Displaying ads to a specific site visitor as they surf innocently around the web, hours or even days after they visited your site is targeted at least, as much as ‘stalking’ if you take an extreme view. There is no doubt retargeting or remarketing as it is also known is one of the most powerful paid traffic strategies of the moment.

Joining James Reynolds on this episode is Justin Brooke a leading exponent of  retargeting. Justin from IMScalable.com provides a retargeting campaign how-to, good for those getting started and goes deeper on higher level strategies like message sequencing for the experienced marketer.

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Welcome back listener! You’re tuned in to Traffic Jam episode #15, I am your host James Reynolds as always, and you are now listening in to the third most loved media and marketing podcast in the UAE. That’s right listener, thanks to your support we’ve now climbed the Apple iTunes rank in the United Arab Emirates, perched closely behind a little known podcast called the Harvard Business Review, and that’s in the business section, subcategory media and marketing. I’m totally blown by this. I think that our tiny little podcast is challenging a big institution like Harvard is just amazing, and it is down to your support so first of all I would like to thank you for listening in to Traffic Jam and helping it become what it is. But of course, #3 I’m not happy with that. Being the type of person I would love to get this show up to #1 position so that we can get the great information that our guests share each week out to a wider audience and positively affect more businesses. So I want your help this week, if you have not done so already, head on over to iTunes via your iTunes player and leave the show a review. Let us know whatever you think about it; perhaps suggestions, some comments or just some good honest feedbacks about the information that I and my guest share each week. I really would be greatful for that, hopefully positive- or negative, if you feel that’s appropriate, help us push this show up there just a little bit higher where we can get it towards to top spot where we can get this great information out to a wider audience.

So go right ahead and do that! All the great comments that I receive will get read out on the show so if you want yourself a little bit more airtime and give yourself some exposure in front of the Traffic Jam audience which incidentally is growing and growing by the week, please make sure you leave your name in the review and also you might want to include your website address so I can give that a mention on the show too.

So what have we got coming up on today’s show? We’ve got all of the bits that you love each week; the one minute traffic tip, this week’s news in traffic, and the Traffic Jam jam which plays out the show. And this week’s Traffic Jam jam is quite a rocky number chosen by my guest so all you rock fans you’d want to stick around until the end of the show for that one.

So who is my guest this week? In his own words, he is an expert in acquiring and converting leads and sales through various online marketing channels and technologies. He’s got particular skills in Facebook traffic, both organic and paid, and the subject of today’s show, Remarketing – or Retargeting as it is also known and is the process of remarketing to people who have already visited your website. This is possibly one of the hottest strategies out there right now, and on this interview we cover everything to setting up your campaigns to sequencing of your messages. So, without any further ado, let’s get stuck in to today’s interview, the topic is remarketing, and my guest on today’s show is Justin Brooke imscalable.com.

James: So this is Traffic Jam Episode is Justin Brooke from IMScalable.com Justin, welcome to Traffic Jam!

James: Awesome, it’s really great to have you here. Before we kind of get stuck to the meat and potatoes of the interview, can you tell us a little bit about what you do?

Justin: Yes. I run a full service ad agency where we do the paid traffic to our paid clients. Our clients are typically they either have an info product sales funnel or they have a supplement product sales funnel although we’ve worked with software, dentists, we’ve worked with sales people but those types of sales funnels seem to work best for us. We had managed their Facebook ads, emails, retargeting, email ads, we do all the creative for them- that’s what we do.

James: I also hear that you break six inches of concrete with your bare fists as well.

Justin: Yeah, years ago when I was in Tae Kwon Do, one of my specialties was breaking. I wasn’t great at the fighting part or the forms part, but apparently I could break stuff.

James: Well, I think when it comes to fighting Justin breaking stuff is probably a good trait to have so I’m sure you are in good stead. And you also like blueberry beer. It doesn’t sound like the type of beer that someone who would break six inches of concrete would like.

Justin: Yeah, I know. My cousin who’s a female, she always says, do they make that kind for men too? It tastes good and I like it.

James: Well I like a bit of lime in my beer as well so we are both guilty of that one. So Justin, tell me how you got started online because I know when we did the pre interview stuff, you told me about some of the different jobs that you’ve had and the different business you had before you even got to the online stuff; you used to work in Wendy’s, in construction and telemarketing- a whole list of different stuff. What was that journey to getting to being an online marketer and the stuff that followed afterwards.

Justin: Yeah I have done a lot of jobs, and I did not graduate high school. So the jobs I had, construction – I was carrying the cinder blocks or digging ditches; I always dreamed about sitting in a desk in a grey crushed velvet chair and I was going to work the phone and I was never going to sweat again. That was my dream. It eventually came through after a while but it happened while I was at a sales job and I learned that I have a pretty good gift of sales- my mom always said that I have a gift of gab but basically, it’s sales job, I learned that I could sell, I was finally inside, I wasn’t sweating for a living anymore and one day I decided I did not want to be making 35% commission anymore which was a good commission. I felt like I was doing all the work because I was bringing in all the money. As a business owner I now know that the business owner was doing a lot more than I thought he was; more than just keeping the lights on. So one day I decided I wanted to make 100% commission and I went for it and kind of met Russell Brunson, we went all down that track.

James: Yeah, it’s an interesting story. I’d like to ask you about your early success of really getting online and that was the story of your turning $60 in to a six-figure business. Tell us a bit about that.

Justin: Right so when I got started I was pretty much begging people to let me build them a website for $189 then I realized that having lots of clients was a little bit like having lots of bosses and so I wanted to learn how to make a website make me pay my bills basically. I saw guys like Russell Brunson and Rich Schefren- all these make money online and so I started following them, started following how to make money online and Russell offered an internship and because I was pretty good at sales, I pretty much made sure that I got that internship. I found his affiliate manager’s phone number, his personal home phone number, I emailed him, I personal messaged him in forums. I just made sure he knew that I really, really wanted it. I got the unpaid internship, had to go out to Idaho, worked for free for thirty days and paid for my own way and all that stuff. He has a quarter million dollar marketing library, all these DVDs and books and audio books. It was my job to go through those courses and write reviews because he was trying to build an affiliate review blog so I got the education of a lifetime doing all of that for him, and then I took that education that I learned while I was out there and went back home. I still wasn’t making money, so I explained to my wife how we were going to make money, I had this little website telling a how to build a website video course, showed her what we would do with adwords, begged her to let me use money – we borrowed that by paying half the electric bill, and use the other half to pay for our adwords account; that was $60, $2 a day budget. At the end of the first month, I made $150, paid back the electric bill, reinvested the money, doubled my money again, doubled it again, month after month for 11 months in a row that I double my money and I had a six figure business.

James: So what were the keys to your success being able to go through that process and doubled that business consistently. What were the things behind that?

Justin: Looking back, something that I learned in all those courses was the importance of tracking analytics and metrics. That was like the underlying key in everything. It wasn’t about certain tricks that I learned from this expert guy or that expert. Everyone was always about doing the fundamentals and tracking everything. Even though I was only spending $2 a day, I was watching everything like a hawk because that $60 to me was like all my money that was money I didn’t even really have. So I watched it and I watched probably almost every click that came in and was optimizing and changing things. So the biggest key that I learned was to watch everything and I learned that one of the reasons why I am successful today is a lot of tracking, a lot of optimization, and I just tried to make sure that I stick to the basics with my ads.

James: One of the reasons I really wanted to get you on the show was to actually talk about one of those things that you’ve been extremely successful with recently and the topic that I’d like to get on today is remarketing because I know that is something that you’ve not only got great results yourself but you’ve also been able to achieve fantastic results for the clients that you serve. So with your permission Justin I’d like to speak to you a bit with remarketing and perhaps if we can start off by introducing the topic with what remarketing is because for many of our listeners out there, it might be a new concept to and perhaps a new word for  so tell us what remarketing is.

Justin: Remarketing or also called retargeting, is basically you are putting a code on your website just like you put a Google analytics code or an opt in code to your website and as visitors are coming to your page, it’s tagging them or cookie-ing them. And then you start building an audience of these people that you’re tagging and then now what you can do is you can go in to the network and you can upload banner ads that you will show to this audience of people who you’ve been tagging. There’s all kinds of campaigns you can do to show them different banner ads at different times. You can get really creative with it but for the most part, basically visitors come to your website and they leave your website, all of a sudden they started to see your ads all over the web so you look famous to them. It’s the same thing like walk in to a store locally offline, and then you came out of the store and all of the sudden there’s billboards all over your town for that store. You would immediately think O wow! This guy, he is the big thing! Everybody must like this guy. And then also sometimes people just forget. Somebody comes to your website, the kids started crying, or dinner was ready; life took over and they were not able to order. A couple of days later they see your banner ads and they remember o yeah, I wanted to buy that thing. It works really, really well right now, it’s showing your ads to a very highly qualified audience.

James: Got it, so it’s basically targeted follow up using display advertising on other websites that your previous visitors may now be visiting.

Justin: Absolutely! It gives you a whole other chain of follow up and some people are calling it the invisible list because it’s like people are opting in to your follow up sequence but they don’t have to fill out a form or anything like that.

James: Yeah, and of course they don’t know themselves that they’re on that list.

Justin: Yeah you have to make sure that you have your privacy policies and everything like that.

James: Got it, cool! Justin, what are some of the advantages of retargeting or remarketing over conventional display advertising. Why don’t you just go out and blanket the internet with display ads as opposed to doing retargeting?

Justin: Well if you just went out and blanketed the internet, you’d be showing your ads to a lot of people who are unqualified, and so the next step would be I would show my ads on sites that I think my visitors would be visiting, well, you’re still showing your ads to people who never really showed an interest. Where with remarketing, you’ll be showing your ads to people who have just opted in, to people who have clicked the order button but have not completed the order form. So you can be showing your ads to people who not only did they visit your website, but they completed an action on your website that shows that they were highly engaged and interested in what you have. And there’s other campaigns that you can run in your display ads: you can have testimonials for your products, you can have come back and you can get a 10% discount. You can get much more creative whereas if you were just blanketing the internet and you have come back and get a 10% discount, it might not make a whole lot of sense but to somebody who’s just been to your website, it makes a lot of sense. And they’re like o wow yeah absolutely!

James: Well I think I like to cover some of that high level stuff in terms of targeting lists and sequencing messages in a short while. But for now, I think it would be nice to lay the ground work for this conversation and really just ask you about what kind of results someone could expect starting retargeting and perhaps compare that to typical display advertising and I know you’re a stats type of person so what type of click through rate for instance might a retargeting ad get comparative to a typical display ad?

Justin: I have seen the click through rate for the most part being about the same, it depends on the type of campaign that you’re doing though. If somebody just hit your order form and did not complete it, your click through rates for the next couple of days are going to be a lot higher – in the 0.3-0.4, even as high as 0.7 – 0.8 CTR% where normally with display ads you’re looking at 0.05, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3 maybe if you are doing really, really good.

James: I have heard people talk about getting click through rates of, in extreme cases might I add, up to 20%. Do you think that it’s actually achievable with retargeting?

Justin: It is totally achievable, but not on a large scale one. If you have a really relevant campaign, or a great ad- the CTR with retargeting is totally dependent in a couple of factors. #1 how far in to your website did they get? Are they somebody who just landed on your website and then bounced off? And they see your ads, it’s probably not going to be a very high CTR. If it’s somebody who came to your website, filled out an opt in form, watched your sales letter, and then they’re seeing your ads, your CTR% is probably going to go up. And then it also depends on how long after they visited your website. You’ve got to figure if after two weeks people would either have bought or decided they’re not going to buy so there are a lot of companies out there who they’re showing their retargeting ads for 30 days, 60 days, 90 days. Some people just leave that thing running as long and after 90 days if somebody’s seeing your ads and they’re not coming back to your website, they’re done. All that you’re doing is just upsetting them with your ads now. I’m sure 20% is possible; I’ve seen some stuff like that on Facebook. Definitely the higher CTRs we see with retargeting is the retargeting campaigns where you’re retargeting people inside of Facebook.

James: Yeah! And I have seen a lot of that recently. I don’t know if I’ve just been happening up on sites that are actively doing retargeting but everywhere I seem to turn in Facebook now are sites that I’ve visited in the last few days so it’s obviously a hot topic of conversation.

Justin: Yeah across the board in all of my campaigns, the campaigns where it’s retargeting people inside of Facebook, they always have the highest CTR and the lowest CPA or the lowest cost per sale basically.  Those are the campaigns making us the most money for our clients.

James: Interesting! Cool, if someone is listening to this right now and they’re quite excited about giving retargeting a shot, what would be the process of getting started with it?

Justin: So you want to pick a network, and there’s a bunch of networks out there. You really want to think about first how you plan to use it and what type of website you have because there are networks that are better for e-commerce sites, and there are networks that are better for sales letter kind of sites. The network that I use is Perfect Audience, they are an all-around network, they can retarget in to Facebook and the whole web, they have a nice interface. There’s other networks out there that specialize in things like capture, they specialize in e-commerce; there are other ones that specialize but Perfect Audience is a good all-around one with great prices. So what do you need to get started? You need to think about how am I going to use it, what network am I going to use, what is my display ad strategy going to be? There are a couple of different strategies, maybe we should talk about that right now?

James: Yeah sounds excellent! I think if we get people thinking about how they are going to use it that might just tick a few boxes for our listeners so yeah, go ahead.

Justin: Okay, so the most basic strategy is you’re going to put your retargeting code on all of your pages and somebody lands on your page and they are going to see what I call a brand awareness ad. A brand awareness ad to me is something that has your logo on there, it has a headline that summarized the big benefit of your product, and then it has a call to action; learn more, get instant access, whatever. So that’s just a real basic campaign. It’s just anybody who lands on your website is going to start seeing your banners trying to get them to come back. The next level up is someone who has not only gone to your website, but maybe they’ve gone to your products page, or maybe they came to your website and they opted in and now they got to see your sales video or your sales page or whatever but somebody who has seen your product and so now you’re going to have ads that showcase that product, it’s still probably going to have your logo on there but you really want to be featuring that product that they were just looking at and you might have a discount, get 10% off or you might have a testimonial for that product, that’s a great campaign to run! I mean imagine all of a sudden somebody lands on your product page and then all over the web they’re seeing testimonials for that product. That’s real strong. Then the next level up is something I have seen Zappos do a lot. Basically someone comes to your website, they see your product, they click the order button, but they did not complete the order. For some reason they did not finish the ordering process so what you do is you basically show them an ad that says oops you still have this product in your shopping cart, come back now to finish your order, or you still have this product in your shopping cart, come back and get 10% off. Get creative on what you want to do. The other thing that I want to talk about is that there is something called message sequencing, and basically these networks will allow you to turn your ads on and off on certain days. So for instance I can create a simple brand awareness ad for the first seven days; this ad is going live on day 1 and it’s going to turn off on day 7 and it’s basically just reminding people of my logo, my benefit, come here. And then on day 8 I turn on a new ad that’s increasing the message and increasing the desire a little bit. This one now shows a 10% coupon and that one runs until day 14 and then day 15 I upload another one and now we have a 25% off coupon! And you can just keep increasing until it’s not worth it for you to get that person to buy anymore or we normally end where it’s a trial for free and pay if you like it, it’s our final last shot campaign.

James: Nice! So the way that these ad networks work, is the actually tag that person based on their first interactions and that sequencing would be specific to that particular person. Is that correct Justin?

Justin: Absolutely! It would be based on the day that they were tagged.

James: Got it! And would you say the best results come when you could be the more relevant with your ads? I mean some of those strategies that you talked about was getting very specific about that particular website visitor’s previous interaction; what products they’ve visited and looked at, what stage of the order process they got to, would I be right in saying the more relevant you can be and specific for that particular user, the better results you get?

Justin: Absolutely! I have seen people do some crazy things with their ads; big bright red borders and weird images on the ad. With that stuff you are trying to get attention and sometimes screaming for attention can increase your click through rates but nothing increases your click through rate better than making that ad more relevant to the person looking at it. We’ve seen that the higher you increase your relevance, the higher your CTR goes. Also, not only does it raise the CTR but it raises the conversion rate of the person actually buying. If you’re out there screaming for attention with that crazy ad, you may get that person to come because they’re curious about what this weird ad is on the website but they may not want to buy. But if you increase the relevancy of the ad, now the person not only clicks on the ad but wants to buy the thing.

James: Yeah, got it. Well it’s all I guess about getting the right message and also the right timing with the sequencing ideas you gave us because as you said you can increase the desire by increasing discounts and things like that to really encourage that action or sale.

Justin: Yeah, one thing I like to say real quick is a lot of times when I talk about this, people’s eyes glass over or it’s very overwhelming because I am talking a lot about advanced campaigns; what I want people to realize is that this is nothing different than your email auto responder sequence except it’s not an email; it’s display ads across the web. That’s all sequence messaging is. You’re just using normal display ads like you would different emails and as they go through different parts of your funnel, now they’re not getting your prospects sequence, now they’re getting the leads sequence, now they’re getting the customer’s sequence of follow ups.

James: With email marketing Justin I am sure you and I would advise our listeners to get started with that straight away, with retargeting is that advise still the same? Or would we need to get a certain sized list to get this thing to be effective?

Justin: There’s kind of a political thing going on with retargeting because there are a lot of people out there abusing it since it’s something where people don’t have to opt in. because some people are abusing it, some browsers do not track campaigns or they are teaching the users of their browsers how to turn off retargeting basically to stop cookie tracking. If you buy a new Windows PC – this is shocking! I just bought a bunch of Windows PCs for my office and when I was setting them up, every single one of them, the settings were default selected to do not track meaning retargeting would not have worked on them. So there’s kind of a window – we don’t know if this browser thing that is going on out there and if the browsers win that means that retargeting is going to go away. That’s a hard pill to swallow because we have been seeing 300 – 500 ROI on some of our campaigns. But at the same time maybe retargeters and advertisers win and this stays a lot longer. So what I would say is right now there looks to be a window of how long you can get started in retargeting. So you should get started as soon as possible because the ROIs are really, really good.

James: Well I guess there is a whole other conversation about relevancy again. I as a consumer would much rather be receiving advertising for stuff that I am interested in, and potentially discounts on products that I’m interested in. If someone like you is advertising to me I think that is a much better scenario than just having people pushing any other old rubbish on to us in the old fashioned way.

Justin: Absolutely! And it’s just that we’ve got a couple of bad apples out there. Just like in email marketing you’ve got spammers. There’s a couple of bad apples out there who are massively collecting cookies, they’re selling those cookies to other people, they’re showing irrelevant ads to these people so those couple of bad apples are what’s doing this but if you are using this correctly for your business and you are trying to serve relevant ads then you’re fine and you’re the people who’s using it correctly.

James: Awesome! Good. Well we have talked a lot already about targeting and sequencing. What about creative and getting the message right? In your experience, are there any types of banners that work better, sizes of banners that work better as a rule of thumb?

Justin: The sizes? Definitely! I urge everyone to do their own testing, try all the sizes, the more sizes you have, the more positions you can show up in. But based on my testing with lots of our clients, we have found that all seizes constantly are doing all the lifting. Those sizes are your 728×90 which is the big horizontal one you usually see at the top of websites. We see the 160×600 which is the sidebar one you usually see on websites, and then the square one which is 300×250. Those three sizes constantly get us the highest CTR and the highest conversions. We as a company, those are the only sizes we do, just to save money on costs and they usually end up winning anyway so we’ve just gone with those ones and if you really want to cut your costs, the 300×250 usually is the strongest of those three- not always, but it usually is the strongest of the three. As for designs, we keep it pretty basic. A lot of times are designs are white background with a picture; it might have the logo, a headline, and a call to action. What you want to do is a banner ad that looks like a banner ad that looks like a banner ad doesn’t get clicked. But a banner ad that looks like a featured article on the website gets clicks. That’s a really big lesson for people learning. And that’s based on our campaigns. Like I said, it could be different for you. Web design companies they need great designed banner ads because people are grading their design but for most of our clients who are supplements and info products and stuff like that, for us, ads that look like a feature article when they are displayed on the website, just a white plain ad displayed on the headline with a blue link that says learn more, read more; those types of ads work really, really well for us.

James: And do they work better Justin than a brand heavy ad? Something that would have the brand or the company’s logo positioned on it because I guess the general thought on it would be I have visited this website before and I recognized the branding, I recognize the logo and I am more likely to click on it. Is that true or is it not true?

Justin: Absolutely! And that’s what where you have to think about this person you are showing the ad to, what stage are they in on my website? Somebody who just landed on your website and they did not complete a lead, they did not click anything; for all you know, they did not even like what you had. That’s all they did; they just landed on your website. You don’t have any information about them. For those people, we show something just general- an ad with a headline, description and call to action. For somebody who has cut a lead or has visited their product page, absolutely show a picture of your product, show your logo. You basically want to be reminding them that they were at your website. You may not want to call out like hey you were at my website 5 minutes and 30 seconds ago, that’s a little spooky but yeah absolutely, like you said increase relevancy.

James: I guess there is a borderline that you’d get to where you’d start freaking out people out right? Who are these people the freaking CIA or…

Justin: Right. You don’t want to be really calling attention to you following them around the web. You just want to make it seem like hey that is so relevant to me it’s like they’re reading my mind!

James: What about changing of creative Justin? Do you recommend rotating it from time to time?

Justin: Absolutely! There are a couple of ways you can save money, I actually just read an article on this- trying to remember where, I think it was on adexchanger.com, it is a great blog for people to follow. You can save a lot of money by showing your ads a little bit later. Right now when we set up a retargeting campaign their ads are live to the person the moment they hop off the website and go around the web. That person may have still converted. They might just have decided to do something else and they decided to go away from your website put in another tab. So sometimes showing your ad a day later; you are showing your ads not to show on Day Zero, maybe to show on Day Two or Day Three, some of those people initially might have come through and bought anyway. So showing them on Day Three you may get the people who may have forgotten about you, maybe worked on an order, so you can save a bit of money there and then you can save a little bit of money by watching over time when your conversion number start dropping off because in the first couple of weeks we have seen increases to conversion but after three or four weeks it seems like if they have not bought within three to four weeks of seeing your ad, they’re just not ready yet and so you might want to turn your ads off and save some money then otherwise you’re burning money on ads that people do not want to see and are not going to click.

James: Yeah got it. You spoke there very briefly about tracking conversions and that of course a really important part on the campaign. With retargeting on these networks, how do you best track conversions; through the typical channels of Google Analytics conversion goals or would there be some other conversion roles you have?

Justin: With Google Remarketing you’re using your analytics account so you can count conversions through your Google Analytics account. With Perfect Audience, you tell them which ones of your pages is your conversion page and so if somebody clicks on your ads and then reach that page then they count that person as a conversion. And you can also then tell it to turn off your ads for that person.

James: Got it. I think just before we close out Justin I’d like to sort of pick your brains a little bit on retargeting on Facebook because as we mentioned at the top of the show it’s something that I have personally seen just grow and grow, I mean literally in the last few weeks or months or so become very, very prominent. How do you go about remarketing on Facebook?

Justin: Certain networks allow you to do that. Not all networks have access with what’s called the Facebook Exchange which is basically a side of Facebook which is just for ads. And the only way you can by the ads is through a network like Perfect Audience or Ad Roll; there’s other ones out there but I use Perfect Audience. And the way you do it is when you are creating a campaign inside your interface it will ask you if you want to create a www campaign or if you want to create an fb campaign. We create both, that way we’re like everywhere on the web. And so when you choose the Facebook one, instead of creating like a banner ad you are creating a Facebook ad. They ask you what headline you want to use, what description you want to use and what image you want to use, what’s your destination URL and what’s your bid – you’re bidding on CPM, campaign cost per click like you would on a Facebook ad, you’re paying on CPM so you’re paying for views here but the click through rates, the conversion on these Facebook campaigns are really, really good.

James: Fantastic! And Justin, your agency, this does remarketing campaigns for clients, so someone could get in touch with you and have this managed by your business?

Justin: Yeah absolutely. If you don’t want to deal with the entire message sequencing and creating all the different creative and worrying about all that, we handle all of it for you then send you a weekly report on your numbers.

James: Awesome! Sounds good! I guess we should give our listeners out there some way to get in touch or at least to find out more about you. What’s the best way for our listeners to go to?

Justin: We’ve got a blog; it’s at IMScalable.com/blog. There are some great articles there. Otherwise hook up with me on Facebook; my personal Facebook account is facebook.com/justinbrooke, my fan page where I share daily traffic tip is facebook.com/trafficstrategist. So that’s a couple more ways you can get more tips or hook up with me directly. You can also always just Google me. There’s plenty of things out there to find about me there.

James: Awesome! My audience are pretty much in to traffic so I’m sure that they’ll find your stuff really interesting Justin. Today’s been a blast! Thanks so much for coming on Traffic Jam. It’s been a real pleasure.

Justin: Thank you so much for having me. This is great!

This week’s news in traffic: The first news story this week is from Facebook who have introduced embeddable posts. The posts work the same way as embed to Twitter or YouTube and once your embed account is enabled you have the option to embed posts. That will produce a code you can cut and paste in to a blog entry or html file. For a post to be embeddable, it must be set to public to be publicly shareable. This enhancement will of course have an impact on how far Facebook content gets shared but it could have further reaching effects in to platforms such as Google who look at social signals and how content is being shared in their own content algorithm. So an interesting update to watch but given that only 28% of Facebook users set their post to public, let’s see how well this is adopted.

Staying with Facebook, they are seeking to snatch the long held dominance of TV advertising budget as they plan to sell TV Star commercials on their site for as much as $2.5 million per day. While the social network already allows advertisers to upload videos to their Facebook page and then broadcast them to a user’s news feed, the new service would let marketers buy their way directly in to a person’s feed with a 15 second pitch. At 15 seconds, the ads would also be the same length as Facebook’s Instagram videos. A feature that was added to the company’s instant sharing service last month. In response to the argument that this will decrease the kind of socialness of Facebook, Facebook have said that members will not see a commercial more than three times in a given day and once in every 20 posts. So keep your eyes peeled for these new ads, they’re expected out sometime this autumn.

Google this week announced a number of updates to YouTube that allow more video producers to use YouTube for live streaming. All channels in good standing with at least 100 subscribers will be able to use live stream from their account within the next few weeks. This is down from the previous requirement of 1000 subscribers so thus makes it accessible in the field for a lot more people.

In a couple of other announcements which we in fact got wind off well ahead of time and reported on Traffic Jam episode #11 with YouTube expert James Wedmore, YouTube have announced that they now allow external links from annotations to link to websites associated with your account; perhaps your blog or your company website. They’ve also announced that you can now use custom thumbnail to all videos in your account. For a real good run down of all this opportunities and how to go about it, go check out episode #11 of Traffic Jam with James Wedmore.

Thank you! It was another busy week in comments over at TrafficJamCast.com and at this point I would like to read some of them. First of all, AJ Sorenson who responded to the Andrew Warner episode – he said great interview, I am a long time Mixergy listener and it was great to hear Andrew from the other side of the table. We have Ralph Schmitz also leaving a comment to the Andrew Warner episode and he kept it very short and sweet but lovely comment, he said absolutely great. Also Edgar from mensdesign.com he popped on over and left a message to the Jeremy Schoemaker interview and he said Jeremy is the man, great interview, I found your blog thanks to shoemoney. I’d also like to take special note of those people that congratulated us for getting Traffic Jam to #3 in the iTunes rank. There was Ken McKenzie, James Schramko, Robin Logan, and Dave Crane. All popped by my Facebook page to leave a congratulatory note so thank you guys for your support. Thank you all for making Traffic Jam what it is, I would love to get more of those great comments and feedback and I’ll try to get through as many as I can on each episode.

Oh and just a little reminder of the quest that I made for you at the top of the show, and that’s to pop on over to iTunes and leave a review and rating. I really, really would appreciate that; it would help us push the show further up the charts in iTunes and get the show out to more people. So if you get a little moment this week, head on over there, leave a review and rating – it will only take a few seconds and I really, really would appreciate that.

The one minute traffic tip: In this week’s tip I just want to share something that we’ve been testing out this week and that is imaged based marketing using quote from the Traffic Jam episodes. If you are listening to this episode within August 2013 and you head on over to LikeJames.com, you’ll be redirected to my Facebook page where you’ll see quotes from Brent Hodgson, our guest last week, and Shoemoney, our guest from two weeks ago. We’re using quotes from the show in image format because people really like both quotes and images. Just look at Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram; see how these types of things are shared. So our method has been go and find a great quote from the episode, put the guest name against it with a little illustration of them and then post it to social media channels. We’ve already seen that people are picking these up and sharing them to their own audience and giving Traffic Jam wider exposure. So give this a try in your own marketing this week and then once you’ve gotten some results, head on over to TrafficJamCast.com, find episode#15, head to the bottom of the post and leave a comment with the results that you’ve gotten. I’d love to get your feedback and how it’s worked for you.

Okay, so that rounds out episode#15 of Traffic Jam. Just a reminder, I do also post tips and training over at my new website veravo.com so go and check that out and you can also take advantage of our website grader report there where we’ll put your website through a 30-point checklist and let you know how it is doing in terms of usability, traffic, social media, Google traffic, and a whole lot more. So go take advantage of that if you’ve not done so already.

Playing out this week’s show is a track picked by my guest today, Justin Brooke and it is a kind of rocky number; it’s by a band called Warrant and the track is called Cherry Pie.

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 weeks guest is a well rounded marketer with expertise in traffic, conversions, copywriting and more. He is a co-founder of the Market Samurai (keyword research software) and the man behind the Zen Tester conversion testing platform.

Brent’s versatile skill set helped him pull off a remarkable launch that pulled in $570,000 in 37 minutes and close to 1 million dollars over the next 3 weeks. Brent shares the traffic and conversion secrets behind this launch and the surprisingly conventional methods getting results for him right now.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

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“Try things quickly and fail them even faster” – @BrentHodgson
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Hello! Welcome back. You’re tuned in to Traffic Jam Episode#14, I am your host James Reynolds and I’ve got another fantastic show and guest lined up for you today. Let’s first of all start with show and if you are a regular listener of Traffic Jam you will be very much familiar with the format of the show. We start the first part of the show where we dive deep in to one particular area of traffic. We then follow that with this week’s news in traffic which is the big news that is affecting us online marketers that has been revealed in the past seven days, we then have the one minute traffic tip, which is short actionable advice delivered to you in under 60 seconds – sometimes a little bit longer than that, I am not always keen with keeping my time, and then we close out the show with the Traffic Jam jam,; a little musical jam picked by today’s guest.

So who is today’s guest? He is a well- accomplished online entrepreneur, his name you may not know of yet, but when you learn that he is one of the men behind the samurai suite of products: that’s market samurai, domain samurai, and article samurai, as well as zen tester conversion optimization software, you’ll quickly understand he clearly knows his stuff. He’s a keyword specialist, an expert in conversion optimization, and he can also throw his hand very well to copywriting. As well as getting him to reveal his very best traffic secrets, we cover some very important marketing fundamentals in today’s chat. And we also foray in to the critical area of conversions.

So with that little intro let’s move in to today’s feature interview, and my guest is Brent Hodgson.

James: So today I am joined by a friend of mine, one of the most rounded marketing talents I would say I know and that is Brent Hodgson. Brent, welcome to Traffic Jam!

Brent: Thanks James!

James: It’s good to have you on the show. I am really excited about this episode. I guess I should give people a little bit of a background on who you are to start with. You kind of cut your marketing teeth early on in real estate; you are a creator of, or at least a co-creator of several software products. You write copy for a number of well-known marketers, and you have a number of done for you marketing services plus between all of that, you travel the world, usually in first or business class to some amazingly exotic places, can you tell us a little bit about what you do because there seems to be so much there?

