Self confessed accidental blogger, Jeff Bullas has stumbled upon a formula for driving traffic that utilises only free social media platforms yet delivers in the region of 4 million page views per year to his highly regarded website jeffbullas.com

Jeff Bullas is the number 11 Social Media Power Influencer on the planet according to Forbes.com, so he clearly know a thing or two about harnessing social media and blogging to build and engage an audience online. Engage yourself in this latest episode of Traffic Jam as Jeff dissects his blogging strategy in this open and honest discussion.

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“Blogging: You’ll need some fuel and that is passion.” @JeffBullas
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Hello welcome back listener! You’re tuned in to Traffic Jam episode#25, I am you host, James Reynolds, and this of course is the podcast show that teaches you how to get more traffic, leads and sales to your website and build a profitable audience online. I can’t quite believe we’re up to episode#25 of Traffic Jam. We are of a quarter of a century of episodes in and I guess at this point I’d really like to thank you, the listener, for making this show what it is. You’re the real driving force behind me getting behind the mike each week and interviewing these top guests that we have on Traffic Jam. And because of that, I really want to know how you’ve been doing with the content. Have you been able to implement any of the stuff that we’ve been teaching here on Traffic Jam? What information have you gotten hold of? What have you implemented and gotten great results with? I’d love to hear some success stories and case studies that I can perhaps share with other traffic jam listeners so why don’t you this week just shoot me an email if you managed to have some success. I’d love to hear about it. Email address is [email protected] or alternatively you can head on over to an episode page and leave a comment there but I really would love to hear your success stories.

A quick announcement at the top of the show and that is on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th of December, I will be co-hosting the Middle East Internet Summit 2013. This is an online event so you don’t have to be physically in the Middle East to be able to attend; as long as you have an internet connection you’ll be be able to take part. And on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th, myself, along with other 18 other presenters will be showcasing 21- minute talks along our various areas of expertise giving away some really good gifts and giveaways as some really good training sources from some of the top minds on internet marketing, well worth checking out. if you want to register, you can do for free of course at www.MiddleEastInternetSummit.com. Go check that out, if it looks of interest to you then I would well recommend entering in to that event.

So on today’s guest. He’ pretty influential in the area of blogging and social media, He is a Top 50 Social Media influencer of 2103, in fact, he is listed at #11 in the Forbes.com list, he is published in the New York Times, he’s also published in the Huffington Post as one of the Top 100 Business Leadership and technology Twitter accounts you really should follow. 2013 Social Media Examiner named his blog one of the top social media blogs online so if you’re investing your time in blogging or social media or in fact want to, I think you’re going to find this interview extremely relevant and appealing so stay tuned for that it’s coming right up next. But of course, if you’re a first time listener, I’ve got to tell you not to go anywhere after the interview because we do have our regular segments – The One Minute Traffic Tip, This Week’s News in Traffic, the round up and also we play out the show with a musical jam so stick around after the interview for all of that great stuff but first are going to go to the interview, my guest is Jeff Bullas from JeffBullas.com, he’s an Australian with a very, very influential blog that’s extremely highly trafficked- 4 million views per year and what’s so remarkable about it is that he’s built this blog with a 100% free traffic i.e. he’s not using any paid traffic at all. He’s primarily building this thing off the back of social media. So without any further ado, let’s get stuck in to today’s interview and it’s with Jeff Bullas.

James: Hello listener! You’re tuned in again to another episode of Traffic Jam and joining me today is Jeff Bullas. Jeff, how are you?

Jeff: I am very well, thank you very much.

James: Well it’s great having you on the call. I think you’re coming to us from Australia today, is that right?

Jeff: That’s correct! Last time I looked I was in Sydney, yes.

James: And still in Sydney. Cool! Well, you’ve got this blog on the domain JeffBullas.com. Now as a quick kind of intro to our listener, why don’t you just give us a quick overview of what you have going on over there and a little introduction to your business?

Jeff: We are creating premium content and we do strategic consulting. I also do a lot of international public speaking so I was actually in Kuwait early this year and then in the US after that and I have been in Turkey, Italy and also in Beirut, Lebanon in the last 18 months.

James: Wow! You weren’t too far away from me a short while ago in Kuwait; I’m just across the water in Dubai. Cool! Well let’s dig in to a little bit more about your blog. I think it is pretty highly trafficked from what I can tell, you’re somewhere around the six thousand mark and according to your bio you’ve got 4 million page views per year. How have you built that traffic to that blog?

Jeff: It really comes down, I’d say to 2 things: one is you create the best content that’s relevant to the audience and I seem to have got that right from Day1 and I got better doing that. The other thing too is in building a tribe around that so work very early on with Twitter and Twitter is a special network that a lot of people didn’t get but I found that it actually drives a lot of traffic, in fact, today; it’s my biggest driver by far than Facebook so Twitter I went really high in building an audience and I have a following of just over 200,000 at the moment so there are two key things, creating the best content you can and doing that relentlessly and also build your following on social network. Those are the 2 key things. There are a lot of other things behind that but if you want to sum it up that would be how I’d do it.

James: Sure. And I’m sure we’ll dive it in to some of that other stuff during the next 20 or 30 minutes but just diving in to Twitter, what are you doing differently that you feel has got that traffic source to be so successful for you?

Jeff: When I discovered Twitter and when I decided to start tweeting and I worked hard to get followers what I found was that all about three or four years ago was that social oomph that allowed me to load my tweets and make it recurring you can load them once and just let them feed tweets to the Twitter stream and what I did originally was I automated early; I have automated about 4 years ago and social media purists would say it’s not real engagement, it’s not real social network and you’re right but from a marketing point of view it worked brilliantly so I didn’t follow what I call I purist traditional path of doing manual tweeting and engaging with anyone that tweeted back because I just can’t do that, especially now so that’s what I’m doing differently so I don’t have to tweet every fifteen minutes and I don’t have to because it does it for me. I also discovered about 2 years ago what I call the power of ever growing content so what I tweet is what I call news because news is old news tomorrow. So I create mainly evergreen content; content that is about social media marketing or search engines or Twitter or whatever. It is basically about principles and solving problems that helps them grow their business and their networks. So those are some of the things that I did a little bit differently; I focused on evergreen content and tweeted a lot. And I got given a fair bit of grief a lot, well not a lot but occasionally but I see it’s working so I’m not going to listen to you and it has proven to work.

James: So has there been any dangers or repercussions with automating your tweets? I know as you said certain social media would say, under no circumstances should you automate? But I know on the flipside of that you are arguing, which I think is a super valid point, in all of these, maintain a consistency of content has got to be a real big factor in your success, being ever present, putting out content regularly is a major, major thing, but just on the flip side, what have been some of the risks, if any, that have been involved in automating that aspect of your marketing?

Jeff: I think they’ve been quite minimal. Some people don’t like it and so they have not followed me and that’s their choice but the thing is, you can’t please everyone all the time. We’ve had much more positive feedback because I treat Twitter as a string and not as an inbox. And as you know with Twitter it’s not like you’ll go in and read my tweets for the last two weeks, don’t do that. You can go in your inbox in your email; we just don’t do that on Twitter. It’s a string, it just strings past you at a time. So, the reality is that, to be ubiquitous and to be top of mind, you need to be popping those tweets in to the string all the time. So that was my strategy and yup. I got a big of flak, it wasn’t big, but it was there and if I had listened to it I would have stopped it and I don’t think I would have created the audience in Twitter.

James: Yeah, fantastic. Well if we were to dive in to your Google Analytics I guess we’re going to see some pretty telling numbers from Twitter as a traffic source. What else could we find if we dive in to your analytics? What are the numbers would be telling for you and your blog JeffBullas.com?

Jeff: Okay, the one things is that the past 18 months is that I have built some authority online is my organic Google search results’ huge now because I create a lot of long form content which Google now actually really likes with the rise of Hummingbird recently and unique content so every piece of content is unique like don’t do copied curate but then it’s wrapped with words and link back and if you look at my stats it’s well over 50% now of my traffic to my blog is organic search traffic.

James: What are you doing to promote those from an SEO stand point? Is it purely powered through social media just announcing those posts across various social media channels?

Jeff: Yeah, that’s the main driver; it’s social and as we know, with the rise of Google+ and web development of Google+ is that Google is the one that catches the social signals so what’s happening is that Google’s valuing social signals highly now, much more than it was three or four years ago so what happens is that then people discover your content through a tweet, through a Google+ update or post or Facebook update and then they actually link back to your blog so what they’re driving is actually what I call Link Building; being relentless by posting content as you can, especially long form content where people are referring to your posts in what I call offsite link building back to your website or blog and well at the webmaster tools recently I think I was approximately 300,000 inbound links. That drives a lot of referral traffic.

James: Yeah, and I am guessing very few of those are actually built per se by you right? I mean this is proper organic, referral based SEO where people are linking to your stuff hopefully because it is a pretty good resource that they actually want to promote and refer it, right? I mean, it is SEO as it should be, right?

Jeff: By doing that in the last four and a half years is I’ve actually converted in to Google+ and Google has actually rewarding now. Long form content, resource based, valuable, unique – that has a lot of social signals so I have not paid for one link in my entire blog career and I very rarely do guest blogging because I don’t have the time but when I am home based I do but only occasionally. I think for me, I got the strategy right which is more about what drives me which is actually creating content for my site and Google’s rewarding of that has proven to be very, very fruitful.

James: Yeah, and you’ve got a few years of content cranked up there that is indexed and will probably be rewarded I guess with the new Hummingbird update. Well let’s talk a little bit about the success of your blog Jeff because you’ve got pretty well known, you’re seen in pretty high esteem, I mean Social Media Examiner regularly ranked you in kind of top 10 social media blog and even Forbes have put you down as being one of the top few social media influencers. What do you think that you are doing differently that others perhaps in your space are not to get that sort of recognition?

Jeff: Relentless content creation. I blog 45 times a week I wake up at 4:30 and I write and edit. I have guest bloggers now so that’s fine but I quite often write myself and I have done that for 4 and a half years so it’s not like I blog once a month or once a week so if you are going to be recognized you need to put the hard work and it’s not overnight success, it’s just persisting and I think to that I write with my own voice so if you actually read my blog post and then you went and read something else again that I am not writing that today, it was a guest blogger, So I think you have to find your own voice online; how you write – be conversational and structure it well. There are a lot of elements that go in to the mix but I think finding your own writing voice and being persistent about writing good content, that’s really, really important.

James: I want to just ask you a couple of questions around domains itself. You’ve actually chosen to blog on JeffBullas.com and then I was a little bit surprised to see that you do now accept contributions by other people, you have guest posts there. So I have got two kind of questions I guess in relation to that. Firstly, why did you choose your own name .com as the domain for your blog? And then on that basis why did you then allow others to essentially undo your name on your website?

Jeff: There was no grand plan. I’m what you call an accidental blogger and I am sure there may be other few blog sites that will emerge around that JeffBullas.com ecosystem but I did aspire for it to be a personal brand feeling a little bit of personal branding it means I really can’t sell my blog because it’s really me but that’s fine. I can build blog properties around that can be in the interesting topics and subjects in the social media or digital space that I am working on at the moment. So there was no grand plan; JeffBullas.com was accidental. The .com was not accidental. I realized that the .com is an international domain name. The other thing too is that a large part of my audience is American so I do not write as an Australian, I write as a global citizen so I think you have to write for the world. You don’t write for Sydney, I don’t write for Australia, I don’t write for Jeff. I’m writing for what I call a digital world because if you do that, then you actually touch a lot more people.

James: Yeah, so how do you get that balance right between finding your own personal voice and being true to Jeff Bullas and then also getting that balance that you’re not alienating the biggest market in the world, the US being an Aussie guy down under. How do you get that balance right in terms of the actual voice of your content?

Jeff: You may think when you’re creating content that you want to reach all this audience so with the biggest audience being the US, my spelling is what I call US English and I did it on purpose. In my location and I am always keeping in mind what who someone who might be struggling with social media or they want to go to the next level what they want to know so I am always asking what are their problems and I have that always at the back of my mind, is this something that would fascinate, educate, entertain, inspire? You just have to keep those questions sitting always at the back of your mind in creating your articles and when you’re writing.

James: And at what point Jeff did you decide to bring on guest bloggers- people that are going to be contributing content to your site?

Jeff: I realized the pace of keeping that writing up is pretty tough and I also wanted to give myself some time to create premium content such as write my book and I’m really rubbing it, Social Media Marketing Toolbox guide which will be 2 to 300 pages which is really intense. So I need to bring myself up to actually create premium so I started basically giving other people a platform so they can actually write for the audience and also what’s great about that is that it gives you some perspective about things, I sometimes feel that I am writing the same thing week in week out, even though they’re not but I feel that I am. So I started giving other people a platform that they can write and also I think what’s good about that  if you get guest bloggers like Social Media Marketer and Mark Schaeffer, as long as you keep the quality up to scratch. That’s the challenge. Quite often the challenge is that they have to write to a similar standard people are expecting from what I have been doing over the years. It’s tough sometimes. It may be not quite there but you edit it where you rewrite the headline name and you put tougher stands in place from an article submission.

James: Yeah, and full disclosure- I mean, when you have people guest posting on your site while it’s on JeffBullas.com it is pretty clear on the post itself that it is written by someone else. It has a different author’s name and other stuff there so I think from the actual visitor standpoint there is no illusion that it’s you or not you. They are pretty clear about it. Jeff, you did say that you kind of got in to this as an accidental blogger, I do now though see that on your site that you are offering services around the topics that you talk about – social media, marketing, etc., what came first, did the blog come first and the passion for social media marketing or did the services come first and you then built a blog around it?

Jeff: The passion came first, the blog was the platform for the passion. And the passion is not a singular word, it’s not social media. A passion is actually the intersection of several passions and they are writing, I discovered once I started the book, 12 months in to it I said hey actually, I love this writing thing. I have always loved learning so blogging basically is about reading to write so you’re actually researching then writing then publishing. I do love marketing and I was intrigued by social when I stumbled upon Facebook and then Twitter in 2008 and I just noticed how it seemed to touch people’s psyche globally; people are obsessed with it they just dive in and they were tweeting and they were Facebook updating. I went well there was some power in there so I was intrigued so I was curious. And I said I wanted to write about something that intrigues me and I am curious about so I started from a passion and also what was on the back of my mind was – when I get a bit older what will I have left behind? What will I have contributed to the planet? So this  legacy question was just bubbling very quietly at the back of my mind so the blog was actually an intersection of quite a few things that happened. And it gave me a voice and what I found is the art of creation and publishing has actually been a huge personal driver so I encourage everyone to start a blog and if you do for the right reason, for the right passion and purpose then the other stuff sort of shows up so the services have emerged out of that and the premium content because if you send packaging and the knowledge of doing it and that then gives you the freedom to keep doing what you love doing and just discover things which are fun and there’s work travel and … but yeah, that’s why I am an accidental blogger with no grand plan and actually no money to do it on my own.

James: Good, well I wanted to kind of ask you that question because having read your stuff it is quite clear that you do kind of advocate and people find what gives them a bit of fire in their belly with what keeps them passionate and then find a platform to kind of write to contribute around it. There is going to be that listener out there who is perhaps in a business that doesn’t really excite them that much. What do you say to the person? Should they go and find something else to blog about and perhaps build a personal brand attached to their business or do they just bite the bullet and actually write about what is relevant to their target market?

Jeff: Well I would hope that if you’re in business you’re actually do it for the right reason which is not to make money but actually because you love doing it.

James: Well I think that’s fair but of course there are still going to be people out there that for whatever reason they found them in a job.

Jeff: Exactly! It’s going to be hard then for them to sit down and blog every day at 4:30 in the morning and I don’t understand it then they are going to look at you seriously and say how you are going to leverage the content. Whether it is getting guest bloggers in that are stake holders in your business or your business ecosystem that are suppliers. There are a lot of businesses that actually have guests authors in them that are stake holders in their business and their ecosystem that surrounds their business. Do that, go and find some great writers on e-lance or freelance and outsource your writing and edit it. Get community managers to look after the tribe. You’ve got to get smart and sometimes you’re not going to be actually be able to do it yourself and I think automation and social media management tools which are evolving quite rapidly now because it’s very hard to get to social scale.

James: Yeah, and I guess to pick up something that you said very early in this piece Jeff, you’ve got to be consistent with this stuff. Building a blog that’s successful is not something that’s going to happen overnight and if you have not got someone driving that beast who’s at least a little bit passionate about writing and contributing content. It’s going to fall a pretty steep death early on, right?

Jeff: Exactly, you need some fuel and that fuel is passion. You only have to look at the likes of Nike and Red Bull, they create fantastic content and it’s passion for their brand so I think brands are passionate on purpose because they’re actually true to their brand and then their whole reason why their product exists Red Bull is just the best content marketing company in the world because they understand the power of content to drive results to actually get conversation. Coco Cola’s a strategy which is based upon the content excellence, not creative excellence anymore. And they are all about creating liquid content- it’s getting content to flow around the web, not a lot involved not in hardships. And that’s where the real power comes in- it’s actually unleashing the power of content and drive conversations about your brand because I tell you what, your tribes in the social network can create much more conversation that you can ever hope to pay for for good live words or a Facebook end so I am a very big exponent and advocate of what I call organically earned social media.

James: Yeah, well it is interesting that you picked up on Red Bull being a leader and forefront of the pack with this stuff. We had just had Joe Pulizzi of the Content Marketing Insititute on an earlier episode and that was really one of the if not the number one case study of a business that really does content marketing well because they live with their brand but really if you look at the basis of it yes they sell drinks but what is that business about, it’s just all about content and everything they do has all revolved around this content marketing machine, right?

Jeff: Yep, and they don’t create content without their brand, their conversation’s around their brand.

James: Yeah, well I want to pick up on this kind of brand being related a little bit to design, of I am right, did you have a background in web design and web development Jeff, is that right?

Jeff: No.

James: Oh, really? You were link to a business marketing firm I thought?

Jeff: I did some part time work for a digital agency, and part of that work is the design and development of an e-commerce site so I am not a designer, my original focus and career in life was being a teacher so I actually just changed to being an online teacher who just happens to be a blogger.

James: That’s right! Now you get to travel the world and I guess teach also from the comfort of your home as opposed to traipsing in to schools or universities or wherever you were before.

Jeff: Yeah, I teach people who want to learn because as a high school teacher I was teaching kids who did not want to learn and that’s much more exciting. You talk with a bunch of people who are just hungry to learn and then they go well it’s just great to learn about this today and that might have some change, so I am still an educator but just online.

James: Well let me still ask you the question I was going to ask you around design because I wanted to sort of get your opinion on how important the design of a blog is to a blog success because you’ve got a beautifully simple that’s got it’s caricature graphic in the header, but aside from that there is not a whole lot more going on visually. It’s plain, it’s white it’s got some banners going down the side. You’ve still manage to get a massive audience so how important is design? Should it be something that our listeners should be investing in or does the content matter far more?

Jeff: Content’s the focus! Don’t get distracted by bells and whistles when doing a blog and going what do I read? It doesn’t mean you can’t have what I call great resources under tabs but you’ve got to focus on the content front and center because that’s the purpose, it’s presenting content that’s easy to read and easy to share, that’s adds values to people’s lives and you just have to keep giving until it hurts so that’s really about creating content and that’s the focus. And guess what. The other stuff turns out, that’s where the magic happens, that’s where the secret sauce so you could really over complicate it and I have seen people agonize over the design, in fact my design wasn’t done by any designer, it was just actually an artist friend who did the caricature that was actually quite different so that was an accidental branding success again so I think you really need to be really careful that you don’t overdo design and there’s certainly the likes of design trends that is there a trend with design but you have to make sure especially if you drive people to a landing page – you want only one thing, buy a book or buy a course or subscribe to a monthly membership. So you have to work out what the objective is to the page and to the blog and be true to that.

James: Yeah, and one thing that you have got quite a lot of is banners and social media links, etc. in your right hand column, do you ever worry that after putting all of that effort in and marketing your website on your social platforms and getting people to the site or you risk bleeding people off to other platforms?

Jeff: A little bit- my bounce rate is quite the same over the years. I am in the middle of doing a redesign and it’s going to be much more responsive WordPress templates. I don’t agonize too much about taking people off, I’ve got a few ads there that’s about content or information that’s about trust and know but if you write really good content then you’re going to keep people on to it so it’s basically just working hard just creating that content that gets some tuning up every time.

James: Yeah, and of course for your content you seem to be seem to be kind of predominantly text focused. You don’t seem to have too much video or audio on your site, is that by design or you just kind of just favor writing over the other mediums?

Jeff: I prefer writing; I think there is magic in the written word. I have tried some video stuff and it just doesn’t seem to draw as much traffic. I think a lot of people like to skim and scan around information very quickly. Maybe it’s a generation thing, I am not 23, 24, or 25 so maybe I am comfortable with writing, but I have tried. I’ve actually had some audio podcasts, I tried it in a year, traffic didn’t increase, and I can put together a text blog, I think it adds a lot of value and takes quite quickly so I am more comfortable with writing I suppose and that’s the main reason. I’ve looked at social media examiner with its podcast and other guys doing podcasts, that’s fine, but it’s a lot of work to do a really good podcast and create graphics and upload a guide and it’s efficiency and I suppose it’s my voice.

James: Yeah and I think it’s clearly working for you, not only has it worked in your favor now with the Hummingbird update, with this nice long rich text post but it’s also getting you the maximum result for the minimum dose right? I mean you’re totally right to put together a podcast requires a whole team behind you really – we’ve got a transcriber, we’ve got an editor here that put these things together though of course I’m recording now with you and then I’ll record some intro and outro sections to go with this and then we’ll put it up in the site. It doesn’t happen in a couple of hours in the morning at 4:30 it’s probably a hard day’s work so yeah, I am feeling you, I understand why you’ve gone for that format and it’s clearly working for you.

Jeff: Yeah, it doesn’t mean I won’t do it in the future; I had a chat with a friend and asked how long does it take for him to put together his podcast, he said a day, I went, wow! It’s a fair commitment, it doesn’t mean I won’t do them in the future, and it doesn’t mean I won’t be doing more, I have done a few videos, but I will do videos maybe for squeeze pages basically as intros to premium content as part of the strategy so I think you start with the content that’s what your more comfortable with and what works for you so I think that’s part of your voice as well.

James: Yeah! And for now Jeff whilst you’re not doing a podcast, we’re very happy for you to come on and share your wisdom with our listeners on this podcast so it’s all worked out nicely enough anyway. So let’s finish up with one question and then we’ll draw things to a close. One other thing that I’ve noticed with your content is that you seem to put a good amount of effort to sort of crafting impactful that’s going to draw readers in. How important is your headline to the success of your posts?

Jeff: It’s a big part – I don’t know what percentages but if there’s one thing you learned to do is learn to write headlines and if you can do that it might be turned in to successful blogs; I’ve read some horrendous headlines and I don’t even want to click on that, it’s going to be boring. So reality too is online, no one has bought anything yet, you don’t have a commitment so the trick online is two second or less and you can go I want to click on that link because of that great headline. So when you buy a book for $20 and you buy it on paperback, but when you buy it online, the only temptation you’ve got is only the headline. So you’ve got to get them and you’ve got to get them in two seconds so five times as many people read the headline as to reading the content so you’ve got to get that right and it’s part art part science you’ve got a lot of great resources around to write a great headline, read those that are really good, there’s a bunch, you can google them, but yes, get your headlines sorted and learn to write a good headline and it will help a lot.

James: Yeah, and I can see definitely Jeff for your particular strategy that’s influenced heavily by Twitter which is the shortest social media platform on the planet. You literally have as you said a second to grab people’s attention or you’re going to die. It is incredibly important. On that note, let’s share your Twitter handle cause you are very active on Twitter Jeff, where would people find you on Twitter? And then perhaps we’ll share some other links if there is anything else you’d like our listener to check out other than JeffBullas.com.

Jeff: My Twitter name is simple; @JefffBullas. Luckily I’ve got a strange name so it really helps, I was able to get my name both as a domain name, as a Twitter handle and a few other things so that’s great. My book Blogging the Smart Way How to Create a Killer Market with Social Media, that’s on my blog so check that out if you have time, that’s where you’ll find me, my blog, my Twitter; you’ll also find me on Facebook and Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube, I try to be everywhere, I’ve got this mantra, to be ubiquitous.

James: To our listener if you can’t remember all of that if you just simply go to Google and search for Jeff Bullas you’ll find that Jeff does dominate the entire first page with his own content so I guess that’s kind of proof. Good stuff! You’ve been incredibly generous with your time and your content today Jeff. Traffic Jam thanks you for coming onboard and perhaps some time again in the future we can repeat this for another episode.

Jeff: Thanks James! It’s been a pleasure. Have a great day!

This Week’s News in Traffic

It’s kind of a light week in traffic again, not too many stories out there, we do have a couple though. The first one’s from Twitter and they’ve announced a little bit flexibility around mobile targeting for their ad platform. Mostly these new targeting options they’ve introduced allow advertisers based on device type and also connectivity so you can now target iOS users or you can pinpoint say Samsung users as well and this is really going to be ideal for those people promoting mobile apps, or perhaps telco marketers who want to offer discounts or coupons to people on certain devices or plans. I don’t think it is going to affect really the average marketer but if you are in either of those segments – apps or telco – the only two that I could think of right now, you may find this useful.

In our second update, out of Google, it seems that the search engine is now rolling out a new look to search engine results, at least testing to this stage. A test that they were doing on mobile devices about a month or so ago is now being tested on desktop devices too. And this new look to the search results is essentially a merging of the look and feel of the organic results with the look and feel of the ads. Whereas before ads at the top of the page be boxed in a yellowy- orange box to make them very distinguishable, now they’re also against a white background like the organic results with a yellow label that says ad right next to the ads listing. It is in testing stage but I think it is the swinging of the pendulum towards advertisers and more likely than not will encourage a higher click through rate on ads and probably the lessening of links on organic results so we’ll see if this is rolled out for sure but for now it is being tested in the UK and in America on quite a large scale so this may indicate that it is close to a large roll out. We’ll wait and see.

Here comes that point in the show where I feature you, the listener and there’s a couple to read out this week, both from the United States and the first one comes from Anthony Tran he says, website traffic is a hot topic and his comment is alright let’s get some traffic, love this topic about SEO and other ways to get traffic to your website so thank you for that Anthony. And also for Andy Gray who as I said is also in the United States. He said actionable and inspiring. Well worth the time and an inspiration for traffic building in each episode, great stuff James so thank you to you both for those 5-star reviews. As always I’d love to get your feedback and reviews on Traffic Jam and the way to do that is on iTunes. Head on over to your  iTunes player, search for the Traffic Jam podcast, hit the review and rating button, give it a star rating out of 5 and then add your comments. It’s more than likely if you do leave a comment and it’s relevant and also nice I guess, I will read it out in future episodes so make sure you include your name and also your website address as a good little marketing tip for you, I’ll make sure that it gets mentioned on an upcoming show.

The One Minute Traffic Tip

Okay, so the tip this week is to set up a referral program who pays commissions to people when they refer customers to your product. You can do this the quick and simple way, i.e. you give me a referral and I credit you when someone becomes a sale and of course you send me your name. or if you have a high volume online product or service, you may want to use specialist affiliate solutions that uses links and IP tracking to effectively track who’s sending you traffic and sales.

Now here’s the key to a successful affiliate and referral program, you want to make sure that you reach out to affiliates and offer them help with content and affiliate use and webinars or anything else that will drive traffic and sales for you, because when you help them make more commission, here’s what will happen, you’ll make more sales yourself. That’s the way a referral program works and of course you’ll be getting customers who wouldn’t have had otherwise access to.

Okay so that brings us to a close on episode#25 of Traffic Jam. I’ll of course be doing it all again next week where you should join me in the next 7 days from now for a deep dive in to the topic of Google+ with my extra special guest so come back listeners for that one, in the meantime, head on over to Veravo.com for more traffic tips and training and to post any comments and questions that you have for this episode. To play out this week’s show we have a track by Linkin Park which is a favorite band of Jeff Bullas. The track is called Castle of Glass and here it right now, see you next week!

RESOURCES

MENTIONS

THIS WEEKS NEWS IN TRAFFIC

ONE MINUTE TRAFFIC TIP

THE TRAFFIC JAM

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

This week’s episode tells a story of how a “regular pool guy” turned around a struggling business in the height of the financial down turn by writing blog posts that answered the very questions he was asked every day by his customers. This simple yet powerful “they ask, we answer” method is now taught by Marcus at conferences around the world and on his website TheSalesLion.

Does it work? You bet! Marcus’s original website RoverPoolsAnd Spas.com is now the most trafficked swimming pool website in the world. It totally crushes its competitors in the SEO stakes, dominating for most of its target keywords. Marcus says he’s not an SEO expert, however his methods work very well to attract Google search traffic. Listen in and learn how you too can attract more traffic with Marcus’ method.

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“Never ever make a single marketing decision based on your competition.” @TheSalesLion
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Hey there listeners! This is James Reynolds and you’re tuned in to Traffic Jam episode#24 and of course this is the podcast show that teaches you how to get more traffic, leads and sales from your website and build a profitable audience online. As always, I am super thankful that you can join me here on the show today, I really do value your time and I hope that you get a lot of value yourself out of the time that you’d invest in listening to Traffic Jam. I think today’s show is certainly one of the episodes with a huge number of takeaways, but not only that, my guest today has really got an inspiring story so I am looking forward to sharing that with you in a moment or two. Of course, as always, we’re going to have the regular segments of the show which is the One Minute Traffic tip, a really short bit of actionable advice that you can go and implement, hopefully right away. We’ve got the news from traffic- all of the news from traffic generation in the past 7 days; that’s the segment we call This Week’s News in Traffic. We’ll have some listener comments and reviews and of course we’ll end the show with our Traffic Jam jam, and today that will be chosen by Marcus Sheridan. He’s the guest.

Marcus has a fantastically inspiring story that I think most business owners would find very encouraging indeed. Just a few years ago, Marcus wasn’t the consultant and speaker at the SalesLine.com that he is now. He, in his own words, was a regular pool guy. He had a company that installed fiberglass within homes. And as you can imagine, at the height of the financial crisis when the property downturn happened, people’s resources and funds for such things as swimming pools had pretty much dried up. So Marcus’ company have found themselves in quite a spot of bother. But Marcus, using the power of content marketing and blogging, was able to turn his business around in to a huge success and create a website that became the most trafficked swimming pool website in the world. Marcus did all of this just with a few hours a day in the evening, blogging about the biggest questions that his prospects and customers had. He calls it, They Ask, You Answer. That’s the concept behind it; he answers every single question that you can ever imagine from a prospect inclined on his website creating valuable content that draws people in to his website primarily through search engine. So Marcus tells us all about this one particular strategy in today’s interview plus lots of other really cool traffic grabbing tips. So let’s get stuck in to the interview right now, it’s with Marcus Sheridan and he’s from the SalesLion.com

James: So as mentioned at the top of the episode, joining me on today’s show is Marcus Sheridan from TheSalesLion.com. Marcus, welcome to Traffic Jam!

Marcus: Hey, man. James, thanks for having me man. I’m excited to be here and hopefully I can say something of value for all those listeners you got.

James: I am sure you will. Well, anyway let’s get stuck straight in. I am not one for kind of a lot of preamble. I want to start off with something actually here, a little bit of fun and a little bit out of the ordinary. When we were setting up this session you told me that you’d like to address some of the issues and attack some of the misses of content marketing so we’re going to play a little game of truth or delusion to kick things off if you’re up for it.

Marcus: Yes, I am absolutely up for it.

James: Awesome! So I am going to give you a statement and you’re going to answer with truth or delusion and tell us why. So are you ready for the first one?

Marcus: Ready.

James: Awesome. Okay, so first one is: to succeed with blogging, you’ve got to create epic blog posts, truth or delusion?

Marcus: Delusional in terms of the way people define epic. I think that’s actually one of the biggest misnomers in the industry because the way we define epic or awesome or amazing or even great varies from person to person. I mean, ultimately, James, if we’re trying to be helpful, I think giving help is pretty awesome. And informative to me is pretty stinkin’ awesome. And if one person reads your content and says, Ah! Now I understand. Now I have the answer to my problem. Now I have a solution to my issues. That therefore is epic stuff. It’s not epic the way that the rest of the world might expect. They might think that it’s got tons of visual this and visual that and numbers and graphs and charts. We just get overwhelmed with all these epic stuff and nothing great gets accomplished for most companies.

James: Yeah, delusional. And it is one of those buzzwords out there right now so it is one of the first questions I want to attack. I think there is quite a lot of pressure perhaps on business owners to really get in the state of overwhelm in content marketing so I am glad that you’ve answered that one in the way that you have. Alright, we’ll hit the next one, share your very best content even if that means you’re at risk of educating your competitors, truth or delusion?

Marcus: If that’s fully true, I don’t care. You should never base a single marketing decision based on your competition. And so until the competition pays your bills, they should not even come in to the fray of the argument and the discussion of what is going to provide value for our prospects and our existing clients. And I just don’t understand why companies will not publish something for fear of what the competition, who has no impact in their bottom line in a good way, whatever the competition will feel, will see, will hear or say – we give the competition too much credit for taking our good stuff. We really, really do. Produce it and whatever you do, who cares?

James: Yeah, sure. Cool! Well let’s roll on. The best blog post titles are intriguing, funny or outrageous as they’ll find the most clicks.

Marcus: Delusional! Delusional 99% of the time; here’s the thing, for most businesses that don’t have this massive list of thousands of subscribers, let’s look at it like this- if you’ve got a huge email list and you’re trying to get people to click through, you might want to come up with writing catchy subject lines, but when it comes to your website, blogs, articles, etc., you shouldn’t try to be witty, or funny or snappy or any of those things. Because guess what, the search engines don’t know what the heck you are talking about. And if they don’t know what you’re talking about, they won’t like your stuff. And regular people, they just want to know what you’re talking about. If they’re confused at all and they have to interpret what the hell you’re going to lose them. I think the number one mistake, I mean it is easily in the top three of all mistakes I see for most businesses, except for those who are on content marketing and blogging, they come up with witty, and catchy, and all these other types of titles. Well, it is not a newspaper, it is not a magazine; you’re not trying to get someone to pull it off the shelf. It does not work like this so you have to be a straightforward. The best article I ever wrote when I was a pool guy was How Much Does a Fiberglass Pool Cost? What is witty about that? None of the stuff that I do that is not that so many articles that have been read so many times and it’s not about some amazing title, tell the people exactly what you’re going to tell them!

