get yourself established, spend a few months doing that, and then once you have that track record and you can show the great stuff that you’ve been writing for this site that I am calling Tier 3 right now, start contacting tier 2 sites and say, I’d be interested in writing for you, here’s the great content that I wrote over at this other site and you can see the social response I am getting with my articles over here is strong and I’d love to be able to contribute content to your audience. And now you have taken a step up the ladder; and now you’re in tier 2. And when you’ve been in tier 2 for a while and established your reputation there, you’ve really gotten yourself to the point that you’re ready to go to tier 1. For me a tier 1 site would be the Forbes and I worked that process up to get there carefully and that’s great. For a local business, it might be the local newspaper. If you are in the Baltimore area, it might be the Baltimore Sun, you’re not looking for New York Times as it is not applicable to you but how you define what tier 1 is to you depends on the specifics of your business and your market but that’s the general way I think about it.

James: Good! Well I am glad you answered that question in the way that you did because that would mean our listeners out there would go, okay it is fine for Eric Enge – he is Eric Enge! He’s got a book, he’s written for this people, he’s clearly going to be able to reach out and reach in to these audiences. But what about what about for me? I have got a small little business but there will be people out there looking for great contributions in your market – newspapers, offline press, blog owners – they all want content and if you can fill a void that they have not gotten filled already, they’ll be very welcoming that you’ve approached them if you’ve got some level of understanding of your own subject matter, right?

Eric: Absolutely! And it’s really important in this concept that and the reason you want to do is that in that local market, don’t go writing for articles if you are in Baltimore using my example for companion businesses in California where nobody is ever going to see that content that could potentially be a customer. Learn how to filter what you are doing based on places where you might actually clicks to your site that could become a customer. Those are the places that are going to build your visibility and reputation in whatever your market is and if you are doing this really well, now you are putting together the kind of campaign that creates that type of signals that Google and Bing want to see from you anyway. That Baltimore business, they don’t want to see you flinging stuff all over the place in California and London and Sydney and Poland. You should be creating content that works for you even if the search engines are turning around in getting visibility for your business.

James: Yeah! I mean that’s it right? It’s knowing who your customer is and knowing where their watering hole is and then just go in to that watering hole with your content. It’s not rocket science. Anyway, it’s a nice Segway to some topic of conversation around search, it of course has been a pretty big past 12 months in search as most 12 months tend to be in the space of SEO but this time primarily due to the biggest algorithmic update since the original Google search algorithm was created – I am of course talking about Hummingbird. How is Hummingbird different to its predecessors, Eric?

Eric: Yeah it’s a great question because there’s a lot of misunderstanding about this so the first thing I want to do is to try to create a visualization for people listening. Imagine that Google search has three major components. The first is the crawler that runs around the web and brings in all the raw data. The second is I think called the index where all that data is stored after a certain amount of processing. And then the third thing, from a technical perspective, is really what we refer to as the search engine and that’s the hunk of code where all the algorithms, panda, penguin and link algorithms and stuff like that reside that knows how to pull data out of the index in response to a query so it is really important to keep those three pieces in your mind. One: crawler, two: index, three: search engine. Part three, the search engine, is the piece from which hummingbird was a complete re-write. That might make you think well ranking probably has changed dramatically at that time but they really did it because there are certain modules in Google search that they did not change at the same time. So the panda algorithm did not change, the penguin algorithm did not change. The algorithm for processing links did not change. But it was a platform change to make that search engine part of their search list more nimble so they can make changes more quickly going forward in the near future. And what this led to is at that time that Hummingbird was released, it was evidently out in the market for something like 30 days and nobody knew! Or very few people substantial changes and it was because of what I described. They re-platformed it but they did not change the basic algorithm that drive the rankings and what people did notice is there were some changes related to natural language search and this is where people get confused and they think hummingbird was just all about natural language search being brought in to google in a bigger way. The truth of the matter is we had natural language search back in May 2013 but it was only tied to Google’s knowledge graph which is basically structured databases where they are able to answer questions like how do you compare apples and oranges and the like but what they did include in hummingbird is a way for natural language searches to begin to operate on regular web results rather than pulling that data from the knowledge graph database.

James: So is there any change in strategy as far as the business is concerned? Of course wanting to acquire rankings within search and I think we need to do different?

Eric: You know it’s subtle because it does not feel like a lot changed but I think what’s really important is it breaks in to probably 2 major categories. First of all the natural language search thing is actually important because people are going to be doing more verbal typing queries and it’s going to be driven a lot by mobile devices. People will be doing searches on their smart phones is that they get increasingly comfortable that their vocal commands are being recognized; use it like star trek communicator and they’ll query that way and that’s going to have some impact. Let me cover the second part too and then we’ll talk about how it impacts people. The second part is that you can expect these new algorithm updates and new ways of improving google search results to accelerate. The whole purpose of this platform change was to allow them to do more. And to move more quickly and be more nimble in google. That was really the core purpose. What both of these things add up to, the platform change, and the natural language integration is it’s going to force you more in to a holistic way of thinking because their ability to attack the kinds of behavior and just simply rank things in their opinion better is increased. So they know what they really want – they really want to have the best possible results in the first few organic search positions and their ability to deal with the not so good results and refine and improve those things has increased dramatically as a result of hummingbird. So let me translate that in to a couple of quick tips. You have to do some real old fashioned marketing things, you have to understand the persona of your potential customers, you have to make sure not only your content marketing strategy – if you’re doing that, addresses that persona. But the content and structure of your website has to address those personas and so that is a different kind of thought process for a lot of businesses who might have been SEO-centric. They now need to unravel that and say they need to get customers in to that tier because that is going to be my best SEO.

James: Well this is nice, this ties right in with what David Amerland talked about on episode 30 so I am going to include that in the show notes so that people can go off and find that episode as well. I guess what we are really talking about is this kind of change in approach to things like keywords. Google now encouraging this kind of common language with natural language search. Also our technology is also encouraging the use of more natural language search be on mobile or whatever else, are keywords and keyword research on their way out as far as SEO is concerned Eric?

Eric: I don’t think so because imagine if we go back 20 years in time and you are a traditional marketer and you don’t have search as an option. Those traditional marketers would die for keyword data because keyword data tells them the language that their perspective customers use. Now you can tailor your advertising and your messaging to be in a common language to your potential customer. That’s powerful stuff! And it feeds very well in to a semantic search, you mentioned David Amerland got in to that term in the conversation. It’s very well in to the semantic search because Google still needs to know what your web pages are about. It’s still problematic for them to read images and videos and that kind of content. They do need text on the page to help them get the context of what you are relevant to. And if you are using the common language as your prospective customer, that’s a stronger match. The prospective customer might say hey I want to find the closest place to get a t-shirt made and get delivery tomorrow. That might be their long sentence right, and if you have a page in your site with custom t-shirt delivery tomorrow and you happen to be in the local area, bang!

James: Well, that’s it right? It goes well beyond search ranking itself and it really goes right in to conversions. If you can match those language patterns that your prospects you are using in search both in the search results and on the page of your website. There is far more chances that that prospect is going to convert in to a customer because they find what they are looking for. I mean that is really it, right?

 Eric: Absolutely!

James: How about the approach to link building? I think I have actually quoted your interview with Matt Cutts where he said link building is not bad and it’s still the best indicator google has of a website’s authority. It seems clear that links are still getting very important but what the approach to getting your content linked to?

Eric: To me content marketing is the approach that we use as we talked about in the beginning – how do you get your content linked to? There is a potentially complex set of thing that you can do but the first thing to do is to get out there and to get known. If you have an opportunity to pitch, to speak in a conference in your industry, or if you are a local business to get an opportunity to go to a local meeting of some sort, people in your community are sponsoring and a chance to present a couple of minutes just to talk about what you do to get known. There is an opportunity to jump in social media and really focus on adding value for people in social media and be known as someone that solves problems for other people. These types of reputation building activities all feed the potential for you to get links to your content and it’s a very powerful thing to do it. And the way I describe it I’ll give you an analogy just as a sort of way to frame this. Traditionally, people have used link building like hunters. And by the way I mean critical hunters here. C-target, pointed target, shoot target, kill target, and every single link they got was some direct activity on their part is the philosophy for link building today needs to be like a farmer philosophy. You have to do some planning, you have to set some things in motion which will bring you a great yield at the end of the season, right? This notion is how do you go out and build your brand and reputation while publishing great content and getting great exposure to your audiences and then getting good content on your site as well all working together and people are going to keep going to find your stuff and come after you and ask you to do interviews and podcasts and HLA events and speak at conferences or whatever the case may be. You kind of have to go to a process of creating demand for yourself.

James: Yeah, absolutely! This interview itself would be a case in point right? I mean I’ve reached out to you because I feel that you’ve got something that’s a value to offer to my audience and of course when we do feature you on the website we are going to link back to you and reference all of those places that you’ve talked about thus building your authority further and potential ranking in the search results. I mean that’s it! It really is a classic case study here in play.

Eric: Yeah, absolutely! And what will happen is because you have been kind enough to have me on the show, I will promptly turn around and roll it in my social media feeds. Mark Traphagen will probably do the same since he works for us and this will generate exposure back for you so we are effectively working together to help your audience and it is building both of our reputation and visibility in the process and it’s a great way to do things.

James: Yeah, exactly. I am glad we touched there very briefly also on social media because again we’ve had this line of conversation running through the undertones of this interview throughout this social driven web. What’s your take on social signals and their contributions towards and impact on search results?

Eric: We’ve done many studies on this and your listeners are probably very familiar with the correlation studies published by Moz and by Search Metrics that show a very strong correlation between social signals and ranking and search results but I do want to caution but I do want to caution listeners that that’s a correlation and there is also a very strong, very well-known correlation between eating ice cream and drowning death and the reality is that both of those things happen because it is hot outside and think it through if I produce a great piece of content that people might link to which nobody would argue would drive search rankings. While people might actually share and +1 that, like that and tweet that. Those kinds of signals are probably going to happen also for that content because it is great content so just to tell you what we’ve done, we’ve done actually three studies that are very extensive. Instead of measuring correlation. We went out to try to measure causation of whether or not Google+, Facebook and Twitter drove search rankings. And we did some very extensive studies to actually take some content and do a hard number of social events for those and see if rankings move in any material way and in parallel we’ve had some baseline pages we worked with so if there was some movement in the test pages and the baseline pages had some kind of similar movement then we’d know that it wasn’t really a ranking and social signal. Bottom line, no real evidence with social signals directly driving SEO but I don’t want to leave it there because there is a huge reason and there’s actually huge SEO reasons to do social media and that’s because you create this wonderful synergy when you have a strong social media presence when the content on your social media’s similar to what you are publishing on your site or your third party articles. When you publish that content, you share that in your social media and hopefully that content is so good that it helps your social media grow and in turn your social media sends traffic – your readers and links, back to that content. So you’re still doing social media when you’re doing SEO. Just don’t take it with this hunter mentality where see-shoot-kill, you don’t get to eat it before you kill it, you know what I am saying?

James: Exactly!

Eric: There is tremendous amount of people on social media almost certainly are making a mistake.

James: Yeah. We bring it back to simplistic terms. What do search engines want to do if they want a place at the top of the results- the best quality, most authoritative content and if you are building your brand and your personal brand elsewhere. That is going to have implications one way or another, be it direct or indirect on your search results. It’s all integrated together, right?

Eric: Yes! Absolutely! And it is perfectly safe to eat ice cream, you’re not going to drown; or in this case, it is great to do social media because it will inevitably correctly drive the signals that drive SEO and that’s awesome.

James: Awesome! I think we should wrap it up there. In addition to some great insightful commentary with what’s happening with inbound marketing and search, we’ve certainly had a fact-filled episode, too. Ice cream and drowning have a very strong correlation and of course we’ll draw back to the Foosball world championship in fact we entered the show with. Eric, thank you so much for coming on and sharing what you’ve had today I am sure Traffic Jam listeners are eager to connect with you and find out more about what you’ve got going on. Where should they reach out to you?

Eric: So three places are the easiest: that’s StoneTemple.com as the website, @StoneTemple is the Twitter handle and +EricEnge is the Google+ handle. Those are the ways to try and reach me. Or if they want they can always email me at [email protected].

James: That’s awesome! So listeners that was Eric Enge from StoneTemple.com. All of Eric’s social links and the resources and the full transcript of today’s interview will of course be found on the center of the web that is devoted to Traffic Jam and that is TrafficJamCast.com so head on over there for all of the resources and I’ll just close out once more by thanking you Eric for coming on the show. It’s been a lot of fun and hopefully we can do it all again sometime in the future as well.

Eric: I’d enjoy that and thanks so much for having me James.

This Week’s News in Traffic

For the first story this week, I am going over to TechCrunch.com who’ve reported on a story that’s been released via Disqus which are the commenting people that actually power the comments over at my veravo.com website and underneath the Traffic Jam episodes. The story is that Disqus have announced a new ad unit called sponsored comments. The Disqus general manager David Fleck actually this new ad unit stems from their newly launched featured comments about a month ago and went on to say that the featured comment is actually a sponsored comment that advertisers pay for therefore allowing them to occupy the same spot at the top of the comment thread. Now of course I realize that Disqus have got to monetize their platform somehow but I don’t think this will be feature that I will be subscribing to either as an advertiser to be featured on someone else’s blog or as a content creator having advertisements featured on my own site. I really feel that the comments section is where all of the open discussion should happen and it should not be disrupted by advertising. It really should be a clean platform, a clean area on your site so it’s not going to something I would subscribe to. I suggest it’s probably something that you don’t subscribe to yourself.

In a different story this week, I head on over to MarketingLand.com who’ve reported on a big push by Twitter to introduce a whole new number of ad units to their advertising platform. This is not just a small push but a massive push of 15 new types of products in the next 6 months. This first ad unit to be released will of course be especially popular with game developers such as Candy Crush maker King who according to some industry experts believe they account is half of Facebook mobile’s ad revenue. So that I think is the story here. Twitter I think have realized that their ad platform kind of does suck a little bit and if they are to regain some of their market share from Facebook they’re going to certainly improve their catering and certainly better for ad developers that seem to make up a large proportion of Facebook’s advertising revenue.

And that really is it for the news this week. Very much a slow week in the world of traffic, not much else to talk about other than a slight update to Google analytics and AdWords account linking, you can now do that in bulk. I’ll make sure that that news story is linked to in the show notes and also a non-new story from Tech Crunch that Bing is here to stay, quashing rumors that seem to be circulating about the possibility of Microsoft selling Bing off to Facebook. So that really is it. Remember that you can get the links to these stories in full by going to the show notes page of episode #34 at TrafficJamCast.com.

A shout out and a thank you to Chall who left a five-star Stitcher review and she said highly recommended. I love Traffic Jam, from the interview, to this week’s news in traffic and the 1 minute tip, James and his guests bring it every episode. The caliber of guests is second to none, and not just the usual old faces either. Keep up the standard James and I’ll certainly keep on tuning in. Thank you Chall! I really do appreciate you stopping by and leaving your comments. I appreciate every single comment that I get for the show and certainly welcome receiving yours too so if you’ve not left a review or comment for Traffic Jam so far. Please do as it really is the best possible way that you can not only show your appreciation for the content that my guest share each week but also to help the show up the iTunes and Stitcher rankings and get this content out to more people. There’s a few places you can leave your review. iTunes is one. Stitcher is the other but also you can do it on the site itself, TrafficJamCast.com and if you scroll down to the base of the site in the footer, you’ll find a leave a voice message link and that will open up Speak Pipe where you can actually talk your feedback in to your microphone on your computer which I will probably read out on a future episode if you do that. So if you want to get yourself some airtime, get yourself heard on the Traffic Jam podcast, that’s exactly the way to do it.

The One Minute Traffic Tip

Today’s tip may be an obvious one if you’re doing it but it’s still amazing how often this small tip is overlooked. So what is the tip? It’s to install social sharing Chiclets, or widgets or whatever else you want to call them on the content pages of your website. The main Chiclet to install would be the Facebook Like and Share buttons, Twitter retweets, Pinterest pin, Google +1, LinkedIn share or whatever other social media network is relevant to your business. Note I said install on the content pages of your website – that would be your blog. Refrain from installing them on your service or your contacts pages because no one wants to share those pages on your site. The point is to make sharing of your hard worked content easy. When you create useful and engaging content, you want your audience to share that content to their own audience in term helping you help more people. Test the placement of the Chiclets in different places in your page. The main objective is to have them placed in a prominent place that will prompt people to share your content, of course, assuming that it is deserving of a share.

So as I almost wrap on this week’s show, I want to thank you for listening in to episode#34 and to remind you that I will of course be back for episode#35 next week where I will be interviewing Martin Shervington all about Google+ and that’s a not to be missed episode.

Remember you can subscribe via iTunes and Stitcher radio and thanks to two very helpful short links you’ll be able to find those places super easily  now and those links are dsafand surprisingly enough, TrafficJamCast.com/stitcher. So that’s where to find the show subscriptions and also to leave your review and feedback for the show. You can also visit TrafficJamCast.com to join the discussion on this week’s episode and to get links to all the resources mentioned in today’s episode as well as heading over to veravo.com for more traffic tips and training and learn how I can help you get more traffic via the search engines.

I close this week’s show with Eric Enge’s chosen jam which is called Roll Over Beethoven, not the original Chuck Berry version by the way but the version by Electric Light Orchestra which were a 1970’s brome band from Birmingham in England, just down the road from me and I am sure you’ll recognize the track, hope you enjoy it. See you back here in about seven days from now.

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THIS WEEKS NEWS IN TRAFFIC

ONE MINUTE TRAFFIC TIP

THE TRAFFIC JAM

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When searching Google you’ve no doubt seen the small pictures that appear next to search listings, but do you know what they are or how and when they appear?  Thankfully my guest today knows all about Google Authorship and its affect on the search and social webs. Mark Traphagen of Stone Temple Consulting is quite probably the number 1 authority outside of Google on all things Authorship and Author Rank; the unofficial term coined to describe the ranking of authors in search results.

In this episode Mark Traphagen and I peel back the layers of this relatively new field on the web, and reveal how you can use Google Authorship to build your authority and personal brand in the search and social space.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

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“Build up your personal network, not just on Google+ but everywhere.” @MarkTraphagen
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Hey what’s up listeners? Welcome to Traffic Jam, the podcast show that teaches you how to get more traffic and a profitable audience online. You’re tuned in to episode#33 which can you believe it, makes us exactly one-third of the way to a century of episodes. Now clearly that is really very, very early in the days of a podcast and we have not quite to a hundred episodes just yet. However if I continue to publish one episode per week, this time next year we will in fact be pretty darn close. Certainly not at this point have we caught up Pat Flynn and his Smart Passive Income podcast which has in fact just past 100 episodes but we’re certainly making steps in the right direction.

So what’s coming up on our one-third of the way to a century of episodes’ show? The topic we are diving in to today is Google authorship and Google author rank. This is a whole idea that Google are moving towards the scenario where an individual authority on a particular topic will have a bearing on where and how their content appears in the search results. My guest today, Mark Traphagen really is driving a lot of the conversation around this topic and he’s even gotten Google reps like Matt Cutts to divulge a few clues as to whether in fact Google are already using author rank within their search results.

So that’s the topic of today’s conversations, certainly relevant and topical but don’t go anywhere after the interview because of course I have got all of the regular segments that we’re so used to on the show, the one minute traffic tip, this week’s news in traffic and the traffic jam jam.

So let me introduce my guest for today, his name as I said is Mark Traphagen. He’s a senior director at Stone Temple Consulting along with Eric Enger. He’s a top 3000 user on Google+ and he speaks all around the world on the topic of Google Authorship, Google+ and Google Author Rank. And apart from these credits that clearly show that Mark is an absolute authority on these topics as you’re about to find out on this interview, Mark is just a super, super nice guy so let’s now get in to the interview- it’s the topic of authorship, author rank and it’s with Mark Traphagen.

James: Hello and welcome listeners to the interview section of episode 33 and welcome to my guest expert and co-host for the show, Mark Traphagen. Mark, welcome to Traffic Jam.

Mark: James, thank you so much for having me. I am so glad to be here and looking forward to our conversation.

James: Absolutely! Well, I have asked you on the show because you know a fair bit about the current hot topic on the search and social web and that’s Google Authorship. Let’s open up with a quick explanation of what authorship is and how you happened to be so involved with it.

Mark: Sure, well basically authorship is a program that Google put forth to enable content creators to connect their content from anywhere in the world with a social profile, in this case, their Google+ profile since obviously Google owns that, indicating to Google that this is my content and allowing Google to first of all track that and have that visibility and see this is where I publish and this is what I published. The most immediate manifestation of that to most people are familiar with and have seen even if they don’t know what it is is seeing an author’s profile photo next to content in search. I am sure by now everyone in your audience has seen that. Google authorship is generally how that is created or how that is generated. And then it’s just a matter of connecting, putting on your Google+ profile in a section called contributor tool in the links section, all the domains in which you publish content under your own name, and then from those domains linking back to those Google+ profiles and establishing that Google profile connection.

James: Got it! So apart from the personal branding effect and the fact that you may or may not get stopped by complete strangers in hotel lobbies exclaiming you’re in my search results which I read happened to you, Mark. What are the benefits of subscribing to Google Authorship?

Mark: Number one that people should be looking is for is that personal branding is if you write consistently about topics that are going to be of interest to your target audience, when they search in Google search, as that content begins to perform well, it comes up again and again with your name and your picture attached to it and I think this has a psychological effect on people over time. They begin to recognize you and think of you as an authority in that field. Psychologically again, it may not be conscious and it says Google is promoting this author and Google wants this impression to go forth. On a more prosaic level, it has been demonstrated in many studies not surprisingly that having your author photo next to your content increases the click through rate on that content in search. People’s eyes are drawn to a face and they also probably have a psychological connection that oh this is content by a real person. Everything else on that search page might be a real person but this one is verified. They’re going to click on it first even if it is further down the page and then finally there is the power of Google personalized search. Google is making it more and more likely that more people are searching and using the web while logged in to Google. The bigger your Google network, the more influence you have and the more likely your content is to show up especially by people who follow you and that have a connection to you, whether it is Google+, Gmail, or Gchat, all the various ways that they can be connected to you. Your content when they do relevant searches in their logged in search is going to be pumped up and promoted to those people. So those are some of the powerful effects that it can have.

James: Yeah, well I think we’ll perhaps dig in to the whole topic of how to build up your network on Google+ perhaps a little later but I do want to ask you about a particular topic that I was not actually aware of until I did some kind of research for our interview and that’s that if you click through on a search result for a particular author and then stay on that content for 2 minutes or more, if you click back to the search results, you’ll actually be offered more content by that author. Is that correct?

Mark: Well, actually that was a nice little feature that came and went, at least here in the United States. It was around for about a year, it was very nice but is just no longer the case. It’s just something that Google tested and for whatever reason did away with, maybe not enough people making use of it or they did not see enough people clicking on the more results when they do that, however, it is still the case that if people click on your name in the search results, they get a dedicated search of just your content ranked by relevancy to whatever their first query was. That’s kind of cool! But going back to it for a moment that even though that feature that you mentioned deprecated, it gave us a key insight of the way that Google is looking in to these things. They are probably the first real world proof we have of something that a lot of people have talked about and that is that Google watches what people do when they click through to content in search and specifically do people come back to search and then click on something else, that would seem to indicate that they did not find what they are looking for in their first click. So this is a real tangible evidence that they’re measuring that and particularly for authors, we begin to talk about the idea that maybe Google wants to evaluate authors based on how people respond to their content, that could be one measure, when people click through, do they spend some time on your site, on your content? Do they click through and say, oh this is junk and come right back?

James: Yeah and this is the whole concept of pogo sticking right? Someone clicks on the result, lands on a page, and then, oops, this is not what I am looking for, hit the back button, and then find something else that perhaps matches what they’re looking for a little bit better.

Mark: Exactly!

James: Let’s talk next about the concept of author rank. Is it in existence already? Fact or fiction?

Mark: Well, the answer is – sort of.

James: Love it! An SEO answer.

Mark: Exactly, and what I mean by that is first of all the concept of author rank – let’s be clear first of all that the word phrase author rank is a made up term, that is a term that has been made up by the general SEO community. It’s not a term that Google has used specifically but it’s based in some Google ideas going back to a series of patents called the agent rank patents that Google filed years ago where they talked about a system of being able to identify various agents, one of which would be able to relate them in to their content and then watch signals and evaluate that author either overall or perhaps even topically like the things the author writes about and give that author a score based on that content and based on how people respond to it and engage with it and that score can then be used to potentially boost search rankings where that would be merited. Ever since that has been released and especially with the introduction of Google+ and the introduction of Google authorship right about the same time, many people expected to see some kind of manifestation of author rank but we’ve been waiting for it and we haven’t seen any conclusive evidence that it is a direct ranking signal yet and in fact we’ve had some Google representatives explicitly state that authorship is not at this present time a direct ranking factor and I want to emphasize direct because that means it’s not a one to one correspondence. If you have a good author score that your content is automatically just by that going to rank better. But I am beginning to think that it could already actually be in use as a confirmatory type of signal would be one way, meaning that other signals around your content are good which the things that normally cause it to rank are. Your author value, your author score, it may be looked at as one more thing that confirms to Google, they should be trusted, they should rank a little higher. One more way in which your author quality is being used is a qualifying content. This we know – two areas where that’s been revealed, one is in the in-depth articles in search. This is something you’ll see on selected queries where Google will provide a box in the search results that shows three articles that go a little bit more depth in to the topic. So how do they select those? The main way seem to be on the basis of publisher so in other words from very well-known and trusted like New York Times, Atlantic Magazine, etc. However they have said you should connect authorship to your content because authorship will be one factor that they will use and recently Matt Cutts confirmed that in a tweet reply to me that it’s indeed something that they look at, the quality of an author’s content as a qualifier for that and then quickly the other place where I know it is being used is in whether you get that author showing up next to your content. Google recently tightened up on that and one of the factors that comes in to play on that is the overall quality of the content. Now what we don’t know is exactly what Google means by quality but the fact of the matter is that they are at least in the beginning being able to look at it and say who are the trusted authors out there and at least use that to qualify them for certain search features if not directly for ranking at this point.

James: Yeah! Well this kind of ties in nicely with the statement that David Amerland made on Traffic Jam episode 30 where he said he knew of cases where author rank was affecting search and the example that he gave was that established authors could rank quickly very well but if there was no supporting signals that kind of confirmed that the content was good, they’d very quickly drop back down the ranks. Is this kind of what you mean by confirmatory signals?

Mark: Yes, I think maybe sometimes Google may be using it, I want to stress may to kind of quickly – I don’t have a term for this yet, but to test something. If I can share an anecdotal example very quickly that we saw recently. There was someone who had relatively obscure blog who managed to get a print interview with Rand Fishkin who’s a very well-known authority figure in the SEO world and he scored this interview, put it up about a year ago, it just did not, for whatever reason – probably because his blog was so unknown, did not get much traffic, did not get many links, did not get much attention, and it was languishing on page 2 of the search results for a search on interview with Rand Fishkin. Then in a little experiment back in January, with Rand’s cooperation, he asked Rand to add his site to Rand’s contributor to links and Google+ profile and sure enough, because Rand’s name is prominent of course in the interview page, within days, the article suddenly popped up to the top of Google. It remained there most likely because it got a lot of attention because Rand promoting that happening, it got on several websites, and it started getting links and so it started to show the signals that Google wanted to see so it’s staying on the top ranking. But that’s one piece of evidence and we’re seeing others that Google’s saying when a trusted author is connected with a piece of content that they may at least test ranking that higher. They may throw it up and see what happens. It’s like you’re throwing a spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks.

James: Yeah, and again a bit of an SEO answer there, I guess it could be or it could not be on that case based on what else is happening around at that site at that time, right?

Mark: Right. And we have to give that answer because it’s something that is very, very difficult to really test scientifically for. To test something and say this is that, this is the author rank, you’d have to be able to isolate that from all the other effects that Google uses to influence search rankings and that’s very, very difficult to do.

James: Yeah, and all of these stuff it works in tandem anyway, right? I think one signal on its own in itself probably does not mean too much unless it is supported by other stuff that’s happening so I guess this is very difficult and I guess this is a topic Mark, I mean SEOs they tend to get quite granular with all of these stuff and look for tactics that kind of cheat the system and influence rank where other things might not. I think we kind of have to get away from that idea anyway, right?

Mark: Oh, absolutely! And you mentioned you’ve had David Amerland on the show, he’s a good friend of mine and that’s the direction that he’s telling us we need to go and leading us that as we come in to the world of semantic search, trying to gain individual factors has less and less return to it, you have to have a more holistic approach, it’s a lot of things working together, it’s building your real world trust and authority, as David so often says, doing the things that would get you good reputation gets you recommended in the real world which we all live are now the things more and more that are going to be rewarded in search as well.

James: Yeah. So what do we know right now about Google’s ability to rank authors? Because I know for instance that Google’s Matt Cutts said something to the extent of we’re doing a better job at detecting when someone is sort of an authority in a specific space so I guess if I use you as an example Mark, Google might know you as an authority in the realm of Google+ or as I have found out by your show notes before the show that you know how to legally marry couples even if you’re not a professional clergy so they might know that you know a little bit about that as well. What else do we know right now about Google’s understanding of authors themselves?