Brent: James I should get you to do my resume for me! I think you have done a better job than I could do for myself on there. Thank you! That’s really gracious of you. If I go back to where I actually started, originally I was a high school student reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad which is Robert Kiyosaki’s book and I looked ahead on the route that was ahead of me if I had kept on going down the path that was laid out and it was leading towards an economic style degree at a university which would have led to working in a suit and tie job, working in the city, perhaps somewhere in the banking industry, and I will be working 10 hour days, five days a week, maybe six days a week, getting one or two days off and then 2 weeks annual leave each year. I just did not like the idea of that. So instead of doing that, I went in to real estate investing and started working for a guy who became quite a successful author and digital product creator in that space. I was really bad in investing, but really good at the marketing side of his business so it wasn’t too long until I worked out that the money was actually being in the income generating side of the business, so I went from being in admin to marketing and kept on pushing myself to get better and better results for this guy, eventually became a consultant, started using some of the techniques I used as a consultant to systemize things, some people saw some software that I had or the company that I was working with had created, as well as some other tools and software that another colleague of mine had created, we put them all together, turned it to some software called market samurai that did quite well in the first three years having three hundred thousand users. Goodness! There’s a lot of stuff in there that you’ve covered off- that business and first class stuff, that stuff I guess I am really good at taking some huge amounts of data, analyzing them down and looking for where the best opportunities are, I guess that’s what I’d do and the keyword research stuff that I do, taking a lot of data, narrowing it down, and focusing on the big bits make a big difference.

James: Well perhaps we’ll talk about some of those things that really can make the difference in terms of traffic and perhaps also conversions as an area that I’d like to talk to you about today- the top 20% of the top 20% really get the big changes of the business but we’ll come to that a little bit later. One of the real big reasons I want to get you on the show is that you’ve real been really successful in a number of traffic sources; in fact I think you’ve developed whole businesses around at least three that I can think of anyway. With all of that experience, what would you say Brent is your favorite way to get traffic?

Brent: This is going to sound a bit controversial given that a lot of the work that our listeners are listening right now would be doing is online traffic generation. One of my favorite ways to get traffic at the moment is actually to take it offline. I think it is an often overlooked opportunity to bring people in to your business. To go offline, particularly in business to business niches and just contact businesses directly via post, via phone, via SMS, via fax. People who have business to business lists talk about doing lead generation for their businesses. But realistically, all the lead generation that they need to do is already done for them and all they need to do is open up the Yellow Pages or go to Google and Google the names of the businesses that they want as clients and get in touch with them. That’s it! There’s a lot of opportunities out there in Facebook- Facebook works very well these days. Google Adwords pay per click is excellent. There’s a lot of stuff that you can do in banner network these days that a lot of people overlook YouTube – because there are so many opportunities out there to get traffic. But among all of them, I think the one that’s most often overlooked and is perhaps one of the easiest, is to just contact businesses directly in business to business markets.

James: Well I think it is one of those scenarios where a lot of people want to jump on the latest riding trend and the coolest and most interesting way to do traffic but sometimes just the simplest possible things, just the old school stuff like picking up the telephone or writing a real note to someone- those real high touch forms of contact are sometimes just the most effective. Because everyone is doing the new stuff the old stuff just often works so, so well.

Brent: Yeah absolutely! You raised the point of just writing a note to someone being so high touch. We start going through the numbers on traffic generation methods that we use- we look at a lead that’s costing us $60 and is generating this much value out of a lead are 5% or 10% on one particular traffic method. The 80%, 90% and sometimes a 100% conversion rates just off a handwritten note, there is a lot more effort, it’s not automated, it’s not like you could build leverage with SEO or with Google Adwords, but it’s still a very effective way to bring in leads.

James: Yeah absolutely. But having said that, I guess there are some ways that those processes can be automated partially. I mean the systems out there now that once you have captured that lead and send them off a physical card via the post. What- if any of those systems are you using or would you recommend doing that type of process?

Brent: Yeah, doing it manually gives you a lot of quality control over how you send things to people. But sometimes it’s not just feasible to do manually. So for example we are doing a mail out to people who are coming to a seminar. There are about 1200 people that we are mailing out to at the moment, and it would just not be feasible for us to write 1200 notes. That will take a long time. So for that particular marketing strategy that we’re using right now to make sure that people come to this free event, we’re using a service called send out card. Send Out Card lets you send out cards to people via the mail. It comes with a stamp that is from your country as well. So even though they print the post cards in the US, they then box them up, ship them to Australia as in our case put a post mark or a stamp on it, and it looks really professional. It looks really nice to receive, something that’s well written; and it even has your handwriting as a font if you want to set up your service to actually do that yourself. We’re also using a couple of different SMS follow up services or SMS sending services and we’ve been able to integrate them to Infusion Soft and so forth. And the issues that you have with email, you don’t have the same way with post and with SMS. So these days we’re sending an email and you sometimes can get a deliverability rate of 50%. Half of your emails go missing. So if you’re looking at the effectiveness of email, even though you can send an email for free, there’s still a value per action associated with it. If you can work out what your value per action is, sometimes it is actually more effective to go down the SMS route and still pay 9cents per SMS but then end up with a much greater response rate so I guess it comes down to having a couple of different strategies to get your message through to people.

James: Yeah, absolutely. And I think there’s always that inclination to go down the route where everything is automated and free and simple, whereas as you said the high touch stuff there, the stuff that needs more effort, sending out a handwritten note and putting the stamps upside down to make it a little bit weird and peculiar to make it worth to open- It’s hard work right? These types of things in environments where its business to business especially as you mentioned is highly effective.

Brent: Yeah. And it’s nice to look beyond the free as well. It’s nice to be able to know your numbers well enough to be able to say I can actually afford to do this thing and spend as much to contacting the client.

James: Yeah absolutely! Good. Well for someone who’s been as long in the game as you have, I’m sure that you’ve got a few more secrets up your sleeve. You’ve covered a great traffic tip there in going offline. What is your best kept traffic secret in terms of generating online traffic?

Brent: Good question! I guess that my best kept traffic secret is not such a best kept traffic secret these days but it’s all about finding the right keywords to target online. It’s something that not enough people do. I think people for the most part when they’re doing search engine optimization; they never look in to the keywords before they jump in and as a result they don’t have much they’re likely to spend doing search engine optimization for how long it’s going to take a result. Or when they do get a result, what result is going to look like? How many visitors they’re likely to attract from that particular keyword? What ranking they’re likely to receive and what each visitor is likely to be worth to their business? I think these are the things that you can get from doing a little bit of keyword research brought from the outset. You can actually reverse engineer the results that you are going to get from search engine optimization and from your website rankings. And that lets you make a lot of decisions about whether or not a keyword is worth targeting or whether it’s better to target it’s lower value cousin that might not generate as much traffic to your website but might be easier to achieve those rankings because they’re just not as competitive. So keyword research is I think part of the secret source of doing any of the online lead generation, and also making sure that any content that you produce, any websites that you put up, anything that you publish, is going to have some sort of return of investment. Because 87% of all sales online start with a search engine search or something ridiculous like that. So unless you are actually take that content and publishing the specific keyword, the chances of actually getting a return on the content is much lower. Or the return that you will get is much you will get is much lower than if you were to actively target your content out to specific keywords out there.

James: Got it! Well it’s about relevancy isn’t it? I work with a lot of businesses as you know and there is always that tendency for them to want to kind of shape everything in their own voice and manner that they totally forget what the actually customer is saying and how they’re searching online and just the vocabulary  that they use. They alienate themselves in many instances from the market that they are trying to attract. That’s bonkers! So that research you said really laid out the ground work for what follows.

Brent: Yeah, it’s okay to have your own voice; it’s okay to say what you want to say. It’s just worth to see whether the client or the customer want to hear it. And if they do want to hear it, what phrases they’re typing to the search engines to look for that information. So then you still have your voice but it actually gets heard.

James: Absolutely! Good! Well I want to talk about some of the results that you have achieved for yourself and for others in the past and I see over in one of your websites, you state that you developed a three week online marketing that was responsible for generating over $960,000 in three weeks. Tell me a bit about that and some of the lessons that came from it.

Brent: Alright, this one is surprisingly simple. We actually did this campaign twice. It was done in two slightly different ways. The first time we released it, it did $570,000 of sales in 37 minutes. And it crashed our servers and we stopped being able to take sales so we flipped over to an “email us if you want to make a purchase and we’ll give you a quick call back to take your credit card details.” And that’s how we were able to take all the sales in 30 minutes – we jumped on the phone instead of taking online sales after our site crashed. But the principles behind this strategy were really, really simple things. This marketing comes down to common sense. We had a list of people who are interested in a particular topic and we kept on noticing that in support and when we ran events and when we chatted with these people on the phone, they kept on asking the same sorts of questions over and over again. And they wanted those questions to be answered in the specific style of product. So what we did was we created a survey and set that survey out to all the people in the customer list and got them to tell us what questions they had specifically, what format they want those questions answered in, how much they would be willing to spend to get those questions answered on the information product that we would create and also some of the inclusions whether or not they wanted regular mentoring meetings, DVDs and CDs that they could play in their car, whether or not they wanted access to a coach that they could telephone their questions. And we went through and we calculated how much each one of those little inclusions would cost; how much would it cost to produce a DVD every month, or a CD every month? How much would it cost for us to have a dedicated mentor that people would be able to call up day or night and ask their questions. And using what people told us they would be willing to spend on this particular product, and what it would cost to do each of those little inclusions, we worked out an optimal profitability curve. So we were able to see what level of demand for the product if it included certain items and not other items and if it was a certain price or a lower price or a higher price. So we were able to work out what the most profitable ones by producing this product was, what it would sell for, and what it should include. And then it was really simple, we went out to the list and we gave it to the list. And this is really, really simple. People often overlook to ask customers what they want to buy. So after going out to the customers and asking them what they want to buy, we created the product, and the product turned in to an annual mentoring program, it was 12 months’ worth of mentoring. It was a couple of thousand dollars to be a part of this mentoring program. For that couple of thousand you will get a folder, I think it was a folder every month at that time. You would get a lot of training that would go in to it, a couple of CDs; you would have a quarterly get together or a quarterly meeting. In addition to that, you’d be able to come to various seminars that we’re running. So we started to run an anticipation campaign, and we knew things are going to take off when we chewed through our whole service bandwidth in the first couple of days. People kept going to our website and watching our little countdown timer and each time the countdown timer was ticking along, it was spending a couple of bytes worth of bandwidth. We eventually chewed through our whole monthly bandwidth bill. Anyway, the day of the launch comes around, and we are watching the server and there are thousands of people who were sitting on the website waiting for this counter to tick down to 0. So they’re just sitting there hitting refresh, and refresh, and refresh. So it wasn’t long after we flicked the switch and made the sales cart available that the cart actually crashed. And this is before the days of internet marketers deliberately crashing carts to create a reason to go back to the list and say you should buy this again because the cart crashed because it was so popular. So it was before any of those strategies so before you start criticizing me for this one here, no it was not deliberate. This thing actually happened because, I will be frank, we were running a poorly written website actually on an AHP/Access database so this is going back a few years. Anyway, the site crashed, we had a Plan B in place, we flicked over to an email address, people sent over their phone numbers and we just jumped on the phone and started collecting these orders and we had hundreds by the time it ended. We did not get all of the thousands of people who were on the website on the first instance but we still made $570,000 in 37 minutes. When it came time to do it again, rather than crashing the website, we decided to do a staged release. So it was the same process over again. We made a couple of tweaks to the way that the product was actually structured, made it available again, did the whole bit anticipation campaign and over the next three weeks we went painfully shy of the 1 million mark. We did $960,000 in those three weeks. So this was a particularly big year for the company that we are in at the time and it was because we asked customers what they wanted to buy. We created a nice anticipation campaign around it, and we gave them what they wanted at the cost that they wanted to spend. So as a result of that, we were able to make a lot of sales.

James: Simple. Love it! Just to clarify then Brent, in terms of the traffic source for that particular offer, was that all preexisting customer or leads that you’d acquired. What was the makeup of that database that you accessed?

Brent: The database was accessed through a book. Most of the people that are coming to that particular database had been readers of the book that was published. So in terms of a different traffic source, this is another one of those offline traffic sources. We knew that there were people in this particular market who were going to bookstores and reading about this particular topic so we published a book around the topic and we were able to get up to 50,000 or so people who signed up for the list over the months after the book was released. The database was originally started out of forums and out of word of mouth and out of search engine optimization, and then it started to grow as a result of this book so we went on to achieve about 70,000 people on the database from search engine optimization for marketing essentially. Those 7,000 people that were chosen from the list formed the basis of the book. So it does not actually take a huge amount of people buying your book to actually become a best seller. You’d be surprised how few people you need to become a number one best seller. As a result of getting that best seller kudos, suddenly all of these magazines started featuring our book, there was a TV segment about the book, we started to be put in to the newspapers- the corporate columns right where people was and we started picking up leads from that as well. As a result, the book went from best seller to mega best seller and we were able to get a lot of leads out of that.

James: Fantastic! So this was a sort of proven buyers list. I think it probably is a nice Segway at this point of the interview to actually talk about the process of converting a lead or traffic in to a sale because this is an area of expertise for you, something that so far we have not really touched upon in Traffic Jam. So you are a big believer in conversion rate optimization as it is called and fact I think you now offer this as a service. To people in the outside, this whole conversion thing can look a bit of complex and sort of tech worthy and scientific, can anyone do it? I guess it’s probably one question I’d have for you and also what is the process behind optimizing a website to make the most of your traffic sources for conversions?

Brent: To answer the first part first quickly, yes anyone can do it. In fact the skill level needed to do conversion optimization these days with tools like Visual Optimizer is a lot lower than what it used to be. You used to have to have a level of coding skill to be able to set up a conversion optimization test, or split test, or multi variant test. And you’d also need a level of mathematical knowledge to work out what the statistics are actually telling you. But these days you can pretty much open your website in one of these visual editors and click on a button on your website and immediately swap it for another button as if you were editing a word document. The barrier to entry to doing all these optimizations is a lot lower these days than what it used to be. When you’re looking at conversion, if you are looking for things to improve on your website, there’s a lot of things that you can do to tweak your marketing. I’ve got a little bit of a different philosophy on conversion optimization from a lot of other people; I think that it’s a nice way to avoid actually making a decision about what the best way to sell a particular product is. So if you have not done any conversion optimization yet, or if you are thinking of putting together a new product, or you’re doing a new sales page, then conversion optimization is actually a good strategy to apply right from the very beginning. The reason why you want to apply from the beginning is because those crazy ideas that you have – maybe I should do this as a video, maybe I should do this as a long form sales letter, or maybe I should ask people to opt in or ask them to give me a call in this particular phone number; there’s no reason why you could not try all of those things all at once and test which ones of those things is responsible for the most conversions, the most sales or the most sign ups. So if you are able to start at the very, very beginning and start with conversion optimization at the very start, you are right at the very beginning are creating a snowball effect, and I’ll have a talk about some of the specific things that you should test in just a moment and just as an example of the snowball effect, back when we were doing market samurai, Market Samurai was released and we didn’t do a lot of conversion optimization right at the very beginning point. But a couple of weeks in to the process, we started to do some conversion optimization for a particular affiliate who signed up, he was an affiliate by the name of Mike Filsaime, who’s a really nice guy in real life although he gets a bit of a bad rep because of his hard marketing style. Anyway, Mike was our first big affiliate beyond people that we already knew. We wanted to get him a really nice result and give him a big commission cheque. So then if he approached people to sell our stuff, most people are more than likely sell our product Market Samurai. We did some split tests and found one particular split test variation that was responsible for doubling our sales and that meant that the cheque that we gave to Mike was twice as big as what we would have normally given an affiliate or what we would have given an affiliate if we did no conversion optimization. So this nice big – seriously big five figure cheque, Mike was super happy about receiving that cheque and what happened after that was Mike told his buddies and his buddies told their buddies and suddenly we had all these big names in the internet marketing industry selling our product. And not just that, people who learned about our product from those affiliates, they started telling people about the product via word of mouth at meet ups, via forums, via blogs, and as a result, we were getting not just sales from that. We were also getting links; links from social media, links from forum discussions, link from blog reviews of our products. So our search engine rankings went up. And that meant we started to get more traffic, we started to get more leads coming in, we started getting even more sales and it started to give us the ability to do even more split testing. And then when it came time to release our affiliate program to the people who have purchased our product in the past, we had an even greater number of people who had purchased our product and we were able to tap in to that list of leads to make even more sales, to get their leads, to give them commissions on any word of mouth referrals that they were able to send in. so conversion optimization is also a nice traffic generation strategy. it also makes paid advertising a lot more profitable and a lot more effective by increasing the results that you are actually getting from your website. So it might be costing you a dollar per click or a dollar per lead to actually get someone in to your website, to sign up or to make a purchase. If you can double your sales and double your sign ups, then suddenly it is fifty cents per lead or sale. So your profit significantly increases as well. In terms of the actual things that you should be testing, there’s about 10 things that I look at when I’m looking at a website and doing a bit of a review and actually testing about whether or not I can increase conversions and most of the time it’s actually fairly fast and easy to increase conversions. Should I go through some of these things?

James: I think that would be awesome! If we could get maybe sort of three to five actionable things that our listener out there can go and check on their website to see if the box is tick that would be fantastic so the floor is yours. Let’s hit a list of three to five, whatever you think is the top few percentile that makes the biggest difference.

Brent: Okay, having done a lot of split test and having done a lot of testing service as software, I have been able to see what’s worth particularly well for a lot of clients and a lot of people doing split testing. The thing that works most effectively is to minimize distractions. And there’s two sides of this. Firstly, on every page, there should be one clear call to action. So if you’ve got a webpage that is a homepage for a shopping cart site for example, these are notorious for having a lot of little things that you can click on and find out more about, but there should be one predominant call to action on that website. The more calls to action on a website the less effective any one of them is going to be. In fact, the less effective they’re all going to be as a result of getting distracted. Everyone gets distracted on should I click on there or there. Anyway, as a result, people with too many options don’t make a decision. So by getting rid of distractions or getting rid of options, you are actually able to make significant conversion gains very, very quickly. And one of those things that you can do, and this is quite controversial, is to remove navigation from the webpage. Sometimes it is not feasible to do this, but for example, for a client that I had recently, we removed the navigation that said here are the products in this particular category that was down the left hand side of the website and just removing that product navigation in the shopping cart, that was able to result in a 419% conversion increase with 99% confidence that I offer you that statistics. 417% uplift and that took us 48 hours to run the test.

James: Wow! From something so simple as just removing a bit of navigation, that’s amazing!

Brent: Another thing that you should also have a look at particularly if you are running a shopping cart style website, if you are selling a visual product or if there is something visual that you can represent when it comes to the product that you are selling, showing it in a good light, almost literally here, will significantly increase conversion. So another test that we did recently was to just change the product image that we had for a particular product that we had on this client’s website. And we were able to run testing for a couple of days and we were able to get a 95% confidence in the sample so this is fairly certain that this is actually accurate, a 173% increase in conversion. So that’s another couple of days of testing and all we did was change the product image. So if you don’t have a product image on your digital product or if you’re selling a product on a shopping cart website that might not be the most attractive picture of that product then just testing the image can significantly increase sales that you make online.

James: Okay so that’s two that we’ve got there, remove distractions and look at your images, what’s number three on your list Brent?

Brent: Goodness! Which one would we use if we had to give one more? If I had a gun to my head and someone said Brent you have to make a sale in 30 minutes on this website otherwise I am going to pull the trigger, what I would do is I would increase the scarcity. And scarcity is all about telling people that the offer is going to end or that if they don’t act now, they are going to miss out. It’s creating pain for inaction rather than the pain of actually pulling your credit card out and taking action right now. So when it comes to creating scarcity, a couple of different techniques that you can use here: you can have a time limited offer, you can have a countdown timer, you can have a discount coupon special. The one that I really like is scarcity samurai. All business partners at market samurai have been using this one recently, I actually packaged it up as a product, it’s a countdown timer with a user limited offer. And this is something that takes a little bit of tech skill to test, but if you can create that scarcity and that urgency to buy right now before the offer expires in the next couple of minutes, then you’re typically receive a massive conversion rate. When I am talking massive conversion rate, back in the market samurai days I think we had something pushing up to 60% conversion rate. I think it was from sign up to actual sale. So these scarcities, these countdown timers, these user targeted offers, if you can create that scarcity, suddenly your conversion to sale will skyrocket.

James: Yeah, it pushes that person to that point of decision whereas if you just leave a buy button hanging there, two weeks down the line they might make it but if they have to make that decision now, it pushes them to either to take it or not, one of those two. It’s the only way they can go right?

Brent: Yeah absolutely! I’ve got a product that I got on a trial recently because I was not able to purchase it right then and there, and 28 days later, my trial is just about to expire, and I still have not gone back to purchase. I will after the trial expires because that’s when the scarcity actually kicks in for me.

James: Yeah absolutely! That’s powerful stuff Brent; I think we should probably draw it to a close. We’ve gone for about 35 minutes and we’ve covered a lot of good areas with plenty of actionable stuff to take away. What if anything would be your final words of wisdom to our listener out there right now listening in to your advice?

Brent: I think that the best thing that you can do with any marketing is try things quickly, and fail them even faster. So try a lot of different things, see what works, see if you can just dip your toes in to a lot of marketing strategies and sometimes they won’t work, but sometimes you’ll find something that is incredible. And we found that recently with SMS, we found it recently with mail, and we found it by testing some crazy ideas when it comes to conversion optimization so test as much as you can.

James: Awesome. Well I guess in theme with the interview we should offer our listener now a call to action which they should go and do as a result of listening in today. Brent, what would that be? Where could people go and find out more about you?

Brent: Well, normally, the way that I work is I work through different marketing agencies so one of the best things that I think people can do is actually get in touch with you and if they want my services is actually to get in touch with you James and say hey I’d like some keyword research done or some website optimization done on my website.

James: You got it. Perfect response Brent, as if we practiced it. Awesome! Well thank you so much for your time and your words of wisdom today. It’s been a thoroughly enjoyable 35 or so minutes chatting with you as it always is Brent so thanks again for your time and we should do this all again soon!

Brent: Thanks for having me James.

This week’s news in traffic: The first news is from Twitter and they are now letting all US advertisers to target people who just saw their TV ads. So this type of advertising is probably out of reach to the average Traffic Jam listener, however this new development is worth mentioning. How does it work. Let’s say Adidas added a new commercial for their new sneaker across several shows on different networks. Twitter is then able to analyze exactly when those ads were shown and on what programs. It then looks at people tweeting about those particular shows or programs by naming them in their tweets or by using relevant hash tags. Twitter is then able to show advertising to these people in their twitter streams using promoted tweets. so have you got a few hundred grand worth of advertising dollars to spend on TV ads and Twitter advertising? Well if you have, you may want to give this a go.

Next we go to Linkedin and in a fantastic development; they’ve introduced sponsored updates, which pretty much seems to be their version of Facebook’s sponsored stories. With sponsored updates company owners and organizations and even institutions will be able to reach people beyond their own following. Using demographic data and profile information across 225 million profiles from LinkedIn, it seems that we can get pretty precise with that targeting.

And finally in this week’s news, a month after Facebook introduced photo comments for Facebook users, the site is implementing this technology now for pages as well. Now people can leave photo comments on page posts and page admins can also respond to comments with a photo. This is rolling out gradually and globally starting this week.

Thank you to Patty from the United Kingdom for another five star iTunes review which I got this week and he said the quality of the podcast is very high in terms of production, but also the content is equally polished. Informative and entertaining interviews, this podcast is packed with tips and insights to boost traffic from a number of different tools and platforms. A must have. Well thank you Patty. As always I’d love to get your feedback and comments relating to the show, and there are a few places which you can do that. There is of course iTunes itself, log in via the iTunes account and find the Traffic Jam podcast and leave your review and rating there. You can also post in the site in the comments for each show and you can also do it via speakpipe, which is a voice message service which you’ll find linked at the base of the site. So I would love to get your feedback and comments however you would like to submit them and any great comments, well in fact, any comments really, I will read out on next week’s show.

The one minute traffic tip; I know how popular it is when I share cool little tools and resources for you so I want to tell you this week of our little wordpress plug in which we’ve added to trafficjamcast.com in the past few days that will get your content some additional social media exposure. This little plug in is called Click to Tweet and it’s super simple. Using the plug in, you can create a pre populated tweet with the message you want people to share and with one click your site visitors can click that message from their own Twitter account and share your message with their audience. There are many applications of course for this plug in but we’re using it to share cool little quotes from the Traffic Jam interviews and because of course my guests share some pretty cool stuffy tweets, retweeting these quotes is proving to be pretty popular indeed. To see the functionality I am talking about, head on over to TrafficJamCast.com. locate the episode page where this episode sits and you should find a very cool quote from Brent, I don’t know what it is yet because I am recording this before that post is written but you will be able to click on that button and share that quote of Brent’s with your followers so go give it a try.

Okay that rounds out another episode of Traffic Jam. I’ll of course be doing it all again next week and to give you a little heads up as to what’s in store on next week’s show, we’re going to be diving in deep on the topic of retargeting, so look out for that episode. If you’ve enjoyed the content here on Traffic Jam, you may also want to check out Veravo.com. that’s my main website and I publish videos almost daily with top traffic tips and and training there too, so go check that out. To play out today’s episode is a song picked by my guest today, Brent Hodgson and the track is a good kind of dance along tune; it’s by Avicii and the track name is called Good Feeling.

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THIS WEEKS NEWS IN TRAFFIC

ONE MINUTE TRAFFIC TIP

THE TRAFFIC JAM

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From fat ass and broke (Jeremy’s words)  to multi million dollar website owner, the story of  Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker is inspiring. Once $50 thousand in debt, weighing 420 lbs, smoking 2 packs of cigarettes a day  and living off a friends couch Jeremy somehow turned his life around going on to build several multi million dollar web businesses and a reputation as a shrewd entrepreneur.

This interview digs deep in to the traffic, business and marketing lessons of Next Pimp, Auction Ads, PAR Program and his shoemoney.com blog.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

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Polarize – positively or negatively. Either you want people to love or hate you. @shoemoney
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Hello welcome back! You’re tuned in to Traffic Jam episode#13, this is your host James Reynolds and I’m super happy that you’re tuning in to today’s show as I always am to have you here on Traffic Jam especially today since I’ve got such a great show lined up.

My guest today, he really just have such an amazing and inspiring story to share with all of you. A real kind of rags to riches story packed full not only of great marketing lessons but also lessons in life and crafting your own success and because he’s such a great storyteller, the delivery of the information is so engaging too so I know you are really going to enjoy today’s show.

But, before we get that interview, a couple of quick announcements at the top of the show, and the first one is a very exciting announcement, at least for me anyway. And that’s that this week I launched veravo.com, the brand new home to my daily training and tips video that used to go out to my two agency sites, ClickJam.com and SEOSherpa.com. Because we were sort of split between these sites, the idea was for veravo to be the central hub for all of the main content that we put out weekly across those two platforms and really that’s exactly what you can expect from the site, regular punchy traffic tips and training, posted three or four times a week, and a real sneak peak in to my own business, so you can take away the lessons that I’m learning and implement them in your own scenario. So I suggest you go and check that out, veravo.com. You can of course subscribe to receive the regular updates and you ge an email when we publish new content. But also on the site you can take advantage, at least for now anyway, of a website analysis report that we’re putting together for everyone, and that is about a 30+ point checklist which will assess your site based on its effectiveness for SEO, social media and just its general usability. That’s a really high quality, detailed report that my team will put together, and you’re welcome to receive one of those yourself and all you need to do is go and pop in there your website URL and your email address so that we can deliver that report to you and you don’t even need to put your name! So if you are sort of guarded about the websites that you own, or perhaps you are so embarrassed about the sites that you own that you don’t want to put your name in to it then that option is perfectly good for you, so a totally anonymous report, go and check that out and take advantage of that.

The second I have actually relates to Traffic Jam and the Traffic Jam jam that comes at the end of the show. I made a decision this week that I want to kind of make it a little bit more personalized, a little bit more fitting for each episode so from this week and ongoing I’m inviting my guest on each week’s show to actually pick that Traffic Jam jam to play out the episode. I am hoping that when we do that we’ll get a bit more personality coming across that really will be fitting of the interview and perhaps the kind of soundtrack that really summarizes that individual guest. In fact, my guest today has really recently written his own book which chronicled his own life story and I think if he ever chronicled that book in to a feature film the track that he’s chosen to play out today’s episode would have to be the soundtrack so stick around until the end of the show also for traffic Jam jam but also remember that coming up before that after the interview we have our regular segments, the one minute traffic tip and of course this week’s news in traffic. But now, I think it’s about time, without any further ado, to introduce today’s guest and to start our feature interview.

James: So I am joined today on Traffic Jam by Jeremy Schoemaker who’s known online as Shoemoney. He’s an entrepreneur and writer with an inspiring story. Using his own description, he went from fat ass and broke to owning multi-million dollar websites. Literally 50K in debt, weighing 420 lbs., smoking 2 packs of cigarettes a day and sleeping on a friend’s couch, Jeremy turned his life around in 2003 and went on to build several successful companies including netpimp.com and auctionhous.com which he later sold and later on build his business PAR ProgrAM. Jeremy, you literally went from no money to multimillion dollar company owner. I would love you to start by sharing your story to how you got where you are today.