James: Got it! Okay cool, next one – grammar is really important and slag should be avoided as it’s unprofessional – truth or delusion?

Marcus: Delusional! And I would say in this regard, if you look at the internet, the companies that are great with this are the ones that are willing to make mistakes on the fly. Sometimes as an individual they’ve never made a blog and they’re not great reader. I am telling you what, James, if you look at my stuff from four years ago it’s like this big mass of content turd. I mean there’s grammatical mistakes, there’s just a bunch of problem and one would look at that, like the internet police that they have today, they would have looked at that and they would have said, oh look at that guy over there, he’s got bad grammar, he’s not a good writer, and I would have listened to them and get all upset. Well it’s a good thing I did not listen to anybody and I did not really care. I was just trying to get better, I was just trying to lead traffic and sales to my website. Am I seeing that you are irresponsible and unprofessional? I am not saying that, but I am saying, if you would have asked me a question at a coffee shop, and I answer it in a certain way, that’s the same way I should answer on my blog for the most part. Yes, I want to be professional, but I want to be personal too! And there is a beautiful mesh between the two if you can find it.

James: Yeah! Got it. Okay, cool! Well I’m going to hit you up with the last one and that’s longer blog posts are better as they rank more strongly on Google, truth or delusion?

Marcus: It’s a really good one! I’m going to say truth based on if you have 2 good pieces of content and let’s say they both have the same title, the same basic group of words, one is 500 words one is 1500 words – the way that hummingbird is now working, the way Google is now working, the 1500 words will outperform the 500 words.

James: Okay, so what you’re saying is- where possible, aim longer if you can.

Marcus: If it makes sense. I don’t think you should stuff words in there that don’t make sense. But if you’re providing the value whole way and if more means more helpful, not just words, then it makes sense to do it and you should do it. Yeah.

James: Got it! Okay, awesome! How fun was that?

Marcus: I had a lot of fun! It was way better than like any other interview that I had so it’s awesome man! Here’s the thing, we do these types of interviews, first of all, nobody wants to hear about me at first until we get going. And they might not want to hear about me at all because the truth is, they just want to know how to solve their problems. That’s what they’re really interested in. and a lot of broadcasts, they just take too much time to get to the meat so it was beautiful because we took care of the meat. If we have advertisers, fine. But we took care of the meat already and it’s beautiful.

James: Awesome! Well I am going to ask you to tell your story now because you have not always been this marketing who travels the world and speaks at conferences and talks to guys like me on podcasts. You were once a humble pool guy. Tell us about that whole evolution of where you got today because I think it is probably quite relevant for our listener and a little bit inspiring as well.

Marcus: Yeah, it’s relevant and I am going to give you the quick 101. I started a swimming pool company that installs in ground swimming pools with two business partners in 2001 and things were going okay until the end of 2008 when the market crashed here in the United States. Nobody could get a loan for a pool anymore because home values were down so much. And so we went through a period in 20009 where we were three straight weeks overdrawn in our bank accounts and every consultant that I talked to told us to close our doors. And so I had to generate more leads than I ever had in a terrible, terrible time to save my business, otherwise I was going to lose my home, I was going to lose everything I had and I did not have any money to do all this stuff. I could not advertise, I just could not throw money I the wind, so I started reading about social and inbound and content marketing and all these things. And the way I understood it was if I’d become the best teacher online about that thing that I do, I’m  going to get rewarded by people and the search engines alike and that’s going to generate more traffic, leads, and ultimately sales. That’s how I saw it. And so what we did with river pools  was that we said okay, we’ve gotten hundreds if not thousands of questions over the years about pools. Why don’t we make our philosophy, our golden rule – they ask we answer, which I think is the ultimate golden rule for anybody today who has been great online. Whenever they ask a question, you answer it. And you should try to give a good answer, an honest answer, a transparent answer. So that’s what we did. We took every question, good, bad and ugly – and turned it in to that title of the blog post. And then we would answer it, and it would be transparent as heck and what happened is, few things: from a search perspective, we just started to blow it up because Google said, finally somebody’s willing to answer these questions that nobody else seem to want to address like how much will the fiberglass cost? That’s the famous one. Also, people started reading the site and they started reading tons of pages on the site. To make a long story really short, River Pools and Spas today is the most trafficked swimming pool website in the world. It gets about 200,000 visitors a month, it saved the business and because of the success that river pools has had, I started writing about the success about a year in to it and started what was at that time just a blog called the sales lion and it turned out to be a great move because people started wanting me to come to conferences and tell that story and teach about what we do at river pools. And so today, that’s what I do, I travel the world and I speak and I consult. My company’s called the sales lion and it’s great life and river pools continues to blow up, the sales lion has blown up, and I am just trying to help everybody see that best teacher in the world at what you do and if you’re the best teacher, you hear better than anybody, you hear what the customer says, what the consumer is saying, you think like them, you feel like them, and even if you address the concerns that they have in the way that they want to get it, you’re going to be incredibly successful.

James: Yeah, I think, I mean, think about how you’ve got going with all of this. Because content marketing, let’s face it, it’s not a short term play, it’s a long term strategy. What gave you the courage and persistence to keep at it early on when your business in such trouble?

Marcus: Well, I think, first of all, we can’t define how quick this is going to work. I know of clients that I have, they will write a blog post today, they will get a lead in a week, there will be a customer in three weeks and that’s a big deal. I’ll see other people write their blog post today and they will not see their first lead for a month or two, maybe three. It is rare it takes that long especially if you are doing it the right way. But we can’t put a timeframe on this but what we can say is we all see where the train is headed, we see how consumer behavior has changed. We see how it all see Google as the source of all light, truth and knowledge that we go there and we want to ask it every single question – crazy questions, odd questions, consumer based questions, buying questions, best of questions, how much is it question, compare this question, we do it for every single thing that we are thinking about. And because of this, and because it is only going to get worse, it’s not going to change, we are not going back to the yellow pages, we are not going back to the paper, we are not going back to these things, we have to see forward and embrace it. And so it does not really matter how long it’s going to take. That is irrelevant to where we all are It’s interesting to me because there was this little period of time, about 10 years ago when a lot people said I just don’t see how a website is relevant to my business. Well it is impossible that anyone today does not have a website. Pretty much 99% of all businesses, they have a website before they go in to business. It’s almost like you don’t have a business until you have a digital footprint, right? But that was unheard of 10 years ago. Well today, if you don’t have content and if you don’t try to be a teacher, if you don’t try to be informative, you’re going to get laughed off at the end of the day at this digital stage. People will laugh you by and you will just be wondering what the heck happened.

James: Yeah, it seems strange right? I’m thinking back 10 years now to that sort of decision process that was happening every single business at the time, shall we or shan’t we embrace online has now become a – well, it’s not even an option now right? We have to go there, otherwise you’ll be left behind, and perhaps even go out of business –

Marcus: Well, that’s it James. That’s exactly why if you look at the last ten years, we’ve constantly relived the story of David versus Goliath and there’s all these digital Davids and because they did not have a huge budget to compete with the media of some of these huge brands they just went right under it all and they did it through the internet, and many of them have overcome the big brands now because they were able to be just like a David quick and nimble and fast and outside the box and they embraced these things early. I tell you who stinks online – the companies who have a bunch of red tape, they have to give every single word that they write on their website approved by some stinking lawyer, by a board of trustees or whatever it is, those are the companies that are dying on the vine while the ones that like are said are quick and nimble and fast, they’re the ones that are doing unbelievable things. They’re generating the most attention, the most trust, and ultimately because of that the most sales.

James: Yeah, good. Well I really want to talk about now Marcus the kind of the practical application of this stuff because you’ve clearly got a formula for this for the question based blogging method that you use, with your approval would you share the overarching strategy or structure of how you put this type of thing together?

Marcus: Well, yeah sure, and I mentioned it a little bit, we do this with every single client, we do it the exact same way, and the first thing that we do is we get in the person of the company that talks to the prospects, and communicates with prospects and customers and clients on a consistent basis. That might be somebody. Sales is the best ones, customer service are the great ones too. And so we say, what are the questions that you get every single day? We brainstorm those questions. Now I have never seen a company do this the right way and come up with less than a hundred questions. And lots of times, they’ll come up with 200 or 300 or up to 500, sometimes in the thousands depending on how many people are doing it. I believe it is on your website. And so take each one of those questions and you turn it in to a title of a post, again that’s just a page of your website. And you don’t say it in incomplete sentences, in other words, you won’t say how much does it cost, you say, if I go online, how much does a fiberglass pool cost or what is the cost of a fiberglass pool? That’s how someone would think it, that’s how someone would search it as a consumer, therefore that’s the way that a post should be titled. You do that transparently and honestly and you just go and go. The best companies are the ones that know how to leverage those answers from their existing employees. And so a company that has got 10 sales people in them should have 10 content producers. And the main areas where people should start with this is what I call the big five, the big five are the five subjects that move every single industry. I don’t care what it is that somebody is buying; the big five are what they are going to be thinking about first. Yet most companies are afraid of the big five. Now what are the big five? #1 it’s cost and price based articles. Anytime anybody’s ever asked you how much something costs, generally the answer is it depends. So people are afraid to put that answer on their website. That’s a really dumb methodology because you’re essentially inviting people to leave your website and go to somebody that’s willing to address this subject and this question. And so you need to take every one of these questions that are cost related, you need to answer them on your website but you need to say, if the answer is it depends, you need to explain why it depends. Explain to me why there are variable prices, explain to me what my options are, explain what drives the cost down or up. Those are the things that I want to see as a consumer. That’s #1. Number two is problems, issues, etc. I’ll give you and I’ll example of what I’m talking about. People used to ask me lots of times – okay Marcus, I am thinking about a fiberglass pool but be honest, what are the potential problems that I might have if I buy a fiberglass pool? So another example is I am a representative for a software called Hub Spot which is an email marketing software and people would ask me all the time what are the potential issues and drawbacks of using Hub Spot? Those are questions that are very relevant and very important. You shouldn’t shy away from those questions; you should answer them on your website. So if you go online right now and you type in what are the problems with fiberglass pools or what are the problems with Hub Spot, You’re going to read something that Marcus Sheridan said because I actually addressed the subject. That’s #2. Number three is versus/ comparisons. We love to compare stuff online it’s because we are fascinated and obsessed with knowing the best and the worst. And so if you’ve ever been asked about your product or service a comparative based question, you need to answer that on your website. So if somebody says which is better, your thing or their thing? Why? Which methodology is better, yours or theirs? Why? And the key in doing this is you need to do it in such a way that you’re honest. You say here’s the pros and cons of our stuff, here’s the pros and cons of their stuff, or their way, or their methodology, whatever it is. Now you can decide which is the best fit for you, because that is what consumers want so that’s number 3 – versus and comparisons. Number 4 is reviews. People are fascinated with review based stuff. They love to do reviews and so they go online and they search reviews, hubs, such and such so you need to write review based articles and you need to do it often. And then number five, you need to address best of questions. People love best questions, they’re obsessed with it. They go online and say what’s the best restaurant in England? What is the best construction architecture firm in such and such town? That’s the way that people think. They love asking best based question. Think of how many times you’ve been asked what the best is such and such in your field and your industry. There’s so many best opportunities and that’s number 5. So to repeat, cost, problems, versus, reviews and best. Those are the big five. You start there and work your way up. Those are the essential questions that people want to know. Once you answer those questions, now you start to see categories for them, you take those categories as you form, and you have 10 or 20 or 40 blog posts in each category. Now you produce guides and e-books from those. So let’s say you have a category that is specific, you’ve got 5 categories and you’ve written 10 blog posts in each category, now you take those, you turn them in to 5 e-books or guides. And all those guides, you integrate them in to your sales process. You have your sales people send them out to prospects and to clients before you have your first engagement, during your engagement, at your engagement. You also have them available on your website, on your social platforms, your lead captures and conversions and this way you have lead intelligence. You can build your database. And so that’s where it all starts; it all starts with knowing the questions and listening well and thinking just like the consumer. Once you do that and you really start to embrace that teaching, that’s when the magic occurs.

James: Yeah, I’m sure with you just keeping your eyes open and your ears open these questions must come up every single day. I mean I’m just thinking through my business, I just have to take one look inside our helpdesk, record a few telephone calls, and make some notes in speaking to customers day in and day out and these questions are just everywhere.

Marcus: This is the mistake that most companies make because who is the person or who is the department James that usually has to address all these questions on the website? The department is the marketing department. And this is where it all gets jacked up because when was the last time somebody at marketing really spent a lot of time with a prospect or a customer? It doesn’t generally happen that way. And that’s why marketing, independent of itself, should exist in asylum otherwise it’s all screwed up. That’s why sales and customer service has to be involved in the marketing process because nobody hears the questions like sales does. Nobody answers the questions nearly as much as sales do. I had a software guy – a guy who worked for a software company telling me- I am not sure what to write about, I don’t know. And I said when the last time you spent with a sales person was? He says I have never spent any time with a sales person. That’s why you have no idea what to write about. This is what you need to do. For the next 2 days, I want you to shadow your best sales guy. I want you to read all of his emails with him, I want you to listen in all of his phone calls and I want you to be on every face to face meeting that he has and write down every single question that he gets during that time period and now you can have enough content to go in until the end of time. He said, well that sounds interesting; he literally contacted me the next week, he said, you know Marcus, it’s crazy I have enough content year and as the case beforehand, he did not have anything! This is where everybody screws up and we have got to change it.

James: Okay, well I guess you have proven it doesn’t have to be as hard as people imagined. But I am guessing past that phase of collecting ideas and questions for the content, do a lot of people actually get stuck writing the content itself?

Marcus: I would say yes, some people do tend to over think it. They don’t have the coffee shop approach. I would say the biggest problem James is that many don’t write in a way where you initially trust them and so most people, when you initially teach this and they start it, they just want to come out and say how awesome they are. If you go to the homepage of anybody’s website, it says about how awesome they are, how awesome their product is, how awesome my service is. And then you get in to their articles in their blog content is like here’s why we’re awesome and it’s like one big bag of awesome vomit. And so what has to happen is that the conversation has to change. So how does it change? Instead of saying you’re awesome, you take the question and you say, if I was an unbiased business person and really present this in a way that is going to induce trust, the best way to do it generally is you have to present two sides to every question, two sides to every story- what is the best, what is the worst, why are you good, who are you not good for? Let me give you an example, do you realize James it is more important on your website that you say who you’re not for, then who you are for? but yet how many companies on their site address who they’re not for? Almost nobody! If you read though, let’s say you come to my site, for example let’s do pools cause that’s an easy example. And I say to you fiberglass may not be for you, If you are looking for a pool that’s longer than 40 feet it’s not a good fit for you. If you’re looking for a pool that’s wider than 15 feet it’s not a good fit for you. If you’re looking for a very, very customized, unique shape, it’s not a good fit for you. But if you are looking for a pool that is less than 16×40 and is offered in the line that we have available, and you’re looking a low maintenance pool that is going to last you a lifetime, it might be a great fit for you! In your mind, you are thinking to yourself, this is awesome because I was thinking of a 16×32 pool and low maintenance, this is a big deal! This is great! Instead most people don’t ever go down that road and so what happens? Nothing good!

James: I guess they’re worried that they might isolate the corner of the market that might not even be available to them anyway just by being specific about who and who they can

Marcus: You said the magic word! I say, people what are you afraid of? Well they say I’m afraid if I do that I’m going to lose a customer. I’m thinking myself, they’re not going to be a customer. The power of this, the greatest content marketers and marketers in the world are the ones who have a very clear identity of who they are, who they’re not, who they want to do business with, and who they do not want to do business with. And they never sit there and say I am afraid to lose a customer. They’ve more afraid of starting a relationship with somebody that’s really a bad fit.

James: Yeah, it’s crazy. Ok, cool! Marcus we have kind of covered how we prepared this content and how it’s structured. Once it’s posted on to our site, what happens next? Do you actually announce this content anywhere? Is there any form of kind of an SEO done on the post? What’s the strategy post publishing?

Marcus: I think SEO is very relevant. Some people who believe in this odd utopic society they think that SEO is dead and not really relevant. They have not really run a successful content marketing campaign with a lot of businesses because not many businesses are social. They just are not. And because they’re not social, SEO is really important because it is used to make up for not having social. I’ll give you an example of what I am talking about, for some reason, people don’t go online and bragged that they just spent $50,000 on a swimming pool. You don’t really see it. That’s why on River Pools there are articles that have been read like half a million times but they’ve just been tweeted once or twice. You say how is that possible? They have generated millions in sales! Because that’s SEO that’s why you need to pay attention to page titles and URLs, meta descriptions and things like that. In terms of the actual words on the post, you do want to be natural there. You want to be as natural as possible. But you do need to pay attention to the front end of SEO which is page titles, URLs and meta descriptions. I have written all about at the Sales Lion but they can’t be overlooked. Social is important certainly in some industries. And the social platforms, in their order of importance change from industry to industry and company to company. To give you an example, River Pools don’t spend a lot of time on Twitter because there is almost no return from the time we turned on Twitter than the time producing  content, producing content is way better! Notwithstanding with the Sales Lion, my marketing consulting company, we have a ton of social movement. We depend on social to drive a ton of traffic.  We use social to generate traffic, leads and sales. Customers as well as new leads so there is a great mix there. There’s a lot of SEO and a lot of social. It just depends. I do think that most companies should do two things; they should focus on SEO no matter what, no allowing it to mess the content up by following best practices, that’s number 1. Number 2, I think they should choose one social platform that will provide the most returns for them. For the majority of businesses, especially in the B2B world, it’s LinkedIn. Nobody pays much attention to LinkedIn but LinkedIn is awesome from a B2B perspective and even B2C oftentimes. LinkedIn is great, but it’s not like that for every single one which is why you have to experiment a little bit and figure out which platforms is the ideal fit.

James: Got it! So is this strategy really a new visitor front end strategy or would you recommend, let’s say for instance, announcing this post once you publish them to your email list. Is that going to be a good use of time or are we just going to frustrate or annoy people sending them answer to questions all the time that perhaps are not relevant?

Marcus: Well, it depends. I mean, obviously you’ve got people that subscribe to your content an that’s great. They’ve given you permission to happen. And then you’ve got your email database. How often should you email them? Well, again it depends for everybody. It depends on what you sell, it depends on your business model, it depends on what you are targeting. I think the most important question is- are you experimenting with your database? Are you sending out emails? Are you watching what happens? Are you following the results? Are you following best practices? Are you putting in calls to action that move people? That help generate leads for your business? Are you doing those things? I’ll gie you an example, with the sales lion, I have a lot of subscribers who get stuff automatically through email or RSS feeds. Then I have an email list, I’ve got almost 20,000 on that list and I probably email them once a month, not very much, and I might mention a few major pieces of content but I don’t wear that list out. Some marketers are different. Some just blow through their list and that’s because they just have a different business model. Everyone is different so unfortunately there is not a great answer to that question.

James: Well I think you’ve wrapped it up brilliantly. I think we have to look at each individual scenario and the case in point for most things, not everything is the right fit for everyone so just review your own scenario and see if it’s going to work for you. Marcus I want to finish up this conversation just along the topic of SEO. How is this sort of question and answer, blog and strategy been affected by recent Google updates? Did you see any difference in terms of traffic for these big Panda and Penguin updates or the most recent Hummingbird one?

Marcus: James, I tell you what bro. I just smack my forehead when I see companies falling out left and right over these new updates because all of my clients are doing better than they have ever done, and Hummingbird was the best of the three and I think everything is coming out in the wash. There’s a couple, you know, you have some anomalies of some websites that were washed over and it wasn’t their fault but 90%+ most of the time. If people try to trick and short range the process in Google they have paid the price. In other words, if you dance with the devil you’re going to get burned. And a lot of people have gotten burned over the last few years because they did things like unnatural link building or buying links or just general keyword stuffing or manipulation, all these types of things and I’m like of course you’re going to get kicked right in the middle and frankly you deserve it if that happens. I have been in this game for 4 years hard core. I have paid attention to SEO and I could have done all those things but every time I tell myself, #1 it doesn’t feel right, #2 I believe that the search engines are going to be smarter than humans in times in terms of grading out content and a lot of people laughed at me when I said that but it’s proving to be a hundred percent true, and that’s why the philosophy is they ask, you answer we do what Hummingbird said. Hummingbird said what you’re going to do we want to address the questions exactly like the people search them. I’m like duh! I’ve been saying this for 4 years! If you think like a consumer and you say to yourself how exactly, if they had that problem right now, how would they go online and find the answers, what would they type in, then you’re going to come up with the right title in the right content, but if you think in a different way especially in the way of manipulation, you’re probably going to do poorly and so you reap what you so in the digital world and a lot of people are reaping what they sowed for good and for bad, I’m doing great.

James: And I’m doing great so this is exactly the sort of stuff that I teach and certainly the advice I give our listeners here and my clients to really address your content to serve the purpose answering the questions that your market have and ultimately Google want to do the same thing as the market. They want to be able to answer those queries with the most relevant results and if that’s what you give to your consumers you’re going to be given the right thing to Google as well so I am glad it is all working out for you Marcus. This has been awesome stuff, there’s plenty of actionable content that you’ve shared today. If people want to go and find out a little bit more about you or follow your stuff in more detail, where can they go and do that?

Marcus: Yeah man, you can find me at TheSalesLion.com, I’m @thesaleslion on Twitter, there is one free e-book it’s called Content Marketing Made Easy, it’s on the Sales Lion,  it’s free so they can go there and download it and I think it will have a huge impact because it is literally for the people that have lived and applied and it’s changed thousands of businesses and lives and it’s my gift to the world. It took about 2 and a half years to write, it’s about 250 pages long. But that’s the best way to find me, and thank you James for this opportunity. I just love what the internet does, people like you and me, completely across the pond, where ten years ago these were different markets. But today, you’re like a local business to me and your listeners are a local market to me and I am local to them, and everything has changed and it’s all because of the power of digital.

James: Awesome! Let’s leave it on that note, Marcus from The Sales Lion, all of those links that Marcus has mentioned will be in the show notes, I guess this is from James, over and out. Marcus, thank you!

Marcus: Thank you buddy!

This Week’s News in Traffic

I have spoken several times before not only over here but also in my tips and training over at veravo,com about how important page load speed is to the performance of your website. I see a faster loading site will not only have a reduced bounce rate because people will want to stick on the site because it loads quickly but it also has a positive effect on where your site ranks within the search engine results. You’ll be pleased to know that Google Analytics have just added a report inside the Analytics dashboard which can be found in behavior, site speed, and then speed suggestion that will give you ideas on how to make improvements on how to make your site load faster. So well worth checking out, this report is perfect for website owners, and one of the things that I really do recommend you spend some time optimizing.

YouTube have made a change to their commenting system and now it’s actually powered by Google+ comments. The change of the YouTube commenting system is supposed to allow for better interaction between commenters. It should do such things such as moved the top comments to the top of the list, show the comments from your friends and people from your Google+ circles and more easily allow you to moderate comments if you’re the channel owner. It has been met by a little bit of controversy especially from the Google co-founder Joward Karim; he actually said, why the bleep do I need a Google+ account to comment on videos? I thought it was kind of funny but anyway, go check out the commenting, I kind of like them especially since I am fully integrated with Google+ but go check those out for yourself.

In other news in what has been a pretty light week really in all things traffic generation, Facebook has updated their Like Button which is now supposed to encourage more likes on your post. If you’re using the old button you’ll automatically be updated a new button so no issues there.

From Google+, they’ve launched helpouts. We’ve reported on that a few months ago here on Traffic Jam so you can go and check that out and explore it for yourself.

I would love to get your feedback and opinion on this week’s news stories so please head on over to veravo.com and find the episode page for Traffic Jam episode#24. What did you think of the new Google+ commenting system on YouTube, how do you feel about the new Facebook like button, and go give the Google Analytic Site Speed report a try and let me know what you think of it. I would love to get your feedback and comments. Let’s open up a discussion on this week’s episode page, episode 24.

I’ve got some fantastic reviews and comments come in on iTunes this week and let’s take a few moments to read a few of those out. In no particular order, let’s start with Michelle Macpherson who was from the United States who said, wow great guests. You’ve created the superb list of guests, not just the usual suspects that speaks to your expertise as well. I look forward to seeing who’s next. Top bloke from the United Kingdom – James provides excellent content here by providing excellent guests. Well worth a listen for the snippets and golden nuggets they contain. We’ve got Dino Dogan from the United States also. James does an amazing job of probing some of the most amazing questions on the subject of traffic. It’s not to be missed! Let’s grab one more, there are others, but let’s grab one more, and that is from Belvedeere in the United States and he or she, I’m not quite sure, said, an SEO related question in a format that doesn’t make my eyes roll up in to the back of my head and put me on a coma, and it’s not that the bar is so low any podcast keeps my interest but this one works for me, and it will work for you too! Thank you all for your fantastic comments, you all left me a five star rating as well so thank you for that. If you the listener would like to leave me a comment I certainly would appreciate that and to do it all you need to do is log in to your iTunes account, search for the Traffic Jam podcast and then click on the review and ratings button, select the star rating you want and leave me a comment as well. and if you’re smart enough to leave your website address which actually none of my commenters have done this week, I’ll make sure that  that’s listed on the show too! I look forward to receiving your feedback and comments and I’ll read them out again on next week’s episode.

The One Minute Traffic Tip

In this week’s tip I’m going to suggest that you make use of what might be probably the most underused page on your website and that is your thank you page, the page that people do to after subscribing to your email list. Now you might ask me, James how can a thank you page be used for traffic? People that visit that page have already come to the site and they’ve already subscribed meaning that it can get you back to your site using email marketing later. Well, here’s the tip, on that page, you want to be adding to your social media accounts, Twitter, your Facebook, your Google+ account because at the point of going to your thank you page, that’s when they are most receptive and really interested in your content. So if you can have your visitors subscribe to multiple channels and not just your email list, you have the opportunity of presenting the marketing channels in multiple different places. Join them back to the site and building up a real live audience and fan base. If you’d like to see this strategy at play, head on over to veravo.com and head on over to the Traffic Jam link in the main navigation and you’ll be taken to an opt in page . Just answer your details there if you haven’t done so already and you’ll be taken to the thank you page where you’ll see other social media icons in place with a really strong call to action. This template is working great for me and I know it will work great for you too so if you want to see that at play, head on over to veravo.com, hit the traffic jam link and then opt in.

That rounds out episode#24 of Traffic Jam. Thank you to my guest Marcus Sheridan. I’ll be back next week with another feature interview where I’ll be talking this time to Jeff Bullas from JeffBullas.com who’s built a website that now generates over 4 million page views per year and he’s done it almost entirely sing blogging and social media so that’s what you need to look forward to next week. In the coming seven days, check out veravo.com for more tips and training on how to grow your audience online. To round out this week’s episode with a track by Neil Diamond, it’s called Song Sung Blue and of course it is chosen by this week’s guest Marcus Sheridan so enjoy Marcus’s track and I’ll see you back here in about seven days from now, see you then!

RESOURCES

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THIS WEEKS NEWS IN TRAFFIC

ONE MINUTE TRAFFIC TIP

THE TRAFFIC JAM

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Starting her career in marketing with Harley Davidson and prominent motivational speaker Anthony Robbins, Amy Porterfield burned her bridges and dived deep in to social media marketing. 2 years out of Robbins, Amy was approached by Wiley to co-write Facebook for Dummies and she’s not looked backed since. She’s now considered one of the foremost experts on Facebook marketing, a reputation she has gained in part through her highly commended FBInfluence program.

In this episode, Amy Porterfield joins James Reynolds and shares her secrets to building an email list using Facebook Promoted Posts. It’s a strategy Amy sites as “building her business” and she’ll share with you exactly how you can build your email list and business with this strategy too.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

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“Once you’ve learned something take action in the next 24 hours.” @AmyPorterfield
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Hello! You’re tuned in to Traffic Jam, this is episode#23, I am your host James Reynolds and you’re tuned in to the podcast show that teaches you how to get more traffic, leads and sales from your website and build a profitable audience online. On today’s episode we are revisiting the topic of Facebook traffic. It is actually the third time in 23 episodes that we’ve gotten in to the topic of Facebook and it is always a very popular subject. On Episode 1 we had my friend Victoria Gibson on the show and a little after that, episode#5 we had Jennifer Sheahan come on and talk about the changes that have happened in the past  6 -12 months on Facebook. And I really do recommend if you have not checked out those episodes yet, go and do so because they’ll give you a really good broad overview on how you can use Facebook to drive traffic to your website. On both of those episodes we did cover a lot, in fact we went even down to things such us how to set up your Facebook page, effective images, text content, how to post, when to post and then when to amplify that content using paid Facebook traffic.

On today’s episode I wanted to go a lot narrower and really focus in on one area of Facebook traffic that my guest today has been getting really strong results with and that’s list building using Facebook promoted posts. I have been particularly excited at the prospect of this episode because this is a strategy that I too have been testing out over the past few weeks with some pretty reasonable success but I am sure there is some wind and some opportunities that I am perhaps missing out on which I know our guest today will surely share with us. So let’s introduce her. Her name is Amy Porterfield, she is an absolute expert in this particular strategy because she has been building her entire business around it over the past twelve months or so. Amy is the author of Facebook for dummies and she also has a couple of programs out teaching Facebook strategies – FB Influence and FB ads insider and in addition to that she is the former content director for Tony Robbins as well as a former marketing and events coordinator for Harley Davidson so if you’re either in the kind of author/ speaker market, or you work with a big brand I think you’ll particularly resonate with Amy’s experience and what she has to teach. So all of that is coming up in just a moment but of course don’t go anywhere after the interview because we have our regular segments on the show – the one minute traffic tip, all of this week’s news in traffic, and of course we end the show with a musical jam chosen by our guest today, Amy Porterfield. So on that note, let’s introduce Amy for a whole section on how to increase your email list using Facebook promoted posts.

James: You’re listening in to Traffic Jam episode#23 and joining us in the virtual hot seat for a fireside chat all about Facebook Marketing is none other than Amy Porterfield. Amy, a warm welcome to Traffic Jam!

Amy: Thanks for having me! I really appreciate it!

James: Well, it is awesome to have you on the call and I am really excited because we have covered Facebook Marketing pretty extensively on Traffic Jam. In the previous episodes I did with both Victoria Gibson and Jennifer Sheahan proved to be very popular so I wanted to get you on Amy to dive deep in to the subject of Facebook Marketing again but particularly one strategy you’ve been getting great results with and that’s email list building with Facebook but I guess before we do all of that, please give our listener a little of a quick intro to Amy Porterfield.

Amy: Okay, so I started my marketing career with Harley Davidson Motorcycles, I always say I am not a biker chick but that’s really where I started work in terms of marketing. And then I went to Peak Performance Coach Anthony Robbins. A lot of people know who Tony Robbins is and I worked there for six and a half years as the director of content development and that’s really where I fell in love with online marketing and social media marketing so I took everything Tony taught me and I started my own consulting business and now I’ve really found my niche in Facebook Marketing. I co-authored the book Facebook Marketing All in One for Dummies and I always say I sleep, read and eat Facebook Marketing so it is definitely something that I love to talk about.

James: Oh good! Because otherwise you wouldn’t be looking to too much anticipation for another conversation about Facebook so I am glad you said yes Amy because the whole plan would have been rambled if you had said to me I hate talking Facebook.

Amy: That wouldn’t have worked so well!

James: It wouldn’t have worked so well! Okay, well, I guess before we get in to the mechanics of how we might build our email list from Facebook, why is it important? I mean the average email open rates are probably 10-15%, Facebook page views are probably similar. Why even bother in the first place?

Amy: I think – actually, I know that Facebook marketing and email marketing go hand in hand and the reason why it is so important to grow an email list is I always look at it as the energy of the business. I learned early on when I was working with Tony Robbins that these days, you really don’t have a business if you don’t have a solid email list because so much of the business is done online, so although the email marketing rate or open rates that you just mentioned may not seem that high, I think the more focus you make on your list the stronger you make your list and you can really increase those numbers. When I first started my online marketing business, I was hustling; I was hustling to find my next customer, I was worried about where the business was going to come from, and then I changed everything and started really working on growing my email list. Now we have this email list where I never have to hustle to find my next customer, I’m always called to meet new customers through my email communication. And so I really do see it as the energy of the business. When you do it right, you’ll have this list that can’t wait to hear from you or they’re curious as to how they can do business with you. That’s really how I see the two working together.

James: Yeah, and I guess we can sort of add on to that you really want to have an asset that you can control, I mean to do all your business primarily from an audience base or I guess any of the platforms for that matter. It is a little bit risky to say the least so great concept. Amy, I guess before we sort of get started about how we might sort of make this all work, we’ve got to get some form of offer together right, in the first place to try and attract people to join our email list. What makes a compelling offer for this type of strategy?

Amy: Yes, you are exactly right. For this strategy to work, you first need to start with a really compelling, valuable giveaway offer that your audience can’t wait to get their hands on. In terms of what I do in terms of marketing, I use a lot of free live and web recording webinars. So if you are in a business where you can teach something of value for free, webinars tend to be a really great gateway so you can actually send people to a page, they sign up for one of your webinars in exchange for a name and email. But e-books are very popular, when you have a really smart newsletter; something that people are going to find extremely valuable, newsletters can work as well. I really like the concept of let’s say a three part video series where people sign up and then you get their permission to send three different emails in terms of giving them pieces of the video series. Now you get to touch them in multiple ways and then in addition to that, if you are a break and order, it’s so great to do some kind of a discount or coupon code in exchange for a name and email. So you really just have to experiment and figure out what would your audience find valuable.