Mark: That’s a great question. What we don’t know is how granular it is as far as topic body, that’s seem to be where you question is going, at least in part. That is something that theoretically that they’re interested in and as you said, Matt Cutts and others in Google have said, we want to know and we’re trying to get better at knowing when someone is an authority in a particular area so I think that it’s somewhere where they want to go and I think they are going to get better and better at because they are getting better and better at being able to evaluate content, not just by keywords like they use to, but by real language measurements, by the kinds of ways machine learning how to understand language in ways that you and I understand. And being able to understand context and what’s most important in a piece of content so I think we’re going to see more and more of that. Another particular answer is again is coming totally out of my observation, I watch this stuff all the time, it’s not something that I can specifically test for but I think that we’re going to see that, we’re seeing it first in terms of sites, or in Google’s publishers because that’s the low hanging fruit. It’s what Google already does fairly well and they know they are able to do so I think we are seeing more and more topical authority in connection with sites and publishers. But I expect that to begin to leak over in to individuals, authors in this case. And I want to say, again, this is just my opinion, based on observation over years with the way Google does things. I think any boost, if it’s already there or if it’s coming, is going to become first to very well-known authors, the people who have a track record. I don’t think you are going to see much of this happening for smaller authors or people who don’t have much engagement or are well known. They are going to play it safe, they are going to promote people who are pretty much already safe bets as being well known, see how that goes and then slowly over time who are those people that we don’t know are maybe going down in the lower tail that deserve to be boosted more.

James: And we certainly know that this is the direction that are heading in right? I mean I know that I heard from Amit Singhal probably going back a couple of years ago now and the phrasing that he used that Google were trying to bring the sense of offline authority and offline authorship in to the online world and give those people that potentially are authorities in a particular topic some form of preference within search. Would you agree that that’s the case?

Mark: Oh, absolutely! Every indication and we’ve had encouraging signs again and again that this is the direction that Google wants to move in. I’m only conservative about it even though I am a big advocate of this, I have been studying this since it was introduced, following it, testing it, using it. I am conservative in saying oh, it’s here it’s a ranking factor that’s helping everybody because, again, I am a careful observer of Google over the years and I know, here in the United States, I’d like to quote this, there used to be a Neb campaign with the late Orson Wells representing a winery and he said we would serve no line before it’s time and I would like to say Google will serve no search factor before its time. They will take all the time they need to carefully test things, to learn how to make it better, and I believe it is very likely that we are deep in to that author authority testing stage now, but they are not going to throw something quickly in the search results, it’s going to make a mess out of it. And this evaluating content linked to an author’s reputation especially if you are going to talk about it being topical, is incredibly more complex than most people think. So I think Google is going to take its time on this and I think we are going to see this gradually rolled out over the coming years.

James: So when, if anytime you think that author rank could potentially link directly influence search ranking?

Mark: Oh, that’s impossible to say, it’s not giving you the answer you that you want, it sounds like I’m stalling but it really is impossible to say. I recently wrote an article on the Stone Temple Consulting blog, my company’s own blog, called crovadous author rank, people can just search for that, I guarantee you, nobody else has used that title.

James: We’ll have it linked in the show notes also for sure – we’ll make sure that our listeners can find that, it’s a great article.

Mark:  Thank you! Terrific! But in that article I made the point that it’s a like a lot of these kind of things because as you said it so well James, none of these is in isolation, that it is highly likely that this is going to roll out and kind of be infused in to search so gradually that it will be turning up the thermostat a little bit more and a little bit more that it is going to be hard to say that today, author rank started. I think we are just going to see more and more gradual effect over time and just something to watch for but I think that we’ll begin to know at some point, we’ll be able to say that it’s obvious that Google was boosting the top authors on these topics. Whether that will come on a certain day that will be hard to say.

James: Yeah, they have a tendency to sneak this things off on us right? I mean all the change of the algorithms in the hummingbird structure kind of went by and they said they actually changed it a few months back and hadn’t had a damn clue that it had happened but it’s still been done but I am sure this could potentially roll out in the same fashion. Well, let me ask you about potentially activating it because there are some reasons or arguments against why Google might not be ready to use an author rank in actually determining search rank and that might be things like they still don’t know a hundred percent who the author of that piece of content is, you know, not everyone’s subscribed to Google+ so there’s an effort that we should be waiting, how far are we away from these factors not being valid concerns anymore?

Mark: Yeah, I think you just named one of the factors that I would bring up but there are several that made me think again when I tried to explain to people why. Google’s still google. They can do anything and they can do it tomorrow! It’s not so easy and there are some hurdles. One is, as you just mentioned, the relatively low adoption of Google authorship. I think Google had a hope in the beginning that this would just take off and that everybody who writes on the web would want to be associated with this, and while on certain verticals has had a lot of adoption, there’s huge places where it doesn’t. Some of the most prominent authors on the web don’t use it at all. Either because they have not heard of it, they can’t be bothered with it, or they are famous enough that they think they don’t need it. And because of that by the way, we’ve seen for about two years now Google trying to experiment with Google trying to auto attribute authorship which leads to something that you mentioned a moment ago, sometimes, misattributions and that’s another indicator why they want to have more confidence that they can get an author right connected with content whether or not that author is using Google authorship mark up on his or her content another area is the signals around an author’s content. They can certainly see the traditional SEO signals, the link graph and the kind of signals that we all know in the SEO field but the agent rank patterns talk about wanting to be able to measure engagement and that means being able to know who is engaging with the content, not just the author, and when and how they are engaging with it and an increasing amount of that of course takes place on social media and a lot of that social media is not as visible to Google as they would like. Facebook in particular is very walled off to Google. So Google is wanting to know how can we be sure we are getting the right signals around an author’s content. And I think that it is something that they are working on and building.

James: Well let’s tear all of these things down to some practical things for our listeners. First of all, how do we go about getting Google authorship set up? I think you eluded to some of those steps in the intro in terms of assigning your contributor URLs in your Google+ profile. What else do you need to do to get it set?

Mark: Yeah, it can get complicated if you have a large set with multiple authors, not horribly complicated, but a little bit more. But let me just give it up at the simplest level and people can work from there. It is simply a two-way verified connection between Google+ personal profile, and it has to be a personal profile, not a business or brand page and your content on the web and how you make that is by a two-way link. First of all, as I said, if you go to your Google+ profile, you’ll find a section in the links section in your about tab that’s called contributor to. And you don’t have to put every link to every piece of content on there, just a link on the homepage of the domain in which you publish is enough. Then on the content itself, the easiest thing to do is just link back to your Google+ profile. From there, at the bottom of your content, if the place you are publishing will allow it, you can say follow me on Twitter, follow us on Google+ so the Google+ link will link you back with your profile. Not absolutely necessary but best practice is to add a rel equals author attribute to that and if your listeners look up in Google rel=author they’ll find plenty of tutorial and how to build a link with a rel=author markup attribute. But that two way connection fundamentally is what makes it. Your listeners can also google something that’s called structured data testing tool. That’s a tool that Google’s provided but once you think you’ve got it set up you can take the URL and leave your content on the web, put it in this tool and it will tell you if authorship has been set up correctly for you.

James: Fantastic! Well, again those will be linked to within the show notes, I guess that’s step one. Second step is I guess building authority. You’ve got a particularly large following on Google+ and you’ve got a lot of engagement. How would our listeners go about building their own authority so they may start to build up some form of authority with that concept of the author rank?

Mark: First of all I want to emphasize because I think there has been a lot of bad feedback, it is not necessary to be active on to have a huge following on Google+ in order to gain author authority in Google. I don’t think that would hurt, I think it adds to it if you can do it and if you want to be that and it certainly adds the biggest values of building a large network on Google+ is as we mentioned earlier an effect to personalize search where your Google+ content and things that you recommend and share can get bumped up in the personalized searches of people who are connected with your but it’s not necessary to do that. What is even more important is that you are producing the best quality content that you can, that you are posting it on good sites and high authority sites. I think the basic measure for that is if that site will accept anybody’s content right on scene, that’s not a site you want to be on. And I think it is more valuable to be on sites that are very relevant to what you are writing about. So you don’t want to be so much on sites about any topic that comes along. But the more focused the site can be the better that’s going to be the best for you. And then, build up your personal network, not just on Google+ but everywhere. The network that builds an audience for your content. People that care about for what you write. And then when you write it, when you share it, they are going to re-share, they are going to recommend you to other people. I think all those things are the type of things that to be doing at a practical level to begin to build the kind of authority that will get you noticed by Google in the long term.

James: Fantastic! We’ll we’ve got some action steps there so I think that’s the perfect point to kind of wrap things up Mark. Where should our listeners go to find out a little bit more about you?

Mark: I think the number one place is Google+ itself. If you just go to google.com/+marktraphagen that will take you right to me. I am on Twitter also by that name, @marktraphagen and very active there and folks can try to connect with me on LinkedIn as well.

James: Fantastic! So there you go listeners. That’s Mark Traphagen. You’ll get the links to all the resources mentioned by Mark in this week’s show notes go to TrafficJamCast.com and then look for episode 32. Thank you Mark! It’s been an absolute pleasure. You’ve been a real generous gentleman with your time, your expertise and the Traffic Jam community. Thank you!

Mark: James, great interview! I really, really appreciate it. You had wonderful questions, I had a lot of fun!

James: Awesome stuff, thanks Mark!

Mark: Bye, bye now!

This Week’s News in Traffic

So we move on to this week’s news in traffic. We stop first at Social Media examiner who’ve reported on a new feature being added by Twitter and that is Twitter photo tagging. In this new feature you can tag up to 10 people in a photo and still have all 140 characters left to write your tweet. To tag someone in a photo on Twitter you select the photo, select who’s on the photo, type and select the name of the person you want to tag and then when that photo appear in that person’s Twitter feed, they will see the tagged names on the photo itself and then by clicking on the tag they’ll be able to click through to that particular person’s profile. Now this is a pretty basic update, I think it will help connectivity and explorability around Twitter but what I really hope it doesn’t do is build rise to this sort of tagging spam that’s so prevalent on Facebook so I really hope that people on Twitter avoid these tactics I am sure you and I have experienced on Facebook.

On the next item, we actually go to Google+ for a very small update I noticed on my own profile that they’ve added on Google+ today and I have seen they have added this little view count on the profile itself. Having dug a little deeper on this and read an article over at Tech Crunch. Apparently this data shows all of the views of a user’s profile, post, and photos, since October 2012. It has appeared on all profile but it is an optional setting. If you’ve rather not show your total views on your profile you can turn it off. Just go to your profile settings to make that change.

For the third and final story this week, we go to Facebook who have expanded their audience lookalike capabilities. The lookalike capabilities allow advertisers to create lookalikes based on people who have either visited their website, used their mobile apps, or connected to their Facebook pages. Previously, with lookalike, I believe you had to essentially upload an excel file with all of your customers and prospects included and their email addresses. And then what Facebook would then do is match those email addresses with Facebook profiles and then profile those people based on their likes and interests and then suggest other people that would be suitable to target so it’s very much a manual process. With this new capability, Facebook can identify those people through the Facebook conversion tracking pixel, i.e. if you’ve got the conversion tracking pixel installed in your website, anyone that opts in to your email list or buys a product or service from you, Facebook will be able to identify and then suggest other people that might be good to target also within your advertising. I’ve got to say, I think this is a pretty darn cool update that’s certainly going to be a huge amount of capability with this. I think their options are going to be fantastic and I certainly look forward to trying it out myself. According to Facebook, it is already available in the power editor and that’s available worldwide so it should already be available to you. To get started, go to the power editor, click on the audiences tab, then select create new audience and within that you’ll then find lookalike audiences where you’ll be able to access this new feature. To find the links to these stories in full check the show notes for episode 33 at TrafficJamCast.com.

One review over at Stitcher.com and it’s from N Lauper who rated the show 5 stars and then goes on to say – doing business online, this is a must listen. James and his guest continue to crush it with awesome actionable content week in and week out. If you’d like more traffic in to your website, and who wouldn’t, this is the show for you. As always, I am always open and very willing to receive more feedback and comments for the show, so usual places, Stitcher.com or iTunes.com or on the show page of the episode itself over at TrafficJamCast.com.

One Minute Traffic Tip

When most people talk about guest blogging, they talk about it in relation to making content for other people’s websites so you can reach other people’s audiences. This is okay but by creating content for someone else’s website, you’re building their asset and not your own. Consider flipping this equation completely on its head and accepting guest contributions to your own site. If you filter your contributors can carefully, only accepting guest post by writers who are real authorities in your market and who have a very large audience, you’ll get the benefits of their traffic when they promote their content on your site to their audience and you’ll get links to their established website, subsequently improving your SEO. All of these happens while they are adding content to your site and building your asset and not their own.

Thank you for listening in to episode #33 of Traffic Jam. I will of course be back in about seven days from now with episode 34 where I will be interviewing Eric Enger who is in fact Mark Traphagen’s colleague in Stone Temple consulting and we’re going to be having a chat about inbound marketing and SEO. So all that to look forward to next week. Remember to visit Traffic Jam Cast to join the discussion on Episode 33 and to get all of the links and resources mentioned in today’s show. You can also visit veravo.com for more traffic tips and training and to learn how I can help you get more traffic faster from the search engines. We end this week’s show with the track called This Year by the curiously named band, The Mountain Goats. Enjoy!

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.

On this episode I am  joined by Alex Coté, the founder of Cloze.com for a fireside chat about the role employees take in building your company brand on social media. After 10 years of social media, businesses are finally realising that the collective voice of their employees is more powerful and authentic than their own.

Alex is the founder of an innovative start up that helps you connect more effectively with the people that matter to you on the web. Alex’s app Cloze, carefully analyses your relationships on the web, allows you to focus more on the people that matter, helps you boost your productivity and find your voice on social. I’ve been testing Cloze and love it.

On the show we take a look at the app, talk candidly about social media and your employee’s role in it, as well as dissecting the value of PR for brands. It’s a fun episode, listen in and enjoy.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

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“Embrace your employees – help them help you build your brand on social”@AlexCote
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Hey! What’s up listeners? This is James Reynolds, your host and welcome back to Traffic Jam! The show that teaches you how to get more traffic and build a profitable audience online, now I don’t know if you can detect it in my voice already but I am feeling very, very happy today and that’s because after weeks of frustration and I finally fixed the issue of the broken iTunes feed. Yup! That’s right! We’re finally syndicating again to iTunes so welcome back to you if you’re an iTunes listener. I am super happy to have you back here with me on the show and as always super grateful that you’re taking the time out of your extra busy day to listen in to Traffic Jam.

I should mention, if you have been away for a while, you should go and check your iTunes player because we’ve had several great episodes in the past few weeks I’d hate for you to miss out on so if you are an iTunes and that is your preferred method of listening, do check your iTunes player to see what you might have missed.

So let’s go back to today’s show. In the hot seat, I have got Alex Coté who’s the guy behind the new and very innovative social media application called Cloze. I will be talking to Alex about how to engage the collective voice of your employees so that in turn they can engage in social media your customers and prospects. I asked him how to identify key profitable relationships on the web that will not just drive traffic but will also drive sales. And I also asked him about how you can use productivity tools like Alex’s application to leverage the time that you use on social media much more effectively.

That is of course coming up in the interview section and right after that I’ve got this week’s news in traffic which as you’ll know as a regular listener to Traffic Jam is a roundup of everything in the world of traffic generation in the past seven days. Then following that is the one minute traffic tip which, let’s face it, really needs no explanation – it’s exactly what it says on the tin and then to end the show, we have the Traffic Jam jam and rather appropriately, this week, the band that Alex has chosen also has the word Jam in its name. Does that give you any clues? Well, you might just have to wait until the end of the show to find out.

Okay so that’s the roundup of what you’ve got coming up. Let’s not wait any longer, let’s get started with the interview, and I’d like to introduce, Alex Coté from Cloze.com.

James: Hello Listener! I am James Reynolds and right over there across from me in the old inter-webs is Alex Coté. Alex, how are you?

Alex: I am doing very well. Thanks for having me James!

James: Well it is great to have you here! You of course have this app called Cloze which I have been test driving based on David Amerland’s recommendation. I’d love for you to share with our listener what the app does and how it all came about.

Alex: Sure! I’d be happy to do that. Cloze is one of those products that was born out of a need of my own and my co-founder Dan TRUDY as well. Both of us, busy professionals, out on the road travelling a lot going to events and meeting and all that kind of stuff that fills your day, getting bombarded through all the different channels that we use for business; you’ve got multiple email accounts, social media, the rise of using social media for business, all of these going together, very hard for you to keep track of all the people that you need to keep track of for business and for personal life so with Cloze what we did is we brought it all together in to a single app and what makes a difference is we bring it together but we also do analytics on it so we figure out through an algorithm that we have who matters to you most. So rather than seeing the content that’s last in, you see the content from the most important people first. So we kind of flipped it on its edge and said we’re going to focus on people, not time but people, and the relationships that you have with those people so we have an inbox called key people and what you see in that inbox after you hook up Cloze and we do our magic is the most important people in your work life and personal life are at the top and we give you some what ways to customize that if you want to ramp somebody up – or not. Dan and I we spent a lot of quality time as we are on a start up together so our scores are higher with each other than our wives. So we allow you to do that and rearrange how you keep touch with people but hopefully you communicate with your wives in person and not electronically so it’s not the measure we’re going after but that’s the mission of Cloze. Give you one place to go, put it in the palm of your hand in your phone. It’s also available on the web but you can get it on Android, iOS and iPad, iPhone, Android devices, and the web too so wherever you may be you can tap in to all of your relationships, all of your contact information but really also what’s important is what they’re saying on those important channels so it could be a Tweet, it could be an article that they have shared and it gives you a real good reason to engage and keep those relationships moving forward.

James: Yeah, and this app has got a pretty pricey price tag as well, right?

Alex: Yeah, it’s free so it’s a lot of value for free and we will be coming out with some premium options very soon actually but yeah, it’s free and it’s got a lot of users on it and it’s been out for about a year now, we launched the iOS version on February of last year, 2013.

James: Very cool! It seemed like a great opportune moment to get you on Traffic Jam because we just came off the back of two interviews that really heralded the importance of social connectivity. There was the interview I did with David of course which talked about the people-driven semantic web but I also had on just before that a guy called Mars Dorian – a really kind of creative genius – I am giving him that term because his stuff is fantastic, out of Germany, who’s built his whole brand really on the connections he’s made and a really strategic, targeted network and I think both David’s show and the show I did with Mars both highlighted that. In fact, where we’re at now we don’t need millions of website visitors, we don’t need thousands of customers or thousands of connections, we just need to have the right high value relationships. Would you agree that that’s really the case of where we are at right now?

Alex: That’s a hundred percent accurate. If you think about what you bring to a company, you bring your skills but you bring your relationships as well and those are the two big things. We’re almost free agents these days. We come and go, people don’t stay in companies for very long anymore. There isn’t the lifetime employee in a lot of cases. And so companies, they seek out people who have these strong relationships, who have these strong networks. When I started Cloze, Dan brings on a ton of technical capabilities and his relationships in that world; I bring my relationships and my skills in marketing and PR but I also bring my relationships in that space so we do go to launch, we show up in the right places. We were in Wall Street Journal, we were in Time Magazine, we were in Tech Crunch and so my relationships and my ability to navigate there very important to getting an app off the ground but equally, Dan’s relationships on the technical side in getting everything going on that side – his relationships with investors and others, all come together in one package and so employees are very much the same way in all levels and ranks. How are you bringing those in? How are you talking to the outside world? This is something that I am getting more and more involved with as we’ve launched a different product in this space. How do you get employees also engaging and speaking about your brand and making sure that they are talking about relevant content through their social channels because if you think about how you get checked on, the first thing you do you get engaged you check out their LinkedIn profile, you check out their Google+ profile, what are they talking about? Is this relevant to me? Do I know this person? Do I want to get to know this person better? A lot of that happens electronically these days and those relationships can get you very far and so how do you build those? How do you mature them? As David’s side of the world in the semantic world I think we’ll have a shift of social media I think you really do want employees sharing a lot of that content out there because it does help rank and get content that you are creating as a marketer out in the right audience.

James: Yeah! I am going to give listeners a bit of a taste of who’s coming up and I don’t normally do this but I think in the context of the conversation we’re having here it’s very relevant. Upcoming in the next show or two we’ve got Eric ENGER and Mark TRAPHAGEN coming on. They’re the guys from stone temple consulting. I was listening to an interview that they are doing with a friend of mine Ryan Hanley the other day and really one of the major decisions why Eric hired Mark and Mark being extremely well known in this space, was the connections that Mark brought with him to the business and the natural authority which now he held which essentially was right over in to Eric’s business too and I guess this is really the concept that you are talking about, right? The social concept – the power of the employees that you have within your business.  

Alex: Absolutely! And because each one of those collectively has their own personal brand and as you start to bring all those together collectively, that starts to become the brand of the business and that’s really changed the model; marketing, top executives, PR, we always try to control. More control, the better right? And so let us funnel everybody in to this sterile and controlled advertising, controlled PR channel, we are going to route you to very strict phone and web channels. Social media really changed that. Where do people vent now? Write to Twitter. Boom! I’m going to hit him hard, I want my response, I’m not going to wait. I’ve got a problem, I am going to complain, I am going to complain in whatever service it may be. But then the flip side of that, they’ll also do the other thing; they’ll say hey this is great service, everybody else should use it. So they go to their friends and family, they go to their trusted friends for that content, the control is gone. So as a marketer, as a senior marketing running the business, you better embrace your employees and help them help you in a lot of ways. Leverage those personal brands because often times there are experts within the organization that do have a significant following and if you’re not looking in to that as a potential to get some leverage and to get some new customers, get them understanding and get them talking is the biggest thing and not just the traditional events and that kind of stuff. You need them out there because they do shape your own brand as a business. 

James: Yeah, well I’ve got two traffic agencies so I am very close to typically the marketing departments in my client’s businesses and I would say that it’s quite typical but either the marketing department or some sort of provider typically manages inverted commerce, the social voice of those businesses, is that the right approach? I am guessing what you’re saying it probably isn’t the right approach, right?

Alex: Yeah, I mean there is going to be a component of the brand talking but I look at it as kind of a faceless brand, right? You don’t really know who you’re talking to on the other side of that inc. in your incorporated social media account and I, as a person, would rather engage in a person; I would rather talk to you not talk to your social media, your company social media handles. I want to know who’s the person behind the curtain and if I look at it from just a pure amplification perspective, if I had got 10,000 employees that would be 10,000 people talking about my company internally exposing that great inside culture outside. Share those experiences because you are just going to touch other people naturally and I think it is much more human. We talk about the humanization of brands, you really want to embrace it and say look I do want my employees and they may not be PR pros but they may speak more naturally and they’re going to engage in a different level and they will tell the truth and I think we are seeing more and more respect for brands that are more transparent and are willing to say when things are right, when things are wrong, they’ll jump on it, but also get those people that are at the lower ranks engaged because frankly it’s just a better place to engage. I think you’ll get the truth whatever that may be without the spin more often and you’ll feel you can solve your problem much quicker if you do have issues.

James: Yeah, but I guess it is going to be easier for a business like yours or mine which is not really necessarily a huge – thousands or hundreds of thousands – a size of business in terms of staffing. How would a bigger company get staff members involved effectively that is going to give them some form of control effectively? What would be your advice?

Alex: Yeah, that’s a very good point. It does matter on size of organization so as I talk to people, as I talk to smaller organizations, a client that is starting to use us that has hundreds of thousands of employees and you look at the range of problems, it’s really different. Social media, we’re on 10 years plus now so organizations when they first started writing these policies they don’t use it for work, they don’t watch you on Facebook, they don’t watch you do that stuff and as they keep going they think we’ll figure this social media thing out – you stay out of it. That’s obviously changing; the policies are getting rewritten which also means retraining and so there’s lots of implications there on that side so what I have been recommending is if you’re going to be changing policies you really need to start at the top here; you get your senior team, you get your top executives and others leading the way on how to use social media on behalf of the business. But as part of that, marketing can help you do some simple things, and this is what we’re doing with a new product of our called Circulate It; we’re providing a very simple conduit that stays in the existing workflow of the employees where a marketer can curate interesting content, tee it out for them essentially and then send out a daily newsletter – here’s 4 or 5 things that you can share with your social network; it is relevant to the business, two-thirds of it is not directly about the business but it is about the industry and it helps shape their personal brand so it gives a benefit back to the employee but with a single button they can share it back to their LinkedIn account or to their Twitter account, their Facebook account – they look like they know what they are saying, they’ve done it in a controlled way, they’ve spent about a minute at most, they click one button and it’s out. It gives them the path and then as you start to evolve that you can share interesting content that is a little different but it starts in to the routine of saying okay I am going to share stuff in to social media and then what they’ll start seeing is inbound content and things start to happen. People start reaching out, they like something, and maybe a prospect shows up, ah! Interesting, this social media thing works! So if you walk it through simply, don’t try to boil the ocean, put a bunch of huge tools and go OC, keep it simple, keep it in the existing workflow, you’ll get a lot of value in starting to get those guys going without having to do a boil the ocean kind of project. That’s my approach and that seem to work for a lot of people.

James: Yeah, and are businesses seeing value or is there some sort of element of idea towards embracing social because I still speak to businesses who would just like, I am not getting involved. We do not want our brand out there, we do not want our staff members out there talking about our brand. I still sense the least where I am talking in the Middle East, it might be a little bit developed from where you are in the US but there are still companies that are frightful of really getting involved in the social web. Would that be the case?

Alex: Yeah, I think that’s always going to be the case. There’s definitely fear of losing control, there’s fear of what they might say. I almost believe that it’s an HR issue – you’re hiring the right people that you trust, you’re trusting them to say the right thing in public, you’re trusting them when they’re working with customers and prospects that they’re going to represent your company correctly. So there is a little bit of a common sense here. If you are hiring the right group, in theory they should be able to handle it so training is a reasonable expectation, if you lead them in the right path, they’ll generally do the right thing. I think some percentages of employees are just more comfortable and others will opt out of it, I think that is fine, I don’t think you’ll get a hundred percent. In certain industries too, there is a regulation by country especially in financial services, health care providers, there’s teachers and students and those kind of stuff, sure there’s other things and places that you need to how you are going to use social media or should you engage at all. But on the other side, if you are outside the regulated market, you can lead them down the right path and start going down there. I think the only way you are going to win in that kind of an environment though is you need to start small. Start with a small team and when you are getting success start tying it back to some kind of revenue, you can bring back the senior management and they start to see okay, there’s a reason to do this, we’ll start with our sales team, we’ll start with very specific groups and then we’ll expand it out because there is no way they can ignore the customer service channel of social media. It is almost impossible these days to ignore that channel. You have to address it. That’s not really a negotiable kind of thing these days. Once you are seeing something different. It is unusual to see a brand these days without some kind of social media channel.

James: Yeah and there is no better day than to get the wrong thing said on social media than to tell people that they can’t go on social media, right? If you just dictate to your staff members, no Facebook, no Twitter I think that is probably the surefire way to get the conversation that’s happening around your brand so you have got to embrace it.

Alex: It’s happening! Embrace it. I have one persona saying well we actually block all of these things at work. For the most part you are seeing a smart phone in action at a very high percentage they have it. It’s not like you are keeping them off of it. There’s them just opening their phone and they’re right there. So to me it sends the wrong message. As I work with consultants in various organizations, they’re ranking companies up that have not done that before, this kind of approach of let’s feed them a little bit of content here and there to show them the path, here’s the way to say it- there are a couple of options on how to tweet, you have to go with the basics, talk to some very, very large organizations where they are saying our sales guy is not even on LinkedIn yet. So there is that kind of consultative thing, we need these guys to actually starting the paths of their social media accounts and then they can advance along so depending on the type of industry you are going to see a lot of different variations there and you may have to take a step back, I think the thing that is interesting is that there is a marketing side of this but there is also an HR side of this. So you are starting to see HR saying we have social employees because it makes it easier to recruit and we understand that if the culture that we built internally is strong and good in all levels, employees will share that out back and we want them to do that, which is not what we would use to see in the old HR policies which would say sign this document, you’re not going to do anything in social media. Now you are seeing the flip side of those things, hey, here are the bounds, we do want you talking about the company business. Share the company party, share the great food selection that we have in our pantry whatever it may be, but share those benefits so that people want to come and work for that business and you get people coming in the door.

James: I’d like to talk a little bit about just the application itself and one of the features that I’ve seen in light is this ability for it to kind of rank relationships based on importance to you. How does the application work in terms of being able to help identify those key relationships that perhaps should be extending and working on as an individual or as business?

Alex: Sure, so the application works with some algorithms that work under the hood, those algorithms work either in the long term score or the short term score. The short term score is very useful in a business situation where you are just starting to know somebody so you and I are emailing back and forth to get this podcast set up. That relationship will be identified within Cloze, this is a new relationship, they’re responding very quickly, we understand to some level the type of content back and forth, we’re going to rank this high very quickly so you start to see so for you it will automatically start serving me information from your social media feeds that will start giving me things that you are interested in, I can see, oh, there’s the podcast from David, I can go listen to that, I can prep I know what’s going on, I get a pretty good picture of the person I am getting to know. Cloze does that automatically for you. It’s a multi factor algorithm so there’s multiple factors that go in to it, one of them is how fast you respond, the type of communication, is it instant messaging, email, what’s the speed at responses, does it take 5 days or does it take 5 minutes? Is it a private conversation or are we on Twitter and we’re private messaging each other back and forth or is it an email and I am cc’ed and you’ve emailed 300 people? Is the content between messages or is it always the same? Are you sending long email messages to me or me only responding with a single word back? Or not at all? So those types of factors go in to whether somebody is a real relationship or not and then what we do with the long term score is when we get to know each other and we communicate a long time across a lot of different channels, that score will grow very strong over time and it will also take a long time to fade, whereas you and I do not continue to get to know each other and not continue to communicate that short term score that I talked of will fade off very quickly and you’ll fall off of my key people and I may not see you and what will happen with that is we may not see and we have another filter called losing touch and I will see you on that list and say here is a list of people that I am losing touch with, here is some content from social media so maybe here is a reason that I can reach out and continue to build that relationship or maybe I can find something that I can react to so I send you an email about it, but this is in a way more naturally to keep those relationships going if you want to. So that’s the basics of scoring model. We try to make it very natural and not kind of touching the levels and scores and trying to manipulate it too much but when you come in you should see a very good representation of where your relationships are and for older relationships falls off, the score is pretty strong so if they reengage with you they pop right back in to your key people pretty quickly.