Jeremy: Sure, and I have given 2 hour talks on that so I’ll make it very condensed version so I might talk fast so I think this is being recorded so people might want to play back and listen to it slower. So I made a site named Next Pimp which was just a fun site and the site stood for Next Pimp with your phone, just pimping out your phone kind of thing. I have always been a little immature and stuff like that but – be careful what you call your site but they just might evolve in to something bigger. And so I basically, and this is sort of a mantra and motto of every site that I had ever had, I did not realize it during those times when I was building those mantra. Is there something out there that I desperately want? And at that time there was no way for average people – I was in this forum called powered forums which was the big thing at the time for cellphone users who wanted to hack their phone and I had a Nextel phone back then and people were talking about here’s a way to make wallpaper but it was so complicated and at that time it had to be a gif format, exact file size, exact height and width on your phone, and you also had to trick it that you are a Motorola developer and all this stuff. So at that time, I just started and I would get on their and I would help people and I wrote tutorials about how to do it but it was just way too complicated for people to do – for your average person. So I figured out how to do it automatically on a website and just made it. It was a horrible looking site but you just submitted an image and what kind of phone you have and a second later and a second later it would spit you back out the correct image and also in that image it also contained the directions, just a step-by-step, really, really simple way for people to do it. Then one day somebody said you should catalog these images and allow people to categorize them, now it’s referred to as tagging. So I did that, and before I know it, it got to be so popular and it grew to all kinds of other phones and keep in mind this was 2003. Basically while sitting on my couch and working on my underwear from home, single and whatever, basically in my free time I made this and over 5,000 images are being uploaded every day. Extremely popular, so fast forward, I did the same thing with ring tones. People had no idea how to load ring tones on their phone, it wasn’t easy how to be in certain formats in certain things, so I did the same thing. I wanted it, so I programmatically made a website, and I was not a programmer. And that would set people back, they were like, I’m not a programmer, and this leads in to some other thing like should I buy info product and stuff, and I always tell people, it depends on where you’re at. Like for me, an info product was a $30 book on how to do Php. That was my info product. That was my education, and that’s how I learned. I basically hacked away at stuff until it did what I wanted and from there, one day I got a call from Google and they said we have this product called Google Adsense. We can tell you had a lot of mobile traffic, we have a lot of mobile advertisers, and we like to make you a premium publisher, and they asked how much you’re making. And I was like, I was not making anything! So through the code of my sites, this must have been late 2004 and the site was making at least $1000 a day and I just was blown away. So fast forward to 2005, by September the site just exploded even more and it was doing enough sometimes $3,000 or sometimes $7,000 in a day, it depends on the advertisers and how much they are going to get up and I had lost my job a month before that and I was on unemployment and then I got on a $134,000 cheque and up until that point, it was only like the month before that I had started decent money that if you want to see a weird look on a teller’s face is when you have an unemployment cheque and a hundred and thirty – they held that cheque for a long time, like 90 days and they did not know Google paid people at that time so from there then, I was this huge success story with Google and I had lost weight around that time and they put me on the speaking circuit. So because I got to tell this wonderful story about how I was broke and on unemployment and because of Google I changed my life. They had me speak about Google Adsense, at that point I was transitioning from Google Adsense to Affiliate Marketing because I really followed the money and I was like gosh these people can afford to pay me $2-3 per click on this Google ads, then where are they making money and so I traced it down and they are all affiliates for ringtone offers and things like that. So when I went direct to my affiliate networks, what they were doing, just following the links, and sign up for accounts, and started making money with affiliate marketing a lot more from what I was making with Google Adsense. So it’s ironic because a lot of the panels with Google Adsense and I had a lot of negative things to say about them, a lot of it being you just don’t have control over what’s happening at your site, when someone clicks on Google Adsense, they are leaving your site and you’ve lost them as a customer or a website visitor and who knows of they’ll be back or not. There are just several ways, and then I got in to making money through donations and then also, because people were searching so much on my website, I had an instant database of what people were searching for. All the typos, all the misspellings, so Ieveraged that in to doing my own pay per click outside of my site to go direct to these ringtone offers and really started blowing it out, so I really learned and the whole time I was doing this that was when I started shoemoney in 2003 but as I was learning how to make money, it started as just like hey I met Paris Hilton, it was just about me and my life then it started to be like hey I discovered this Adsense, this thing is kind of crazy, then it’s like, hey affiliate marketing works like this and now it’s like hey here’s my experience in doing pay per click and here’s  how you know. I was sharing what I was learning everything along the way. So then I got to be known as this guy who makes money online, and I wrote about these things and gave people value but I’ve always have the mantra of kind of like not telling people what to do but just sharing with them my experience and let them do what they want. From there, one day I have a site and I’m sitting there thinking gosh Apple has got such an amazing click through but I have no control over those ads, I can’t make them open a new window and I thought what if I just develop my own network that had the look and feel of Adsense but went to my own affiliate ads? So I created shoemoney ads and I had a lot of people using it, just a free thing that I offer to people, and again it’s something that I wanted so I built it for me and then built it for other people. And then I created a little reporting thing, different stats and different things and blah, blah, blah. So about four months after that I’m playing poker at affiliate summit or something, and this girl who’s next to me was like you’re that guy who owns shoemoney and she just happens to be the head of the e-bay affiliate program and she said you should build that around e-bay because our affiliates are using your ads and doing very, very well. So, I was like, interesting! And so I started an auction ad which was purely powered by the e-bay API. If you had a site like Darren Rowse who has this photography blog which is doing well, he can put images of cameras and how long the auction is – we powered all of that! And because we were doing so much volume, within four months we were doing like $2 million a month in gross that was paid out to our publishers. And I know something you want to get in to is how to grow and build traffic and all that which I am happy to share with people but we can get to that but it really was crazy. Because we were getting so much money we could pay out on the highest tier so if you started on e-bay you got somebody to sign up for like $12 we were getting like $20 so we were able to pay out 100% because I just want to grow it superfast. And so now you could go through e-bay or you could go through us at almost double the payout. So that was one reason why auction ads grew, there’s many- but from that, I built up products, there’s been many along the way, shoemoney tools and free seo report, just a ton of things. I sold next pimp to a ringtone company. Shoemoney tools became deprecated of the APIs going down. The SEO Report I sold and then I came up with the shoemoney system which is a training product to help people learn about marketing and learn the basics of all that. Several other things, and through that I had a secret way if you will, not really a secret but which is why these companies grew so fast after auction ads and why they became so successful and really why I was able to crush my competition and in 2012, the early phase of that, I started thinking I just don’t want to do this affiliate stuff anymore, I just don’t want to make tons of money in one month and then try to figure out what I want to do next, I had never owned a company for more than four months and I sold it! That was really a confidence thing! With auction ads I was paying $2 million a month with paypal with a csv file doing a mass pay. We had 20,000 people on the database and around 4,000 people are getting payments. That’s something you don’t have a margin for error on. And then I got in to stuff like currency hedging, just way out of my league and it was me and a $20/hr programmer. We did no customer service; it was like if you could not figure it out then you’re dumb. I did not know how to do it. So looking back on that, I know I sold it way too cheap because I had gotten to be friends with the company’s owner, they are willing to pay a lot more than what I sold it for but anyway, I basically in another situation of four in the morning drinking with friends and told them I want to build a real company, or I’m just going to write. I have put enough money from the companies I have sold to live a good lifestyle for the rest of my life! I’m either going to take a run and build a good stable company –but I don’t know what that stable company is. My friends were like you’ve had this one thing that helped you grow your companies and all these companies don’t know how to do that and so why don’t you just do that for other companies so that’s the PAR Program.

James: And that’s where you’re at now. Wow! That’s a miraculous story, I mean just hearing you really just make it sound in hindsight so simple but I am sure there are a lot of mechanics behind it. I’d like to start I guess with the first big public success which was next pimp and the six figure cheques from Google that followed. That if I understand was getting somewhere near 200,000 unique visitors a day at one point. Perhaps correct me with the numbers, how do you get about an audience that fast and that large to a website in the fashion that you did?

Jeremy: You know, and this is something that always works for me, is giving value and not focusing on the money to start with, but more on like what can I build that is something that would improve my life? And that was ringtones – what I cared about. And just improving that and improving that, everything else took care of itself. I never bought traffic to that site; it all came to me and it was because you could go and buy ringtones or you could go to this site that had millions of ringtones submitted by users and download them free and all this stuff. But actually to answer your question, it was featured on many newspapers, it was featured in Dig which was a big thing at that time, it made the front page of Dig many times which that would bring in at that time, you would get the users in addition to what you had, all the Nextel stores I could go to any Nextel stores anywhere and they would know the site well and they would actually know me as the owner. I was actually sued in Federal court by Nextel because the site looked pretty much identical to Nextel in yellow and black. At that time and they were saying people were getting confused because I outranked Nextel for Nextel ringtones – they sold ringtones and I was just like third from Nextel so if you are looking for ringtones and you type in Nextel where are you going to go? They took me to Federal court and we had over 6,000 pages from logs of Nextel stores accessing the website and even affidavits from Nextel’s employees saying that because of that site they were making sales because they showed people where they can get ringtones for their phones. My big secret to growing the site was engaging with my audience so I was on every form that had to do with cellphones and my signature was getting ringtones and I would help people because a lot of people just did not know. For every person that found the site, they just blew up from there. And another thing too is leveraging. Before I ever ranked for free ringtones or ringtones or anything like that, I would leverage the domain of these forums and in the title I would put how to load ringtones on your Nextel phone and then I would go to Sprint forum and I would write the complete guide not like telling people to go to my site but just saying I went to next pimp I downloaded the ringtone and then here’s the steps and of course people went to the site and people have got away from the whole – they were buying all these products that just spam everywhere. Just give people value and you can drop in your stuff in there. I am sure that just by listening to this people are going to go and buy something I sell or probably contact me about the PAR Program or something and it’s just because of talking to people and just giving them value, opening their eyes to things and it comes back to you. So that was my big secret to growing the site. Did it get a hundred thousand visitors? No. again, I built it for me. And just the same thing my blog started with nobody reading it and it was just because I gave people value over time. Everything, including auction ads, did not make a ton of money the first day. But just as people found out how good it was, then it just spread rapidly.

James: Well, it is interesting that you touched on things like forums because that was some years back now but forums are still a fantastic way to get traffic and really just dive in and get in to that watering hole of passionate users who are going to devour your stuff when you find the right target market and that sort of same stuff still works today; the tried and tested methods that still work.

Jeremy: Absolutely! There are things that people don’t think about; now people are really spamming the crap out of stuff and I know there have been products out there about how to make money on e-books and stuff but I can tell you one of the key things for my company now which is part of retention and stuff- I accidentally discovered something; I put a guide on Amazon called The Ultimate Email Marketing System and lo and behold it started ranking for email marketing and I sold it for 99cents. Amazon allows you to give it away for 4 days a month and when I gave it away for free it’s got tons and it would go all the way to number1 and all these stuff but really what it lead you to do is I gave them so much value about how to approach people and how to really relate to your customer and all these – whether they are bloggers or whatever, they read about oh you build a list and then you slam them with all your offers and all these stuff. They don’t even understand your story and how you – I mean do I hit people with offers and make a ton of money from my list? Absolutely! But I tell people when I speak at conferences I’m like if you want to see me in action get on my list at shoemoney.com and I guarantee that I’ll see your name, and you’re going to buy something from me. And they all laugh and I’ll say you laugh! But I know the average dollar value of a person who gets on my list organically is worth $80 on average the lifetime value of a person and that is attributed to – and believe it or not, that is low! For the clients that we have that are e-commerce people, somewhere around $160 per email which is pretty amazing and very eye- opening.

James: Well coming forward from Next Pimp to your second public success if you like, the e-bay affiliate marketing service, that in comparison to Next Pimp a totally different business model. Would you say that you’ve got this natural ability to find natural angle and exploit them for profit?

Jeremy: Yeah and I wrote a book which talks about it, and I am not here to talk about my book but I always saw angles and they always got me in to trouble as a kid but now in business the way my mind works, not only seeing angles but not being afraid, and I talk about this constantly – of being in that gray area and it’s not for everyone. But for me where I found success is crossing lines or bending rules legally, morally, ethically – what other people might not be willing to do and that is the difference no matter who I talk to, if you look at the success of any major company, I don’t care what the major company is, they’ve done that. And that’s the difference between a successful company and others – it’s just fact. There’s people who want to work 9-5 and then there’s people who want to do their own business but just don’t know how to grow it. Look at Steve Jobs, or Microsoft or all those guys, they have borderline criminal backgrounds of the lines they put. It’s another thing to be a criminal but they were very brave and even Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, look what he did. Look at the MySpace guys, started as massive spammers and look at plenty of fish who did some pretty wild stuff and putting up allegedly a lot fake female profiles to get people interested. In a way I am saying that these guys started at some angle and took a step that most people will not be willing to do and with auction ads, I had a 10 point plan which was insane, nobody in their right mind would do what I did but because I did it, I was able to grow that company within four months to 2 million a month in revenue. And what I did was – #1 I gave everyone who signed up and implemented the code $5. I just put $5 in their account. Behind the scenes, in the fine print, you don’t get paid unless you make $10 and if you make $10 I knew that you are going to be worth it because the hardest thing to get people to do when you are on an advertising network is implement it. And people who are so complacent, whether it’s Google adwords or whatever it’s to just do it. That was like step one. Step two is market penetration. So I would go to Tech Crunch and I would say, what are you getting with Adsense? I will pay you 10% more to implement auction ads and I don’t even care what you’re making. So I did that and it cost me a lot but everyone followed suit though. Because all of a sudden Mashable is running auction ads as a regular publisher because they saw Tech Crunch was doing it. And then all these other sites started running Auction ads because Tech Crunch was doing it and then I penetrated the mix martial arts industry which I am a huge fan of so I went to the biggest site there and I said the same thing – I will give you 10% more than your best month of Adsense and I just routinely did that which was very, very brave. Another thing I did is I paid out Net 0 terms which was crazy! I paid out people 90 days before I got paid. So by the time it was hitting millions a month that was very scary because if e-bay decided for whatever reason they don’t want to pay me I’m in trouble. So I am a little extreme at that time but you’ve got to be willing to do what others are not and there are 8 companies doing what auction ads was doing when I launched it including e-bay who had over $5million in development and 5 years in to it. And here I am, I launched it 8 weeks after I met with that girl in e-bay and so many weeks later the publishing network. So the things I did that I did to grow, and now I’m on step 4 of my marketing plan and I am not a big planner, I have never written a business plan and I don’t even have an MBA in fact. So I am not a big planner I fly by the seam of my pants and sometimes I come up with an idea and I take action. I don’t sit and think a lot about things a lot. In fact it drives me crazy when I am sitting and talking to someone and a lot of people are like, hey let’s chat about stuff and I’m like hey let’s do something. I am not chatter; if we talked about something and I have not acted on it within the next couple of days, it’s not going to happen.

James: Looking back at Auction ads, do you think you kind of pushed the boundaries as far and as hard as you did if you did not have Next Pimp behind you? Because if you kind of look at the history of the likes of Steve Jobs – the example that you made, I mean he really pushed things close with lawsuits but kind of always cited the fact that because Apple is so liquid you can kind of push things to the edge a little bit. Do you think you kind of had a little bit security behind you knowing that perhaps if something went badly wrong it would not be too much of a downfall for you?

Jeremy: I’m glad you asked that because a lot of people assume that because I had the revenue from Next Pimp that I was safe. Imagine you’re getting tens of thousands of ring tones uploaded a day. Hoe much of that content do you think are copyrighted? How many cease and desist orders a day do you think I was getting? I was strategically planning for it, my bills to my attorneys were five figures a month because we had large record companies if one of those would have gotten in to a lawsuit together in a class action I was broke! I can’t even tell you how many sleepless nights I had; yeah I made money with that but could that be over? Not only could they take all of that in a minute but also take my house and everything I had ever built? Absolutely! I was very fortunate that all that time right up to when I sold the site that none of the companies really want to punish me and make an example of me even though I was a pain. This was before the DMC act; this was before you could say this is third party content, I can’t control it, I am doing everything I can! Anyway to answer your question, I had no security. The site I was running was a huge liability, a massive liability! It’s kind of all relative because a lot of people start out but yeah you had this so use your money you could do this and I’m like you know what, this is not for you. If you can come up with excuses why you can’t be successful to start with, it’s never going to work. Because I was paying out a hundred percent I had a really cool affiliate program but it did not cost me anything but time to do auction ads, and I programmed out about 80% of it and the funny thing is it wasn’t that secure, the code was very bad! I was a horrible programmer! But it’s funny I built a multi-million dollar a month website from books I got from Barnes and Nobles and really just taking code that was copy and paste but changing a little bit of it to make it do what I wanted it to do, something simple, like making usernames and this and that. That’s not that hard! There’s all these examples that show how to do it like how to make an upload thing. I already had the backend stuff, those are programmer’s stuff which is a horrible security but I had registered globals on because those programmers understand how a horrible programmer I am but it worked and that’s the thing. I had a million dollar company operating on a completely insecure site. I’ve always had the thing where it does not matter until it matters so lets worry about security if we run in to an issue. Instead let’s do great backups and if we get hacked we’ll roll it out and figure out what happened. So let’s keep great logs. I don’t even know if that answered your question but with me I find that it’s about the security of what I had built before, oftentimes people ask me, if you were to start tomorrow, what would you do? And I have found myself in that exact situation in the last year because every year- I have money, I put money away, but it’s invested in a lot of hard assets, I bought farmland, and I bought buildings. And my wife is very frugal and likes having a nest egg. And last year was the first time since I started my company that I lost money. It was very humbling for me because I’m shoemoney I don’t do anything wrong. But it was because I focused on the long term company that happened and for me to go to my wife and say that I maxed on a credit line and need to take money out, she was completely against it. She was like, I want to see a plan because when I come down to your office, you guys are all playing video games, you guys are all watching YouTube videos and you’re throwing parties. In my office I have a stripper pole, I have arcades and I wanted to build a very fun place where everyone loves working here. We have a fund that changed and I had to show her. People say, so what did you do? Well I started this company in debt. Anyone can take small business loan right now. I started less than what everyone could get with a small business loan who had a good plan. And it’s funny because I did not want to do the hoops that everyone had to. They’re basically letting you do unsecured loans for an enormous amount I am really surprised with that! So if people ask me what would you do if you started over again, it’s like I just did, I just totally did. And a lot of people are actually in a better position than I am. When I wake up every day, I have to make three grand today to break even. You think you are in a better position than I am right now? Imagine not having the money coming in that you did but having all the expenses. I’ve got $100,000 a month right now in expenses. I’ve got to make $2,798 a day to break even. So fortunately this new company, once we had it developed and everything has taken off like a rocket, we’re doing fantastic. But it really made me think like am I cut out for this? Am I the fly by night guy that I have always been in making companies and selling them or making companies and making a ton of money and then having a load of crap because I just moved on to the next thing or can I really do this and it was a very humbling experience for me; it was a very educational experience for me.

James: I’d like to talk Jeremy about the shoemoney blog for a little while. That itself has become extremely established and certainly established your name. It does pretty well with traffic as well. According to my notes, well within the top 10,000 or so most trafficked websites in most major countries, I think you’ve got a readership somewhere near 30,000 people daily. How has that result been achieved? Is there any tactic involved with the blog or was that again more of a long term strategy that helped you build that thing up?

Jeremy: Like I said, I just wanted to write it for me. I know everyone does not want to hear that. So as the site built up, we almost had to start at 2003 or 2004 when actually someone else besides my mom would read it. And as I started giving value to people, the biggest reason – and I have large, large companies coming to me and they’re like, nobody reads our blog. They’re like, we get 500 people that read our blog and I read it and it’s just like, why would anyone want to read this? You’re talking about company news and how you’ve just partnered with this company. Why the hell would anyone want to read that? Why are you talking about how this company is doing it wrong? And I’m not talking about what everyone says – 10 ways to do this or 5 ways. Just titling the thing like that sucks. Be polarizing- positively or negatively. Either you want people to love or hate you. I have picked fights a lot of companies including Google and I have been in about 12 different lawsuits because of what I have said or because of whatever but I can tell you that I’ve never come out cash flow negative on a yearly basis on a legal issue. I’ve actually made a video if anyone ever cares called Affiliate Legal Issues, it’s free, and it goes through a lot of the legal cases I have been in whether I have been sued or I have sued other people and the legal system is a tremendous tool to not only, I mean everyone loves lawsuits and reading about them. And people say check this out, it’s not just about Facebook and Twitter and all that but in the end people still will just forward stuff. If people out there were to start a blog, give value to people and be you. Everyone has opinions and they’re so scared about writing something. I can tell you when I posted about how I was fat and the pain of kids making fun of me, just the whole thing – I was scared to post that! And also I talked about my addiction to online games and how I basically lost 2 years of my life in all this stuff. Those are some of my most popular posts because I put my heart out there and I was just like this is going to be ammo for all my haters but it wasn’t. it just drastically increased readership because you’re relating to your reader. I can’t tell you how many people since I wrote my blog have written me and was like I went through the same thing. Everyone has opinion on stuff but when people post about it, they’re like featured in everything. And the best part about this is whether I have written negatively or positively about a company, people forget about it two weeks later. But they’ve been to my site they know who I am and they subscribe.

James: One of the things I was reading on your blog was your whole philosophy around embracing new trends in everything you do. What sort of interesting traffic messages would you say you’re embracing right now and exploiting to your best advantage? I think you were telling me before a little bit about something to do with the mobile app network you are getting great results with. Tell us about about that.

Jeremy: Yeah absolutely! I want to look at the name so I can tell you people about it, there’s a mobile ad network that I discovered through a friend and so I signed up and he said, dude, put $100 on your account and look at how much traffic you are going to get from it so I was like alright, I put $100 in there, I got like 60,000 clicks. I know there’s a lot of fraud in there because on a we gen that I was doing, I only got like 40 submits out of 60,000 clicks so obviously that’s not adding up. But I came out very casual and positive about that. I have explored a lot more mobile themes we found and this is kind of embracing something, is actually building out. If you want to see an interesting example of how companies like myself, if you go to shoemoneytraining.com and you’re on an iPhone, you will see an iPhone very, very, looks like a native application and it caters to mobile people. And people don’t think about on your email submits or however you collect leads on your site if you do that and we have some clients that do that, some do other stuff but they think like you need your name and email horizontally, it does not work that way on a mobile phone, you need to do things vertically. And you’re going to see a huge difference and the thing is, it’s kind of going against what I normally do, that’s my experience and you’ve got to test it and figure out how it works for you but on all these things, mobile traffic right now is so I am getting away from the fly by night building a company, I can’t help it. So as my hobby, I still do a lot of affiliate stuff on the side, like at home or when I’m in between talks and working with clients and stuff, I love it! I love affiliate marketing, and also, I know that there is a very limited shelf life on affiliate marketing. You are coming down with all these FTC logs, you are coming down with all these taxes that are the nexus tax which is all these companies kill their affiliate programs so it’s a very limited time for people to make from home for no investment or little investment, an enormous amount of capital and I look at his company I’m building and I realize in the first year if I could make as much as I made in three or four weeks in some years, I am supposed to be happy. Most companies would freak out if they did half a million or a million in a year in profit and I am sitting there and I am going god this is so much work I’ve got so many employees I am managing and I know people listening are probably like this guy’s so cocky but this is the way it is. There’s so many guys out there that are 16 ,21, no education, dropped out of school, but they are millionaires – because of the time we live in right now and that if there’s one thing I can pound home with people it’s no matter if you are getting traffic when you see in facebook you are completely ruined for guys like us trying to advertise because brands have moved in. it takes a while, so like this mobile thing I just mentioned, that’s got a very limited shelf life. Mobile advertising is a new cutting edge thing, you can go to digital forms and they talk about it and it will take a year for big brands to recognize how profitable and they will jump in to it and they will destroy guys like us because they have big money and they don’t even care if they’re making money on it, they just want to brand out more.

James: Let’s close out Jeremy by talking about this new business venture of yours which is called the PAR System which stands for People Acquisition and Retention Program. You described it yourself as kind of a big brand personal marketing and it kind of looks to me very much like an intelligent auto responders and message sequencing system. Tell us a little bit about all of that, it sounds super exciting.

Jeremy: Yeah it is very exciting and from a very, very high level. We have amazing technology and we can do a hundred percent email deliverability like nobody else and I am happy to talk to anyone who wants to talk about that because there’s got a lot of guts in that but the end big picture is this: I have built companies around connecting with my customers and giving them value. And somewhere along the line, these big brands have lost that. So the PAR Program is all about that, and I have been selling somewhere around $10million through my own list of building that relationship and I am not shoemoney so much as I am Jeremy. When I email people, if they respond to that 120,000 list that goes to somebody at my office who will answer and if it’s too technical for them, they give it to me and I answer. The best way I have ever come up with explaining things is called You Don’t Know Jack and it is about a guy named Jack Keifer who has a company called Baby Age, one of our clients, and I am using him as an example and it’s like – and you don’t know Jack but I know Jack because Jack met my wife one time and told her about what to watch out for when buying a stroller. And so my wife buys from Baby Age even though Amazon is 30% cheaper. But she knows Jack and she does not care because Jack is there for her. It’s not Baby Age, it’s Jack. And somewhere along the line these companies think they’ve got to do these. The stats that we have are mind blowing and I’ve been writing and selling stuff through email. You show me one company who actually sells an e-commerce product. So we have experience doing it. Another one of our clients is blue electronic cigarettes, twice as much as their competitors but they just sold for $100 million and their revenues are ridiculous because their CEO is out their all the time. When you think of it, you think of Jason Hellie because he’s the president and when you think of Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, they’re people behind a brand. And they’ve got a story. I know I am going really long here but the point I’m trying to make is, and trust me I am not trying to sell my company to you guys because we only take on about 4-5 clients a month just because I do all the copywriting so we are very selective on who we take on and stuff but everyone out there can do it. You can go to Aweber, it will cost you a buck, and if you are a company out there drastically improves – for some of these companies we improve their sales 20% to 50% and I am just stunned because all they do is email out an image, not even text usually, a huge image – I’ll give you a staggering, quantifiable fact, on desktop clients, we can see 70% never load an image of desktop clients so nobody is even seeing anything, just a blank white page. It’s like somebody coming up to your booth and they have to touch a button to actually see what the hell you do, it’s like all of a sudden all these big brands have lost the whole thing and when we talk to them and they’re just seeing returns through email, and I am like, yeah because you are sending people a special offer every time. That’s all you do. When I get an email from Dell, I don’t engage with that, but when I get an email from Jason at Dell, he is my rep, and he is emailing me because they’ve got a special or one of my warranties is expiring or something like that, he’s there and I can call him and email him. And people can use a guide I wrote called Email Acquisition and Retention, it’s free and it goes through like what’s the persona, what’s this and I give all the qualified stats and the reason I do this is that those people who can do these themselves are not who we’re looking for as clients but I give away exactly what we do for these big brands and so those who just want but do not have the time to do this, those companies are the ones who we just take it all off their plates.

James: Awesome, I am definitely going to include a link to the PAR system in our show notes as well as a bunch of other stuff you mentioned today including the shoemoneysystem.com, shoemoney.com and of course shoemoneytraining.com. Jeremy, any other links that we should place in the show notes for our listeners today?

Jeremy: You might just want to note that the shoe money training is actually the shoe money system I created a couple of years ago and it is absolutely free, so you sign up and it gives you your name and your password and it’s got a hundred and some hours of content plus all my radio interviews and it’s really great stuff and I spent a lot of time building it and I just give it away to everybody.

James: And you’ll be in good company when you download that because you have over 5 million downloads of it already so it’s really good information there.

Jeremy: Yeah and the funny thing is that exact same thing sells in You Do Me for $200 and it is always within the Top 5 percentile of You Do Me’s gross email. So they always want me to do something and that’s a whole other story.

James: Awesome! I am also going to recommend people check out your recently published book called Nothing’s Changed But My Change which is kind of an overview of your back story and based on what you shared with us today I think will be a fantastic read, so I am assuming Jeremy that is available on Amazon?

Jeremy: It is Amazon, select Barnes and Nobles and also public libraries and I have been getting letters recently from prisons so evidently if you’re in prison you can pick it up too! But Amazon is the best price. I wrote it for my kids and I did not want it to filter stuff so I have to warn people out there, it is raw, it is mine, and I wrote it, it is five years in the making and the reviews are interesting. It is not a how to make a money online book, I talk about building the companies I built but in no way I want people to be confused about that. So it’s not that, it’s basically just about a crazy kid who had a semi criminal at times background and I say nothing has changed but my change because I am still the same guy I just have a lot more change in my pocket.

James: Fantastic! Well you did warn me at the start of this interview that there may be some sort of profanities but we managed to stay pretty clean. I suggest that our listeners check out the book for the uncensored version. Jeremy thanks for your time today, I had a whole lot of fun listening to your story and perhaps we can do it again sometime in the future.

Jeremy: Alright sounds good! Thank you so much for having me on James.

First of all, Gmail, the much loved solution from Google has been rearranging its inbox. The interface is now in a tab style arrangement with filters in place to push email to the relevant tab. As standard, there is a tab for primary email, social email, promotions, updates and forums. The functionality that Google have just introduced with Gmail was pretty much available before with filters and labels but now with this new setup Google really are encouraging people to get organized with their email management which from a user standpoint I think is a very good thing trying to manage their email but from a marketer’s standpoint this probably could be seen as a bit of a hindrance because we do like those marketing emails that we send to land up in that primary email inbox whereas now with this new Google functionality inside of Gmail it looks like they may be getting pushed away from attention.

In other Google news, Tech Crunch is reporting that Google is developing an e-commerce platform called Helpouts. The platform is currently being tested and according to Tech Crunch may get a release sometime next month.

From Facebook, they’ve just announced their Q2 numbers and the numbers are in growth. Active montly users have grown from 1.11 Billion to 1.15 Billion. Mobile users have also increased, as have daily active users, they’re both up from the Q1 numbers. Whilst all these numbers are up, most of the growth comes from Asia where Facebook actually make less money per user so it may not be entirely the good news that’s being reported.

Youtube: they’ve released a range of subscribe buttons that authors can put on their website to encourage subscription to their YouTube channels. Previously, there was only available a subscribe widget which did not have much functionality for customization, it was pretty much standard. The subscribe button should offer a range of cool designs will maybe encourage more people to subscribe to your channel so go check that out.

In Twitter news, Twitter have finally killed off auto follow functionality. The practice of auto follow was used by new Twitter users who wanted a quickly inflate their follower numbers and from these spam type services from which you could go and buy maybe 10,000 or 20,000 Twitter followers at a time. Twitter of course has been getting a lot of rap for this and they are reported to be the most spammed of all social platforms and they are trying to do this to clean it up and to make it more social and make it more real again. This obviously is a good move, so as of now, auto follow functionality has now been stopped.

Thank you to you if you are one of the commenters on the Andrew Warner episode, the last episode of Traffic Jam. We had some really great feedback which is absolutely no surprise because Andrew is a fantastic guest. If you want to interact more with the show, please go ahead I would love to hear your comments and feedback and questions that you have for our guests here on Traffic Jam and you can do that as always in a number of ways, you can comment on the show notes page itself over at TrafficJamCast.com, you can leave a voice message which you can do by again visiting Traffic Jam and then going to the speak pipe functionality to the base of the site or of course you can head on over to iTunes and leave a review there. I’d love to get your feedback and if there’s any particular great comments and reviews, they’re bound to get read out here at TrafficJamCast.com so if you’d like to get yourself a little bit of extra exposure, pop on over, leave us a comment, maybe even leave your website address as well and we’ll make sure that’s read out on a future show.

The one minute traffic tip; this week’s traffic tip is as much as a leverage tip as it is a traffic tip and it’s all about taking one piece of content and then leveraging that in to multiple modalities to attract different types of traffic. We all know the power of video so start with a video piece of content that’s engaging and compelling to your audience. Then what you do is you take that video, upload it to YouTube and embed that YouTube video on to your blog. You then transcribe the video so it then goes in to text format, paste that in to your blog post and then also attach a PDF version for people to download. Then from the video you strip out the audio, upload it to your server and then syndicate it with iTunes so now you have an iTunes podcast going out as a different version here. So the end result here we’ve got a well searched optimized blog post, lots of rich content, you’ve got a video which can be found via search and also within YouTube and you’ve got a version of that post in iTunes.  So you’ve got their three fantastic sources: YouTube, search traffic, and iTunes. Of course if you go and announce that post on to your social channels, you are also tapping in to social traffic. If you want to see an example of this I suggest you head on over to my new site, veravo.com where we’re just putting the finishing touches to the iTunes aspect of that process and you’ll see that coming in to play real soon. This is all about leverage – taking one input and then leveraging it in to multiple modalities to attract different types of traffic.

That’s it! That’s a wrap for episode#13 of Traffic Jam. We’ll be back again soon with another episode and joining me on episode 14 a good friend of mine and we’ll be discussing not only traffic but also conversions too. So stay on the lookout for that episode.

To close out the episode this week is a track chosen by Jeremy which is a metaphor for his life story and his life journey so far. The track is by Drake and the title of the track is Started from the Bottom. Enjoy!

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Andrew Warner knows a thing or two about audience building having built a .com business that at one time had the 19th most trafficked website in the world. He’s also the man behind mixergy.com a site that teaches entrepreneurship via interviews with proven tech founders such as those behind companies like Sun Microsystems, Pixar, Groupon & Linkedin. Andrew has access to the highest knowledge base. Listen in as Andrew shares his expertise in this interview.

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Hello! You’re tuned in to Episode #12 of traffic jam, this is your host James Reynolds and I have another great show for you today, this episode, as always, we have our popular segment, the one minute traffic news in this week in traffic and we have an interview with a very interesting entrepreneur who built the 19th most trafficked website in the world. It is a bit of a disruptive yet content filled interview right from the start; in fact my guest does not even allow me to complete my introduction before delivering his first traffic tip.

So let’s introduce the guest to you. His name is Andrew Warner and he’s the founder of Mixergy.com, a site where Andrew interviews proven tech founders and teaches entrepreneurship. There are currently 800 interviews with founders of companies like Sun Microsystems, Pixar, Groupon and LinkedIn, as well as various personalities you’ll recognize like Timothy Farris, Seth Godin and Traffic Jam guests like Pat Flynn and Max Teitelbaum, all of these guys featured in mixergy.com. In his 20’s Andrew used credit cards and JCrew refunds to create a $35+ million generating business online. At one point, his website ranked #19 in the world for total traffic. On this interview Andrew is going to share with you how he built an email list with over 20 million subscribers and the strategies that helped his business become a top 20 ranking website in terms of overall traffic. So here’s the interview.