James: Okay, and have you got any stats for this? Have you tested different offers in different markets i.e. video courses versus free report versus cheat sheet? Is there a one that kind of trounces the rest typically or is it varied so much between industries and particular markets?

Amy: What we’d seen recently – this trend change over time but over the last year is that the tip sheet or some kind of PDF gives away tend to be pretty valuable. I do a lot of work with leadpages.net. They are a company that I use to create all my opt in pages. I love them so much that I tell everybody about them. But what they found is they test so many opt in pages and the give aways behind those pages and all that good stuff and they found that the cheat sheets or let’s say list of Top 10 tools, top 10 tips, those tend to convert really well. and the great thing is, they are easy to put together. So I love the guide or the cheat sheet or the list kind of giveaway. It works really well for both sides.

James: Yeah, well I was hanging out with Clay in Australia I guess back in June and he was saying that exact thing that cheat sheet, the one page PDF with the list of top three or four tools or resources. We’re just trouncing every single of the offer, almost two to one in many cases. That’s kind of good news for us marketers, right Amy, because it is super simple to put together?

Amy: Yes, so true.

James: Alright. We kind of got a good idea of what might make a good offer in terms of presentation, is there any process that goes in to what would be good in your own market or are you suggesting Amy we just go out and test a bunch of stuff and see what comes up the winner?

Amy: Well, there’s two things that I do, first I find out what my competitors are doing, and also what’s others are doing that have an audience that’s aligned with mine. They might not be my exact competitor but I love to go and research to find out what others might be doing. That kinds of just give you the sense of what may or may not be working. From there, if you have a small audience, I would survey the audience; maybe three or four really easy survey questions just to create some feedback before you create anything. I know it’s more work, but it definitely helps in the long run so you don’t start creating something that nobody is going to want. A short little survey and some research – I think it is worth your time before you actually start creating.

James: Got it. And would you do that on Facebook itself like you just might post a post saying hey what are your challenges, what’s the biggest issues that you’d like solved in your business right now. Is that the best way to go about it?

Amy: It’s such a great question! You can do a few different things: one, yes, you could post just directly on your Facebook page and say, hey will you list the one challenge you’re facing in your business right now, or maybe it’s the one thing that you would love to learn from me basing on your content or whatever it might be, you can make it more personal or more general. So just posting a question on your Facebook page could really work. Or you could use something like Survey Monkey or I think there is one called the Survey Pop where you can actually create a quick survey and link to it on your Facebook page. You’ll probably get more information that way but probably less people will engage with it. The easier you make it, the more often you’ll get a bigger response. So I think either of those options would work but you definitely would want to put some thought on that question you ask because it is going to be extremely valuable in a sense that you are going to put your time and effort in this giveaway, you want it to be worth it.

James: Yeah for sure. Okay cool, we’ve got a feel for perhaps what we might offer and how we might put it together Amy. I guess the next step is to create a page that we can send people to, what might that page look like?

Amy: Okay, so great question. Here’s what happens when we’re talking about Facebook marketing in terms of giving away something to grow your email list and that is you can have an opt in page or a lead page inside of Facebook our outside of Facebook. You can put one in to a custom app so you’ve got that big timeline cover photo on your Facebook page and underneath you’ve got those small boxes where you can create an opt in page. To me the easiest way to do it, you can tell me if you have a different solution, but the easiest way is to use a tool like Lead Pages where you create the opt in, and literally it means adding some text; they’ve already created all these different pages that convert really well; so you add some text and some details and then you can actually have that live outside of Facebook on its own URL or lead pages now allows you basically with like 2 clicks of a button to pull it on to a custom map on your Facebook page so either, or – either option, very, very easy if you use a tool like Lead Pages. So the reason why I always talk about Lead Pages is they’ve tested their opt in pages they know what converts and a lot of the time if you tried to create an opt in page on you’re not going to know exactly placing a button here versus there and what the difference in conversion would be. And so you might be spending all this time trying to drive traffic to an opt in page and is not converting. The lay out of the opt in page is really important, would you agree?

James: Absolutely! And I’ve got some follow up questions too Amy now that you’ve mentioned Lead Pages. My first question is based around posting that page to your Facebook or your own site, which is highest converting generally?

Amy: Here is the deal- it really depends what you are marketing and we are going to talk about Facebook ads in a moment because that’s the piece of the puzzle. If you are running Facebook ads to your existing fan base, you have a little bit more leeway where you can get people outside of Facebook if they are already your fans and get pretty good conversions- really strong conversions actually. If you are marketing to nonfans, I always suggest bringing people to your Facebook page, your custom app because studies show – we don’t have an exact number, but studies show that you will keep people’s trust who are more likely to give you name and email if you take a nonfan in to a custom app in Facebook versus a non URL page that they have never been to. So you see the difference there? If they are your fans already and you have their trust, you can take them to a non URL page. If you don’t have their trust just yet, I’d keep them inside of Facebook.

James: Got it! That makes total sense; keep them in the environment that they’re used to, I guess that’s the thought process behind that, and yes, my second question around Lead Pages is, I guess we have a number of guests here who would be familiar with the templates and formats inside Lead Pages. Which of those templates has worked best for you?

Amy: Oh, great question! The one that’s been working best for me – there’s always changes so recently they just changed things, it looks like a video in the middle whereas I am giving away three part video series so it looks like a  video in the middle and people click the video and there is actually a pop up that says hey you’ve got to opt in first to get the video and so then it has just an area to put in an email but here is the best way to do it. When you go to Lead Pages, you can actually sort the templates by the ones that are converting the best at that time. So that’s what I always do – probably every 30 days I’d go back to the Lead Pages, I’d sort the templates, find the ones that are converting the best, I’d test it out versus the one that I am currently using. That’s how I usually find the ones that do the best.

James: Got it, got it. That’s a pretty nifty tool that they’ve just added inside Lead Pages so for all those familiar with that, I am sure they can have a play around and find the best and most appropriate form of opt in page for their particular offer. Let’s roll it forward from their Amy. We’ve got the landing page set up. We’ve got the offer sorted. We’ve probably got delivery worked out, which I guess if you Lead Pages they can take care of that for you as well if you’ve got some form of PDF give away. I guess we are talking about traffic next are we? Is that the next step?

Amy: Yes, so this is the big step of the puzzle and this is really where it comes down to how powerful Facebook marketing can be. So what I do, and this is what I teach all my students, is I use page post ads. A page post ad is really just a status update that you put on your Facebook page. Just like any post, you would first post it on your Facebook page and then from there you would go in to the ads dashboard and you’d turn that status update in to an ad. Let me dissect his a little bit just to make sure that it really makes sense. For example, I do one for an automated Facebook webinar I have, so what happens is the image I use, usually it’s a picture of me because it’s my own personal brand, and maybe I will have some text next to my image, something like free training how to use Facebook for your business. So the image shows a picture of me and then some words about the training. And then the status update might say something like I am hosting a brand new free training all about Facebook marketing. Here’s what you’ll learn. And I might list three quick little tips on what they might learn in the training and I’ll just say click here to join. And so now you have a link in that status update that will send people to your custom opt in page or whatever tool you use for that opt in page. So this is just a status update; anything that you would post on your page is a status update. From there, I actually go in to the power editor. I don’t use the traditional power ads dashboard but I use the power editor just because it is more robust, more features and better results on the Facebook apps platform, totally free, you can find it inside your traditional ads dashboard. You’ll see an option for the power editor in the left column. It will take you there. There’s a lot of free trainings on how to use it. It’s a little clunky at first but here is why I use the power editor. From there, I can actually choose my status update that I want to turn in to a page post ad and I can decide where I want that ad placed. Here’s kind of the big aha moment in the page post ad strategy. I only place my page post ads in the news feed of desktop and mobile. What where finding is that ads that are in the news feed versus the right hand side column ads. We’re seeing about 2-5% conversion rates with those news feed ads versus 0.04% in those right hand column ads. Plus, a page post ad in the news feed looks like a status update. It’s got the like, the share, comment buttons and it’s got this big image of you when you upload an image and a status update so we’re talking about a really big real estate in the news feed for an ad versus that tiny little rectangle that you get in the right hand column. So to me, this totally changes the game.

James: Okay, so follow up question Amy, how does the price of the traffic differ from the right hand side column ads and the news feed ads that you’re talking about? Are we literally getting the same price of traffic but 10, 20-fold the conversion rate or is this traffic more expensive to us?

Amy: Oh, such a great question. Facebook won’t come out and say this, however, all of my peers and from my own personal experience, I tend to pay less per click on a news feed ad than I would with a column ad. So for example, the average cost per click on a right hand column ad is 80 cents, but I have seen in the news feed, 30, 40 ,50, 60 cents per click depending on the pages I am targeting versus that average 80  cents per click in the right hand column. So I am personally and many of my peers that use the same strategy are actually seeing less per click on that ad versus the right hand column ads.

James: Got it, and I am guessing the image content is very important. The example that you used was a picture of yourself. What about for an offline business? Perhaps a service related business that have not got a face or a personal brand behind them, what might be the kind of the images that they could use within that update that are going to be effective to drive clicks and traffic?

Amy: Great! I am so glad you asked this because two things here – if you are going to use an image in your ad, which I suggest every does for a page post ad, one thing you need to know is that image, when it actually is put out in to the news feed, that image cannot have more than 20% text. So when you’re going to turn this status update in to a page post ad, no image in an ad can go in the news feed if it has more than 20% text, it will get disapproved. So with that, your question is really important because you want to use graphics or imagery as well as text. So if you are not your own personal brand and are not going to use your headshot, you just want to think in terms of what kind of feeling you want that ad to portray. Usually if you can use images of people, that’s probably the best way to go; happy, smiling women still tend to convert better than any other people on Facebook. Babies tend to be the second. But you have to make sure that that picture is actually going to make sense for whatever it is that you are promoting. So let’s just say that you are a restaurant.  Showing some imagery of the people inside your restaurant is a great idea. Adding text to that image talking about a discount or a coupon is going to take things actually to the next level meaning people are going to start paying attention. The better that image is – more colorful, it really stands out, the more it is going to grab the attention of the people that are sort of just scrolling in to their news feed. So spend time on that image for sure.

James: Yeah, good stuff! Okay, I guess my next question and perhaps final question around the targeting of the advertising would be sequencing. Is this sort of a one-time shot or should we be thinking about sequencing ads with multiple messages considering that it is going to be going out in the news feed itself?

Amy: I am not exactly sure what you mean by the whole sequencing, give me a little more information.

James: Okay. So would we create just one ad and then let it run or would we create multiple ads that perhaps target the same audience but would be sequenced one after the other?

Amy: Gotcha! And that actually leads me to one more thing I want to add to this – these are such great questions James. So basically what you want to do, you could actually do just one add, and then target different groups. So within targeting on your Facebook ad dashboard, you can actually target other Facebook pages so let’s say for me, I am in the marketing arena, so let’s say I want to target all the fans of the Hub Spot Facebook page. So I could target all of their fans but maybe I want to run another type of campaign, so I’d like to keep my ads in different campaigns depending on who the target audience is, I might run my add through people like mail chimp, infusion soft, aweber- those different Facebook pages that have fans that are thinking about building an email list and maybe my webinar is about how to use Facebook to build your email list. So you want to target not only your competitor’s fans by targeting their Facebook page but maybe think of pages that have an audience aligned with whatever it is that you are promoting. So you can do all of that inside the targeting area of your ads dashboard. So you can do the same ad and just target different groups but one thing I want you to think about is what happens once they opt in, and that’s really where most people fall short – and that is that when someone opts in to get your free give away, I encourage you to create an auto responder series, meaning you give them that give away, and then you set up three or four emails that go out maybe every week in terms of just really great, valuable content related to that giveaway. So you’re just building up trust and you’re building your relationship through a series of just value added emails. At some point after you add those value added emails, you’re going to promote something. Tell people how they can do business with you. That way you turn that lead in to a customer. To me the biggest thing for your buck is to collect leads in your Facebook marketing and use email marketing to eventually turn that lead in to a customer. I have seen it happen over and over again where it can be really successful when you put the effort in to the strategy.

James: Yeah, great stuff. Well I guess the question that would come to my mind that would follow that up Amy is what is the next best step? Do you find any particular form of offer – a webinar, a free consultation, or something similar that seem to be working best off the back of an opt in from Facebook?

Amy: Yes, and that is to start the beginning of your sales funnel so here’s what I mean. If you have programs, products and services, strategy could work really well for you. But start at the beginning of your sales funnel. Maybe you have a free consultation or a $49 product or a $79 product, something for people to get their feet wet but there is not a huge investment. This does not work really well when you get the lead and right at the start you tell them about a thousand dollar program without earning the right to tell them about these big programs and products you have. To me you have to earn it. So you have to start with those value added emails and then just ease them in to your sales funnel, from there you can upsell and do bigger opportunities but it tends to work really well when you get them through the door of that introductory offer.

James: Yeah, that would make total sense. Well, let’s talk about results Amy. What sort of results have you been able to achieve personally with this strategy because I think you have been doing it quite heavily through Facebook to that webinar that you spoke about. What sort of results has it gotten you?

Amy: Yes, you know the whole idea of page post ads in general has dramatically changed my business. When I first started running these ads and experimenting with them, at that time I would get maybe 50 people in to program, it’s called the Facebook Marketing Profit Lab but I only offer it a few time a quarter, and so I would start with getting about 50 people in the funnel. When I perfected this and really understood how these page posts ads can work, what to do and when to get his lead, at this point, we just finished the Profit Lab with over 750 members in the program for this quarter. And I truly set it up so that I ran ads to a live webinar I taught for about 30 minutes and then I told people about my program. But because I have been doing this over and over again, these people have been on my email list as well so they’ve gotten other communication from me so what I really want to point out here is if you continued this type of strategy, you’re building up relationships so that you can then start promoting even bigger programs. So it dramatically changed my business from a six-figure business maybe that first year to multiple six-figure business really quickly after that and I really attribute that to my Facebook ads strategies.

James: There you go, well, if you’ve not just given away some form of six figure strategy there Amy for people to go and implement then I think people are listening with their ears closed right now so it proves to them you’ve done it yourself. Now you teach all of these stuff Amy. You are very passionate about it. I think you’ve also got some places where people can go to to learn more from you either through some form of paid courses or pre information, where might we send off to today if they’ve got their ears pricked up as a result of this interview?

Amy: Thanks for asking. You can go to AmyPorterfield.com or you can go amyporterfield.com/fbwebinar. You can see my webinars and see how I do and my strategy a little bit more so I appreciate you asking.

James: You are most welcome! For our listeners, we’ll make sure that the links to those places are featured in today’s show notes. Amy have you got any parting advise that you can offer our listener or maybe some form of call to action or suggestion that you could make as a result of today that we can get our listeners to take account for after today’s session?

Amy: I do, I love that concept. So first off, you’ve got to be patient with yourself. Facebook ads definitely take a little time and trial and effort so you’ve just got to be patient with them and experiment yourself. Once you really start understanding them, they really take off! And also one thing I learned from working with Tony Robbins is never ever leave a scene of a training or just a podcast that you learned something without committing to take action in the next 24 hours. So right now, what you need to tell yourself is that in the next 24 hours I am going to do – whatever it is that you’re going to start to take a step forward to get some momentum so I encourage everyone listening to do just that.

James: Fantastic! To our listeners out there, whatever you are taking action on, we’d love to hear about it in the comments section for today’s episode. So let us know what you’ve done and how you’ve gotten on with it and report to us back in the comments. I am sure Amy will pop along to offer some suggestions and feedback as well so Amy, thank you so much for coming on Traffic Jam it’s been an absolute ball and hopefully we’ll get an opportunity to do it again sometime.

Amy: Thanks for having me I appreciate it!

This week’s news in traffic

This week Google+ have added vanity URLs meaning you can finally kiss goodbye to those super long, ugly looking URLs which used to accompany your Google+ profile. I got an email to say that my URL had automatically been changed to plus.google.com/plusJamesReynolds so if you want to come and find me that’s the place to find me on Google+ and you can get yours updated too as long as you have a profile photo, you have at least 10 followers and have an account that’s 30 days old or more.

Twitter have tweaked their timeline to include pictures and vine videos right front and center in tweets. Those also include paid tweets created and promoted by brands. Whilst this may seem a small update it is in fact pretty significant because it is giving the brands now an opportunity to buy display advertising on Twitter.

In a report I found in Mashable.com Bing is making sure that you never, ever miss an ad again. Microsoft search engine is offering advertisers basically hero ads which cover the full page on Bing’s home page at search. According to Larry King, the chief technology officer of the search engine marketing company, this will appear when the searcher searches for a specific company by name.. If you search for Home Depot or Radio Shack or Walt Disneyworld for example, you might come face to face with a monster sized full screen advertisement. In this move, additional search results will appear on the second page. The new ads, which Bing announced in an event in Microsoft campus on Wednesday of last week, are being tested right now with selected advertisers within the United States which are utilizing Windows 8.1 according to a company spokesperson.

Thank you to you if you’ve left a comment or a review over at iTunes for Traffic Jam podcast. Please do keep them coming in, I really do appreciate them, in fact I’ve got a couple to read out this week from opposite sides of the world. Let’s go to Canada first. Robin Hipple says great energy and timely information. James does a great job of keeping on top of the latest strategies and bringing in A-list experts to share their wealth of knowledge, so thank you Robin. And then from another side of the world, all the way down in Australia, Tasmania, Happy From Hope Out which I know is my friend David Counsel says, a must listen. JR is the go to guy so if you’ve not left a review or a rating yet for Traffic Jam, I’d love to hear your feedback on the show. in order to leave a rating what you’ve got to do is log in to your iTunes account, do a quick search for Traffic Jam podcast and then on the podcast page. Select the ratings and reviews tab, select a star rating and then leave me a comment. The likelihood is that on a future episode, I will read your review out and if you are smart enough to leave your website address, I’ll make sure that’s mentioned too as well so you may get a little bit of extra exposure and perhaps some traffic to your own website!

The One Minute Traffic Tip

This one is short and sharp and I will actually try to get it done within one minute, and that is, make sure that you are in investing in a good website design. It may sound for a traffic tip but ensuring your site looks good will encourage people to stick around when they go to visit your site and come back to your site again in the future, therefore encouraging repeat visits. This is important for your desktop site but of course don’t forget your mobile version either. So much traffic now is originating from mobile devices, currently at about 25% of all internet traffic but growing by the day. So if you’ve not done so already, now is the time to invest in mobile. I have an episode coming up on mobile marketing in the coming weeks but in the meantime, if you’ve not done so already, make sure your site is mobile optimized.

That pretty much brings Episode#23 to a close. We will of course be back here in about 7 days from now for another episode of Traffic Jam. On next week’s episode I’m going to be talking to Marcus Sheridan. He’s the sales lion and we’re going to have a conversation all about blogging. What I like most about Marcus is that his approach is incredibly easy to implement. What he’s going to teach you will move you right past that writer’s block that all of us experience from time to time to create that blog posts that are not just epically useful but also can get found easily by the search engine so make sure you check out my interview with Marcus on episode#24.

To play out episode#23 I’ve got a track chosen by me by an artist chosen by my guest today, Amy Porterfield. Amy said to me I want any track by Luke Bryan and then left me to go off and research and choose one, so the track I have chosen is called I Don’t Want This Night To End and my only reason for choosing it is the following line in the song – You’ve got your hands up, you’re rocking in my truck. I just laughed at that. Totally awesome, so play out this week’s episode, we’ve got a track by Luke Bryan. I Don’t Want This Night To End. See you again soon!

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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.

The first Traffic Jam search engine optimisation episode has been along time coming. The wait is finally over. My guest on episode 22 is Rand Fishkin the CEO of Moz.com, the founder of inbound.org and possibly the most prominent SEO in our industry.

Rand and the team at Moz are at the forefront of search marketing research. Moz through their field studies (such as the bi annual ranking factors study) and with access to a large data set via their analytics and marketing tools know better than most what’s influencing search rank in the current times. Listen in to my grilling chat with Rand as we discuss why SEO now is different, what most SEO’s have got wrong, how Google+ really affects your rank and much more…..

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

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“Don’t just build a website, build a brand.” @RandFish
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Hello listener! You’re tuned in to Traffic Jam, this is episode#22 and I am your host James Reynolds. Of course you are listening in to the show that teaches you how to build and grow a profitable audience for your website.

Now I’ve got to say this episode is one that I have been looking forward to particularly more so that others because today we’re finally covering the topic of search engine optimization which if you are a regular listener to the show, you will know that it’s something that’s particularly close to my heart, because I do myself run an SEO agency SEO Sherpa and it’s of course it’s a topic I get to talk about everyday coaching my team, educating customers on and of course creating really valuable content around that topic too!

So when we did finally cover the topic of SEO, I wanted to make sure that we got a guest on the show who could add real value; someone that I look up to personally myself and I don’t think my guest today is going to disappoint at all. My guest today is none other than Rand Fishkin. He’s the CEO of moz.com which I have got to say are rather up there in the go to resources for all things SEO as far as I am concerned, probably my top 3 if not my top 1 actually. I really do love everything that moz.com do. He is also the co-author of the art of SEO and co-founder of inbound.org. Both inbound resources of SEO in their own right. And aside from all of that cool stuff, he is a fan of NFL Football, he likes a bit of theater and he likes a good drink of scotch so in my mind he is a pretty cool guy.

Rand’s interview is coming right up but of course you don’t want to go anywhere after that because we’ll have the regular segments which we all so much like and enjoy – at least I enjoy making them. Anyway we’ve got the one minute news in traffic, this week’s news in traffic, and of course to play out the show we have our musical jam which is always a bit of fun so I guess without any further ado today I really want to get stuck right in to the episode right away, the topic is search engine optimization, inbound marketing and we do cover some other stuff related to social media and some cool other traffic tips that Rand serves up to. So that’s served up right away, right now is my interview with Rand Fishkin, here it is.

James: Okay, so this is Traffic Jam episode #22 and my guest in the Traffic Jam hot seat today is the CEO of Moz, the founder of Inbound.org co-author of The Art of SEO and self-confessed search and social addict, Mr. Rand Fishkin. Rand, welcome to Traffic Jam!

Rand: James, thank you so much for having me.

James: I guess I could have added a bit of a PS there and said you are a bit of a scotch lover as well, I did notice that.

Rand: Oh, that is definitely true!

James: Good. Well the conversation is not going to be about scotch, at least in the most parts today. We are going to dive deep in to a few different topics but mainly focused around search engine optimization because that’s kind of your real area of expertise should I say. Now my only question is, you started out online in about 1997 I believe, before there was even Google. Now when you take away all the tricks and tactics, what’s actually changed in the art of search engine optimization in that time?

Rand: We’ve actually had a huge amount of change in that kind of period; I would kind of separate us in to three unique blocks of about 5 years each. ’97 to about 2002, SEO was pretty much – well you could be very successful with SEO simply by doing a small number of manipulative things and I think that was really the start of the black hat, gray hat SEO world; you know, stuffing your SEO title tags, meta keywords tags with terms and phrases that would help you come up on the engines, putting white on white text so that you have the keyword repeated on your page more than your competitor would, buying crappy links from link networks, spamming blogs, all these kinds of things. And really Google’s rise to dominance in the early 2000 helped put an end to a lot of those practices and made them tremendously harder and those folks who still did practice the gray hat- black hat got much more sophisticated and then we had our first generation of what we’d call our SEO marketers in the early mid-2000s and those folks, I think many of them are still practicing today of course but this is when you’ve really got an art behind SEO, it was a practice that required some technical expertise; making websites search-friendly and search-optimized as well as doing some classic kinds of marketing things like building a brand and earning links and getting attention and PR and press and those kinds of things. And today I think that’s become an even wider array of things. If you want to be good in SEO in 2013 you really have to be good at a lot of different kinds of marketing because the search engines are taking in to account signals that are far broader than what they’d ever consider in the past so links are still important of course, what’s on your pages is still important as well. But now we’re looking at things like social shares and user and usage data; there’s a lot of signals coming from a lot of interesting places! Topic modeling kinds of things that they’re doing on text analyses with updates like Penguin they’re doing more and more sophisticated kinds of query matching. So this has become an art and a science; it’s big broad marketing and it’s also getting technical in the details.

James: Okay, good. I’m going to ask you a question now where you may cringe at a little when I ask you because guys like you and I have to sort of respond to this question it seems extensively, perhaps more times than we’ve had hot dinners. In 2013 with everything that’s gone on in the past 12 months and perhaps even before that, is SEO as we know it finally dead?

Rand: Well, it depend on what you call – I mean, what’s dead is an old style of SEO that had barely existed and chugged along in from the late ‘90s into the early 2000s and now is almost completely dead and that sort of SEO is Oh look here’s a keyword people are searching for, I’m going to go make a page, put that keyword in my title, put it all over the page, build a bunch of links to it with that anchor text and it doesn’t really matter on the page or whether my site’s any good, I can still rank because I’ve got the links, I got the anchor text, and I got the keyword matching. That kind of SEO, if not dead, is definitely on life support!

James: Yeah. Well I want to kind of roll forward a bit now and we’ll talk about some of the stuff that really does influence ranking in 2013 and over at moz.com you’ve got access to a lot of data via your tools where you do your sort of bi-yearly SEO ranking factors study. Let’s talk a bit about what really does affect ranking at this point. If Google’s own official language is anything to go by, they say that all you need to do is focus on having a good website with a good user experience and I certainly agree with the fact that you can’t rank a shitty website in 2013, but is it really that simple? I mean is that really where the focus should be?

Rand: It’s not that simple! And I think that Google’s advice is actually kind of poor on that front. Like many things in the world of marketing or in the world of building a business, it’s complicated, there’s a lot of new ones, and there’s a lot of things of grey. And one of the things James, I think this is an important distinction, what I don’t want to say is I or any other expert in the SEO field knows all of the things, or even most of the things that Google actually uses on their ranking algorithm on who should be higher in ranking than somebody else. However, what we do know a lot about is the features and factors that predict that on average a site that performs above other sites, or pages that performs than other pages – what are the features that that site or page has? And we can tell you that from looking at lots of broad correlation stuff from first-hand experience of earning particular kinds of signals and seeing sites go rank above them. Of course in our ranking factors, the bi-yearly one that you mentioned, we also do a survey of a large number of professional SEOs and we aggregate their opinions and that’s where a lot of this data comes from. So today if you go and search Google for ranking factors, you’ll find this big list and you can go and check it out at your leisure but essentially we’re talking about a few big categories that most of the elements have fallen under. The big important one is domain authority. This is essentially how powerful, important, reputable, influential, how effective in gaining and keeping an audience is the website on which you’re hosting your pages. So for example if I were to go and try and rank for orange ipods, I would have far greater success if I put a page on Wikipedia.org than if I put a page in rands-house-of-ipods.info.

James: Which you don’t own that domain?

Rand: Oh I just bought it, yeah, yeah.

James: Well good luck!

Rand: Yeah, right! And this is because Wikipedia has all these signals right? It has all these signals that Google has seen over time. It has seen lots of people going to those pages and clicking on that site using it, remember they have access to Google Chrome which is tied to the #1 most popular browser, they have the toolbar, they have data from Google Analytics, they have data from providing wifi and internet service, they’ve got a ton of information on who visits what, when or why, how – all of that stuff and so they can take those signals in to account when determining how important a site is. They also know if a site has earned a lot of links, a lot of mentions, a lot of brand extensions, then that site is probably more important than others. That’s kind of the concept of domain authority and that’s why in the SEO world one of the things that I always recommend to people is don’t be building multiple websites targeting different things, build a brand, build a business with a brand that people know and has a positive association. Build it on one website, keep all of your content on that one website if you possibly can.

James: Yeah, and I guess the spin-off of that Rand is that it is also far easier to manage one resource than be trying to split your attention to multiple websites all particularly set up to target a particular keyword phrase. It is particularly heavy on resource- that type of strategy.

Rand: Yeah absolutely! And I think you’re doing exactly that with Traffic Jam right? You’ve built up a brand that people know, when you emailed me, I recognized it, I googled it, I saw the other guests – it builds a brand right? And that’s exactly what you’re searching for. Some of the other elements are, there’s obviously page level signals meaning are lots of people pointing to the page from lots of good sources? Google has gotten really good at differentiating essentially editorially given links from the classic kinds of links that SEO has given to build or acquire. And I think they have really shifted to a world where acquired links – links that you can get without interfacing with another person or without earning them are going away in terms of their value and importance. They do look at things like anchor text, what the links say, but they’re also looking at things like surrounding text and the text of the page that the link is on and we’ve seen some pretty interesting rankings where something will be ranking really well for keywords that has virtually no anchor text. You’ll go and look and a lot of the pages to it happen to mention or be about that term or phrase. So that is contextual matching on Google’s part. And then there’s social shares using a number of other technical things obviously keyword matching on the page is still relatively important as well.

James: Good, well I think we might tackle a couple of those in a moment or so but before that, I read in a post recently where you likened link building to sex. I’m not quite seeing the connection, tell me more about that.

Rand: Yeah it goes in a off-handed relation; let me put it differently. It is very similar to dating, right? What you definitely don’t want to do if you want a long term positive relationship with Google is to go and do all kinds of things that are one time paid activities. And this is true in dating as well, generally speaking right? If you’re seeking a long term positive relationship with a man or a woman you generally don’t want to do one time paid kinds of activity.

James: Yeah, got it. And I think that this is something that is underlying within the kind of SEO community at large that people are very much focuses on this transaction on the type of SEO where they’re just thinking on the tactical elements of building links as opposed to what you are speaking about and I certainly advocate building up authority and a brand online.

Rand: Yeah, actually I think you nailed it James, the term transactional SEO is what I’d use to describe this and I’d say that is dying or dead.

James: Yeah, let’s talk a bit about social signals; you know the amount of likes and shares and how that influences rank, I think that came up recently highly within your moz.com report and you also made a comment recently about Google+ having a significant impact on page rank passing or something to that effect which then got you in to an online squabble with Matt Cutts. Tell us a little bit about what happened there.

Rand: Sure, yeah. So Cyrus Shepard who’s one of our senior content editor in Moz, fantastic guy, really, really smart SEO, he basically had noted this very high correlation between things that earn Google+1s and Google+ shares and the way that those pages rank. And so he wrote about this, in a way which I think was pretty well done, he did not say Google is clearly using +1s or Google+ shares to rank. He said, pages that are earning these signals, pages that are getting lots of +1s and lots of shares tend to be outranking pages that don’t at a very high rate. And Matt Cutts had jumped on and he said, his language was extremely careful – it was something to the effect of – I’m not sure how to best debunk this.  I think that was what he said and then people jumped in and said, hey wait, what do you mean? Do you mean this was a poorly done correlation study? Do you mean Google isn’t directly using +1? Are they not using shares? I know that if someone I follow in Google+ +1 something then it ranks higher for me, you know, that personalization element is certainly there. Google shows you in there if you +1 something it will say James Reynolds +1 this, follow them. So the clarity around what is exactly is wrong I think is unknown at this point. I think Matt Cutts was essentially trying to say we don’t directly use +1s as a ranking signal in themselves exclusively and that actually you can sort of prove to yourself and I think that Eric and Mark on Google+ did a pretty good experiment. They essentially said, hey let’s go take a page that’s ranking on Page2, were going to get a bunch of people to +1 that page but not do anything else- no link building, none of those things, let’s see what happens. Gosh we replicated that experiment a few different times and no movement on any of those search results. It does look like independent of everything else, Google+1s exclusively are not the kind of transactional tactic or transactional SEO that’s going to move the needle for you. But, I think it is really, really dumb if you take that experiment and Matt Cutts’s words and you say to yourself oh, well there is no reason for me to use Google+ to help my SEO both because of your personalization and because what’s certainly going on there because there is some sort of secondary or associated signal that’s causing that high correlation meaning maybe it’s the page that has the ability or in general would earn lots of +1s also earns other things that Google is considering also gets whatever it is, links mention some sort of secondary element. Maybe they’re using their +1 in combination with other sorts of data on Google+ or in their world of signals that they consider in general. But whatever it is, it is a really high correlation; it is a weirdly high correlation.

James: That’s interesting. Has there been anything Rand that in all of your studies at moz.com and access to all the data that you have that has been a really surprising ranking factor if you like that has caused significant movement, something perhaps that Google would see as being insignificant? Has there been anything like that that you’ve come across your time?

Rand: Yea, we’ve seen a few weird ones. I think one of the more odd ones a few years back was the high correlation with no-followed things in the ranking factor specifically and we did see some experiments. That was one that we tried to perform some experiments and seem to see movement from no-followed links and we weren’t exactly sure what was going on, that correlation by the way has over time decreased; when people tried to replicate the experiment and seen less impact or maybe no impact from no-follow links so it could have been Google used to consider or maybe just some weird data. There was one a few years back, this has gone back a while now, but we noticed that Google would not index a page if it ended in the extension 0. Most pages in the internet right, they’d have no extension or an extension of .html or .php or what have you but we had a page that was .zero and we looked around and we found there were other pages that were .zero and we learned that none of them are indexed. So we actually dropped a line to some folks in Google and I emailed Matt Cutts and some other folks in the search quality team, they fixed it.

James: There you go!

Rand: Some weird ones.

James: It is some weird ones! Okay, so I guess we could just wrap that up and say probably the biggest mistake that you can make in SEO in ending all of your pages with .zero.

Rand: But Google fixed it now so you’re okay.

James: We’ll say back in the day. What about now Rand, is there anything that you’ve seen come up time and time again that you see is a big mistake that people just generally make with their SEO beyond the transactional stuff that we’ve talked about in terms of the general direction, is there any big clangers that people should be aware of?