James: So how else Alex can the data be interpreted and utilized? You mentioned one example there with this losing touch category which would kind of prompt you perhaps to reconnect with people. Is there anywhere else that the data can be utilized to really to help develop and nurture relationships?

Alex: The data, because it is always changing, you are constantly in to the loop as to what’s happening across these relationships so what we are finding across these relationships is that they kind of try to organize these relationships, we have the ability to create lists on who’s on Facebook and twitter but within those lists tend to be groups you want to stay in touch with, it could be customers it could be prospects, it could be for my purposes, I keep track of bloggers and writers and different categories like tech media in the US, it could be local tech writers in our town here in Austin. All these different people are saying things all the time and from a practical perspective, unless you are in front of tweet decker all day long, you never see everything. So what cloze does is it keeps track and ranks all the content in there from all the different people so that when you can catch up again, it’s all there for you waiting in an organized relationship first perspective so it does not matter what channel they are on so that as I get off this call – I have been offline essentially – I can catch up and say what was happening? What did I miss? And just a couple of clicks across all your building channels which is basically your relationship obviously with a customer or a prospect situation, if you are in tune with everything they’re saying, that customer on the other side is going to say wow! This guys is really on top of this, I am impressed. Those little signals that you can make, retweeting something, liking something, commenting, replying, whatever it may be, are all little signals that help you build a relationship and if you don’t have a tool to keep track of all of this, it is easy to miss stuff and then you’re behind. And that just shapes how you look from the outside which comes back full circle to what is your personal brand out there on social media.

James: Before I do ask this next question I want to say that I have plenty of friends who work on public relation so the words that follow are Alex’s, they’re not mine – Alex, you say that companies should not be engaged in PR firms and PR is best done yourself. Why is that the case?

Alex: Ah! I have a lot of friends in PR too and we debate this one. I am slightly biased by the fact that I am in leadership in startups is my entire career so you can use an agency, they do great things, they have an incredible network, they open doors that you may not be able to open on your own. But from my perspective as a startup founder who’s been in business for a long time so spending a lot of money with a PR agency can be a significant investment for a startup and can be a significant investment for a small company. Given the access we now have through social media and through email and through just understanding what the readers want through the questions they ask on social media, quickly getting in to their content, you can do a tremendous amount on your own and so you can build those relationships. You can introduce yourself to writers, you can comment on something that you have written about. They will start to know you and if done right, over time they will start to reach out to you. So what I recommend is, get to know your writers, understand who they are and cover what they’re covering on your space, and develop those relationships. Find them in advance, find them in different places, you can cultivate them over a period of time and you can get pressed, you can get covered. I am not a PR person, I am not professionally trained in the work in an agency, I do not do anything like that but I’ve got a very good lesson from the companies I have worked for over the years and I have been quoted in a lot of great publications but that’s because of these relationships through these channels I’ve built that they all have access now so it’s much, much further and all you have to do is set up an appointment do a briefing and you did not have those channels available to you they were very much managed by these agencies who had the phone numbers but nobody uses phone numbers anymore. Nobody calls, most is done through emails and most writers say it’s done through content and through emails. Depending on the shape, some of them really like to engage through Twitter. Tell me quickly, my time is precious, in 140 characters, why does your content matter? Who are you? Why do I care about you? That is great for press, people talk about the mechanics of a pitch, it’s short, it’s hard and you’ll have trouble doing it too but it does work very efficiently and that’s why it comes down to saying if you want traffic for your website, if you want traffic for your product, do the press yourself and get a significant amount on your own. Later as you grow, bring in the agency because you can’t, as an individual, do it all yourself, but you can do a lot on your own.

James: Yeah, I would advocate this, I have gotten great success with just emailing writers and journalists and saying, hey you’re writing about this topic, I really feel that I could add something great to this, bring more traffic to your website, bring more exposure to your publication and these guys having wanted content as they’re really struggling to find stuff and good people to comment and write content for their publications and are actually looking out for guys like you or I who’s got something good to say so it’s not actually difficult. It all just comes down to this building and establishing relationships again right? It’s really not that –

Alex: Yeah, build relationships and be a really good listener and so it’s knowing who matters in your industry, roll that down to 20 people at most and really listen to them carefully because you’ll find signals and try to be helping, not about your business most of the time and then when there is that moment where you have something else then you can engage something and say hey look would you like this news about my company and if  they can’t cover it sometimes they’ll point you to somebody else that will or they’ll work with you in a way to build it in. so once that relationship is established it’s going to find it much, much easier every single time when you ask them something, it’s like a sales call. It becomes a very cold pitch and they’re busy with other stories, you want to be in their mind on various topics and that can be done takes time and it does not happen overnight but you have tremendous access now but it is essentially free and it is your time you are giving up but from a pure business you know that you have to make them know about it and as they try it out that’s very important to the success at an early, early stage of the business. That’s why I strongly recommend that founders and businesses to do their own PR.

James: Yeah and I guess your app does help with it right? The ability for it to create groups of people that you can follow and engage with probably makes managing process a lot less time consuming than it perhaps could be.

Alex: Absolutely! And that’s like eat your own dog food as they say if we know the product very much we can do that. It’s very useful of keeping track various groups of influencer whether they are media writers and such and bloggers or it could just be an influential user of your product that talks in behalf of you and the brand out of the kit. All those people are important to the success of the business so the more you can listen and engage with them as often you can be and it’s hard you have to say I have to sit down and carve out some time to make sure I am listening but listening is half the battle, usually you find somebody good to engage with getting a note back out to them is pretty quick.

James: Yeah, well Alex I think we should be pretty close to wrapping things up but I always like to ask the question – is there any last piece of parting advice that you might have for Traffic Jam around the topics we’ve been discussing today?

Alex: Yeah, I guess my last two are: do PR yourself, use a product like Cloze to listen, listen carefully, keep track of those really important to you and use a product like Circulate to get the rest of your organization involved because they are your life blood, they can do tremendous things for you. Get your employees to engage in social media and you’ll reap the rewards.

James: Fantastic! And Alex, where do Traffic Jam listeners go to to connect with you?

Alex: You can find me on Twitter I am @AlexCote. I am regularly blogging at Blogs.cloze.com and you’ll find lots of good content there too.

James: Awesome! That listeners was Alex Coté from Cloze.com and of course you’ll find the links from his Twitter profile and all the links he mentioned today’s episode by going to TrafficJamCast.com.

Alex: Thanks James!

This Week’s News in Traffic

First story this week is from TechCrunch.com and it’s a story about Gmail and it’s actually an interesting one I think for us marketers because Google are actually testing a completely different format for the display of email which initially they are trailing on the Gmail promotions tab. We’re all pretty used to a typical list view for our email in our inboxes that might have the sender’s name and of course the subject line and then perhaps a little snippet of text for the first line of the email. This new format is a grid style format that shows the subject line and the sender and a big giant picture. It’s completely different to the format that we’re used to but very, very interesting and potentially game changing for us marketers because in the new format if it is rolled out widely it will make the image you choose in your email equally as important as the subject line, if not more important. Go check this story out in greater detail in TechCrunch.com or if you want to try this new feature yourself in your own Gmail account you can participate in that test from today and during the test you can actually toggle between the old view and the new view for the promotions tab if you don’t like the new format but I kind of like it, it looks pretty cool and I think in terms of options for us marketers we can stand out and get a little bit noticed it will allow for a little bit more creativity in our email marketing which will be a good thing and certainly something I will be interested to test out myself if it is rolled out the bigger Gmail audience.

The next story I picked up from MarketingLand.com is the eagerly anticipated news that promoted pins on pinterest could be making its debut as soon as next month. With Promoted pins or better known with the simple terminology Pinterest ads, are going to share the same apparently as organic pins but with the exception of an organic pin tag displayed on them. The idea is with promoted pins the advertisers will be able to reach more than the active users in the platform than of course just their own followers and those that see their follower’s re-pins. So apparently, advertisers will have the option to buy on a CPM, that’s cost per thousand impressions basis or a CPC, cost per click basis and that will depend whether you’re running your ads for branding or performance related campaigns so I think this is good news especially for you guys that are in the e-commerce sector. I know there are a lot of e-commerce marketers getting great success with Pinterest so the ability to target more people on the platform will be warmly received.

A hat tip in the general direction to listeners I am very grateful for because they both left 5 star Stitcher reviews this week. The first comes from Jeff Brown who titles his review – I so need this. He then goes on to say the SEO, search, traffic, all things that make my eyes glaze over may be yours too. The thing is, if you’re going to be successful, you’ve got to have an understanding of how it all works. Enter James Reynolds and Traffic Jam. He makes it fun and entertaining, I am enjoying for the first time learning about these topics and that’s from Jeff Brown who’s the host of the read to lead podcast which on a side note I do recommend you check out – excellent guests including some ex-Traffic Jam guests like Chris Brogan so go check out his podcast, well worth a listen.

The second five star review comes from American Jim who says great information! This podcast offers a wealth of information that you’ll probably pay for with a marketing company. Looking to market your business product or yourself online, this is definitely a tool that you’ll go by so thank you to American Jim. I will be truly grateful if you too leave a review for the show because it really is the best way that you can support Traffic Jam and just like Jeff and Jim, I’ll make sure that you get a bit of a shout out.

The One Minute Traffic Tip

Okay, so over 30 episode in to a traffic podcast, I do believe today’s tip is the first time I have actually shared a traffic tip related to podcasting. Much of a podcast audience on iTunes will begin from just searching in iTunes itself. iTunes is essentially a search engine so it does kind of make sense to make a little iTunes SEO. The approach to optimizing your podcast is much like optimizing your website. Select popular keywords related to your podcast and include those keywords in your show title and your show description. Of course you should appear keywords in whichever way you can however where you can include them naturally, you should include keywords if possible. The keywords that you may want to consider are the topics that you want to cover on your show but also if you have an interview style show just like mine, you can also include the names of your most well-known guests. There you go, a real quick tip to optimizing your show for iTunes so you get higher rankings within the search results.

So that pretty much brings episode#32 to a close. You can get the show notes and all of the resources mentioned on the episode by going to TrafficJamCast.com and then of course locating the individual show page for Episode#32.

To play out this week’s episode, we’ve got a track from 1991 of the debut Album called Ten and it’s by Pearl Jam. The track is called Jeremy and of course it’s chosen by my guest this week Alex Coté. I absolutely love this track; great choice and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do and I’ll see you back here in about seven days from now.

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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.

Neil Patel, the man behind the Quick Sprout blog, Kiss Metrics and Crazy Egg helps some of the biggest companies on the planet drive traffic and revenue. Amazon, NBC, General Motors and Hewlett Packard all have him on speed dial for when they need a bump in sales.

The Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the web, Forbes says he is one of the top 10 online marketers, US President Barak Obama has recognised him as one of the top entrepreneurs under the age of 30, yes 30! In Neil Patel’s own words he is “kind of a big deal.”

In this episode I tap Neil’s broad experience and uncover his tips to getting more eyeballs using traffic channels like Facebook , Twitter, Infographics, SEO and Out Reach, plus a whole lot more. Listen in now.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

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“Don’t look for quick and easy – provide value and build traffic for the long term.” @NeilPatel
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Hey, what’s up listeners? This is show#31 of the Traffic Jam podcast, I am James Reynolds, your host, and the companion in your ear buds for the next 30 minutes or so and you are going to enjoy it because I have got an incredible, incredible – that’s double incredible guest lined up for you today. It is Mr. Neil Patel. If you have not heard of Neil before, he can be best described as a serial internet entrepreneur. He’s the co-founder of several internet companies in the marketing space I am sure you have heard of already. Companies like Crazy Egg, Kissmetrics, and more recently, Hello Bar. Neil is not just a software guy, he consults with many large corporations I know you would have heard of already, and they are massive companies, companies like Amazon, NBC, GM, HP and Viacom. Neil helps those guys with traffic and conversions really helping them build a profitable audience online, Neil does what we talk about here on Traffic Jam each and every week in the trenches so to speak, with the world’s major corporations.

In the press, Neil has been called by the Wall Street Journal a top influencer on the web, Forbes say he’s one of the top 10 online marketers you should follow, and get this, Entrepreneur Magazine say he’s created on of the 100 most brilliant companies in the world. That’s a pretty darn impressive CV to say the least, but what’s way more impressive than the CV itself is the fact that Neil Patel is not even 30 years old.  That’s right, he was born April 24th,1985, which I should mention just in case you want to send him a birthday card of course which give or take a day means that Neil is almost 5 years to the day younger than me.

This guy is good! I mean, seriously, what this guy has been able to achieve a few years out of high school is real, real impressive and it’s absolutely no surprise therefore that President Obama himself honored Neil as one of the top 100 entrepreneurs under the age of 30 and I got to say just deserved. I myself have been following Neil at least quite a few years online now and I think his quality of content, the regularity at which he puts his stuff out with the consistency that he puts it out with the brand values that he has makes him one of my real, to follow guys and I know you’re going to want to follow the content that he’s going to share today on this interview, it’s going to be highly impressive stuff, I know so perhaps get a pen ready, get yourself a little bit more comfy than you are right now, grab a drink and get ready to take some notes because you are going to take  away a lot from this interview.

But don’t think that Neil is going to be the only the only spectacle today, he’s not. We have of course the regular segments, they are all coming up, and as they do each and every week, the One Minute Traffic tip which is a bite sized traffic nugget that you can easily implement in your own business, that’s coming up along with this week’s news in traffic, and of course, I don’t mean the congestion that’s happening on your local highway, no! I am talking about all of the latest news, all of the updates out of all of the major traffic platforms – places like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, your ad networks, whatever is happening in the world of traffic in the past seven days, you’ll get to hear about it, that’s all coming up. But, right here, and right now, it’s the feature interview and it’s with of course, Neil Patel.

James: So what’s up listeners? This is Traffic Jam interview #31 and joining me is Neil Patel from QuickSprout.com, CrazyEgg.com, Kiss Metrics, and a bunch of other places I am sure you have all heard of, Neil, welcome to Traffic Jam!

Neil: Thanks for having me!

James: Well, it is awesome to have you on-board. Of course I have been doing my research which I always do before these interviews and I had a read of your bio on your website and one of the things that you state there which I am going to open up with is that you are born with a gift and that is being able to help websites get a ton of eyeballs on web. I wouldn’t normally open up with this question but I am going to because I think it is appropriate, what is your #1, your very best traffic getting, eyeball grabbing strategy?

Neil: Content marketing. It works very well, create good content that people want to read and they’ll love and they’ll come to your site and eventually some of those people will end up converting.

James: Fab! Well, that is good, I think we’ll run with this theme across the interview but let me start by diving in to SEO because that is a topic that is very close to your heart and you’ve got great success with it for yourself and for others. On the side of that, as you have just said, a big advocate of content marketing and you are a prolific creator of content yourself but I also get the feel that you enjoy exploiting a few hacks that can leverage a few quick wins. What shortcuts are there, if there are any in this sort of semantic era that can boost search results without putting the hundreds or thousands of hours required in to content marketing?

Neil: There’s a lot of things that can be done right? If you are just trying to boost your rankings, one simple thing is look at the on-page SEO elements. A lot of people make mistakes with titles, headings, making sure their code is clean, a lot of people are messy codes and not cross-linking between your pages. Mashable does a good job of this which is why they rank so low. So these are some of the basic things that a lot of the companies are still messing up on. They may seem obvious but it’s usually the obvious things that we need to work on a bit more.

James: Yeah, I mean even with the rankings as they are, if you can increase click through rate as you said just by optimizing your page title is better which I guess is even more topical right now because of the way Google has just changed the search results layout right? I mean the bigger fonts, there’s probably lesser fonts so I am sure that is a pretty quick and easy win.

Neil: That is correct, you got it right.

James: Cool! You have gotten pretty good results in SEO for people like Tech Crunch – I believe I read in your blog that for your own site, QuickSprout.com, you’ve managed to increase your visits by, well I am going to get this right, 173,336 to be precise per month, how do you manage to do that?

Neil: Yeah, sure. I am going to go with you on that number –

James: We will cross check.

Neil: To be clear, it’s just content marketing. Writing good content, writing it on topics that people want to read, share, focusing on what’s working on the social space like on Twitter and Facebook. A combination of all of those stuff is what is causing the real boost. One thing that we have done that’s really helped increase traffic is long tailed SEO. So what we’ll end up doing is we’ll see what posts are ranking and we’ll use Google suggest to type in the keyword and then we’ll see other similar keywords because Google suggests other popular phrases and we’ll start integrating those keywords in to our existing content when it is natural, we won’t just keyword stuff and that has also been helping us get a lot more search traffic.

James: Yeah, I read this post and I think the example that you used was you were ranking quite well for motivational quotes was it, and you just literally used –

Neil: I guess that was motivational and inspirational quotes or something in that terrain as well.

James: Yeah, it is kind of funny, right? Google actually does give us all the clues if we are ready to go and look for them, I mean they’ll tell you what other variations might make good keywords to target and it is all there in the plain search platform, you don’t have to look to far, right?

Neil: That’s correct.

James: Awesome! A couple of posts that I’ve seen that you’ve published relatively recently was how to steal your competitor’s Twitter followers and how to steal your competition’s fans. First of all, I have got to say, very cool headlines – simple but certainly eyeball grabbing and secondly very cool strategies that I am sure Traffic Jam listeners would love to hear. Tell us about those two.

Neil: Yeah, there is a lot of things that you can end up doing right? In the basic sense, with Facebook, you can actually just create an ad campaign and target fans of, let’s say if I want to target fans of Hub Spot, I can target Hub Spot and all their fans and advertise just to them and try to see if I can get them to come over and like my page, right? Twitter: there’s a lot of free tools out there depending on what you end up doing but you can actually see who’s engaging with your competitors, who’s on your competitor’s list, and then from there you can actually go and target a few of those guys on the list and see if you can actually get on those lists because if you are able to get on those lists, what you’ll end up noticing is you’ll instantly get a lot of traction because those lists already have followers it’s just more on how you can get on there and it actually works quite well. For Twitter if you are trying to do this, one of the tools that I recommend using is Twitonomy and that should help you quite a bit with finding out who is active in your competitor’s profiles and stuff like that.

James: Okay cool. So that’s Twitonomy, we’ll make sure that’s linked to within the show notes for this episode. So once we’ve established what those lists are, what strategies are there to actually get ourselves on those lists, if any?

Neil: I try go see who the list owner is, I try to interact with them, tweet out to them and then I’ll direct message them after a week or two seeing if they can add me.

James: Okay, cool. Perfect! I love the simple answers, they’re always the best.

Neil: Yup, and then for Facebook you can always use fan page comments to see who’s active on your competitor profiles also.

James: Got it! Nice! Well again, I think for a little bit of further explanation we’ll make sure that those 2 posts are linked off to the show notes. Now, one thing that I have got to say Neil, is that you’ve got, from what I can see at Quick Sprout especially is that you’ve got an extremely engaged audience, I mean if we look at those two posts that we were just talking about, both of them have got a 150+ comments, at least at the time of recording anyway but for our listener out there who’s got a dormant website which feels like a ghost town which I am sure many have, what advise have you got to increase audience engagement to kind of somewhere near what you have been able to do?

Neil: The biggest thing to increase engagement is to just ask a question at the end of your blog post and respond to every single person that leaves a comment. Those two things help out quite a bit.

James: Okay, so what sort of examples might you have of good questions that you can end a post with?

Neil: If your post is on stealing your competitor’s Facebook fans, you can end up with – so how else can you grow your Facebook fan page? Just something related to the title.

James: Got and then would you add in some sort of a call to action, would you post your comments below?

Neil: Not really call to action, just ask them a question and the comments are right below so if they want they can leave a comment right?

James: Yeah, got it. Okay, so there certainly is no sort of pushy tactics involved there, you just leave them with a kind of open loop that is hopefully going to encourage people to interact on their own accord.

Neil: That’s correct.

James: Got it. Okay, good! Another thing I want to ask you a little bit about is infographics. I know Traffic Jam listeners will certainly be familiar with them because we talk about them a lot on the show and I think in terms of content they’re fantastically share-worthy content that is of course very easily spreadable. But Infographics 1.0 version, a little bit of old hat now right, Neal? You’ve got something different that you’re doing with infographics right? Tell us a little bit about that.

Neil: I’m doing something quite a bit with infographics which I am just trying to explain complex data in visual format and they seem to be getting good traffic so I like it. I don’t try to make it too complex or anything like that.

James: What’s your process for getting topics and data for your infographics? Because I am sure there is a fair amount of research to put one of those things together right?

Neil: Yeah, I just have someone who focuses on that and then they just work on continually improving the data so I have a full time person who goes out there and find data for me.

James: Yeah, well that would make sense. Who’s actually producing them? I am sure you are not doing the artwork and the infographics yourself right?

Neil: We have a full time designer, she just cranks them out so –

James: Yeah, good. And she really just crank them out, I mean, you are putting out a lot of those things right?

Neil: Yeah, one a week.

James: Yeah, good work.

Neil: Every Friday.

James: Good stuff. I’d like to ask you a little bit about who else is creating content for your site? You’ve mentioned that you’ve got this infographic creator and a researcher in-house. Are you doing everything else? Because you’ve got a lot of blogs right? It’s not just QuickSprout.com, you’ve got active blogs on your other sites as well, and who’s putting all that stuff together?

Neil: Quick Sprout’s the only one that I manage myself, other people do the Crazy Egg and Kissmetrics for me.

James: Yeah okay. So what size of team have you got? I mean that’s got to be a big power engine behind all of these right, powering this thing along?

Neil: A lot. I don’t know all their names and I don’t know everyone on the team but just in general, in a company we have tons of employees, right? We have tons of job openings, probably 15-20 so

James: Wow! What advice would you have for someone who’s got a smaller business getting started with this stuff that would probably be the authority in their business and there for the sort of person that should be driving the content. What advice would you have for them? What should they get started with and where should they get started?

Neil: Yeah, the best place to get started is look at your competitors, look at their blogs, see what’s working in their space and go from there. Don’t just start by saying here’s what we’re going to do it’s more so first analyze the space industry and see what gaps and voids you can fill and what’s working for other people.

James: Got it.  Now strategy I see that you do a lot of but many others shy away from because I guess it takes a lot of time and energy and that’s outreach. I guess you do a lot of it from what I can see, would you recommend that our listener start to conduct outreach programs themselves and if so what advice have you got for them for doing it effectively?

Neil: If they are going to do outreach and they are going to do it themselves, the best thing I can end up saying is make sure with all the outreach the overall goal is just being friendly and trying to help people. Most people who do outreach continually pitch and that is all they do and sure that is awesome but outreach does not work that well when you’re pitching. You actually need to help people and provide them with advice and try to help them out.

James: I’d like to dig a little bit here Neil, if I can. What examples can you give to us in terms of suitable ways to identify places to and also what sort of lead in might be effective that’s not kind of pitching your wares?

Neil: It’s more sort of finding out what people need help with then going from there so the best strategy for outreach is look to see who in your space is not competitive but see who is open about posting other people’s content and are linking out and tweeting out as well as engaging with them, it’s usually the friendly ones, don’t look for direct competitors.

James: Yeah! So would you actually look for sites for instance that have regular guest posting and regular contributors? Would that be a good place to start?

Neil: Yes, I would. So I look for blogs who accept guest posters, even people from the industry. I would not go and be at my competitor and say, hey, could I blog in your blog?

James: Yeah, I think that would be received with the most amount of warmth right?

Neil: Yeah, you could get someone to tell you to buzz off so –

James: Yeah and that’s the polite response. That’s the censored version. Where else are you syndicating content other than the outreach that you’re doing, which you are clearly doing quite a bit of? Where else are you creating content for or syndicating your content to?

Neil: With me, like we’ll work out deals like with entrepreneur magazine and they syndicate for us so what we end up doing is find out who needs more content, publish it, and we try to get more information that can benefit their readers.

James: Okay, so Entrepreneur is one –

Neil: Yeah the way we get these deals is we do manual outreach like hey we noticed that you guys publish a lot of content, are you guys looking for more? We don’t have time to write any content for you but are you open in syndicating our existing content?

James: So they just pick it up and plug it in? Any adaptation or do they just take an off-shelf version putting it straight in there?

Neil: They take the off the shelf version.

James: Nice! That I think is certainly in terms of what we look back to at the start of the interview in terms of quick wins for content marketing that would certainly be one right? You can leverage what you’ve already got and get that in to that hands of more places it is certainly a way that you can leverage it a bit quicker.

 Neil: that is correct!

James: Cool! I have been following you for a little while now and of course reading your content but more importantly watching what you do, one thing that I have observed is you’re extremely innovative and you seem to be ahead of the bell curve on many things, inforgraphics is one, and perhaps we can comment a little but about that.  The pop up I see you are using as well, this kind of choose your own journey 2-step pop up, the first time I saw that was certainly on your site. As somebody who’s seem hot on new innovations, what do you think is coming up next? What are the emerging channels if you like, that our listeners should be looking out for?

Neil: I really still think it’s Facebook and Twitter. Not enough companies are leveraging them and the ads on those channels are dirt cheap.

James: Yeah! Are you doing a lot of stuff on Twitter?

Neil: I am- Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. A lot of people looking for different channels that no one’s tapped but at the end of the day it’s about the channels that you know but no one’s using right?

James: Yeah, so what are you doing differently with these two if anything or are you just working them harder than others?

Neil: Just working them harder, being smart on the ads, we’re testing them a lot versus just setting them up and letting them sit. We’re also testing quite a bit of the video ads in YouTube so we’re doing quite a bit of everything.

James: Nice! Okay. Cool stuff, just before we kind of get towards the close, I’d like to ask you a little bit about these gif-ographics because when I saw you at traffic and conversion event, you were leaving quite a few little hints about what you’ve been doing with them and the results that you’ve been getting. Let’s talk specifically about these animated gif-ographics you’ve been getting a hold of.

Neil: Yeah, so I have been creating – I believe that sometimes with complicated things it is easier to explain them through stories and making it animated and visual so it is taking inforgraphics to the next level and it seems to be taking quite well which, just showing the data in the visual format that is animated and that animation helps explain the story seems to be converting quite well, right? People sharing it, embedding it on their site, it’s doing quite well.

James: Yeah, well I guess it’s new, it’s different. I guess when people stumble upon your gif-ographics in your site, perhaps they have not encountered something similar before so it has certainly got that appeal that would be more interesting and worthy of sharing, I think they look stunning! The one I saw with, was it a leopard running? It was very cool, it was certainly eye-catching and presented the information very well.

Neil: Exactly! I think they are great and more people could end up doing them like they do, I think in the long run they’ll do exceptionally well.

James: I am sure as we link of to these in the show notes of the episode, some of the Traffic Jam listeners start to get a hold of it I am sure you’ll start to see a few more pop there in the interwebs, just keep your eyes peeled for those. So Neil, we’ve gone through very quick, we’ve covered a lot of what I wanted to with you and you have been extremely generous with your expertise but before we wrap up, what sort of parting advice that you’ve got for our listeners that you really think is relevant to anyone wanting to build traffic to their own website?

Neil: Don’t look for the quick and easy route. A lot of people just think how they can get more traffic tomorrow. Look for the tactics that are long term, provide a lot of value and are very educational.

James: Yeah, okay. Good! That is certainly in line with what we teach here each and every week in Traffic Jam so I am glad that was the answer that you Neil. Just as we wrap up, where should our listeners connect with you further?

Neil: Just QuickSprout.com.

James: Fantastic! So Traffic Jam listeners, head on over to QuickSprout.com for more of what Neil has got to talk about in the blog that I follow and I certainly recommend that you do the same so please head on over, so Neal, thanks again for coming on Traffic Jam I certainly enjoyed it today and I appreciate your time.

Neil: No problem, thanks for having me.

This Week’s News in Traffic

Right, so I am starting this week with a story out of Facebook originally reported on MarketingLand.com so thank you to the good people over at Marketing Land and they reported on a test that Facebook has been running for a business manager which is certainly a tool for agencies and large businesses to manage multiple Facebook advertising accounts within one fascia. So I guess this a little bit like the MCC that Google have that my client sent us that agencies like myself use to manage multiple Google Adwords accounts from within one place. So this fascia, this dashboard, it has all of the things that you expect to find in a product like this. You can manage campaigns, reporting, billing, account permissions and of course assign account permissions to people within your business from manager level to admin level and give people different rights to do different things within the accounts so all the things you’d expect there. I think the nice thing especially from the usability standpoint is that it allows you to add access to people who you’re not necessarily friends with in Facebook so those disgruntled employees who don’t want to make friends with their team members at work, this will allow you to do that. So always an upside, I think it will be well received by agencies. If you want to go check this out because you are an agency, there’ll be a link off to further about this within the episode notes of this episode of Traffic Jam.

In my second story, well, it has been proven that Tweets that have a photo or a video URL tend to lead to the biggest increase in retweets from verified accounts on Twitter. Now that’s the key take away from a study out this week that analyzed more than 2 million tweets sent out to about a space of one month from verified accounts related to TV, news, radio, government or sports. That’s what Twitter is telling us and the study analyzed in depth all this as the real hard attributes of a tweet, those being like a photo post, hash tags, links, videos, and also tweets containing either a number or a digit – that would be something like a sports score or an official stat and overall, Twitter study found that tweets, photos and videos produce the biggest jumps in retweets – 35% of photos and 28% for videos. So the take away here is and honestly there is no real big surprise – is that visual content outperforms text in almost every scenario. It’s why so many Traffic Jam episodes have been focused around the topic of visually prominent marketing be it the discussions we’ve had around Pinterest, video, be it the discussion I had today with Neil all about infographics, you absolutely need to be using engaging imagery in your marketing.