James: Ok, this is episode #12 of Traffic Jam and joining us today is Andrew Warner from mixergy.com. Andrew welcome to the call!

Andrew: Hey, thanks!

James: Good to have you here. Of course on Mixergy you invite on to the show proven tech founders who share their journey through strategies in entrepreneurship to your listeners, I’d like you to sort of follow the same today in Traffic Jam and ask you about your back story, and hopefully we can get some great insights and how you build several tech businesses and hopefully gain some good ideas for traffic generation and audience building as well but the big question …

Andrew: Let me give you… I already interrupted your intro, but I have to tell you why I’m interrupting, because I have to give you my number 1 suggestion to you for more traffic, you’re a good looking guy with a mic that looks really powerful; it communicates a lot of authority. You’ve got guests on here that I can see from their faces are impressive guests, like who’s the latest one? Chris Brogan is the one I’m looking at on the site; you’ve got to do video. People do not understand that those little boxes with the play button, what they mean, they’re worried that they’re going to sit and listen for someone drone on for a while. To give them video, it just for some reason get their attention, gets them to hit the play button, and gets them to hit the fast forward and spend some time if I’m boring, which frankly I sometimes am. They look at my face and they’d say look at Andrew, he’s kind of a weird looking guy, why is he doing video interviews? Look at the mic they’re each using. My suggestion for you is for traffic put video on there. When I put video, people started to really believe that guests were real; started to feel like hey, Seth Godin’s in the room with Andrew, I want to see what Seth has to say.

James: Well I’m a massive advocate video Andrew so I’ll stake that claim now. Some of the most powerful stuff that I am doing in my own business is regular video content, two or three times a week, informative, quality content, and that stuff gets shared; I mean it’s just going everywhere it’s building an audience so you don’t have to preach to me I’m definitely on the same level with you, but perhaps we’ll also consider adding a video element to Traffic Jam in the future.

Andrew: So I was interrupting you, what was I interrupting as you were saying?

James: We can start literally just by rolling back to how you got started; because you’ve got a fantastic entrepreneurial history, you’ve done a lot of stuff in tech. tell us about your first .com business, you started it at the age of 21, tell us how it came about.

Andrew: It happened because I was looking for some way to make money, I was really desperate to give some meaning to my life but I also needed some money so I can survive and thankfully I thought the two are combined; if you have money then it means you are doing something meaningful, if you’re doing something meaningful, then money will follow. That’s the way I was thinking at the time, obviously not exactly true, but getting to the idea, we did online greeting cards as greeting cards are extremely viral. What we did on other people who do greeting cards is when one of our users would send an electronic greeting card to their family members, we would have a check box on the side that said tell me about other greeting cards, and so people would join our mailing list. Then whenever we’d have a greeting card, we’d tell them about it. Another thing that we did that was different and I think we copied it from other people. We did not just wait for mother’s day because we knew that mother’s day is such a powerful day for greeting cards, we did not wait for Valentine’s Day which is also a powerful day, we started inventing our own holidays. It would be like Happy Love Your Hair Day, I don’t know, something ridiculous like that. But if it was a holiday that we made up and we said it’s real, people would send out greeting cards and of course someone sends out a greeting card, or every time they join our mailing list and every time they are spreading the word about our greeting card site to their friends who are receiving those cards.

James: So how are you monetizing this thing? Because if I remember rightly, you actually offer these cards in many cases, if not all the time, actually for free. So what was the monetization model?

Andrew: It was all free, and the monetization was lead generation. So with the banner ad, you might make a buck, maybe if you’re lucky, $20 for a thousand users. If I could do lead generation, I would get paid a buck to $7.50 every time I collected a lead for a client, so I think I can do maybe 50% of the people who sent out a greeting card, I could get them to become leads to one of my clients, so that becomes a minimum of $500 CPM as opposed to $20 if you’re lucky. So more specifically, here‘s what we do and one that people can relate to. After you sent out a greeting card, you’re done. But you already gave me your name. so I would say, Hi Veronica Smith, thanks for sending out the greeting card, by the way did you know that Time Magazine is giving away 5 free issues of their magazine to anyone who wants to try it? Just fill in your information below, and we’ll send it out to you. The fine print says if you don’t cancel you get signed up to get Time Magazine for maybe a year, but it’s Time Magazine so you get to cancel anytime, you don’t have to pay anything, all good. Now she sees that form that asks for contact information, her name is already pre-populated in there, again so she feels alright, half the work is done, all she needs to do is put her address and submit and she’s good to go. That got us $7.50.

James: Wow! So you are basically doing traffic arbitrage right? You’re buying traffic at a low price and selling it…

Andrew: I would not call it traffic arbitrage because traffic arbitrage is we just get traffic and we sell it without doing anything to it. We were definitely buying traffic on a cost per action basis but the action was sending out a greeting card, something is being done. Arbitrage would be if we go to Time Magazine and say give us $7.50 and we would go to another guy and we’d say, hey, James Reynolds we’d give you $4 every time somebody fills out our form and we collect $3.50 that would be the arbitrage, but it was much more sophisticated than that.

James: And did the revenue model remain constant or were there any innovations along the way that led to the profitable model that you’ve just describe?

Andrew: So at first the way that we were going to make money was we would get people to send out greeting cards, and while they’re sending our greeting cards they would have the opportunity to join our mailing list. And when they join our mailing list, we send them content plus ads; you know a joke a day via email and an ad the top of the dough. That’s a good way to make money but it takes a freaking forever so we’d have to make a fraction of a penny through the user every day through the ad until we finally made up our money. That’s a lot of cash, we were paying 10cents to websites every time someone came from their website to our and sent greeting cards. So we were paying 10cents per user, just about, and it would take us 100 days I think, maybe even more, to make the money back. I forget the exact amount of time. So what we’ve decided to do, instead of just making ads that way, why don’t we make a lead gen in to each greeting card? And then we started charging a $1.50 then increase the prices from there. So we were paying 10cents, running $1.50, our net was $1.40, and so we can afford to pay more. We started out with 10cents which amazed people, and then we paid 25cents to websites every time someone from their site sent out a greeting card, that blew people’s minds. Imagine you’ve got to add greeting cards to your site and you’ve made 25cents every time someone sent it out, beautiful!

James: Perfect! Well I think at one point your greeting card website got to 19th most traffic site in the world. To get traffic of that magnitude I am sure you were doing some more nonconventional stuff the average website owner are not doing themselves. What was the best..

Andrew: There was nothing more than what I told you. The first thing is we were paying affiliates to send us traffic, #2 when someone sent out a greeting card we would ask them to join our mailing list. Our mailing list got to be a little more than 20 million people, nothing sophisticated than that.

James: Ok, well there you go there’s the holy grail!

Andrew: It was that simple but frankly, if you look at your life, if you look at the things that work especially well, they are the simple things. The machine was very simple, when the machine gets complicated, when there are a lot of different parts to it, it’s too much that it can break! When it’s simple it can work!

James: Yeah, and I guess the lesson in there is once you’ve got a formula that works it’s just a matter of ramping it up to do as much a bit as you can. Well you eventually sold that business, and if I’m right in saying, that when you sold it, you actually sold it in parts. Net Creations bought your opt in email database, I think I remember you saying, how much was it actually worth to them at that time?  

Andrew: You said Net Creations? Yeah it was a good amount of money, they bought not the 20+ million list but a smaller list of people who specifically signed up for offers targeted just to their interest and double opt-in. Net Creations was in to that. I won’t say the amount, I’ll say it’s seven figures and I think I have a copy of it somewhere scanned in my computer because it’s one of the proudest cheques of my life but I won’t say the amount.

James: Well, after a few years of hiatus after you sold that business you then started in I think 2004 Mixergy. What inspired you to take on that project?

Andrew: You mentioned that I was the 19th most visited site, we were constantly in the top 20, nobody knew who we were, and partially because I did not want people to understand what we were doing because then it might compete with us, I also did not see much value in people knowing what we were doing so what’s the point of telling them; that was the issue. And then the other part was, I was just not part of the cool kids, you know, there are cool kids even today in the tech world that everyone knows about, everyone loves, everyone admires. They’re making no money, they’re scraping by, and their business is barely surviving and eventually they’ll fail but they’re cool, so the big blogger s write about them, the big reporters talk about them and the people who are impressive keep referring to them. I wasn’t one of those people and it pissed me off. I thought I know more than all those people did because most of them were just flailing around. So I thought the way for me to not be an obscure nobody in this world is to do something that people care about, to leave a legacy and that’s why I decided I would focus on ideas. Ideas are where I would make my mark on to the world.

James: Well, then in creating Mixergy you’re inspired by Howard Dean’s presidential campaign, I want to tie this in to traffic generation; you’ve watched him create a massive following using local meet ups. What we teach here in Traffic Jam is all about audience building, what were the biggest lessons you learned from modeling Howard Dean’s campaign that you are able to apply to grow Mixergy?

Andrew: You know what, to be honest; it did not work for me, but here’s what I learned and was what I admired even though it did not work. What Howard Dean was doing was he went from being a nobody- a governor of Vermont, most people could not find Vermont on the map, and they’ve never been to Vermont, they don’t see Vermont as a leading state, but still this guy was leading in a democratic primary. Why? Why was this nobody this big? And if you’ve started reading the newspapers this time you’d see that what he was doing was he was using technology and what he was doing specifically meet up technology to get his followers in person. They would meet at bars, at back rooms at bars, they would meet in person and they would encourage each other. They would come up with ideas, they would execute ideas in a small scale and then share those ideas with the main campaign. They would feel involved and so they would put more money in to the campaign. It was all that stuff that was happening because you got them to meet in person, and so I said if I want to create a movement, I should get my people to talk in person too. Here’s where I failed. When I went to a Howard Dean meeting, you knew what the goal was; you know what the mission was. When you went to my meeting, you did not know what the mission was because I was too much of a wuzz to stand up and say here is my mission. And I had not frankly even thought of what my mission would be in clear details because I was too embarrassed to talk about it and because all I ever really wanted was to be somebody. You know and I can’t stand up with everyone all because I want to be somebody. So the mistake that I made was that I should have been clear beyond me, and there was not beyond me. I should have talked about it and I screwed up by not talking about it and when I look to people’s eyes and say hey they don’t really understand what I am about I would have been forced to go home and rethink about the way what this meet up was about because I want to get people together in person, and so that interaction would have challenged me and forced me to think about my message and if I had a clear message then maybe people would have gotten together outside of my small community of Southern California where I happen to live so all I did was I got all these groups together in person, we did not talk about what the message was, we did not talk about what the reason was, they would leave, and then I would have to do it again. Not really the best way to do things. So my big take away from that is that just the power of getting together in person but more than that the importance of standing up and saying what you’re trying to say and what you’re standing up for. And it’s really scary to do that when you’re starting out because what if you fail? Then everyone knows what you’re trying to do, they all know that you failed. It’s scary because you don’t exactly know what you’re doing at first. When you’re starting out, you’d say, I will try to figure it out, I think that the business is but it like… for you for example, you stand up and say, I’m going to help everyone and my mission is to help people who are listening to me become better at getting traffic. It’s kind of scary because now we all know what James is up to and if James fails, we know, so you might be hesitant to say that. It is also scary to say I’m going to do it via audio interviews and that scary because you don’t know if it’s going to be audio interviews or some jerk is going to complain to you that you should be doing a video and maybe you’d post a video and maybe neither one works because people are too tired of consuming content over the course of 20 minutes to an hour and then you decide that checklists are the most effective things. Screw interviews, create checklists. But, the power of saying it publicly is that people can have an argument with you, that they can judge you in person, that you can see what they’re excited about, and I’d say the same thing to anyone who’s listening; that’s one of the big lessons I have, stand up and say what you’re trying to do and it’s okay if later on it doesn’t work out, it’s okay if later on it changes.

James: Well, you’ve got a pretty clear mission now right, with Mixergy. It has evolved in to something very different. I am sure many of the listeners that are tuned in right now, know all about it, but to those that don’t, what has Mixergy become today?

Andrew: Mixergy is the place to learn how to build your business by listening to real entrepreneurs tell you their stories and experiences and what they’ve learned.

James: Cool! Well that sums it up quite nicely, leads very well in to my next question. You’ve of course interviewed some pretty prominent people, the likes of Guy Kawasaki, Tim Farris, Seth Godin, the founders of Groupon Living Social. One of those names that I mentioned, Seth Godin, recently came out on his blog to say that he only accepts interviews by those that have bigger or more influential audiences. Is this a strategy for you?

Andrew: Bigger audiences than him? No. I get why he is doing it. I am disappointed, I did not realize, I don’t know what he exactly said, I did not see that post but one of the nice things about Seth Godin was that he would do – he did an interview with me when I did not have an audience and then when I had an audience, I was able to keep promoting and help him but more than that I guess he helped me, and I guess by helping me, he got his message out. I always talk about when I had no audience I interviewed Seth and I said to him, your book is about how to build a tribe what do you say to someone who has no one? Who has no tribe? I have no tribe here. He started telling me the story about Barack Obama. Barack Obama was travelling with just a photographer for a long time, no one was paying attention to him. Before the audiences that would soon pass out, it was him and one other person in a car trying to get attention and in time that tribe came and I learned from that; just focus on my message and not pay attention to how many people are out there and eventually they will come out and I think by teaching me, he helped influence a lot of people when I wish he would recognize the power of it if he doesn’t, he probably does. As for me when I do, I try to say yes to as many interviews as possible because I don’t know who’s going to be big, because talking to you helps me sharpen my ideas, even if nobody listens to this, even if you accidentally destroyed this interview, the fact that you pushed me to think what I stand for is helpful. The fact that you pushed me to think what I learned from the first version of Mixergy which was to say what you stand for and to look and see how people react to it so that you can know if you’re expressing it right, that’s helpful for me. I think those conversations are very useful.

James: And of course you are putting out a lot of interviews. As an interviewer, you’ve put out one per day I think and also you’re putting out pretty much a course every week. I am sure there is someone listening in to the show right now who’s going, heck I can’t even put out one piece of content per month, how can Andrew be so prolific with his content creation? What’s your secret?

Andrew: I disagree with them. People always think that they can’t. I think they are overthinking it. I say the put out whatever is simplest. I am big on interviews, I’m big on not pretending that we as bloggers and writers and entrepreneurs who know everything. I am big on saying who out there knows? I’m going to listen to them, learn from them, and write what I have learned from them. And so here is my suggestion, if you are going to interview, do it. And second, don’t feel like you have to copy me. Don’t feel like you have to copy trafficjamcast.com. The goal is to find the simplest way to do the interview and get it out there on a regular basis without any headaches to you. The goal is not to make it look good; the goal is not to make your guest look good, the goal is not to make it looked polished, the goal is to keep it simple that you can do it over and over, you get good and better and better so you become the best. My suggestion is maybe what you do is you say I’m going to come up with one question that I care about and my own content generation process is to ask people about that one question, and so you say, Andrew was just interviewed on TrafficJamCast.com, I’m going to interview him too but I am going to keep it real simple, I’m going to say Andrew I only have one question for you, I’m going to type out your answer, and I’m going to put it on my website. That’s it! And then you do it over and over again. And then maybe in time you can say, maybe I can record that and put a recording of it on. And then maybe say, yeah, I could do a video recording of him, and say maybe I can do whatever. Start with whatever, the simplest and repetitive. Every day you want to do it.

James: I guess it is all about creating consistency and a schedule in doing this stuff and you’ve got a deadline that you’ve got to get this out like we do here, we have a deadline of each weekend it has got to be published then you have to force yourself to follow through.

Andrew: Yes, keep it really simple – with everything.

James: There you go. Well, closing question as we get towards the end. I noticed that stats for Mixergy.com that your number 1 traffic source in terms of your traffic it seems to be Google. What is your best traffic source in terms of conversions because you do have a paid element to Mixergy? What is your most effective traffic source?

Andrew: I don’t know. I have tracking on my site and what is noticed is that people will go through the site often for weeks, actually what, conversions I take it back. Google absolutely, and I’ll give you an example it. Someone will be googling how linda.com built its business because they want to build an online education business for example. And then they’d end up on my interview with Linda of linda.com and they’ll listen to that and they’ll pay to listen to it. And they’ll see if I pay to listen to this and hundreds of other interviews that are similar, boom! I’m in! Hey and if I am not happy, I can cancel and get a refund. Google’s terrific but what I notice though is that that is a small portion of my overall sales, where my sales really come from is someone might be listening to this then they come check out my site, then they check out, then they check it out again then they check another interview, then they join the mailing list then they see this course, then they get a little bit of what’s on the course but they want the rest of the stuff so there’s a very long process where they get to know me where they trust that they get their money back, they trust that the content’s good, sometimes it stinks but I want to support them and then they buy. There isn’t a very clear sales funnel.

James: I think that’s the power of what we’re doing here with video and audio, you can really nurture process and people will sample your stuff and come back to you repeatedly again until they feel comfortable enough to take on your paid stuff so I’m sure you’re testament to that. Andrew, thanks for your time today, have you got any final words of wisdom to our listener out there?

Andrew: Yes. You should not just be listening to this interview you should do your own interview. I told you how simple it could be. You just send one email out and ask someone to do with one question, post that one question and answer on the site, you’ve got an interview and that’s it. Keep it simple!

James: Boom! There you go. Cool. So Andrew from Mixergy.com is that where I send people off to as a result of listening to this?

Andrew: Yes, send them off there and I would send them off to your contact pages, it’s on the top of your site and I would encourage them to tell you that you should be doing video.

This week’s news in traffic: For users of Instagram comes the exciting news that you can now share stories not only using pictures but using video too.  When you go to the photo application, you’ll the addition of a video camera icon. All you do is tap that and you’ll enter in to video mode where you can take up to 15 seconds of video and share it with your usual Instagram followers. The video feature comes with a bunch of cool settings and the usual types of filters that you are very familiar with in the photo option.

If you’ve seen the little camera icon in the comments field on Facebook, you’ll realize that you now have the ability to add photos and images to your comments on threads. This feature is new, it’s only available to profiles right now and not to pages.

Google’s dominance continues to raise eyebrows in the Federal Trade Commission. A Google spokesman confirmed on Monday that the company has been contacted by the FTC about its $1.1 Billion purchase of Waze, a competitor to Google Maps. The purchase raised eyebrows among consumer groups worried that the internet company’s picking up its competitors one by one. If there is one thing for certain, Google is moving in to many more spaces and we can expect more acquisitions in the future.

Well, there’s a couple of really nice iTunes reviews this week, both of them come from listeners in the United Kingdom. The first one is from Toxic Creative which I happen to know is Chris who will be listening somewhere in North Hamptonshire and he says I am really enjoying Traffic Jam. I’ve been following James a few years now and he obviously knows internet marketing inside out. I tend to listen to this podcast whilst driving in to work and often find myself pulling over and making valuable notes each time. This is definitely a must listen for anyone who wants to increase their online audience fast. Thank you Chris!

The second review, also from the United Kingdom, and also a five star review, is from Tomos Wyn and Tomos says I can attest that James knows what he’s talking about. Anyone who is in to internet marketing should give this podcast a listen. Each episode is full of useful information that you’d probably end up paying for elsewhere. Give it a listen today. Thank you Tomos! Tomos is in fact someone I have worked with several times, he does some of my development work and he’s really knowledgeable guy himself. So thanks Tomos for piping in and leaving a review. If you the listener have a review also, just to remind you, you can submit that in one of three places: the first is on TrafficJamCast.com just simply by leaving a comment beneath the episode on the individual episode page. You also have the option over at trafficjamcast.com to leave a voicemail message which you do using the speakpipe function which sits right at the base of the site so if you want to get your voice heard on Traffic Jam, that’s the way to do it. Any questions or comments will be gratefully submitted there, and of course the third option is to leave a review over at iTunes. Now to do that, you’ll need to log in to iTunes via your computer and then do a quick search for Traffic Jam in the business podcast section and you’ll land up then on the podcast page. Simply choose a star rating 1-5, submit your review, and you’ll more than likely get a shout out on a future show.

The one minute traffic tip- This week’s traffic tip comes courtesy of Clay Collins who I shared the stage with in Sydney, Australia a couple of weeks ago, and he describes this tip as fixing the leaky traffic on your website. If you’re someone who I’m sure has searched the internet several times, you’ll know that you can quite often end up on a 404 error page. This can happen when you mistype the URL or you click on a link from another website that happens to be broken. If you yourself have a reasonably well promoted site along with a decent level of traffic there will be people landing up on error pages on your site too. If you’re smart like Clay, you can actually turn that wasted traffic in to a subscriber. What you would do is set up a custom 404 page that might say something like oops, you’ve landed up on an error page but I don’t want you to leave empty handed. Download my free report, the five things you can do today to instantly boost your website traffic. Then have an opt in form as a way to download that free report that you’ve created.  You can do it the hard way and you can mess around with the design from the ground up, or you can use Clay’s Lead Player software and literally make that page with a couple of clicks.  I’ll link to the software for your easy convenience from the show notes so whatever device you’re listening to, head on over to trafficjamcast.com and locate the episode page and you’ll find the link there to Lead Pages. This is super simple, it’s not going to make a massive difference to your business but certainly will get you a few extra subscribers per day or so if you have a reasonable traffic and it’s a very quick and easy win. Go try that out, go try Clay’s Lead pages software and let me know how you get on.

That rounds out another episode of Traffic Jam, of course we’ll be doing it all again next week and if you’ve enjoyed this episode, please do log in to iTunes and leave a review. And as I mentioned it may just be that you’ll get a little shout out on next week’s show. Playing out this episode is a track by Faithless. The track is an old classic tune from a few years ago and it’s one you may well know titled Insomnia.

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THIS WEEKS NEWS IN TRAFFIC

ONE MINUTE TRAFFIC TIP

THE TRAFFIC JAM

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Listen in to episode #11 for a lesson in YouTube lead generation as James Wedmore of jameswedmore.com and Video Traffic Academy joins James Reynolds on TrafficJam.

The two James’ discuss how to build a YouTube audience, the best destination for your traffic and a step-by-step system that will multiply conversions from YouTube.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

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Hello! You’re tuned in to Traffic Jam, I’m your host James Reynolds and thank you for listening in to this episode #11. If you’re a regular listener to Traffic Jam you’ll of course know that each week I invite on to the show a world leading traffic expert who shares their top tips for generating traffic and increasing user engagement online whatever their chosen medium may be. Now we have covered a fair few topics already; things like Google+, podcasting, Twitter, Facebook, and email drops and a whole bunch of other topics too. If you haven’t been through the past episodes to this point now is probably a good time to do so, we really have some amazing guests – people like Chris Brogan, Pat Flynn, Scott Stratten, Jennifer Sheahan, Chad Hamzeh, and a whole bunch of amazing experts as well! And of course today is no different; I’ve got another fantastic guest lined up for you today.

Now today’s episode is in fact being recorded on location, I’m actually in Sydney right now, preparing for a three day Mastermind group and conference. Now my guest is undoubtedly super high caliber and I’m hoping that the audio quality, despite the fact that I’ve not got my normal studio set up is going to be pretty high quality as well, and that’s because I’ve got a new trusty portable recording device called a Zoom H4  recorder which seems to be pretty good. It’s what I use for all of my videos so I am hoping for podcasts as well the audio quality is nice and crisp but let me know how it’s sounding, if it’s sounding nice and crisp and clear in your earbuds.

Now just reminder, stick around until the end of the show because today, as always, I will have another one minute traffic tip for you and of course all of the latest news from the past days in traffic generation.

So what is today’s topic, well it’s one that we’ve all been waiting for, at least me anyway, and it’s YouTube traffic and our guest today is James Wedmore. When it comes to YouTube, James really needs no introduction. Over the past couple of years, James has built up a highly successful YouTube channel and has really established his reputation as the YouTube go to guy to YouTube traffic by his product Video Traffic Academy and the training James puts out on his website JamesWedmore.com This dude James is in real demand right now and I can be true testament to that because I have been trying to get James trying to get us in to the same time zone to get an interview, we’ve managed to get it finally, so with that in mind, I really don’t want to delay the content any further, so without further ado, here’s today’s episode and as we said, it’s YouTube traffic and my guest today is James Wedmore.

James R: Hi! This is your host James Reynolds and joining me today is YouTube specialist James Wedmore who is more famous in YouTube than PSY and Charlie who had his finger bitten combined. James Wedmore, welcome to Traffic Jam!

James W: This is all false information you are hearing right now, that’s amazing! Thanks for that introduction, best one I’ve ever had.

James R: Cool! Well we’ve been looking to get you on for some time so I’m excited about this, let’s start off by giving us your back story, from sweeping floors in a gym via anonymous bartender job to now a kind of virtual YouTube sensation, what is the James Wedmore back story?

James W: Yeah, in a nutshell I with film, with video, I remember being 8 or 9 yrs. old taking my mom’s camera, these are the big, clunky, heavy cameras that I can barely lift and all of a sudden I’m making a stop animation video out of may play dough collection where like little balls are turning in to people and waving in the camera, I had no idea how I knew how to do that, I look back and I’m like how did I know how to do that? And that started my career and I said I’m going to go to film school for this. To pay my way through film school, I became a bartender. And that grew in to something and I decided I did not want to go to film school or I decided I don’t want to be in the Hollywood industry anymore and so when I graduated film school, I took this bartending thing I’ve been doing and took it to the internet. And I said I’m going to teach people how to bartend, this is something I know how to do, I love this entrepreneurial thing and I launched my first product website course at the end of 2007 and for about three months, it was a ghost town. No traffic and no sales! Actually, it was no sales and I did not even know why, I did not know that I needed traffic, I did not make that connection, I just assumed, like most people do when they first got started and that was when I said I have to learn how to get people to come to my website and I heard someone in passing at a conference that YouTube and this was back in 2008 and sure enough I put some videos up there and about a week later, it was now April 18, 2008 I made my very first sale of my online bartending course, and that’s a $200 product. This is not like $19.95, it was $200 and that very first sale came in April 18, 2008. I will never forget that day, and I checked the email first I thought it was an order that I had placed for $200 because I had never seen what a new order looks in my email inbox. When I realized it was my first customer, and I remember they came from Arlington, Texas, I looked down and it said how did you hear about us and it said Youtube.com and it’s one of those things as an entrepreneur, as whatever you want to label yourself as, a business owner, a marketing exec, when you find something that works, that’s when you go at a 110% and that’s what I did, the exciting thing is that that product that website is still live today, those videos from 4 years ago are still live and they’re still bringing me sales. So when we talk about all the stuff that changes with social media, Facebook and Twitter and all these new sites that pop up or go away, how many of them have really been working for you for 4 years? People will say video takes too much time; it’s so much easier just to send out a tweet. But what are your posts and tweets doing for you? And it gets me really excited when I have videos that are four to five years old that still bring me traffic qualified leads to my website. So don’t look at it as it’s too much- too much time, too much work, too much effort because you’re putting an investment, you’re putting an autopilot employee in your business for you. You’re putting a system in place that’s going to work for you for a long time and that’s what’s it’s all about for me and that’s extremely powerful.

James R: And you’re not going to get that return are you from a tweet? I mean a tweet goes out and its lifetime is finished within about 10 seconds but as you said a YouTube video, it remains up there, people are going to find it if its good content and it can work for you and work for you for months and years on end and like you said bring you the results.

James W: Absolutely! Absolutely!

James R: So here’s the premise James, each week we invite on to the show a specialist who is onboard a particular traffic channel, yours is YouTube, what is it that you really like about Youtube? You’ve touched about one point there, is there anything else that really makes it the great traffic channel that it is for you?

James W: There are three things. Number one is the thing I shared; it’s that it’s going to work for you for the long haul. It’s not about just a weekly video and then your traffic disappears. That’s the first part. The second part is that with all these social networks, it really is the one place that can inject itself in to whatever social network you have. So whether you’re like our audience really likes us, we’re going to do Facebook fanpage, that’s great! You can be sharing videos every day on Facebook, in fact YouTube is the most shared type of content on Facebook. Instead of just like internal Facebook content, it’s the largest external source of content. Any social network as well, call it a viral video, because it is so easy to share, when you are in a place like Facebook and Twitter, where everyone is talking and no one is listening, how many times have you felt like that? YouTube is the one place or type of content where everyone shuts up to watch your video. And since so few people do it, it allows you to take center stage and have all eyes on you. So that’s the second thing, and the third thing is that for me, and I think this is important, the biggest sin in marketing is to be boring, we have heard this before, and video allows you to be infinitely creative. And I think people, I think big companies that are finally starting to get this, and are being so much more creative now than they were. Look at the old sized campaign, it was ahead of its time, the Hello ladies guy and it was so creative and unique that it went insanely viral and you’re seeing a lot more of these bigger companies with big budgets to do that, and whether you have access to that budget or if you’re someone like me who does not have a million dollars to spend on a YouTube campaign, you can still be so unique and creative. Just finding a concept, a great song, or a great idea and turning that in to video, we have the opportunity to be so creative and I just think that’s important because I think we need to let that creativeness shine instead of all just being black and white, buy my stuff, buy my stuff.

James R: Well this is something that you do very well James, and I’m sure before the end of this interview we’ll point people off to some of the examples of your stuff which is really creative. You obviously spend a lot of time of energy and thought in to the kind of structure that content in your videos so we’ll make sure that that happens, the question I want to ask now is we’d kind of covered off the why and we’ll talk a little bit later about a lot of things like what software we use, what editing and that type of stuff, I’m going to ask you about strategy, how can video be used in your business and marketing, what are some of the possibilities for it?

James W: there’s several ways that we can be using video but there’s really only one way that I teach time and time again that’s just a proven simple traffic strategy on YouTube and it comes down to what is basically called the video SEO and it’s simply identifying what is your ideal customer searching for, what are the keywords or keyword phrases and then you create video content based off those keywords. Optimize your videos in YouTube and you can get results, so when you understand that YouTube is a search engine, which most people don’t. that’s probably what we need to like get over that hurdle first. YouTube is not just a place to share videos, it’s not just a place to go when you’re bored. People are going there for information, education, how to use tutorials etc. and a lot of younger generations are bypassing Google altogether and they are going straight to YouTube. They want the full effect, they want the audio visual kinesthetic answer. And that means when the young generation do it and are going to do it even more, we always pick up their trends. So YouTube is a search engine but not only that, videos and mostly YouTube videos get ranked inside of Google. And with all those Panda, Penguin and Polar bear update where all of a sudden people’s websites get deranked and disappear because they did scammy backlinking strategy or they paid some SEO company three thousand dollars to do these black hat things. YouTube and these videos are impenetrable to any of those changes. And that right there is amazing, and that’s why my video is 4 years old and still getting ranked for their keywords because YouTube is owned by Google, Google is not going to derank YouTube. They want videos on the first page in there so they’re not going to all of a sudden say no, no, let’s push videos down. And so if you just create target content based off of relevant keywords which we can go in to as much details as you want James, people type in that keyword, they find your video, they watch your video, they like what they’ve seen, you give a call to action at the end of the video, they go to your website. But here’s the best part, and this is the cherry on top, the magic ingredient, the thing that makes it all worth it – it’s an extra step to get to your website. Watch the video first, but the traffic that comes to your site, to your blog, your sales page, whatever, from YouTube will be the highest qualified, highest quality, highest targeted traffic you’ll ever experience. Except from an email list – but those people you’ve already captured, we’re talking brand new people, and we did a study on this where we sent traffic Google.com from Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites and YouTube and we sent them all to a squeeze page or a landing page or an opt in page, same thing just different verbiage different vocabulary, where the goal on that page was to capture their name and email address. And we tracked which traffic source converted the best, all traffic is not created equally and YouTube hands down destroyed everyone else in the test and its simple if you think about it because no one is going to go to your website from a YouTube video unless they liked your video. So your video ends up being this – like I said earlier, an employee that works for you 24 hrs. a day 7 days a week to build rapport, to build a relationship with your future customer, and your audience member because we all know people buy from who they know, like and trust, so now people are watching this and they’re primed, they’re pumped, they’re ready to go, they click over to your website and the next step is a no brainer for them. Absolute no brainer, otherwise they wouldn’t have clicked. So you get the highest quality traffic source – this is just huge that I have to like share that because there are all these reasons that do make YouTube this, it’s still untapped and it’s not that YouTube is anything new and it’s not visionary, like so many people I have talked with convince themselves that YouTube is not for them because they go I don’t want to be in front of the camera, I don’t have the time, or I don’t know how so I don’t need to do it, so I am like, I mean, it is right there staring you in the face all the reasons why this is such a game changer for any business. I have been talking about this for years and I still get passionate about it so …

James R: I can tell, I can tell, you spilled out for a good few minutes there, you unleashed some real strong gems and a few of them I have got to agree with and I don’t always agree with my guests by the way…

James W: Good! You should!