Rand: This is really consistent, I don’t know where it comes from but I have seen people who target keywords right, they say, I want to rank for this orange ipod and they do the sort of ranking of things right and they get the user experience totally wrong! They don’t think about when people go to this page what do they actually want not what’s the content that’s going to help rank me well. But what does a human being, who clicks over at the search result looking for, and what’s going to help them discover that? And the problem is that it doesn’t just hurt you from a conversion and optimization standpoint although of course it does, it also hurts you from a ranking standpoint and the reason is that they have used, and Google has talked about is that they do use signals, not directly like bounce rate but something they kind of call pogo sticking, which is essentially, I’d perform a search on orange ipods, I click on your page, it loads for me and I immediately click the back button because you did not have what I want, and instead of performing a new search, or going on to a different activity, I’ve gone back to Google so now Google knows that  I am no longer on your page and on theirs and they click on a different result or they find your search query, and that tells Google, hey wait a minute, I know you’ve got a bunch of signals saying you have that but the user data is telling us this is a crappy experience and maybe we shouldn’t be ranking this page. So that’s one that I have seen people get wrong time and time again – they’re kind of good on the SEO side and then bad at delivering what people want!

James:  I guess that’s just inherent of people thinking about SEO as a tool for traffic rather than thinking what the end game is and that would be some form of business metric, a sign up or sale, or a contact – whatever it would happen to be, the secondary action you want people to take once they get to your website but ultimately what you really want to be driving your SEO right?

Rand: Absolutely! Why are you trying to get this traffic if not to help people accomplish some goal?

James: Yeah, got it! Well, Rand, let’s turn our attention and conversation to moz.com. You’re a company that primary offers content and tool to kind of gear towards inbound marketing, what are some of the most effective marketing channels that you’re using in your own business right now?

Rand: Sure! SEO actually is a big one for us, social media actually is huge so Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, Facebook actually has gotten sort of more effective over the years for us which is interesting because I always think of Facebook as being a very consumer focused network and not really B2B and I always think gosh, who’s going to share moz’s post with their friends and family in Facebook, but it has been happening but I think people are using it more and more as a personal network. We actually have a lot of success on the paid media guide with remarketing and retargeting which is essentially you come visit moz through one of those channel searches or social for our content, maybe you type it in, maybe enter a community, and then we drop essentially a cookie that says hey this person has visited moz, we especially drop that cookie if you go and check out our products section, take a tour of Moz Analytics and then as you’re surfing around the rest of the web, we’ll have the display ads, a lot of them featuring our robot kind of popping up all over with people commenting on Twitter and those kinds of things like hey I visited your website and now Roger is following me around like a lost puppy and that’s actually been quite an effective channel on paid site. I do invite folks to check out remarketing I think it is a cost effective way and one of the only ones I consider inbound media because you’re really taking people who have already expressed an interest and showing them ads based on that.

James: Yeah, we’ve done a whole episode on that, I forget to recall the episode number but it’s the one with Justin Brooks so I’ll link to that within the show notes because I personally have been getting great results with remarketing as well. Rand, now you mentioned also in our kind of pre-interview discussion that you’re getting really good results with Facebook promoted posts that were promoted in the first few minutes of seeing a good strong interaction. Would you share that little tip with our listener?

Rand: Yeah, well basically Facebook, it’s no longer about the purely, about the edge rank algorithm because of course what shows up in the feed as getting so different over time with Facebook but what we have seen is that Facebook essentially relies on acceleration rate in the very early moments of a new post going out so when we’re using a Facebook share that we’re getting a lot of activity on, what we’ll generally do is we’ll almost always use an image, a photograph, a screenshot, something that’s interesting and would make someone want to click on the link or the post and would want to share it, as opposed to just sharing a raw link, just sharing a raw text. And then, in those first 5 to 10 minutes – it’s really about a 10 minute window and in the first five you should know, you want to look and see how much interaction you’re getting, how many likes, how many shares, how many comments and if that number is sort of exceeding your general average by a lot. So let’s say you’ve got, let’s say from my personal page I have around five thousand fans and when I see a post that’s got 50 likes in the first 7-9 minutes, I really think to myself okay, this is an opportunity to pay for a promoted post and spend a lot less money to reach many, many more people than I ordinarily would. And that’s because essentially Facebook’s algorithm at that point is showing show this to a broader set of people because that’s earned an early traction and attention and if you’re getting high engagement rates with it every person or every group of a hundred people who see it are going to be even more and be cause for every share and every like that you have. So that’s a really interesting thing to pay attention to is that Facebook is not one of those fire and forget ad networks especially if you’re using the promoted posts functionality you want to be paying close attention to for the first few minutes.

James: Yeah and I think Facebook really introduced recently a little prompt or a little pop up or something that tells you in the first few minutes you know this is your above average interaction, do you want to promote it? Do you want to put some money behind it? So it’s quite an easy way to keep tabs at that now right?

Rand: Absolutely! And I think that’s very smart on Facebook’s part but it also kind of exposes and interesting portion of their algorithm for showing stuff so just make sure- you actually have to visit your Facebook page again in these first few minutes right? Don’t be hitting refresh every three seconds but every ten or twenty seconds maybe.

James: Yeah, good stuff. Cool, well, over at moz.com you have recently changed your brand’s name from SEOMoz to Moz.com a few months ago, what was the move behind that change?

Rand: Well, it was a few things, one is we threw some acquisitions and threw some things that we built in-house, we’ve expanded quite a bit beyond SEO so we now offer a number of tools for things like social media marketing, a lot of social media marketers using brand mention trackers, freshweb explorer; so given that we have gone beyond SEO, it is actually quite hard, I’m sure you can imagine, to have a bran that says SEO Moz but does things that are not SEO and so we realize we needed to expand the brand we needed to do that. But to be honest there are other reasons, one of those was our take on the expansion of SEO which is that the responsibilities of someone who does search engine optimization have expanded very far outside of what is classically considered as SEO and so for a lot of those folks, the SEO name is saying I help with SEOs as saying I am an SEO is very limiting because then you don’t get budget or authority or influence to do all the kinds of things that you need to do just to influence SEO alone, and then one of the more peculiar ones was actually having SEO in our name made it very hard to hire software engineers. Software engineers are a group who in general has a bad taste in their mouth about SEO and so even though we could get someone in for an interview, it could be a very compelling place to work, just getting that application is tough.

James: Yeah, well that’s interesting. It is a bit of a black word in many circles right? If you are an SEO consultant, it kind of has a tarnished view in many cases to previous experience so I can see exactly why you did that. Did you have to pry the domain away from someone who already pre-owned it?

Rand: Yeah there was a guy who did own the domain though he wasn’t using it so we bought it from him, he was actually pretty cool about it, I think his price was quite high but reasonable enough.

James: Yeah, I’m sure, and based on everything that we’ve discussed here earlier, building that brand up, getting that domain name right itself, I’m sure that investment will pay itself over many times in the future.

Rand: That’s what we’re hoping.

James: Good stuff. Well Rand, to close out, what’s on your own personal radar coming up?

Rand: Gosh, I am seeing this more and more, the trend in content marketing, helping to drive a lot of attention and awareness back to SEO. It is kind of weird now that content marketing has become such a buzzword and such a big practice in the industry like social media marketing was a few years ago. The overlap with SEO from a content marketing perspective is even higher so we’re seeing a lot of renewed interest in that. Also on the transactional SEO side, many folks use and have used for years a strategy that is very reliant on guest blogging and Google has made a lot of statements in the last couple of months suggesting that guest blogging is going to be, guest posting anyway, is going to be a part of the algorithmic update that may devalue a lot of those and so I think if you’re doing – Ink or Fast company reached out to me and asked if I’d write an article for them and I said sure. They put it up and there’s my bio line on Inc’s website. That kind of stuff is not going to get you in trouble and that’s probably a very, very valuable link. But if you are posting on hundreds, thousands of sites with mediocre to crappy contents, stuff that you’ve copied everywhere, stuff that no one cares about or reads jus to earn a link back, I’m guessing Google’s going to find a way to devalue those links as an influence in a near term algorithmic update.

James: Yeah. And I think you did a whiteboard Friday update on this not too long ago right? Rand, would I be correct in saying?

Rand: Yeah, I did film a bit about guest posting maybe a few months ago.

James: Yeah, that’s what I thought. Good, well I’l dig those links out and I’ll make sure that they’re included in the show notes for today’s episode. Rand, other than moz.com and your own blog section in moz.com, is there anywhere else that I should send our listener off to as a result of hearing you today?

Rand: Well, if your particularly passionate about Twitter I do spend a lot of time there and I’m @RandFish.

James: There you go, well all of that will be included in the show notes, Rand thank you so much for coming on and sharing your marketing advice all about SEO and depths further than that here on Traffic Jam, it’s been a pleasure speaking to you!

Rand: You too James, thank you so much!

This Week’s News in Traffic

It appears that Facebook have lost a whole chunk of advertising revenue, in fact, $1billion worth of advertising revenue they could have yielded in 2013 had they rolled out their video ads. According to All Things D, the digital website, their video ads expected this year won’t now be rolled out until 2014 so if you have got that chunk of cash ready for when they roll out these ads you will just have to wait a little bit longer.

In a story I picked up from searchengineland.com, Google has confirmed that they’re testing incredibly large banner ads for specific phrases. In fact the story that’s posted there picks up on a tweet by Synergy HQ who showed a very large full width banner ad showing from the search query Soutwest Airlines. These banner ads look pretty much like those that appeared on top of YouTube. Spanning the whole width of the frame and really taking up the majority of the real estate right at the top of the page. This is interesting because in 2005 Google promised that banner ads would never come to web search. In fact, their quote is there’ll be no banner ads from the Google homepage or web results pages. There will not be crazy, flashy, geographical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site ever. Well, it does seem that Google have gone back on their word or at least ready to do so.

Lastly, in this week’s traffic news, I actually want to tell you about a little app that I had been playing with over the past few days and it’s called the LinkedIn intro app and it’s an add on to your mail application for iPhone. If you are familiar with reportive this is basically a development of reportive specific for iPhone mail. What reportive does is pull from LinkedIn profiles, now you can see a full kind of profile of a person that you’re sending or receiving an email from including a photograph of them and links to their other social media accounts. I absolutely love reportive because it is so, so good for kind of one to one directories on mail communication i.e. if you want to you’re getting right in to the right person in a targeted email contact then reportive really helps you to do that so not much use on that really just something that I want you to check out and try out this week. If you’re not already using reportive for Gmail go and give that a try and if you’ve got an iPhone go try this app you can download it from intro.linkedin.com. Go give it a try I think you’ll enjoy it.

Thank you to my man Zach Reese from the United States who left me a five-star iTunes review this week and it reads James you’re the man, keep up the good work, thank you for offering such useful information, it’s been extremely helpful. I secretly do a little dance before every one minute traffic tip. Well Zach I’ve got to tell you I secretly do a little dance for your review, so thank you for that I appreciate for feedback and of course the five-star review as well. To you the listener, I’d love to hear your feedback on Traffic Jam, and of course to do that, do what Zach Reese did and head on over to iTunes, search for Traffic Jam podcast and then submit a rating and a review. The best ratings and review will get read out on the show so if you want to get some airtime here in Traffic Jam, that’s the way to do it.

The One Minute Traffic Tip

In this week’s tip I want to tell you about another tool that I have been playing around this week that will help you identify what type of content is most effective in your market on Facebook. This little app is called ShareGrab and the way it works is you could basically pick out or identify which pages on Facebook you want to follow and then what ShareGrab will do, it will show you the top rated content for that particular page assessed by most shared, liked and commented on. Now the idea being here is you can basically see which type of pages on those content get the most interaction and then follow the format for your own Facebook page. I have started to follow a few pages in my market and I have got some great ideas for really good shareable content for my own page. The thing that I like most about this tool is the fact that it is free so I am going to encourage you to go check it out for yourself. You can get it from ShareGrab.com. Once you’ve given it a little test drive head back over to TrafficJamCast.com, head on over to episode#22 and then post on the page you experience. I really would love to get your feedback. It’s something that I had been getting a bit out and I am sure you will too.

Okay so that rounds out episode#22 of Traffic Jam, I’ll be back with episode#23 this week for a discussion with Amy Porterfield, all about Facebook traffic. Stay tuned for that one. In the coming week please be sure to check out all of the post at Veravo.com, we’ve got things covered such as how to make sure that you never run out of content ideas for the SEO tip and training of the week and in Google Adwords training I’ve got a little tip on how to track and measure the return on investment from your marketing channel so that you can make better decisions as to which ones to keep and which ones to get rid of so that’s over at Veravo.com

Playing out this episode today of Traffic Jam is a track of course picked out by my guest today Rand Fishkin. It’s a track from RJD2, The Final Frontier is the track name. It’s from 2009 and it’s quite apt because the lyrics in it are “the show is over” do listen out for that one. Anyway, kind of enough of my singing, let’s play out this week’s track, I look forward to welcoming you back next week for another episode, see you again soon!

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THIS WEEKS NEWS IN TRAFFIC

ONE MINUTE TRAFFIC TIP

THE TRAFFIC JAM

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Pinterest is the 4th largest traffic driver worldwide and Melanie Duncan claims if you apply what she teaches you can get a large chunk of that traffic. On this episode entrepreneuress Melanie shares the basics of Pinterest, so if you’ve  not harnessed its power yet you’ll soon be ready to get started, plus for the experienced Pinner Melanie reveals her secret tools that’ll take your pinning to the next level.

Melanie Duncan from the Online Edge Academy is the creator of The Power Of Pinning course used by over 7000 members to increase traffic and sales to their business.

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“Pinterest is an absolute traffic driving powerhouse” @MelanieDuncan7
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Hello listener! Welcome back to Traffic Jam, you’re tuned in to Episode#21 of the podcast show that teaches you how to get more traffic, leads and sales from your website and ultimately build a profitable audience online.

Today I am going to be pretty lean on the preamble and dive straight in to the interview so allow me to start this episode by introducing my guest today, her name is Melanie Duncan, she lives in New York and runs online businesses that generate over two million dollars in annual revenue. She’s featured in major television shows like ABC’s Good Morning America and NBC’s The Nate Berkus Show, and now she gets to complete her set as today she’ll be appearing here on Traffic Jam. Aside from being passionate about teaching others how to create success and freedom online and her love for travel, cooking, fashion and design, Melanie is a specialist in Pinterest Traffic.

So our feature interview today is all about Pinterest. We’re talking about how to use Pinterest, tips for creating effective pins that drive traffic, the boards that you absolutely got to have in your account, where to send Pinterest traffic and why plus a whole lot more. Of course the interview is coming right up next but don’t go anywhere after that because I’ve got a whole load of traffic grabbing tips and news in the one minute traffic tip, this week’s news in traffic and of course we’ll play out the show with the Traffic Jam jam. Okay, so let’s now go to today’s interview, all about powerful Pinterest marketing with Melanie Duncan.

James: Okay, so this is Traffic Jam Episode#21 and joining me today is Melanie Duncan who I’m hoping will teach you a few things that might just give you the edge with your Pinterest Marketing. Melanie, welcome!

Melanie: Thanks for having me James; it’s going to be a lot of fun!

James: It is going to be a lot of fun! I am going to ask you a question right up here at the start. You’ve got a program called Power of Pinning which claims you can double your traffic and sales from Pinterest in less than a week, sounds like a big claim – can it really be done?

Melanie: Well it absolutely can be done, Pinterest is an absolute traffic driving powerhouse and whether you are a male or female marketer if you have the right kind of business and you understand; you have a little bit of correct marketing foundation and really increasing your traffic very quickly is entirely possible.

James: Excellent! Good! It sounds like we’ve got the right person on the call; I want to talk about having the right business as a follow up question, I have heard you say that personal brands and service businesses can quite often do more interesting stuff and often be more effective than product businesses. I am intrigued by this because I am a services business owner so I think I have some questions around that to move on and to perhaps kind of frame this maybe we can use my own business as a kind of virtual case study so to give you a background, my business offers search engine services. We help basically business owners drive traffic to their site using SEO and Google Adwords – so my question to start with is a broad one, are my potential customers really on Pinterest, researching or looking for inspiration that might influence their decision to buy something like SEO?

Melanie: Yeah, it’s a great, great question and I always love doing a podcast interview about Pinterest because it is the ultimate challenge because Pinterest is an entirely visual platform so to entirely explain and illustrate examples always challenges me a little bit but we can definitely, definitely tackle that. So what I would say is that absolutely that service providers, personal brands, Pinterest is a definite place you want to try. Now, I say try because Pinterest is still a primarily female based platform which means if you offer your service that you know women are not your ideal target, Pinterest may not be the correct place to spend your time. I say “may not be” because you see brands like Hub Spot for example, if you check out Hub Spot’s Pinterest page, they are doing a phenomenal job marketing software, business resources, educational training and e-books so it absolutely can be done but it’s got to be in line with what your market wants and what they’re currently doing online. So it’s something I don’t say every business is a perfect fit for Pinterest but it’s one of my pet peeves that a lot of social media gurus would say, oh my god, everybody should be using Twitter, everybody’s got to be on Facebook. It’s got to be in line with how you market your business; if you don’t have any visual content and you can’t possibly conceive of a way to create visual content around your brand, Pinterest is not the place you want to be spending your time. But it’s surprising sometimes when we push ourselves to think outside the box, for example you were talking about SEO marketing, there are a lot of female marketers, female business owners, small business owners and also social media strategists, content creators on the Pinterest platform so if you can create visual content around what you do so could create a cool giveaway of a video series, you can create a cool image that  actually markets that to give you a cool example, for my own personal coaching brand, I created a free gift ,something that a lot of us have on our own website, maybe on our opt in page, maybe it’s an e-book or a checklist or a free report, something like that. I actually created an image for that which most of us already have we have created something like that for an opt in page and I actually pinned that image described what the giveaway was and I linked it, so I actually went in, edited the pin, because you can upload the images from your computer, and I gave you my disclaimer, it is a little difficult to describe this- you can actually upload an image from your computer and then you can go in and add a source link so that it actually links to a source in page, and I have been doing that to generate leads with business owners, giving away checklists of my marketing strategies or free online business tools and I have actually done lead generation and list building from that so it can be done to do services, personal branding, lots of creative ways but it’s got to be in line with what you are willing to do because if you just go on Pinterest and you add a bunch of text it’s not going to be compatible with the platform.

James: Got it! Well I think Hub Spot is a very interesting case study to look at because they would be aligned with the type of businesses that perhaps our listener base here at Traffic Jam might have. What sort of stuff are they doing? Are they using the kind of example you just gave of visualizing opt in gifts and reports, what are those guys up to?

Melanie: Yeah, absolutely! So they have an entire board the last time I checked, the last time I checked it was called marketing e-books and it was exactly what I kind of explained to you which is they have full different pins, each pin is an image of an e-book that is on a particular topic like Facebook Marketing or Twitter Marketing or email marketing – anything like that and each of the pins links to a different opt in page where they do their normal Hub Spot email form where you answer a couple of questions and then in exchange for that information they go ahead and email you that free e-book.

James: Got it, got it! Cool, well I think we might have covered how a service business might use in terms of the content they prepare. How would a service business or in fact any business to be honest – how would they go about increasing their following because I am using Pinterest recently actively, the Traffic Jam always get a visual content always posted to Pinterest but I find it hard to increase the number of followers on my account, what’s some strategies around that?

Melanie: Yeah absolutely James and thank you for asking that because that’s something that comes up with a lot of people and what I found is the hardest is just to get the first 100 followers. After you hit around 100 it seems to become a tipping point where it then becomes easier to organically start to develop exposure and everyone does regardless of the size of your audience is as soon as you make the move to try out Pinterest to integrate your social media marketing; If you are using Pinterest you probably are also using Facebook or Twitter and other social media platforms and I think the biggest mistake a lot of us make is we us them isolated and something that I had done from the very beginning is I always integrate all of my social media accounts so if you go to my Facebook page which is the entrepreneurus academy you’ll see that I actually have a Pinterest tab on my Facebook page that you can get by going to Woobox.com/Pinterest and I will also, since most of us have been using Facebook for longer than we’ve been using Pinterest we most likely have more followers on Facebook than we do on Pinterest just because there are more people on Facebook and most of us have been using it for longer building our audiences, every week, once or twice I will post a link with a different pin I have updated, if you want to link your personal Facebook and your Pinterest account you can do that so your activity actually publishes on your Facebook. You can’t link it to a business page on Facebook but there’s a lot of ways to get reporting, letting people know on Twitter. Emailing your list, if you’ve got a list as soon as you join Pinterest and you have some sort of a strategy behind you which you definitely can get like you are talking at my power pinterest program, Power of Pinning, we show you that strategy and then you want to reach out to your audience, let them know that you are on Pinterest and also tell them why they should follow you, it’s not enough to just say hey I’m on Pinterest but are you going to be giving behind the scenes access, are there going to be special offers just for your Pinterest followers? You’ve got to make it sound sort of an exciting incentive but reach out to your audience however large or small it currently is and let them get you to that first 100 follower mark.

James: Got it! So really what we are trying to do here is increase the amounts of touch points across multiple platforms, I guess that’s the real strategy here right Melanie?

Melanie: Absolutely!

James: Great! Well let’s take the conversation a little further about what makes good content in Pinterest. What type of content in your experience gets the highest engagement?

Melanie: Great question. So you heard me say it before, visual, visual, visual! That does not mean it has to be pretty but the most engaging content on Pinterest is something that is inspiring, it is something that is visually engaging – something as simple as a basic checklist or an infographic. Anytime you can take information and turn it in to a visual platform, that really, really seems to increase the engagement because people are in discovery mode in Pinterest and so they are looking to discover new information, new brands, new products and so you always want to have a very visual format whether you are selling a product or a service but as I mentioned things like lists, visual checklists, infographics, even quotes, like some sort of an informational quote or a simple tip, you don’t want to have more than 10 words in the actual pin, you should have more visual information than textual information so keeping things very colorful and visual attractive design, if you can do cool typography but really I found that checklists and also videos, you can actually pin videos from YouTube and those seem to get really, really high engagement on Pinterest as well!

James: Great! I was going to ask you about videos, I think it is probably an untapped element of Pinterest, what about sound? Because you can use even soundcloud embeds I think or at least you could do at one point, how do they do, are they effective as well?

Melanie: You know that is really interesting, I have seen that a little bit – the sound embedding like in mp3 files, I haven’t personally tested that because my stance on it is I am moving towards visual content so sound is okay but I think really with a personal brand I would always do video or something where they could be direct to camera, face to face, or I’ll use screenflow or camtasia if you have a pc and I’ll do little three minute clips because video tutorials or little presentations but I don’t want to miss out on the visual component since Pinterest is a visual platform.

James: Yeah, got it and have you got some sort of sneaky Melanie Duncan tools that are really cool for creating pins?

Melanie: Well, you’ll probably crack out but one of them is entirely free and it’s called PicMonkey.com and they do have a paid version if you want to upgrade and get a lot of extra tools but it’s a really great free program that you can use to overlay text on images so a lot of times if I am putting an image on a blog post or if I’ve got a new video up and I want to overlay some text on an image I use picmonkey because you can add little banners, you can add text, really similar to what you can do on photoshop or real illustrator but picmonkey is free and really simple. You can even add buttons so you can add little shapes and I’ll add clickable buttons, just a circle and I’ll say click here cause we do find that adding calls to action on the images on Pinterest increases the engagement by 80%.

James: Love it, love it! That’s some gold there, really great advice. Well we’ve covered what it kind of looks like and what sort of media works. What about pin size? Is there some sort of format being used by various marketers? What’s most effective?

Melanie: Yes! Absolutely! Well we do see pins that are taller than they are wider and they have more height than width seem to get more engagement simply because it doesn’t limit the amount of height within reason – I think if it’s a really tall one they’d start to shorten them an give an expand option but in most cases they won’t strictly limit the heights so you can get three to four times the amount of real estate screen than news feed if you do taller pins. The follow up question everyone asks me is what is the proper pixel ratio? If you go and Google Pinterest you know pin ratio, it is changing all the time, people will say 800×300 or 1000×220, really what I found, I haven’t found that much of a difference in terms of little minute changes is the pixel ratio. What is most important is that you’ve got the height that’s 2 times larger than the width that way regardless of the pixel ratio you’re still getting more height than the news feed.

James: Great! And I think things like infographics would probably lend themselves in that format right?

Melanie: Absolutely!

James: Yeah, good stuff. Cool! As you know already I’m an SEO guy and Pinterest in itself is its own giant search engine. What tips do you have to get more search traffic with Pinterest?

Melanie: Search is a fascinating topic to talk about with Pinterest. When it first rolled out we had follow links with everything so it was really exciting then there was no follow links then there was follow links again, so I think currently right now the current stance is that there are no-follow links when you pin something but they do provide some SEO juice so I make it a big strategy to make sure to include a lot of my keywords in my board titles. In the actual descriptions of my pins, I use my keywords and most importantly, I try and rank my page for SEO juice so I will use keywords like business, marketing, pinterest in the about section of my Pinterest profile. Because I found if you do enough keywords and you have a bit of a followers and you do a bit of momentum on your Pinterest page, it’s a lot easier to rank with your keywords with your Pinterest account than maybe your website, just because you know the importance of a root domain. So having a Pinterest account, they already have such a nice substancial root domain so I can get my Pinterest page to rank for things that I can’t get my independent website rank for as easily.

James: Got it and what about sort of search habits if you like of people on Pinterest itself? I mean if someone was going in to Pinterest and actually doing a search within the Pinterest ecosystem, are they using the same types of keywords that they would do on a Google search perhaps?

Melanie: You know it’s a little funky, we don’t see the majority of people are going on to Pinterest and using the search box heavily, the majority of people are using the platform simply by following other accounts and then seeing what is visible and their newsfeed. There is a little search going around trending topics so let’s say for example around Christmas you’re going to see people searching for Christmas cookie recipes and that sort of thing but in terms of actually understanding how to gain Pinterest for search results, right now there is no strategy with what you can do, sometimes it seems that if you’ve got enough repins you’ll get ranked higher for search but searching on Pinterest as a search stategy,  I don’t really recommend putting so much time and effort in to it until they really become a little more transparent about what algorithm they are going to be using for that.

James: Which I am sure they probably won’t do in a distant future right? So I think we can forget that one. Cool! Well you’re obviously on Traffic Jam Melanie and our focus here is teaching strategies that will increase traffic. How will our listener effectively drive traffic from Pinterest to their website?

Melanie: The best way is by having pins like I said earlier that have text overlay. So something I do is I create what I call teaser pins so if I have a new blog post or a new video or a new podcast, or something like that, instead of just uploading the basic image what I will do is create an image with 5 or 6 words that really gets people’s curiosity peaked. So maybe it’s like the three biggest mistakes you should never make on Pinterest and I’ll create a really cool graphic on picmonkey or photoshop, and I’ll overlay that teaser text, upload it to my Pinterest and link that to my blogpost or link that to my video or whatever I’ve got on my site, my content, because this little bite-sized pieces of content are fantastic for driving traffic particularly if you add like I said a call to action in the image so something that looks like a little button because if you click on the image in Pinterest that will take the person automatically to wherever that source link hooked up to but I also for an additional traffic driving strategy, I will add a call to action so I tell them exactly what I tell them to do, a call to action actually in my caption- that text area below the image and I will say click here to learn the three biggest mistakes you should never make on Pinterest and I actually would type in the URL. If you type in a URL in to the caption it would automatically be hyperlinked just gives you another way for people to click and find a way to your site.

James: Love it! And of course you get a little bit more link juice there right because you’ve got an extra hyperlink situated in that piece of content. Love it! That’s killer stuff; well I guess we should also talk about where that traffic should go to, we’re of course sending it to our website but what would you recommend in terms of a landing page or place to actually drive the traffic directly to?

Melanie: Well the most important thing is to send it somewhere specific. You don’t want to have a bunch of pins that link to your homepage. Whatever you are promising- you are talking about, if you are promoting a product or some sort of information you want it to link directly to whatever you are promising or you want it to be the most consistent experience for them as possible. So you just want it to be very consistent, if you are doing an opt-in or some sort of giveaway that we talked about like an e-book or report, you want to make sure that then links directly to an opt in page with a picture of that exact offer that you are offering in the pin with a few simple steps. People’s attention spans are short, you want to make it as direct and as easy as possible for them to – whatever the conversion is – to buy the product, to sign up for the offer, to download the e-book. Just make it very quick and direct and simple.

James: Yeah I got it and I’m sure repeating that image on that landing page to make that visual reference to where they’ve come from really does help increase conversions. Okay, I’ve got a few more questions for you and the first one is around sort of timing of when to pin. Is there any particular times of day that are more effective or perhaps a schedule that works particularly well?

Melanie: Of course and this is another one of the topics where everyone has their own opinions. Some say that Saturday mornings are the time where the most Pinterest activity. It is kind of interesting, but as always, you need to test. It really depends on your audience. Just because the majority of people are on Saturday morning, you might find that your audience – maybe they’re moms and they’re taking their kids on soccer games on Saturday mornings so they’re not on Pinterest on Saturday, they’re on Pinterest at 10o’clock at night after the kids are in bed or something like that. You want to know when your audience is on and you will be able to gauge that just by posting content seeing if there is a particular day of the week or time that seems to be the most activity but rule of thumb standard, they say Saturday mornings, early in the morning, or late at night during the week and if you do want to schedule there is a software called Pingraphy and it’s a paid software but it will allow you to upload your pins in bulk kind of like HootSuite would allow you to do except they don’t have a Pinterest extension yet and you can upload your pins in bulk for the week, schedule them out at various dates and times and they will post them for you.

James: Got it. Now will there be any repercussions with that? I mean that would be a strategy perhaps you would not use on a platform like Twitter where people might expect a kind of immediate response and if you are not available to do that it looks kind of a bit anti-social if you like but with Pinterest is it kind of okay to schedule those in advance?

Melanie: Absolutely, particularly when you look at the alternative, for a business owner particularly if they are not scheduling their pins on something like Pingraphy that means that at various points throughout their work day which is very, very valuable time they are then going to Pinterest, doing their pin, most likely getting sucked in and getting distracted when they should be doing other things. The reason that Pinterest works so well for marketing is because it is very, very engaging – it pulls you in. So for me, I know my temptations and I won’t go on platforms during my crucial affective hours because I have to be focused on other things.

James: Well I can vouch that in fact, the lady who will be editing this podcast episode, Chall I often find her getting lost in Pinterest when she’s apparently researching so she’ll laugh at that when we talk about it but it is one of those quite consuming platforms right? You can go down a rabbit hole and find yourself out on the other side maybe an hour or two later.

Melanie: Exactly!

James: Great! Well my kind of pinultimate question is probably about how to actually put the boards together, and I am looking at the moment at your entrepreneuress Pinterest profile and you’ve got boards here that consists of About Me, you’ve got testimonials there, you’ve got Melanie TV, you’ve got some references to the media that you’ve appeared in, are there any kinds of staple boards that you would suggest to a kind of good themes for the majority of people or is it just literally whatever you feel is kind of appropriate or fits your brand yourself.

Melanie: I think there is definitely a five or ten boards that every business should have and exactly if you look on Pinterest.com/entrepreneuress you’ll see an example of those which is – I have a blog post board, it’s literally just an index of all the different blog posts on my site, the little teaser images that we just talked about. I also have different boards that will talk about different events I am hosting. I will have boards full of testimonials for my clients. I do some sort of TV board or video board is really cool! It kind of feels like a Pinterest video channel so whether it is content that you are curating which is fantastic, whether it’s you delivering the content or it’s other content from your industry that is going to serve your audience, having some sort of a video board. Press is great is great if you have some place to feature press articles and I do think an about me board whether you are selling products or products and services, we all buy from people so a board that shows a little behind the scenes of the business that tells your story and the story of your business is effective. That’s not going to drive traffic necessarily but it’s a nice complement to maybe other traffic driving content on your page.

James: Yeah and I’m sure those types of things would definitely build rapport and perhaps credibility as well so I can see how they can be extremely useful. Well Melanie you’re not just a one trick pony, you teach more of the topics that we discuss here in Traffic Jam in your online edge academy, tell us a little bit about that program.

Melanie: Yeah absolutely! My background is I’ve been starting online businesses, e-commerce businesses since I was in college and my first two businesses which are still alive and well are a custom home décor company and a custom apparel company; in fact we’re one of the largest apparels for sororities and fraternities. I know it’s more of a US things but for college students we do really fun custom apparel for them all across the nation so I have gotten my feet wet on online marketing for six or seven years now and I found that there is a lot of people who need across the board information about what we should be doing online and how to integrate it all together. As many great courses there are on Facebook, there are on Pinterest or on email marketing and sometimes you need a broader scope on how to bring it along together so along with my husband who has been my business partner since college we founded the Online Edge Academy which gives people a simple and integrated way to integrate or to use all of their online marketing together and actually get results.

James: Sounds excellent! Well if that’s picked any ears for any of our listeners out there, Melanie could you answer the question as to whom might it be a good for- any particular requirements?

Melanie: It is great for people who already have a business- that is one of our main requirements. It is not for if you are interested in starting one or you need help in selecting an idea. Online Academy is for business owners who already are generating revenue, it doesn’t have to be millions of dollars but there is some cash flow in the business because we do talk about paid traffic strategies, you have to have to be able to have some money to put forward in these resources and strategies that we are teaching inside the academy so you should have a business that is generating income but it is equally as important for you to be either a service provider, or a product or an e-commerce experience in both so a good fit for both types of business owners.

James: Excellent! Good and I can see that you’re probably closed right now but I know there is a waiting list so if anyone is interested they should head on over to Online Edge Academy and register details there, Melanie?

Melanie: Yes, we do a wait list actually. We only launch every one or two months we open it up because we found that it’s such a social component and we have so many amazing business owners in there that we like people to join in groups so they don’t just come in to the academy and everyone’s already best friends and talking and they go oh no I’m all alone. We do it almost like in greek life in fraternities and sororities where you have a group of people where you rush and you go in to the academy together where you have people starting at the same place as you.

James: Excellent! Well, Melanie would you like to give any particular call to action at the end of this podcast, send people off anywhere other than the ones that we’ve mentioned during today’s interview?

Melanie: Yes so if you want to learn more about this strategy, learn more about how I built my multi-million dollar e-commerce online, if you head to MelanieDuncan.com you can sign up for my email list there and I send free video training every week. I also host once or twice a month, I do invitation only online free training. You have to be on that list to get the invite so MelanieDuncan.com, sign up for my email list there and you will get little videos from me every week, they’re lots of fun!