In my final story for today we go to Tech Crunch and Tech Crunch have reported on a story that Yahoo have partnered up with Yelp to bring local data from Yelp in to Yahoo’s search tools. Now the deal was to seal additional Yelp information that you’d be familiar with such as things like ratings and user photos piped right in to Yahoo’s search. Really, put another way, Yahoo’s search is being increasingly flavored with third party data and not just their own. Really, Yahoo is no longer a company that is well known for its search products. It’s long ago seated its search technology to Microsoft but the company still does have a reasonably large command of the search query markets. It’s probably just an effort to regain some of that or at least consolidate the level of market that they currently have. Is this type of deal anything new? Well, no. The company that they sold their search technology to- that’s Microsoft – announced a very similar deal with Yelp about 2 years ago which seems reminiscent of that type of deal. Anything that we need to do to adapt as marketers? Well, no not really. This is very much a case of business as usual.

One Minute Traffic Tip

This tip is going to be for you if you’ve got a Facebook page which I am guessing there’s quite a few of you, if you are freaking frustrated because less than 10% are ever getting your update anymore. I can assure you, when you apply this tip not only will you get super high visibility but you’ll also not need to spend 20, 50 or even 100 bucks or more, Facebook recommend to boost your post. So here’s how it works, inside the power editor to continually run from this day forward, always promoting your most recent post as a promoted post in the news feed, select the campaign you want to target and then select the campaign to only show to people who have already liked your page. Each time then that you create a new post on your page, Facebook will automatically submit it for review and then if it is approved, it will replaced the prior post that appeared as an add and will show the post as an ad in people’s newsfeed. Doing it this way, your entire budget and I recommend, wait for it – as little as $2 – $5 per day, it will all be spent in getting your ad in front of your fans. This is a ridiculously cheap strategy and an extremely effective way of sidestepping Facebook’s horrible edge rank and boosting your engagement.

That almost draws Episode #31 of Traffic Jam to a close but just before we close out I want to say thank you to you out there the listener for taking the time that you do out of your day to listen in to Traffic Jam, I really, really do hope that in return I am managing to deliver some value that you can apply to your own business to increase your traffic and grow a profitable audience online. That’s the aim of Traffic Jam.

Now, remember, you can head on over to Veravo.com and find all of the episode and show notes for this episode and all the others of Traffic Jam along with a host of other traffic tips and training so head on over to veravo.com and as always, we’re going to close out this episode with another musical jam so here it is. The track is called Skaramoosh, which is in fact, our intro track for Traffic Jam, so at last, you get to hear the full length version and big shout out to Paul Thomas, he’s the wonderfully talented DJ and producer who produced this piece of music and other tracks that we use here in Traffic Jam so big shout out to Paul, a very good friend of mine. If you want to check out what he is doing, go to DJPaulThomas.com. Anyway, that’s it for Traffic Jam and I’ll see you back here in about seven days from now. See you then!

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THIS WEEKS NEWS IN TRAFFIC

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The world of search is constantly changing and how it was defined in the past does not reflect how it works today. With the evolution of Semantic Search, the practice of Search Engine Optimisation has evolved (thankfully) too. The skewing of results through manipulative tactics is near on gone, and the way to reign supreme now is as it always should have been based on value and the reputation of the website/brand, the content and it’s author.

This week’s guest is David Amerland a specialist in Google Semantic Search and the best selling author of the book of the same name.  In this episode David and I discuss how semantic search has changed not just SEO but the entire web as we know it both for users and for marketers.

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“Change focus from search to people and through people you get the search you want.”@DavidAmerland
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Hello! I am James Reynolds and welcome back to Traffic Jam episode#30. This episode and every single episode here in Traffic Jam, my guest and I share tips that help you get more traffic and build a profitable audience online.

This week, we are back visiting the topic of Google search which for me as a search marketer of course I am excited about because I get to geek out a little bit with someone who is equally as passionate about SEO as I am and my partner in crime who I’ll be geeking out with this week is David Amerland and he’s a pretty eminent authority on all things Google semantic search. If your mind just glazed over by the term semantic search, then don’t worry because David and I covered that right in the front of the interview before going on to explain why this is the biggest distraction we’ve ever had since the whole web came along. Without exaggeration, this is going to affect absolutely everything from the way we market to the way we get jobs and even to how we might find life partners. And of course in this interview, I get David to share exactly how you need to adapt for the new semantic web.

Right after my interview with David, we’ve got this week’s news in traffic, I have my regular segment of course, The One Minute Traffic Tip and then we have the Traffic Jam Jam, a music track chosen today by my guest, David Amerland.

So who is David Amerland? He is a former journalist, a former corporate executive and former SEO manager. He likes martial arts and quantum physics and he can even still run the 100 meters in 11.4 seconds, now that to me sounds super-fast! He is the author of several marketing books Getting To Number 1 on Google, The Social Media Mind, Online Marketing Help and of course his latest book, the best-selling Google Semantic Search. That is of course the topic of today’s interview so without any further ado, let’s dive straight in, this is David Amerland and we’re talking semantic search.

James: So I am here with David Amerland, author of the popular book Google Semantic Search, which is kind of lucky because this is the topic of today’s episode. David, a very warm welcome to Traffic Jam!

David: Hello and thank you very much for having me here. I am really excited to be here.

James: Well, this is going to be a blast! I love talking about search and I know this is a topic that’s very close to your heart so we’ll dive straight in to the content and I think I’d like to open up with what perhaps might be a basic question, I’m sure one that you have been asked all too often but I guess none the less, very important to set the scene today, what the heck is semantic search?

David: You’re absolutely right! Everybody asks that and ever rightly so because semantic search is the biggest deal ever since the internet came along. So it is really, really radical and so powerful and we need to understand that, so explaining what it is, it really is rocket science for a change in the world of search but how it affects us is very, very simple and it is great. Let’s think of it as a sandwich; it’s comprised of literally 3 layers. Layer 1 is us – people doing the search and the way we do it, how we do it, our search history, our patterns and behavior and everything we do goes in to that layer and begins to form a search mechanism. Layer 2 which is he middle bit, is what we see on our computers or our devices. It’s basically the search interface which sometimes can be voice, rather than the screen or it can be, in terms of Google now, it can be predictive search. And the final layer, which is where all the magic happens, is the search engine mechanism itself where it goes out in to the web, collects information, ever since I said, since search began. But then it has something new, it actually understands the language it finds the way that you and I would, and it begins to index it in its index in way where it’s compared to under construction. It gets a little bit technical un-stretched information, think of it as straw heap, the traditional haystack, and very neat little bale and is actually labeled and is very easy to find.

James: Got it!

David: So that’s what it is, everything comes together. The moment all this comes together, search changes, it changes because suddenly we can find information which is contextualized for us at a personal level. If for instance I am in Dubai and I run a search on my mobile device, the information that I find will be contextualized to my situation, my IP Address, my location and even sometimes even the time of day.

James: Fantastic! Let’s continue this line of conversation, perhaps talk a little bit about how the search web has advanced from the point of view of the user and maybe it might be even worth mentioning some of the terms that perhaps our listener may or may have not noticed using Google and the other search engine.  I guess I am kind of talking here about without answering your question here for you, we are kind of talking about knowledge graph, Google Now that you mentioned already and things like voice search and some of those advancements we’ve seen recently.

David: There like a 19-thread tool which can be scary sometimes when you take it to its logical extension and the scary bit in this thread of course is artificial intelligence. So essentially if we think of search in the past, it was really a dumb mechanism and it was really, really dumb. I’ll explain how dumb it was. It was essentially a textual analysis which is statistical and created a probability of right or wrong in bringing search queries. So in the past we had to use some keywords when you search for instance, let’s say you’re looking for podcasts in Dubai for instance, you have to have the word podcast and Dubai and perhaps the name of the presenter. You put a lot in search and search will find it in its index and then work out in terms of the number of keywords that in terms of documents have much in terms of probability and this created two special binds, first in terms of the search experience. If you are inexperienced, then you are looking for something and you are not familiar with keywords or you were not familiar with using search operators, then your likelihood of finding something precise dropped off a little bit. So the moment you went off the beaten path you were in to unknown territory. On the side of the person creating the content, you also had to try and second guess those who would be likely to look for it. So if you are a business person for instance, obviously what you want to do is promote your business, you have specific jargon sometimes, you have specific things but you also have to think at some level, it still needs your services or your products. What are they likely to look for? And then you had to look for your game where you are creating more and more keywords while finding your keyword footprint. And you need to create content around those keywords. And some of those keywords are a little of we call them long tailed keywords, they are not very popular, we still had to create content; a very thin content because it was only specifically created to bring in traffic from search on a probability basis if somebody searched for that. It was not a very good experience; it created landing pages, it created a lot of work people who had businesses. It became a very loss in preposition in terms of the value iit gave to us individuals. All of this has changed radically. Now semantic search looks like a document, looks like a page of a website, it tries very hard to understand what the business does. How does it do it? What are its specificities? What is its specialization? How good is it? It is mind blowing; we get search now trying to put us in place in terms of qualitative judgment and serve us up ahead of somebody who does. So it tries to do all that and then it tries to understand what do I mean when I put down for instance podcast in Dubai? Am I looking to start a podcast myself? Am I looking for a podcast in Dubai? Am I looking for perhaps podcast equipment in Dubai because I might actually be doing that. And the way it is trying to do that is through my own personal signals so this synthesis now, when it works perfectly, what it does is it understands what I am looking for and gives me the best possible answers which is good news for me the consumer and good news because usually there is only one or two businesses which will come up as that answer. There is a caveat here, we’re still not quite there yet. Because in order for semantic search to work, it needs tremendous amounts of data. It is getting there, it’s getting faster and faster in terms of how quickly accelerating but right now we have a little bit of one we have a little bit of the other – it’s a slightly imperfect world. And sometimes depending on the type of business we are looking for, or depending on the kind of device we are on sometimes, we might get answers which are not as satisfactory.

James: Yeah, but we can certainly see that movement in the right direction, I mean looking at the search direction in themselves if we look back perhaps even six months, certainly 12 and definitely in 2 years and beyond, the quality of those results is far less manipulated than it was previously and it certainly is far less low quality results, right, coming up in the upper parts of the page or at least it is moving in that direction.

David: Definitely! I think you made 2 very important points here and I am grateful for that. First of all you said they are less likely to be manipulated. In the past, because search was able to be broken down to very specific steps which we could understand, then we’re bound by human nature to put them in to effect and more of that as we went along and this turned a bit of a game and enhanced the gaming nature of search where we could see websites coming up which perhaps did not quite deserve to be there the way they were. Now, semantic search is a lot harder to gain, it’s a lot harder to gain because it is more complex and we still cannot understand it, but the entire economic value of any gaming behavior is that it actually provides a shortcut between what you do and the goal you are trying to achieve. So in the past if you want your website to rise in Google for instance, you do certain things and it rose very quickly so you saved yourself a lot of time, you gained a little money in the process and it works. With semantic search, this is not so. You still have to do the same amount of work if you were to fake something as were you were to do it for real. So because the time element has gone, because there is no shortcut, then the economic behavior trying to gain something does not make any sense anymore. And that makes it more likely that you will actually do the work that is required in order for your business to actually rise on semantic search which then has a positive impact in terms of consumer’s quality and less manipulation. And since we are talking about quality, of course the easiest shortcut for any business looking to gain an edge in semantic search is to actually produce quality content in terms of reaching first its primary audience, its customers and secondary creating a website that will appeal to search engines and that again is a win. Those consumers will tend to get better information on the web and it tends to satisfy the needs we have when we search for it.

James: Let’s talk a little bit about these steps that we might go through now as a business owner or as an SEO or some marketer compared to the past, other than putting out quality content, what other steps might we be taking to position ourselves better in the semantic era compared to that of the past where we would stuff content with a string of keywords to try and influence the relevancy of content for the results etc. so how have things changed David between the past and the present?

David: Well, there is a magic formula to this now. I am bound to say that right?

James: We love magic formulas. I’m sure the audience will too!

David: I’m asked every time. What is a man’s secret sauce? And I always say the same thing- I know the answer and I am going to tell you and the moment I tell them they realize there is no secret sauce. If you want to gain traction in semantic search, you ask yourself three basic questions: who are you, why you do what you do and how do you do it? These are three things. These three things however, form to have many steps when you actually break them down. They’re very inward looking and they tend to form the unique proposition of any kind of business. Basically, it is business identity and the moment you have a business identity you realize it is unique. No business is like any other business even if you are doing the exact same thing in the same industry. And that begins to become the defining factor. Once you have that in place, any questions becomes a lot easier. How do I project this? Do I need for instance have to have content that has to be videos ad shows my passion for my work or the uniqueness of what I do? Do I need to have text? Do I need blog posts? And we don’t need to write everyday anymore. It’s not like in the past where we’re slaves to the blogs because we had to do it and if we don’t do it we don’t get indexed as much and then we did not show up in search. Now all these values of who we are and what we’re doing and why we do it, they’re an integral part of the quality of what we do on the web and the quality of what we do with our digital identity. So if you create all these for your business, and I make it sound very easy of course, there is a lot of work doing it. So you’ve spent the last year doing it so what’s next? Be critical. You need to have a social layer with everything you do. And why do you need to do that? Because essentially, and Google has said this, Semantic search is a transition from a web of websites to a web of people. And this is a little bit of cipher because I still search information in websites, I still make purchases in websites, well yes, as vehicles and when you connect to people and you need to have the website to have a sense of who you are connecting with in terms of the people behind it, their passion, their drives, their identity, which creates a trust factor and which is what we need. In fact, trust is where all connecting starts. So really in order to have those connections with people, the social layer, whether you are in Facebook or in Twitter or when you are on Google+ and Google+ should definitely be in your radar, you basically crate all these social connections which “buy” into what you do in sense of purpose, drive and passion and they become your amplification points so suddenly your social footprints begins to increase, and I’ll give an example of it. Suppose for instance you’re selling kayaks, and you are in Dubai selling kayaks. I am not going to buy kayaks from you because you are in Dubai because I am in Britain and I can find a kayak on my doorstep. However, if we connect online and you are really passionate about what you do and I am interested in kayaks; you tell me about this and I think this is pretty cool and I listen to you and I begin to form an idea that hey, you know your business and what you do is fantastic and resonates with me. I am still not going to buy anything from you. Because we connected, engaged and interacted however under personalized search, somebody looking for kayaks who’s on my social network is now likely to find your content even though they are not your direct customer, they do not know you they know me, so basically through me, who I am not your customer but I am your connection because we connected socially, they now find you and because they know me and trust me, they are more likely to make a connection and a purchase from you. So basically the world has got very small; the traditional six degrees of separation now there are about two maximum three which means the connection of friend of a friend now actually has monetary value which is why social creates a social proof by creating a social layer. Websites are critical because that’s how you actually find the audience which is targeted and more likely to find an audience with you.

James: Got it! So this is really, I mean I guess from Google’s standpoint of how they are trying to push this thing forward and position it are they really trying to bring that real world offline interactivity that an individual would have with their network or community or following and then trying to bring that in to a new age online environment where the same connection still exists right? I mean it is really that transference of real life activity online.

David: That’s absolutely right! Exactly what you said. We’ve known these things and we’ve put them in to use in our offline environment and our offline world and offline connections. For the past 10-15 years we wrongly assumed that digital also meant an economy of sale and a massive audience in just a few clicks and it’s not the case. You really have to market to one single person at a time, you have to make that resonant connection which then allows them to become your online evangelist, your amplification point, which then spreads the message- spreads your presence essentially on the web and makes it more likely that you are going to surface in search in very different formats and very different environments. And this is another difference with semantic search. The traditional first search page of Google which we all vie to be in the first 10 links after the first three otherwise your clicks drop off and everybody sort of tried to gain the position really does not work anymore. Because the first page of Google is becoming increasingly personalized which means that it’s different for every person depending on different factors from the devices they use, to the search patterns, to the time of day; all of this way on your world. So really you are going for visibility rather than ranking in search. And what I noticed with websites of companies who want my advice is that when semantic search kicks in is they witness a strange thing. The traffic that they had has dropped off, sometimes by as much as 40%. However, they have seen an increase in conversions, sometimes by as much as 15% so really what’s happened is you’re getting fewer customers landing on your webpage but they are more highly motivated and more targeted and at the end of the day, that’s the real kicker because that is exactly where you want to be.

James: So what sort of change in mindset do we need to have to really have a go of semantic search? I guess the first thing would be to have a real kind of moving away or though away from traditional keyword based search and keyword data which I guess for Google to be kind of forcing on us right? I mean we can’t access keyword data in the same way that we used to. I mean on that point, should we still consider keyword data? Should we still look to map our site and build our purpose around what people are actually searching?

David: It’s a brilliant question, you’re right! Keywords that are provided now is universal. No way must it actually get keyword data because they can’t really track keywords that put customers in to their websites, although through Google webmaster tools you can still get keyword data for the past 90 days. But really, the point behind all this is that we used to use keywords because we chased search engines. We created content which appealed to search engine bots first and people second. And that mind-shift that needs to take place now is that you need to run your online business in exactly the same way as you would your offline business. So how would you run an offline business? You’re not trying to impress your advertisers or wow your suppliers, obviously you do it differently but that’s not the way you do your business. What you are trying to do is get your customers, those who see you, to make an informed decision that you have the business that they actually want to work with, you’re the person they want to make a purchasing decision for with. So in order to do that, you have to basically in every kind of contact, whether it’s visual, whether it’s through your advertising whether through the setup of your shop, and in this case your website, you create visual cues which sent a message you create with all these information which allows everybody to make an informed decision based on this. And this is the mind shift. Basically you are focusing from search to people and through people you will get search so you are really chasing people. And I am using chasing here obviously in a sort of very broad context. The thing is, the moment you succeed in that, you’ve won. Because suddenly you have an audience and it’s your audience, it’s not anybody else’s. That gives you a good operating base and that moment you have an audience, you also have an impact in search because that audience is an online audience, they are active in the social web, they are active themselves in websites, they are active in terms of how they pass around information and engage and interact with it. So they become your footprint on the web, it’s like your shop has suddenly grown times the number of people in the audience that you have. And that’s an incredible thing to have.

James: Great! Well, let’s talk a little bit about content because I am sure that the kind of mechanics of content would always be something that would always someone who is getting in to this. What sort of frequency, format should we be looking at? Or in fact does none of this stuff matter but we should do it with a personal voice that connects with our audience?

David: Certainly there is a technicality to that but the most proficient and efficient SEO in the world would not be as a really passionate person can really reach the audience which is your connection with your online audience is key to this. If you have a voice, obviously you think how you use it best. And here there are several factors. The amount of time you have available coming, the amount of money you have available for this coming to it, perhaps the technical expertise will come in. if you can make fantastic videos which everybody loves to share to go viral, great! Do that! If you make podcasts, very good. If you can write really well and really passionately, that’s fantastic. To get the technicality of how long should my writing be, well it should be as long as it should be to get the message across. If you look at Seth Godin for instance, these days, he barely writes more than 25 words but they are 25 fantastic words because he has been thinking about it for ages. He puts that in there because he does not have lots of time, and he gives you an idea which is really fantastic. And it’s that kind of value that we are actually looking for in terms of a win in a semantic web. It is transparent where everything you do now begins to accrue value, it has a reputation which broadens your digital footprint.

James: You stated somewhere in the web when I was researching for this interview that Google+ is the closest you’ll get to a shortcut in semantic search. Explain what you mean by that one.

David: Okay, a lot of people think that Google+ is a rival to Facebook because we use the word social network to explain what it is because it is convenient but really it has nothing to do with Facebook. Google+ is a social layer that Google has put in place and its real intent is to create an online identity service for semantic search. And why do we need that? Because semantic search really needs that unique factor, it needs to understand that I am David and I do very specific things and you are James and you do very specific things and although we are both male, that’s the only commonality we have, we’re in different geographic locales, different age, different experience, and different activities and so on. The only way you can do that is if it begins to identify us from an initial point and the easiest initial point is Google+ so if you are in Google+ and you have your profile, through that profile, what you post or your interactions and your engagement; through the engagement that you post that you have, the people you connect with, all these things are summed up. As they are summed up, they go to your reputational sound cloud which Google uses to assess the impact of what you do. So for instance I was a world’s best fisherman and I had an account in the cloud and on Google+ that is fantastic and I happen one day to come across a bicycle shop and I liked it and I thought it was really cool, I share it with the other fisherman who follow me and tell them have you ever thought of buying a bike? This is the place to do. Well, I can’t do that – or rather I can but it will have no effect whatsoever because my particular pool is in that particular sector which I have built up over time. And again, this would work pretty much the same way that it would work offline. You meet somebody offline who has authority on that subject and they tell you, hey listen if you want a brain operation, I know somebody who knows somebody and the guy is a skier, there is no real connection there but if he is a doctor and he told you that, immediately you begin to trust him right away so it’s a kind of a approach, a kind of human specialty that we get now and Google+ because it’s Google’s own social layer, is entirely transparent to it and right now it will give you the easiest way to gain foothold in Semantic search.

James: And how much David this is actually affecting rank in the search results because Google might argue and I am sure there is plenty others out there, including perhaps myself that also might state the case if there is someone out there who is an authority in a particular niche or area and they are not signed up on Google+, should someone who is part of Google+ automatically get preference within the results? Is this actually on the ground level affecting search results?

David: Great question, the short answer is yes. You actually see a bit of a shift. Now, given the fact that not everybody is on Google+ and Google primarily does not want to focus on that, right now it does that because that is its starting point, eventually as semantic indexing gets more data it will apply pretty much the same nuance metrics on the activity we do here irrespective of whether they are on Google+ or not. We are still in the early days and I have carried out tests with a group of other Google+ experts and this is what we have seen, if you are an authority in your area and you promoted a post, the post is likely to rise to a high visibility and a desktop search results in the first page of Google within a day or two. And it does that very quickly. It does not stay there very long because obviously unless it is a more collaborative activity type i.e. it is thought to be of high value, it is re-shared and visited frequently, then Google’s confidence in it begins to drop off and the moment it begins to drop off the results now is okay but then down it goes. If actually the post is actually engaged with, it does stay and there some examples of posts which started out in Google+ and they’re still on the first page of Google for now two years on, so they have stayed. But they did get that engagement so that is why at this point Google+ is a shortcut, it gives you an instant point to jump off to semantic search. If you are an authority in your own field outside of Google+, you should be there anyway, and Google can actually weigh that and they constantly look and see, it is a very fluctuating field that they look at the results in terms of the user behavior and the visitors to your site and they make a decision which is why posts that are put there don’t stay there more than a week or two.

James: Yeah, got it. Which really revolves back to earlier what we are saying in the piece about identifying what you want to be known for and then creating content that is going to position you as an authority in that particular space, right? I mean regardless of whether you are on Google+ or not, that is the end game.

David: Exactly! Exactly! Yes. At the moment it is an easy win if you are on Google+ because it does give you access to this kind of jump so it is almost a no brainer in terms of doing it.

James: Yeah, let us talk about another win as we kind of get close to wrapping up. In the olden days, and honestly in current search, links from a website to another website is still one of the biggest factors that certainly would signal an authoritative site. We know people have tried to gain that in the past, how in the current day and time in semantic search might an SEO approach link building change comparative to what’s gone on before?

David: What I’d like to see is links go entirely but this is not going to happen anytime soon so –

James: But they have been testing that right? I mean Google has just done a test where they tried to see how a web without links would work –

David: Yes. It has been inconclusive but they have, they actually tried, you are right. The reason they have tried is the moment you create any kind of leaderboard and essentially links because they can be numbered and they have a specific point of origin, they can in themselves be reputationaly valid or not, they create a leaderboard of sorts. The moment you create a leaderboard you also create the incentive for humans to create an economic behavior around it which tries to game it. Which is why Google is trying to move away from that. As semantic search stands at the moment, links are still valid, it certainly is an SEO strategy and they are still as valid in the past in specific industries but on the whole they have been devaluated so basically their drive to build a website up has dropped off and the argument behind that or the logic behind that is that if you take semantic search like a pizza for instance and you have so many slices of the pizza and then you say okay I am going to have a few more guests around the table, well the pizza is still the same right? All you’re going to do is make the pizza smaller. So each slice now has a slightly smaller value because you have more guests at the table. With semantic search there have been a lot of new ranking factors which have been introduced, but the pizza has not grown in size, the game is still the same. So really what happens is the moment you have more factors, a different weight is given to the pre-existing factors, they drop off and then the new value comes in to the new ones and Google constantly assesses the equation to see its effectiveness so one of the maddening things in this area if you are chasing search engines is it’s a very floating game. The moment you think that you’ve nailed it, it actually changes again.

James: Exactly! Well that’s why exactly why we should be moving away from this kind of tactical methodology where you’re seeing a link from a page rank 5 website in this particular vertical is proven to increase results, let’s go and get one it is bound to be good for my website. I mean that sort of mindset is clearly not going to work as things move forward.

David: That is exactly right. You really need to focus on the one thing that you can actually win which is people over and they are hard to fool- we are hard to fool, which forces everybody to be more transparent, more real, more honest. It is a big win for everybody.

James: So where is this whole thing heading? I mean where are we in the evolution of search right now? And what’s coming up in the future do you anticipate?

David: I am very glad you asked that because essentially in the very near future this is what is going to happen, we’ve seen two big moves, one is that chrome has actually got hands-free voice search and we have also seen that Google Docs have now got voice dictation. And these are examples of those increasing sophistication in voice in both understanding and delivering values in terms of that which means that semantic search is going to watch its natural evolution which is screen-less, keyless computers where search is purely voice activated and even the little search box we are familiar with right now eventually is going to disappear and what you are going to have is pretty much a programmable artificial intelligence agent you’d be able to ask to do something for you to go away and come back for results and if you are not sure about them- those results, you can say, how did you get to that answer and it will give you all the different steps it actually took so you can actually verify them so that is where we are heading.

James: It sounds like that recent film, right? Have you watched Her?

David: Her! Yes, fantastic, really! I mean that is very much a sign of our time because when they created Her I mean the female basically feeds off the subtext of the cultural sub-stream that if floats in and there is an undercurrent where we are increasingly bonding with the technology, it is becoming and indispensable part of us. We carry around small pocket size computers wherever we are. We carry tablets with us which gives us incredible computing power and access to the web irrespective of where we are. I have done hangouts in airports and have closed business deals in cafes which is ridiculous when you think about it. But it is done through these wireless connections so it is very much a reflection of how we are subconsciously seeing ourselves evolve with the tech that we use.

James: Fantastic! We’re certainly getting there with things like Google Now, right which has the ability to anticipate where we’re going, what we’re doing and make suggestions on that basis. It is really mind blowing stuff right?

David: It is predictive search at its best certainly and it sort of nails the argument that we are unpredictable because really we are not, we are very, very predictable. What is missing to make us predictable is the masses of data which form our habitual activity and the moment that data is there then we can see that we are creatures of habit we do very specific things in very specific ways and it can actually be pre-programmed ahead for us.

James: Yeah! Which makes us wonder maybe that actual reality of that movie Her is perhaps not that far away from us right? We are probably getting close to it.

David: Well, there have been a couple of instances in Japan where Japanese executives actually have married an AI I think and in terms of the emotional impact and connection, in the person’s mind, it is the real thing. So what you are missing is the contextual contact elements and that is an entirely different story now we’ve evolving in that direction.

James: Yeah, well I think on that point David, let’s wrap it up, I certainly did not expect us to be talking about marriage and artificial intelligence on this interview so I think that is an appropriate time to wrap things up. You’ve af course got a book on this whole concept Google Semantic Search, I am sure our listeners would be interested where they can get that. Is there any available online and in any good bookstores?

David: Absolutely! They can get in Amazon, Google Play and certainly any good book shop should stock it.

James: Fantastic! And where should we go to find out a little bit more about David Amerland?

David: I blog a lot about all these things including search at DavidAmerland.com so if you search for me there you’ll find the content that I produce.

James: Well you’ve been extremely generous of your time I have thoroughly enjoyed our last 25 to 30 minutes of conversation, David, thanks for coming on Traffic Jam.

David: Thank you very much, I was really excited to be here.

This Week’s News in Traffic

Okay, so we have a couple of stories this week both from the big giants online, Facebook and Google, and we’ll go to Google first. There’s been an update recently in Gmail that allows you to use this to auto unsubscribe from promotional messages. Now already, Gmail users are seeing a more permanent link at the top of the email beside the sender’s name allowing them to unsubscribe without looking right at the bottom of the message where you’ll normally find the unsubscribe link. Now of course, marketers – they’re a bit aggrieved about this, they are all worried that this will drive lower subscription rates but there are some upsides. I think it will drive complaint rates lower and improve deliverability and potentially increase the amount of messages that get in to the inbox, since the link from Gmail itself, I do think that subscribers will be more likely to click on that link rather than ignoring future emails and that of course is a win for marketers. What do you need to do yourself in light of this news? I think the first action item would be to implement your own auto unsubscribe sequence to remove people who don’t open your email and also give instructions to Gmail users to drag your email in to the main inbox so you are less likely to fall foul of this unsubscribe request later on.

Next we go to Facebook and they have given advertisers a way to target by relationship status. The new targeting status now include those who have updated their status recently i.e in a domestic partnership, in a civil union, newly wed, etc. etc. Additionally advertisers can target by recently changed life events within specific periods of time – i.e. new relationship status, newly engaged, newly wed within a specific time period like three, six months or even one year. Advertisers will also be able to build campaigns around combinations of geographies country and city like the UK and Dublin, country and state such as Canada and California, and state and city New Mexico and Los Angeles as well as easily include certain areas such as the UK excluding Cambridge for instance. The ability to build ad campaigns that target your users by specific interests will also be more refined. For example, marketers can choose baseball as their targeted segment which correlates to users who have liked or expressed interest in baseball related topics and pages.