James R: Well, I’m an SEO guy and I agree the future in traffic is in video SEO and starting off with video media and then getting it out to other sources and leverage but for that simple reason that you mentioned of video being so high converting, it’s just no reason not to do it and it’s so damn easy to create video now with the equipment that’s available there is just no reason why people should not be doing it.

James W: Yup I agree, and here’s the funny thing, if you’re listening to this right now and you’re saying yeah, but I don’t want to be in front of the camera, here’s my only answer to you, whoever said you had to be? I just think it’s so funny that people automatically equate because the word says YouTube that it has to be you on camera. And it really doesn’t! I mean we can do an entire hour interview just on all the creative ways that you can make amazing converting videos without being in front of the camera, that’s just an excuse, that’s no reason to just say I’m not going to do video. I choose to be in front of the camera because I am a personal brand and if you are a personal brand you should be in the spotlight but it does not mean that you have to be, not by a long shot.

James R: Well, I’d like to just touch up on the conversation we started a short while ago about actually building up viewership on YouTube. I think you’ve got well over 160 videos in YouTube I believe, on your YouTube channel now, 10,000 subscribers or more, and 7 of your videos have been watched more than 30,000 times. Is the secret literally keyword research on YouTube and creating a video that meets those searches or is there a deeper secret on getting a lot of eyeballs on your videos?

James W: To me that is the secret. I have some good friends of mine, people I have consulted with and worked with, you might know them Marie Folio, Derek Halpern, and these people have in the last couple of years or so, and Derek in the last 6 to 8 months and Marie for the last 2 years have really turned YouTube in to a cornerstone of their business, and they kick my butt, I mean Derek in a couple of months got the same amount of subscribers that it took me a year and a half to build he did it in like a couple of months. Marie has 4 times as many subscribers, she’s like 3 and a half million views something like that and it’s funny because even though I am good friends with them but I have given them a lot of advice and tips over the years on YouTube stuff, we don’t see eye to eye on this one element here and I’ll show you the difference but I am all about at the core of everything, it’s keyword, it’s video SEO. And they’re not really the same way, they’re much more about making videos that are topical and relevant to what they share and discuss in their industry, not necessarily what the person is typing in to Google. So let me give you an example, there is a keyword on things like how to attract women, or how attract the woman of my dreams how to get dates- stuff like that, these keywords, if you were to do a research, I mean half a million searches a month. Like this are a lot of people typing in how to attract a woman how to get girls, ton of searches. And if James here were to be a dating expert, one of things that James would teach these young guys teaching the searches is you have to have confidence to get the woman of your dreams blah, blah, blah. Well, if you were to check the term how to be confident, it has like 1/100th of the searches. It has a fraction of the monthly searches. Literally, I can’t remember now but we’re talking like a thousand searches a month for how to be confident, we have half a million for how to attract a woman. So for me, if I am in that industry, I am going to make a video on how to attract a woman but Marie and Derek are going I’m going to make a video on how to be confident because that’s what they need and I know that that’s the answer and they still get views and the reason is they already have a base audience. So this is the important distinction and I fragged that point out for this very important reason, when you have the audience already through email list and other social channels, you can create content that’s much more on your terms but if you’re starting with very little or nothing at all, no leverage, no audience, no previous whatever, you have to go for the keywords, otherwise, how is anybody going to find you? So if you are starting out, it has to be the exact keyword as the people are typing in or looking for, as that’s the only way they are going to find you, otherwise if you already have a big list, a big audience, they can be sharing that for you and then they become your virtual salesman or saleswoman promoting your content and then your list grows even more. Does that make sense?

James R: Got it. Perfect sense, and if we keep it strictly on subject here talking about traffic then your method is right way to go about it because what we’re talking about here is reaching a new audience and then bringing all those in to whatever sphere it is that you have – your website, whatever it is you’re driving people to, attracting people from YouTube and bringing them to where you want them.

James W: Yeah, absolutely! But James, real quick, let me share with you though, and Derek does this, and I don’t know if Marie does this that much but there are other real cool tricks that we can always get in to and go deeper with where we’ll do things like, when I mail a video to my list, that are people already subscribed to me, I’ll say things like hey if you’ve enjoyed this video, can you forward it to a friend who you think will enjoy it? Or can you share it, can you tweet it, can you promote it, can you do something? When you ask those things to a loyal follower or subscriber, believe it or not, they do it, and so they’re not to be ignored because they will help you find a new audience as well. And that’s what it’s all about, it’s about continual momentum that you get not just from the search but now your fans become your promoters basically.

James R: Right, good, cool! Well I want to dive deep on what could be a touchy subject for you, your business is really built on YouTube and there has been several cases of video bloggers getting their accounts banned in the last year or so and in just a few weeks ago Facebook banned thousands of advertising accounts by mistake, do you ever feel vulnerable that your traffic is kind of dependent on a third party channel and if so, how do you handle that?

 James: Since this is more of a traffic related call, I will really let you know how I have set it up, so no, I have never really felt that even though I have felt vulnerable or nervous that YouTube would shut me down because it did happen to a lot of people and it happened really fast, and it’s the last thing you want – you’ve been putting all these work on these videos and all these stuff and then they just say goodbye to everything you have ever done, good news is on that, we have actually had some students of ours, and I have a whole case study in my blog where they got their account banned and actually got it back, so it is possible, but for the sake of this interview because we are really talking about traffic what I learned rather quickly was not try and do it all. There are so many traffic sources and if you’re listening to James’s stuff every week, you know that you are going to have a new traffic strategy and my firm belief is that the more you try and do all of it the more you’re going to spread yourself thin, you can’t master everything and you’re going to see minimal results. So I am all about what I have struggled is that I have struggled in three traffic sources and I try and do the best I can will all those and ignore the rest. And maybe I will switch one out and it does not mean they are permanent, and yes have a few things and for me right now, it’s Facebook ads, its YouTube, and it’s actually JVs. So connecting with other people and leveraging their existing audiences has been a wonderful traffic source for me so I have never felt like Oh my gosh I’m totally dependent on this one source but yes it would still suck if my channel’s deleted and I don’t want anyone to put all their eggs in one basket. I also don’t want people to worry about it, don’t buy views, don’t do anything shady, and don’t do anything that your mother or anyone over at YouTube will frown upon, and you’re going to be fine. Don’t copy other people’s videos or music and upload it t0 your channel, don’t do anything stupid like that, you’re going to be fine.

James R: You heard it here, we’re going to send you off to look at James’s channel at the end of this interview but don’t copy his stuff just look for inspiration; we don’t want to get you banned.

James W: Thank you!

James R: So James we talked a lot about how to attract views and build traffic to your videos, I really want to talk to you about how you move those viewers away from YouTube to your own website perhaps and I guess this is going to be a 2 part question, A – how do you move them, and B- where do you suggest moving them to?

James W: Yes I love this, and I am so glad, you’re like the only person who’s ever asked me this and I appreciate that because you can see the whole strategy in place and sometimes just getting someone to make their first video is as far as we can discuss on the calls, so this is like where the fun stuff is because this is the strategy and this is the first thing you should be doing, before you even create the video, before you even buy a camera, this strategy stuff is the stuff we need to be getting excited and hungry about. So there’s kind of 2 ways I do this, well there’s one and a half ways, I send people to some sort of lead getting page. If you’re a physical product owner, and you’re selling something very inexpensively, like my example would be an iPhone tripod mount that sells for $22, you can send people straight to the add to my cart page, because that’s like a no brainer purchase, they probably came to YouTube to look for a review and they’re ready to buy. But if you are selling something that takes a little bit more time to warm up the lead, you want to capture their contact info from YouTube, so 90% of us, that’s the strategy and that’s what I do. So send people to any type of squeeze page, sign in page, lead capture page whatever you might want to call it, after YouTube to capture their contact details. And one of the most effective ways I’ve done to do this, and it takes more work but if you have the systems down and you have the team in place, this is so powerful. I make what we call irresistible free offers or free gifts or free content that is directly related to the video that I uploaded so I am going to give you an example and in this example I get between 12 – 20 leads per day one this one video, and here’s the best part, that video has been up since October of 2012 and it has not skipped a day. 12 – 20 leads a day, boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! So I put up a video called royalty free music and all I do in the  video is demonstrate what is royalty free music, how do you use it, and where do you get it? Three minute video; and at the end of the video I give away 5 songs that I have master resell rights to, and I give away songs for free. So here’s someone who’s Googled or YouTubed royalty music, they find this video of this goofy kid, they click on the video, they’re learning everything they can about where to get music, how to use it, what not to do, and then at the end of the video instead of saying to learn more traffic click here, it says to get your hands on five free songs click here, and it’s such a higher correlation, it’s so much more of a direct connection with the viewer, and they do it, a lot of people do it, and 12 -20 a day, they click over, they go to a little squeeze page that says fill in your name and details here and I’ll send you the five songs on the next page, and so they do that, then I send them to a thank you page where they can get their songs, so we are going a little bit more advanced so hopefully you guys are with me and stay with me a little bit more here…

James R: I’m with you, this is good stuff!

James W: I send them to the thank you page and I say hey thanks so much for opting in and below this video are your 5 free songs, but real quick, while I have got you here, if you’ve enjoyed these five songs, while I have you here, I have 5 more songs for you, and in order to get those additional five songs, all you have to do is click that big fat tweet button below this video. Now what I did is I installed a little piece of software called Tweet to Unlock and when people click that Tweet button, it tweets out a link to my YouTube video or to the Royalty free music video and it will automatically give them 5 more songs. So now, I am ethically forcing all my people to share or tweet out my video and in exchange I will give them more songs, so now a couple of thousand views that have come just from Twitter that I would not have had before because I added that extra step. But now they are also on my list, and people are doing that every day, and I firmly believe that that strongly helps and looks good in YouTube’s eyes, that someone is sharing my video every single day on social media state from YouTube I think that’s huge, it keeps my video up there and it’s a very competitive keyword so that’s basically the strategy and that’s the drawing out strategy, you don’t have to make it that hard, you can have one generic opt in page or squeeze page you can send them to that, that’s what I usually do for most of my videos but every once in a while I create a very specific offer for a very specific video, and the conversion rate for the opt ins are much, much higher and much more consistent.

James R: Nice, I have got to say James that’s a pretty ninja strategy that Tweet to unlock, I love it! And actually you’ve segwayed very nicely in to my next question, I don’t know if you have planned that..

James W: Of course I did!

James R: There you go, as if we practiced it! Now I’ve seen you using some pretty ninja strategies across your YouTube channel and your site etc., I’d like to in kind of a bit of a quick fire round just ask you about each of the following, so the first one that I have seen you using that perhaps our listener hasn’t put in to play yet is a welcome video on their YouTube channel page, you use yours quite well, tell us about that?

James W: Yes, so this is called the YouTube trailer video and if you update to the new channel, which we won’t talk about here but I have a video in YouTube about it. Upgrade to the new channel design, and what they’ve done is really cool. If you have people coming to your channel for the first time, there is a special video that they get to see that you create that encourages them to become a subscriber. This is exactly like you were to create an About Me video on your website, it’s the same thing but it is more about your channel and what you want them to do. So here’s the basic template for how you could do that:  you talk about what your channel is all about and what you will do for your subscribers. What type of content will you provide, why you provide that content, what do you do for your customers, how often do you put out content, etc. You just give it an intro to like welcome to James Reynolds.tv where we share the best traffic getting strategies that you can take action on today, we upload videos twice a week, every single week. That’s it, that’s fine, I bring you the best of the best traffic experts so you can get more traffic to your website, blog or sales pages. Then you just want to give a call to action and that just simply says, make sure, we  come out with videos twice a week, or once a week, or once a month or whatever, so make sure to subscribe by clicking the subscribe button above, that way you’ll get notified when all of our content comes out. Also, if you haven’t yet, I put free video series on my favorite traffic strategies that you can get started with right now, and to access that, just click the link over on the right and you can get access to that video series now. So what you’ve done you’ve put a video welcoming people telling people what’s this all about you’ve got them as a YouTube subscriber, and believe it or not, that’s really important, I can talk about it if you want, but that just makes you much more of an authority channel and you get them to opt in as well for your free gift, free video, etc. so that’s the YouTube traffic video, pretty easy there.

James R: Nice! And what’s that little one that you slipped in the end there, is that the external links that you’re talking about where they can click on a link to take them somewhere else?

James W: So three places that they can actually click, and this is going to get a little hard without showing it cause if people have not seen the page they won’t know what I’ve been talking about. There’s three places they can click, on your channel page there is a place where you can place your channel URL so you want to make sure you have that. And if you want to go to mine then you can see that you have these three places. You can put it the URL on the channel page, you can put in the description and we can do a James is talking about an external link annotation, now this in itself has almost doubled, I believe it did double, no quadruple, it was something between 10%-15% and now it’s up to 34% so that’s a little bit more doubled my conversion rate from views to traffic so if we’re talking about traffic and getting more people off of YouTube, one of the things that I am loving right now is the fact that YouTube -not for everybody yet, they are rolling it out still so don’t get upset if your channel doesn’t have it but they’re rolling out something called an external link annotation. This is a little button that you can put inside your video, anywhere on your video, top, right, bottom, left at any time in your video, beginning, middle or end, and in your video, you can literally point to it, like click here to get that free video series, click here to get that free report, and if people click on that, it will pause your YouTube video, open up a new tab and send people wherever you want to send them, which is mainly your website or squeeze page or opt in page, etc. and that is really huge, depending on the offer we do and how we do it, we get about 34% – 37 %  of our views to go over that.

James R: That’s nice, that’s killer! And that’s something that they brought out relatively recently right? I mean it’s quite a new innovation on YouTube.

James W: Yeah, they’ve started rolling it out in January and they gave it to most channels by February – March, but from what I have been hearing, the buzz is that only the United States channels have it, but I don’t know that’s just a rumor. I just heard some other people in other countries say they don’t have it yet so we kind of made that assumption but you can assume that you will get it eventually and you’ll want to take advantage of that.

James R: Yeah, well I’ll make sure my team here check that out because that is a very sneaky strategy and I can see how having that embedded right in the video would really increase that traffic that you get from the video itself so we’ll be trying that ..

James W: And once again, you get to have a lot of fun with this, you could do things like raise your hand and be like click on my hand right now to get that free report or click on my face, you know what I mean? And like, because it’s so new, people want to do it and see what happens, that’s the funny thing.

James R: Yeah, cool! One of the things that I have seen you do very well again is use custom video thumbnails. Talk us through very briefly how that’s done and what’s the strategy because I am guessing that is probably increasing the amount of views on your videos themselves?

James W: Well sure, if you look at it this way, let’s look at Google and if you type in something we are looking for, sure, 9 times out of 10 we probably picked the first result but if someone has done a really great job to write great title tags so that they have great copy on their search results in Google, we might click the second or third or fourth results in Google, because it caught our attention because it was exactly what we’re looking for. It’s the same thing for YouTube. If I Google how to do something, and I just see some kind of ugly screenshot thumbnail, I’m like, what is that? Is that what I want? Or I see an attractive young woman and a bunch of text like how to tie a tie, I go, I know exactly what this video is all about, I know exactly what I am getting, this thing caught my eye, I’m going to click on this one even if it wasn’t the first result. So it’s an extra layer of getting people’s attention when we’re doing video SEO. So maybe your video does not rank #1, maybe it’s #2 or #3, but if you have a better thumbnail you might get clicked on when the other video doesn’t. and guess what, here’s the best part, YouTube can actually look at that and say man, everyone is clicking on #2, #3 here and bump that up, so that is extremely important plus it’s great for branding and all that so if you’re a personal brand, you have your picture in there and you have text. But either way, adding text inside the thumbnail is real simple. How to do this, you just go to your video manager, you click edit on the video, and most channels now have the option to upload a custom thumbnail. Otherwise you have to choose from three random shots that they give you on the video.

James R: And they’re always bad aren’t they? They’re always down or … I think someone inside of YouTube handpicking those thumbnails to make us look bad, I think that’s the case.

James W: Yup!

James R: Ok, the last one in this quick fire round is a piece of software and I’m sure our friend Clay Collins will thank us for mentioning this, and I have seen you use it, and it’s a piece of software called Lead Player which you are using on your site, tell us how you’re using that.

James W: This is very exciting because I have a screenshot that I have shown people that just blew my mind where I had my assistant go in and install this thing called Lead Player on all my videos that are on my blog so it does not work on YouTube, it works on your blog. I’ll tell you what it does in a second, but basically, we checked our stats about a week and a half later for AWeber to see if it helped increase our list, and I had a 400% and something increase on my daily email subscribers or opt ins, so I quadrupled my daily intake of new leads just from my blogs just by having my assistant install this thing, and I was just ecstatic! So I have been a big fan ever since. It is a real simple, simple tool; there are a couple other software companies that do this but Lead Player I like because it does just this. And anytime you get a piece of software that’s very specific on one thing, it ends up doing it really, really well and that’s what they do with Lead Player. So you can be watching one of my videos on my blog, when you watch the video, you press play, I start talking and then 10 seconds, 15 seconds, whatever, the video will pause, and will ask for an email address to continue the video, now there is an option there that you can skip it, because some people are going to be like, I have already given you my email, I just want to watch your video, but you put that up there and people opt in, people give you their contact info. People want to keep watching the video, so that’s extremely powerful and all I can say is that we tested it and it worked and I love things that work and if you have not figured it out by now, we are talking traffic but I could care less about traffic, I care about leads, traffic is just the means to get the leads and so that’s really the ultimate goal for me and it should be the ultimate goal for everybody else. We should not think about traffic as much as possible, because if it’s bad traffic, if the traffic does not take action… but if we can be putting actions and systems in place that are building your list, building your audience each and every day, you can see a direct correlation with growing your business in there.

James R: James, absolutely cool! I think we are going to draw this to a close now; I’ve got a heap of notes from today that I’m going to try to implement in my own business from what you’ve shared. Before we wrap up, tell us a little bit about your products and services, what do you do and how can you help our audience?

James W: Cool! So this one really went fast and there is a lot of stuff that we did not get to, I put a lot of stuff that I know about 5 and a half years of doing this in a very simple but proven video SEO strategy, how to create a video, optimize it per keyword, and get it ranked in YouTube and all the cool little ninja tricks that you’ve talked about today, and there’s countless more in a product called Video Traffic Academy, that’s my flagship course, and that’s where I teach everything about what we’re discussing today, and that thing is only a $100; it’s $97 and it’s been incredible because we’ve had that course for about 2 years now, we’ve had about 7,000 people go through it and it’s been an exciting journey so, yeah, that’s my main thing, but I definitely also want people to head on over and check out my YouTube channel, that would make me extremely happy if you go to my YouTube channel, youtube.com/jameswedmore and subscribe to my channel and leave me a comment there’s a lot of stuff in my videos that I share I give away in free video tips and I invite you to visit those videos when you get a chance.

James R: Awesome! We’ll make sure that each and every one of those items are linked off to in the show notes beneath this podcast, so whatever device in this interview you are listening on head on over to TrafficJamCast.com, look for James’s page and you’ll find all the links to James’s YouTube channel, his blog, Traffic Academy product, etc. So that’s your call to action today listener. James thanks for joining us today, I really appreciate your time and I had a lot of fun today.

James W: Yeah, me too. I really appreciate it.

James R: Awesome! See you!

James W: Take care.

This week’s news in traffic, well, let’s kick off with some Facebook news and the first news is that they’ve reduced the number of ad units available to advertisers by approximately half. Now we don’t know all of those ad units which are getting shoved off of Facebook lists but we do know 2 ad units that have been confirmed as redundant and they are the questions product and the offer product, Facebook said. They said that we noticed any ad units accomplished the same goal so we’re cutting out these redundancies. This includes removing the question product pages because marketers can simply ask a question in a post and get answers in comments. They then went on to say that it also means removing the online marketer product because marketers have found that using a page post link ad is a more effective way to drive people to do their deals on their website, we’re going to start making these changes as early as July.

Well, in summary, what I can see them doing here is really just making everything a little more simpler and that includes both the ad creation process and the actual offering which seem to make sense because many users on to the ad platform as possible and in doing this it simplifies things and makes it more accessible to the average advertisers.

Also out of Facebook this week, we have the news that they’ve added hash tags, a little bit more similar to Twitter and more recently Google+. Now what effect will hash tags have on traffic is yet to be seen, all we know is that Facebook have indicated that they want to push conversations surrounding public events to the top of news feeds and this is really their aim with hash tags.

Now here’s a quote from them. They simply said, to bring this conversation more to the forefront we will be rolling out a series of features that surface some of the interesting discussions people having about public events, people and topic, and as a first step we are going to be rolling out hash tags on Facebook.

A small bit of news out of Four Square, and that is they’ve been testing paid promotions and started doing so by working on a small geographic area of New York City. Now we don’t quite know when it’s going to be rolled out more globally but watch this space and we’re going to report on that when we know more.

Finally in this week’s news roundup, Ezra Firestone, our special e-commerce expert from episode#3 of Traffic Jam has just released his training product, Brown Box formula which you can get over at BrownBoxFormula.com. Now inside that product, you’re going to learn how to build a profitable drop ship physical good store. Ezra does this stuff day in day out and has built up multiple six-figure, even seven-figure e-commerce stores using the knowledge that he shares inside this product. I have been hanging out with Ezra for the past few days here in Australia, and I know how much effort and energy he’s put in to this training. He’s already getting a wealth of support and I know the quality of stuff that he shares there is extremely high that if you are looking at getting in to e-commerce, or you already have an e-commerce store that you want to leverage further, this training product will undoubtedly be the go to resource for you, so head on over to check that out, it’s at brownboxformula.com.

Traffic Jam reviews and comments: Well I had a nice comment about the site this week from Amir Anzur who was listening in to the podcasting episode with Pat Flynn who said, James and Pat, really enjoyed the content, great work, and as always, thanks for the tips. The best education people can get from real life experts. Thank you – Amir. Well, thank you Amir! For taking the time to head on over to the site and leave a comment, I really appreciate your feedback.

I have also had some really great comments in person this week, of course I am in an event here in Sydney and one of the people I have caught up with was Andrew Pototschnik from Marketing expert who said Traffic Jam is one of the very few podcasts he listens in to regularly and knowing that Andrew is a very high level marketer who knows his stuff, that’s a really nice endorsement, so thank you Andrew for listening in.

I also had a nice comment from Ashwinth who said that he too listened in to Traffic Jam Cast regularly and really enjoys the content and again it’s one of the very few podcasts he listens to all the time so really nice in to

be getting the feedback that we are, if you too have a comment, or some feedback, either positive or negative, I would love to hear from you. Head on over to TrafficJamCast.com and leave a comment beneath the episode that you are listening or of course log in to iTunes and leave us a review there. I really do appreciate all the feedback we get and it really helps to make a better show for you. So whatever your comments and feedback, I would love to hear from you.

The one minute traffic tip, well I’ve got a super, super, super simple traffic strategy for you this week, but hey, it may not be that sexy, but simple is always the most effective and I know that when you apply this week’s tip, you will get great results. As marketers, we do know to look out for hungry, passionate crowds who just literally devour whatever products or services that we offer. Online, some of the most hungry passionate crowds tend to hang out on forums and Facebook groups, perhaps a community that builds around a particular interest or vocation, or whatever it is that you perhaps offer as a service, so as I said, not particularly sexy stuff; all you’ve got to do is find these groups, sign up to them, deliver value by answering questions and solving problems within those forums and groups and then over time what you’ll be able to do is build up trust and pull people away from these communities to your own products and services and that’s simply by telling people what you do and perhaps adding in a link to your website in your forum signature or just literally posting about it in those groups on Facebook. Super simple traffic strategy, go try it out this week, and let me know how you get on.

Ok, so that rounds out episode #11 of Traffic Jam, of course, I will be doing it all again next week so stay tuned for episode#12. Rounding out this week’s episode is an old school track, one that’s quite topical for me because so many friends have been going off to see this band in recent weeks. The track is A Fools Gold, and the band is Stone Roses. So enjoy the track, I’ll see you back next week.

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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.

To mark episode 10 of Traffic Jam,we are joined by New York Time’s best selling author Chris Brogan and the topic in discussion is Google+.

Chris Brogan of ChrisBrogan.com and HumanBusinessWorks.com published his book Google Plus for Business in December 2011 and called Google Plus out as the next big thing. 18 months on we’ll see if Chris’ prediction came true.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

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“It strikes me Google+ is place to be yet everyone yawns when I talk about it.”@chrisbrogan
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Hello! Welcome once again to the Traffic Jam podcast, a weekly show where I interview the world’s leading traffic experts so you learn how to build and grow a profitable audience for your website. I’m your host James Reynolds and you’re listening in to a mini landmark episode, we’re up to Episode #10 already of Traffic Jam and I’ve got to say I’m chopped to bits at this point, there’s been so many people involved who helped me put this together such as my Mastermind group, my beautiful team who do the illustrations and the transcriptions each week, Paul Thomas for supplying the intro tracks, fantastic guests and of course you, the listener, thank you for getting us to this point. We’ve got plenty more coming up over the coming weeks on starting with this week where we’ve got a fantastic guest to celebrate episode #10.

So who is it that’s joining us on today’s episode? Our guest today is a New York Times bestselling author of books like the Impact Equation, Trust Agents, Social Media 101, and Google+ for Business. He is a pretty well-known personality in the social media and business arena and he’s had publications go in to the Success Magazine and Entrepreneur Magazine, but I’ve got to say most impressive of all, he’s appeared on the Dr. Phil Show and that’s pretty cool! Okay, so hopefully those clues have given you an idea who our guest is today – if it hasn’t, I’ll reveal it now – It’s Chris Brogan from ChrisBrogan.com and HumanLabWorks.com.

And remember to stick around after the interview with Chris because I will be sharing all of the latest and greatest news from the past seven days in traffic as well as the weekly one minute traffic tip.

Now without any further ado, let’s drive straight in to today’s interview with Chris Brogan, where we’re talking all about Google+.

James: Okay so this is Traffic Jam episode 10 and with me hanging out today is Chris Brogan from ChrisBrogan.com, HumanBusinessWorks.com, and writer for Entrepreneur Magazine, Success Magazine, author of the New York Times Best Seller Trust Agent and the book Google+ for Business which I am sure will touch on today, Chris welcome to Traffic Jam.

Chris: James couldn’t be any happier. Thanks for having me.

James: Have you got your teeth in today because I clearly haven’t?

Chris: Oh you know, I’m lucky that way, but it’s early so I don’t want to jinx myself, so I’ll say I have no idea. Let’s see how we do, I don’t want to break things.

James: Let’s see how we roll, cool. Well I just reeled off a whole bunch of accolades for you and I have done a fair bit of time in your business but can you just share for our listener out there a little bit about who you are, what you’ve done and what makes you tick.

Chris: Sure, I mean bios always make me strange because it always makes me sound better than I am. But I’ll say that what I have done is I started in this phase of my business because in the old days I was in telecom, but when I started getting involved in this mess, it came from the events industry, I started a blog back in 1998 and then I started podcasting and then I started an event called PodCamp with Christoper Penn about podcasting and new media type stuff and at that event I met this guy Jeff Pulver who had co-founded Vonage, who’s now running a bunch of events about the future of voice video and the rest of the internet and he hired me on the spot to run an event that he had started Video on the Net and then split me on to another thing as well being a community developer for his new startup he made up like a few days after he and I met called Network 2. So I got in to that mess via that phase. Jeff and I parted ways a year later as the event was a little too early in the disruption cycle, no one believed what we believed yet. And then I went on to another events organization and in the process of it I started a consultancy as part of that company, a marketing consultancy company called New Marketing Labs, all of this to say I started at the gate in regards to all of this organizations, we worked with mostly really large companies on how to use the digital channel better and how to be human on the web. But I don’t know a thing about getting about getting traffic except for that very organic, very friendly ways, I don’t know a thing about SEO believe me I’d rank for the stupidest things in the world but Google broke everything about SEO anyway so no one knows anything about SEO until a few months from now, and so instead what I learned was to build better relationships and marketing and sales and support type of work via digital channels and that’s what I have been helping companies with for a long time, and then most recently I’m teaching courses and things like that and how to master the digital channel no matter the size of the company even if it’s just the company of your bedroom.

James: And of course recently you’ve put out a few books, in fact I just want to check my facts here: On December 2011 when you published the Google+ for Business Book and I think if I’m right in saying, at that time you were quoted by entrepreneur.com and they said that you said Google+ is the next big thing, now I want to ask you the question, 18months on from then, do you see that as still a true statement?

Chris: You know what, I do, but I have to put a little asterisk and it’s the strangest experience I have ever had so far in this digital space which is along comes a perfectly serviceable, very sensible to use platform, and everyone says, huh, I’m kind of bored I don’t think I’ll use it. And the stats are really strange because every time Vic ANDRODA goes on stage, he says bigger and bigger numbers, more than 600 million people using it, so more people than Twitter are using it according to him after the very first year and it took Twitter many years to get the numbers that they are at. They’re saying that even if you skinned that down to how many people are using it daily, it’s about at par with Twitter. This is the number one search engine in the world’s social platform which means that it’s very attentive to the social signals put out in this platform. It would strike me inside and out that this would be the place to be and yet everyone yawns when I talk about it. No one’s like I’m going to rush to Google+ and tell my friends, and the people who are there and who use it get great benefits from it but there’s something holding it back and that’s really going to nerd out and boring everybody that listens to Traffic Jam but they just have not really opened up their API if there’s any third party apps that are of value to the platform and I think that’s killing it. Now, here’s what I really think though, I don’t think it matters what type of social network it is. I think what they should have done is to create a backplane to all of their other services and beyond now and I think there’s going to be a reveal moment, maybe in the next 12 months, and everyone will be like, who cares about the actual Google+ location, it’s gone mobile and it’s embedded everywhere, and I think that’s in to play.

James: And we’ve seen that already right? I mean I am an SEO guy so if it gets kind of bored and off the hook with the stuff that I talk about, that’s why but we’ve already seen that in full trail crossing across SEO of course, search now is very much social based with the whole rel author status and all that sort of stuff, so you can already, I guess see how they’re infiltrating in to everything else that they do.

Chris: I think so, and knowing that you’re SEO, I mean that’s partly right but the fact that I have absolutely no skills in it, I rank for the stupidest things in the world, I rank for things like grow bigger ears and you are doing it wrong, but as I pointed out, Panda and Penguin have screwed up SEO for a lot of reasons, that which was classically known to be the well-known practices are out the window and one of the very true, relevant experiences – I mean look, SEO Moz has just renamed themselves Moz, I mean if there’s no better concept of beating than right even on the wall they say SEO alone is not going to be a good story to tell, and that content and marketing and all that has to be integrated. I can’t find it. To me this one detail of SEO Moz renaming to that, the fact Andy Solomon does not just have search engine guide but it’s doing more marketing watch now. I think the writing’s there that if you’re doing sort of technology to augment your operations and sales, it’s not that you should not you should not do SEO anymore, it’s that you need to expand your thoughts.