James: Excellent! Melanie that sounds really, really good, so I’ll make sure that those links are all placed within the show notes in today’s episode which is Episode#21 of Traffic Jam. Melanie thanks for your time today, it’s been a blast.

Melanie: Thanks for having me.

This week’s news in traffic: Google plans to launch the new product endorsement ad which will incorporate photos, comments and names of Google+ users who have liked the product or company serving the ads. These new ads are similar in concept to social ads in Facebook however they are being met with the usual resistance from those who believe that advertising such like this is an invasion of privacy and unfairly commercializes internet user’s images.

This week Four Square opened up Four Square ads to all small businesses around the world. These new ads are similar to a Facebook or Google ad and that they’re featuring the Four Square results and are marked with promoted and in a stand out color. Four Square say creating a Four Square ad is super simple. All a business owner needs to do is go to foursquare.com/ads and build their ad. They do that by choosing a great photo of their space and either offering a special or highlighting a great customer tip. They then set their monthly budget and set their ad live for people nearby to see. If you are a business who’s already tried Four Square ads, I’d love to hear your feedback please post your comments about your experience with Four Square ads over at the Traffic Jam episode 21 page.

Facebook have announced that their own remarketing platform integrated in to Facebook custom audiences will soon be released. Currently remarketing to people who have visited your website or mobile app on Facebook can be done using third party tools like adroll and perfect audience which are connected to Facebook exchange. Facebook say we anticipate that marketers will use FBX, Facebook Exchange and website and mobile app custom audiences in different ways. For advertisers who have a large number of products and advertise to multiple audiences, FBX is the better solution. For businesses that don’t typically work with third parties website and mobile app custom audiences will allow them to show ads to the people who have been to their site on mobile app and still use Facebook’s targeting abilities.

The one minute traffic tip: this valuable tip is deserving of a mention as I have been investing my time a lot in it recently and it’s something that from the outside appears difficult, however, it is surprisingly easy. And that is getting free publicity. But of course there is no such thing as free publicity right? Well wrong! Getting featured on the news or in a daily newspaper can actually be quite straightforward and cost you no more than a little time and a free email. So how do you get featured? Well, you just ask. Reporters are on the lookout for experts who can write or just provide quotes on specialized projects. Now I suggest you make a list of publications that are relevant in your market and then contact each editor with your bio or profile and tell them why featuring you will benefit their publication. You can also subscribe at helpareporter.com and receive notifications when reporters are looking for a source right on deadline. Just by reaching out to reporters in the last two weeks alone, I’ve been featured in one of the Middle East’s largest business magazines with a full page feature and on prime time TV news so it really is that easy!

That brings Episode #21 to a close. Join me back on Traffic Jam next week where I’ll be talking to Rand Fishkin from Moz.com all about SEO and inbound marketing. For more tips and training to help you build your audience checks out the latest post at veravo.com.

To play out this week’s episode Melanie Duncan has chosen a track by her current favorite artist Lana Del Ray, and if you watched the movie The Great Gatsby then it’s a track you may well recognize. The track title is Young and Beautiful, this is the DH Orchestra version, and here it is right 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.

Be inspired to take on the web and use social media to the maximum in your business and dominate.  Keynote speaker and author of Maximize Your Social Neal Schaffer reveals the keys to knowing whether you are doing social media right, who should and should not be doing social, how to track and measure your social ROI and then leverage up your results.

Whether you are B-to-B or B-to-C  can social media play an integral part in marketing your business? Neal Schaffer and James Reynolds reveal all.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

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“Social Media doesn’t replace anything, it complements everything.” @NealSchaffer
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Hello! You’re tuned in to Traffic Jam, I am James Reynolds, and welcome back to the podcast show that teaches you how to get more traffic and build a profitable audience for your website. This is Episode #20.

So you may have noticed, the show has been a little less frequent recently but I am glad to say that is all about to change; over the coming weeks I’ve got a packed agenda with some very, very exciting guests. I wouldn’t normally do this but I am going to give you a sneak peek of who’s coming up in the next few shows: firstly we’ve got David Siteman Garland, he’s from Rise To The Top and the creator of Create awesome online courses. We are going to be talking about becoming a mediapreneur and using paid courses to drive traffic to your site. I am inviting on to the show Amy Porterfield who is probably one of the leading influencers in all things Facebook marketing. Following that we’ve got Melanie Duncan who’s a Pinterest expert from the Online Edge Academy. And I have also got coming up, Rand Fischkin from Moz.com. Now if you are in to SEO, Rand really needs no introduction. He is a spearhead figure within the community so that is going to ba an exciting show too. And plus I have Greg Hickman coming up. He is from Mobile Mix and of course we are going to be talking about Mobile Marketing with Greg.

So those are just a small selection of the guests that I have got coming up; I’ve kept some big players up my sleeve so you’re going to have to stay tuned to see who they might be. In fact, really if you have not subscribed yet in iTunes now is a very good time to do it. Log in to your iTunes, look for Traffic Jam ad hit the subscribe button because that is going to ensure that you get first access to these interviews as soon they get posted.

What have we got coming up on today’s show? Today we turn the traffic chat to social media: how do we know if we are doing it well? Should we even be on social media? How do we effectively track results; All leading to the question how do we maximize what we do on social media platforms? To provide the answer I invited on to the show Neal Schaeffer, creator of the ad age top 100 global marketing blog, Maximize Social Business. Neal is a global social media speaker and author; and as an author he is best known for his definitive book Social Media Strategy Creation, Implementation and Optimization Maximize Your Social, a one stop guide to building a social media strategy for marketing and business success. And that book is out to Wiley and also published to other thickly acclaimed social media books Maximizing LinkedIn for sales and social media marketing and Windmill Networking: Maximizing LinkedIn. It’s another great interview and of course that’s coming right up next but don’t go anywhere after that as we give you some more other actionable traffic tips in our regular segment the one minute traffic tip plus of course we have all of this week’s news from the past seven days in traffic in this week’s news in traffic. I have your feedback in the listener comment section and of course we’ll end the show as we always do with a Traffic Jam jam chosen by our guest today.

Okay, so let’s get stuck right in to the content and learn how to maximize your social media with Neal Schaeffer.

James Reynolds: So this is Traffic Jam episode #20 and joining me today is Forbes Top 30 Social Media Power Influencer, Neal Schaeffer from Maximize Your Social. Neal, a warm welcome to Traffic Jam!

Neal: Well, thank you very much it’s an honor to be here.

James: Forbes Top 30 Social Media Power Influencer sounds pretty impressive but what does it actually mean?

Neal: Well, Forbes, this is actually their online website did a survey in to who are the people within the social media industry that seemed to have a lot of influence. Now a lot of your experience in social marketing, how do you measure influence that people have and it is obviously very, very hard to do. You can actually read the article that Forbes created and they used a few different things and it was basically metrics from things that you can pull down from social media sites but I am because what I do for a living is social media, obviously I am very active in social media, I have written three books, my third book just came out last week, on social media, I speak a lot on social media, I blog, so I think it is representative of how active and your reader base and how many people are actually acting upon what you are writing about, so that’s how it came about. You couldn’t apply for it, they really did their own research and came out with those figures.

James: Well it is an interesting topic and it is one that we will touch upon in the next 20 minutes or so because I think being able to measure and understand the effectiveness of your social media is important, I think it might be a question that I might open up to Neal. None of our listeners are new to social media, some of them will be doing it to a greater or lesser extent, how do they actually know if they’re doing a good job of it?

Neal: That’s really a great question; I think that’s the question that people are frankly starting to ask because they are spinning their wheels on social and say, you know it is eating a lot of time, it may be eating a lot of resources, are we getting tangible business benefits from it and what I have been doing for a living since January of 2010 when I launched my social media strategy consultancy is really helping companies figure it out. The problem is, if you don’t have a strategy, you don’t have objectives and therefore you don’t have metrics to measure how well you’re doing right so instead of jumping in to hey how do I audit myself or how do I measure the ROI, I take a step back and go, what are you trying to achieve? Obviously a lot of small businesses out there it’s all about generating new business, new leads what have you but it’s not the same for some businesses. There are businesses that already have a majority market share. They want to create a deeper connection with their client base, maybe they want to create a new product- it could be for a variety of reasons, so really without that strategy and my book Maximize Your Social can really help you create that strategy, and when you create that strategy, you create the metrics because you are creating the objectives like how will you know if you are successful or not, so that’s where having a strategy, define an objective and creating metrics that that align with your objective which is probably the most difficult part because getting more followers and a higher average retweet per tweet or average like per Facebook post, that doesn’t help you feed your product right? It doesn’t feed in to your bottom line. These are what I call secondary metrics which do  give you an idea how effective your social media is purely from a social media perspective. But it really comes down to how it affects your business and with that in mind, there is no social media dashboard like social marketing suite that’s going to be able to give you that answer. You’re going to have to create that. Now if you are in e-commerce and everything is digital and everything is healthy on your side you have Google and you have your conversion funnel set up, obviously it gets a lot easier to measure this right? If you are purely looking at are you converting from your social. If you’re like many businesses that don’t have that, you’re going to have to be more creative on how you define those metrics.

James: Good well I am glad you bought up this topic on having a sort of social media strategy or a road map to social media, because this to seems a likely a fuzzy subject because to me at least, I would say that social media is a conversation with your customers and your target market and to kind of have a strategy in conversion would seem to me anti-social, so what do you actually mean by a social media strategy and what would one actually look like?

Neal: Yeah that’s a great question! It’s funny I was on a podcast yesterday and I got asked that same question. It social dynamic when people are having a conversation how can you schedule tweets in advance right? Isn’t that anti-social? And it comes down to this – social media was made for people, not for businesses, we all know that so businesses are at a disadvantage. The other disadvantage that businesses have is that they have limited resources and limited time, and they have to answer on how they are spending their time and therefore if you are going to be spending any time in social media just like any other function that you do, it is no different than if you’re in HR, if you’re in legal, if you’re in sales, you have to answer up to how you’re spending your time so that’s why in order for companies to really gauge how well they’re doing and to control their spend on social – the funny thing with social is that it’s free right? And you put people on it, and it does not look like you’re spending money but people cost money and they cost time and if you can calculate that, you can start to get an idea literally in dollars, pounds, euros or what have you as to how much you are spending and companies are in business to make profit right? It’s about increasing sales or decreasing expenses and social can help you do that but if you don’t have that strategy in place, you’re just doing it in the blind without knowing how effective you are and therefore there are some companies that say you know what we did it organically we are doing great and that is fine right? But for others who are trying to figure out how to deal with social, get a feel for what you’re spending and how much you’re making from that and tweak that. My whole idea about Maximize Your Social is there’s so many businesses can do but social is always changing almost like there’s this never-ending experiment; if I had asked a bunch of business people three years ago if they were on Facebook they will laugh at me right? Two years ago, Pinterest did not even exist. Google+ is obviously gaining traction and it is always changing and therefore without this data driven approach that I recommend, you’re never going to know how you’re doing, you’re never going to get optimized and therefore you may be wasting a lot of time and a lot of money so social media is now mainstream, it is a business tool. 92% of American companies with 100 or more employees are using social media for marketing. It’s like having a website, it’s not like some fringy hey we’ve got to do this to be cool, we need to show that we have a lot of likes; the ending does come down to integrating to social media everything that your company does. So I think if you had asked me that question 2-3 years ago, the answer may have been different, I don’t think the industry would have been ready then. Right now it really is mainstream content for search engines. Isn’t that unnatural? But we know that it’s a respected practice and we need to do that in order that Google discovers our relevant content and sere it up to a relevant audience so I believe with social media it really is the same thing.

James: So you just said that somewhere around 90% of large businesses are using social and this is probably going to be a bit of a 101 question but is it essential now that as businesses we are present on social media?

Neal: I believe it is and when I said that number, I have spoken in Europe and in Asia and I’m at Southern California right, so I understand that the pace of social media and its adoption by people and therefore by businesses is different throughout the world wherever you are right? There are some countries that are 6 months behind the US, 12 months behind the US. There are even some who if not are ahead of the US in some aspects but at this point the global usage of social media, I know that there are some sites like Pinterest that are not as global like LinkedIn it’s not US centric, I know that there are European countries like Germany that still prefer Zing, the German social network so I know that some of the platforms are not global but Facebook and Twitter are global platforms, YouTube is a global platform and if you think about blogging as a way to give your company a social voice and also a way to get content discovered but inside social and outside social that is something global as well so assuming that your audience is in social and that there are benefits for your company to be in social, I would say yes it is a requirement. It’s almost like having a website and in fact a website is a requirement now right? But a website you’re only reaching 75% of the online audience because 25% of them are in social so if you think about it that way then yes it is a requirement to have even a minimal presence and I wouldn’t just chop shop because you want to keep up with the Joneses and everybody else’s setting up shop, I would not start with that strategy but if you’re thinking about creating a website you should be thinking about creating that social presence.

James: Yeah, well it’s a question I wanted to ask because I hear businesses say and perhaps rightly so, why should I invest time and energy and money depending on their approach in social when perhaps doing SEO or buying a bunch of banners on a banner network might get them more immediate traffic and conversion so what would your response be to that Neal?

Neal: I would say that social media doesn’t replace anything, it complements everything so keep doing what you have been doing and you know what if you don’t have social media going and your company is still profitable and you’re meeting your business objectives, sure you don’t need to be in social right? But I think about 90% of the companies that I meet want to increase profit and increase sales and are looking for more sales so definitely, SEO is not dead, it’s more important than ever, online ads is more important than ever as well as we shift to mobile and we have retargeting technology and all these great things that are coming out that allow us to do be more effective with these online ads then keep doing that. But I also say that right now the average spend – this is in the United States – but the average spend of the companies that are doing it, of how much they put aside for social is between 10-20% so if you are skeptical, don’t even start at 10%. Take a few percent of your marketing budget; and you don’t even need to add money, take a few percent out of SEO and or PPC, right? And experiment. You’re never going to know how successful you’ll be, and you know, paid social, you brought up the term James, I bring it up in my book, I’m a huge fan of paid social, I think that social ads are one of the most unrealized ads especially on social media marketing and I have seen companies being successful at a relatively low price depending on their objectives so if you want to start somewhere, maybe that’s where you start.

James: Got it, good. Okay, so we have got our strategy down, we have decided we are going to invest a little bit of money in it and dip our toes in social, what KPIs do you recommend that businesses track and I am aware it might be different depending on that strategy to kind of understand whether it is working for them or not.

Neal: Here’s the thing, it comes down to no cookie cutter to strategy in social so every company’s social strategy is going to be different because every company has a different objective, their KPI is going to be different as well so it is hard to say this is one universal KPI but at the end of the day, for instance, the easiest to understand example is if you are an e-commerce site and you’re tracking your conversions where they’re coming from, you know that you have conversions coming from organic search and therefore there’s the ROI of your SEO. You have conversions coming from your ads and you have an expense to that, there’s your ROI. Now hopefully you are going to start to get conversions if not leads that are coming from the different social media sites where you have a presence and or you have ads on and the easiest way to track it, it’s there but for some companies it’s not just about the conversion, it’s also how do we generate more website traffic, how do we get more leads, what is the cost of a lead? What is the cost of acquiring a new visitor to our website? And if you have those statistics, and once again, it may not be relevant for sites that don’t have e-commerce but if you have those metrics and you start getting active in social I think you can pretty easily and quickly create some analogies as to okay I am doing this and now I am seeing this effect of it. I have met with small business owners and the CEO is saying, what’s the ROI of social and I am like what’s the ROI of your print ads, what’s the ROI of your website? What’s the ROI of all the other advertising that you are doing? And a lot of companies have never tracked that ROI, believe it or not. So social when you start to look at it is extremely trackable in certain aspects. Now there are a lot of other aspects that are not trackable and intangible but are also beneficial to your company but if you really want to go for the jugular and go for that what’s the specific ROI KPI that’s some place to look at. If you are a B2B company and you have a conversion form on your site, where are people coming from? If you start to blog and you see people coming in from your blog content moving over to your conversion form whether it is generating a lead or a whitepaper download, a webinar registration, you can quickly start to paint a picture as to how much social is generating leads for you as well so I think that’s the easiest, most intuitive and practical way of tracking the potential of this.

James: Yeah, and I’ll tell you something interesting. If I typically log in to my analytics and I look at my conversions and I go down to the multi-channel conversion report, in a large percentage of cases social has had some point of influence on converting. It might be a small part, it might have started the stream of traffic, it might have been the final step that caused them to convert but social does play a big influence and my business is a B2B business it’s not a typical business where you would expect social to be a major influence so I’m sure it’s at work there in most businesses whether we actually know it or not.

Neal: Yeah, absolutely! And you know social touches so much these days; I often get asked where do I get my leads as I am B2B as well and I don’t know where people find me on social because usually they find me on multiple platforms, they may have gone on the blog, went to my Twitter stream, checked me in my LinkedIn so yes if we are spending 25% of our time on social when we’re online then chances are if we have multi-channel touches, one out of every four touches is going to be a social touch somewhere and so many people really, to check out your business, they’re really looking at your social media profile, they’re looking at your Facebook page, you LinkedIn company page and in the B2B we call it solution selling, my background is B2B enterprise; sales and stuff and marketing and in the solution sales, you’re trying to find the solution and pitch the solution to your client based on asking them questions and xp-raying their budget and finding out all this information. Well that has been flipped on its head because now when someone is contacting us James, the data is that 56% of the deal of all the due diligence has been done because our prospective customers are researching the heck out of us with all this data that is available online; I think that’s the same for any business out there.

James: Yeah, it has turned its head it used to be that we have the powerful position as the business because we can kind of retain some sort of black box and secure information from the customer but it’s all in their hands now, right? I mean everything is available to them if they want to dig and find a little bit of it out.

Neal: Well that’s the analogy of my book because when I was doing B2B technologies sales, I lived in Japan for 15 years; I was selling to Asian consumer electronics manufacturers. They contacted me, the sales person because they knew that if they wanted access to the technology, it was my FAE (Field Application Engineer) who had the demos, who had the knowledge. They want to get access to that knowledge right? Well now that knowledge with contact marketing, there’s a heck a lot of knowledge out there, they don’t need the sales people are not the gatekeeper anymore right, they’ll be able to find that out on their own.

James: Cool, alright let’s move forward from there. We’ve talked about some platforms in passing and there are so many platforms out there, many of which we’ve covered here on Traffic Jam. How does a business go about identifying which playing field they should be playing on?

Neal: Great question and I think with social, whether how you use it inside your organization or where you establish shop, you really need to think holistically right? So it all comes down to where your target audience is. If we look at the stats of where Fortune 500 companies here in the US here are investing in social, Twitter is actually the platform that gets the most investment. More than Facebook, more than YouTube and it is interesting because Twitter is in itself is a search engine. It is a real time search engine. If it’s data are adjusted, it is getting about as many data on it or as many search queries on it as Youtube would so I think if I was going to create a social media strategy for you and you were B2B and you were B2C, Twitter would probably play a role in it because it’s where the media is, it’s where people are looking for news;; it generates a lot of traffic and what have you’s. so I think the no brainer for most businesses and I will name a lot of different platforms, you don’t have to need to be on all these platforms, you’re going to have to decide which of these are relevant to your businesses. If you are B2C, Facebook is a no-brainer. If you are B2B LinkedIn is a no brainer. Twitter I believe both B2B and B2C should be on. And then we get in to a blog, I think every company should have a blog as a part of their social media strategy. I think that of the Fortune 500 only one third of the companies are blogging but I would recommend that for B2B as well as B2C as well as YouTube also, I would not be creating videos on a weekly basis but YouTube can be extremely beneficial for both B2B and B2C as well and with blogs and Twitter, I would also throw Google+ in thereas another channel that I think that every company that believes that Google is important to them that that should have a role in it. And then you get to other networks. Those are not the only networks out there, there’s a bunch of fringe networks out there obviously but the only other networks that I would bring up are Pinterest and Instagram. If you are B2C, go to Pinterest, if you press at the top left corner you do a search you’ll see all those categories; is your product pinnable? Do you have a product that is consumer facing; that provides inspiration to the female demographic that’s on Pinterest? If not, don’t spend your time there although I do see some B2B companies experimenting and some are successful but really that’s what Pinterest comes down to. Instagram gets even more difficult because there is no direct linkage. You can’t click on a link on instagram and go anywhere like you can on Pinterest so I think Instagram is more for consumer facing brands especially if mobile is your focus. It is a very, very young demographic so Pinterest and Instagram would be the sort of the special ones but within all these platforms that I talk about you have limited resources. The easiest thing to do and I do this a lot for Twitter when I have skeptical business owners saying I don’t care what you ate for breakfast. I go, okay let’s put in some keywords that are relevant to your company and relevant to your industry. Put in some competitor keywords and see what comes up and every single time I do this they are always shocked that what their competitor is tweeting has a relevant audience or people aren’t talking about things that are relevant to the business. So with any of these social networks, do a search and if you see a lot of conversations you see your competitors there, you’re going to have an idea that there’s a potential to have that conversation it could be something there.

James: Cool! Well let’s have a conversation now about who should actually be doing the social media management because in your book Maximize Your Social recently published on Wiley, I will get that little credit in there; you say that businesses you say that social media should not a drop a chunk of cash on social media consultant instead they should manage their own social media. Why do you advocate businesses do it themselves and not outsource it Neal?

Neal: When I started my consultancy in January of 2010 I was approached by four different businesses here in Southern California that wanted me to help them with their social media and I decided at that time that the right thing to do was just like any other function was to help them become self-sufficient in doing that so I still think that there is a need for consultants to come in at a strategic level and at an educational level in terms of training but I do think that it’s established of outsourcing some work, for example ad agencies have incredible creative edge, know what consumers have a lot of experience can replicate the message in a way that can generate business. And I you could say the same for social, but social is a little bit different than that. It’s a lot more of sending higher frequency messages out and at the end of the day it really does represent your brand on a day in and day out basis to a huge amount of people. So I really believe that it becomes an inseparable part of a company’s brand and therefore for a company to tell that story, it has to come internally. It’s like me when I was in sales, whenever we had the CEO come out and we went to the customer, the CEO is always able to tell these stories of how he was able to help out his early customers, how our company was founded, what are we doing with other clients around the world and it’s that story telling that is the heart of what companies are trying to do in social and it really comes down to being able to tell an authentic and transparent story. I think a lot of people are switching off to that sort of speak that is very market and is not authentic as the younger generation so yes it is enough to say that isn’t there – I know there are probably agencies that are listening to this podcast- not to say that there isn’t a role, there is a need to coordinate all this activity, there is a need to create a lot of content that some companies just can’t do so I tell companies look if you can’t create all the content and we have the advent of content marketing agencies, work with great agencies that can help you but make sure that you revoice that content in your brand voice and make sure that you own the strategy and what type of content is being created and that it goes to a quality control check, it goes to a revoice check for your brand and I think it can be extremely effective if you use these agencies to help you scale your social media so there’s an ideal but unless you are a huge company with lots of resources it’s hard for you to do everything internally if you want to scale very quickly in social so there’s the role that agencies can play. At the minimum, companies need to own the strategy. you can’t give up the strategy – you know what your business objectives are, don’t listen to anyone else, work with a consultant to help you create that strategy or remaximize your social to create one. But then from there that means that you’re in control and therefore when you work with an agency and they’re working aligned with your strategy it’s going to be a much better and a longer term relationship for everybody I believe.

James: Good! And how will a company go about identifying a suitable person internally to manage it if they have internally to manage it if they have that resource available to them.

Neal: Yeah another great question and I would encourage more companies to do this. You know what? Ask. Social media is a wonderful thing. A lot of people are very, very passionate about it. There are some people who like us want to do social media for their career looking for opportunity so I always tell people, especially people who are marketing and PR, say, we are doing social media and PR, what should we do? Ask people internally. Your HR people may want to get involved with social recruiting, your sales people may have an interest in using Twitter, I don’t know but once you start internal conversations, everybody has a pretty good opinion about social. You may get good ideas on how to collaborate internally and undoubtedly you’re probably going to find people that will want to play a role in it. Now, just because they are passionate does not mean that they are going to be good in that role because as we know, using social media from a professional perspective is very different from using it on a professional perspective. And I would tell companies when they did not want to go that route they wanted to literally say Neal, who should we pick? I tell them that the customer service people are usually very good because in the customer service role they are used to dealing with customers that have difficult situations, they know your products and they’re used to getting things done internally when there’s a problem. That is almost an ideal type of person but that’s like the outward facing community manager. On the inside you still need content management. That person may not have the skill set for the content. That may be a different person so in an ideal world you have an outward facing socialite customer support community manager and on the flip side you have to have someone really good facing the copywriting content- that would be the ideal organization.

James: Excellent! Well let’s wrap up with a couple of topics and the first one I quickly want to ask you about is paid social media traffic, we touched upon it just briefly earlier. Can you still get results with pure organic social or is there a need now to amplify with some sort of paid social advertising?

Neal: It is getting more and more important for companies to supplement their organic social with paid social; we all know what Facebook has done and now obviously Twitter has been doing it for a while. LinkedIn now has promoted posts show up in our news feeds as well so it really comes down to when you have a strategy and you create your KPIs and you benchmark how well you are doing with your competitors, you create certain metrics right and you are monitoring those metrics and if you don’t feel that your social is as effective as could be that’s when you may want to consider supplementing your paid. The problem with social is people don’t scale but paid social scales. It scales very, very quickly if you have the budget. And it’s funny I was on a podcast recently with Michael Steltson of the Social Media Examiner. Why would you want to pay $100 on social media? What is 1 hour of your time worth? If you could get 200 clicks at 50cents a click at with an extremely relevant audience on Facebook, how much value does it have on your business? It probably has a lot more than the $100 that you think your hour may be worth for instance. I’m sure James you tried a lot more than a $100 like I do. So that’s where it comes down to. The paid social can be extremely effective because you have the ability to target individuals or businesses in a way that just never been possible and to not take advantage of that I think that you missed out on the opportunity and think what happens when your competitor starts to take advantage of that so it’s one big experiment. If you have not experimented with paid social, you should and if you have those KPIs and say you know what we’re doing great organically, we’re hitting all our numbers and what have you that’s great but if you ever want to maximize your social you really need to have a paid component right now. It’s funny because you can’t advertise on all the social networks but when I was in Japan I started Google Adwords ads for Google pages so you can get pretty creative about this. Pinterest just started ads, they’re only doing it with a few different brands but there is no reason why you could not have a pin me ad in Google Adwords so that’s what I love in social media; it’s that creative aspect. All the advertising agencies will have the creative zen. Every business can do that now in their own paid social as well as organic social and do some wonderful things to engage with their audience so we’ll see how much more important paid can become just since I’ve seen Facebook and Twitter release their paid social platforms and they’ve become more mainstream, I don’t see people leaving Facebook because of ads. I see some people grumbling but I think it’s successful and one reason why I see its successful is when you have companies with IPO, they’re going to need to increase the profits and if Facebook is already at the point of saturation, you’re going to see more advertising appear in the network and I think it is going to be great for companies there’s going to be more opportunities. But as long as there are no backlash you’re going to be needing to do more and more paid social just to the Joneses in essence.

James: And ramp things up; it’s going to be difficult to get started and you’ve just got a few fans and you hardly get any sort of reach so I think that paid element just to get things moving for you is becoming almost essential. So Neal, let me wrap up with one question. You of course consult with a lot of  companies and  I am sure you did plenty of research for your recent book; what are some of the big mistakes that you’ve seen businesses make because I want to know some of the real bloopers that you’ve witnessed.

Neal: Wow! It’s funny I was just asked to contribute to an e-book about LinkedIn and one of the questions was what are the big mistakes people make? LinkedIn is something I have written two books about so the question goes on and on about the mistakes I see there so obviously the biggest mistake is that companies  are not aligning their social media presence with their business objectives. It’s that lack of strategy that is obviously the biggest problem and if you’re in that boat, you are not alone. I think 80% of businesses if not more are also in that boat so that’s you know, what you are trying to do. The second thing is not responding. And it really is just common sense but I see a lot of companies that have presence as you go to their Facebook page, they have fans asking questions and they are not responding right? You tweet at them and there’s just no response. If you’re a huge brand that gets a thousand tweets a day I understand but if you are a smaller business you have no excuse because with every conversation you can have in social, you can start to leverage the potential of marketing by followers seeing the conversation, when you like someone’s comment you respond to them so it really is social media 101 but it is forgotten about and that’s a lot of things. I think the other thing that I see about the United States is that companies are still operating in social media as if it was 2010- 2011. They have not looked at Google+, Pinterest and Instagram which are the next three emerging social networks that I think if you are in e-commerce Pinterest is extremely important. Instagram, depending on your audience and then Google+ really is important for every business that considers Google or wants to become friends with Google. It really is a no-brainer to get a verified profile and to map out digital properties using your Google+ profile. I can go on and on about the mistakes but those are some of the big- and I think companies really misunderstand Google+ as not just a social network but social layer is another huge mistake that 90% of businesses that I talk to are doing. I mean if you are on Twitter and you are tweeting 3 or 4 times a day, why can’t you take it to Google+ and replicate it? Even at minimum, you can reap the benefits. So those are a few tips for you out there listening.

James: Excellent! Neal that’s been absolute marketing gold! Thank you so much for that. Where should our listeners go and find out more about you?

Neal: Well, the name of my book, Maximize Your Social is also the name of my website so go to MaximizeYourSocial.com. You can download a free excerpt of the book. The book is published by Wiiley’s so it is available internationally in hard cover and as well as in e-book Kindle iTunes or whatever reader you have. And I also run a blog called Maximize Social Business which I founded that has about 20 different contributors with a wide variety of social media for business topics and I blog there as well so MaximizeYourSocial.com, MaximizeSocialBusiness.com.

James: Excellent! And listener you’ll get links to both of those websites within the show notes of Episode#20 of Traffic Jam so head on over to the website for that. Neal Schaffer, MaximizeYourSocial.com, thanks for joining us on Traffic Jam.

Neal: Thank you so much for the opportunity James, it was a lot of fun and I wish every the best of luck in maximizing your social.

This week’s news in Traffic: If you are an app developer, Facebook have added some options allowing you to display customized calls to action within your ads promoting your ads on Facebook. These options include general actions like use app and more specific ones like shop now, book now, or listen now. Behind the scenes, as an advertiser you can now deep links area. This new calls to action which are to be used in targeting users who have already downloaded your app should encourage engagement and in some cases if you have an app that sells something, drive sales too.

Google is believed to be working a new and anonymous for advertisers to track what website visitors like based on the sites they have visited. The anonymous identifier for advertising being referred to as ad ID would be an alternative to the third party cookies currently used by advertisers to serve relevant personalized adverts. So how would this work? According to the Daily Mail under the plans when a person visits a site an anonymous ad ID would be sent to advertisers and advertising networks that have signed up to the system. These advertisers would have to adhere to a set of basic guidelines about what they can and can’t track and how they can and can’t user the information they are sent. Only advertisers who stick to the guidelines will be given the IDs and if they break the terms and conditions, they would lose access to them. Users may be able to create secondary ad IDs for when they want to keep their browsing history private. It is also thought that the system will be opted in similar to the way cookies are handled and people can disable the tracking at any time.

Lastly and going back to Facebook, it’s as if they knew what our topic of conversation was today on the interview with Neal because they need some changes to Facebook page insights so you can better understand and track the effectiveness of your Facebook Marketing. If you haven’t checked those updates out yet, log in to your Facebook account and look at the new insights section.

A thank you and a shout out to Ben Lanoy from the United Kingdom who gave me a really nice 5-star iTunes review this week and he said James gave real time tips that work through seeing everyday results from his own business. His credibility and passion allows him to interview which allows him to interview some of the internet marketing greats. Gaining traffic and customers online no longer needs to be guess work. Essential listening for anybody for established internet marketer. So thank you Ben I really do appreciate you dropping by iTunes and leaving me a review. To you the listener I would really appreciate you leaving your review as well. Please log in to iTunes, head on over to the ratings tab and leave your review along with the star rating for the show, whatever you feel it deserves- five stars, four stars, even three stars, I really would appreciate that.

The one minute traffic tip: Okay, so Google have made searched encrypted meaning no keyword data now gets past in to Google Analytics. So how do you know what keyword searches bring traffic to your website And are good targets for SEO? The answer is Google webmaster tools. Google webmaster tools can be installed in a similar fashion to Google Analytics. You’ll first need to create an account and then add the unique code provided to your website. From webmaster tools you’ll be alerted to problems Google find with your site but additionally you get to see how many times your site shows up in the search results for a particular keyword search. Plus how many clicks it got and the average position your site ranks for any given phrase. If you use this data effectively, you can spot high potential keywords that are good targets for an SEO campaign. So what are you looking for? A. you want to find keywords with a high number of impressions. B. you want to make sure that the keywords are relevant, and C. You rank well for those phrases already but you’re not on the top half of page 1. Once identified, you can create more content on your site themed around these keywords to make your site relevant and then power up those pages with a reputable SEO agency, perhaps someone like my SEO agency SEO Sherpa or similar. That will move those potential keywords form the strong position up to the high position where you’ll get all of the traffic.

Okay, so that rounds out Episode #20. I’ll be back again real soon with another episode of Traffic Jam for your listening pleasure. For more tips on training to help you get more traffic leads and sale from your website, check out the latest post at Veravo.com. Some of the most recent posts for you there are crafting your user’s journey, how relevance can increase your SEO rank and your conversions. We’ve got mobile site design must haves, tips on creating compelling and high converting landing pages for your mobile website plus I have got a whole report on Hummingbird, the new algorithm from Google, what has changed and how it affects you so head on over to Veravo.com for those posts.

To close out this week’s episode we have a musical jam which of course is chosen by my guest today Neal Schaffer. It’s his favorite band Jamiroquai who happen to be one of my favorite bands too Neal so great choice in music. The track is called Virtual Insanity and as I said it’s by Jamiroquai. Enjoy!

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THIS WEEKS NEWS IN TRAFFIC

ONE MINUTE TRAFFIC TIP

THE TRAFFIC JAM

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More than 120,000 slide  share views is possible when your content marketing is of rock star proportions. Lee Odden of TopRank Marketing discusses the importance of instilling awesome in all your content because high quality content stands you out from the crowd and gets shared more.