If you are a seasoned Traffic Jam listener and you’re yet to leave the show a review, then what the heck are you waiting for? As I said many times before in the show, leaving a review on iTunes or Stitcher radio really is the best possible way that you can show support so if you are an iTunes listener perhaps this week head on over to iTunes, search for the Traffic Jam podcast and leave a rating, a bit of a comment and a bit of a review or maybe if you are a Stitcher radio listener then head on over to Stitcher and follow the same process to leave a review for the show there as I said in this little sequence and many times in the show before, it really is a great way to show your support for the show; it helps us move up the rankings and help get this great content in to more ear buds  and I think that should be a goal for all of us.

The One Minute Traffic Tip

Okay, so I’ve got another email marketing tip for you this week and this one is so simple and obvious I think you are going to kick yourself in the foot if you are not doing it already. If you are broadcasting eamils to your list which of course you should be when you’ve got something interesting or valuable to share with your audience, make sure the largest number of people possible from your email list get to receive that information. Perhaps the easiest way to get it opened is to email again everyone that did not open my original email. Don’t get worried that this tactic might be annoying, people do get a huge amount of email and yours might just got buried in and amongst that. Now perhaps your subject line may have nor resonated originally or maybe you have sent your email on the wrong time of the day so when you do email again and of course just to those people who did not open their first email, try sending at a different time of day and using a different email subject line, one that perhaps has a different angle or approach. This is a very easy process and most email broadcast systems like Aweber and Ontraport and others do allow for filtering recipients who did not open the email. Go give this a try and I think you’ll see a big difference in the number of people that get to read your emails.

Okay, I guess that’s it! That does round out another episode of Traffic Jam. Thank you to my guest today, David Amerland. There’ll be lots more quality guests lined up for the forthcoming weeks including one very, very special guest next week. A real celebrity in the space you’re not going to want to miss that episode. In the coming week, please be sure to check out the content over at veravo.com. You’ll find this episode listed there plus a host of other traffic tips and training as well as ways that I can help you in my SEO service and Google Adwords management service so if you want me to help grow your traffic faster, then that’s the place you’ll find out about all of that. To play out this week’s episode, of course we have a track chosen by my guest today, David Amerland, it’s by a Scottish singer – songwriter who is known as the Brother in Arms  or the sultan of swing, his name is Mark Knopfler and the track that we are playing of his is called Sailing to Philadelphia so enjoy that track and  I will see you back here real soon!

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THIS WEEKS NEWS IN TRAFFIC

ONE MINUTE TRAFFIC TIP

THE TRAFFIC JAM

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In the ocean of online content, unless you can stand up and stand out, your content will almost always fall on blind eyes. In this episode Mars Dorian the branding and all round creative whizz kid reveals how you can get noticed online even in the most crowded of markets.

Mars (but from Earth) has got himself noticed online, because he’s adopted a unique visual style driven by his edgy graphics and loud colours and supported by a unique writing style that caught the attention of Mark Schaefer and Corbett Barr amongst others. Tune in and learn branding, content and connecting tips that will drive targeted traffic to your website.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

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“Traffic alone only creams your ego, it does not cream your wallet.”@MarsDorian
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Hello! I am James Reynolds, welcome back listener! You are tuned in to Episode#29 of Traffic Jam, the show that teaches you how to get more traffic and build a profitable audience online.

Absolutely no messing around this episode, we are going straight in to the content so get prepared as myself and my guest today, the branding Buzz Marketing and all round creative dude, Mars Dorian, discuss among other things, Lady Gaga and getting naked. Those references may mean nothing to you right now but stay glued to your speakers and you’ll learn exactly why both are excellent metaphors to standing out online and getting noticed in a crowded space. Here’s that interview.

James: Welcome to the interview section of the show. Today I welcome Mars Dorian who’s going to share how to stand out online even in the most overcrowded of markets. Mars, welcome to Traffic Jam!

Mars: Wow! Thanks for having me James and I can’t wait to spread some fire and share some knowledge with your community.

Mars: Not really!

James: Tell us about it.

Mars: No, I mean today with everyone being able to start a global business based on a website, attention has become so scarce and it really is hard to stand out anymore and my main focus nowadays – I help people with my illustration designs to stand out online is really to ask myself the question and how can I create a content or a page on website or something else in a way that makes people not only pay attention to it but actually consume it, and spread and talk about it so that they get really word of mouth value out of it and really get the business going to the community.

James: Well it is interesting, I kind of whole approach that you have, the kind of whole naked red feather thing – the fact that when I get an email from you in my inbox, it comes from the name Greetings from Mars! And you website design, you’ve clearly got a standout style of brand and a stand out kind of content. I guess because we are kind of audio only today, take a moment to paint a bit of a visual picture to our listeners what the brand of Mars Dorian kind of looks like and represents.

Mars: So the website itself is a branding creativity and online business blog in terms of writing, right? But obviously because I come from the visual area, I draw everything myself, I have a tablet which I work with online, and I have cartoony, very colorful images on every blog post. I have quite a big header, I have my about page which is pretty much like a comic like you can scroll to and read my background story in tidbits. I have my manifesto which is also in comic version and I pretty much have unique visuals, my own trademark style on every single page in my guide in the writing that I do mixes with everything that I do really to create something that is true to myself and hopefully it gives value to my visitors and potential clients.

James: Well, I think later in this section we’ll dissect perhaps a piece of Mars Dorian content because having looked over your stuff you have got perhaps a different approach to others and I think as a case study it would be interesting to have a look at some of those elements but I think as we are a traffic show, I’d like to get started really with a question about what you feel is the most important thing in terms of standing out and getting business online and I ask this question because having read your content, I felt that I may have stubbed myself in the foot. You say that traffic actually isn’t that important and that something else that is far more important – tell us what that is?

Mars: Yeah, when I started out I was so worried about just general traffic – I was just worried about that unique visitor count up every month, like hoping it would skyrocket someday. But the thing is, it did happen because I blocked a lot of valuable connections. But just because traffic shut up doesn’t mean like my income shut up, right? So there was really a big difference between how much I was making and how much I should be making based on how many view counts I got. So at one point I said to myself – it’s not just like big traffic that counts, or targeted traffic that counts and I know of a friend in the United States, James Younger, he’s an artist, and I think he gets between 800 and 1000 people on his website every month which is not a lot, right? But he has a six-figure business based from that because the people that come to his website are really interested in working with him and buying his artwork. Most of his people are what you called qualified traffic, right? And when I read about that 2 to 3 years ago, I thought, geez! I have to think the same way. Who care about getting high numbers? It’s going to crimp my ego but it’s not going to crimp my wallet so I changed my approach and really focused on creating a writing style that has a personal and specific message to a specific customer that would actually want to work with me based on how I am and how I represent myself.

James: That is interesting! Let’s have a look at what that messaging might look like because you’ve obviously developed a very distinct style of messaging and a very distinct look. Perhaps, from a point of view of how you might help a business that you work with, what would be the process that you would step someone through to develop that message and develop that brand so they can connect with that audience once they reach it?

Mars: I think the problem that most people had was the problem I had at the beginning. At first you try to appear to everyone, even though you deny it. You say, no, no, it’s just like me and I put out my style and my message and my offer and people are going to jump at it. But the truth is, the more specific you get, and the more you cut away, the more specific your target audience can be, right? In the beginning I used to have a writing style that was – I don’t want to say that it was covered in any way, but it was more safe. I wasn’t really expressing myself, my offer was very general; I did not talk about the clients instead I was talking like in a very mellow, very general and no one in today’ age with so much specifity going on, no one is going to go for a general approach anymore. People want to exactly know how you can help them so I had a customer from the beginning that were mostly from America that were very open minded, a little more on the creative side and less corporate like and I thought, those people are really fun to work with and they have money, I think I should target my business towards them. And then I learned what their business is for, they were like small business owners like people in start-ups and I cannot write the way I wrote is like targeted to them and showing the projects that I had and the site that I had, and then I lost all those clients that I had that were on the little safer approach and they thought that my writings and my drawings were a little bit too edgy for them, and I made my drawings and my writings even more edgy because that is who I am, to really appear to my kind of people and I lost all the people who wanted more of the general side of me. And it happens every day. Just three weeks ago, I had a client who said that they really want to work with me on a visual slide show presentation but it’s a little kind of over the bit with your style and then some of the words that you have on your areas is a bit too much, could you tone everything down and then we can work with each other? And I really did not want to right? It was like doing censoring and the kind of version they wanted to see from me was not who I want to be. I would really like using my style and they were like Disney level and I thought I don’t want to do that, it feels wrong. And they would have paid well but it just did not feel right so I said good luck in your search but I don’t think we are perfect for each other. So that’s the price that comes with it.

James: Yeah, so how would you describe your style to a prospective customer who might be listening in to this podcast trying to visualize what you do and how you do it. How would you describe it to fit that ideal customer profile of yours?  

Mars: Yeah, so it’s a very colorful style, it is very vibrant, it has a lot of dynamics with it I use a lot of pictograms and writing on the clothing that I create for those characters and for those images. It has a lot of shapes and words that have to do with the branding so when I work with someone who wants a slide show presentation about entrepreneurship, I would take his colors, red for example, and I am going to create characters and specific images that directly adjust to his brand and make it a little bit more dynamic, make it a little bit more funky clothes and funky designs that really look unlike anything else in that range in order to make people pay attention to it.

James: Yeah, okay, well done! I know it’s hard to paint a picture visually when you’re just talking. We had a Pinterest episode a few months back and it is always a challenge trying to explain a visual method and a visual approach in words but I think that summarizes it and of course we’ll make sure the links to your website and your content are found in the show notes. I think one of the things I really want to speak to you about amongst others Mars is your own development online; how you’ve built your own audience because from what I can see, you’ve been very targeted of who you work with and who you approach. I mean, if you look at your content I see you’ve appeared for instance on Corporate Bar Traffic, that one springs to mind. Tell me the story about how you made that happen and how you sort out these influential people online and ended up working with them yourself.

Mars: In the beginning, I was just blogging and trying to find my way. And the thing is, if you have a specific interest, in my case, in the beginning it was mostly blogging and personal branding and creative entrepreneurship, then you find like one person online, that’s how it starts, like on Twitter and you think ah, interesting, I want to follow that person and then I would do a personal approach and contact them and say I love your website, you are so awesome, like this is what I do – and that’s how it starts. And I did that for like the first year, just making very specific connections that really wrote a similar and Corporate Bar was really one of those people that really – I mean he still has, right? I really liked the way he worked and the way he wrote and his ideas, I thought it was so compelling, and I made that personal connection and because I already had other people in my connections that also knew him, we made a personal connection and he actually came with his wife to Berlin, but not because of me but because he wanted to visit the place and I saw him in person and it was even a better connector, and I said, you know what, we should do a small, little project. We do a mutual posting where our posts are interlinked with each other, kind of like a viral spread of mutual content and we did that and was semi-successful; not as big as I thought it would be but it created an even bigger bond with each other and that’s how it all started.

James: Great! And I have also seen that you’ve guest posted for our friend on Traffic Jam Mark Schaeffer on his Businesses Grow website, what’s the result in guest posting on that type of environment gotten you?

Mars: Well actually I’m not guest posting for him, I am a paid contributor so I write him a post every single month, I just finished my last post about 2 days ago for him – very awesome relationship and that started actually from three of us who runs the Instigator Experience and the Unmistaken Creative which is a kind of a podcast about creative entrepreneurs and he knew Mark Schaeffer personally and Mark was looking from some blogger who’s not American, who was really good in English and who had a different style than most of his social marketing people and somehow the three of us talked about me and approached Mark Schaeffer and said here’s my blog, let’s see if we can work together and it was about one and a half year ago and yeah, he just introduced me, and it worked out because it was quite different from all the other people he has on and it was really fruitful, I mean the guy is huge – he has like 10,000 visitors a day, like avalanche storm. And he has so many interesting people on him and he has a new blog post every day and I get a lot of referral traffic, I have clients coming over from him because they saw my drawing style on his blog and it has gotten a lot of new context and a lot of traffic and sales from my outstander guide but nowadays, because I am blogging so much for him, the return of investment is like slowing down because people get used to you and he has a lot of core readers who read his post every day so they kind of know my face so I get diminishing results but it’s still a blast; he’s an awesome source guy.

James: Yeah, Mark’s awesome; one of my favorite Traffic Jam episodes, and I’ll get a link to that in the show notes, definitely worth to check out Mark’s stuff. So I am just going to do a sort of a mid-way round up Mars, I guess we have spoken at this point about developing a unique style of content and messaging that’s not fearful of alienating people and should actually try to bleed towards the edges as opposed to trying to satisfy everyone then as you have done, perhaps seek out others who may have a similarly lined target market or audience and then if you can, find a way to have them first and then offer them an opportunity to be helpful. Would that be a good summary at this point, kind of halfway through?

Mars: Yeah, just one addition, if you do your targeted marketing and offer some people sounds kind of calculating, but if you connect with people that you really like, writing something similar to them feels very natural. And like you said, you want to give value but you also want to make sure that you connect with people who have a different skill set. So you can be on a similar niche but you don’t want people who do exactly what you do right? I follow about 650 people on Twitter now and I am very specific about that and deliberate and I rarely follow illustrators and people who do what I do and then it’s going to be like ideas and he has a similar skill set and we cannot give value to each other right? So most people that I am friends with, they are good at a lot of things but they are not good with designing or drawing which is my strength, this is where my referral traffic is coming from and the clients because they always come back to me and say, hey, can you do this for me or this client needs that, can you help them out and that is very valuable so look for complementary skill set.

James: Okay, good. And what is your approach to connecting with these people once you’ve identified that they may be a good fit? You mentioned that Twitter is perhaps a tool that you follow people on but do you have a kind of process of connecting with people and reconnecting with them to maintain those relationships?

Mars: I always believe that you should be ultra-specific when you connect with them, right? Just today I got an email and the subject line: Business Opportunity and then I read the body of the email, it’s half a page, and it doesn’t even have my name in it and it is so general, you can write it to a vacuum cleaner would be just as fitting and it does not talk about anything that I do and it’s just about the person and what he wants, and I know this person sends bulk mail and he is going to send it to a million people or so and obviously it lands in the spam folder. So obviously, in order to fight that, to break through with the clutter, always be ULTRA specific that if you approach the people you want to connect with, tell them why you are connecting with them, keep it short but keep it very specific.  Tell them, you know, I am making this up now to make an example – I read your blog post from January 2014 where you wrote about Facebook marketing or something and it was really interesting because I don’t do any Facebook marketing and I learned a lot from that post, maybe we can contact, I just wanted to say hi so you are really specific and the person on the other end knows you are a real human being and you really took the time to interact with the person’s work instead of just writing a bulk mail.

James: Yeah, absolutely! Well I don’t know whether you recall the email you got from me when we were setting up this interview but I think a lot of that stuff was at play there, I think I would more than likely perhaps included your name in the subject line but then immediately after that I was telling you how I got to find out about you and that was through a mutual friend Ryan Hanley who put the two of us in touch so immediately there was a connection there – how we got in contact and what the connection was and I am sure that got your interest to read beyond that about the email so these are all the skill sets and tactics that you use when you are approaching people in this manner.

Mars: Yeah, just one last thing. People always worry about the perfect strategy that should be all five lines and that six lines is bad and five lines is better because of some I don’t know, law. I think it is all BS! I think you should worry more about being specific and being personal and if that is authentic to you then the other person will start connecting with you if there is any mutual value that you can get right? So don’t fret about making it perfect, just make it personal and it can be perfect.

James: Got it! Well most guests that we’ve had on the show advocate trafficking the website by targeting small niches of focus buyers but having read your site, you say that you believe niches are old school. If we are not targeting niches, we are focused on those. What should we focus on instead?

Mars: Well niches, it kind of depends on how you define that. The thing is that, if I ultra-specialize and I focus all my skills on one specific skill set, the danger is that because the times are changing so fast that your skill may not have any value in the near future because that service is not that valuable anymore. So I believe that you should still be a specialist but more like a generalist with a specification. So you have a focus on a specific value that you give but you still have enough leeway that you can change and adjust and that you don’t depend all of your resources on to one skill because when that skill is not in need anymore, you and your business are gone!

James: Yeah, so will that be kind of in line with a personal brand that really elevates above and below what you actually do? I guess there’s examples of people like Richard Branson or someone like that, he is a strong personal brand, and he can go in to anything and almost be successful because people know him for who he is. Does this dissect in to the personal branding as well?

Mars: Yeah, I think people always say content is king but honestly, I don’t think and some people kind of said it as well, we are not looking for like skill itself, and the content itself because you can find the content almost everywhere. People go back for style, for personality and for brand, something that emotionally connects that person. That if someone from America, like Texas, and wants to know internet marketing, is he going to prefer working with a person who is in to internet marketing also from Texas? Probably, right? Because there is more emotional connection there and I don’t know if some guy from Germany would offer the same deal. And that’s what makes people come back – if people have similar goals to you and you want to be like them and you have that emotional connection, so really making sure that style is just as important as substance. That part really gets supported by your belief, by the way you do your business, by the products that you offer, because that emotional thing is what keeps them from coming back, It’s not just the services itself, it’s how it makes them feel towards you.

James: Absolutely! Good! Well I said I wanted to dissect a piece of Mars Dorian content; here are my observations, you can tell me whether this is kind of true of your content or not. Looking at your stuff I see that it’s typically quite long, you generally favor the written word as opposed to audio and video, and of course you have a stunning original image with your content mostly and you write with a lot of personality and perhaps you post less than others as well, would that be an accurate description of your content style?

Mars: Yes, I really love writing; I love writing as much as I love drawing and designing and the thing is that I do audio when I do interviews like right now in a podcast, but I mean there is only so much you can do in a day, right? And my main focus is really in the creation part and block writing for me is not as important as before because I am establishing my niche in my area with the people that I work with and I have strong word of mouth from my friends that I work with and colleagues or peers and that really gets me a lot of business which I work on every single day. And I blog only like once a month which is terrible if you start out, like I would say like say at least once a week but for me it is more like a diary that is valuable to a lot of people but it’s not really bringing me any business. No one hires me because I wrote a superb blog post, right? They hire me fully for the visual work that I do. So I have to concentrate on that which makes me more money, which is more important to my business. So that’s why I am sort of neglecting that aspect.

James: Yeah, well I am experimenting with this a little. I was mostly a frequent poster for majority of 2013 but I am kind of winding back a little bit now and putting more focus in to putting less frequent but higher quality content than sort of putting stuff out almost on a daily basis as I was last year and I am yet to see what that result will be as a result of that but I think if you look at the stuff that gains traction online, the stuff that really supports us which is the content that is really being shared and is really being drawn to because the stuff is so good and I think if you try to put out too much, to maintain a level of consistency and quality just becomes that much harder because of the volume you are trying to put out there.

Mars: Yeah, and also, I don’t believe there is the right way because it depends on your business; on where you specialize and what kind of personality you are. For some people, blogging every single day may work out because people have the outstanding short snappy posts but then it just depends on your specification and what kind of service do you offer.

James: Yeah, and I guess Seth Godin will be a great example of regular, short daily content. His stuff is exemplary but I think I would certainly struggle to put out that sort of stuff every single day.

Mars: Yeah, it works out for him because he writes double sized tweets because you just have one or two paragraphs mostly and he does that every day but then again, he’s not making money from blogging, right? It’s more like an open diary where he shares his thoughts and leadership word on marketing and entrepreneurship and what have you. So I think you should not worry what other people are doing but really expect experimenting, like what I call crash and burn. You see it doesn’t help me and does not give me return of investment if I blog every day or something I do which has no value whatsoever.

James: I want to ask you also about how you syndicate your content once you have posted to your own site. Where else are you posting your stuff? I guess your images would certainly land themselves to social platforms. What’s your strategy around getting your content out there to a wider audience?

Mars: Well, I use three major platforms; I use mostly Twitter but obviously my Facebook fan page and sometimes my personal profile which gets more responses because it’s more personal. I get Google shares as well as some Google followers like a lot of people following them like hundreds and thousands and because of the better visual post, I post them on Pinterest which doesn’t give me much result yet, maybe I am doing it wrong or I have not found the right way yet to make it more stand out but it’s mostly – it’s not technical but it’s geared towards creative entrepreneurs from people who work on the internet so it has a better response in Twitter and Google+.

James: Yeah, sure. And what is your best traffic source for your site?

Mars: It’s organic mostly, it’s like 50%. The last time I checked, Twitter and Facebook actually are quite low. They make together like 20% and Google+ is even less, and then some other sources. Truth is, in the last month, I even have not checked it yet, because I don’t worry about traffic sources any more, I worry more about client sources. Every client that I have, I am asking them, where do you come from? And where did you hear about me? So that when I get a lot of overlap on this platform then I want to strengthen that approach.

James: Exactly! It’s zeroing on what works and then doing more of it right to compound the results.

Mars: And really for me, I have to say it is word of mouth at this point, I have not done any marketing in the last year. I think it was one week where I told some people of my new services and my portfolio page and there was the first weekend, March 2013 and that was it. The rest of the way people find their way in to my inbox and I am just like clapping hands and counting digital dollar balls.

James: Awesome! Well I guess it really comes back to how we opened up the interview in terms of talking about becoming stand out because someone like yourself I would assume is much more referable than just some sort of regular person that looks like every other single person online; you’ve got a stand out style and very easy to talk about and refer I think.

Mars: Yeah, and the other thing that is also true is that what I did not understand in the beginning because apparently everyone says you have to be the best in the world and you have to be extraordinary, you have to follow your passion, be the best, etc. but the truth is, you always recommend someone who is good, they don’t have to be the best, but if you have a good relationship with them, it is enough to recommend a person if he or she is good, right? Like let’s say there is an illustrator/ designer who does exactly what I do and he is five times better, if I have my people and my network that know me personally and they do not know that other illustrator, chances are, they are going to hire me even though I am a much worse compared to him, right? Because they have that connection and that is so valuable. People will always prefer people they know and they have a personal positive connection to make sure that you have that network and it does not matter if you’re not the best, I mean you should always improve but connections matter so much. All the work is really from people who know and love my work and they know me personally. Those are not people that have never heard of me. It’s always about the personal relationship.

 James: Awesome! Well good stuff! I think we should get close to wrapping up, but there is one question I have been dying to ask you and that’s what did Lady Gaga teach you about traffic and building an online audience?

Mars: Oh man! That post – it’s always, it feels like the dark ages of the internet for me. Is that the one I wrote for ##### Traffic?

James: I think it was, I think that’s where I found it but I love the content and I think that it’s certainly as relevant today as it was whenever you wrote it so I would love for you to share that idea and concept with the audience here.

Mars: I don’t remember every single step that I wrote on that post anymore but what I love about Lady Gaga, I am a huge fan of her music, is just the way, everything from her branding, it is very specific and it is very unique. From the dresses she wore like even pieces of meat on her skin which is like absurd at most but it fits her branding because she kind of has that wacko commercial style to the personal greeting she has for her friends, I don’t know how she calls them, I think the monster paw or something where she uses her right hand pretends it’s like a tiger claw or something, and even the idea of calling her friends like little monsters and I think she calls herself mama monster, everything she does from writing to calling her friends to building the community has a direct branding that is directly associated with her. There is no doubt that it is coming from her. Nothing that she does generic, she is doing the greeting as Lady Gaga. The music is Lady Gaga style, the clothing – like every time you talk about it, it really is Lady Gaga and that really occupies your brain space and links everything that is remotely even like it to her and that is really just another call to action to people to stop worrying about generic and doing what other people are doing and really focusing on your core strength and like I said, Mars Dorian is my nickname, like Mars, the full name is Marius, because it sounds like Mars and a lot like the planet mars and it’s red, my favorite color, I make sure that greetings from mars I have a red logo and stuff like that and that I am consistent with that approach because that is going to help me stay out more and help me become more memorable.

James: Got it! Well there are some great lessons there, I mean she has developed a very distinct brand, she is hugely remarkable. There is no doubt in the fact that this conversation is happening about what weird and wacky Lady Gaga is doing all the time and of course she has developed a really strong tribe that follow her every move and I think if you just apply a fraction of what she is doing to your own business then you should have some pretty good success. So Mars, thank you for sharing what you have today, it’s been a lot of fun to say the least. I will make sure that everyone has links off to where they should find you but just for the sake of audio, where is the one place you’d like people to go and find out a bit more about you?

Mars: So the Mars Dorian mother base is on earth, hosted in America but you can find it online on MarsDorian.com and pretty much every way to approach me has got to do with Mars Dorian right? The Twitter handle is @MarsDorian and I could say more things but those are the most used channels, my mother base and my Twitter handle. That’s where you can find me.

James: Awesome! Those links will be in the show notes of Episode #29 of Traffic Jam. Mars, thanks for coming on board!

Mars: Thanks for having me and I hope this is really valuable to people in the community and I hope they take that approach and rethink their brand to the next level with it.

This Week’s News in Traffic

So in last week’s news, we announced how Klout has just introduced a content suggestion tool that would suggest content based on what may relate to your target audience, therefore helping you create content that’s relevant to the people that follow you. In this week’s news we can announce that Klout have introduced a scheduling tool and this scheduling tool is purported to suggest the best possible times for you to post content based on when your audience is generally most engaged. Klout says this is different to other tools such as perhaps Hoot Suite which suggest only on when the average user would be most active. Klout is saying their tool suggests the best possible times based on when your own audience is most active on social platforms. It is now available inside the Klout dashboard, you can go check that out.

In news from Pinterest, they’ve just made gifs, those animated images viewable and pin-able from all iOS and Android devices. That may not seem such big news for a traffic show but this is really great news especially for those exponents of gifographics, those animated infographics that people like Neal Patel and his Quick Sprout blog are getting great success with. It is something that I am going to try and I am very happy to hear that Pinterest are now supporting posting of that content on their site.

If you are a fan of Traffic Jam, I’d absolutely love it if you left a comment or a review of the show, tell me what you like about Traffic Jam, and perhaps tell me some areas of improvement or perhaps some guests you’d like to hear appear on the show; I’d really love to hear from you.

There are a couple of places that you can do it offsite and that is Stitcher radio and iTunes as an option to leave a review for the show on both of those two platforms and also on TrafficJamCast.com, you can go to the episode page and leave a comment. Do that right below the transcript in the summary there is a comment section right at the base but also, you can leave a voice message via our Speak Pipe which is found in the footer of the site. It is voice message; click on that link, you’ll be taken to the Speak Pipe recorder and you can talk to your microphone and actually leave a voice message for me.

We’ve not have a Speak Pipe message read out on the show yet but I am looking forward to doing that. Why don’t you be the first? Get your voice, get your name, get your website mentioned, leave a little bit of a comment and a review for the show and we’ll play that back on a future episode.

The One Minute Traffic Tip

This is an email marketing tip that will help you get your emails read by more people. The most important part of an email other than the sender that will determine if your recipients open your email or not is the subject line. So craft your skill at copyrighting but also split test your subject lines. Instead of sending a broadcast all with the same subject line, divide your broadcast list up.

To the first 25% of your list, send subject line A. To the next 25% send subject line B. then, wait for 48 hours and see which of these two subject lines gets the best open rate. Then to the remaining 50% of your list, you are going to send the winning subject line. This really is a very quick and easy way to significantly increase your email open rate, just by testing exactly what works.

That brings yet another episode of Traffic Jam. Episode #29 to a close. Remember, for more traffic tips and more traffic training, head on over to veravo.com for more videos, more podcasts, and even some funny traffic toons as we call them to get you giggling as well.

And also if I can help you grow more traffic, head on over to the products page of veravo.com and you’ll learn exactly how I can work with you to get your website climbing. To play out this episode of Traffic Jam, I’ve got a track of course chosen by my guest today Mars Dorian. It is by a band called Angels and Airwaves and the track is called The Adventure.

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.

Google Hangouts On Air harness the power of video, social media and live broadcasting. On this episode Ronnie Bincer The Hangout Helper  focusses in on exactly what you need to do hangouts right!

New to Hangouts? Fear not, we cover exactly what Hangouts and Hangouts On Air are, why you might want to do them, the tools you’ll need to get started and exactly how to set one up.  This is another jam packed episode. Listen in now.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

SUBSCRIBE TO TRAFFIC JAM : iTunes | Stitcher

“Back off a little – stay real, stay authentic.”@RonnieBincer
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Hello! I am James Reynolds, welcome back to Traffic Jam, you are tuned in to Episode#28 and of course it’s the podcast show that blends together interviews with web traffic experts, traffic tips and news and musical jam selected by our featured guest. This is another jam packed episode.

I have got to say it is great to be back behind the mic recording another episode, it is about one month since Episode 27 went live so this one, Episode 28 is well overdue. I did make several attempts to record this one, it has been delayed quite somewhat basically due to technical challenges namely crappy internet which cut short three separate interviews. And so we’ve had that against us and then I have also been travelling quite a lot in the recent weeks, I’ve been to Amsterdam, I have been to Houston, then San Diego in the US which was for a traffic and conversion event which was great networking actually for Traffic Jam. I had lined up quite a few guests from the event who are all going to be quite a good fit for the show and you’ll have those guys to look forward to in the coming weeks. After the US trip, I went to Paris and then London before finally returning home to Dubai. I have got to say it is great to travel, it really is good to get out behind your guests and network with people but there is nothing like getting back home and getting back behind your computer with a big screen and getting back in to normal routine especially since that means I can be putting out more content which I absolutely love and I am going to be making a real effort over the coming weeks to make sure that Traffic Jam returns to being a weekly show. I had been a little sporadic and show’s been going out less frequently and I do want to rectify that – I want to get us back to being a weekly show because hey I think I love creating these episodes so much, I love interviewing the guests and I think you the listener get a most value when it’s a regular weekly show because you’ve got seven days to process the information, seven days to implement the lesson and then another focus seven days ahead. That’s my promise to you – weekly shows from here on.