James: Yeah, absolutely! It’s a thing that we teach a lot here –not to be single point on any traffic source, and that said, what we tend to do each week here on the show is invite a particularly skilled in one particular area of traffic or indeed audience building. Now your preferred channel that I would like you to talk about is of course Google+. So what is it that you like so much about the platform?

Chris: What I like the most about is that it’s very simple and mercenary. If I post something public to Google+, it impacts the Google search results quickly, and especially if I publish some really useful content and point to that reasonably useful content, then people find it rather quickly and take an action and go to that content. And then should that content also have the option to sell then it benefits me financially. I find that the interface is crisp and clean, I think that hangouts, which Google is recently starting to realize as their secret gem as well is really important. I think that their community platform is way better than Facebook groups and events. It’s just easier to organize, there’s a lot more things that you can get done with it. I think that it looks like it has been made by a bunch of engineers and not by somebody who cares about people. And you know, considering how simplified and simplistic most Google platforms are, it just still feels clunky and bumpy – I look at the blogging platform Medium that’s shown up, and I think that’s just pure elegance and I’m thinking that Google should probably start looking for something more elegant.

James: Yeah, well they seem to be doing more stuff, I mean I’d like to talk to you in a short while about some of the updates that they’ve made recently and one of them has been a complete facelift, but the next topic of conversation which we’ll talk about briefly is about Facebook. Now Facebook is something I update most days, I’m on there pretty much once or twice a day and apparently they’re close to 100 million status updates every day, however when I go to check your Facebook page Chris, the last activity I see was July 2011. For a social media specialist, that’s kind of pretty lame on my book. How come you’re not on Facebook?

Chris: Oh, I am, I’m just not in the one that you checked. I don’t use it for business though, I find that there’s no – I’ve had 0 business benefit in Facebook. There’s lots of people doing traffic but I like to tell people that unless your product is a cute 5 yr. old granddaughter, then it’s probably not going to get you that far because the number one people do when they go to Facebook is look at their family’s pictures, and beyond that, they go there evidently to share some e-cards to each other, but that’s what I’ve noticed, and dumb graphics. So I’ve never even once have some business success with Facebook. Amy Porterfield would be a great guest for that or Marie Smith but anytime I’ve even tried spending some dollars, what I like about their ad platform is that it’s very targeted and it’s meticulous. I’m an 18 year old boy who’s picking his nose, who for some reason continues to believe that he leads a great football team, and I’ll get that and that will be very clear. But it does not seem to translate to us and I just think that there’s a limited subset of businesses that can really benefit from using Facebook and I think that just the average monkey doesn’t get much from it. But to be really honest James, there’s a sort of garbage in garbage out. So I guess if I were trying harder, if I felt somewhere in my heart of hearts that it’s me that is to blame, I could say that you try harder and make some better results out of it.

James: So what’s the one big thing in Google+ that kind of wins it for you over Facebook? Is it kind of that element of Google+ that allows you then to appear on Google search and kind of a wider platform and audience? Is that what it is?

Chris: Yeah, I think that because of that impact on searches it’s so attractive to me that way, secondly it’s very elegant. I think that the lay out, I love the concepts that they have, but if I’m right about social block fame thing, it will probably fade a little bit but this concept of circles to be a little more exclusionary if I want to as a marketer I would never want to do that but I like that we can. I think that the privacy methodology is a lot easier there. I just think that there’s a lot going for it. But the thing is, if you sort of squint and you don’t look at it as a destination but you look at it as a tool that is going to be sprinkled in to other tools, I think that Facebook has that identity pretty much owned right now. When you sign in with Facebook, you sign in with Twitter, and when you sign in with Twitter they tend to sign in with Facebook, I’m not sure why but that’s what we do. And then we tweak it to make sure it’s not sending the update to everyone we know, and then we just forget about that. We just don’t care on a lot of our sign ins on other sites that we use Facebook in that for it. What’s going on with Google+ or what I think will go on with Google+ is sharing of that simplicity will become the norm. we will have a sort of a +1 architecture across all the platforms and you won’t ever think about it anymore much like we don’t think much about signing in anymore. But that’s a way’s out. That’s just sort of me pontificating and futurizing.

James: Cool! But of course you are on Twitter, and we know you’re on Google+, we’ve just been discussing it and of course we have your blog ChrisBrogan.com, how does your strategy differ for each platform?

Chris: Oh, so I have a strategy that I started back in 2006 called the home-based and outpost strategy which is essentially that your primary site should be your home-base. And that the real goal of your site is to get people there and that some form of conversion should take place there. And what I do with the social platforms is they’re outposts, and the way my strategy works is that it used to be I would use my outpost to try and sell things and then I realize that that does not work very well. So what I’ve done is that there is a third element to this now that I call my immediate empire. So the home-base is where I want anything to happen, the media empire is great information that will guide people to the home-base at some point to take an action of many or not, maybe they’ll just read the content and move on, and then the outposts are places where I share access to that media and try to promote people that are consuming that media, because what I’ve come to realize is that no matter what platform you’re on – instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, any of them, we go in there with sort of a browse mode, we don’t go in there looking to spend some money I’ll just check out see what’s on Twitter. But we do go in there and say, oh this has raised my eyebrows to a few degrees, I shall click. Then, when we’re on that place, then there’s some opportunity to be a little more persuasive and make a request of some kind. Remember that sometimes when I say sell I might just mean sell you on the next action where I ask you to sign up for my newsletter or whatever. But I’m trying to leverage your interest on the media I’ve created to take the next action. That’s how I use it; so that’s how they work when it comes to which platform or what, I tell people this all the time – pick the platform that lets you tell the story that you want to tell the world the way you want to tell it. Don’t worry about how many millions of people are here or there; just make sure that you can pick the platform where you can tell the best story.

James: Got it, cool, okay, I know you’ve been on Google+ since the early days, I think you mentioned somewhere that you joined Google+ day2 after the platform was launched. I’m sure you’ve seen your fair share of Google+ profiles, what top 3 things do you think makes the difference between a good Google+ profile and a great Google+ profile?

Chris: James, I’m really grateful for that question because I think this is really where a lot of people. If they take one thing out of Traffic Jam besides realizing that I don’t know anything, this would be this next piece of information. When you swing by your profile page and you click on the about, I’m sure you take a look at what you look like, and by the way, it’s stunning how few people do this one thing – look at their about. The story part of it that’s in there, you should make sure that it’s really clear for what you do for other people. You should make the introduction what you do for other people. So for instance my tagline right now – today, reads Publisher and Media Company for the personal business revolution. Oh, what’s that? You wonder. Introduction- I run human business works specializing and empowering the business revolution, we publish courses and other media to help you grow. I built writing course, business coaching experiences and much more. For more on that go here. It basically says these are the ways that I can work with you. I’m a speaker, I’m this or whatever, if you want to do this here contact me. Stuff with ways for you to get in touch with me – not too many to overwhelm but just like serving suggestions of what type of business you might take a choice, and don’t. the other thing people don’t do very well is fill out their contact info in such a way and expose enough of it that it’s useful for someone to reach you and then finally just to make it three just like you asked, they go to the links section where you can point people to other things you do and they stuff it full as if general and some kind of army and you need to know like 75 different elements and I think that the best way to consider doing that is maybe make 2 or 3 links and call it a day.

James: Got it, okay, well I’ve noticed some errors of my own there so I better go and sort those out after this interview. I want to ask you about kind of what’s top though with Google+? We said at the top od the show that they’ve been making a lot of updates and changes. What do you think are some of the best things out of it recently?

Chris: Boy, that’s a little tricky, I mean, for one, they’ve sort of Pinterested their lay out, they made their lay out a little bit more like three or four columns or whatever on Pinterest and I think that’s useful to a lot of people. They’ve integrated local in a way that’s useful. I mean it’s so close; small businesses were just a hair smarter about this, they could do a lot more with that. They’ve really married the concept of hashtags in to their work, these little # symbols and then a word which lets you dig deeper in to people sharing information that they think might be useful and I think that’s a really neat feature that it’s a lot more organic to kind of fall down the rabbit hole or something you find interesting. And then I guess finally the hangouts is where they seem to be investing a lot of their time. They’ve caught on that there’s great value and they’re sort of skype like and what they’ve started calling hangout party where it’s hangout on air multiple type of connections and things like that. There’s all these new ways that they’ve language this to say that they’re really trying to make this more of a communication hub as well. I think that they’re after sharing. What also might be true James is that they might be going after to be some sort of a communications platform/center because of the fact that they’ve got hangouts, they’ve got hangouts on air which is like the one to many, they’ve got party which is like a multi person call and they’ve got Google voice don’t forget. You could say that they’re building this little communications system- the fact that they’re so dominant on the Android platform gives you that way too.

James: Well we probably should have done this interview in a hangout and both wore pirate hats and funny moustaches and …

Chris: And that’s the weird part. Don’t you think James? Here they are trying to say we’re this really awesome thing and then they put things like – and the pirate hats are fun except you sort of wonder if someone at some major bank click on a pirate hat, this is the service we should be using.

James: Who knows? But before we close out Chris, I’ve got to talk about audience building because that’s the kind of focus of this show Traffic Jam, what strategies can you recommend to the person listening to this podcast that they can go out and use today to build their Google+ audience?

Chris: so I guess first and foremost I started down on a whole different answer, so the one thing you can do is – I see a lot of people just dumping in things that they find on the internet in there like it’s a dumping service, and if you start curating a little bit more and thinking of yourself as curating information that’s useful to the bio that you are hoping to attract, you are doing a much better job of attracting them. If you just share anything that you think is vaguely interesting, people are not going to know what to get. So that’s my first piece of advice. My second is, start a real strategy. I mean, start thinking, I’m presuming I have a 24/7 audience may I should try putting 4 pieces of content – maybe one every 6 hours roughly. Maybe of those 4 pieces of content leads to something of mine for my own value or sales, because otherwise, another place where people go wrong is that in trying to build traffic, they try to sell all day! That’s like buying a magazine and finding that it’s stuffed with only ads and so that’s not such a great plan. Some of my friends in other spaces find that they can sort of put a few more ads per offer but I just don’t think that it works that well on Google+. Third and finally, continue encouraging people to come to a platform you have the ownership of. This is always this one that I think people do a little strange. For instance, you’ve got this TrafficJamCast.com, you’ve got this really easy, simple email sign up app, you’ve got the get more traffic, come send me a voicemail, you’ve got all this stuff that carry on the conversation that don’t exist on a platform like Google+. So moving the ball from Google+ to you is a great way for them to take those actions as well.

James: Got it, cool, at this point I want you the listener, to go add Chris to your circle by going to ChrisBrogan.com/plus to see exactly what Chris is doing with Google+, but Chris if you were to recommend our customer to go peep over the shoulders of other people or brands doing really good stuff with Google+, who would that be?

Chris: There’s a few that I really like and I would say that first off would be the Kirkland Group, they are a real estate company and so like of all the strange people to pick, this real estate company really excites me because what they’re doing is, they’re just showing lots of interesting things happening in New York and they happen to be selling high end real estate there. Mike Elgan is doing really amazing good stuff in there. He’s produced quite a volume of information and it’s really hitting hard on the people he’s aiming for. I guess if you want to pick a third one, Marsha Collier, she does all kind of interesting technology stuff, she’s an eBay professional and has taught tons of people how to get a lot out of eBay, and by the way, just as a last interesting note about her, she made social media history recently because her boyfriend proposed to her on Vine, the newest little video app – so she’s the first vine proposal online.

James: Well let’s see if we can get a link off to all of those in the show notes as well as that proposal – it would be a nice viewing for our Traffic Jam listeners. Chris, thank you for your time, where can our listeners best find you?

Chris: The easiest way is at ChrisBrogan.com, all roads lead to Rome, so you can find me from there.

James: And I guess the book Google+ for Business is out there on Amazon right?

Chris: Yes, Google+ for Business is out there, you can find it in Amazon and any of your local stores. There’s a real good opportunity that there’s a second edition and it’s what you’d want to look for. There’s a first edition and they were kind enough or mean enough to make me write a second one, and so make sure you grab that one.

James: Awesome Chris! Thanks for your time.

Chris: Awesome! Thank you!

This week’s news in traffic; Google this week launched its new content experiments API, a tool that allows developers to easily test variations of their content to see which performs best. The new API is integrated with Google Analytics so developers can use all of Analytics power to measure their different optimizations. Now in comment, Google says this API makes an A vs. B testing platform where developers of all types can leverage the power of Google Analytics to run their experiments.

A vs. B split testing is not a new thing. There are many services out there such us Vigil website, The Optimizer, and Optimizely, however this API is the first that allows developers to create their own variation logic and use Google Analytics to measure their winners.

Yahoo this week tweaked its search results page to actually make it more Google- like. The design refresh gives better emphasis to pop search results and that clears up the visual clutter in the navigation bar and additional settings side bar. Yahoo also says there are some important improvements in the back end that could result in faster load times and notes that the new navigation bar will spread to the other Yahoo properties soon. The company is also saying that this is just the beginning and this seems to indicate the further changes that search results will be coming out over the next few years. Now if any of these changes will allow them to pull back some market share from the dominant Google that remains to be seen.

The well-known website SEO Moz this week transformed itself in to a new brand, moving its products, company name and all of its efforts from SEO Moz to the new name Moz. In the statement, Moz said calling ourselves SEOMoz is no longer transparent and authentic, citing the fact that they teach much more than just search engine optimization. In addition to the name change, the site has also gotten a facelift and well worth checking out. Personally, I don’t really care, SEO Moz or Moz I’ll continue to be a fan, they are one of the few sites that continue to teach good, quality SEO practice, well, other than my own site, SEOSherpa.com of course!

So as we reach episode#10 of Traffic Jam, I’d like to get your feedback of the show so far. What should I start doing on the show? What should I stop doing on the show? What aspects of traffic would you like to know more about? Also, who do you like me to interview on future episodes? These are all questions that I’d like to get your response on. So please head on over to TrafficJamCast.com, leave me a comment, leave me a voicemail, or sign in to iTunes and leave the show a review. The comments I get from you will help me plan the next episode and to make this an even better show.

The One Minute Traffic Tip; well I’ve got a little SEO tip for you this week and it’s a real simple one. Give some thought to your Meta data. That’s it! Simply that, give some thought to your Meta data. Well, first we must give some thought what the hell is Mata data. Well, it’s the page title and description of your website that shows up in the search results when your website is listed. Too few people give some thought to this few lines of text and it can mean the difference between your results getting clicked on and your competitors’. So make your Meta data compelling like a well written display advert. Include your USP, include your call to action and tie your Google+ profile to your website so that your picture also shows up in the results next to your listing. Do this and your results will literally jump out of the page and with it, your traffic will jump too!

That rounds up episode #10 of Traffic Jam, I’ll be back again next week with an episode devoted to YouTube traffic. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, log in to iTunes and leave me a review, and you may just land a spot in next week’s episode.

We end today’s episode with a bit of a sing along tune, a stand out track from Mark Ronson’s 2007 album Version. Here we have it, Mark Ronson, featuring Amy Winehouse – Valerie.

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.

You may not have considered podcasts as a traffic channel. With over 4 million downloads of his podcast Smart Passive Income, Pat Flynn proves that this medium is a very effective way to grow an audience.

On today’s episode Pat shares his smart secrets to better podcasting and reveals the 3 step strategy that has helped him build a #1 ranking podcast and how you can too.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

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“Podcasts give the ability to build relationships with many through the power of  voice””@PatFlynn
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Welcome back listener! I’m James Reynolds and you’re listening in to Traffic Jam episode #9, this week and every week here on Traffic Jam I invite on to the show the very best internet traffic experts so that you can learn how to build and grow a profitable audience for your own website. So what do we have coming up on today’s episode? As always, we’ve got our regular segments – this week’s news in traffic, the one minute traffic tip, and the traffic jam jam which plays out the show. And as you’ll know if you’re a regular listener to Traffic Jam, the main segment of the show is a feature interview with a special guest who has a particular expertise in one particular traffic channel.

Now podcasting is the focus of today’s episode as I invite on to the show Pat Flynn from SmartPassiveIncome.com. Until now you may not have actually considered podcasting as a traffic channel in its own right but of course it is! iTunes in itself is a search engine with its own rank determining algorithm, and of course that’s not the only place you can place your podcast to get in front of a new audience, you’ve got places like Stitcher and even Soundcloud as well. Of course, I’m a big advocate of podcasting and it’s exactly why I put together TrafficJam and one of the main reasons behind doing that was to reach out to a new audience and build traffic to my own products and services so I’m especially excited to get Pat on the show because he is a very experienced podcaster with over 67, I believe at the time of recording this and approaching somewhere near 4 million downloads of his show. So let us get stuck straight in as this is another content packed episode, here we have it, podcasting with Pat Flynn.

James: My name is James Reynolds, your host; this is episode #9 and our special guest #9 joining us on the airwaves today is none other than Mr. Pat Flynn of SmarPassiveIncome.com. Pat welcome to Traffic Jam!

Pat: Hey thank you for having me I appreciate it.

James: It’s cool to have you here, I mean, you’re the expert podcaster, if I got the terminology right, and you’re really joining me on the airwaves, I don’t guess you are, are you?

Pat: Airwaves not so much but we do it on the internet by voice which is really cool as opposed to text and I think there’s just something about that that’s just amazing; just the whole power of podcasting and using your voice to get people to do stuff.

James: Well, we’re going to dive deep in to that today because that is the kind of the topic of conversation that we’re going to be podcasting. But before we do that, it’s nice to paint a bit of a picture of who you are. If I get my facts right, you’re a former architect, born in Connecticut, USA as quite a large baby I understand at 11 lbs 12 oz and you grew up liking Back to the Future; now you’ve got one of the most popular business podcasts on iTunes, I guess I’d like you to fill in the gaps a bit for me. How did you get where you are today?

 Pat: Well from 11 lbs to 160- a lot of things happened. But I guess I’ll just really quick just share my story so we can start where this all came from. I went to school for architecture, like you said I got out of school and got my great, dream job right out of school. Everything was perfect, I had proposed to my girlfriend, everything was going well, I got promoted- and then all of a sudden in mid-2008 I learned that I was going to get laid off. And that was very traumatic to me, I was on the verge of depression, I was angry, I was just disappointed at myself. I discovered on the internet there’s this podcast and on the show they had a guy named Cornelius Fichtner who was talking about how he was making a living by teaching people to pass this exam called The Project Management Exam, and that’s when the light bulb went off for me because when I was still in architecture, I was studying for a test and I built a website that would help and a couple of others study for this exam and I passed that exam and I just let that site sit there. And so when I heard that story it was a hit, maybe I can share this website with other people around the world also who are studying this exam. Little did I know, after I put in a tool on to the site just to gauge the amount of traffic I was going to get? Little did I know that for how long, thousands of people are already visiting that website that I created every single day – 4,000- 6,000 people every single day and I have no idea that’s happened; I was actually initially freaked out about it because when something is going on and you don’t know about it you’re kind of like – what happened? Apparently I have written so much good stuff about this exam, it’s called LEED exam – my website can be found at greenexamacademy.com; I’ve just written so much stuff about this for over a year that Google picked up a lot of the keywords and ranked them really high for a lot of keywords that people were typing in and people started finding the resource to share it, talk about it on blogs, forums and link me to all these good stuff and so to make the long story short, October of 2008, right at the time when I was officially going to get laid off, I published an e-book study guide for my audience there and that very first month it had made $7900.55 and it was just a $19.99 e-book. Later I raised the price and I included an audio guide to go along with it, I was just cruising, I was making $20,000 to $30,000 a month- it was just so life changing and that’s when I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur, and that’s when I started the Smart Passive Income blog because not only was I making this good money, it was done in a way where it’s mostly animated. So I had this website, people can come to it, buy a study guide, and get it automatically delivered to them without me having to fulfill that transaction and it just changed my whole world as far as internet business was concerned. Before I always thought it was sort of a scammy industry, and here I was providing this valuable resource for people, getting paid for it and getting thanked for it on top of that, and now on smartpassiveincome.com what I do is I build businesses and I talk about the businesses that I have, everything that goes right, everything that goes wrong, things I wish I had done better in hopes of inspiring other people and sharing with other people the roadmap that I had made so that they can make a roadmap of their own. I have helped other people be able to create side incomes, full incomes and it’s just so amazing and I have this podcast as you were saying that is nearly approaching 4 million downloads now, one of the number 1 rated business podcast in iTunes and I’m just a regular guy, you know, right there next to Jim Kramer and Fast Money and MSNBC and Susie and Oprah, and then it’s like Pat Flynn! It’s just so crazy and that’s one of the cool things about Podcasting, it’s still sort of the wild, Wild West and the gold rush when it comes to podcasting, I mean there are 420 million active US blogs, there’s only 250,000 to 300,000 active podcasts so it’s still wide open and hopefully that swayed in to what you’re going to talk about next well.

James: It was perfect and it’s very interesting to listen back to your history, I can see how your path was indeed set out, listening to that podcast with someone else teaching tactics and strategies for doing stuff online and lo and behold, a few years later, it’s exactly what you are doing yourself on your own very successful podcast. It’s amazing how history repeats itself.

Pat: It’s crazy! Paying it forward is for sure what I want to do.

James: Awesome! Let’s talk about Smart Passive Income because this is kind of the focal point, you are of course extremely well known for it now, you’ve said that you’re approaching nearly 4 million downloads, you’re ranking #1 in iTunes in its category, these are real good strong indicators of kind of the level of exposure podcast has given you and your business, but I’d be very interested, kind of in order to set the scene of the discussion, to get an idea from you what business results podcasting has given you and what you can directly attribute to it? Maybe things like leads, sales, revenue – what has podcasting been able to do for you?

Pat: Sure, that’s a fantastic question and I’m going to get in to it, but it’s hard to look into it from the outside because podcasting – it’s just your voice to translate – how can you track those things like ROI and there’s a few things  I want to talk about. 1, is I actually ran a survey on my blog, not my YouTube channel, not my website, but just my blog, people reading my website, and I asked them a question, how did you first discover Pat Flynn or Smart Passive Income? That’s the only question I asked and over time I had over 7,500 people respond to the survey; the number 1 way people found out about my website was through my podcast. 19% -1 out of every 5 people discovered me now reading my blog and I have become a part of their lives as a result of finding me on iTunes or listening to my podcast. #2 was actually YouTube and #3 was links from other sites. So that is crazy, 52% of the way that people discovered me is on stuff that is outside of my own website, and the number one way again was through the podcast. So that’s great tangible results right there when it comes to that, but what does it actually mean? Well, I have started to do a lot of public speaking lately and that is another sort of byproduct of doing the podcast and getting comfortable with it. I was definitely afraid of the microphone at first and I would never have dreamed to do public speaking, and because I started the podcast and I just did it. I was scared but I just did it, and said “hey what’s the worst that can happen?” – I became more confident as a communicator and it has helped me become more confident enough to do public speaking, it has helped me communicate better with other people I do business with, also communication in my family – when I think about it I’m just a better speaker because of it, I mean it has taught me so much. Going back to where I was earlier, I go to these conferences like New Media Expo with some of the other bloggers where I am sort of a “celebrity” – I never want to call myself that, it’s sort of weird that people are coming up to you and say, “oh my god, it’s Pat Flynn!” I’ll never get over that, it’s crazy. But people come up to me, and the first thing that they say is the podcast, and it’s crazy. And there’s another interesting thing and I want to tell this story, I was at a conference and they’re having a dinner cruise and I was going out the bathroom, a woman comes up to me and she kind of gives me a funny look and I thought maybe I have toilet paper stuck at my shoes or something, but then she looks at me and asked, “are you Pat Flynn?” and I was like, yeah, yeah. I’m Pat Flynn, and she was like, “oh my gosh, I listen to your podcast, I love it so much, I listen to it every day when I go to work on my car or when I’m at the gym. I can’t get enough of it, thank you so much for podcasting.” I was like, that’s so awesome and I caught her name, her name is Michelle, and then I asked her, this is a question I ask everybody who mentioned they’ve heard my podcast, I ask what do you remember from the show? And I love that question because it’s so very general and I can get a really good idea what people remember from the show, and I’ll never forget what she said, and she said,- and you already mentioned it actually, she thought for a second and she said, well, I remember you were a big baby. At first I could not remember what she was talking about and really I was thinking she was talking about some attitude I had but she was like, “no, no in one of your episodes you talked about how you were an 11 lb. 12 oz. baby. And it’s really interesting that it was a fact that you mentioned in the beginning of the show too. What’s interesting about that is that at everything that she had listened to, and at this point I had 61 episodes I believe, and out of the all the content that she’s listened to, that was the one thing she remembered or that she pulled out first, and that is a fact that you would remember about a friend or a family member, not somebody that you’ve never met before. And here I was talking to Michelle and this was the fact that she pulled out and that just shows you the power of podcasting, the ability to build a real relationship with a person through the power of your voice. And you know, when we talk to people we use our voice and when you think about it, when people listen to your podcast, they’re plugging you in to their brain, like in to their ear. I mean that’s even more intimate than talking to people face to face. It would be weird to put your lips to someone’s ears right?  But you’re actually putting yourself in to their brain in almost complete isolation. Yeah they might be doing something else like driving, or walking or jogging or whatever, and that’s the cool thing, you don’t need to be in front of the computer in order to enter yourself in to someone else’s life through the podcast, that’s another big part of it and people can consume it anywhere and you can imagine how many people drive to work every day, how many people go for walks or go to the gym- more people are listening to podcasts and companies like Ford and BMW, they’re integrating podcasts in to their cars soon, and at social media marketing world, which is where I did this thing they mentioned that podcasting was the hottest trend in social media in 2013 which is really interesting. But going back to the power of podcasting, you’re speaking in to people’s ears and you have the power to build a relationship just like Michelle did with me and I have not been able to meet her yet, but you’re able to do that on a scalable level so to each person who is listening to you may seem one on one but you’re able to reach many people at the same time, and when you speak about speaking for instance in front of a crowd of people in a conference, and that’s cool you get to present one time and speak to 200 different people. Now imagine doing that, but to thousands anywhere in the world, you don’t need to put a conference to put your message in front of people and I did this really cool presentation at a demonstration and I asked people, how long does it take you to read a tweet? And they’d be like, 8 seconds, and I ask the next person, how long does it take you to read a blog post? And someone would mention 5 minutes average. And then I asked people to raise their hands if they’ve listened to a podcast longer than 8 seconds, and 90% of the room raised their hand. And then I said, how about longer than 5 minutes, everybody kept their hand up, 10 minutes, everybody kept their hand up, 30 minutes, everybody kept their hand up, maybe a couple of people put their hands down, I said an hour, maybe 4 or 5 hands went down. An hour of your time, your message, your brand in to people’s lives is huge in a world where we are fighting for attention these days, we’re tweeting for people’s attention. Imagine putting an hour of your message in to people’s lives, it’s absolutely huge.

James: Well to put that in to context, you said you are approaching 4 million downloads, let’s just say hypothetically that it’s an average of maybe people listening to you for half an hour at a time, I mean that is a serious number of one on one hours, as you said, I don’t know how you can do that today in any other medium.

Pat: Yeah, it’s crazy, I remember when I got to 1 million or 2 million and I calculated the actual man hours of listening and I think it was a 174 years of consecutive listening time. I mean that number means nothing but it just shows you how much time people spend listening in to the stuff.

James: Yeah, if you were to summarize your purpose to podcasting, are you using it as a sort of medium or channel, perhaps to sell some sort of product or service or monetize something else, are you looking to use podcasting to sort of deepen relationships with your existing customer base, what’s the kind of main focus for you?

Pat: Yes. You can use podcasting for a many reasons and for me I use it for all that stuff- mainly for building relationships but obviously it’s been a great way to reach out and finding people to get to know my brand. Again, one of every five people who discovered my discovered me through my podcast and so it’s about discoverability and getting people to find me, but then it’s also about stickability, getting them to find me but also listen to me and resonate with what I have to say and want more and then it’s also about sharing or the ability to share, and you can do that on podcasts. When people listen to you for an hour or even 30 minutes, you have permission to do something for you, to take some sort of action, whether it’s share or buy something if you were to pitch it nicely, or obviously if it offers value to them, and that’s the beauty of it. You have permission to ask people to do something, to take a call to action, they’re not called leads anymore and you have actually a call to action, and you’re not going to get the negative feedback that you are to get if you are doing something like cold calling people. You’re providing value for x number of minutes and then you’re pitching something. I don’t pitch that often myself, I like to use the podcast as a way to bring people back to the website and I do that favorably getting people to understand that the show notes that I do on each of the episode is really important – they contain the links, the resources and other important things that are related to that episode which gets people back to my website and it’s on my website where I recommend products and services and affiliate commission from them or get people to download my book or things like that.

James: Got it, got it. Cool! And have you been able to directly track those conversions to podcasting, have you been really able to define down its strength and quality as traffic channel down to the point of conversion- it this achieved or is it not possible?

Pat: It’s somewhat possible if you are to create a special link with a tracking ID that may be redirected to a URL that you created, I mean for example I have a number of easy URLs that I’ve created which I sort of consider as wormholes, they are actually domains that I purchased which are easy to memorize and type in and it just redirects them to a certain page – be a landing page or sales page or something that would normally have a really long URL so it forwards to that long domain. So I have for instance, if you got to ebookstosmartway.com, it redirects people to my page where they sign up and they get that book for free; or I have keywordresearchwebinar.com or patsfirstbook.com or things like that. So that’s a really cool strategy for podcasting or even video to have these really easy URLs for people to direct traffic to and you can put tracking code on to those things and see how many people are going through, you can create campaigns out of that and to see how many people exactly are going through those links actually convert.

James: Alright, you clearly love podcasting, you’ve been doing that for some time now, you’re probably what, 70 episodes in to smart passive income podcast, thereabouts?

Pat: Yeah absolutely, #70 is coming later this week, it’s on its way. There is a guy named Cliff Ravesncraft, which is where I learned podcasting from, he’s done over 2,000 episodes in 6 or 7 different shows. He got his start actually by doing a podcast for the show Lost – it was a fan podcasting, he had tens of thousands of subscribers and they connected with him so well on that podcast that he was able to throw a sort of farewell party for Lost when it was the very final episode and had people fly in to see him and watch the sort of finale with him and watch, that’ the sort of connection that people have with people through the podcast.

James: It’s obviously working for you also, and this might give our listeners an option on how you answer these questions but I’m interested to get your take on how big an opportunity podcasting is right now because you said people are calling it the next big wave and opportunity, but it has been around some time, are we still in the infancy of podcasting, is there still plenty of opportunity there or is it starting to get saturated?

Pat: I think it’s in the toddler stage where this toddler is starting to get really active and crazy; it’s been around for years, 2005 and even before that, but it’s initially a geeky and techy type of thing and now it’s just starting to go mainstream and they’re just starting to be – there are tutorials out there for easier ways to start a podcast, before you would have to understand all those techy stuff and hack your way in to it, but now it’s becoming so easy that anybody can do it and the people who are doing it are getting featured in iTunes because there’s just not that many other people doing it right now. They’re getting featured in new and noteworthy, they are getting a lot of new eyes on their brand, a lot of people have just recently started, there’s a guy named John Lee Dumas who has a show called Entrepreneur on Fire, he started last October, he’s already getting 2,000 downloads every month. He is doing a daily show which is crazy, he must have good systems going on because it just takes a little bit of stuff to edit and there’s people that help do that for him. So might have people do that for you too, to edit then post and do things like that but he’s already seeing a ton of listens and downloads, he now has sponsors to sponsor the show and he’s also making money from that and then some product too.

James: Got it, now I’m going to ask you how to set up a podcast, because there are plenty of resources out there that teach that and even you might have one which you might want to plug at this stage, you’ve got a little mini course I believe?

Pat: Yeah, it’s free, it’s absolutely free, no email required – it’s already helped tons of people start their own podcast, you can go to podcastingtutorial.com,  and it will redirect you, just like I taught you earlier, to a page on smartpassiveincome.com which will show you six different videos, step by step how to do it, I believe it’s the best resource out there and it’s something I wish was around when I first started.