In this episode Lee who is the author of Optimize reveals 2 content strategies you can easily replicate in your own business plus the Optimize 360 formula for attracting, engaging and converting prospects.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

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“People will work for a living but they’ll die for recognition” @leeodden
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Hello welcome back to another episode of Traffic Jam, the podcast show where I, along with my podcast guest each week teach you how to get more traffic and build a profitable audience for your website. This is Episode#19.

Coming up on today’s show, I am talking with Lee Odden from toprankmarketing.com who is the author of Optimize, how to attract and engage more customers by integrating social media and content marketing. It’s actually Joe Pulizzi that introduced myself and Lee so I do want to say thank you Joe for putting the two of us in touch, and to you the listener, if you enjoyed the episode I put up with Joe which was #16 of Traffic Jam, then I am sure you are going to enjoy this episode with Lee as well. Not only do we pick up on the conversation I had with Joe about integrating content marketing in to your business, but we also talk about content marketing in relation to SEO as well. Lee really dishes out some great marketing in this interview; some really good proven concepts that he’s used in his own business to achieve such things as over 125,000 views of a slide share presentation and tens of thousands of downloads of an e-book. We speak about the importance of design and marketing, we talk about writing a physical book, and if the payoff is worth it because Lee has done it himself, as well as some easier to implement content marketing strategies such as using lists in your marketing and co-authoring with others. That’s all coming up with my interview with Lee in just a moment so stay tight for that, but don’t go anywhere after the interview because I’ll be giving you some more advise in the section I call the one minute traffic tip, plus of course we have this week’s news in traffic, we have some listener comments and feedback, and of course we end the show with the Traffic Jam jam which will be chosen by my guest, Lee Odden.

Before I get stuck in to the interview, let me give Lee the introduction that he so rightly deserves; he is a former member of the US Army, has been with TopRank Online Marketing for 12 years, and TopRank are a digital marketing agency that help companies, mostly Fortune 1000 Companies in the B2B space attract, engage and convert more customers by integrating content, search, social, and online PR. Lee is a coveted speaker, he is the author of Optimize and in his spare time he’s big in to sports, travel, and food. So there you go, that’s a brief introduction to Lee, my guest today, so let’s get stuck in to the interview.

James: This is Traffic Jam Episode #19 and joining me on the hot seat today is Lee Odden from toprankmarketing.com. Lee, welcome to Traffic Jam!

Lee: Hey it’s great to be here James.

James: Great to have you on the call. It is an early start, but I hear not so early for you because you’ve actually been up for 5 hours despite the fact that it’s 8am where you are. Sounds like quite a long day.

Lee: Yeah, well you know, it’s the price of being a dad and having kids and lots of work to do

James: Yeah rolling all in to our businesses, it’s got to be a challenge. Good, well at the time of recording this we are at mid-September 2013 and I understand you’ve just gotten back from content marketing world where you probably presented to several thousand guests, but more interestingly to me from what I understand, you published there a slide share presentation that’s had over 40,000 views already. I’d like to start the interview by asking you a few questions around that. From what it seems there might be quite a few marketing lessons in there that might be good to share with our listeners. So tell me a little bit about what the concept was to put this presentation together and some of the results that you’ve achieved so far.

Lee: Definitely! We are big fans of content marketing world conference. This year was the third year; I had spoken on all three years and last year in talking with the event Joe Pulizzi and how we’ve worked together, I presented the idea of what if we came up with a promotional vehicle that’s a win for everyone and so the idea of an e-book that would feature speakers and draw attention to their sessions was developed. The first e-book was called Content Marketing Secrets and it had a secret agent theme and we literally solicited the speakers in character, setting the tone that they just had a rendezvous with their handler, their secret operative back from a dangerous mission and now they’ve got a secret, a content marketing secret but what secret is that they can share to save the content marketing world, and ironically enough, some of these big brands, they answered in character as well. and so we have constructed this e-book that was designed to do a couple of different things. One, be an aggregation of useful content that anyone can find value in, whether they attend or not, but certainly to draw attention to the event and also to draw attention to individual sessions, and as a result, the conferences incentivized to promote the e-book, certainly the speakers were incentivized to promote the e-book. And we picked speakers based on the combination of their subject matter expertise and the depth and reach of their own network. This year we repeated that exercise with a different theme- rock n roll was the theme because the conference happens in Cleveland, Ohio which was the home of the rock n roll hall of fame. And so content marketing rock stars is what we went with.

James: So what sort of avenues did you use to promote this? I guess there is A- the event that you are going to be promoting themselves, that is a real benefit to them. I would assume also the speakers would probably put a little bit of light on to it as well. What are the channels you are using to get that content out there?

Lee: Part of what makes a co-created content object like this work is that built in incentives that participants can be motivated by to share and that is all factored in to the content planning so months in advance, speaker selection, looking at who their connections are and what topical relevance and authority that they have according to our objectives present and then making it attractive through email communications and romancing them to be involved and letting them know how we will be promoting and how they can help. So planting lots of seeds in a timeline of communications and ultimately giving them things like pre written tweets, giving them the embed code from slide share, and then of course we deconstructed the e-book and popped it in to Pinterest, in to Flicker, we did it for long form interviews and on blog posts and things of that nature, and lots of people liked it.

James: I love it! I mean I see a lot of similarities actually to what I am trying to do also with this podcast. I carefully select who are going to appear based on quality of the content and how much of that is aligned on to my audience but also in terms of how much reach that that particular interviewee has themselves and then kind of post interview, it really does make sense for that interviewed expert also to share the content because they also want to make themselves good and I try and make that as easy as possible for them by giving them templates to share to their own audience, I am a true testament to this because I can see things happening with my own stuff so it is great to see it at play at a larger scale through what you have done at Content Marketing World, it is fantastic!

Lee: Yeah, we have done similar projects for companies like Dell; their last e-book had 6,000 views and we did a co-created e-book and 120,000 views, same brand, same slide show channel, the magic in this is not just the idea of picking the well-known individuals who have reach and incentivizing them but the fact that what you are creating together is really awesome. They’ve got to want to belong to it, it’s got to be something that they’re proud to be really associated with, and I think that’s what really separates professionals like yourself and a lot of other link bait people are doing right, when they are just going after the famous and not after the quality.

James: Yeah. Well one thing that really struck me while looking at that slide share presentation which we will of course link off to within the show notes is the actual quality of it. Not just in terms of the content but also in terms of the lay out, the design- I mean it is high quality stuff; it’s not the presentation that has been thrown together in a few hours, there is a lot of thought that has been to it. How important is getting that sort of brand design force right to make this thing become successful?

Lee: It is absolutely huge! The hook is essential not only in the messaging but also in the aesthetic that communicates it. You have to think not just about the interestingness of it or the usefulness of it but how is the thing you’re making going to make people feel because people take actions based on emotions right? And you’ve got to align that aesthetic- the visual elements of the thing with the hook, right, with the ask so to speak. What do you want people to think and how do you want them to feel, after they consume this content what do we like them to do? Very, very important.

James: And what sort of result has this gotten for your own brand Lee? I see it sits up on slideshare.net and there is a link off to your website, how much business or direct result have you been able to attribute to exercises like these?

Lee: We view and evaluate content marketing projects like this. At the campaign level we look at them as key performance indicators, so any metric associated with it as a campaign is only a key performance indicator to the broader scale of things, so for example, our buyer is going to interact with multiple pieces of content over a period of time before they ever decide to hire us. We don’t employ sales people so everything is inbound for us and so from a KPI standpoint, having over 40,000 views, over a thousand download and sending over a hundred people to the conference is all good for the event. But as far as us, numerous people mentioned the e-book on their sites, software companies that would be perfect customers for us for example, and many of them actually embedded the deck on their site. Over 50% of the views of the deck of the slide share – e-book are the result of embeds and many of those are companies that we would like to do business with.  So we have been able to work with some pretty formidable companies as a result of people seeing from TopRank speak, from seeing our blog which is quite popular, from seeing contents like this and this is an annual thing now; we are doing it again next year and people look forward to it so I can’t say that I’ve got six customers because of that one e-book but what I can say is that we are now providing content marketing services for LinkedIn and LinkedIn, according to content marketing world is all in on content marketing going forward, so that alone is a tremendous thing. A little bit of that decision is influenced by the kind of content we create.

James: Yeah, got it. Well I’d like to a bit of extend this conversation around content marketing a little bit further; this is pretty much I think the third interview and in succession that we have spoken on the subject. Joe Pulizzi was the first, then I had Mark Schaefer on the show last week. I would guess though that perhaps as a kind of a social marketer and an SEO at heart because you do cover SEO at your range of services at TopRank Marketing, what’s your take on content marketing as a discipline because I’d like to kind of see whether it differs to those views that we had already.

Lee: It is interesting, having come from – I grew up so to speak in the digital marketing world from a webdev/ SEO standpoint – ’97, ’98, ’99 and so forth is when I started doing SEO stuff and from a search perspective people are countable for organic search traffic right? It just makes sense and so a lot of folks are identifying content in the SEO world as just creating more content, and you have PR people who think of content in terms of earned, and owned and paid media. What I think of content is that it is information that is designed for a specific audience and is intended to affect  a certain business outcome, so it is intentional. That is really the big distinction. And so if I start to understand a customer segment, if I begin to understand who my best customers are and what the buyer journey is like, what the experience is like for them when they seek out, evaluate and ultimately purchase products from a company like mine, what is that journey like? What kind of questions do they have and how can they architect content to answer those questions so that they think we’re the best answer no matter where they look, and that’s an elaboration of course but it’s that intentional design of content for a specific audience empathizing with their journey designed to affect a certain outcome and then the continuous optimization of performance.

James: Got it! So I guess that would be perhaps, one thing we could point, and I know you wanted to perhaps kind of talk about this because it is something that you have quite invested in. SEOs quite often get content marketing wrong from your definition because quite often it’s purely content for the sake of content right? So create content to increase that online imprint and perhaps increase search ranking as the result. What you are saying is that every piece that has to have that clear intention and be designed for in order for it to be productive.

Lee: Yeah and if we do those things, we don’t have to of course, we can do anything, but if we do those things the performance of our content is more easily measured and optimized from a performance standpoint. In the search world of course, one of the challenges is getting companies to create more  content so they actually deserve to rank for the phrases that will attract more customers right? So there is always this okay we optimized what’s there, great. Now what do we do? Link build? But there is more to it than that so… You know what, if I look back, and even in doing SEO in 2001, the world is looking for other content that we can get clients to come up with, and so we are looking at public relations content and customer service content, or at least we were. And so we are looking at recruiting, who’s jobless, and blogging on any content that we can find so we have always had this holistic view towards optimization and content creation. Simply as a means to get more hooks in the water so we can catch those search fishers or search fish so to speak, so a lot of SEOs, because they are held accountable to certain metrics will see content marketing simply as a means of just a matter of creating more content or creating contents that will attract more links rather than designing content for a certain customer segment than even drilling down in to that, what questions do they have as they become aware, evaluate, consider purchase and so on and so forth. Another interesting element to this is the notion of personas because obviously when you do a direct marketing, identify different characteristics of a group of customers. You can create an archetype and call that a persona so we can better understand who that group of customers as if it were a person and of course in the SEO world personas are often fake profiles of people who you use to go and link build rather than representing a group of customers. So there is that common language but it differs a little bit.

James: Yeah, absolutely. Do you find this a challenge? I mean you have spoken there about creating valuable content that serves a purpose; like one of the biggest challenges that I am sure both you and I when dealing with clients is getting them to find the resource to come up with any form of content at all. Does it become a challenge in your mind to kind of get people to create this stuff because there are a few barriers in the way right?

 Lee: Well there are, there’s obviously resources, but more so, there’s a lack of confidence. And depending on the size of the organization there may be other factors like executive sponsorship and the perception of risk or the perception that it can’t be measured, and traditional or legacy attitudes about marketing that everything can’t be directly measured to a lead and those types of things. There’s all kind of obstacles but a modern marketer is going to obviously think about things in terms of what the customer needs to buy and a legacy marketer is going to think of what kind of information the brand needs to push out there in order to be hopefully be persuasive enough to get somebody to buy and I think those who are investing in the customer experience are – they start to realize the value of content and there’s literally a content marketing maturity model we developed to help companies understand where they are now and help them plan for what resources they’ll need to capitalize on being the best where they are in the moment and then how to move forward. We look it a lot of times in Phases: Phase 1, Phase 2, Phase 3 and that sort of thing and that helps peoples understand – if I just start a blog or if I just start contributing articles to industry publications with a Twitter account, we can Masha that, we can go deep with that and then we can start to expand; that sort of thing to build the business case.

James: Yeah, I got it. Good! Well one of the agreements Lee that I have with my guests here at Traffic Jam is they have to share their most successful current traffic strategy. You’ve mentioned at the top of the show you are getting great success with these co-authored e-books, what else is getting success with you right now?

Lee: Well, one of the things that we’ve been doing is developing lists in a really meaningful way and making them an annual event so there’s this adage that people will work for a living but they’ll die for recognition you know and there’s a lot of really talented people doing some great work on specific vertical markets that are unrecognized and maybe they don’t have time to spend much on Twitter and Facebook and Google+ and LinkedIn and that sort of thing yet. Their peers know about the sort of thing that they are doing. We can shine a light on people like that and tell their story in an interesting way. Wow the propagation of that kind of thing is just wild. So an example of this is a couple of years ago I read an article in Clicks, I was listed in a social media something list or whatever. Anyway, I noticed that there’s no women in this list and I’m like I know all kinds of women who are kicking butt in social media! I’m like, are you kidding me? And so I made a list of 25 that I knew and I wrote the bios myself based on what I knew about them so they were personal. When I published that listing, Kabaam! It was a massive, massive exposure for that. 9 months went by and I am like I will do that again. So what I did was I went back to the people who were named on the list and I was like, could you nominate three people that you know to be considered on the next year’s list? And this really impressed those folks and many of them connected me with people that I never ever would have connected with otherwise. And so we narrowed down that list of 60 down to 25, we did it again, again I wrote the bios based on my research, and some of them I knew. And it’s happened a third time, and it’s happening a 4th time this year and it’s women who rock social media. You can Google that and you’ll see this list and they’re widely popular because not a lot of folks are narrowing on that.  I see Forbes and other public magazines do that sort of thing but it’s very superficial. They are not doing a ton of research it looks like, or they are relying purely on a tool of some kind to algorithmically determine who’s popular but again, what about the people who are not really active on the social web but they are doing amazing work? How can we shine a light on them? So lists like that are another thing that we have done that are really, really successful.

James: Love it, and I am sure those listeners out there are probably getting some great ideas for their own markets and verticals because this sort of content, it would be something that most businesses could take on right? I mean you can find top performers in your market or the rock stars in your industry to create in to a slide share, I mean I love that it’s transferrable across any vertical in any industry or it will almost work everywhere I guess.

Lee: It’s very duplicatable and what stops people from doing it is the sheer amount of work to put up with a quality product, that’s it.

James: Yeah, I can imagine. Good! I mean I love it, I’ve got some great ideas for myself Lee so if no one else takes anything from this call, I certainly will! Some fantastic stuff! Now I want to ask you a little bit about your approach over at TopRank Marketing because you’ve actually got what could be a proprietary method, I don’t know, but you have a name for a process that you call optimize 360, tell me a little bit more about what that is and how you actually do it for your clients.

Lee: This notion of optimizing for customer experience is a huge driver for how we provide content marketing services and of course those are integrated with search and social and email and ads or trying to be the best answer wherever the customer is looking and so the start of that is this empathy with the customer doing how do people discover, consume and act on information. And when we answer those questions, we can implement a strategy of attract, engage and convert meaning all of the content objects that we are creating are accountable to how is it that we are going to attract a traffic meaningful to a certain audience with this content object, what messaging is going, and what platform, and what media type; video/audio, text or whatever is going to engage them best for a specific audience and then what messaging or hook or ask is going to be most meaningful for helping them to take action. An action doesn’t have to be a sale or lead, it could be a social share, it could be a referral, a recommendation, so our work in this way, this attract, engage, convert is applicable not only to customer acquisition but it’s also applicable to growing a network, growing brand visibility. And it’s also relevant not just for the buying cycle from awareness to purchase but also throughout the entire customer life cycle. So when we talk about retention, we wanted to retain our existing customers, what type of content can we do to do that and then we want to inspire advocacy of course. The best form of advertising is word of mouth, right? What can we do to facilitate word of mouth and referral through content marketing?

James: Got it, and of course you’ve written the book on this topic, Optimize, is that correct? It kind of covers the optimize 360 process?

Lee: It does! Especially if you are in the US, you can type optimize and I’m sure we registered the s as well but yeah that book has done really well for us in terms of exposure vehicle but it also educated a lot of folks that weren’t like really clear on connecting the dots in searching social and content.

James: Great! I actually wanted to ask you on that point in terms of a medium for getting you out to a large audience, how successful has an offline – your traditional printed book been for you because you’ve obviously had great success with e-books. Was the work involved in creating Optimize worth the payoff in terms of what you’ve got out of it?

Lee: Well, I think so, absolutely. I am very glad that we did the book. I’ve had a couple of folks within our own team help contribute to it so it’s really great help from the team in TopRank, and there’s just something about a tangible thing and also there’s cache to being an author so apart from the way we create a positive signal for the brand and that effort to be the best answer, what we do involves public speaking, and we do a lot of conferences and so having a book is beyond to doing solos and keynotes as opposed to a panel where you compete with other people, so that is a huge advantage just because of a book. Another thing, but this is kind of a tactical thing, some thing anyone who is an author of an e-book can do, I have been doing this  for a while since the book came out, during a session I’d say hey you know, we got his book and that’s a great book and whoever does the best tweet during my session will win a copy. And it’s unbelievable, when I’m on a session there’s 250 tweets that have happened only in my Twitter handle and things related to what I just presented so it is a very, very effective mechanism for many different reasons beyond what I just said but I’m definitely glad I did it.

James: And of course you’ve got a family Lee and taking them down to Barnes and Noble to share daddy’s book that was probably pretty cool too right?

Lee: Yeah that was pretty cool too.

James: Good stuff! Well, before we close out, I want to get your kind of viewpoint on where you think content marketing is heading because you have been in the industry quite a long time, you’ve been on the online space probably 16 years or so, where does content marketing go from here?

Lee: I think there’s two angles to that, one is of course where it’s going as an industry and I think obviously there’s a lot of convergence happening between different disciplines, advertising, public relation and marketing, a lot of those folks are being held accountable for each other’s deliverables and so content is really a vehicle to make that happen. Clearly, when you think about things in terms of how people discover, consume and act on information, it is easy to see I think mobile is a huge driver for the future of content. And not just mobile but any internet connected device really, I think it’s Ericson that and Mike Graham from Incisive Media that says a lot. By the year 2020 there will be over 50 billion internet connected devices, that’s clearly far more than there will be humans and that then powers people to do lots of things 24/7. So that’s one angle of the industry, wide, clearly visual and interactive and dynamic, participatory, the community owns the brand so to speak thing and as well and creation I think is what I see in the future. Companies will compete with industry publications than their same vertical. We already see this in some examples of American Express and Adobecmo.com so I think those are some of the future trends and clearly I think they’re going to move from a sort of status quo as just creating the content they have to be creating the content more SEO like and then moving in to more utility and storytelling and actually being able monetize content not just from customer acquisition but through syndication, through advertising, and so they can make money coming and going because their content is so effective.

James: Great stuff! Well I am sure you will be speaking about some of this stuff at your upcoming very busy October, it looks like you’re speaking at a few different places Lee, what do you have coming up?

Lee: So, on October- Social Media Examiners Social Success Summit, there are in fact, 3,000 to 4,000 people on it already, really amazing portfolio of names, Mark Schaefer, the fellow you had on previously, and Joe Pulizzi I believe will be there, Chris Brogan, Mark Smith who’s going to be talking about social media, so we are doing that on October 3rd, Marketing Pros in Boston, there’s a B2B Conference there that they’ll be doing and several others, there’s on in New York City, in Iowa, and the International Conference of Philadelphia at the end of October.

James: Wow! It sounds like a busy month or so coming up for you, what about any overseas travel plans? I know you’re an avid traveler.

Lee: Oh yeah, in November I’ll be doing a Keen OM Expo in Madrid on November 5th and then I am doing a workshop in Moscow for a small social media conference there in the 3rd week of November.

James: Very nice! Well if you ever make it kind of further east over towards Dubai, it would be fantastic to see you in this neck of the woods Lee.

Lee: That would be great!

James: Good stuff, well I think we should close it out we’ve got a pack full to a 25-30 minutes of content, there’s plenty of resources for the listener to go off and find and they’ll be linked to within the show notes for Traffic Jam episode #19 but for now Lee I think we’ll close out. Thank you for such awesome content. It’s been an absolute pleasure speaking to you today and enjoy the rest of your day.

Lee: Thanks James, appreciate it.

This week’s news in traffic; Facebook has made some updates in their ad formats this week, mostly in relation to Page Posts, Link Ads, Offer Ads, and Event Ads. Most of these updates relate to ensuring ad units display in exactly the same format across all placements on Facebook thus having more consistency plus and more excitingly, larger images. If you have been keeping a close eye on your news feed, you may have noticed that the links you post now display with a larger image. This has been rolled out now to ad units too which is fantastic news!

On to Google+, they’ve introduced embedded posts. After embeddable tweets, Pinterest posts and Facebook updates, you can now also embed your Google+ posts on to your website or blog; text, photos and media posts are all supported and the embeds are fully interactive. So visitors can +1, comment, and follow you on Google+ right from your website.

In event news, the social media success summit is coming up, several of Traffic Jam guests will be appearing – Chris Brogan, James Wedmore, Pat Flynn, Joe Pulizzi, and my guest today Lee Odden will all be appearing at the summit. It’s from the 1st through to the 24th of October and if you’re worrying about having to jump to a plane to attend, don’t, because it is actually happening entirely online. For more information, go to SocialMediaExaminer.com.

Finally, to celebrate helping 100 companies reach on top of Google, my SEO agency SEO Sherpa are giving away to one lucky winner a three-month SEO package valued at $2400. Full details of the competition can be found at veravo.com. To register, all you need to do is enter your name and email until the 6th of October to be in the chance to win. If you want to get your website ranking and attract new customers, what better way than to enter the competition, full details can be found at Veravo.com or by searching for my fan page on Facebook and then clicking on the competition tab, entry is free.

Thank you I have a couple of great 5-star iTunes reviews this week and the first of which comes from Jeff Ross  from the United States who says, great resource, great content for anyone looking for a boost for traffic to their site, so thank you Jeff.

The second one, Rick Noblet, he’s also from the USA and he says, James, I love Traffic Jam! The entire idea of it, the format, content; awesome! This show has a ton of actionable content people, you need to subscribe. Thank you Rick, also a fantastic comment; I really do appreciate your feedback and if you the listener would like to leave me a comment or feedback on Traffic Jam, you can head on over to iTunes, search for Traffic Jam, and leave a review or rating there. And of course you can post on the episode page of TrafficJamCast.com as well which has now moved to Veravo.com but still the best way to find it is by heading to TrafficJamCast.com and you’ll be redirected to the right location. So I look forward to receiving your comments and reviews and reading them out on next week’s show.

This week’s one minute traffic tip will help you get more clicks and thus more traffic from your online display ads, also referred to as banner ads; and the tip this week could not be simpler. Make your banner ads not look like banner ads. Consistently in testing we found that banner ads that don’t look like banner ads outperform fancy banners often by two or even three times. And the logic is pretty simple, people are basically turned off by these fancy banners as it’s blatant advertising. They’ve become blind to them and thus become more difficult to create a fancy ad that stands out and gets clicks. However, if you ad looks like a part of the editorial on a site, it bypasses people’s aversion to the advertising and it is far more likely to garner interest and thus clicks to your website. So an action step this week, if you’re doing banner advertising, go create a banner ad that is plain simple text against a white background and test it against your fancy ad and see which one wins. I’d love to know what results you get, please post your comments on the episode page over at trafficjamcast.com.

That rounds out episode#19 of Traffic Jam I’ll be doing it all again next week with another action packed episode. For more tips and training to help you get more traffic, leads, and sales from your website, check out this week’s post at veravo.com. This week I report on the new mobile ad format Google are testing that will have a huge impact on your Google ad click through rate. I also expose some cowboy SEO practitioners in a classic example of how not to do SEO, and as I mentioned earlier in the show, when you head on over to veravo.com you’ll find details of our amazing competition where you can win a three month SEO package from SEO Sherpa valued at $2400 USD just by registering your name and email before the 6th of October.

To close out this week’s episode, of Traffic Jam, we have a musical jam chosen by my guest today Lee Odden, the artist is called Skrillex and the track is called Bangarang. See you back here again real soon for another episode of Traffic Jam.

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THIS WEEKS NEWS IN TRAFFIC

ONE MINUTE TRAFFIC TIP

THE TRAFFIC JAM

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More than just how to grow your audience, this week’s episode teaches you how to grow and influence an audience online. You may ask what is an influencer and how that helps my business model, but worry not, we’ve got all that covered from a great influencer himself, Mark Schaefer.

Mark from Businesses Grow is a man who’s list of credentials goes on and on, but to sum it up he’s a best selling author, a blogger, speaker, mentor and Twitter expert, and he can teach you how to build authority and klout online. Don’t miss the great tips he is sharing and listen in now!

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Hello welcome back! You are tuned in to Episode #18 of the Traffic Jam podcast, the weekly podcast show where you learn how to build and grow a profitable audience for your website. Yet again it has been another busy week here at Traffic Jam HQ and depending on when you’re listening to this show and where you listen to it, you may find that Traffic Jam has a new home. Until this point you will find the episodes posted over at TrafficJamCast.com, however depending on where you’re listening to this you may find that those episodes now appear at Veravo.com. Veravo.com is a relatively new hub site if you like, where I post the majority of my traffic tips and training on almost on a daily basis. We’ve made the move to put Traffic Jam on to Veravo.com really from the point of simplification, there is a real lesson in that. It is easier to manage one site than it is two. But also just to give you the listener the opportunity to find other tips and training that may be helpful to your own business. So from this point on forward, to find all episodes, go to Veravo.com, however if you do go to TrafficJamCast.com you will be directed to the new place on the Veravo website and you will be able to get all the past episodes really, really easily.

Now it also has been a busy week this week lining up the next guests for the upcoming shows and I have got to say, we have got some pretty cool guests lined up in the next few weeks. A couple of those guests I have been trying to get for some time now but for whatever reason we have just not been able to align diaries or work around other commitments. But we have been able to do that. I am not going to say who those guests are yet because that would spoil the surprise but what I would say is we’ve got the topic of SEO covered for the first time. It should be a good, fun interview. And we’ve got a rather big name from Facebook coming on the show which I know is always a popular topic so those are a few of the episodes that we’ve got lined up for the next few weeks, however let’s not get run away with ourselves just yet because we’ve got a fantastic episode lined up today.

My guest on today’s show is Mark Schaeffer who is a globally recognized speaker, educator, business consultant and author who has a fantastic blog over at businessesgrow.com. He’s the author of three best-selling marketing books: Return to Influence, Born to Blog and the Tao of Twitter which is the best-selling book on Twitter in the world. He’s among the world’s most recognized social media authorities. He has been a keynote speaker on conferences such as the Social Media Week, New Media Expo, and will be speaking at the upcoming Social Media Summit.

So there’s the official bio intro but basically you can read from that that Mark is a pretty big deal when it comes to social media and more to the point on how to attract a following, create buzz and influence others online and that’s pretty much the angle we’re going to be going deep on in today’s interview because I really want to get Mark’s insights on how not only to attract audience but also how to influence an audience because when you become more influential, more of an authority you can easily get people to act on your suggestions, you can of course build a loyal following who come back repeatedly to take a look at what you have to offer and read your content. And also when you become more of an influencer and a person of authority, you can charge more as well. So all of this have amazing impact not just on your marketing but also on your business as a whole. Mark also has written the most popular book on Twitter on the world as I mentioned so we also dig deep on to Twitter on today’s interview and how you can get the most return from that platform, and hey, even if it’s the right platform for you in the first place. I am not always convinced it’s the right platform for me personally but after today’s interview you can make that decision for your own business.

As always, coming up later in the show, we have this week’s news in traffic, the one minute traffic tip, and the Traffic Jam jam. Now this week’s track is one very close to heart for Mark Schaefer and you’ll find out why at the end of the show because as always the Traffic Jam jam plays out the show.

So let’s keep the preamble short and sweet, let’s end it right there, and now let’s get stuck on today’s interview with Mark Schaefer.

James:  This is feature interview #18 of Traffic Jam and joining me on the hot seat today is Mark Schaefer from businessesgrow.com who is a globally recognized blogger, speaker and educator, and the author of books The Tale of Twitter and Return on Influence. So Mark, welcome to Traffic Jam!

Mark: I am so delighted to be with you!

James: Well thank you for joining me today. Let’s get this interview off to a flying start with a bit of a crunching question to begin the show with; my guest on episode#4 of Traffic Jam Scott Stratten said that there is no such thing as a hard ROI in social media. Is he right?

Mark: No. And I like Scott very much and I respect Scott; and I certainly understand his point. But look, ROI is a very simple, straightforward financial calculation. Sometimes, obviously you can figure out the return on investment. There is a company here in the United States that created a community that featured their customers, their brand advocates; this community decided to start having live events, they had live events in their stores, and they could track that every time that they would have one of these live events that they would triple sales in that store that day. This is a community that is held together by social media, was created by social media, the event’s entirely are publicized through social media; there’s no advertising expenditures whatsoever. So it’s a very easy calculation to say look, everytime we have one of these events created by social media, publicized by social media, we triple sales in the store. That’s ROI. I think the point that Scott was trying to make is – and it’s a good one, is that what most businesses miss the qualitative value of social media in addition to the quantitative value. And I think he’s right in that most cases calculating the financial ROI is difficult. But that doesn’t mean you should not do it! What’s the ROI of a traffic billboard along a highway? That is something that businesses have used, at least in my part of the world, for many, many years. And they’ve been comfortable with the results of those billboards without finding the financial return so you need to look at social media in the same way. In my classes James, I give examples of case studies and I’ll ask the students to list all of the benefits of a story that I tell. And I turn to them, well, which of these can fit in an Excel spreadsheet? And almost none of these benefits can. So the point is, look at these tangible important benefits like creating impressions, creating awareness, finding a new business partner, finding a new supplier, finding an inter to hire, what’s the ROI of that? You can drive yourself crazy trying to calculate it; my point is, don’t! Just find a way to acknowledge the qualitative benefits of social media instead of just the quantitative benefits.

James: Let’s talk a little bit about quantitative and how probably we can draw attention to something you speak about in your Return to Influence book which the platform is called KLOUT. I checked in a couple of days ago on my profile and I see that my score is somewhere in the 50’s or thereabouts. Yours of course is much higher than that. What does this data actually mean and based on what you just said a short moment ago, should we actually even care about it?

Mark: Well, I think that you should, and it’s a very controversial topic and I think that this company Klout brings a lot of that controversy needlessly upon themselves. So let’s step back a minute and see what is this company trying to do. Their website says we are the standard for influence. Now, are they the standard for influence? No. Will they ever be the standard for influence? I doubt it. Can they tell you how influential you are at work? No. At work? No. With you children? No. However, this is what they’re trying to do; they’re trying to identify people who can move content and engage an audience on certain topics. So let’s say you blog about sports; let’s say you’re a cricket fan. And let’s say that every time you blog about cricket, it ignites. People tweet about your articles, they comment on your articles. Now, say you have a neighbor who also blogs about cricket and nobody pays attention to it, on a relative basis, your Klout score should be higher than your neighbors’ because you are creating content that is igniting. That is a very small sliver of influence in the world, and yet, this is very important because you’re creating buzz. And a lot of companies and business and brands would like to get to know you. Maybe Nike would like to get to know you, maybe one of the local cricket clubs would like to get to know you because you are seen as an expert creating content on this topic. So the revolutionary piece of this is- we’ve always known that there are highly connected influencers who can help sell our stuff. Either advocates, people in our community who say, you know, I love this product and I am going to recommend it to all my friends. But how do we find those people, how do we nurture those people? It’s almost impossible to do until now. Klout and some other companies have created these algorithms that can very quickly and can very inexpensively find people who are talking about your products, your companies, and areas that you are interested in. Is it 100% accurate? No. it’s a blunt instrument; but sometimes a blunt instrument is all you need to make progress. Again the billboard reference; a billboard along the highway is a blunt instrument and yet it works really, really well. and in a world where traditional means of communication like television, newspaper and radio are dying, marketers are eagerly embracing new ideas like identifying and connecting with these influencers to borrow those powerful communication pipelines to help spread their message that’s why this is a very significant trend for businesses to understand.

James: So what we’re really saying is Mark, is that it’s probably something that we should not care about too much in terms of our own influence, but in terms of reaching out to identifying influence who could be beneficial in our own market place it’s a really useful tool.

Mark: Well it depends on your goal. I agree with you. For some businesses and some products it is being used today in very creative ways; I think my favorite chapter in the book that I wrote Return to Influence is a chapter filled with case studies of how businesses; big businesses, small ones, even non-profits and universities, how they’re starting to use these tools in very creative ways. On a personal basis, let’s say I want to get a job at marketing, sales, PR. Today, the ability to move content online and engage an audience, that could be a very important skill set on jobs, maybe even in HR, maybe in customer service. So I think it is like an indicator, it’s like a financial credit score. If you have a credit score, that doesn’t indicate what you can do with your life. It doesn’t indicate whether you are going to pay a loan back or not. But it’s an indicator of something that is still very useful for businesses to see. So basically a Klout score to me is a representation of – is this somebody who creates conversational content that ignites on the internet and if I am trying to hire somebody who can do that I think it would be foolish to at least take a look at that score.

James: Well let’s talk about that for a second and talk about that as a skill set. Is it something that is inherent between individuals or is it something that people can actually learn like can you learn to be an influencer online and create buzz?