So what’s coming up on this episode? Well, the main event is Ronnie Bincer who is on the show for a deep dive on Google Hangouts. We’ll be talking the difference between Hangouts and Hangouts on Air, we’ll be looking at Hangouts on air vs. Webinars, how to do email capture as a follow up on a Google Hangout – that’s pretty cool, how to leverage your hangout for the best exposure, the best hangout format, the before, during and after of a killer hangout on air and much, much more. We really go deep on the topic.

Following my chat with Ronnie we’ve got the regular segments, this week’s news in traffic, the one minute traffic tip, and the traffic jam this week is a classical piece of trumpet music which is kind of appropriate because Ronnie is a trumpet player himself. He’s got a whole degree in trumpet performance, but that is not the topic of today’s episode, we are of course talking Google Hangouts and here’s our interview.

James: Welcome to the interview section of the show listener. Today, I am hanging with the Google Hangout helper, Ronnie Bincer. Ronnie, welcome!

Ronnie: It is a pleasure to be here James.

James: Well, let’s get up to speed real fast before we dive in to the content. You used to train people on Adobe Photoshop. You got started online I believe in video SEO. Now you help people with Google Hangouts. How did you become the hangout helper?

Ronnie: Yeah, that’s a little bit of the story and how it flowed. When I did training, I did that stretch for 12 years straight. I traveled all over the world literally and did training in front of crowds on how to use technical products. And that training skill that I’ve developed over the years I carried in to what I do now which is helping people learn how to use this hangout tool and in between I had a stint with a large sized company where I was their video SEO guy, helped search engines find videos in behalf of the company. So I bring that sort of angle with me because of the way hangouts work with making video especially the hangout on air type. It just was a natural fit for me and the fact that Google+ is a place that influences search results all really ties well together.

James: Great! We may have some discussion around that integration and how Google Hangout has a whole affect search because it is an interesting conversation but I think to start with, let’s get back to basics because potentially we’ll have listeners in a few camps here; we might have those that are using Google hangouts either as a presenter or an attendee, we’ll have those that have heard of Google Hangouts and we possibly have a few who have not got a blind clue, so let’s make this discussion all inclusive, would you mind just by starting what a Google Hangout actually is?

Ronnie: Sure. There are 2 main categories that I group them in, one is a video type, and the other is a text type. And let’s focus on the one that is most popular which is the video type and within the video type there’s two categories: there’s a regular hangout which us old timers use a regular hangout but and they keep changing the name slightly so sometimes it is called a hangout video call, other times, more recently it’s called a video hangout. Either way, it is a meeting room where you can have up to 10 people in a room where you can all see each other and you can all talk to each other and it does not matter where you are geographically located, just click a button and you’re in a room and you can chat. That’s a traditional hangout, and then there’s the other type of video hangout called hangout on air where you take that video call conversation and you hit a button and it starts going live. It’s a live broadcast version of the conversation. So those really are the most popular ones, the video ones, but there is another type that does matter and it’s the text type. It’s a little room where you can chat text-wise back and forth with up to a hundred people and then very easily click a button and it turns it in to a video call so it transitions back in to one of those video calls where it is up to 10 people in a video room.

James: Yup, got it. Well that is a fantastic overview. Hopefully that sets the scene. I think that probably most of our conversation today will be focused around the video hangout, the hangout on air style because most of our listeners are really interested in the marketing aspect of what we are really going to talk about, but I want to ask you, really, a bit of a why question to start with. I know you’ve got a bit of a reputation of being able to communicate the why and how so my first question is- why should we get started with hangouts?

Ronnie: Wow! That’s a deep one, but I will give you an easy answer- because it makes building relationships simple.

James: Yeah, and I guess there is probably a second element to that, right? It is scalable as well. I mean it is a lot easier to build relationships with people further afield on such a scale with a larger tool which is Google Hangout. Would that be fair?

Ronnie: Sure. It would. If I am a Hangout on air which is literally a broadcast version of a video call, I can chat with multiple people in the room but I can have thousands or hundreds of thousands watching from the outside. They can be interacting with comments and literally by just watching us have a conversation, they get to see from the outside. The viewers from the inside can start to know and the other people that we’re talking with or the concepts that we’re talking about very, very easily because it is like they are having a view in to the meeting room of the business.

James: Yeah, fantastic! Well today we’re recording this interview via Go To Meeting which is the baby brother of Go To Webinar so I guess I feel kind of like I forced you to commit some kind of digital adultery Ronnie. You’re cheating on your girl but what advantages does a hangout have over a webinar?

Ronnie: I would say the visual component, that part is actually missing right here right now. But, it’s not that bad say it’s about where people come and using webinars to present information and idea and you want to bring in the video component, I know that there is a little bit of that coming in to the webinar space but it is not as easy in essence and it’s not that made of to a product. So the hangout on air is built in from the very beginning from the ground up to have the video component of it and it’s something that tends to be missing in many webinar platforms but here are more and more that I call rappers or hangout on air rappers that are utilizing Hangout on Air as the video engine and they are adding the registration components and the follow up components that are lacking from the hangout on air tool. They are adding that wrapping around their hangout tool.

James: Got it. Coz I guess that would be the big calling cards. Perhaps in the past where these rappers described them were not available, something like a Go To Webinar would perhaps offer more options in terms of sign up and therefore integration with email and SMS and those types of follow up tools that would help as a marketing person but now with these rappers you can do all of that within a hangout itself, right?

Ronnie: That’s correct, yeah.

James: Now I have never heard of these hangout rappers, what might some of these things do because it is interesting stuff and where might we go to get a hold of them? What are the products that you would recommend?

Ronnie: There’s one that I recommend, there’s actually a few of them that I helped in the development of, and then there’s another that’s just recently coming on to the scene that I really like and the reason why I really like it is because it is easy. Some of the more technically challenging ones may have a little bit more capacity here and there but I think you lose something in ease of use. So it’s okay to mention the name of one, in fact I can give you later an affiliate link that I’d love people to click on if they wanted to check it out.

James: That would be super cool! Feel free to mention it and we’ll make sure that the links are in the show notes too!

Ronnie: Okay, so the one that I am liking the most right now is called Webinar Jam and what it allows you to do is it gives you a 15- it may seem like a lot but it gives you a 15 step process to set everything up and they do a really nice job with their user interface. And someone that helps, that’s me, I help people design these things sometimes. And as I mentioned before, sometimes really, really focus on attack and they forget the interface is important. I think these guys with webinar jam did a fabulous job on that interface as well as doing a pretty decent job with technology to make it all fall together.

James: So what sort of capabilities does this thing got? Does it have a sign up process integration with email I would assume? What sort of capabilities does this thing got?

Ronnie: Out of the box it’s got the capability to work in to whatever your emailing system is right now as well as allows you to craft multiple messages that would be sent out for example, at the beginning of a registration and when someone registers, there is a follow up thanks for registering and there’s a reminder thing so all the things that you would normally see in a product like a Go To Webinar are built in as far as the registration and the process of all that. There is also built in analytics to see those when did they drop off in the process, how long did they stay and all that stuff is all built in and the ability to in the actual Hangout on Air it has its own interface added on top of Hangout on Air where you can do things like you can add in bling features, you can add in offers. So you can do offers on the fly. You can just build them on the fly or you can just set them up ahead of time where all you do is just press a button and then the offer is then shown as part of a live webinar and then after the fact if people signed up and did not show up or signed up and show up, you can send out different follow up messages. So it’s a really full package when it comes to the interaction of the registrants, and the analytics, analytics is a big part too.

James: Nice! This sounds very cool! There is always that limitation with a webinar in terms of the number of attendees but I guess you don’t have that right with the Hangout; it is almost unlimited attendance –

Ronnie: Yeah, I tend to forget about because I have come at this primarily at the Hangout world where there is never, ever a limitation for the number of viewers, and they are taking that lack of a limitation and bringing it to their webinar tools. So you don’t hang anymore for having 10 people to 10 thousand, the price is for an annual fee for that product.

James: Well, we like the name of it, Webinar Jam, seeing that we are talking here on Traffic Jam, I think the name is pretty cool so for that basis alone, it’s well worth checking out.

Ronnie: and they try to brand the name of what you do as Jam sessions so I don’t know if you’ve got that but just realized that’s what their description is going to be.

James: I just probably should look at some copyright legislation here to see about that. Cool! Well Google Hangouts is of course part of the Google+ suite and the greater Google ecosystem. Are you aware of any kind of auxiliary benefits that doing Hangouts have like improved author rank that could translate in to search engine results for instance?

Ronnie: Yes and no. The direct connections are denied up and down by Google. They say you can do activity on Google+ and it is not necessarily going to give you a boost over any other activity elsewhere but reality shows that it does. So the reason why is that Google has full access to your productivity on Google+. They may not have full access on let’s say Facebook for example so as a result, they are going to say, we don’t favor our network over anyone else, but reality is, they do. So with that said, when you do hangout on air activity, you put a face on your business, you put a face on your marketing. And that face causes people to connect with you more and so when they connect with you more, they tend to share more of your stuff. When they share more of your stuff, there is more interaction and that interaction leads directly, very documentable to better results in search.

James: Yeah and I guess there’s that factor of better brand recognition that Google is really going after now, you’ve got the strength of authorship and individual authors offline getting more support or benefits online I can see how that might all tie in.

Ronnie: The authorship also ties in beautifully and I don’t want to get too sidetracked but there is that pretty picture that shows up in search results when authorship is really working well for you and research has shown very easily that when you see a picture of a person, especially a person that you recognize, you’re more likely to click on that link.

James: Absolutely! Absolutely! I do webinars from time to time but I’d be really interested on your opinion on how I might use Hangouts in my own business, either using my SEO or my Google Adwords agency as an example, how might a business like mine – a service business, leverage Hangouts?

Ronnie: Well your service probably has pressure points or choke points where people start to get confused, would you agree? Would you acknowledge that?

James: Absolutely! Yeah.

Ronnie: OK, I thought you might say no – ours is perfect but then so even though it makes sense to you because you designed it, it doesn’t mean your clients fully understand them and so what you can do with the hangout on air is you can basically bring out those pressure points or what I call choke points and clearly describe here’s how people tend to wonder or have questions and here’s the real answer and you can even show the visual representations of how you would guide somebody through to get past that little hurdle and so the ability in essence to do a live show, you could bring in some clients that are wondering or those that in your customer service department that already have the proper answer that they give all the time and you can have a Q&A; go right online live with those specific situations then, here’s a wonderful tip, you might do that with three or four questions. You can then afterwards because it creates automatically a video, you can download that video and then with your video editing software or with your contractors that do editing for you, you can cut that say 40-min hangout on air in to three smaller segments, one covering each question, and now you’ve not only got a show that covers all of them together but you’ve got individual videos that you can then bring in to your website so that when people have those exact questions, they can get that exact answer and that specific answer. It can also be a teaser to lead you to a full answer where there are all three of them together.

James: Nice! So you’re recommending that perhaps the best approach or one of the best approach is literally one of those frequently asked questions, the stumbling points, the objections that come up in your business and then answer them in a live environment and then use the live recording that you enter and leverage that in to formats that you can use elsewhere like your website.

Ronnie: Correct! There is something special about live, it makes you seem more real honestly. So sometimes, when I see people doing these hangouts and try to get so professional, for me it looks great but back off a little – stay real, stay authentic. And don’t try to look so polished because I believe honestly that people relate to this sort of rough edge thing and the live thing helps you do that.

James: Yeah, absolutely. I’ll tell you something I have experienced with webinars also you can put all the effort in the world in creating a video sales letter but sometimes if you just get on the webinar with them with the pressure of people being there and it’s not so polished, you do stumble occasionally, is that it’s actually more effective in terms of connecting.

Ronnie: It makes it more authentic, it’s an authentic thing. I think it matters.

James: So what are some of the most effective formats, Ronnie? Is it sort of a guest of perhaps a customer asking a question or could you do a hangout just as an expert on your own? What’s the best format?

Ronnie: It really depends. There is an SEO answer; it depends for most people because Hangouts can be used for almost any type of business. You tell me the name of the business and I can give you examples of how you can probably use hangouts. But the one thing, if you are doing a presentation and you are doing a walk through as to here’s how to use our product and you just want to show step by step a little area of it then there is nothing wrong with doing a hangout on air just by yourself then maybe doing a screen share along the process because you can literally show your screen if your product involves your website for example, you can show step by step on how to do something specifically on your website, live and that’s turned in to a video so it’s a great training tool. The other part is a great conversational tool so if you would bring multiple people in to the film strip area and let the conversation go, you try to guide it as a moderator. Then that’s another way to do it. And then the third way is to do a live show where you actually have people on the outside interacting by adding comments and then you can bring some of those comments visually on to the screen so then you get this sort of live TV broadcast network where you can actually bring the people in the audience right in to the show without actually being in the film strip. There are many, many different ways to go about doing that.

James: Awesome! Good! Well let’s dig a little deeper in to the how and discuss the kind of the before, during and after units of running a hangout. Beginning with before, how do we get started with hangouts? What do we need in our toolkit before we start?

Ronnie: We’re focusing on the Hangout on Air and we’re calling them hangouts and because I am a technical trainer I tend to be pretty precise because a regular hangout is honestly just a meeting and it doesn’t require you to have a YouTube channel per se. But when you do a Hangout on Air, because you’re going to do this broadcast and it’s going to end up as a video in YouTube, you are required to have a YouTube account, though let’s just focus on the Hangout on Air part because I think that’s where your audience is primarily interested. You’re going to need a Google+ account, you’re also going to need a YouTube account and pretty much now a days when you set up one, you end up getting the other; but you’re going to need to verify the YouTube account and without getting in to too much of details, that’s going to allow you to do this live broadcast, you’re going to need this live YouTube account that’s connected to either a profile which is you as a person, or a page, which is you as a business. And honestly, there is another whole level of conversation when you do one versus the other but the key is, your profile can do a hangout on air, or your page can do a hangout on air and they each have their own YouTube connection.  So when that’s set up, you will also in the process of doing all this will be downloading a piece of software that Google gives you to do this hangouts. And then you are ready to go as far as technology software-wise. But then hardware-wise, you’re going to need some things like a camera; many times people will have a built in webcam, and that’s totally fine to start, but at some point you may want getting a secondary camera if it gives you better quality. And you’re going to need, in my mind, a microphone and ear buds, or what I use really is a headset, where you’re going to be able to separate the sound that comes out on the speaker, which is on your head, if it’s a headset, from the microphone so that you don’t get echo. And one of the biggest problems I see or hear is when people try to do hangouts with their laptop; very, very common problem because the microphone is right next to the speakers and it tends to bring a little bit of echo in and that echo can be quite distracting. So you’re going to want something that separates the speaker from the microphone and for me the easiest to do is with a headset but if you don’t want to go with the nerdy look of a headset so get yourself a separate microphone and put in some ear buds so that somehow you are able to separate the sound that comes out of the computer from the microphone that is bringing sound in. So different software, different hardware than you might have, but it’s really not expensive really. The cameras nowadays, like there’s one that I suggest, if people are not using their built in ones, then they get the Logitech T920 and that runs right around $60-$70 and if you were to look for a decent microphone – or the headset I use is made by GE and it is only $30. But if you were to go with a separate microphone then I highly suggest the blue line of microphones. The lesser expensive ones is called the blue snowball, the more expensive one is he blue yeti. The snowball is totally fine for my use and that runs you around $60 as well. So if you look at $60 for a camera, $60 for a microphone, you probably have ear buds from your MP3 player or whatever, you probably could get everything you need for $120.

James: Yeah, which is like you can’t get in to many things for $100 or less right so I think it is a pretty straightforward way to get started, I know people are going to love links off to kits from the recommendation so again those recommendations from Ronnie will be in the show notes. Ronnie, we’ve got set up now, we’re live on air, what advice would you give to our listener for running a successful Hangout?

Ronnie: There’s a good one. What I’d say for running a successful hangout and I am going to shock you, is look at the camera. I think most people totally ignore that because what happens when you are on a hangout on air there’s this thing on the bottom called the film strip and that’s where all the activity tends to go on with all the other people in that are guests in the show, and your eye naturally is drawn to looking at those people because that is part of the reason you are in the hangout. However, when you’re talking, you really need to try to force yourself to look at the camera because then it appears that you are making eye contact with everybody in the show. And so as a result, it is a hard thing to do really is to stop looking at the film strip and start looking at the camera. So to me, that is going to make one heck of a difference if you do that because then you get visual eye contact. In fact now, it is silly, I am looking at the camera because I am so used to doing this but it doesn’t matter because we don’t have a video component so anyway, that’s one big tip that I will give that you’re probably not going to get elsewhere. The other is –

James: I was going to say I resonate with that. I did an interview for Traffic Jam several months back with Andrew Warner from Mixergy and he really favors doing video interview so impromptu he said let’s do it on video and you know what, I was just rubbish because I wanted to look at my questions and the notes that I had prepared and I realized that I was not looking at Andrew and it was all disjointed I found it horrible experience so I think that would be something I would need to get used to when preparing for hangout for sure.

Ronnie: Yeah, let’s talk about the preparing part because that’s really where I would normally go with that kind of a question. And really, the bottom line is, I don’t suggest that people start out with a hangout on air. I’d suggest they start with a regular hangout. They go in to the video room, where they are just alone, just them, and get used to poking the buttons, push all the buttons and see what happens. And then the next level is invite friends in or co-workers, people who I am not worried about making mistakes with, and this is still all not a hangout on air. Then my third phrase, is I would suggest that you get invited to somebody else’s hangout on air and if nothing else, just sit there and be part of it, and maybe ask a question as part of the show. and then the final phase is then you start running your own and all this stuff of course would be handy if you have some training and because that’s what I do for a living, I really stress that. But where do you get the training? From me or from somebody else, find a way to learn because it is frequently changing, it is constantly being updated, but it is a very, very powerful tool. So I would not, repeat, would not, start my first effort doing a live broadcast hangout on your show, which would actually be the last thing and then once I get there then you’re off and running.

James: Great advice! Okay cool! So we’ve done the before, we’ve done the during, what about the after process? What’s the process there? You’ve shared a good tip earlier about chunking that recording on hangouts on air in to smaller videos. What else can we do to leverage that session?

Ronnie: This is where I bring in my years of experience in video SEO. Part component of the video that many don’t have- I came from that background of how you get videos get found on the internet. What you need to do after your show is over is do optimization to your video. Basically make sure that the text that’s part of the video posting makes sense and ties in with the conversation that you had. So you use the words that you are speaking in hangout, repeat them in the text, and I would not do it literally, I mean, I would not do a transcript in essence, but I would bring in similar words to their primary keyword phrases that you are wanting to get across, that should be part of your optimization now, but that means back up second, you need to be actually saying those words in the hangout as well. so if you can think of the end before you can get started, and what you end up doing when you are optimizing your videos, that can guide your conversation and the words you are using in your hangout and then it is going to be a much more synergistic effort so you’re going to want to make sure you’ve got good keywords in your tags in YouTube as well as put them in to the description text and if possible they should be part of the titling of your video. That is all available, normal video SEO things that you would do, but then there is other things like if it was part of a show and there was a lot of interaction, one thing I love to do is bring some of the better comments that were part of that show out in to the focus and so what that does is that you can do a post or article and you can highlight certain people’s comments because lots of people will make a comment that’s really, really valuable along in your show and then you can give them credit. Social credit allows them to be seen and known, and then what you think it does for them it helps them share it. So it is a very synergistic effort when you can bring in the interactions that happened in your hangout in to a follow up post or a follow up blog article about what you just did.

James: Love it! Then it’s self- perpetuating. I guess you can just keep rolling this thing on and on. One hangout on air, get a bunch of questions asked then you’ve almost got content for your next hangout on air, I mean it just gets on and on. Awesome, well let’s begin to wrap this up Ronnie, you teach all of this of course in a program called Hangout Mastery. Tell me and the audience a little bit more about that.

Ronnie: Sure, the Hangout Mastery is a place where I have a private mastery group and they have access to materials that we put on a regular membership website but the most compelling of it is they also have access to a private community inside Google+ and the beauty of that is that there is a ton of people in there, all helping each other, asking questions and giving wonderful answers and we do a lot of testing because this is still a very new area and people are saying can we do this with it? And well I would say I am pretty sure but let’s give it a try. So we just start up and we do a test. And the ability to do this worldwide, because the people all over the world that is happening 24/7 within that community is probably the best part. I am the leader of the pack and so if somebody asks a question, another person within the group gives an answer and it’s not the right thing I tend to go in and politely nudge it to the right answer just to make sure that things are accurate but it is a really, really valuable environment and it may sound like I am salesy – but trust me when I say this – I have never been in an environment where everybody helping each other to this degree and is so excited about helping each other that they’re like pouncing on the people’s questions like they know the answers. This is amazing.

James: Great! If this sounds exciting to our listener and they want to take it a bit further, where would they go to find out more about Hangout mastery?

Ronnie: Probably the easiest way, besides links that I would give in along with in your program, is go to www.thehangouthelper.com that’s my primary website and you’ll see links there to take you right in to the membership environment where you can see the overview of some of the content that is in there and then click that buy button and then what it does is a month to month membership. You can cancel it anytime. So you get a 30-day session in essence. You can even pay the day and cancel so you have access for 30 days and then you won’t be hit with the renewal. And of course we hope you stay right? Because that is part of the beauty- being part of the community, I just want people to realize that they don’t have to have a long term commitment.

James: Absolutely! I am sure they will see value and it sounds fantastic. Let’s wrap things up. You have been generous with your time and expertise and I thank you for that. What action should our listener take right now as a result of listening to the podcast other than of course checking www.thehangouthelper.com?

Ronnie: I would suggest, if nothing else, get to the membership landing page because there I’ve got 4 or more videos that give you some more good basic overviews of either how to be a phenomenal hangout on air guest or how to start your hangout on air, and they are all free right there on the landing page so start out with www.thehangouthelper.com, take some ride over to the membership site and see some very good introductory videos, I think that would be a very good start.

James: Awesome, Ronnie Bincer, thank you!

Ronnie: My pleasure, thanks for having me James.

This Week’s News in Traffic

With Facebook, they have added call to action buttons for their news feed ads and regular organic posts. You may have already seen these pop up in your own news feed. The post looks pretty much like normal but in the bottom right hand corner you’ll see a call to action that may include a phrase like shop now, learn more, sign up, book now, or download. They’re the currently available calls to action. These calls to action buttons, they’re only able to be created with the power editor, that’s the add-on for Google Chrome used for creating Facebook ads.

I do think that this calls to button action are going to be great for marketers, at least over time, I think they’ll help to increase click through rates, but I will say is that the early data, at least that that I have seen, is showing at least right now, they’re not making a market difference on click through rates but I do think that’s probably just people getting used to them, popping up in their news feed whilst they are getting used to them, they are perhaps a little adverse to clicking on those but I think as they increase over time, more and more people will use them. I do think that it will have an effect of increasing click through rates.

The other great thing about this is that it really helps us marketers stop playing around with pictures, we’ve always been subject to the Facebook 20% text roll when we try to include headlines and calls to actions in images and we won’t need to do so much of that now because of those buttons. I think those are really going to be helpful. Anyway, go try these out for yourself. As I said, only available right now using the power editor but do give them a play and let me know how you get on.

Klout is developing from a tool that measures the effect of the content that you share on social media. A tool that help you create a content for social media. The new create tab that Klout have created inside their portal helps you find great articles and posts worth sharing with your audience. They say, unlike most apps that suggest content for your personal consumption, Klout intelligently recommends content that will strike a chord with your unique set of friends, fans and followers. It is now available inside the Klout website, go check it out.

If you are enjoying Traffic Jam and getting real value out of the show, I’d absolutely love it if you leave a review on either iTunes or Stitcher radio. That really is the best possible way to support the show, help us climb up the rankings and reach more people with the content that I put out here, not every week, but generally bi-weekly. To do it over at iTunes, just log in, find the Traffic Jam show, click on ratings and reviews, select a rating out of five stars, preferably five, but give it a rating that you think the show deserves, and then leave a comment along with that. Stitcher radio, the process is pretty similar, just log in and find the show and then leave a rating and a review for it. If you do that in this coming week, then more than likely, I will read your review out on next week’s show so again if you want to get yourself a little bit of airtime, perhaps also mentioning your website address or your business name I will make sure that is mentioned along with your review so thank you in advance, I really would love it if you did that for us that will really help us climb up the rankings, help more people and get this great information out to a wider audience.

The One Minute Traffic Tip

Okay, so full credit to Ezra Firestone for this one, this is a killer tip that landed up in my inbox the other day and I just had to share it. The example here relates to Facebook advertising but it can also be applied to other platforms. Most Facebook advertisers get caught up selecting their image and optimising their ad copy but there is actually one element that appears on every Facebook page post ad that also affects results, and that’s the page name you create the ad from.

Using a page name that is relevant to the audience that you are targeting with your ads will increase click through rate. Here is an example. If you have a campaign title targeting, say, Lawyers in Dubai, try creating a Facebook page called Dubai Lawyers and creating your ads from that page so that is the name that appears at the top of your ad. According to Ezra, this increased relevancy will give your click through rates a sizable bump. Go give it a try!

So that brings Episode#28 of Traffic Jam to a close, join me back here for another session real soon. On the next episode I am going to be talking about image marketing, not a topic we have covered yet so that is bound to be interesting, I am certainly looking forward to it, you should too! To play out this week’s episode we have a track of course chosen by my guest, Ronnie Bincer and it is a classical music track, it is nice to have a bit of a classical in the mix for the first time. The track is called Pictures at an Exhibition and we’re going to be listening specifically to the trumpets so enjoy this to play out the episode. Remember also to go and check out veravo.com for more traffic tips and training and I’d also recommend heading over to SEOSherpa.com where we’ve just launched a new feature section called Base Camp where we answer your most commonly asked questions, so go check that out. Again, to play out this week’s episode, Pictures at an Exhibition and it’s the trumpet solo.

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.

According to this week’s guest, mobile marketing is the way of the future, and he tells how the use of mobile can indeed get you more traffic, sales and better reach to your audience.

With his background starting with huge brands and SMS marketing, Greg Hickman has grown together with the advancement in mobile and smart phones. As Greg would say it, mobile marketing is the future, so listen in right now.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

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Mobile gives the opportunity to connect with your potential clients anytime, anywhere.”@GJHickman
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Hello listener! Welcome to Traffic Jam and indeed welcome back to Traffic Jam if you are a regular listener to the show, I am James Reynolds and you are listening in to episode#27 of Traffic Jam which is of course the traffic show that teaches you how to get more traffic, leads and sales from your website and ultimately build a profitable audience online.

If you have not gotten your mobile marketing strategy in order yet today, this episode is one that you want to play close attention to. Now, I’ll not on this stage reel off a bunch of stats about mobile marketing; I’ll save that for my guest later on the show, but what I will mention, real, real quick at the top of the episode is a couple of experiences that really cemented the absolute importance of mobile in my mind recently. The first of which was an event I attended at Google here in Dubai where the regional director of Google shared with us some stats about usage on Google and he told us that of all searches happening within Google within the GCC region, more searches now happen from a mobile or tablet device than a desktop device. For me as a search marketer, that was certainly interesting hearing and certainly reinforced just how important it is to make sure that you’ve got a mobile ready website. The second experience was the building of the veravo.com mobile website late in 2013 and since showing a special mobile site to mobile visitors as opposed to our general desktop site, we’ve experienced a 107% increase in conversion for our website analysis report which is just quite phenomenal, certainly exceeded my expectations of the results of going mobile and again it just reinforces the fact that everyone is online on their mobile now and if you’re not making that experience friendly for them you really are doing yourself disservice and are probably shunning people away that otherwise enjoy visiting your site, enjoy your content, just because you’re not making it easy for them to access your site from the devices they’re using.

Mobile marketing is well and truly on my radar and I posted about it extensively both in relation to SEO and to Adwords so if you want some deeper learning on this topic you want might to head on over to veravo.com to check out those videos, just enter mobile in to the search bar on veravo.com and you’ll find all of those posts.

So let’s introduce today’s guest. His name is Greg Hickman and I first heard him interviewed on a couple of our past guests; podcasts; Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income and Amy Porterfield’s Online Marketing Made Easy podcast, which on the side note you should absolutely check out because are great shows.

Greg’s a dude that’s out there literally leading this whole mobile marketing revolution. He’s got a lot of experience to back himself up too; he’s been a marketer since college, he’s worked for a bunch of agencies representing brands such as Pepsi and Unilever and he’s executed mobile programs for brands like the New York Jets, the Florida Marlins and AT&T and currently he works with Cabellas helping them with their mobile marketing strategy. As I know you’d like to get to know our guest up close and personal, you might be interested to know that Greg likes mountain biking, road biking, gymnastics, and cross fit, and apparently he does a very mean handstand too. So a gymnastic mobile marketing Greg Hickman from MobileMixed.com is coming right up now followed by all of the regular bits that you know and love, the one minute traffic tip, this week’s news in traffic, and then of course the reason this podcast is called Traffic Jam, we have the musical jam to end the show.

So let’s get started, here’s Greg Hickman for a chat about all things mobile marketing.

James: This is episode#27 of Traffic Jam and joining me today is Greg Hickman from Mobile Mixed. Greg, welcome to Traffic Jam.

Greg: Thank you for having me I appreciate it!

James: Sweet! Well, we’re recording this on January 2nd 2014 so I guess I should first of all wish you a Happy New Year.