James: OK, cool, that will be positioned in the show notes beneath this recording which I guess we’ll talk about in a moment, we’ll talk about show notes. But what I’d like to talk to you about now is your three keys to becoming successful at podcasting and you’ve touched upon them a little bit already- that’s discoverability, stick-ability, and share-ability. If it’s cool with you Pat, let’s tackle each one by one.

Pat: Sure, discoverability is the ability for your podcast to be discovered, and there are certain things you can do within iTunes for your podcast in general to make it stand out and to make people find it. What people don’t realize it and don’t think about is that iTunes is actually a search engine. Apple’s a little bit more discrete with things about the algorithm but it is a search engine, and if you go in to iTunes right now and type in blogging you’re actually going to see my podcast is number 1, if you type in online business, it’s going to be number 1 or number 2. So there are opportunities there to put yourself in front of people who are searching for you already but just don’t happen to be there yet. So it’s very important that you think about it like that, that it’s a search engine and people are looking for you, they just have not found you yet and using iTunes is a great way for you to put yourself in front of them, and also the mobile apps for podcasting, it’s just one sign that podcasting is growing. Apple initially created the podcasting mobile app in iTunes, they built their own app and that just recently came out several months ago and so that’s a good sign, they know that something’s going on with podcasting enough to create their own apps. And in that app there’s a big, huge search bar at the top where people could search for stuff so again, that’s a really important thing. Another important thing, when you’re thinking about SEO, you want to make sure that you have keyword rich titles, keyword rich description and also you can have keyword rich hostname, so my hostname for example is Pat Flynn Collin: Online Entrepreneur and Business Blogger, so that allows me to potentially rank for keywords as well. You obviously want to write for humans, you don’t want it to keyword stuff but it doesn’t sound attractive at all, you want to combine search engine optimization strategies with the description and the title and the host name that you have here on iTunes. There’s other thing like rankings when it comes to search engine optimization as well, discoverability, when you first create a podcast, when you have good artwork, that’s another key thing for discoverability, it’s having good artwork, something eye catchy but also looks good a smaller resolution. Again, people are searching and finding these podcasts to their phone and before anyone listens to anything you have to say, they’re going to look and see the artwork that you have created for your show, so make sure that they are really good, and that they’re clean, and you can type in some of the keywords that go in to the category before you even create your own podcast that you are going to go in to and see sort of what stands out to you and what stands out to you or maybe what you might be able to do differently to stand out which is a good tip. There’s also sort of how Amazon has the whole people who bought this also bought this type of algorithm where you see across items. iTunes has that as well for shows so one good thing to do if you want to get in front of other big brands is to mention those brands or those podcasts on your show, get your listeners to listen to them, what happens is that it cross references both your podcast and theirs and you’ll actually show up on that popular podcast’s related list and that’s another cool trick that you can use when it comes to discoverability and the rankings again, it’s not known exactly how they work but generally speaking, people have noticed that the more downloads you get, the more listens you get, the more ratings you get within a short period of time, the higher you’re going to climb. So I’ve always noticed that when I come up with a new episode, I’ll typically get to number 1 and number and 2 in marketing and management. And then over time if I don’t get another episode or a day or two before, I’m typically in 5 or 6 and then when I come up with a new episode I go back up. The more consistent you are and the more you push people and you can ask people to do things at the end of your show, to subscribe if they have not already, to leave a review or rankings on iTunes because the rankings are a proof if your show is actually worth listening to or not.

James: Got it, cool, I guess we’ll talk about how to encourage reviews and downloads in moment but I’m just going to review a set of action steps that you’ve just told us there, we’ve got keywords, we want to make sure that the podcast title and the description is rich with the keywords on a rank for but not stuffing. We’ve got artwork, and we’ve got cross promoting- to try and talk about other podcasts so that hopefully they’ll reciprocate in the also like or what they say, also liked or also downloaded, listened?

Pat: Related- they call it related but it’s sort of the same with what you just mentioned. But just mentioning other podcast and sending them an email and say hey, I love your show I mentioned you in my show here. More often than not, you’re going to get some reciprocation in one way or another.

James: Well, we’ll send a message over to John Lee Dumas, make sure we know that we just plugged him. There you go.

Pat: I almost guarantee to you he will tweet it.

James: Awesome, that’s discoverability, next is stickability, and just walk us through that one Pat.

Pat: Sure, stickability is the ability of your podcast to keep people around and it’s obviously very important to be found, a lot of people find things all the time and forget about them. You want to be remembered. That’s why you call it discovered, because it’s more than just being found you want to be discovered by people who want to keep you around. A couple of parts to this that I want to talk about, the first thing is first impressions, the first impression people have the first time people listen to you or even your artwork is very important, obviously you have to have great sound quality, if you have the best content in the world and your sound quality is terrible, a lot of people aren’t going to listen to you, because a lot people are going to be listening to you hopefully for a very long time and if it’s not pleasing to the ear, it does not mean that you have to worry about your voice, just the quality of the sound. If there’s a lot of crackling, or it gets to the red area of the little meter all the time, you don’t want to happen. You want to have great sound quality. We also want to make sure that the information that you share is relevant to what they’re looking for. So it’s really key right away to share what you’re going to talk about so that people understand this is something I have to download to listen to or something I don’t want to miss. Another thing, and this is what bothered me at first when I started discovering podcasts in 2008. A lot of people were fluffing around. They were talking about all these stuff that did not matter. They would talk for 1o minutes about breakfast they had the other day in this really cool restaurant, which is pretty cool, which had nothing to do with financial planning which is one of the podcasts I was listening to. It’s okay to talk about a little about the personality side, that’s actually the 4th key in first impressions so you want to inject your personality a little bit but you don’t want to do it so much or just talk about stuff that does not matter. You want to inject your personality in to stuff that’s relevant to what people want to listen to, the next thing is you want to have valuable content and one of the first things that you have to remember is, this show, although it’s by you, it’s not about you. It’s about your audience; what’s in it for them. Always keep that in the back of your mind. You always have to make the content special. A lot of people come out to me and say hey can I take audio from my YouTube channel and just repurpose it in to podcasts? Yeah, you can do that and you might get more ears on your brand by doing that but you’re missing out a lot of opportunity to provide content on this really powerful medium if you just do that. I would definitely create content especially for the podcast. Interviews are great for that. Actionable content that’s also something that’s very good. Something with great results too, that’s the key, not just being able to take action based on what you educate them on or what you share but also giving them something that they can get immediate results from, that’s a good  trick that I learned from Derek Halpern of SocialTriggers.com. you can get people to do really quickly and actually ask them to do it in the podcast if you see results right away, they’re going to stick around. They’re going to say, wow! That worked. I want more! So instant results are good; another thing for stickability is social proof. The ratings and reviews are very important but another thing you can do that would actually get people involved. You can have people voicemail their questions and and there’s a tool called Speakpipe.com where you can set up a voicemail thing and it’s awesome, you get to share a special page where they can go to, they can record right from their computer a question that gets sent to you, you can pop that right in to your podcast, and what that does is that even though you’re not able to connect with everybody who’s listening to the show, you’re able to connect with one person but everybody is listening to you connect with that one person. It’s going to make you seem more real, it’s going to get people interested, and a nice way to break up some of the content in the show so it’s not so monotonous, so you’re hearing from somebody else who has a question that potentially will have that same question too. And also another thing for social proof as far as stickability is concerned; sharing your achievements, that’s why I always share my download numbers because I know they are pretty impressive and that gets people to understand that my show is worth listening to, I also share – I think I just passed 850 5-star ratings in iTunes, that’s another big one. Once you get to start those ratings, and it might be smart just in the beginning to call out some of the people who have left really good ratings for you or reviews and just to share them really quick, what’s cool is those is that those people will be pretty stoked about it and they might share your podcast as a result of being on it and a lot of other people will be like oh, wow maybe it’s my time to leave a review, I might get on the show wow that’s really nice of that person I’m going to and he’s right I’m going to leave my review too. So those are some important things for social proof. The last part as far as stickability is tactics you can use while you’re speaking, while you’re doing your show to keep people engaged. The last thing you want to do is have people fall asleep. And so you want to keep people engaged, and listening and entertained and it does not mean you have to have music all the time, and be silly and crack jokes all the time although that may help you and that depends on you of course, there are certain things you can do while you’re speaking, and one of the best tactics you can use, if you’re trying to prove an important point, this is probably the best thing you can do, the thing you want to do is Pause, like I did there. What it does, even just for one or two second pause is going to get people to think what’s he going to say next? And they’re never going to forget that. So you’re never going to forget now that pausing, just a little bit, right before when you are about to say something important, is a great way to make sure people listen to what you are about to say. Another cool thing to do is to is to repeat yourself. That’s another way to show that whatever you just said is really important. That’s a tactic that I remember from high school I think. Every time I would hear somebody like one of my teacher say something twice, I knew that it was definitely a note that I had to take in that potentially could be on the test. Another thing that’s cool and unique to podcasting is the ability to have a wide range of dynamics in your show. So at certain moments when you get excited, it’s good to be excited. And to share, speak a little bit louder. And if something is really personal, or really important then it’s cool to whisper a little bit because that gets people to understand a different feeling, right? And so you can utilize dynamics during your show and also transitions. If you have a rather long show, it’s good to break it up just like a blog post right? You want to break it up in to little chunks so it’s scan able and yeah it’s audio but it’s more listen-able and if it’s sort of broken up and people can sort of reset in between these segments. So that’s stick-ability.

James: Got it, okay cool. Well, I’m going to reinforce one of your points there by repeating by what you said earlier about reviews and I know that the comments that I’ve received from people that I’ve read out on the show for leaving an iTunes review or comment on the site has been has been so well appreciated they say hey James, I just heard my name read out on the podcast, thanks so much for mentioning me. I think it kind of brings them inside the show, and for us that has been extremely effective.

Pat: Awesome.

James: Ace, well we move on to the third category and that’s share-ability; so I guess this is getting your podcast read even further by your audience but you’ll explain better than me Pat, so dive in, what’s share-ability all about?

Pat: Yeah, well it’s exactly what it is, how primed is your podcast to be shared by those listening to it, and there’s some obvious things that you can do which is just create something more sharing whether that’s something either controversial or that’s something that you’re in to or something that’s sort of epic. Just create something epic and something that nobody’s ever done before. Something noteworthy and that does not necessarily mean you spend hours in to it, just create something epic, and for me a great example is episode 51 when I had Tim Ferris on the show. Having him as a guest was epic in itself but the way that I conducted the interview and I did a lot of research before that interview because he was promoting the book called the 4 Hour Chef which is why he agreed to do a bunch of podcasts and interviews, so I listened to all of them, or most that I could and I started to see what questions most people are asking and I made sure to ask completely different questions. And as a result of that, a lot of people listening are like hey this is a different interview than all the other ones I’ve heard and would share it, and so that’s what’s something worth sharing. And whatever that is for your particular brand or niche, you would know that better than me so create something that is worth sharing and a good sign of what that may be is what are people asking you about all the time, create a podcast episode about that. That is something that is going to be shared. Also create something that is incredibly to share. One thing I like to do which I actually learned from Michael Stelzner from SocialMediaExaminer.com is that at the end of his podcast, he says, if you really enjoyed the show, I really want you to go to socialmediaexaminer.com/love and share your love for the show there. And so if you go to the site, it actually takes you to a page where there’s a prepopulated Tweet that has a specific hash tag and also a link back to the podcast saying something like “thank @michaelstelzner I loved the podcast…” and then a link to the show or whatever you want in there. And it’s just so awesome! You get so much viral quality out of that particular strategy and that’s something that I have not done on my podcast yet but I do that live whenever I speak live, if you go to Patislive.com it does the same thing and I’ll get hundreds of tweets from people in the room and it’s just really cool! And so the method for doing that is there’s actually a few steps here; the first one is you want to go to bit.ly and there you can shorten any link that you want to a really tiny 12 character link that you want; that is a bit.ly link and you’ve probably seen that before. And what that does is that it shortens the big links in to small ones so that you can fit more stuff in to the next step which is at clicktotweet.com, so what you do at this site is you create that prepopulated tweet that you want and you enter that link in there, put in any hash tags that you want, any @replies to your name or anybody else’s name that you want to capture, and what you do is click generate link and then it spits out a link, and when you go to that link that’s that prepopulated tweet page, it just makes it really easy to share. You can take that one step further if you want to, the way Michael did and how he got it to be his domain/love. He used the WordPress plugin called Pretty Link so you can put that click to tweet generated link in to pretty link as the target URL and then you can customize any sort of link that goes after your root domain names, so for me it might be like smartpassiveincome.com/awesome or whatever, you can be whatever you want as long as it has not been used before and that really good tip to get people to sort of share your stuff, also, you can use that similar that which is similar specific pages, you can also use landing pages, or your show notes or anything that you might be selling. I think I have 8 different domains that I am paying for that to redirect to someplace to my site, or someplace off my site that’s really important and that’s a really cool strategy that you can use and that’s generally what share-ability is.

James: Yeah and I guess that would be kind of like creating what would previously be described as the radio domain, that easy to pronounce and understand domain that you’d say across the airwaves, but in this case of course, it’s a podcast domain. But good tips Pat, love it. Cool, thank you for helping us create something so epic, there you go, picking up on something you just said there, we’ve gone for a long time, I think we should get close to wrapping up, but not before we find out what’s next on your agenda, I know you’ve got a few things in the working and a project that’s just recently come out, what does 2013 look like from here on for you?

Pat: There’s lots of stuff happening, I just released a book called, Let Go, which is my story and is released in a new platform called Snip it up in iOS which was recently released and reformulated for Amazon and when it went to Amazon this book went to number 1 in small business and entrepreneurship so I am very proud to say that in 2013 I am now a bestselling author which is really awesome and there’s more books coming in the future potentially a traditionally published book which is always a goal of mine, it has always been a goal of mine to take my kids to a bookstore and show them daddy’s book on the bookshelf. I’ve always wanted to do that, and I have a couple of online courses coming out, they have been a high demand from me for years now and I’m at a point now where I have the ability and I feel like I should be doing these to help people even more than I am now and then just more speaking – I have my first Kino Presentation in October at the financial blogger’s conference in St Louis, and my second Kino a month later in Arizona at another conference- just amazing things happening. Getting paid for speaking out is just awesome and again, this is somebody who is definitely afraid of the microphone, let along getting in front of a crowd before, and yeah, that’s really the big lesson here. A lot of people will fear podcasting when they get in to it but for me whenever that fear shows up it’s actually a good sign now. I know that it’s a sign that whatever it is that I am about to do is something worth doing.

James: Yeah, it’s definitely proven today how leveraged podcasting can be and the level of audience you can reach through it so you’re a testament to that Pat. I’m going to make sure all of those links are placed in the show notes beneath this recording and I’m going to give a call to action now which you said is a good tip, go and check Pat out at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I suggest you subscribe on iTunes and if you’ve enjoyed his show, also leave him a review, he’d welcome that very much, so Pat, thanks for joining us today and I look forward to joining you again soon.

Pat: Thank you for having me, I really appreciate it!

This week’s news in traffic; rarely does a week go by where there’s no news coming out of Google and this week is no different. In the past seven days they’ve landed themselves in a spot of bother with the federal trade commission who’ve opened up a new case against investigating whether the search giant abuses its market leading position to curb competition in display advertising. They’ve also been receiving some criticism in the UK Press over alleged tax avoidance. But the big news for us marketers is the release of version 2.0 of the Google Penguin ranking algorithm. This is the much anticipated release supported by the announcement from Matt Cutts recently who said that Google Penguin 2.0 would go much deeper than its previous incarnation. The truth is, the roll out of Penguin on Wednesday, the 22nd of May, passed without too much of a halo baloo. Whilst a large amount of the search results have been affected, most hard hitting being the real estate and retail sectors, the results only affected 2.4% of search queries comparative to version 1 of search engine affecting 3.1% of queries. I have a full report of Penguin 2.0 over at SEOSherpa.com/news where I reveal the findings of the very interesting case study of SEO Sherpa which received an immediate 27% growth in search results impressions for the few days following Penguin 2.0’s release.

Google’s rival Yahoo has also been in the news this week as they acquired Tumblr for $1.1 Billion. The Yahoo – Tumblr deal is being described by the CEO of Buzz Feed as representing a shift in media. He said social is no longer a niche method of consuming content. It’s now the dominant way people discover information online.

Twitter, they have been on the news as well. They’ve been out with some new program for TV advertising and promoted tweets using video fingerprinting technology. This is a pilot program available to just a few where digital marketers can see real time when their spots air and what resulting tweet activity occurs about either their brand or their TV show, then at least in theory, they can then target more intelligently Twitter users with promoted tweets based on who tweeted about the commercial or show. For a link to these stories in full visit TrafficJamCast.com and check out the show notes.

Thank you to Nick Elison and Charles Kirkland who’s passed on very nice comments this week saying how much they are enjoying the show, thank you guys! Comments and reviews are always welcome and I’d always love to hear from you so please be reminded you can do that in one of three ways – you can leave a comment over at TrafficJamCast.com in the normal comment section, you can send a voicemail message via the SpeakPipe voicemail function on the site if you really want to get your voice heard on the show or even better still, head on over to iTunes and leave us a review.

The one minute traffic tip: Now this week’s tip is simply this; match your traffic source to your landing page to increase conversions. Match your traffic source to your most relevant landing page to increase conversions. Now what to do I mean by this? The more relevant the page you send people is to where your visitors came from, the more effective that traffic will be for you. For instance, if you have an ad that talks about how to improve your Spanish, send that traffic to page in your site that talks specifically about Spanish Language classes as opposed to a page that talks about learning a language. It will be more relevant to your visitor and thus more likely to convert. In another scenario, if you are advertising on Facebook and want to send that traffic off Facebook to your own website, you may want to make that page blue and white in the same color scheme as Facebook therefore ensuring your visitors feel comfortable when they first visit the page.

On a third scenario, if you are promoting a product on your website, you should probably consider sending your past customers to a different page than your new prospects. Your past customers already know about you so may just be interested in the product itself whereas your new prospect may want to know more about you and the product- so different pages will be relevant. So my tip is this, consider where your traffic came from before they arrived at your website and ensure that traffic is directed to the most relevant page for them.

So that’s a wrap on another episode of Traffic Jam, of course we’ll be doing it all again real soon with another expert interview and the latest traffic tips and news. If you’ve enjoyed this episode log in to iTunes and leave us a review. We’ll probably give you a little shout out.

At the time of releasing this podcast we’re just heading on to the summer month of June so what better tune to play out the show than Seven Days in Sunny June by Jumeraquai. I’ll be back in 7 days from now. See you then!

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THIS WEEKS NEWS IN TRAFFIC

ONE MINUTE TRAFFIC TIP

THE TRAFFIC JAM

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In episode number 8 of Traffic Jam we focus in on email drops with Chad Hamzeh. Our interesting guest from Traffic Black Book guides us through the email buying process, from how to get started if you are new to email advertising right through to list testing strategies for advanced marketers.

Chad Hamzeh’s packs a punch, the former ultimate fighter delivers a foray of tips on this bumper episode including his 1.6 million client case study.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS

SUBSCRIBE TO TRAFFIC JAM : iTunes | Stitcher

Welcome back listener! I’m James Reynolds and you’re listening in to Traffic Jam episode #8. This week and every week I invite in to the show the very best traffic experts on the internet so you can learn how to build and grow a profitable audience for your website.

Before we get stuck in to the show this week, I’ve got to give a shout out to Jennifer Sheahan who helped get my Facebook advertising account reactivated this week after it was unceremoniously deactivated by Facebook in some kind of random aberration; it seems Facebook mistakenly flicked the switched in their lab somewhere and took out thousands of accounts literally overnight by complete and utter mistake. My account was in perfect standing, as were others that I know that Jen was dealing with, it was very frustrating for a few days before our account was reinstated. There is a great lesson there, on that we teach on this show, and that’s not to be reliant on only one or two traffic sources because when you are, your business is vulnerable. Follow the advice we give on the show here and build up multiple traffic channels, in fact, if you’re new to Traffic Jam go check out some of the other episodes. We’ve already covered some of the things like Facebook, LinkedIn, e-commerce, traffic channels, banner advertising and Pinterest – so if you master just some of these, you’ve already got a strong website that’s safe from random axing of traffic like I experienced this week. Anyway, thank you to you Jen, your advice is so valuable to me and to listeners out there, at this point I have to recommend you go check out episode#5 especially because that is my interview with Jen on Facebook advertising innovations and it has got to be one of my favorites so far.

So what’s coming up on today’s show? We have another form of paid traffic being discussed and its email drops; essentially a fancy name for a purchased email broadcast. Telling us all about it is our interview guest for the day, Chad Hamzeh, that’s coming up next. Stick around until the end of the show and I will tell you what’s going on in the world of traffic in the past seven days as well as the popular and very actionable one minute traffic tip. Today’s show is one of the longest episodes so let’s not hold back the content a moment longer, here’s today’s feature interview.

James: On today’s episode I have Chad Hamzeh, the creator of Traffic Back Book, Chad I’m happy you could be with us today, welcome to Traffic Jam!

Chad: Oh thanks! It’s absolutely my pleasure James.

James: My absolute pleasure! I’m going to ask you to spill the beans on your secrets over the course of the interview but not before I ask you to share a little bit about who you are because I have to say, you are the first ultimate fighting mayor candidate I’ve ever had on Traffic Jam. So tell us a little bit about your back story – you’re an interesting guy by all accounts!

Chad: That’s what they say! I don’t know, it’s just me trying to keep myself busy I guess. I’ll just talk briefly about how I started here – my brother brought home a copy of the ultimate fighting championship in 1993 to our house and I said, that is the coolest thing that I have ever seen and I want to do that! So that was pretty much my obsession as a kid from like 13 and going forward so my life revolved around training and doing all sorts of that stuff. But obviously that does not really pay the bills at that time so during my 20’s I got a small web design studio and when I was about 23 years old, I started at a telecom and I eventually became a business analyst there. What happened was I’m working on this cubicle job, I’d say this time about 27, so this was in 2007 and I’m having my quarter life crisis and I’m saying I’m not doing what it is I really want to do. I want to see what I can do in this fighting game, I want to go somewhere where I can train full time and not have to worry about work and that sort of stuff. That was essentially how I ended up going to Thailand. I just took off to Thailand, my wife and I took off. She agreed to this crazy idea of dropping our jobs and that sort of thing and heading off to Thailand and just kickboxing and fight training full time, and that was in 2008. And we were there for about a year and it was great. All you’re doing every day is just working out and training. I would take a web design project every few months and since Thailand is so cheap, that money from there would last for 5 months and it was great. But then what happened at about 10 months in, we got an email – my dad was visiting a friend in Malaysia and he got sick. We went out to Malaysia to visit him and when we went back home, he actually ended up having stomach cancer so we went back home because he was going to be living with us. He was obviously faced with much more adversity but we were going back and so I got a large mortgage, my wife was now pregnant so I got a baby on the way and I definitely did not want to go back in the cubicle. So what I did is a couple of months before leaving Thailand, I started researching on how to make money online, and as cliché as it sounds, I was that guy who basically googled that and I just kind of stumbled upon pay per click marketing and that sort of stuff and it was great- I found some forms that I could just learn about pay per click and I did not really start doing any testing on my own until I got back to Canada. I would say, in the first month of me working on to display traffic, I probably launched 130 Google display campaigns in that first 30 days. It was just me doing it myself, I was functioning as an affiliate at that time, and this was mid- 2009. That’s it, that’s pretty much how I started and I had some really good early success as an affiliate and ever since then that’s how I got in to this whole game. It was just kind of accidental- I was not really like I’m setting out to be an entrepreneur and that sort of thing, the agency thing even kind of happened organically, just people came to me and said they’re interested in me running traffic for them as opposed to me running as an affiliate. That was kind of how all that came about, it was just out of sheer necessity that I just did not want to go back to the corporate job. The mayor thing was just funny, I think it was 2001 when I ran for mayor, I was 21 years old, it was all basically I just wanted to see what it entailed to run for mayor in my city. And basically it just came down to register for $100 and anyone can run for mayor. It’s kind of ridiculous but I wish I had my ad generating ability back then that I do now for when I ran for mayor because it could have gone maybe really well. I did not get last place though, so that was cool.

James: Well I guess we know the outcome of that story, you didn’t become mayor I assume, I don’t hear stories of you Chad wandering the streets of your city ringing a bell, singing Ole ole! 

Chad: No absolutely not! I’m not mayor, there were a lot of people who ran that year, I think 15 – and I was 12th place, so we’re not last! Most of my friends forgot to vote for me which means that some people actually liked my message and voted for me because they believed I was the man for the job which was cool!

James: Wow that’s cool stuff! Well I’ve got to say I’m glad that we’re separated by an internet connection and several thousand miles because if I ask you any questions you don’t like today I think I’d become a little bit more worse off than I am with those ….

Chad: No, I’m pretty laid back.

James: Yeah, you seem it. Well, tell me about your business now, you’ve obviously been in the game a few years now, what do you do now, and who do you do it for?

Chad: Okay, so a couple of different things that we do now is obviously we have the agency side and that only started about a year ago and like I said kind of happened accidentally in a sense that people had seen my original traffic black book product, they just knew about me and they just said, hey we have a new product, a new offer and we were wondering if you would manage some traffic towards it. And so that’s what we do right now, we do traffic on one side, and we do well with it, which is the agency side. And we only manage about three client campaigns right now, we don’t take on a lot of people – 2 of them are on the health space, one has a blood pressure type supplement, they also have a couple other offers which are joint pain related and that sort of thing. And then we have another one which is a weight loss client and they are getting in to the male muscle type market but for older males and that sort of stuff so one one hand we take on a lot of health type of clients, not a lot of them but those are the people that we have and tend to gravitate towards us. And the third client that we have they’re like a real estate investing, private mortgage type of clients, so we do some adwords management for them, we do some email, and we do a lot of display as well. The majority of people that come to us, whether we take them on or not, and obviously we don’t take on many but the guys that we have taken on, they’ve typically tested their own stuff with email traffic beforehand, joint venture traffic and that sort of thing, and they want to expand with cold traffic and typically display traffic is what but we’ve done a lot more email as well as of late and so those are the types of guys that usually go for us, so that’s one side, that’s the agency side of the business, we also have a couple in house offers, we test and we want to roll those out as well, and we’re doing more and more of that and that’s kind of where I see the business is going – our own in house health offers and that sort of stuff.

James: So is that where your energy is really spent at the moment? Do you prefer to be developing your own stuff as opposed to servicing other businesses?

Chad: Ah, you know, right now it’s about at 50/50. I can see us gravitating more towards that more because it just makes sense but running a successful offer, there’s a lot more to it than just running the traffic side of things and so it’s taken us to partner with a lot of really good copy writers, conversion specialists – guys that are really good at converting traffic, as well as the front end of an offer but yeah, we’re not closed off to the service side of things because it can be lucrative and it gets people really good results so I could see us gravitating more towards that but right now, it’s 50/50.

James: Yeah, it keeps you sharp right? When you’re managing someone else’s dollars, you have to make sure you know your stuff and you’re performing, right?

Chad: Oh, absolutely, Yeah for sure!

James: Well you know the premise of the show, each week I invite on some form of expert in a particular form of traffic so I’m going to ask you now and reveal what is your best kept traffic secret, what’s working for you most right now, Chad?

Chad: The first one that I would be talking about would be CPM email drops on publisher side and that sort of thing. Typically, what this means is we will go to a website, kind of like we’re doing a direct display media buy on a specific publisher site so I’ll give you an example, like Newsmax might be an example, and they have a lot of display traffic but they also have a lot of email traffic as well and so what we’ll do is we’ll buy two types of formats of email traffic: the first is the dedicated email drop, which these companies are sending out their email newsletter, your message is the only message in that email newsletter. So as the name implies, it is a completely dedicated email drop towards your message. Typically the message is about a one page ad and the traffic it’s sent to, a landing page or whatever. The other one, which is more of a “secret” but not really a secret because other guys use it, it’s just that not many guys use it, is called sponsorship emails. There are a few different formats, and the format that we typically use is – the publisher site is sending out their daily based content newsletter, with the sponsorship emails, it’s simply a banner ad inside of their newsletter. When I originally saw this, I did not think people clicked on these very much. I just thought they’re getting the newsletter email; they’re probably just read the newsletter and ignore those ads. But they actually work really, really well and you get email quality traffic at a much cheaper cost. So to give you an idea, we were doing one dedicated drop which was running on a $30-$50 CPM on this one publisher site. In the same newsletter chain, to do a sponsorship drop is at $5 CPM and we were getting comparable clicks in terms of the cost so the average click cost is much, much cheaper than on a dedicated and so we were able to profit 200-300% ROI versus just using the dedicated drop. The dedicated drop has the advantage of a brand engagement as well, but in terms of just pure response and profit in that sort of thing, we found that the sponsorship email seems to be just the best bank for your buck. That tends to work very, very well and we’ll go with those more often than not and plus the lead of time and the setup is a lot easier because we can just take our successful banner ads and just take them right in to a newsletter versus having to build a whole dedicated creative and see which dedicated creative is getting the best pull or not. So we really like those, not a lot of people are using them, and they’ve been working really well for us.

James: Awesome! I think it may be kind of worthwhile kind of running the steps of how you go about doing both the dedicated drop and doing the sponsored email or news release. I guess we should really talk about first, where we can go and acquire this media? What sites can we approach? Is it a direct buy? Are we going through an agency or broker? What are the steps involved to kind of get this thing off ground?

Chad: Ok, so you kind of mentioned a few different sources and we actually use all of them, so we do a lot of direct buys because it tends to be a lot cheaper and you’re not paying a margin or a spread or anything like that. Number one is going directly to websites. So now since we buy a lot of traffic from conservative news sites and that sort of thing, so we might go to websites like Newsmax, Archemax is another general interest type one that we’ll go to. But really it’s going to come down to that’s the ideal demographic profile for whatever offer that you are promoting to your clients and that sort of thing. And a lot of these publisher sites they do have a newsletter type sponsorship option, they either have a banner, or even just text links within the newsletter. And one of our most successful ones is within Archemax for example, is that they have a text link within the email newsletter. It doesn’t seem like it will get clicked a lot but for how cheap it is, and their list is very, very big, you get a lot of traffic. So let’s talk about the sponsorship one: the set-up is basically either go direct or go through an agency. We go through one of the agencies, they sell a lot of the conservative types of news agencies. So we’ll go to an agency and we’ll say we’re looking for some sponsorship drops to put our banners in the email. Another good route is there is a network and I’ll say this network because we don’t use them a lot anymore, not because their traffic are not really good but because the offers that we’re promoting they’ve been more restrictive on them so maybe somebody else out there would make use of it. But there is a network called Live Intent who has very, very good traffic. They are essentially a traffic network for banners within people’s newsletters. So you buy it as you would a CPM buy on a traffic network like Yahoo or AOL, and it’s rep managed so you just send over your banners and your links and that sort of thing and they will put those banners into several different placements but you won’t see the placements as it’s kind of like a blind network. To give you an idea, we were spending about $150 grand a month on Live Intent for a while but they started to crack on health offers and that sort of thing, they just did not want to deal much with them, but like I said, if one of your guys has an offer that they would like to go with, they get the ads in to some very premium quality publisher sites. We were buying all their second tier stuff, which was more of the conservative new sites on some of the lower end newsletters that were converting well but if you have something that needs to brand safe levels, they have that same type of inventory. So we either go through an agency like I said, we go direct a lot of the time, or we’ll go with a network like Live Intent. I have not found many other networks like them, and then essentially at that point, what it comes down to is like setting up any other banner buy, you provide your banners, tracking links, some of these guys will actually allow you to use your server tags within their email newsletter, which is pretty cool, not all the networks will allow you to do that. One website we use a lot for women’s traffic is Live Script and allow us to put our tags within their newsletter and so we can start rotating ads and all that sort of stuff on every successive drop they do for us. And then after that, it’s just like tracking any other buy. We’re looking at our EPC more than our cost per click really so if we see we’re backing hours, we keep buying off, and we are going to rebuy. You know you hear about some guys who do the sponsorship email and they won’t rebuy until every four weeks the buy was successful just to avoid saturation. I typically won’t buy more than once or twice a week but I will buy pretty frequently when it comes to the sponsorship ones.  So I won’t wait four weeks on a sponsorship. With the dedicated email, I might wait 2 – 4 weeks just to avoid saturation, but with the banner ad styles, the sponsorship emails, I will buy those more frequently. With the dedicated emails, the process is very similar but those will typically go either through an agency or most of the time we’re just going direct because we have relationships with a lot of these publishers and again it just comes down to which types of sites have our demographic. Most of us have our dedicated email action and we’ll mail out our email. We have one like on live script for example for one of our health offers. We will mail dedicated on a cost per click set up with them, probably we’ll drop to that list 8 -10 times a month, and what happened on that one is that when we started out we doubled the money, if the buy was around $20000 to bring in all those drops and we are bringing in around $40000 of revenue for the client from that one buy. So that went out well, and month over month we have seen the ROI just slowly drop. So now what we’re doing is this month, this client has another offer so we’re just rotating in that new offer so there’s a new message now going out and we want to do that to avoid saturation, we’re going to see how this new offer resonates with the audience. And so that’s a good tip right there- they have a cost per click type of model. If you can get a cost per click type of model, at least for the initial test on the dedicated drop that helps a lot because you don’t necessarily know how good their traffic quality is and not all of them will give you a small test. So when you do a CPM email drop, it can be a bit risky, who knows what type of deliverability this might have. So if we can structure a cost per click thing, a lot of them won’t do it, but if they allow us to, then that’s a great position to be in on email traffic. We’ll use our own tracking links as well so if they’re saying you got 10000 clicks and you’re paying $1.50 CPC, and then we’re seeing only 3000, then we can tell them there are 7000 clicks gone missing, what happened here? And we’ll have that in our insertion orders, we’ll bill off our own numbers with a 10% allowable variance to avoid any big issues or anything like that.