Mark: That is an excellent question! I don’t think I have been asked that before James, that’s an excellent question. I do think that it can be acquired and it can be learned, and I’ll tell you why. In the real world, how do we acquire power and influence? It might be from the University we attended, how much money we have, who, even what family we married in to, it might be from a title from an organizational chart. Guess what? On the internet, none of that matters! Nobody cares. James, I don’t know what university you went to, I may be able to dig down and find it out –

James: I didn’t. There you go.

Mark: Beautiful example. When I was writing my book two-thirds of the way, I realized, every case study of a power influencer in my book James, none of them have a college degree. And I think that’s amazing because in the real world, influence comes through chucking boxes, it comes through knowing the right people, it comes through knowing hurdles. So we have a new opportunity now, just as you are doing, you are creating value through the content of this podcast. You have chosen yourself. You are not waiting for a university degree, you are not waiting for someone to say you’re the anointed one. You are choosing yourself and you are saying I am doing this, I am choosing my authority and explore how far I can take my influence by creating great content that gets shared, and I think that is a great example; you’re a living example of this- you’re creating your own destiny. It doesn’t even matter if you are an introvert or an extrovert, techie or non-techie, or college graduate or not. It doesn’t matter anymore. What you need to do is help people create value that informs, entertains, educate and help people and that is real root of power and influence on the web today.

James: Well I guess we are talking about a couple of things within that. I guess there is the reach of your audience, the size of it, but there’s probably also the quality of the influence of those people that you are connected with. Is there a way to kind of reach out to those influencers, I may be giving a clue away with the fact that I am interviewing you on this week’s episode but is there a way to kind of reach out to influencers in your market to improve the quality of your reach if you like?

Mark: That’s a really key idea, and obviously you are correct. That is the way it works in real life and that’s the way it works online as well. And let me give you an example first I think of how people are doing it incorrectly. An example I will use is that I had a company call me last week and if you have seen my blog at all, I write about business marketing and kind of the human intersection with social media technology. And that’s what I love, that’s what I am passionate about. So a company called me up last week and said, I have never heard of this person before and they said, I represent a shoe company and I want to you to blog about our shoes. Oh really, well who are you? I have never even heard of you before, why should I blog about your shoes? I don’t care about your shoes, I don’t care about your companies, it’s not a fashion blog but this is typical of all most relationships trying to live out of desperation. This person has woke up one day and realized, oh my gosh, we have got to connect with these powerful online influencers, this is really where the world is going. But business is built on relationships, it’s built on trust – it always has been. If you and I were in a live business networking meeting, and I came up to you and said hey James, on your next podcast I want you to feature my shoe company. You’d think what a bizarre person this is. You just don’t do that. So if it doesn’t make sense in the real world, why would you do it on the online world too? We still have to build relationships. Here’s the trick, it takes time and it takes patience to build these relationships, we need to help each other, we need to support each other. And there is no guarantee of a payback. There probably won’t be but there’s no guarantee. And so in a world basically built around advertising budgets where the money goes up and the money goes down, how do we now create programs built on building relationships where the money can’t go up and down? The money has to stay the same because we are building relationships and that doesn’t go away. So there are challenges, for budgets, for businesses, for ad agencies trying to figure this stuff out because it’s a whole new channel, it’s a whole new strategy and companies are struggling with that.

James: So what would have been the correct approach of that shoe company if indeed their product is aligned with what you talk about at businessesgrow.com?

Mark: There’s an antithesis to this. There is a young lady who’s been coming on to my blog for six months now. She leaves a comment on my blog almost every day and she adds some useful value to the community so I am starting to get to know her. After she left a comment a few times, I clicked on her link and I thought, who is this person? So I saw that she’s from a marketing and communications company and I thought, well that’s interesting. And she starts following me on Twitter, connected with me on Twitter and she subscribed to my blog. Well, after about six months, she sent me an email and she said, hey Mark, I wrote this blog post that I’m really excited about, can you give me some feedback on this? So I looked at the blog post and honestly there were some things that were fundamentally wrong with it so I told her, I said, you know, I really don’t kind of agree with your approach here. And she said, I feel so disheartened now and I said, you know what, you don’t need to feel disheartened, let’s have a phone call, let me help you walk you through you this. What’s happening here is she has been making an authentic attempt to connect with me as a person to get to know me, to help me, to support me, to support my blog, to leave value through comments and at some point, it’s okay to ask for help, and when she did, I can’t wait to help her. And in fact, I’m not just going to give her an email feedback, I’m going to reach out and say, hey you’re a young person that could benefit from some coaching here. I am not going to charge you any money from this, but I’d do this because this is my opportunity to be authentically helpful. At some point, her blog post is going to be great, and I’m going to tweet it, I’m going to support it, and maybe even ask her to do a guest post to my blog. And that’s how the world works.

James: Yeah, got it. Well it’s no coincidence that you’ve featured a piece of Return of Influence from Robert Chaudiny who talks about the whole concept of reciprocity. That’s exactly what was at play, that this girl was giving value at the point there were she actually may be needed some help her in return that you almost feel indebted to return the favor.

Mark: Brilliant point! And that’s exactly reciprocity at work and reciprocity makes the world go round. I mean, it’s a constant exchange of favors, it’s an economy of favors. And when those favors add up, even if it’s a Facebook like or a Facebook comment or a comment on a blog post, at some point, if that person comes to me and asks for a favor back, you’re going to say yes.

James: Yeah, Mark let’s talk about Twitter for a moment because that’s another area where you have expertise, you have written a book called The Tale of Twitter. Me personally, I am just not good at Twitter and have not experienced any pay off in actual business terms, however, if I look at the likes of you and some other guests that I’ve had on Traffic Jam like Scott Stratten and Chris Brogan, you guys have really built strong businesses with Twitter as a driver. Now with all of the other long lasting forms of social content like blogging and podcasting, even Facebook and Google+ that kind of have a longer life span than the 140 character tweets that go out. What’s the real benefit of investing so much time in Twitter?

Mark: Well, let’s take a step back and say that I think the foundation of your social media presence for almost any business has to be something that I call rich content. It can’t just be LinkedIn, Facebook, Tweets; it has to be something with substance so that could be a blog, a podcast, a video series, maybe something like e-books but generally those three: blog, podcast, or video so you have to start there because that’s the engine that drives your social media presence. That’s the deep content that creates voice of authority and gives you the opportunity for vast exposure. And that’s really what drives the Klout score, right? It’s original content that gets attention. If all you do is tweet, that’s not going to drive your Klout score. If all you do is post on Facebook, that’s not necessarily going to drive your influence because you’re just sending links from other people – something like that. So that’s got to be the engine. Now, how does Twitter fit in to this? Twitter fits in to this in that I believe it’s the fastest and most effective way to build a targeted audience. It’s very difficult to build a targeted audience on Facebook or even LinkedIn because to connect with someone to connect with you back. Not so on Twitter, there are lots of ways to find relevant, interesting, motivated people who might be interested in your business in Twitter and then you go out and follow them. In my book, you mentioned the Tale of Twitter, in Chinese they call it the Tao of Twitter, Tao in Chinese means path and in the book I’ve got an entire chapter teaching people how to find those people. So Twitter is kind of like the movie trailer for the movie that’s your blog or your video or your podcast. So you cast the net, find all those people, start building relationships with those people and if you do that through Twitter and say once in a while, hey I wrote this new blog post I think you might be interested in this. Then they’ll click and they’ll read your blog post. Now you’re starting through Twitter to build your blog audience, you’re starting to engage with them in a deeper way, in a richer way. They’re now reading your blog posts and listening to your podcasts, maybe now they’re looking at your website, they’ll say what else does this company do? And that’s sort of how it all connects together.

James: Got it, got it. Cool! Well I want to ask you about a specific chapter in your book which I saw was listed called the secrets of influence on Twitter, what are your top tips that you’d allow me to share today on the interview for Traffic Jam listeners in terms of actually creating influence on the platform?

Mark: Well, I think it’s really this simple: the thing that most businesses miss James is that they look at social media as just another place to put their advertising and their press releases and social media is a entirely different channel and we need to treat it differently. People do not go on social media to view your ads or view your press releases, they go on social media to get away from that. They go on social media to play Farmville or to see pictures of funny cats. They don’t want to see your press release about your new line of ball bearings or a picture of your company president handing a cheque to a local charity or something like that. That’s just not interesting to them! But what people will do, they may not spend any time on your advertising, but they will spend time with people and ideas and content that will help them, help them make money, save money, have a more interesting life, have a more entertaining life, help them save time, or do something in a new way, help their health, help their self-image and every business is geared towards that in some way and I have a favorite case study of a medical clinic that I work with in my area and they took one of my classes, they read my book and they said, we have got to change! We’ve got to stop selling, selling, selling and start helping, helping, helping; and that’s what I call the social media mindset. You’re creating this mindset and if you can embrace that, if you can adopt that, and have a strategy of creating content that truly is helpful, then that is the key to truly giving in this space, creating influence in this space, creating real advocates and loyalty in this space.

James: And Mark, does the same apply in blogging? I mean I go over Business Grow, your blog there it gets a huge amount of interaction. I mean I am seeing shares and retweets and dozens of comments on each post whereas most businesses really struggle to get any form of interaction going on their blog at all if anything. Is that your secret there as well? I mean literally it’s all about creating value and helping and as probably most businesses are doing – sell their latest products or a picture of the company director cutting the ribbon, is that it? We see a lot of that right?

Mark: That’s exactly it! I mean I am trying to think back to the last time I tried to actually sell something on my blog and I would say it was probably at least five months ago, I had a new book come out called Born to Blog so I had a podcast saying hey I have a new book, you might like to read it, I think it’s really good, I think it’s really interesting, you might enjoy it. That’s as close to selling something as I have gotten on my blog for the entire year of 2013. It seems strange to people that I am spending all this time giving away my ideas, giving away my advice on this blog, sending them on the comments section, engaging and helping people. If someone is really struggling, I’ll send a let’s get off the comments section go ahead and give me a call and let me see if I can help you with this problem. But what happens is people get to know me and they trust me and a few months ago I got a call from a gigantic company here in America and they said, we’re having a national conference and we want you to be our guest speaker and we’re going to pay you a good sum of money to do this. And I said if you don’t mind me asking, why me? How did you find me? They said, our executive vice president is a huge fan of your blog. There you go, and that’s how it works. I am building a presence, I’m building a brand, I am building a voice of authority. Now, if that executive vice president came to my blog every day and on my blog I say here’s my newest product, now comes lemon scented. Here is my latest donation to the local charity. Here’s a picture cutting the ribbon. Is he going to keep coming back to my blog? I am not running a blog, I am running an infomercial; it’s a long series of advertisements. I’m not being helpful, I’m not being compelling, I’m not being interesting and so it is really difficult to make that transition to say I am going to stop selling, I’m going to start helping. It’s scary, because as business people, we’ve been conditioned to sell and we’re scared because if the selling stop. And I mean you still need to have sales people, you still need to service your customers. But as far as another way to angle your marketing, this really works. I have seen it work with dozens, probably hundreds of my customers and my students so I know it works.

James: Yeah, it’s interesting I had Joe Pulizzi on the show I think a couple of weeks ago; we had a conversation around a very similar type of topic where we spoke about how business owners become almost afraid of sharing and helping because they almost feel like they’re going to give away their secret sauce or their special knowledge by actually trying to help people rather than selling them the product or service and then offering to help. But it’s counter intuitive it actually works in the opposite way, doesn’t it?

Mark: It does, and one of the examples I use is I have written well over a thousand blog posts and the last I looked I think I have written about 90 different blog posts about blogging; best practices, ideas, how to’s. You could go on to my blog and you could click the category of blogging best practices and click all those for a couple of hours and have a pretty good idea of how to start your blog and what to do. And yet, people still buy my blogging book. They still call me every day saying can you help me with my blog? Can I hire you to be a coach to get me through this while I’m starting to do this to help me get it on the right direction? And so it is counter intuitive. I’ve shared all my secrets, I don’t hold anything back. I’m going to help people and share as much advise and content as I can, it’s all out there if you look hard enough for it. But people don’t want to look for it, they want me. They still want me, they want to talk to me about their specific idea, their specific problem and I am happy to do that. So it seems counter intuitive but it actually works really well.

James: Well Mark let’s end on that point because your information today has indeed been truly helpful, I’m sure our listeners have got a huge amount out of today’s session but I don’t want to leave it just as a great interview which it has been. I want to ensure that our listener out there has some actionable to walk away from today’s session with. What one piece of advice that our listener can go and perhaps implement in the next 24 hours can you give to us today?

Mark: Well if you’re really struggling with how to get started with social media the best thing to do I think is to start with my book the Tao of Twitter because it talks about this path, this framework, of how to get your business ready to succeed. You can read it in 90 minutes, it costs $8 USD or something like that on Amazon. It is incredibly cheap but for many businesses, that turns things around, that really gets people started in the right direction and I think that is the best action a new business or someone struggling with this to take to kind of get pointed in the right direction.

James: Well guys if you’re listening to this episode on iTunes or your media player, head on over to TrafficJamCast.com and you’ll find a link to that resource in the show notes as well as a link off to Mark’s website, businessesgrow.com. Mark, you’ve been a fantastic guest, you’ve been generous with your time. Thank you so much!

Mark: My pleasure!

This week’s news in traffic: I am really glad to say that Facebook have updated their page guidelines to now allow contest and sweepstakes on Facebook contact pages. For a long time the page owner had to use a separate tool or even host their contest elsewhere such as perhaps on their website or their blog or otherwise risk having their Facebook account shut down. Of course, when hosting contests on external tools or websites, it did limit how successful the contest could be. However from now on you can run a contest on your page itself and even use the Share, Like and Comment features as part of your contest. This is something I personally will be trying out as part of my own Facebook campaign in the next few weeks and I will make sure that after making that I will report the results back to you here on Traffic Jam.

Google+ have confirmed that they are going HD with Hangouts. Over the next weeks they will be rolling out high definition to Hangouts on air initially and then to all desktop hangouts video calls over the next few weeks. My eyes have really been opened up to the possibilities that Google Hangout holds for us marketers, things like informal Q & A sessions, online seminars, product demos, they’re all possible with Google Hangouts. If you’d like to get more ideas for yourself on how you can use hangouts on your own business, then I’d recommend you check out episode #10 of Traffic Jam which was with Chris Brogan.

And lastly on what is quite a short news round up this week, Google and the Hershey chocolate company have announced a co-branding deal. In an about turn from Google, they have named their brand new operating system KitKat and not Key Lime Pie as expected. With the naming of the new operating system, Google and Hershey have announced a co-branded deal by the new android operating system will be marketed on KitKat chocolate bars and vice versa. Reportedly, there was no cash exchange between the parties for agreement.

The one minute traffic tip: Okay, so I have a super simple and really quick to implement tip this week for generating cross promotion traffic by using your email footer. In the case of my business I have got my email contact divided up within my database according to the news that they’re subscribed to and the products and services that they purchase. In my particular business that’s really two categories; those people that are interested in Google Adwords update from my Click Jam pay per click management agency and those that are interested in SEO Updates from SEO Sherpa. Whilst I ensure that those people that are subscribed to the list only get the updates they requested, it is also true that someone interested in Google Adwords news would also be interested in SEO News as well. So everyone getting that Google Adwords news will see in the email footer a little P.S. that says, to get SEO news too, click here. And by clicking on that link, they’re then subscribed to my email database for my SEO updates. All of these can be managed in your email management system. For a system like Aweber or Mailchimp you have to get people to opt in and subscribe again however with a system software like InfusionSoft or OfficeAutoPilot, just by clicking on that link on the email you can have them subscribed on the sequences, have tags added to them or subscribed to an entirely different list. This PS Section is really a very simple way to inform your customers and prospects about the other products and services that you offer so it doesn’t need to be intricate, you don’t need them to be subscribed to other email lists, you can simply use those links or a banner to the issue in the PS section to promote other stuff that you’ve got going on. So my task for you this week is to get creative with your PS section, find another product, service or event you want to promote in your business and then add that to your email auto responder sequence or the broadcast that you have coming up this week. I’d love to see how you’ve gotten on with this so once you’ve gotten some results post them over at Traffic Jam Cast beneath episode 18 and let’s see who’s come up with the most creative idea for their PS Section.

That rounds out episode#18. I will be back next week with another episode of Traffic Jam so stay tuned for that.  If you’ve enjoyed this episode please log in to iTunes and leave the show a review and rating. I’ll more than likely read that out on next week’s show. You can of course leave a comment and feedback over at Traffic  Jam Cast as well, you can do that by leaving a comment beneath that episode itself or hitting a leave a voicemail message at the base of the site. Also this week, go check out the traffic training and tips over at veravo.com. I’ve got a post this week with a tip on how to speed up your SEO results and I’ve also got my reaction to a controversial video ad banned by Google from the Australian Sex Party. In that ad appears numerous censored reference to the F word so you’d probably get a good idea on the type of idea that may be but it’s clever advertising nonetheless, I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether Google made the right decision to ban it. That’s all over at Veravo.com.

Playing out this episode of Traffic Jam is a track called Waking Up Weird by the Royal Bangs. It is of course picked by my guest today Mark Schaefer and the reason that it’s so special to him is that Royal Bangs is his son’s band. To play out the show, Royal Bangs, featuring Ryan Schaefer, son of Mark Schaefer, Waking Up Weird.

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THIS WEEKS NEWS IN TRAFFIC

ONE MINUTE TRAFFIC TIP

THE TRAFFIC JAM

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This week’s guest lives and breathes podcasting 7 days a week, 52 weeks of the year! John Lee Dumas is the host of the #1 ranked business podcast on iTunes; a daily podcast show called Entrepreneur On Fire where John interviews successful entrepreneurs about their journey to success.

What is so remarkable about John’s own success with Entrepreneur On Fire is the speed at which he has climbed the ranks from nothing. 12 months ago Entrepreneur On Fire was still to be launched to the world, now the podcast sits atop of iTunes having been downloaded over 2 million times continuing to grow at a rate of 350,000 downloads per month.

Listen in as I ask John to open up the studio doors to reveal the lessons of Entrepreneur On Fire’s success.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

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“We are all terrified of failure but that’s what it means to be an entrepreneur. @johnleedumas
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Hello! Welcome back! You’re tuned in to Traffic Jam, the show that teaches you how to build and grow a profitable audience for your website. I am super excited you can join me on today’s episode #17 because in the hot seat today is a very fiery entrepreneur who in just 11 short months has built from nothing the number one ranking business podcast on iTunes. The stats of this podcast are quite phenomenal – it has received to date 3 million downloads and that number grows at a whooping rate of 350 thousand downloads per month. When you consider that my guest’s podcast at the time of recording this is only 11 months old, the fact that it now has probably the largest audience of any business podcast in the planet is simply amazing. I of course am going to be pulling back the studio doors of this podcast to see how a successful podcast like this is built from scratch at such a phenomenal rate.

Of course in addition to the guest interview today we have the regular segments, they’re the same every week, we have the one minute traffic tip, we have this week’s news in traffic and of course we have the traffic jam jam to play out the show. The jam is of course chosen by my guest today, however the artist who performs this track is someone that I have personally gotten to meet; we hung out probably in 2000 and 2001 for a whole day when we were both photographing the same wedding. I am not sure if it gives you any clue as to who the artist is however they are also a talented photographer as well as being a very talented performer as well. So, I don’t know, does it give you any clues? Stick around until the end of the show to hear this week’s jam but coming right up now is a guest that I am super excited to have on the show, it’s John Dumas of Entrepreneur on Fire podcast, a daily podcast show where John interviews successful entrepreneurs about their journey. I’ll be sharing my journey as a guest in John’s show very soon but today, John shares his journey to the #1 rank on iTunes in this week’s interview.

James: Okay, so this is Traffic Jam episode #17 and joining me on today’s show is John Dumas from EntrepreneurOnFire.com. John, 300 episodes, 3 million downloads, 145 countries; have you been surprised by the amount of exposure the Entrepreneur on Fire podcast has achieved in less than a year?

John: Absolutley! We are as we speak at the 11th month mark James and it has really blown me away on a lot of levels as to how podcasting has taken off in general and specifically the traffic that has driven myself and my brand.

James: Yeah, well those numbers are pretty impressive. I was doing some calculations – I don’t know if you’re a numbers man before this interview but I’ve worked out- you’ve actually created somewhere near 147 years’ worth of spoken conversation when you factor in the amount of downloads you’ve had and the amount of episodes; that’s a whole lot of content! It’s a pretty phenomenal number.

John: Wow that’s really interesting! I would love to be able to use that data on my podcast because I am really impressed by that.

James: Yeah, phenomenal! I’ll share the numbers with you, you can pick holes in my math as well just to make sure I got it correct. John, what has been the business model for you? What’s behind Entrepreneur on Fire?

John: The business model James behind Entrepreneur on Fire is very straightforward- it is to build a massive audience and I knew without a doubt that if I could build a massive audience, if I could generate massive traffic to my sites, to my podcasts, to my brand on a daily basis then modernization streams are going to open up all over the place and that has definitely been the case; Entrepreneur on Fire has allowed me to open up diverse and multiple income stream so it’s been a very healthy business as well because my business model was from Day 1 to leverage the audiences of the massive and great and inspiring and successful entrepreneurs that I interview on a daily basis.

James: So was there a plan from day 1 or did you kind of let that audience build to the point of critical mass and then assess really what your monetization was going to be?

John: Really the latter; because I knew that my audience was going to tell me what they were suffering, what their pain points were- what they’re struggling with in life and then that was going to give me the key to the products and the services that I could create to solve those pain points for them so until I grew that audience, I did not want to spend a lot of time creating something that maybe nobody wanted to get. It really points back to one of my prior guests Eric Lease and the Lean Start Up Method where you really just want to create that minimally viable product; don’t spend much time, don’t spend much energy on it because you don’t really know what your target market wants until you get in there and you’re being exposed to them so until I was exposed to my audience, until I had an audience to be exposed to, I had no idea what they wanted so I wanted to wait until that critical mass happened.

James: And I guess now at 300 episodes, you’ve had a feedback loop to determine exactly what would be a viable monetization model that would also benefit that of your listeners too?

John: Absolutely! Yeah.

James: So what is the monetization now? From the outside looking in and I’m a listener to Entrepreneur on Fire, you have sponsorship on the show, what else is going on behind the scenes if anything?

John: Sponsorships is definitely a major revenue; that’s a five figure income source for Entrepreneur on Fire on a monthly basis. We have 6 sponsors, of which I have 2 maximum sponsors per episode; each of which pay $400 to sponsor Entrepreneur on Fire per episode- a total generation of $800 per episode when I do have those two sponsors. That’s been very steady going forward. All of my sponsors from Q2 and Q3 are continuing to move forward into Q4 so they are seeing results. Entrepreneur on Fire listeners are really resonating with the sponsors that I have so that has been a great model. Another one James came directly from what we talked about of listening to your audience. Once you do have that audience, what are they telling you? And a consistent thing though keeps coming back to me time and time again was, John, I am an entrepreneur but I have no entrepreneurs like me around me. I feel like I am all alone, I feel like I have no support, nobody to give me feedback, nobody to hold me accountable to what I feel and want to do. I want to be part of a mastermind. I keep hearing that over and over again. So just a month and a half ago, almost two months now, I launched officially Fire Nation Elite which is a mastermind for Entrepreneur on Fire listeners who are looking to surround themselves with energetic, successful, energized entrepreneurs who are really looking to support each other to take our businesses within this mastermind to the next level and that has turned out to be another phenomenal income stream because it’s a $165/ per month to be part of this mastermind. We’re currently sitting at 82 members so that’s another five figure income source per month recurring revenue which is obviously a very nice business model and we are very soon, probably within 15 – 30 days, going to be at 100 members which where we’re going to cut it off for Fire Nation Elite because we have decided as a mastermind, that’s the right number to be: #1 powerful enough and large enough a number to really impact each other’s businesses, but #2 not be so large where people within it are feeling overwhelmed and not really able to form business relationships. That has been a great experience James! I am involved with Fire Nation Elite every single day interacting with these entrepreneurs and it has been unbelievable and a great experience for me.

James: Congratulations for that! I have heard very good things about it on the grapevine but John at this stage let’s wind the clock a little bit – tell us a little bit about how Entrepreneur on Fire just 11 months ago, It seems probably to you quite a distant past isn’t it? Maybe after 300 episodes it seems a long time but in actual time it’s not too long ago, so what is the story? How did it all come about?

John: Oh it really does both seem like a long time ago and then like a blink ago at the same time because at this time last year James, I had not released my first podcast. I was still about a month away from releasing the first episode of Entrepreneur on Fire and like with all entrepreneurs, we never really know what’s going to happen when we launch that product, when we launch that service. And I had no idea! When we launched at this point last year, I had about 20 or 30 interviews completed but I had no idea if my kind of weird business model of a 7 day a week podcast was going to work, because going back to your original question, how did it all begin – it all began pretty simply. To be honest with you, I mean, here I was in commercial real estate, a very corporate type job, wearing a suit to work every single day, driving to appointments, meeting with different people for different real estate transactions. But the common thing there was I was always in the car, I was commuting all the time to different appointments and wherever and I was loving podcasts and I would listen to podcasts all the time but I ran out of my favorite podcasts all the time because they’d be produced once a week, once every two weeks, and they were great content but not just enough quantity so it was during one of those drives that I literally had my aha moment where I was like, you know what there must be other people like me James who drive to work every day, that hit the gym and love  consuming great content while they’re at the gym. I would love personally a 7 day a week podcast and I am sure there must be some other people out there who would as well. That’s the day the idea is born, and I did nothing, just put my heart, soul and all my energy in to that idea since.

James: Yeah. One question you asked on your show John that I want to kind of spin back to you if you like is – what was the biggest mistake, or failure or obstacle that you had to overcome when getting started because you did start from scratch. You had no experience when you first launched the show, you must have been faced with some challenges early on. What were some of those?

John: My biggest failure was truly my fear of launching. This is something I can point to very directly because here I was James, I have “given it all up”- I quit my job, I poured all of my time for months; all of June, all of July, and here we were in mid- August, and I just poured this last two and a half months trying to learn how to podcast, interviewing, all the stuff, and then I was having this fear of launch. I was supposed to launch August 15th and I bumped it back, then I was supposed to launch September 1st and I bumped it back. And looking back on it, it’s very easy for me to diagnose that I was terrified about launching than it not being a success because if that happens when I left my very comfortable, very solid job, I had invested a lot of money, a lot of time, a lot of effort, and very public with my family and friends of this venture that I was doing so as long as I hadn’t yet launched, I couldn’t fail. So I kept pushing that launch date back to September 15th. Finally, and lucky for me, I had a coach, I had a mentor, who was able to hold my my feet to the fire and say, John I will fire you as a student and as a mentee unless you launch today literally; and so I launched, and it was the best thing that I could have done. I wish that I had launched a month prior. I would have just accelerated the entire process that I was going through so that fear of launching is so prevalent to all entrepreneurs; because until you launch, you really can’t fail. It’s only when you get it out there, and we are all terrified of that, of failure, but you know what, that’s what it means to be an entrepreneur, to swallow that fear and go straight forward. It wasn’t a straight trajectory, I still face a lot of roadblocks and a lot of obstacles after I launched but I kept tackling those head on, and you were right James, as we sit today, in August of 2013, Entrepreneur on Fire is the number 1 ranked business podcast in all of iTunes, I have unseated the previously unseated Dave Ramsay, generally over 350,000 unique downloads per month in over 145 countries, none of which would have happened if I had let my fears which were taking over me completely take over.

James: Yeah, absolutely. I think as you said those things that hold any entrepreneur or business owner back is getting stuff out there. But unless you get stuff out there you haven’t got anything at all have you? So you have to overcome that fear if you want to stay in business. So tell me about the show. One of the big differences about Entrepreneur on Fire is the frequency of which you publish. You’re a seven-day-a-week podcast. There’s got to be some effort involved in building a show like that. Why don’t you tell me a little bit about the process? Because I am just sitting here thinking I am doing a once per week podcast and there’s a lot of work involved in that. How on earth does John get out seven episodes per week? What’s the trick? There’s got to be something in a way.

John: Well, first and foremost, Entrepreneur on Fire is my full time thing. I mean it’s all that I do, I am 100% focused on the podcast first and that’s really where I pour my heart and my soul in to so there is a lot of time for me to devote in to a venture like a 7-day a week podcast. With that being said, I really have developed some schedules and some systems that have really worked well for me. For instance, James and I are talking here on a Monday, today, I have 8 more interviews, all for on Entrepreneur on Fire, I batch my interviews on a one-day a week, every single Monday, I do 8 back to back interviews, all for Entrepreneur on Fire. It’s a very long day and it’s emotionally draining. You have to be really revved up for every single interview; it’s not that hard to do because the people who I am talking to are so inspired and so successful but it’s not an easy day but the beautiful thing about this batching is that there’s really no way for me to kind of let things slide like bang, bang, bang, bang! I just need to knock this eight out and be fully focused on to my game for one day- Monday. Then I wake up Tuesday morning and my interviews for the week are done. All I need to do now is focus on the other aspects of Entrepreneur on Fire, running my mastermind, dealing with sponsors, continuing to grow my brand, be interviewed on other shows like yours to continue to promote entrepreneurs in general, what we are doing both you and I James which is something that in this world 20 or 25 years ago. It’s a whole new crop of people like yourself, like me who can now truly pursue our passions and be authority figures in the world of entrepreneurship and continue to motivate and inspire others.

James: Do you have a team around you John? I mean is this a one-man show or is the people in the background also supporting you with the production of Entrepreneur on Fire?

John: I’m a big believer in teams and as soon as anybody can afford to bring on a team, it’s really important to. You want to do it very slowly because you have to have the right people, but as soon as you can, you really want to start looking to make those hires and to bring those people on so you can continue to leverage in your abilities within your organization so for me I have one at this time, full time virtual assistant. She’s based out of the Philippines, she works 40 hours a week, and she does a ton of the stuff that I now do not have to do. She takes it off my plate. A lot of my social media, a lot of my design work, a lot of repetitive tasks that just have to happen with every single business when it grows on the size of Entrepreneur on Fire has grown to. And also, I am very happy to say, about 4 or 5 months ago, my current girlfriend, Kate Ericson left her job as a full time account executive and joined Entrepreneur on Fire as a Director of Content Creation so now there is the three of us. She is working full time with the company, directing all the content creation and doing the blog post that we have and helping run the mastermind community and that has been incredible; and this team has allowed me to continue to focus James on what really is the bread and butter of Entrepreneur on Fire which is the 7-day a week podcast format in keeping those podcast high quality and packed full of actionable tips for every listener.

James: Yeah, first of all John props for getting your girlfriend involved in the business and making that happen- that’s a whole different point of conversation –

John: It wouldn’t work for every relationship and I can’t picture any of my past girlfriends being able to take this role but fortunately for me, Kate is the perfect person both as a partner and just mentally for this job and it’s been a great experience, it’s been very great.

James: That is good to hear. And of course you wouldn’t want several of your past girlfriends working for you all at the same time. That would just not be worth considering.

John: That is terrifying!

James: So let’s move on John. Let’s talk about Entrepreneur on Fire and really the podcast as a traffic source; we’ve preluded already to how to build an audience and Entrepreneur on Fire itself becoming a source of traffic to your mastermind, but I want to ask you first of all, how are people finding Entrepreneur on Fire? You’ve got such impressive numbers, download’s through the roof, where are you finding those people in the first place that just move in to listening to the show?

John: Entrepreneur on Fire truly is a great study piece for this because when I launched James, I had zero online presence – literally zero. I had never have a job prior that had me build any kind of an online audience or an online following so I did not even have a Twitter account, I had no Facebook business page, I had literally nothing as an online presence but my business model for Entrepreneur on Fire from the beginning was to gain traction by leveraging the audiences of my guests. So I would have these great guests on, they would share their life stories, they would share their failures, how they overcame those failures, they share an aha moment and how they turned that aha moment in to success then we talk about what they’re doing right now and then we’d finish with a lightning round of five really cool interesting questions and so these interviews were fairly unique because most of the interviews at the time were just talking about what these people were doing right now and for me as a listener, there always seemed to be this chasm that existed – this chasm of well, okay I know they are successful now but how do I start and how do I get to where they are and I want Entrepreneur on Fire to kind of bridge that gap so the point of me saying all that is that now all of these guests that I had on realized that this interview that they just gave was very unique and showed a side of them that most of their other interviews hadn’t shown. So when their interview went live, I reach out to them for first thing and said Seth Godin, Tim Farris, Gary, your interview just went live on Entrepreneur on Fire this morning, you shared an amazing journey, I would be honored if you would share this journey with your audience and 99 out of 99 times they would share with their audience. And so every single day, a whole new set of eyes, a whole new set of audience would be exposed to Entrepreneur on Fire for the very first time, and that was consistently happening again seven days a week. That’s one reason why the seven day business model worked incredibly well because instead of it just happening one day a week, it was happening seven times a week, and that snowball started a lot faster and gain momentum and because of that, then I started ranking incredibly well in iTunes, and iTunes is what Amazon is for authors, iTunes is for podcasts where we generate 85% of our downloads. There’s other places like Stitcher Radio that are amazing and coming in to the marketplace and taking some great market share, but iTunes is the king of the jungle. And so when I started ranking high in iTunes and there’s 45 million people that come in iTunes to search for content, people started finding my content organically, because there I was, you click on top business podcast and you look for the top rank podcast and as we sit right now, Entrepreneur on Fire Is #1 so everybody that is checking out business podcasts they’re finding that organically and even if they have not heard of Entrepreneur on Fire before, they’re giving it a try because of their ranking. That social proof is there – there’s over 700 5-star reviews. I have over 300 interviews and so when people are seeing these things they’re continuing to add to that snowball effect. So now I have the combination James of both my first email that still goes out every single morning to my guest who’s going live, and #2 people are organically finding Entrepreneur on Fire due to its ranking and placement in iTunes, so those two things are continuously working towards it and allowed me to take down Dave Ramsay – we took down the old guards my friend.