Greg: You too, Happy New Year!

James: Happy New Year! You’ve carved out a pretty strong reputation in the area of mobile marketing, in fact, when I was really considering who to invite to the show to talk about the very important topic of mobile, there was only one name that kept popping up and that was of course yours but for those who are unfamiliar with Greg Hickman, give us the quick cliff notes version of kind of who you are and what your business is.

Greg: Sure. I got started in mobile in 2005 and I worked for an agency that represented some brands and professional sports here in the United States. This was before the iPhone and everything which text message marketing is heavily based in that and since I have worked with small businesses and big brands most recently, a large retailer called Cabelas, which focuses on the hunting, fishing and camping space, I was leading their mobile strategy, and as of recent, I left there and taking my business which is primarily powered through the blog and podcast of Mobile Mixed, which is at mobilemixed.com like you mentioned. It is really focused on training businesses and even agencies on how to implement mobile marketing in their business or the client’s business. It covers everything from mobile websites, to apps to text messaging, all the different aspects of mobile so it is very much a training platform that businesses can rely on to help them implement campaigns that will work using mobile.

James: Cool! So you got started in this really way back in the day right? When there was just SMS and the clunky old Nokia phones, how have things changed from then and now? I am sure that development of mobile is probably – well it is massive right?

Greg: Oh yeah! It was probably back then it was very much based in text messaging, ringtones, wallpapers, people want to have cool backgrounds on their phone, very kind of basic and it has come a long way with smart phone applications and augmented reality and all that stuff but I think a lot of the basics are actually still being missed by most businesses and the foundation elements like text messaging, email and mobile websites and things like that sometime go overlooked because of the new shiny objects of applications and mobile video and all these other things so it is interesting because it started off as a marketing tool like email but now mobile really is just a part of every aspect of marketing whether it is search, banner advertising, email, SEO – all that stuff, there is a mobile component in to all of it so it really is just this constant thing now through anything that we do as marketers.

James: Yeah, well I see 2013 was a big year for mobile right? I think of those years that really bought mobile to the top of attention and I guess this coming year 2014 is probably going even bigger again so I guess to kind of set the whole scene with what we are to talk about, for those of our listeners who are setting their new year’s resolution and deciding their priorities next sort of 12 months ahead, how important is it that they put mobile marketing at the top of their priority list?

Greg: It is very important, I just think that no matter what type of business you have, your audience, your potential customers, your existing customers. They are all using their smart phone or mobile phone. In some way, shape or form, that is going to give you an opportunity to connect with them and you don’t really have a say anymore as to how, when, where and what device your customer uses to connect with you or read your email or to look at your website or anything so it’s more of just your audience is already there so as a business owner you need to catch up and be a part of it.

James: Yeah, well I liked the recent comment of Eric Shmidt in the 2014 predictions and he was talking about the year that had passed and of course the forthcoming year as well all about mobile was winning, 2014 is all about mobile has won so he kind of set the scene for what this has become. What I’d like you to do is expand on that and share with me some of the statistics that would be most surprising about mobile as it is now because I have seen your website and there’s some pretty unfathomable numbers in terms of mobile usage. What are some of the most impressive ones?

Greg: Yeah, I’m actually presenting in a media expo in 2 days and I have been kind of diving in to some more statistics around mobile content because my topic is how to create a mobile content strategy so I was looking primarily at how people are consuming content through social channels so there’s some staggering numbers like 88% of all photos uploaded to Facebook are coming from a mobile phone. I am actually going to pull up my slides here for you because there are some really, really good stats like almost 70% of all Facebook usage is happening from a mobile phone so if you are using social media in any way, shape or form, or Facebook rather, the odds of your customer actually seeing that message on Facebook are extremely high that it is going to be on a mobile device so that’s a no brainer then that you need to think about your customer. To rattle off a few more, by 2015 more people will be accessing the internet through their mobile phone compared to a personal computer; 48% of all email is opened on a mobile phone. This is an interesting one – 61% of all people that followed a group or liked a page that was created on Facebook like by a brand came from a mobile device so that engagement of someone initially saying I like this happening on mobile. 65% of all watched video clips on Facebook are from mobile. 90% of all shared links to blogs on Twitter came from a mobile phone so if you are looking for Twitter as a distribution channel, almost a hundred percent of people actually sharing your tweet are from the mobile phones so that’s super important. Some other things that I thought were interesting were that 86% of smart phone owners use their mobile phones while watching TV so kind of debunking the myth of mobile users are on the go; they’re very much not on the go and of that 86%, 41% do it every day and then there is a growing population now, at least in the United States, of people that their only access to the internet is through their mobile phones. 31% of Americans that access the web do it from only their mobile device so that’s a growing number of people that any sort of business, it’s a number that you can’t really ignore.

James: No, certainly not. I mean this numbers stagger me, I was meeting up with the UAE Google team 2-3 weeks back and they also shared some interesting facts around search traffic on mobile devices and I know the reported number I think is kind of worldwide that 2015 mobile search traffic would exceed desktop however where I am here in the UAE that has already happened; I think 52 or 53% of all searches happening on Google are happening on a mobile device which is just astonishing numbers.

Greg: Yeah, totally. Even when it comes to like the local aspect, I think one in three searches maybe even more than that now, has mobile searches has a local intent so they are looking for something in and around their current location so if you are a business that has brick and mortar physical location and people are using search to find you, the mobile is one of the ways now that is going to be kind of the way to help people find you.

James: Yeah, and then I believe for those types of searches conversion percentages are typically much, much higher right? Because people have often already made the decision that they want that thing only to visit that place they just need to access that fast.

Greg: Exactly!

James: Cool! I guess we have set the scene now Greg that mobile is pretty important, what are some of the biggest considerations that our listeners should be making, before they get started if indeed they have not already got started with mobile?

Greg: You want to first make sure that your audience, your customers are using their mobile phone to potentially connect with you and let’s say probably 9 times out of 10 the odds are that they are. Look at your traffic; look at where your traffic is coming from. Is it coming from Facebook’s mobile site? What percentage of it is coming from a mobile phone? I have seen on average 25% for most people all of their incoming traffic is coming from a mobile phone. How much of your email is opened from a mobile phone. Depending on which email provider you use, you should be able to get some of that information and so just kind of assess your current situation; how many of the people that are currently connecting with you are on a mobile phone because those are people that you might be potentially neglecting and a lot of people are always trying to grow their audience, grow the number of customers but if you have, just for the sake of easy numbers, a thousand people on your email list and 50% of them are opening on their mobile phone and your email is not mobile optimized and you are focused on getting that 1000 to 2000, well what’s the point if you are neglecting 500 already. You’re probably going to be neglecting a thousand of them once you get to 2000 so like start taking care of people who have already shown interest in you by mobilizing the aspects of your business that people already connect with. I would say do that first, and then, no brainer is to make sure that your website is mobile optimized just because of all the different ways that people can get to your site from a mobile phone but then I would say after that before you go on some of the tactics like SMS and email and things like that I will really focus on how does mobile play a part in to your strategy like your goals? Are you trying to sell more products? Are you selling information? Are you a content marketer that is really just making money off of advertising and things like that? Where does mobile fall in to your own business and from there align yourself with the other tactics that might make the most sense because text message marketing might not make sense for you whereas maybe a smart phone application might make sense for you so depending on where you spend your money and time outside of having your site being mobile friendly, it’s something that only you will be able to know by looking at your own business and what your existing customers are currently trying to accomplish.

James: Yeah, cool! Well I guess let’s start with the broad brush stroke concept of being mobile friendly because I guess regardless of what business you’re in, making sure that your site, assuming you have one, should of course be mobile friendly. Where do they start with that? What does mobile friendly actually mean?

Greg: The way I guess I would define it is that anything that your potential customer can do with your business, they should be able to do from a mobile phone easily, not like painstakingly having to pinch and zoom like if you are a commerce site and people can add products to a shopping cart and check out, they should be able to do that from a mobile phone in a very mobile optimized, mobile friendly way. If you are a blogger or a news source, I should be able to read any single article that you write from your mobile website, and again not in a way where someone has to pinch zoom to even find or click accurately on the links, they should be presented in a way that is friendly for a mobile device so someone can navigate around and accomplish the tasks that they would have been able to accomplish if they were on your full desktop site. So I would essentially say that that’s what it means to be mobile friendly.

James: And I guess, as basic as it might sound, I am sure that there are people out there that have possible not done this. I guess just go and try to access your own site from your own mobile devices and see what the experience is like. I mean it is often overlooked; you and I have surely visited sites where you try to expand the screen out and we can’t click on a link it just gets so frustrating that we give up in the end right and then if we do that we’ve lost a customer for sure. So there’s always this big debate Greg about a mobile friendly site versus a standalone mobile site. What’s your recommendation? Do we go for responsive design or do we go for 2 sites – one for desktop, one for mobile?

Greg: I really think it depends on your business. At this point I would say that using something like responsive design is the direction you want to be going for the future but that does not necessarily mean that you can do it today based on your circumstances. Everyone has different circumstances, I mean if you just rebuilt your website and you did not build it responsive, the odds of you trying to rebuild a responsive site right now are probably low which might then make you want to create some sort of separate mobile optimized experience that you can drive people to on their phone. If you can, responsive is the right direction right now and I guess my caveat to that is that it also depends on that type of business that you have so I see opportunities for businesses that have a local presence like a brick and mortar establishment; I see opportunities for them to have a separate mobile site for a lot of reasons, especially like in retail space – knowing that as you mentioned earlier people are searching from their mobile phone, they’ve sort of already made up their mind, like if I am doing a search for pizza, the odds of me wanting to get pizza are pretty high like the intent of the searcher is a lot different than someone who’s just browsing so when you create a separate site you can actually create a separate site that really caters to what that searcher is looking for, again when you are thinking of a local brick and mortar establishment, people are looking for the phone number, they’re looking for the hours, address, maps and direction so you can guide people through that experience, I think much easier right now by having a separate site than you can using responsive so if you are brick and mortar I think you don’t have to go responsive you do have opportunities to create a separate site. Also cost is a big thing and resources. Not everyone that I know is capable of developing responsive sites, you can purchase responsive WordPress themes if you’re a blogger or something like that but if you’re an established business, you’re probably not going to be buying a theme online or anything like that. You’re going to want something customized to use so if you don’t know a developer that can do it, that’s going to be an obstacle for you. Responsive usually takes a little bit more time from the development perspective because of testing. You’ve got to test on all these different devices as well so it’s really your situation, your budget, your current circumstances. Have you just invested in a site redesign so if I can sum that up in to what types of businesses should be looking at what solution, I think if you are a content based business – a news site like New York Times, Boston Globe, blog or a podcast or social media marketer type of person, responsive is probably the route you want to go, if you’re a retailer or someone that has a local aspect, I think a separate mobile site can still benefit you right now in the short term. But again, like I said, I do think the future solution lies in and around responsive.

James: Yeah, there has been a lot of talk about this, the scale seem to tip from one side to the other. Even as far as Google go, they’ve always spoken about having the benefit of having a separate mobile site, they even seem to be saying now that the sort of future ongoing that responsive is probably open but I guess the argument is still open. I think even from a search perspective, there is an advantage for a mobile only site because you could potentially optimize for those more locally inclined searches that might be things like get pizza or where can I find pizza etc. which has its benefits. I guess it is evaluate your own situation, decide what’s the right fit for you. Any particular design considerations that we should be thinking about other than whether we go down the responsive or mobile only route?

Greg: Yeah, I would say that your main call to action should leverage probably buttons versus text links and sort of the minimum size for those buttons is usually 44×44 pixels is kind of the best practice for a touchable area so when you’re designing your site for mobile, I think it is important to understand that you’re really designing for touch. We’re not using a very small mouse pointer anymore, we are using our fingers and peoples fingers are different sizes; people typically use their pointer finger or their thumb so you want to make sure the sizes of those clickable and tapable areas are easily able to be found and also tapped without misclicking or touching something else that will take them off in to another experience so designing for touch is important. If you are again a local aspect, make sure that your click to call phone number is very accessible, maps and directions is easily accessible and your hours are very easily accessible, ideally all above the fold, which obviously is a lot smaller, you have obviously a much smaller real estate in mobile; so those are the things that sort of jump out.

James: Got it, there are some definite action steps that our listeners can certainly be going and checking on their own site to make sure that they’re mobile compliant and mobile ready. Let’s move the conversation on a little bit from there and perhaps talk about some of the tactical marketing stuff. The first thing I want to talk to you about is email marketing and I think you mentioned at the top of the show that something like 47% of emails are accessed now from mobile devices. How do we need to think differently about email marketing for someone viewing your email on a mobile device?

Greg: Before you even get to things like responsive email, I think it is important to know that when it comes to email your subject line are even more important because depending on the phone screen, your email subject line will be anywhere from 5 to 7 words, typically 60 characters before it gets truncated so if you’re the type that writes super long subject lines make sure that those first 5 to 7 words are enticing enough to get someone to even open it because like we said earlier, almost 50% of all emails are now opened from a mobile phone. So the only thing that you can kind of work with there is copyrighting, understanding your customer, do they like sort of a mysterious headline, is there something intriguing or some actionable call to actions like save $10 now is that something that’s going to get them to open it more quickly? Subject line is important, another one is time of day, that’s really relevant whether it’s on mobile or not but I think it is even more relevant now. Monitor your open rates and see are more emails being opened at different times in the afternoon? Because if you are always sending in the morning – I’m not sure if you’re like this but I know a lot of people are – the first thing we do in the morning is pick up our phone and look at our emails so I think it is interesting that our mobile device has actually become like a filter for which emails we are actually going to read and I can tell you that I delete many emails before I even get out of bed just to lighten the load when I actually sit down at my desk to start working so if that’s one of your emails, maybe that’s just why people are not opening it, maybe because they’re just deleting it in that sort of morning ritual of lowering their stress by decluttering their inbox so I would say test the time of delivery and the last thing before you go on responsive is really the name of the sender so you’ll notice on most mobile devices, the name of the sender of the email is in larger font, it’s usually in bold especially on the iPhone like the eye is drawn in to that before the subject lines so if you send emails from and it gets displayed in people’s inboxes like [email protected] that might not be as enticing as maybe the name of your site, or maybe your own personal name like my emails, even my newsletter, it comes from Greg Hickman it’s not from [email protected]. So depending on what that send address is, make sure that it is displaying the way you want it to within the inbox because that’s what people are going to see even before the subject line.

James: Yeah, got it. Or worse something like noreply@ or something devilish like that – you really just want to give them the pass not to open your email.

Greg: Exactly! So I mean that’s just to get people to open it and then once it’s open, kind of the same things apply as to your website. If you have a call to action, you want them to be buttons and large, nice fonts that should adjust based on your device so responsive email templates are something that are really great when it comes to email that most people can get for free if not buy for very inexpensively if their email service provider doesn’t offer that so I think that if you like to send long emails using bullets and lists and subheaders that will help make your email a little bit more scannable, will make it more easier for people to read it versus just kind of one big massive block of text and then I would test it on your own device and also see like if you’re using multiple text links because it’s more like a secondary call to action. When it’s on the mobile phone like are any of those text links crowded? Are they like next to each other? that maybe trying to tap one will be sort of difficult because there’s two links next to each other so I would look in to that as well.

James: Got it! Cool! I guess I want to move a little forward a little bit from there now and talk about text messaging because that’s one of the other great communication devices I guess would be extremely relevant for a mobile. I want to ask you about some of the things that I have seen, I have recently witnessed some great integrations of text and SMS in marketing sequence such as SMS used in conjunction with email to remind me about a webinar. What would you say the best applications of text messaging that perhaps our listener could go and check out for themselves?

Greg: Again, it depends on your business. For local businesses it is a really good remarketing tool to bring people back to your establishment with offers and things like that. But from a service perspective it is also really good as a reminder tool, like what you said, like in the webinars or for an appointment. You have to understand the immediacy of text messaging, so if you are using text message marketing, your recipient, the people on your list, will receive your message almost instantaneously but once it hits their phone, 90% of people will read that message within 4 minutes so you can’t be promoting something that happens a week from the day that you sent the text message so the content and the call to action should be very timely, time sensitive so you’re promoting a webinar and you have a few extra seats so you have a database and you can say hey we have 20 spots left in this webinar, click this link and be sure to sign up. That link should take them to a mobile optimized landing page than hey I have this webinar next week on Thursday at 2o’clock, click here to sign up because that is not leveraging really the immediacy of it or you could flip the context and say hey I am sending out this announcement to my SMS database first, I have not even promoted this anywhere else, as a mobile subscriber you get first dibs on the first 10 seats or whatever in this webinar so you can use it as like an exclusivity thing as well so I would think about, if you are using that focus on time services messaging, sort of service oriented messaging as something that will remind someone to do something or be somewhere or use an offer or coupon, SMS works really, really well. and then also think about ways to make that message exclusive because if you are just repurposing the content that is in your email, you’re not really giving anyone value because they could have gotten that through email so you want to make sure that the messaging and the things that you are discussing through that channel are different than what you are talking about in email.

James: Cool! And I have seen you, or should I say, heard you talk about using text messaging really nicely at a live event perhaps to capture data or as opt ins. Tell us about how we might do that and some of the applications for it.

Greg: Yeah so depending on – just like email providers, there are so many SMS providers out there so some of them actually offer the option for you to text your email address in to be opted in to an email newsletter which is awesome. I think MailChimp and Constant Content offer that so if you are speaking in an event or some sort of live atmosphere you can be like hey text join to 12345 and then reply with your email and you’ll be put in my email newsletter so it is a quick way in the moment for people who are interested to opt in to your list. You could also combine that with a link that drives to a landing to gt maybe like a free pdf of some sort or something so for example speaking in a media expo in 2 days and in the end of my presentation I will allow people to text in. You’ll be opted in to receiving a mobile marketing tip via a text message once a month and then they’ll also get a link that will take them to a landing page where they can enter their email address to receive the PDF of the slides that I just took them through in that presentation so at the end of the presentation I am going to say, hey if you’d like to receive one mobile marketing tip and get these slides to kind of look through some of the statistics and some of the things that we’ve talked about today, just text Live to 585858 to sign up and get that PDF delivered to your email inbox. That will put people in my list that will also get people in to my mobile list and will also be a way that they’re like I want this and they can do it right away then and there and then have the PDF slide sent to them via email and they don’t have to worry about forgetting, like there are so many times I write things down at conferences and I am like don’t forget to get this PDF or email this person after the show, you never do it so just someone right they if they really want to, they can text in and they can get it so those are a couple of ways that you can give away things. I have talked to authors and they have like a best-selling book, using text will be a great way to give away the first chapter like hey, do you want to see a sample of the book, if you’re on the fence about buying it, text in and you’ll receive the first chapter by email. It can even be a mobile optimized version of the chapter that they can look in to right then and there. So there are different ways, I think you have to be creative with how your particular business will use it or can use it but again focusing on that time sensitivity, the exclusivity, the immediacy, as long as you’re delivering content that is valuable or providing a solution that is making your audiences lives easier and some way, shape or form, you should be pretty well off.

James: Yeah, sweet. I have tested the 1.0 version of this when I have spoken at live events before and actually just gave them a mobile number for people to text to to receive something and the number of people who are texting, we are looking at 75% + of the audience were actually SMSing to receive the giveaway and I’m like killer numbers if you just give them the opportunity of subscribing by visiting this website, the chance of them actually doing it are far, far less. I can certainly vouch for that being effective but I don’t suggest if you can get away with it actually just sending it to just a normal number because you’d be wading through data all night as I was; not the most effective way.

Greg: Yeah and I think one last thing there is that it’s still fairly new to a lot of people even though SMS has been around for a while. Just the intrigue of being at a live event and being like hey text this to get whatever-  most people still probably has not seen it that it’s new that they’re just going to try it to experience it so you have that going for you as well.

James: Yeah, absolutely! Cool! Well I’d like to just flip the coin for a second before us wrapping up; how can us marketers and content creators use mobile devices available to us to better connect with our audience?

Greg: Oh man! Most of this is going to be through social just because of how, we talked about earlier, the number of people that are liking and sharing and all that stuff for mobile that it gives you the opportunity to connect with your audience through your social platform. Gary Vaynerchuk, if you’re familiar with him, is the great example of this, I mean every time he says he’s in a car or in a cab, he’ tweeting at people, direct messaging people that have reached out to him. It just allows you to I guess be productive in those moments between meetings and things like that where you can use your device to just interact with your audience, assuming that they are there, which for most of us, they are. And also, it is a way for us to create content – a quick video that you can share on Facebook or you just walk out on a meeting and something kind of hit you and you just want to share with your audience. You can record a quick video, you can take a picture and drive them to an article that you read on Twitter, just the same ways that we expect people to share our own content. We could be sharing content that we find interesting with our audience.

James: Yeah, well Gary, he’s a perfect example; I remember seeing some of his videos he’ like looking half dead, rocked about 2 hours of sleep in the last 24 hours rumpled in the corner of a plane or something on a flight and you’re thinking, really he wants to share this sort of stuff? But it’s a huge amount of interactivity and genuine notes that I think is super effective right –when you’re just kind of sharing stuff as it happens. Alright, let’s wrap things up or get close to, I’d like to ask you one more question, if you are up to the challenge on this, you have a regular segment or show episode on mobile mixed that you call how can X use mobile or how can blank use mobile, and of course you give various example of different businesses can tap in to it. I, knowing that you were coming on the show, post this to the TJ audience and we had a few different businesses reply, I have picked one so if you are up for the challenge, how can our listener who has a shop online in retailing flight bags, how can they use mobile marketing?

Greg: Like luggage?

James: Yeah, they have this cool, little leather luggage bags and they have kind of designed the style that I guess is lined for short term travel but he retails these just online, he hasn’t got a physical store, he’s got a website promoting it, so there you go, the floor is yours.

Greg: Yeah, outside of just making sure that people can buy the products from the mobile site I think some interesting ways would be to – and this is where I think mobile is interesting is it has to be integrated on other things that you are doing right? So I mean, what if this person, with every bag that was sold a free sort of like luggage tag or what have you was provided for free that had some sort of interesting call to action so that provided a service to that person who just bought the luggage, I can put my name and my contact information on there so if it gets lost or stolen, whatever, that information is there but when someone is like, oh I really like that bag, where did you get it? Someone could really just look at their tag, maybe there is a QR Code on there, there is a call to action where it can take them right to a mobile optimized landing page of that particular product or something like that, so you know, if I am sitting on the airport and I am guilty of this which is why I kind of am coming up with this idea, I see someone who has a really cool bag and I am like where did you get that and they are like oh, I don’t know, I’ve had this for like a little while now, I got this as a gift, I am not sure, and it’s in my mind the bag that I want, like I have been looking for this bag, where did people buy this bag? If I were just to say, oh, look here’s the tag where I got it, scan it and boom I can buy it right then and there that would be interesting I think maybe some sort of mobile optimized tips for maybe how to pack your bag. It could be something that existing subscribers/ existing customers use that maybe can drive them back to the site for the new products that are coming out or even just as a service for potential people, maybe this person has a blog where they talk about travel in a more general sense maybe that you can receive text message tips on how to pack certain items in to that bag or maybe just any bag and maybe just travel tips and things like that where I think you could be using mobile as a distribution channel for a content that you are creating that will maybe help others and then really just kind of that awareness of taking the offline experiences, where will customers interact with this product offline, again while they’re traveling in the airport or whatever that you can attach to the product in some way that will help drive more people to the site. Does that make sense?

James: Absolutely! For putting you on the spot at such short notice, we did not discuss this right, before the show, I love that! That’s an absolutely great idea. It brings that real life element to where you are actually integrating interacting with the product and in to the mobile experience so I could see how that would be very, very effective so Greg well done for that, I put you on the spot there. Cool! We are at the start of 2014. Let’s just end with Greg Hickman’s predictions for 2014 in mobile – what’s next in mobile marketing?

Greg: I think this year you are going to see a lot of businesses actually going from just doing mobile from a tactical perspective to actually incorporating it in to their strategy so thinking about it just from a more strategic perspective so you are going to see it integrated with other aspects of marketing that are driving towards a specific goal. They are going to use mobile to try to sell more goods or to drive more foot traffic or things like that versus just like oh I am trying this text message marketing program so I think the way in which mobile is used is going to start making its way in to the ongoing strategies that the businesses use.

James: Awesome! Well, Greg that’s great. I guess just to once again share with our listener how they can reach out to you, MobileMixed.com, is there any other websites or social media profiles you’d like to mention at this point?

Greg: Sure! Outside of Mobile Mixed, you can find me on Twitter @GJHickman and if you want to email me, I am [email protected]

James: Great! Well, listener, if you’ve not got a mobile device to hand write and to tap that information in to those links will be in the show notes of episode 27 of Traffic Jam so you can head on over to the episode’s page to get those. Greg, thank you once again for coming on Traffic Jam!

Greg: James, thank you so much I really appreciate it.

This Week’s News in Traffic

Okay, so the stories this week extend a little beyond the last seven days as we’re kind of catching up a bit from the last Christmas and New Year period. The first story I’ve got relates to YouTube and they’re saying that everyone who has a verified account that’s in good standing will now be able to stream live video directly from their YouTube account. This is done using Google Hangouts on Air which can now be accessed directly under YouTube Live Events Manager within your YouTube account.

Twitter have launched promoted account options that help users discover businesses and people of interest and to help the advertisers build a highly engaged audience of Twitter followers; well that’s the statement. The way that it works is that as an advertiser, you have your handle shown in the home page feed and if someone is following a business or a person on a similar topic of interest to your own, beneath their tweets you handle will be shown as a promoted account, other accounts should then follow. This is topic based marketing and perhaps a way to build a targeted following of people that you know are already interested in your topic or field.

The last story in a very social media orientated this week’s news in traffic comes from Facebook and they have now rolled out across all iOS devices auto play videos which means when you scroll down on your timeline, an embedded video in Facebook itself, not YouTube, will now auto play for users. I think it is going to encourage more people to upload videos directly to Facebook and could give us a strong indication that video advertising on Facebook is probably coming very soon, keep your eyes peeled for that, more on Facebook, I am sure.

So it’s that short interlude in the show where I thank you the listener if you’ve left Traffic Jam a review on iTunes and I have one to read out this week and it is for Hoy, Jamie from Australia and he says in the content, thanks James for the tips. Love the podcast, and as a reminder really, leaving a review or on Stitcher radio is the best way that you can support the show. For iTunes just head on over to your iTunes player, search for Traffic Jam podcast, hit reviews and comments and then leave your review along with a star rating. For Stitcher radio, I am not quite sure of the process but if you search inside Stitcher, locate the podcast, there is a way to rate and review the podcast also and Stitcher radio is one of the new platforms that is up and coming and a greate way to consumer podcasts so if you’ve not given that a go, you might want to go and check out Stitcher radio, a really great application that’s available in your phone and also in browser and also in some car stereos as well so it’s really an insight in to how podcasting is developing so please leave a review, if you have not done so in the show I would really love to get your feedback and perhaps a chance for you to get read out on next week’s episode.

The One Minute Traffic Tip

This week’s tip is all about creating irresistible, share worthy content that will get shared to a wide, wide content just because it is so damn good. And one of the most damn good pieces that you can create is an infographic because everyone loves images and everyone loves information so if you can combine the two in an incredibly stunning traffic that’s relevant and on topic to the products, services and information that you share, that really is a great piece of information of content. Quite often it is difficult to get the ideas and number statistics for your infographics so I am going to recommend a resource called wolframalpha.com and that’s a computational knowledge engine that will overturn your information and stats on really any topic that you could ever imagine. So a couple of resources to check out for this week’s tip, the first wolframalpha.com as I just mentioned. The second is an example of an infographic and one that we just produced for our SEO business SEO Sherpa and it is all about organic SEO so if that kind of interests you I will make sure that is linked off to within the show notes so you can go and check that out as well.

So that brings episode #27 of Traffic Jam to a close. Keep your ears open for another episode coming to you real soon. For more traffic tips and training in the coming weeks, head on over to veravo.com. Of course to play out this week’s episode, we’ve got a track chosen by my guest today by my guest Greg Hickman and it is a classic piece of 2pac, it’s called Changes. See you soon!

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.

A self-confessed Google+ geek, this week’s guest brings to the show a lot of insights on why Google+ is the social platform that you should not forgo especially because, as he would say, Google plays favourites!

Find out why for Content Warfare author and podcaster Ryan Hanley Google+ has the edge among other social media platforms as he unveils the Google advantage.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

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Google+ traffic: It’s not what you know it’s who you know.”@RyanHanley_Com
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Hello! This is James Reynolds, your host and you are tuned in to Traffic Jam episode#26 and it is the podcast show that teaches you how to get more traffic, leads and sales and build a profitable audience online. So I am going to get stuck right in to talking about my guest today and his name is Ryan Hanley. Ryan was introduced to me by Marcus Sheridan, who was a guest here at Episode #24 of Traffic Jam and the first thing that I found of Ryan’s was his Content Warfare podcast; it’s a slightly more established show than Traffic Jam, it’s being going for about 50 episodes but there was a real strong cross over in terms of the guests that Ryan has on the show. Ryan has interviewed people like Neal Shaffer, Chris Brogan, Amy Porterfield, Pat Flynn, and a whole bunch of others that you’d be very familiar with if you’re a regular listener to this show.

But the appeal of the show is really not just confined to the guests; it really revolves about Ryan’s ability to get the most out of his experts on each episode but also his way of applying what he’d learned through interviewing others to his own business. He’s got an independent insurance agency, he’s the head of marketing for that business, and Ryan provides a lot of case studies of how he’s using content marketing to grow his own company and I really like that. I think it is one of the reasons that Marcus Sheridan referred me to Ryan because I do see Marcus cut from the very same cloth- he’s one that doesn’t just teach he actually does and certainly a trait of Ryan’s too.