James: Good Luck! We’ll see if we can get an edit in there with some cheering in the background and some party poppers going off to celebrate that fact.

John: I never thought Dave Ramsay could move. He’s been stuck at #1 for like 4 or 5 years and it’s just beautiful to see him no longer there, even if it’s only for a week.

James: Okay, we’ll get that Dave Ramsay interview lined up next on Entrepreneur on Fire, let’s get his feedback.

John: I would love it!

James: So is that John is that literally all that you have in play now? You go after the big fish in your market with interesting stories and then get them to share. Are you doing anything else? Are you doing Facebook ads, are you doing Google traffic? Is there anything else or is it just really a complete organic content machine that you’ve created?

John: It’s a complete organic content machine. I am truly active on all social media channels. Very active on Facebook- we have over 3000 fans, very active on Twitter – we have over 15000 followers. In LinkedIn, in Pinterest – the same. However, I don’t have any paid search or paid ads of any kind. It is all organic, it is all content that I’ve created and it’s all been organic growth. When Kate came on she started doing first 7 days a week and now it’s either 3 or 5 days a week – she is producing a blog, an article on entrepreneurship area so that is creating more content on the site for entrepreneur on fire; we post show notes of every single interview that we have at the site. So the site itself beside from being an audio producing online machine is also producing a ton of content in all the social media channels as well as our website so that combination has really just made it a very natural and organic content machine.

James: Yeah and then it becomes self-perpetuating right? I mean with that volume of content out there being organically shared, one it’s hugely robust and two you don’t have to be reliant on any other traffic source really because it’s all happening so naturally out there in the market place.

John: Yes, absolutely!

James: Good. Well John I guess we’re probably getting some people excited about the opportunity of podcasting and I am certainly an advocate it. I love hosting this show and it is really paying dividends for my own business. There are going to be people I am sure that either have got some concerns of getting started, they are worried about frequency and technicality and all that type of stuff. What advice would you have to someone considering podcasting right now in order to get them started?

John: This is kind of another income stream I have been able to diversify with, albeit not on a massive one but it’s more of a brand builder. It will be a great resource for any of your listeners. So back in February of 2013 I kept getting those emails from people, John how can I start my podcast? What’s the first step? Obviously I can’t sit down and respond individually with a 2-3 thousand word email response because there are a number of steps involved. So I did sit down over one weekend, I wrote an e-book, it’s 38 pages, but then I also included 15 video tutorials with this ebook that takes you step by step through the podcast set up process which is really of incredible value. I published it on Amazon, it immediately shot up to #1 in Amazon for the word podcast with over 135 5-star reviews. So anybody who wants to check it out, it’s $5, Podcast Launch, that does come in 15 video tutorials. It’s in an audio form as well for audible if you are more of an audio guy like I am, but either one would be a great option.

James: Good stuff! Well you’ve kind of blown my close out to this interview John, because I was going to ask you what your internet resource, a little bit like an evernote is but I guess you might have come out with that anyway, so is there anything else other than that that you’d like to send our listeners to as a result of listening to today’s episode?

John: Well, I’ll just send them to a great internet resource in general which I think is phenomenal and which I think will give great value to anybody listening and that’s call Shedule Once. It’s a scheduler that I live and die by, it’s how I schedule all of my interviews and anybody that is listening that has issues or whatsoever with scheduling, it just does the back and forth email like how about Tuesday, 9AM? Oh, wait 9PM PST or GMT? Like if all of that would happen to me that would really plague my life for so long, Schedule Once truly did change the game on that, and James that’s how you booked this interview, I’m sure you are pretty impressed with the system because it is flawless and I just can’t say enough about that company, I actually talked to the founder I was so impressed. He may be a future guest of Entrepreneur on Fire, but that is a great resource. For your listeners, if they want to find out more about me, EOFIre.com is a really easy quick way to get to my website Entrepreneur on Fire because Entrepreneur is a pretty tricky word to spell James so I made it a little easier by shortening that up to EOFire.com.

James: There you go, EOFire.com, ScheduleOnce.com – You’ll find those in the show notes of Traffic Jam Episode #17. John, you’ve been a fantastic guest, thank you for sharing so much on today’s episode and hopefully we can do it all sometime again soon!

John: I look forward to it James, thank you!

This week’s news in traffic: Facebook COO Sheryl Sandburg has revealed that of all users who bought a product they saw advertised on Facebook, 99% of them didn’t click on the ad. Perhaps this revealing revelation has proved that optimizing for the click only in the Facebook advertising may be the wrong strategy for you.

LinkedIn continues to spruce up its platform and has now redesigned the look and feel of LinkedIn groups. According to LinkedIn the new streamlined look will give group managers and group members the ability to customize and visually differentiate their group space. For a full lowdown on how to use LinkedIn to generate targeted traffic and leads, check out Traffic Jam episode #6 with Los Silva.

Yahoo continues to make over its websites including Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Weather and others; the makeover though is not just including changes to its look and feel but it also includes changes to Yahoo Advertising with support now for stream and billboard ads and yet more to come.

I’d like to say a big thank you to Ryan Spanger for his iTunes 5-star review, and Ryan from Australia said. “this is a brilliant podcast, the research that James obviously puts in, the insightful questions that he asks and the caliber of the guests put this head and shoulders above most other podcasts. If you’re interested in marketing and driving more traffic to your website, this is unmissable.” Well thank you Ryan for your great feedback and your fantastic review there on iTunes. Ryan himself is a video expert and he himself has a great podcast called the Web Video Marketing Show so if you are looking to take your video marketing up a notch or two, I strongly recommend you go check out his podcast, it’s available on iTunes, and it is as I say called the web video marketing show.

I would love also to get your comments, review, and feedback. And you can do that in a variety of places here on Traffic Jam. You’ve of course got the option over at the site itself, TrafficJamCast.com where you can leave a comment on the individual episode page as well as a voicemail message using the speakpipe functionality which you’ll find at the base of the site, and you can of course, like Ryan did, leave a review on iTunes. Head on to your iTunes player, search for Traffic Jam and there’ll be an option to leave a review and a rating for Traffic Jam. The reviews, comments and feedback I get this week will be read out on next week’s show. so if you’d like to get yourself a little bit of airtime, perhaps leave your name and website URL along with your comment and I’ll read it out for you in next week’s show and let’s hope we can get you a little bit of exposure to the Traffic Jam audience.

The one minute traffic tip: This week I just want to tell you the little addition that we’ve done to our website, it’s called the DISQUS Commenting System. Disqus is great because it’s really widely used; currently over 200 million websites are using it; the comments themselves get picked up really easily by search engine so it’s great for SEO and from a user standpoint it’s really easy to use as well. Unlike wordpress you don’t actually logged in to place a comment or moderate a comment but from a traffic standpoint which of course is what we are discussing here, I love disqus because it shows other related posts after the comments section which helps to pull visitors away from the piece of content they’re reading to other posts on your website.  Plus it also follows up people once they’ve placed a comment when someone else places a comment to that post which of course helps bring people back to the site itself. So it’s fantastic in terms of ease of use and it’s great for traffic so I wholeheartedly recommend you check it out yourself. You can get it for free over at Disqus.com.

That almost rounds out Episode #17 of Traffic Jam. I’ll be back again of course next week with another episode and this time it’s going to be devoted to content marketing and social media so tune in again next week for that. In this coming week if you’d like to get more traffic training tips, you can head on over to Veravo.com where I publish regular 2-5 minute videos with training on all aspects of traffic but particularly search engine optimization and Google Adwords pay per click. This week, there’s training on how to do keyword research for SEO, there’s some fast acting adwords tips that take 2 minutes or less to implement and I’ve got a revealing look at an interview where Google’s Matt Cutts disclosed what still is the search engine’s still #1 ranking factor so if you want to find out what that is head on over to Veravo.com and whilst you’re there, you’ll also find a new addition – we’ve just introduced something we’re calling Traffic Toons which is a good funny comical look at traffic, SEO and social media in cartoon form so go take a look at that and let me know your feedback, that would be fanstastic.

Of course we are going to have our regular play out to an episode; it’s called the Traffic Jam jam. This week’s track of course is chosen by my guest today John Dumas and it is from the artist whom I photographed a wedding with. Okay, so drumroll, who is it? It is Bryan Adams and the track that John has picked today is Summer of 69, so enjoy the play out and I’ll catch you back here again next week.

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THIS WEEKS NEWS IN TRAFFIC

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Content Marketing is nothing new, companies like John Deere have been doing it for over a century. However in past few years as we move through the eras of web 2.0 and web 3.0 content marketing has resurfaced and companies both large and small are using it to catch the attention and trust of their target markets.

This week’s guest Joe Pulizzi, the ‘poster boy’ of Content Marketing is leading the content marking revolution. His company the Content Marketing Institute is the number 1 online resource for content marketing and it’s event Content Marketing World is the largest content marketing event on the planet. Listen in to this episode for a fast paced discussion on the what to do’s and what not to do’s of content marketing.

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Hello! Welcome back listener. You’re tuned in to Traffic Jam, the show that teaches you how to grow a profitable audience for your website. This is episode #16 of Traffic Jam and on today’s show I invite on to Traffic Jam the poster boy of Content Marketing Mr. Joe Pulizzi of the Content Marketing Institute for a fun, fast paced discussion about, what other, content marketing of course. If you want to learn how to create epic content or if you want to break through the barriers that are actually holding you back from creating content in the first place, then you’re going to love this interview.

When it comes to content marketing Joe is the leading authority. He’s responsible for producing the largest content marketing event in the world, Content Marketing World and the leading content marketing magazine Chief Content Officer. He is also the co-author of Get Content, Get Customers recognized as the handbook for content marketing might I add. And Joe has spoken at more than 200 locations and 10 countries around the world advancing the practice of content marketing. On top of all of that, he also has a brand new book coming out this fall called Epic Content Marketing and on this show today you’ll learn how to create some of that epic content marketing Joe describes.

Joe literally has all the content you can want on content marketing and we’ve strained so much down in to the very best bits and it’s coming right up next. But on top of all of that, we’ve got your favorite bits of course. In Traffic Jam today we have this week’s news in traffic, we have the one minute traffic tip and of course we have the Traffic Jam jam to play out the show and this week of course it’s chosen by my guest Joe Pulizzi and he picked a Billy Joel track so stay tuned until the end of the show for that. All of that though is coming up after the interview and we’ll get stuck right in to that right now.

James: So this is Traffic Jam episode #16 and joining me on today’s show is Joe Pulizzi for a little chat about content marketing. Joe, welcome to Traffic Jam!

Joe: James thanks for having me, I appreciate it.

James: Well, it is awesome to have you on the call and I guess since this is a call I can’t what attire you’re wearing today Joe, I have to ask, what color are you wearing sitting behind your computer today?

Joe: You know I’ve got a Star Wars shirt, it actually has a bit of orange in it but I am wearing orange pants so I have always have something orange on.

James: For the benefit of our listeners Joe’s personal brand color is orange and he can pretty much be seen every day wearing that especially when he is presenting. I am glad that even when the cameras are off Joe that you’re still true to your brand.

Joe: You have to be. I can’t go outside anymore without some orange on because somebody will call me on it.

James: Awesome, today’s topic of course is content marketing because that is where you are an expert and it is a real big buzz out there especially in internet marketing circles right now. Let’s set the scene for today’s topic. Joe what is content marketing?

Joe: Content marketing is a very old discipline that everyone thinks is brand new. I always like to throw that out James because content marketing as a discipline is over 100 years old, the John Deere, one of the largest tractor manufacturer in the world created a magazine called The Furrow back in 1895 and they are still producing that today. It’s now the largest circulated farming magazine in the world. That is historically what we would call as content marketing. Now because there are no barriers to entry and we are all indeed publishers, we are all getting in to content marketing and it’s basically instead of distracting our customers with advertising messages around somebody else’s content or creating our own valuable, compelling content and becoming the go to resources for our customers so that we can communicate now that there are no barriers to entry, we have all the opportunities in the world to be really that go to expert resource and create buyers from our prospects through great content.

James: Got it. You’re very much ahead on the curve on this right? You, Jeremy, have been doing content marketing for seven or eight years, the content marketing issue has been going what since 2009. What was it about content marketing that got you inspired to really take it up as your preferred method of marketing?

Joe: I started working in the publishing industry in the year 2000 and I was in charge for Penton media which is the largest independent business publisher in North America. I ran their custom media unit which means that if our sales reps couldn’t sell advertising in one of their magazines, they threw them over the wall to us and we tried to sell them things that were not advertising which became custom magazines’ newsletters, podcasts like this one, blogs – whatever was not advertising driven. And as I sat down with chief marketing officer from smaller companies to larger B2B organizations, I started to figure out that there is something to this. There is something about this thing going direct and if we get rid of some of these barriers especially in technology. I really thought that there was going to be a boom and talking to these CMOs – there’s a lot of terms for this industry, custom publishing, custom media, branded content, corporate storytelling, customer media is big in Europe. But when I said content marketing and this goes all the way back to 2001, CMOs have sort of shifted and I sort of get that. That means that I am creating my own content. And by the way they were all doing it right? They were starting their own videos, a lot of them had their own newsletters, but they were not taking it seriously as a market and as a go to approach and that’s where we’re seeing the big difference today. Before like you and your content folks are at the backroom or in the basement creating content like it’s sort of a hobby- and today it’s sort of a center point for marketing initiatives because if you want to be found in search, if you want to drive leads online, and if you want to have anything to do with your social media programs working, you better be telling fantastic stories at the center of that.

James: So that thing that brought about the shift –the whole big explosion of online marketing that revolves around the core discipline of content, is that what’s been the big change for all these businesses?

Joe: I think you can say yes because there are no technology barriers. You and I can start up a blog or a podcast in two seconds and it does not cost us anything – that’s a big deal, I get that. But the bigger deal is the consumer is completely in control. That’s the issue. The consumer can control the buying process and when I started this industry back over 15 years ago now, there were only a few channels that buyers can get information from – they were very distinct channels and there were trade shows and there were magazines and we were just starting seeing newsletters at that time. But they were basically vendors and media companies owned those channels, if you wanted information, you have to go to those. Now, all of us have a little device in our pockets at all times that we can get any information and ask any questions and get the answers to them that we want to so all the control has shifted and now as marketers we’re saying we lost all that control, sales does not have control anymore. Basically most of the buying process gets done before it even gets to sales now so its completely turned on its head. And in order to get attention from customers today we better be giving amazingly useful compelling information like media companies have done forever or  they can simply ignore us today.

James: Well I really want to ask you right up front Joe what sort of information is compelling or what sort of messaging should a business put out? Because I guess the big thing that I hear regularly from business owners and marketing people is what the hell do I talk about so what’s the directive from you there?

Joe: You can use all types of different tools whether it’s Google transfer or social reputation management systems listening devices. The best thing to do is talk to your customers and you have got to remember most of us have many different groups of customer types- that’s what we call buyer personas. We at Content Marketing Institute we have nine of them; we don’t have content strategies for all nine but we have nine defining groups that we target. You need a different content strategy for every one of those groups. So first of all, pick your audience, figure out what your goal is and what your objective is. And then what we’ve got to figure out is where we can really be the leading information expert for that defined group. The problem that most marketers run in to is that they try to boil the ocean with their content and you try to cover as many personas as you can do and that’s not going to work. You’re getting to broad, you’re not useful enough; you really need to focus and you really think about for that persona, for that customer you’re targeting, what are their paying points? What’s keeping them up at night? Basically all you have to do James is talk to them. You can do surveys, you can do lots of things, but I really prefer going around and talking to your customers and saying, what are you challenged with? What kind of information do you need to solve your buying problems and challenges and what do you need to live a better life and have a better career and those types of things? Those are the things that we need to be providing; not more information about our products and services, because James, they have plenty of that. There is no brand out there that has any shortage of that kind of information and when you say content marketing, that’s what a lot of people think – testimonial stuff and demos and those types of things- that’s fine. What we really need is information that is going to move our buyers to the buying process and answering their questions and you’ve got to figure out what those questions are. And then you have got to be giving away some of the secrets there not getting anywhere else. That’s where we’ve seen a lot of vanilla content like oh let’s target these keywords and then let’s do the five tips for that, the seven steps to that and it’s very, very vanilla. It’s just like everyone else, you have to figure out what is your content marketing mission statement. What is your story that is going to differentiate you and your brand and your mission from all the other content, I’m going to say crap –because there is a ton of it out there and we’ve got to separate ourselves. And that where most brands – they don’t take the really extra step and say this information is going to be the best information in the planet, it has to be because there’s so many other places our customers can get that information from.

James: Yeah, got it. And in fact you’ve written a book on this topic right? A book called Epic Content Marketing and it seems to be that a lot of people speak about and talk about creating epic content and writing epic shit. The one issue that I have with that and perhaps business owners do too, is do you think there is too much pressure on going out there and creating the perfect piece of content and is that holding a lot of businesses back from actually doing this stuff?

Joe: There is no such thing as the perfect piece of content because the perfect piece of content is one that never gets published. But it doesn’t mean that it can’t be an amazingly useful content. That’s same thing with a book right? Epic Content Marketing comes out this September and I could continue working on it right now James and what we have to do and that’s what I love about Seth Godin and Seth Godin says the most important thing for marketers you’ve got to shift- you’ve got to put in the process as you need to. And that means, it doesn’t mean we’re throwing out content and we’re haphazard about it. And that means you’ve got to put a process; for us, we have three different editors in the process before the content goes out. We look at the raw content, we are proofreading that content, we are looking at that from a search engine and social standpoint. If you have those processes, then you catch most of the things that make sure that that content piece is on target. Actually most marketers when they fall down, it’s not about the content, it’s that they stopped. It’s that they’re so campaign focused like they say we’ll work on this for three months to six months. But most marketing content don’t work that way, you need at least a year! And most marketers are very impatient. That’s the biggest problem. If we can get the marketers to get a little bit longer view point and a little bit more patience because they are out there, they’re blogging, they don’t see results in six to nine months and they stop and it could have been that next post that could have took them to the next step but they’re not doing that.

James: So you’re saying therefore that consistency is as importance as quality when it comes to content?

Joe: Absolutely, yes. If you are planning to do a content marketing program and you only have your sights set on three to six months, just go and do paid advertising. I think it is much worse to start a content program and to start building a relationship with some of your customers and then stop, than doing it at all. Don’t even go there! Think about it, I grew up in publishing; when we launched the content product; we did a three year timetable. And does any marketer out there think three years? And I’m not even asking to think about three years, I’m asking at least think about that six to 18 months timetable settled and we can figure out what those metrics are along the way and if we do that, that will be more successful with our customers because we’re not just looking for the quick hit.

James: Yeah, I mean I am not going to argue with you there based on experience and the listeners listening at the moment will be familiar with my content stuff and I have been doing this really, I would say, consistently, and when I say consistently, I mean, three, four, five content pieces per week for about a year now, and it really has been the last two or three months where that whole effort is really starting to pay dividend and it’s just blown through the roof. I guess if I had not the persistence to carry on through after six months, all the payoff would have been just for waste really.

Joe: For us when we started the institute, I started blogging about three times a week, targeting midsized to large enterprise  marketers and the first six months the only one who was reading my blog was my mom and she did not even know what I was talking about. I mean it really was like we had no audience! It was about the ninth month mark and now we’re at a 150,000 unique visitors a month and that took six and a half years to get there. Now everything has worked but really it was the ninth month mark for us that made sense. I don’t think everybody has to go out there and do daily blogging. Do what you can but just do it consistently so if it’s one post a week and one white paper a month or if it’s a weekly newsletter or weekly podcast, it needs to be at the same time and the same day. Get that consistency going and get that people to anticipate that content.

James: Yeah, got it. Well I want to pick up on something you mentioned a couple of minutes back where you said you’ve got to really find some messaging and information that consumers cannot find anywhere else to kind of differentiate yourself away from the pack. Do you think there is a worry from a business that they can give too much away? Like this is our own information, these are our own processes; this is what makes us unique, I don’t want the world knowing about it, so they keep it to themselves. Is that a challenge for business owners?

Joe: Yeah, it’s historically been one of the biggest challenges especially if you’re talking with consulting driven companies that feel that they have that some kind of secret sauce. Honestly, most of us don’t. Right, we think that our products and services are so fantastic but honestly, we’re the only ones that think they’re special. Really, they’re not that much different. You could probably find somebody else that does that. Even McDonalds secret sauce, you can go to McDonalds.com in Canada and get the recipe. There is no secret sauce anymore. We need to get over that! What we talk to our clients about is look there could be a competitive advantage here but it might not last very long and if we talk about this now we can be a leader talking stories about this. We need to get out there now or somebody else is going to take that position, and it really does happen that fast. For us in content marketing, we came out with content marketing in 2007 nobody was calling it that, nobody positioned it just like that. Today, I couldn’t come out of content marketing. I mean there is nothing special about that term that’s going to differentiate us from anyone else. It would have to be financial content marketing or something with even more niche. Some people will disagree with me on this but I don’t think you can give away too much information. Of course if you are talking about patents and copyrights and those types of things but that’s not really for the most part what we’re trying to do. What we’re really trying to do is uncover the expertise in the organization that we already have and get that information out. We just focus on that. Like all your engineers and your product managers and your senior executives have so much wisdom that we’re not sharing with anyone, that we’re doing one on one with customers. What if we took that one on one content with the customer that we shared and we gave all this IP to, what if we took that and created 20 amazing pieces of content about it to help move buyers down the buying cycle? That’s content that we already have and that’ the thing- when we talk about content marketing directors or people that are social media managers or people running content, they’re thinking we’re are we going to get all that content? That’s never a problem, the challenges that we’re finding the content; it’s that always getting the content that we already have and putting it together in story form.

James: Yeah, exactly. Again, I am going to be testament to that, I put out a lot of content, especially in relation to the two services which I offer which is Google Adwords management and SEO Campaigns and I do talk a lot about what people would consider to be the secret sauce and I took a very reserved look I could go and say wait a second, if people try and implement this themselves and take all of my teachings. But truth is they don’t! they know that I can do it for them and they’ve much rather have an expert carry and handle that than to try and take on that knowledge themselves.

Joe: It’s funny I talked to a consultant from a very large consulting group that started to give away a lot of this content. They saw a ton more traffic, a ton more social and a ton more inquiries coming in and the same question was asked, do you feel you are giving away too much information? They said, look, there is going to be a small percentage that go out and do it themselves and there’s got to be some of our competitors who might take this information and find out something they did not know before but I am willing to take that risk because first of all that 1% that takes it and does something with it, those are not good customers for us anyway. What we want is the person who looks at us as an expert, sees that and says that’s too hard to do themselves, and then hire us to do the job. Just because of the fact that you are getting to so many more of the right people is going to make all of the difference.

James: Yeah, absolutely. Well I’m sure our listener out there are curious as to what tools they should be using for content marketing Joe, things like blog posts, podcasts, videos, social media etc., is there one platform for you that trumps the rest?

Joe: I hate this question. It’s a great question James – I hate this question because there are so many marketers who go straight to a channel or tools; they will say I want to do a blog, I want to do a newsy newsletter, I want to do a podcast – when that is like Step #7. Really what you want to be finding out is what our goal is, what is our objective, who is that audience that we’re targeting, what is that mission that we need to create? So we’ll pass all that and then let’s look at tools. I mean honestly, the blog is my favorite because search engines love it and social media loves it and you can launch subscription programs through blogs. That’s fantastic as long as 75% of all marketers have some kind of blog. Here is the challenge though, if you look at IBM research, 85% of corporate blogs have 5 or less blog posts which means that just because three quarters of us have blogs but the majority of those blogs are inconsistent or dead; which is the marketing mindset right? So if you can create a marketing blog that really solves the paying problems for your customers, you have something. I love e-books which are sort of white paper on steroids, our sexy white papers; I like those because you can integrate them with slide share. For those who don’t know what slide share is, it’s like the YouTube for Power Points. I think it is one of the most under rated social channels out there – SlideShare owned by LinkedIn. I love podcast like what we’re doing now, but as you know, it takes a lot of work to do a podcast, and you need a unique voice out there. I think that blogs may work better as a starter. I think there is still an opportunity depending on who your audience are at print. We do a print magazine Chief Content Magazine; the reason why we launched that is because I show all the posts dry up. Nobody’s getting mail anymore but everybody’s still got that channel. Think about it, if all your customers were on Facebook but none of your competitors were, wouldn’t you be like there’s a huge opportunity there to give amazing information and create a relationship in there. All the print just dried up so we’ve seen an incredible bump just through using print; it’s old school but it’s become new again. And then infographics are incredible because you’ve got Pinterest, the videos that you can do with Instagram and Vine, I think a lot of it is in experimental stage but the question that I ask is, just like you do when you’ve always gone to trade shows, where are your customers hanging out? Wherever your customers are hanging out is probably where you need some kind of a content focused there. The other thing that I would say is look there’s 26 to 50 content tools depending on the channel and how you look at it. What I would say is, be great at something – be great at a podcast, be great at your videos, be great at your blog posts and then use that as a core to create content products out of that. So let’s say you’re great at a blog you can get a white paper series, an e-book series, info graphic series from the blog post content that you create. Think about it from that standpoint and be great at something instead of dabbling in 17 or 20 different tools. If you look at the greatest media companies that have ever existed, they’re always great at one channel and then they leverage the other channels to roll that channel.

James: I love the part that you talked about print as well. We have in our episode #14 who’s an out and out online and he said that the best success that he’s had right now is getting back to basics and doing traditional offline stuff like direct mail, sending handwritten notes out to customer. Just the absolute basic stuff while everyone else is pushing their latest fad or tactic that everyone else is jumping on board with.

Joe: I understand it because print is so much harder to measure, you can measure clicks and likes and all that fun stuff but you can measure print. It just again takes time and consistency on focus on the audience but wow, we’ve been doing ours for three years and I just love going to trade shows and seeing Chief Marketing Officer’s holding out our magazine. That’s all I need to see.

James: Yeah, you’ve got it. Well I was actually having a browse through your content marketing playbook before the interview and I think you have 42 ways to connect with customers there. Some of the things that came lower down the list were a little bit more obscure – Facebook apps and virtual trade shows, is there anything there that you would say for our listener not to try because it’s just too obscure or not working for you right now, anything to avoid?

Joe:  The reason why we put out that playbook is they’re 42 legitimate ways marketers are using in some way so I would look at all of them. I can tell you that for us the blog is the best one to use and we use white paper, research, ebooks, I think honestly that a big opportunity is in research. I think if I was going in to content marketing right now, I would really look at partnering with a research organization coming out with research and answers because day to day everybody wants the data because they want the justification for the moves that they’re making I would look at that. And then you can use that in numerous ways. I would be weary if there’s things like action forum and offsite session networks, those concern me. So if I was going to look at anything, I would be careful. The first thing I want to do is look at if there are any channels like if there are any customers that are already active that I can tap in to I would look in to that first instead of saying I’m going to create my own LinkedIn group or I am going to create on my own link platform or my own discussion forum because it is so hard to create something like that and get that kind of community when people are already in it. I would go in to client communities that are already in there and tap in to them.

James: At this juncture Joe I am going to suggest to our listeners out there go and check out content marketing institute to see how it’s done well, but other than yourself, is there any really good examples of companies that are doing content marketing exceptionally well right now?

Joe: So I will give you some big and some small ones; the big brand, the epitome of content marketing is Red Bull. Red Bull is a media company that happens to sell energy drinks. They have a content syndication platform, they have a magazine, digital and print called the Red Bulletin, and they have about 5 million subscribers to that. They fund independent artists and then syndicate the content from that. They are just doing some amazing things. Procter & Gamble with their sites like Home Made Simple, beinggirl.com, they have great content platform usually for every audience out there so those are some to look at. USCO Bank in Denmark, they’ve set up a television station within their bank and they feed that out on a consistent basis to their customers and prospects. I love those from a larger standpoint. American Express does openforum.com where 99% of that content is not about American Express and they drive as many credit card inquiries through openforum.com and anything else that they do. From a small business standpoint as simple as River Pools and Spas blog; Marcus Sheridan launched that blog, they were on the verge of bankruptcy in 2009, they launched the blog and answered questions no one else was answering and they’re selling more fiber glass pools than any other pool installers in North America two years later just from answering questions that no one else was answering. And the last example that I would show you is Open View Venture Partners, A BC Venture Capital Company out of Boston launched a platform called Open View Labs. It is one of the most helpful tools out there for small businesses and I love the fact the a venture company that most people don’t think as a capital company was able to create a content marketing platform as center to the organization and to their customer. So you can be any size and any industry, as long as you are focused on the needs of your audience, you can make it happen with content.

James: Wow! Cool! That was rapid fire, I’ll make sure that all those references are linked to off the show notes of episode 16 of Traffic Jam. Joe, before we close out, I want to ask you a little bit about your event that is coming up in 4 weeks’ time, the Content Marketing World, tell us a bit about that.

Joe: Content Marketing World, September 9th to 12th in Cleveland, OH this year. We’ll have about 1500 people represented in over 30 countries, it is the largest in person event for content marketing- over 60 sessions on a 100+ speakers. We’re just thrilled that it’s been able to grow like this. I’m completely biased James but it’s the best place that you can meet content creators in midsize and large brands that are doing this actively. We’ve really tried to reach out to international folks with this comms and things because we know it’s a pain to travel so far in the North America but we are able to get quite a good percentage of international folks of course, as well as from the big brands around the world that are coming in and I’m just happy about that event and that’s sort of become – we’ve sort of positioned ourselves as the South by South West for content marketing; that’s not nearly that big but we like to have a lot of fun and we’re looking forward to it this year.

James: Well I’ve got to say if there’s one thing that you can do to accelerate your businesses, hop on a plane and go to a specific live event where you can meet and line the people in the same sector as you; it will really move you forward. If that rings a few bells for people, Content Marketing World coming up, Joe it’s been an absolute content goal, thank you for your time today, I know our listeners are going to love it.

Joe: James, thank you, I appreciate it. Anytime!

This week’s news in traffic: a nice fun piece of news to kick things off this week and that is Yahoo, the kind of older yet frumpier brother to Google in the search the search arena is getting a brand new identity. On September 5th this year they’ll unveil a new logo. But in the lead up to that, they are showcasing variations of their new identity up on their homepage of Yahoo.com. So if you want to get a feel of the new direction that Yahoo is heading, head on over to Yahoo.com and check out those logos.

Facebook’s graph search, the tool that lets you search by anyone to find stuff like people who live in my city or my hometown or friends of friends who like Michael Jackson or whatever combination you can dream, is now available to all users in the platform with US English set as a default language, and in turn, Facebook has now turned off search by name setting. So if you are yet to optimize your business for graph search searches, now is a good time to do this and if you want to get more information on how to do it, I suggest you check out episode#5 of Traffic Jam with my good friend Jennifer Sheahan.

Staying with Facebook, they have made an update to their algorithm meaning the post you make that may have been missed by your fans or friends can resurface at the top of their timeline if they’re still deemed to be relevant and still receiving likes and shares. In recent test following the release of this algorithm with a small number of users, this resulted in a 5% increase in the number of likes, comments and shares on the organic stories they showed from pages. This data does seem to prove that the important update that you want your friends and fans to find are now making their way towards the top of the timeline and are getting seen.  Whilst this is an important update which a lot of people are conversing over, I’ve got to agree with Scott Stratten who put it down to the point this week on Facebook and said if you want your content to get found by more people, create more awesome content on Facebook. There you go, words of wisdom from Scott to finish this week’s traffic news.

Okay, so right on to listener comments and feedback and there are a couple I want to mention this week, the first is a 5 star iTunes review from Kelly Lundberg who says, well done James, loved the style of the show, I really enjoyed the past interviews and look forward to many more inspiring episodes. Kelly was referring to episode#9 of Traffic Jam which was with Pat Flynn; all about podcasting and it should be the episode that Kelly is interested in because she herself has just started her own podcast where catwalk meets commerce. If you are an aspiring entrepreneur wanting to get in to fashion, which is a podcast well worth checking out and you can find it in iTunes.

I don’t make a habit of doing so but the second comment I want to read out this week is actually from my guest of last week, Justin Brooke who said on his Facebook page, Traffic Jam has a ton of killer episodes. This is probably the best podcast on iTunes for real meaty traffic lessons. Well Justin, I do have to agree, this is probably the meatiest podcast in iTunes for traffic lessons. If you the listener agree and I hope that you do, please head on over to iTunes and leave me a rating; 5-star, 4-star, 3-star, whatever you want to give it, I’ll read it on next week’s show and give you a bit of exposure to the Traffic Jam audience so go ahead and do that this week.

The one minute traffic tip: this week’s traffic tip is super actionable and it revolves around the subject of email marketing and getting your emails open. Now alongside the from sender field and shortly followed by the first 20 or 30 characters of your email, the most important element of an email that will determine whether it gets opened or not is the subject line. A few quick tips for crafting a powerful subject line is #1 make sure that your subject line is curiosity driven, #2 make sure that it’s chatty, a little bit like an email to a friend, #3 do not include the receiver’s name in the subject line despite what people say increasing the open rate- it doesn’t! What about some good examples of subject line? Well to finish off this week’s one minute traffic tip I’m diving in to my Evernote to give you some ideas, here you go. #1 Can We Talk?, #2 I Quit, #3 Hey, #4 Update, #5 Please Read This, #6 This Was Awesome, and #7 A Very Useful Resource. There you go, seven ideas for subject lines that may increase your email open rate. Go give them a try this week and let me know how you get on.

Okay, that pretty much rounds out another episode of Traffic Jam, before I do though, just a reminder, you can get more traffic news and training over at Veravo.com; two video training posts this week, one how to set up Google Maps Appa advertising and the second is an introduction to how Google search works. So if you’ve ever wondered how the answered are returned to you when you type the query in to Google, this post will reveal all. That you can get over at Veravo.com. Here at Traffic Jam, we’ll of course be back with another episode next week. Playing out this week’s episode is a track by Billy Joel. It is of course chosen by my guest this week Joe Pulizzi and the track title is We Didn’t Start The Fire. Enjoy!

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