I spent a good amount of time going through the episodes of Content Warfare before inviting Ryan on the show and some of the episodes that picked my interest most were on the topic of Google+. Ryan’s interviewed several expert on Google+; people like Pat Pagan and Jessie Woodilow spring to mind, and Ryan really held his own in the subject and seemed to have a really good, broad level of expertise which is also packaged up to this great little starter course on Google+ called the Google+ Starter Kit. Now as it has been a little bit of time since we’ve covered the topic of Google+, in fact we’ve only covered it once and it was with Chris Brogan back on Episode#9 or so, I thought it would be a good opportunity to revisit the subject especially as there has been quite a lot of changes with the platform in recent weeks.

So Google+ is the topic of today’s interview and that’s coming right up next but don’t go anywhere after that because we do have our regular segments, the one minute traffic tip, this week’s news in traffic and the reason this podcast is called Traffic Jam, we have the musical jam to play out the show. So let’s get stuck in to today’s interview with Ryan Hanley who incidentally who incidentally since this interview is recorded became a first time dad so big congratulations to you Ryan. Here we have it, the Ryan Hanley interview – all about Google+.

James: This is Traffic Jam Episode #26 and joining me on the hot seat this week is Ryan Hanley; Ryan, welcome to Traffic Jam.

Ryan: James, it’s so good to be here, thanks for having me.

James: Well it’s kind of a little bit different for you, you spent a lot of time on the other side of the mic and asking questions so hopefully this might make a refreshing change for you to feel the view this week.

Ryan: Oh, yeah. A lot of fun – I am looking forward to it man!

James: Cool! Well you’ve got a bunch of things going on, you have got of course your content marketing focused podcast, you’ve got a Google+ mini course and of course you’ve got a bricks and mortar business where you apply a lot of what you teach to others, for those of our listeners out there who have not heard of Ryan Hanley, just give us a quick overview of you and your business.

Ryan: So basically I am the founder of Content Warfare which is just a platform or a community where business owners, marketers and kind of the solopreneurs and entrepreneur crowd can come together in many different formats, podcast, video on YouTube and on my blog and just discuss what’s going on in Content Marketing and how we tell our story, be useful, and kind of attract attention and an audience and we tied it up to a lot of different experiments and a lot of different ways to do that and everything that I talk about is drilled out of the kind of brick and mortar, independent insurance agency in which my family owns. So I am the Director of Marketing for a 15-person, single location, independent insurance agency in Alba, New York which is about 2 and a half hours from New York City and all the strategies are actually things that we are doing in our agency to attract business, it’s not just like theories that I have scraped off someone else’s website and this is the things that are working and the things that are not working, in a business that has to pay the bills, has to keep the lights on and do so in a local environment.

James: Got it! So it think it will be pretty fair to say that what we are going to talk about isn’t going to be fluffy stuff; this is stuff that you personally are using on your own business to get results.

Ryan: Yes, this is the grainy details man!

James: Love it! Cool! One of the things that you are especially passionate about, that you have been getting great results with, with your, of course say so Ryan, and I’d like to focus a lot of our attention there today-

Ryan: Fantastic man.

James: Sounds good? Cool! Okay well let me kick off this interview with what might be the most offensively basic question I have ever asked a guest about their area of expertise, what the hell is Google+?

Ryan: So Google+ is Google’s social layer and I am going to try not to geek out on you here because I have a tendency to do that when it comes to this tool. I started experimenting with Google+ and YouTube tools in general and just found an amazing return on the time spent and the energy spent, you don’t really spend too much money inside the tool but what we are giving to it, we are giving back exponentially so when I say social layer, what I mean is, at its core, Google’s mission is to provide every problem, every question that anyone has, anyone in the world on anything with the best possible solution. So at its core, that’s what it’s trying to do. And when Google realized probably a long time ago but really started to implement about three years ago, was that they knew that people were having all of the interaction inside the social space –Facebook, Twitter and all the other thousands of social networks and though Google was getting pretty good grip on websites and forums and places like that, what they were struggling with were all these interactions that were taking in the social world and they tried to form a partnership with Twitter which did not really work. Facebook has been, this is kind of a used up analogy but like a walled garden, they can see its likes, see the pages from the outside but what’s happening internally, Google can’t get a good grip on. So then Google created its own social layer. It’s more than social network because now it is starting to come in to YouTube comments, and Google Drive has now been integrated with Google+ so all their tools are starting to be connected to Google+ and the reason being is every single action we take inside of Google+ is being indexed and categorized and ultimately used to rank accounts, whether it’s a Google+ page or Google+ profile, rank authority on certain topics and we can get more on to what it is but that is what Google+ is; it is a way for Google to understand how we interact with each other as people and not just how we interact with web pages.

James: Got it! So the core of this, it wasn’t such a dumb question on my part right? This is not a typical social media platform in the way that perhaps a Facebook would be. This thing is kind of working and integrating through the entire Google ecosystem which I’m sure has an effect on other areas of what Google do.

Ryan: Yes. So basically what Google wants to understand is that they know that human interaction – so you post something inside of Google+, an article that you’ve written or one of your podcast episodes and you put some text in there and a link to your article and I listen to the podcast and I come in and I say James fantastic, I love this part and here’s something that I was thinking about and then we have this conversation inside of Google+ and then let’s say because of that conversation more people are coming in and now 20 or 30 people are interacting and what Google has seen is that, one our interaction is now linked. Google is now saying okay, what James does, Ryan was interested in and now I can start to correlate them a little more and James’ article got 30 +1s which, for people more familiar with Facebook is like clicking the like button. It’s essentially giving them a high five I guess. There is more to it than that but when you give someone a +1 now Google is saying so this article that James wrote about whatever it was has got 30 +1s and other people in this general topic that this article was written about are on average getting 15 so that tells them, and this is broad sweeping stroke, that tells Google and their algorithm that you are more of an authority on that topic than someone else who may consistently get less reshares, less +1s and now they take the kind of authority that you’re getting off your website in general and now you can add in how people interact with you do in a social space and really get a firm grip on the topics that you are most knowledgeable in and the topics that people are most engaged in you on because I could write a topic all day long but if no one cares, perfectly SEO’d out, buy tons of backlinks and traditionally that website will rank really well. Well Google said that you can do all those things but if no one is engaging with you, they’ll know that it’s really not a good resource and that’s what Google+ is allowing them to find out.

James: Got it. So this is really all about Google kind of bringing offline authority and expertise status if you want to kind of give it a label online right? It’s kind of to establish online who is an expert in a particular area and then perhaps give them favor elsewhere on the Google platform.

Ryan: A much more concise way of breaking down the diagram that I just went on.

James: Well that’s what I am here to do. Now, if our listener is not already on Google+ and I am sure there are a number of people out there who would find themselves in that situation, I think you and I can probably do them a good service by setting them out on the right track. What thing should our listener be doing when setting up their account to ensure they’re set up right the first time?

Ryan: Really all you need to have for Google+ is a Gmail account. If you have a Gmail account, then technically you are already on Google+ platform if you have a Gmail account. If you don’t have a Gmail account then signing up for Google+ is as simple as getting a Gmail account and you don’t have to use Gmail for your email but you have to have a Gmail account to get on to Google+. Some people have a problem with that but it’s kind of just the way that it is. Once you’re on there, the very first thing that you want to do is spend some time in your about page. So Google+ is a fairly simple social network. You have an About page, you have a page that lists the posts that you make and you can now actually add your YouTube videos, you can connect Google+ with YouTube which we will get to in a minute but you can now have your YouTube videos listed inside your Google+ profile page as well. These are the three main tabs, there are a couple of others but those are not really as useful. Those are the three main tabs. Here’s the beauty of Google+ versus your Facebook page, and this talks a lot to traffic which is what this podcast is all about, right?- Ranking and search and getting traffic to your page. Your profile on Google+ has rank like any other website. So if you take your Google+ profile and you stick it in to Google’s page rank checker or any other page rank oriented program online, you’re actually going to get a score for that page so your Google+ About page is an area that you should fill up with information about yourself, your contact information, what you do, you should link out to all your pertinent platforms because that page, as you build connections, as you build links to that page inside the Google+ platform, is growing in page rank like right now my Google+ profile has a page rank 4 which for people who are not familiar with that, you don’t necessarily need to know what that means other than it has a relatively decent amount of authority that I can pass through to another page by linking to it. So if I link out from my Google+ page to another website I am giving that website a nice boost in rank, so you really want to take some time and really build that out so that you’re giving Google a nice picture because all that information is categorized and indexed so you can be found in search, you really want to spend some time there. And then have a nice cover photo, a nice profile like you would anywhere else, so it is relatively simple in getting started from the set up perspective before you get to using it.

James: Great! Well we’ll come to content as kind of the next topic, but before we tackle that, I want to ask you about the Google+ profile versus the Google+ page because Google+ page for Business is still relatively new, in fact, my agency SEO Sherpa recently had its Google Places page kind of automatically converted over to a Google+ for Business. Where should our listeners be focusing their Google+ activity, profile or page, assuming that they are a business owner?

Ryan: This is a really interesting question because my answer is going to start with the worst answer you can give any question which is it depends, right? You have to think about what your goals are for the platform. If you have a business and it’s a brick and mortar business, any type of local business, you absolutely, absolutely want to have a page. A profile is a person, a page is a business or an entity of some sort, because, like what happened to your business and what is going to happen automatically to just about any business eventually, but you can actually initiate the process as well, is Google Places is now integrating with Google+ and becoming Google Local. And that for a local business is one of the most powerful tool that you can have; it’s where you collect your Google Reviews, it’s where you enter your information that is ultimately going to show up inside of Google Maps. If you want to be found in your Google search results through your Google Places page moving in to the future you need to have your Google+ profile filled out completely with good detailed information so that is an incredibly important tool for local businesses; similarly important for business that might be virtual but incredibly important, almost a necessity if you are a local business. If you are a virtual business what I would recommend is having the page and whatever business that you want to do is there is something called the Publisher tab and it is similar to Google Authorship that we have not mentioned yet, but basically it connects your Google+ page for business to your business website and it’s just a simple piece of code that you can add either through a widget or you can have if you don’t do your website stuff yourself, a very simple piece of code that your web designer or whoever can add for you and this tells Google that this website on the internet is connected to this Google+ page and over time you are building authority through your actions on your Google+ page and your actions makes authority runs back and forth between those two places so you want to make sure that you have that publisher tab installed and you want to make sure that you’ve combined your Google places and Google+ account to create a Google Local, as what they are calling it now.

James: Yeah, got it. And one thing that I had noticed when we had this rolled out which I guess might be a couple of weeks – we might be behind in some areas further in the world, this affected the actual search listing itself. If I just look up my business now and perhaps our listeners as an example, you might want to do this, SEO Sherpa, you’ll actually find now that that listing is much richer in context than it ever was before. There’s the review showing, there’s the maps listing showing right next to it and there is even a link off to a verified Google+ page which makes our results stick out from all of those around it because it is just so much richer in content and detail.

Ryan: Yeah, this is why, like I said, I can geek out on this a lot. This is why I love playing Google’s game, right? There is absolutely no doubt that Google plays favorites, they want you to use their tools, and they want you to integrate your website in to their products. That goes the same for YouTube and Google+, Google Drive, Google Calendar and all these additional tools that they have and are coming out with, they want you to use them and if they do, they are going to reward you by placing additional pieces of information in to Google Search, the most notable one was Google Authorship, we’ve explained the Publisher tab, very similar process but for people, so your Google+ profile, the human being- you, and you can add a little piece of code to every article that you write and if you do that, Google places your Google+ profile picture next to your search results and if you’ve done any searching inside of Google in the last six months to a year, you’ve seen some search result little image next to it, that’s because of authorship. By adding authorship to the articles that you write, your click through rate is 47% higher regardless in what position you are in in search. When I am talking to a group of small business owners, I push authorship very hard and the reason is because if let’s say, my small business is an insurance and I am going up against mega companies like Guy go and some of these other huge national companies that pay billions of dollars in advertising. It is very hard for me to beat them in search to get to #1. But I can get to 5 or 6 and if I get to 5 or 6 and I have authorship and they don’t, I am actually getting more clicks in the 6th position in search than they are getting in the 1st position. And that is an incredibly important tool for a local business.

James: Yeah, absolutely! I mean if I just do a search now and again, maybe an example for our listener who is by their PC right now, you go and search for content warfare podcast, you’ll see then that there’s a little authorship picture that comes up next to the result with Ryan’s image on it, terribly professional photo might I add, Ryan you’re looking rather suave in your picture there but that’s building up your own personal brand right? Not increasing click through rates but rather getting your brand out there as well.

Ryan: Well, I have my authorship transcends my kind of consulting, marketing agency brand to also my insurance agency so I write for both places and I have this really like kind of cheeky marketing guy picture which I thought was really cool and then my boss saw that and he was like, that’s a cool picture but I don’t want it on our agency results to I kind of had to change it back to this more –

James: You got the suit back out again. Awesome! Well let’s move on to content. I have heard you say that the Google+ platform forces you to create better content. Why is that the case?

Ryan: The reason that I say that is for a couple of reasons. The first is, on like Facebook right? Or maybe you quickly just dropped a LinkedIn with a tail and boom you post that out to your peeps. With Google+ every post that you make inside the platform is indexed and ranked like a web page so you have to think of every post that you make as an actual blog post. Additionally, you can draw attention to your post by formatting them. Google allows you to add bold, you can underline, you can strike out, you can add italics. There are all these different ways that you can format your Google+ post to draw attention to them so essentially these are almost becoming blog posts, and they are ranked in Google search like blog posts. Usually the first line is what will show up in the tail in Google search but you write a really well received post in Google+, let’s use as an example you post your podcast and it just kills it, let’s say 100 people +1ed that. So every time someone +1s an article, unlike Facebook where it is just like this cumulative ranking and we feel good about that, Google+ is actually creating a whole new webpage. Every time someone clicks +1 that links back to your page so if you get 30 +1’s on a post you essentially have 30 new links pointing to that post and passing their page rank and their authority on to each one of those 30 pages gets 5, 6, 10, a hundred likes, now you’re going exponentially and all that points to your profile. So I have seen Google+ posts rank in search for months! They do tend to deteriorate over time but if you have a really powerful post, it can be ranked in search and drive Google traffic to your post and really gain a lot of traction so you really take every post seriously because it has certain ramifications and if done right can certainly be a powerful tool. The second reason is the community that you find inside Google+ and link dumping like Twitter or Facebook or even LinkedIn Strategy now just popping a link in and hitting enter and hoping someone clicks on it. If you do that inside of Google+, the community will shun you and I am not just saying that because I am like a geek for the network. I had made this mistake when I first got there. I had used Twitter for 4 years to market my business and now all of a sudden I am using Google+ and you drop a link in there like nothing else and nobody clicks +1 nobody comments, nothing happens and you’re like, this place is a ghost town. it is not a ghost town, it’s just that the community actually demands that you provide more value with the content that you share there. If do take the extra step in writing a little reason why someone should click through, they are so incredibly supportive that you’ll see posts having gained incredible reach in a matter of minutes if you actually take the time to create a post that is of value.

James: Awesome! Okay, you prompted a couple of follow up questions so I’ll throw both of them at you in one go; do you think that that being the case that it’s demanding a better quality  content perhaps Google might favor the longer post on Google+ because there is more indexable content? Are we putting ourselves at risk of perhaps pushing our best content on Google+? That’s question one. And the second one, is how do we attract the right people to interact with our post because I am assuming that if someone within your space who is also an expert in content marketing like yourself, Ryan, if they +1 your post I am sure that has more weight than someone else. How do we attract the right audience to view and share those posts?

Ryan: Great questions! I am going to start with the first one first because that makes sense. Are we giving away our best content on Google+? A really, really good question, a question I actually get a lot from people that go through my Google+ starter kit because it is the next question that you think to ask. I want to spend my time on my site and put my best content there, what I tell you is if you believe in guest posting at all and the power of what guest posting can do for your business. What I would think of- I would think of each Google+ post- now if you wrote a great article and you’re sharing it inside this space, you do not need to write a book when you share it. Maybe just kind of bold the headline, one or two sentences and then kind of read more here, here’s a link and then add some more hash tags, right? So it doesn’t have to be these big drawn out thing but you just don’t want to dump the link and be gone so when you’re sharing your articles you don’t have to give the whole article away inside of Google+ but your post that aren’t just sharing one of your own articles, I would think of each one of them as a guest post because what you are getting out of them is equivalent to guest posting on someone else’s website – you’re getting reach, you’re getting exposure to other audiences because people who find your articles are going to then reshare them on their own and unlike someone resharing something inside of Facebook or retweeting something inside of Twitter, you’re not just getting exposure to that new audience when you’re doing that, you’re getting all the SEO value that passes through those links so what I would encourage people to do so that you’re not just giving away your best content is if you do write a longer post inside of Google+ include a link a the bottom if people want more like I sometimes include a link to one of my landing pages to subscribe to a newsletter. So I will write a nice sized post on Google+ and then at the bottom I’ll say if you want to be a content warrior that’s what I call my audience or you want more great content marketing information, subscribe here. So now I am not just putting a post out there for the fun of it, I’m actually including a call to action at the bottom which is driving people to grow my email list, or grow my podcast list or drive people on to my Google+ starter kit or whatever. Think of them as guest posts so you’re not just giving it away, you’re helping build your brand. The second question, finding the best audience, the great place to start is in communities, communities are like LinkedIn groups to a certain extent, but you can search for communities, there is a community on absolutely anything and find a community of people who have a like mind interest. I am a moderator for a content marketing community, I own an insurance community; my two fields of expertise so I am involved in those communities and I easily connect within those two communities who have similar interests so I’d start with communities, build up connections inside communities and then those people will start to connect with you in the mainstream as well.

James: Got it! I made some notes as you just spoke there Ryan those past couple of minutes about what might make up an effective posts. I’ve got a few notes here- the first one is a headline, a reason to click through, a call to action, and hash tags, are there any other that I missed in my notes there that might be good things to include in a good post?

Ryan: Yes, so one thing you want to have if you’re not just sharing a link; if you are sharing a link then underneath the body of the content will be a thumbnail and a link to the article. So if you just put a link in, that’s what will be under there but say you are using the guest post strategy, creating a nice piece of content and you are maybe trying to drive some email subscription or something, then you want to include a nice image that captures the emotion of what you are trying to explain. A good example is, last night before I went to bed, I had something on my mind and it was about putting in the work essentially and it was meant to drive people to my podcast so the call to action at the end was driving people to my podcast page and I found on a website called photopin.com, which is a great website to find free images, a picture of a guy like really running and he was really laboring and it kind of like draws out the emotion that I am trying to pull with the article. The image captures the people’s attention. It gets them to actually read your content and if your content is well formatted using bold headline, italics to kind of draw out certain ideas and hash tags so that they can be searchable, you have a really good chance that person’s going to want to engage, click through and share your article. The only thing with photo pin is a lot of times you have to give image credit which shouldn’t be a big deal but that’s an excellent resource and I use it all the time for great photos.

James: Great and Google+ inherently is a very visually led platform, right? I mean when the images come up I’m guessing that it’s an important feature.

Ryan: Video does really well, YouTube videos do really, really well obviously because they integrate and people can watch them right from the platform so if you’re a YouTube creator Google+ is like almost a must use especially now that YouTube comments have been integrated with Google+.

James: Yup. Got it. Well, we might talk about that in a moment but I want to ask you very briefly about what I see as the distinguishing feature of Google+ and that as a publisher you can control who receives your content, it isn’t just a reach all platform like a Facebook or like a Twitter would be, how do you use that functionality in terms of who you target your content towards through your circles and your connections and what are the protocols?

Ryan: So for those who are not familiar with the Google+ platforms, everyone who you connect with you have to put in a circle, and circles are really just a way for you to categorize by topic or by their interest or by how they are affiliated to you people who follow you or who you follow. So the beauty of that is that you can really break them down in to who you want to share this piece of content with so one of my expertise is insurance industries marketing. Though many of the ideas are the same if I were to publish a post about insurance industries specific marketing and I sent it out to everyone and James you saw that article you would not be interested in that article because you don’t work in the insurance industry and it’s just not something that you are necessarily interested in. There is no reason for me to throw that in to your stream because you are going to be more likely to tune me out. That’s where we have the big issues with Facebook right? 16% of people see our content and a big part of that is Facebook trying to figure out a way to put the best content in front of people that they are most interested in. Google+ has actually allowed us to do that for our audience. So I have a circle of 500-600 insurance professionals, I will only share that post with the insurance people because I know that I don’t want to fill up the circle of my other people because those people will then skip over my other posts that I provide to them. So it really provides us a way to segment our content and be a niche publisher and really provide specific pieces of our audience with the content that they want. And this is kind of a little, I was going to say a pro tip but something that you would consider. Google+ gives you the option to email notify the people that are in your circle when you post a new article. You do not want to do this by fault ever because it is almost an immediate on follow or someone will mute you that they can’t receive notification from you ever again so never ever do that unless you have permission. What you can do though is build up. I know a lot of people, I have not really done this and I know people who are like I wish I had started an email list sooner, which you’ll hear like so many people say, I wish I started this sooner I only started this recently but at the end of your post, you can say, hey let me know in a comment below if you want to be notified of future posts on XYZ topic. So what you can start to do is build up a list of people who are okay being email notified when you post a new article on a specific topic and what this does is exponentially drive engagement to your post. You’re essentially email marketing them and it’s just an incredibly powerful feature and you have to think about it, it does take time to grow just like an email list but if you have a sizeable amount people that you email notify when you post in you Google+ posts, your engagement is like off the chain.

James: Yeah, I can imagine. Well, that’s an awesome tip. I get a notification from a guy who’s actually a respectable marketer and a good friend of mine who always adds me in on that notification to send me an email and it’s just like wait a second dude it’s like you’ve just added me to your email list without my permission and it’s nothing worse, I mean he’s just driving down his reputation; I won’t name names because you might know him but he should know better that’s what I’m trying to get at so it’s a great way to move people from a sort of a notification type scenario to where they get those emails that’s ethical and with their permission that’s going to be effective.

Ryan: We want to send that email but you really got to restrain yourself because it does, just like you said, it kills your reputation.

James: Yeah, now I have noticed Ryan that you just added Google+ commenting to your blog. Why have you chosen that over something maybe like Disqus or the inbuilt WordPress commenting? What’s your reasoning?

Ryan: I have so believed in the Google+ platform and what it can do. The traffic to my website has increased I try to stay away from Google Analytics since it’s like a crack addiction so I check once a week but I have not checked this week yet but last week I had grown 50% from 3 months ago so I had almost 50% of what my traffic was added to what was my traffic since I doubled down on Google+ and that’s seven months ago and it’s almost all from search and looking at the articles that are receiving that traffic, it’s the articles that I have focused on inside of the Google+ platform so I can say without a doubt that today there is no better way to drive up your search engine traffic than to be an active, engaged participant in the Google+ platform. My belief, I’m sure there are loopholes in it but it’s based on my experience so that being said, I believe the value of a comment like in the native WordPress system or in Disqus and I look at the value of the engagement and I look at the value that I get from Google+ and I have decided that to me capturing comments on my WordPress site, I think, though I know that it adds content to your site, from what I have read and the research I have done, comment content; it is very low in terms of what it adds to your search engine ranking and I know that the engagement I get inside of Google+ and what that activity has done for me so I just said if maybe if I get a few less comments, I am okay with that. If I can capture that engagement in conversation inside of Google+ platform and again with each new integration I just find additional boost in what’s happening inside the platform and then what Google has done to drive additional traffic to my site.

James: Got it! Awesome! Well Ryan you’ve shared a ton of value. I think we should get close to drawing things to a close but I want to first ask you a question that came up in our pre interview discussion where I ask you what is your best traffic getting secret that you’ll allow me to share, I normally get answers like Facebook page posts add to an opt in or some funky new ad network, your reply to me was, it’s not who it’s what you know, I did not get it right you might be able to say it better.

Ryan: It’s not what you know it’s who you know.

James: Exactly. There you go. You’re there to back me up this time. Explain it for us.

Ryan: Basically, look, I have tried every traffic strategy that exists online and I have done that both in my virtual business which is what Content Warfare is and I have done that in my brick and mortar business which is my insurance agency and what I found time and again is that having strong relationships is what drives traffic. And what I mean by that is if I have a friend or colleague who is an influencer inside a community that I know would be interested in my piece of content having them share that in my community drives exponentially more traffic, and really qualified traffic over just what I want to my site then any tweet five times and then retweet and then none of their gimmicks or tricks or their strategies can compare with having good, solid relationships with people who are willing to refer you to their audience when you have a piece of content that can help them so my piece of advice to everybody is build honest, transparent, strong relationships with people who service a similar audience as you and you’ll never want for traffic.

James: Got it! Well that’s a perfect place to close this out that’s exactly where I see Google+ being a strong platform so thank you for that, you have shared a real amount of gold marketing information so thank you for today’s session. Close out just by saying where our listeners should connect with you should they want to find out a bit more about Ryan Hanley.

Ryan: I would love for everyone listening, if you’re in to podcasts, Content Warfare podcast, just google that and you’ll find me. And anyone who’s interested in learning more about Google+ I have a free course called the Google+ starter kit and if you google Google+ Starter Kit you will find that as well and like I said that’s kind of like a free resource that will take you from zero to hero inside the Google+ network. It’s been a pleasure James, thanks so much for having me man.

James: And to you the listener, we’ll make sure that both of those resources are linked to in the show notes of Episode#26 so head on over to the episode page of Traffic Jam Cast for that. So Ryan, thank you.

Ryan: Thank you!

This Week’s News in Traffic

Okay so we’ll start this week with Facebook and they’ve made some updates to their page composer to make it easier to share content on the platform There’s two main updates, the first is around post scheduling and if you are familiar with scheduling posts in Facebook, you’ll know that you have to fill in about 12 fields just to schedule a post for tomorrow. Well, thankfully that has changed and it really has been simplified to pretty much 2- one to select the date and one to select the time so if you’re a Facebook admin you’ll be well pleased with that update. The second one is just to make it easier to upload images to Facebook and now you can use a drag and drop facility to upload multiple pictures. There you go a couple of quick updates that will make usability on Facebook pages a bit easier for you.

In the second story this week, I am going to stay with Facebook. And while this story isn’t new, I want to bring it up now because I seem to be seeing it more and more which might suggest that it’s being rolled out up to a greater audience. This story actually emerged on November the 7th and that was that Facebook are testing star ratings and displaying them on Facebook Business pages. You might find, if you go to Facebook now that beneath the cover timeline image and beneath the business name you’ll see a star rating out of 5 displayed for business pages. This kind of follows suit with what Google do with Google+ pages and Yelp do, even Four Square do with star ratings for business so it’s going to be interesting to see whether this does get rolled out to the entire Facebook platform. What it might do is really change the focus of Facebook for being all around likes for business with a focus more on customer service and making sure that you actually get good feedback which could in fact be a good thing and hopefully if used properly will kind of distinguish the good businesses from the bad businesses. But anyway, I’d love to get your feedback, have you seen this on your own Facebook business page? Let me know what you think by posting your comments on this week’s episode.

Okay listener, so it’s that point in the show where I thank you if you’ve left me a review or comment on iTunes and if you have you’re probably sitting at the edge of your seat with abated breath to see if your name gets read out. Well, I’m not quite sure about that but we’ve got three this week, all from people in the United States. The first is from Nick Neath and he was commenting on the Rand Fishkin episode and he says Rand Fishkin is the man. James, thank you for this podcast, that interview is great and I’ve subscribed. Anthony Tran also from the United States; he says website traffic is a hot traffic. Alright, let’s get some traffic; love this topic about SEO and other ways to drive traffic to your website. And Finally from Andy Gray – he says actionable and inspiring, well worth the time, I am finding both actionable content and inspiration for traffic building in each episode. Great stuff James so thanks guys! Please do keep the comments and reviews coming. They really are helpful to me to know which types of episodes are getting the most feedback and are most interesting to you and it also drives me on to create more so if you haven’t yet left a review or comment on iTunes then perhaps you might do that for me this week. It really is the best way that you can support the show. And of course to do it, what you need to do is to log in to your iTunes account via your iTunes player, search for the Traffic Jam podcast, click on ratings and reviews, select a star rating and then leave your comment along with that.

The One Minute Traffic Tip

Okay so keeping this week’s tip precise and on point to the interview, and the tip is simply this, interview someone interesting just like I do on every single episode here on Traffic Jam. Cause not only are you going to learn something interesting, which I certainly do in each episode, but your interviewee will probably share your session if you do a great job. I’m sure Ryan is going to share this podcast episode with his audience and I’ll do the same when I appear on the Content Warfare podcast which Ryan has asked me to do later this year. So staying completely on theme with what Ryan said on the interview, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. So who can you identify in your market that has a similar type of audience to your own that you can perhaps interview because when you do you’ll find that what happens is kind of a cross pollination of audiences. People from their audience will find you, and people from your audience will find them.

So that listener brings episode#26 of Traffic Jam to a very near close. Remember for more traffic tips and training to help you grow your business online head on over to veravo.com and that’s also the home to the Traffic Jam podcast as well so you’ll find the episode page to this episode #26 with Ryan there too so if you want to post any comments or feedback on the episode page, please feel free I’m sure myself and Ryan will be diving over there to answer your questions.

To play out the episode we’ve got a track chosen by Ryan. It’s from the 1998 album, Moment of Truth, the track title is called Work and the band is called Gangstarr, now I have got a little word of warning for you it does contain some quite strong language so if you are easily offended by the swear word then I suggest you tune your ears out now. So here we go, Work by Gangsta and I’ll see you back here next week for another episode of Traffic Jam.

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