James: we’ve got a pretty savvy listener base here but I think we should probably at this point elaborate on what a CPC and a CPM is so that our listeners out there knows exactly what we’re talking about. Just explain those two for us Chad.

Chad: Yeah, for sure. In the CPM, in relation to the email drops, it’s cost per thousand cents. On a banner ad, what CPM means is cost per thousand impressions – every thousand times your ad is shown, you’re going to pay whatever that CPM charge is. For a $5 CPM, every time your ad is shown a thousand times, you are going to pay $5. For high volume sites, a thousand impressions can go by very, very quickly. So obviously, anyone that’s done this knows how fast this can happen. With the email it’s different. With the email you’re paying on the CPM in terms of the email sent. So it does not matter if the email gets opened or not, that’s typically how it’s going to be. Some networks, like Live Intent for example, CPM is actually based on the number of people who actually view the email because you’re paying like a banner ad network. But typically for email, dedicated sponsor ship, it’s just going to be percent so they might say that they have a list of 5 million people and you don’t have to test all 5 million especially if it’s a brand new list, you can say can I do a quarter list or can I just do 200000 names and typically if they have a list of 5 million, yes, you can test just a hundred or 200000 names. So if you’re paying a $10 CPM and you’re only testing a hundred thousand names, then that should be a $1000. So you are going to pay all hundred thousand emails sent in terms of a $10 CPM, you’re not going to pay just for the people that opened. That’s a very important distinction if you’re doing the drop – you keep that in mind.

James: I guess these are things that we really should be wary of – what is the quality of the list?  How fresh is it? How was it acquired? Because if we don’t look in to these types of things especially if we’re doing a CPM type arrangement, we can get dramatic results on exactly the same size in terms of sets of names, is it?

Chad: Yeah, exactly. So now we are getting more into some of the more important details so let’s say somebody has a 5 million person list, so that’s like the universe. That’s the terminology for a list of 5 million. You have to be careful with this- I typically don’t find this as an issue when I’m going direct, but if I’m going through brokers and what not, you have to be careful with this. So let’s say I want to test 10% segments and let’s say the original test goes well, what a lot of people starting out will do is that they’ll test all 5 million next. The problem with that is you don’t know if that broker segmented the very best to that 500000, like the people that are clickers and openers and that sort of thing. And then now, you are going to buy a 5 million person, 5 million name test and get absolutely burnt. So what I like to do is I like to increase it by another 20 – 30% on the next rate, or even up to 50% so I might go 750000 after the 500000 test, and I might just increase it gradually like that. People might get impatient but you have to be really, really careful. Usually you want opt in list versus compiled list. Compiled list could mean many different things, it could be leads that were purchased, it could be scraped lists; it’s hard to tell really with compiled lists. When I go direct and this is again why I like to do direct in this sort of case, typically it’s those opt in lists, it’s buyer’s list and that sort of thing and that’s what you want. That’s typically how you ensure that you’re getting the best quality. So I like to go direct in a lot of these cases, I know it’s a bit slower a process than going to a broker, unless you really trust that broker in that agency, test small. I even test small when I’m going direct. At least when you’re going direct, usually you can test smaller and you know you’re getting the true opt in list, the true buyer’s list from that publisher.

James: Got it! Well that certainly opened our listener’s eyes to some of the pitfalls to avoid. Is there anything else that they should keep an eye on for when doing an email buy?

Chad: Yeah, you know the next one that I would say, and this is kind of in your original set up when you’re negotiating with a rep at the network or at publisher site, I’ll always ask them if we’re paying on a CPM, I’ll say how many clicks can we expect? And they’ll always say it comes down to the creative on how engaging it is etc., but they will have a range. So let’s say I’m doing a buy of 10,000, they should have a range, and they might say you might get between 7500 and 13000 clicks. So if that’s the range that they tell me, I’m going to estimate on the lower end. So I can say that I can expect 7500 clicks and it’s going to cost me $10,000 so the average cost per click is going to $1.33, if I know the average EPC on the client offer then that gives me a good idea if we should proceed with this buy, if we proceed with caution and maybe do a smaller list just to make sure that it’s not going to be completely blown out. If the numbers are relatively close to what I need in terms of cost per click, then I’m fine and I’ll do the test. But if it’s like a crazy range where the cost per click is going to come in at $5 and I know the EPC is $1.50, I don’t think I will go ahead with that test. I still might do it on a lower volume because their traffic quality might be much, much better but usually if it’s something of that much of a difference, I just won’t do it. Like we had for example like with Newsmax they had this really high quality buyer’s list and the average cost per click is going to work out to be somewhere around $10, and I knew that the EPC that this client was getting was around $2.75 on Newsmax’s general list but I did not go ahead with the test because I did not think that the buyer quality list would bring in almost 4 – 5 times the quality. I could be wrong on that, but they only allowed a larger quality test, so I passed on that offer. Once you get in on these reps, especially the direct sites, they’ll start to give you offers and stuff, but you have to keep in mind that you are dealing with sales guys, and it does not mean that they are trying to rip you off or anything but nobody cares about your money as much as you- and you need to watch that, test them all before you go big. That’s always the way to do it.

James: Well, there you go some words of wisdom. I’ve got to ask at this stage, we might have a listener or two sitting out there, thinking, well hey guys, this is all well and good, but I have a small local business that’s perhaps concentrated in my hometown, can you do email buys for a more localized market, or have you always have to go through these direct buys or agencies?

Chad: A lot of the direct ones can actually segment out the list, statewide or even city now if the city, usually it’s a major city but usually they can segment out local consumers. So it is an option on the email buys and you’ll not get huge amounts of volume but you’ll get all what you need to, and it’s just a matter of … the other thing to, if you want to target locally, we’ll go direct to, tampabay.com for example, we wanted to get traffic within Tampa Bay, this is a fairly big website for news in Florida in general and even southeast Unites States but you can go to the big news sites for each city and you can just target those directly and then I’ll often have email drops as well where you can segments just drops to the city. And they can do that to a degree but you can actually get 80-90% accuracy in terms of targeting people within an area. Obviously not a 100% of the people will be there but you can get the majority so that’s probably the best option I have seen in terms of targeting right down to the city; going to the news outlet and that sort of stuff. You can go to the website, at the bottom of the page there is usually an advertising link, and they’ll usually have a sponsorship or a dedicated option once you contact the rep there, and of course banner ad options as well.

James: Absolutely! Well I know where I am in the Middle East and Dubai, there’s several publishers, most of which actually come from a print type environment and then have moved online on news related sites, and you can definitely take out these options for email buys and sponsorships for those types of places and I’m happy to hook people up with some contacts there if they get interested in the stuff. But Chad, I think we should move on, I think we should talk about another form of traffic that’s really working for you right now, what else is bringing you good results or perhaps giving you good results for your clients?

Chad:  Yeah, when we run the majority of our volume is with display traffic, and with that I just mean banner ads for the most part, last month we had a client where we generated I think 1.6 million revenue for them, we spent about 900 thousand which is a pretty good profit and I say that of that ad spend, probably 800 thousand of it was display traffic. That’s nothing on Facebook, nothing on Google display network, nothing like that. That’s been our bread and butter, and that’s the reason why people have been coming to us – because we run a lot of banner traffic. With banner traffic, that’s what I did originally, we started with Google network; I’ve done a lot of Facebook as well, but I started with Google display network. I started moving away from Google just because I was promoting a lot of health offers so I did not get a lot of flexibility in terms of the compliance and that sort of stuff, so I just went ahead and I went outside of Google- don’t get me wrong, I think Google is a killer traffic source, but we do elsewhere. So some of the places we go,#1 we go direct, so to give you an idea, for that one client, there’s probably 20 to 25 direct sites that we deal with, and so we have the small, little portfolio websites. We try to find sites that can deliver more than a million impressions per day, keep in mind this is a pretty mass market offer which is usually what we deal with, but we usually find sites that can deliver a potential of a million impressions minimum per day. That’s part of our criteria and so we’ll build up our network of these sites that are fairly good sized and can deliver a good amount of traffic. The other places we go are obviously networks like Yahoo – not Yahoo self-serve ads through Bing and that sort of thing but we go through Yahoo display. One of our other clients, the weight loss client, we did for a good majority we were probably spending around 5,000 a day and bringing in 16-17 thousand in revenue, and it’s going very, very well, specific to Yahoo. To give you an idea, as an aside here, we have started this campaign on Yahoo in January, and we were not really profitable but we weren’t losing much, we were sort of just chugging along, we could not find the good packets, and then in late March going in to April, we just cracked it and we just started doubling money and then tripling money and to give you an idea on how much we are able to spend, the target CPA to apply this sale to our client, is around $100 -$200, and we were hitting $60 – $65 pretty regularly, with the average sale being a $170 so we are pretty happy with the results. So Yahoo is a good place to go to, AOL as well, these are the big ones where we can match the volume like Google or come very, very close – Yahoo display or AOL display. And we have a couple other channels, one that I won’t really talk about but it’s similar to Yahoo and AOL and that sort of stuff. So even if you just focus on just getting offers to focus on Yahoo and that sort of thing, you wouldn’t run out of volume. On AOL and Yahoo’s front page, you can spend two grand in one day so there’s so much volume there and we typically would do that. Sometimes we go through agencies but usually we go direct on a big network like Yahoo. On self-serve networks like Wham or wham PPC we do really well with them, Ad blade as well. We’ve worked with them for a while and then depending on the offer, if it’s an offer that we think can convert on their platform, we’ll work with Adblade as well. And so those are the types of sources we work on and display is absolutely our biggest channel for sure and that is where we focus most of our time as well.

James: I slipped in that piece there that you were suddenly able to ramp up your client’s results with a few changes, I’m sure there’s a secret in there that you’re probably not revealing just yet. What caused that massive change in improvement in that campaign?

Chad: Yeah, I don’t mind mentioning it, and the reason I don’t mind mentioning is because you couldn’t buy all the inventory here anyway, but when we start out and when you go to a network like Yahoo, there is so much volume and typically the reps would say, let’s run it on RMX, RMX is Yahoo’s right media exchange, it’s kind of their run on network like their remnant traffic. The remnant traffic when we go direct to a site we’ll buy. When we go to a network, we typically won’t buy the remnant traffic, what we’ll do is we’ll build out our proof of concept, we’ll find the ads that work on the direct buy and then we’ll find the demographics that work on those direct buys and we’ll take it to the networks like Yahoo and we’ll say these are the types of sites that we are converting on, these are the ads, let’s buy more premium traffic. What will happen is we’ll try to make it work on the remnant traffic on Yahoo and it was breaking even then what we did near the end of March, my rep said he wanted to run it in four premium properties, it’s kind of just running on Facebook versus running on just some random network. There’s a trust factor there, that when people see your ads on these more premium properties, they tend to trust the more, that’s my hypothesis. So that’s what we did, we shifted out over 80% of the spend to the more premium channels and if you are to go to Yahoo and you want to run on Yahoo premium properties, Yahoo will tell you which ones they are. And not every offer can run there but most client offers and that sort of thing are pretty safe though. That was the biggest shift that we did! We went after quality traffic, and I should mention that, this goes for email and everything, we don’t typically go for cheap traffic, we just go for converting traffic, so we’re willing to pay a cost per click that is three times more, a $1.50 versus 50 cents or a dollar versus 30 cents because the EPCs and the refund rates are lower and the EPCs are higher once we go on the more premium traffic. So the average sales are higher. To give you an idea, one of our biggest sources that we’re running for that one blood pressure client, the biggest data that we’ve had in terms of revenue was probably $60,000 from that one source, and we were running it in a lot of different quality traffic that we’re mixing it to a lot of different networks, I can’t give too many details like in terms of names and stuff but what was happening was we were seeing at a bigger scale we went, the average sale started going down. Our average sale originally was $250 and then it started going down to $220, $210 and then there were even some days when it was $190 and at those average sales, it couldn’t be sustained by the  client, it wasn’t backing out enough. The 90 day trend in terms of refund was going up so our refund rates were going up from 7% to about 12% and we factored all that in, they’re actually losing money despite them on the front end for one month looking like they’re making tons so what we did, we scaled back the volume and we focused more on the premium and all that kind of reversed. The average sale went back to 260, 270 even. The volume went down but it was more profitable. So #1, that’s probably the biggest shift in stuff that we’ve done in the past year – just focusing more on premium traffic, and the thing is, when you go direct, it’s when you get the premium traffic, I’ll give you a really good example of this, so I’m sure a lot of your listeners know about site scout- site scout is an RTB, it’s a real time bidding platform. Site scout will typically access the remnant inventory on different sites, and this is probably the biggest thing – with the remnant traffic, there is one site for example where you can buy traffic on it for $1.50 on Site scout’s RTB. When we go direct, it’s about a $4 CPM. The thing is, if anything should be priced here, what’s happening there though is it’s the impression order that we have found that becomes the big issue. When somebody visits a site, are you one of the first ad that they see or are you the fifth or sixth ad that they see? And usually the RTBs and that type of remnant traffic, you’re further down the line, down the food chain in terms of impression order. And so what tends to happen is we’ll get much more worse results even though the CPM is lower. I know some guys make a lot of money off of RTBs and that sort of stuff but I have talked to some of the best guys in it and they all do say, yes your rep at the RTB network can make a very big difference in terms of the inventory you are accessing at that exact same site. Now when you do direct, I usually can bypass that. I pay more but I can get converting traffic right by the get n go. So that’s why I like to go direct, that’s why when we shifted traffic on AOL over to their branded properties versus their Right Media Exchange, it works better. The best quality remnant traffic that I have seen is on Google display network, just accessing their little ad words, simply because, this is my opinion – #1 there are a lot of people who don’t have any other ads or network on there other than Google so you’re accessing that first impression type of traffic anyway, otherwise, the ECPM that Google generates for these other publishers is pretty good so it puts them higher in the impression order but I think that’s why Google is kind of the exception to that remnant inventory type of thing, you can steal some really good quality pockets on Google display network but most networks I find traffic as good as right away. You have to burn through a lot of money before you just get to these premium quality pockets. That’s been the biggest change if that’s what you’re asking for the premium pockets right away and tweaking the offer in the ads if you work there.

James: I love it Chad! I think this is the probably the interview that I’ve had to say least on, I just asked a question you just unleash yourself 5 minutes with an awesome answer, so that’s great stuff.

Chad: Sorry if I am being a little excessive here.

James: No man, it’s all good stuff! You’re clearly a big advocate of media buys and this is what you do day in day out, what really makes it a good traffic source to you and why do you put so much focus in it over search traffic, or social, or Facebook or other sources? What makes it really work for you?

Chad: Why do I choose it over others? So #1, with search traffic, this is my thing. I’m not lazy but – I don’t want to say that because I work really hard for it but –

James: You’re a multi boxer so I don’t think we can call you lazy right?

Chad: Yeah, it’s not really lazy but I have this problem with dealing with compliance issues that I don’t understand fully. On networks like Google and networks like Facebook, I’ve had the rug pulled out from under me literally overnight on campaigns that are working really well, all of a sudden, next day, ads are approved our accounts are banned and that sort of thing, it’s not really something that is really shady or going against the terms of service and that sort of thing. Don’t get me wrong we still run on Google display network, but only for specific types of offers because Google has certain types of policies that we have to follow. I love Google’s traffic, I love Google’s display network, and it’s absolutely great. I love Facebook quality traffic. Whenever we can something in Facebook? Our ROIs are just insane! 200 -300% ROI, that’s just great, in terms of the babysitting that’s required for Facebook, that’s typically why we like to run on display, to give you an idea, even on a site they can deliver a million or two million impressions a day which is not huge right? We can have ads running there month after month that are profitable that we don’t really have to rotate and test new ads I we did not want to. We usually take 10 – 15% of traffic and we’ll test new ads to see if we can find your winners, but that’s the first thing that I like. It just is more stable right? For the longer term I mean. There are ads that we have been running for 8 months buying a 30 – 40% of voice which means that we’re buying a lot of their traffic with the exact same ads and we’re still maintaining a 7% click through rate while still getting really good results without having to change up ads whereas on Facebook we’d be changing ads at volume at least weekly, and that’s of we can get our ads approved every week and that’s if we can get our ads approved. So just allowing us to just buy the traffic, that’s the main thing that I like, I’m just like please I want to give you my money so let me buy and most of them are happy to do that. I like the human element of dealing direct. We can just say, for example, one client we’re doing really well on this website and we asked them, we’re like, you know what, you guys have great traffic and we simply can’t buy enough of it and you’re telling us there’s no more left. So would you consider doing a – this is a secret type thing but – would you consider setting up a new ad unit that might be a pop up or a peel back that you guys don’t even have right now? And they’ll do it, I mean, I can’t go to Facebook and say, hey Facebook, we’re doing great results with you, would you mind doing some pop up ads on your site for us? It’s not going to happen right?

James: Yeah, It’s not going to happen.

Chad: No, it isn’t, and same with Google. Even though I love Google’s traffic, it’s not going to happen. Whereas on the direct sites, they’ll say, yeah sure, how much more would you buy? If it’s converting like it is now, keep buying it right? And so they set up pop up ads and we’ve had those running for at least six months now, we barely have to look at it and its profitable month after month, and that was an ad unit that did not even have advertising, nobody has it, and we’re just hey would you be able to do this? And they’re not going to hammer their users with this pop up ads, so they’ll say we can do this many impressions and it’s just the flexibility of why I like it; the ad approvals we are able to get up and running very quickly so that’s kind of why we focused on it. In terms of search it’s something that we have not done much of even historically myself- it’s not something I did a lot of. Even when I did search as an affiliate, I took my keywords from Google display network and I would move those in to a search campaign which is really backwards from what most people would do but I would take my Google Display ad groups, let’s say I would have 500 adgroups and eventually after optimizing it would get down to one ad group with 10 keywords in it. I will take those 10 keywords and I’d do a search campaign. And it worked out really good, but it’s just something we have not focused on and if we ever are getting one that asked us hey do you do search? We’ll say no but usually we pass them along. And with Facebook, we’ll take some of the stuff on but only if we know that it’s compliant. Same with Google – our real estate investing, private lending client, we run them on Google. I think the ad spend right now is about $50 thousand on Google, we do another $30,000 through display network and then we do a couple direct buys and some email. We do still run Google for some stuff, we like the easy run and all that but the flexibility, the transparency, and dealing with that human element is what we love about the media buys –because they need the money, so they are just willing to go to whatever to close the deal.

James: Well, I know exactly what you mean about the rigidity and lack of flexibility when it comes to Facebook. I, unfortunately was a victim, as were a number of people that were kind of mixed in the same kind of circles and we had our accounts banned, be it temporarily for no apparent reason at all and you try on contact Facebook, and I mean seriously you have to send them a Morse code message or something to get through to those people to find out really what’s happening. Anyway, lo and behold, we all got back in to action again but there’s no support or help there being offered at all.

Chad: I’ve noticed Google’s a lot better this days, it’s like Facebook now where kind of Google support was maybe early 2010 when they were just going on mass bannings, whereas Google now, any issues we had we are able to contact them and deal back and forth with a dedicated rep which is really cool but, Facebook is just like – I mean, I just can’t handle it. We let go of a really high profile client, somebody who I’d really like to make it work, I said, I think your biggest wins are on Facebook, and I would need to hire a dedicated rep to deal with it and I think at most you’ll be able to spend maybe a couple of hundred thousand based on the pool of traffic that they needed, they’ll going to be able to spend a couple of hundred to a thousand a month and for me to dedicate like 2 guys because you’re going to have to concentrate on each ad, and get them approved, and contact Facebook- I said we’re just going to walk from this one, and when we did it was unfortunate but it has come to that where it has to be something I know Facebook is fine with  before we run it, because they have great traffic, it’s just the way they choose to run it. It’s working for them obviously, and they can take advice from me so …

James: No, my good friend Brendan Colley so poignantly said this week that they’re like these mad scientists they just play around but not really knowing what the result is going to be so lo and behold a few things tend to mishap every now and then and they don’t really know what quite caused it but it’s all fun and games to watch right?

Chad: Oh of course yes. Especially if you’re not depending on them, that’s cool!

James: Yeah, that’s another important point. You got to have diverse traffic sources because if you’re solely reliant it does not take much for these people to pull the rug out from underneath you and can leave you high and dry if you’re not prepared. Good! We’ve gone pretty long Chad. We’ve covered a lot of ground so I think we should get towards a close and I think we should wrap things up. Tell our listeners what’s going on in your business right now. What are you up to at the moment?

Chad: Yeah, so like I said we’re still at the clients and what’s going on and we’re working on a couple health offers internally because I’d like to get in that game. It’s always been a personal interest of mine anyway. And since we have a lot of traffic for that stuff, I figured, why not? But it’s a whole lot learning curve on its own to create winning offers and that sort of thing and so that’s going to take some time. We just actually just recently today, we got the new traffic black book 2.0, we’re kind of targeting just more on agencies, small business and that sort of stuff so we’re really excited about that. It was actually featured in Tech Crunch today. So Tech Crunch is going to be featuring it for the next thirty days. Tech Crunch has us in in their new Crunch University and we’re one of two that they’re exclusively featuring about email blast and that sort of stuff and we’re really excited about that. People can check it out at Trafficblackbook.com. Right now that’s just redirecting to the other page but we’ll be doing our own internal push once the Tech Crunch promo’s out of the way but I got myself, Mike Flannela from Adbeats who’s a really, really smart guy, he’s in on it. There are just a lot of really smart guys who contributed to the product so I’m happy with how it turned out. It’s definitely a bible of the paid traffic and what we do and that sort of thing so I’m really excited about that.

James: Excellent! Well I hope today we have a few people excited enough to want to take this stuff further and find out more about how it’s done. So we’ll make sure that link is placed beneath this recording over at TrafficJamCast.com. Chad, I’ve got to thank you for your time, you’ve shared a lot of stuff and you’re such an easy guest to interview, like I said, I just ask a question and off you went so I have been enjoying my cup of tea here as you go so it’s been fantastic!

Chad: Awesome! I’m glad I made it easy for you.

James: Good stuff, thanks again for your time and I look forward to speaking with you again in the future.

Chad: Much appreciated James, thanks guys!

This week’s news in traffic: a couple of weeks old now but still deserved of mentioning, Twitter have rolled out marketing options including keyword targeted advertising in a move they hope emulates with Google’s success with keyword targeted advertising, Twitter have introduced options for advertisers to show ads in Twitter search and Twitter timeline so the trigger by mention of a keyword or a key phrase. Keyword targeting can be used in addition to Twitter’s existing parameters like geo location, device agenda and is available in 15 languages through Twitter’s ad platform and ad API partners. Agencies give an early access to the keyword marketing options indicate that users are more likely to engage with promoted tweets using keyword targeting than other forms of targeting in the timeline. Now this is really no surprise given the ability to serve up far more advertising than was previously possible with only interest based targeting.

Moving on to Facebook, they’re going to roll out video ads on to user’s news feeds as soon as July this year. The social media giant is really trying to steal a chunk of TV advertising revenues with these new ads. Now reports are that targeting options will initially be limited to four demographics and ads will be limited to 15 seconds in length and will likely be auto play. Wow! I am looking forward to the backlash from the spam haters on that one.

Now staying with Facebook, they’ve announced their first quarter earnings and almost one third of Facebook’s advertising revenue is now coming from the mobile platform according to the  company’s latest earnings release, about $375 million of Facebook’s $1.25 Billion revenue came from the companies mobile app install ads, which is up from last quarter when Facebook said it made 3.5% or $305.9 million from mobile ads. So this is a nice 22.5% increase quarter after quarter in mobile advertising revenue. If you are not embracing web 3.0 and you’re not yet mobile friendly, this is yet another indication you absolutely should be.

I had a nice message from Makesh Pandi this week who said he liked the LinkedIn podcast with Los Silva and that the Facebook podcast with Jennifer Sheahan is absolutely awesome. So Jen is obviously getting a lot of love on the show today, and now from listeners too. Makesh really liked the information that was there for him on Jennifer’s episode especially as he manages leads in Dubai. I have known Makesh for some time now, he has attended some of the events that I have spoken at and we catch up from time to time in one place or another, and I have known that he manages paid traffic accounts, particularly Google adwords and that episode will be of real interest to him, so thank you Makesh for your nice comments and I’d like to receive your feedback too. If you have a comment or a question please head on over to TrafficJamCast.com and use one of the options that are there, and if you’d like to leave a review for the show, please do so over on iTunes, it would even be better still.

The one minute traffic tip: Matt Cutts has announced in the recent SMX convention that a major Google Penguin algorithm update is on its way in 2013. Now Google Penguin is the code name for Google’s attempt to stamp out websites that may be trying to manipulate the search engine by using backlinks to climb the results to a position that they do not deserve to be. This forthcoming Penguin update is expected to be the biggest yet and previous updates did catch a lot of websites out who had inadvertedly been using SEO techniques that Google do not look on too well. So in order to remain safe from the upcoming algorithm update and maintain or even increase your ranking when it occurs, you need to check the links coming to your website to ensure they are natural and safe. This process deserves longer than the one minute we have here so I’m going to cheat a little bit this week and send you off to a video I posted over at my SEO website SEOSherpa.com where I give you a step by step list of things that you must check to ensure your website does not fall foul of Google Penguin. If you are listening to this on iTunes right now, head on over to Traffic JamCast.com where you’ll find the link in the show notes. Good luck and tell me how you head on.

That’s a wrap on episode 8 of Traffic Jam, of course we’ll be doing it all again next week with another expert interview and the latest traffic tips and news. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, log in to iTunes and leave us a review; in fact if you did not enjoy this episode, I still want to hear your feedback too! It’s all welcome.

Playing out the show this week is Daft punk tune, it’s not the recent Single Got Lucky, which is blowing up across the internet right now. This is a single from the year 2000 and later featured at Daft Punk’s 2001 album Discovery, the track is One More Time. Enjoy!

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THIS WEEKS NEWS IN TRAFFIC

ONE MINUTE TRAFFIC TIP

THE TRAFFIC JAM

Daft Punk – One More Time

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By the tender age of 20 years old, Max Teitelbaum had purchased several million Dollars worth of online media buying banner ads to promote affiliate offers and amassing large commissions in the process.

Fast forward a few years, Max is now the COO and Co-Founder of What Runs Where a competitive intelligence service that tracks campaign performance for online media buyers.

Max has access to a huge data set which allows him to create winning banner ad campaigns consistently. In this revealing interview Max lifts the lid on the secrets behind winning campaigns.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS

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“You can’t just throw something up somewhere and hope it works.” @MaxTeitelbaum
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Welcome back listener! This is once again Traffic Jam, the show where you learn each week from the very best traffic experts out there on the internet that you could learn how to build and grow a profitable audience for your website. I’m your host James Reynolds and you’re listening in to episode#7.

One quick mention at the top of the show, and this goes out to you if you are a female entrepreneur listening in from Australia, Victoria Gibson, our inaugural first guest here at Traffic Jam, is holding Break Out Success Live on May 11th on Melbourne. This is a one day event and the description is as follows; full disclosure, I have taken this from Victoria’s website so I make sure I get the details right for it.  #1, you’ll uncover the steps big online players are using right now for more impact success and profit; it includes intimate sessions of mind storming, I love that phrase- and inspiration for female entrepreneurs. Jump start your success online with specific and actionable game changing steps that will turn your approach to your online business on its head for big results. If you are a female entrepreneur and anywhere near Melbourne, Australia, and then get yourself to that event. Victoria is an extremely successful entrepreneur and I know she’ll be sharing her top secrets at this one day live event so for further information, head on over to her website that’s dedicated for this event, and that is breakoutsuccesslive.com.

So what’s coming up on episode#7? Well, when you stick around until the end of the show today, you will learn how to turn your videos into visits in this week’s one minute traffic tip. I’ve got for you all the latest goings on in the world of traffic in the section we called, This Week’s News in Traffic, and finally, playing out the show, as always, the Traffic Jam jam.

But before all of that, coming up next we’ve got this week’s feature interview, Max Teitelbaum, a successful, young entrepreneur who created his first star up at the age of fifteen, and by the age of twenty, had already made millions as an affiliate promoting offers via media buy, which is buying banner advertising to third party offers, off which we would then be paid a commission when a sale was made. Max is now the co-founder and COO of whatrunswhere.com, a company that helps people buy media more effectively by providing data of competitors and verticals within the online advertising space.

If you are advertising online, perhaps from Google, or Facebook, or any of the other networks, or even considering it, on this interview, Max reveals exactly what you need to know about setting up your campaign so that it makes you profit from the start, where you should be placing your ads, the exact elements that make up an effective banner, as well as his sneakiest, and somewhat unexpected tips surrounding effective banner design. So let’s get stuck in to the interview right now.

James: Now today the topic conversation is online media buying and to peel back the layers of this particular traffic channel, I’ve got a successful, young entrepreneur all the way from Toronto, Canada and that’s Max Teitelbaum. How are you doing Max?

Max: Not too bad, happy to be here.

James: Well, it’s awesome to have you on the call, I think you’re going to be sharing some great stuff with us today, but before we dive deep into the topic of online media buying, you have to tell our listeners a little bit about how you got in to this because the word on the street is that you’ve got pretty damn good at media buying even from a pretty early age, practically in your teens. Tell us your back story.

Max: Yeah, it was actually in my teens. I started buying media online; I started running a small affiliate company when I was 15 years old. And between the age of 15 and 19, I bought millions of dollars’ worth of media online for other people’s products and services. So we would buy all that media for them. Through all that, I really learned what works and what does not and how to really make a buy work.

James: So walk us through some of the numbers Max, I know you are buying a lot of media at one stage, tell us about some of the success that you had if you are willing, and able to share some of those numbers.

Max: I don’t like to brag and I am a fairly reserved person but I bought somewhere between $3 – $4 Million of media in pretty much three years and obviously that ramped up towards the end and brought up provocatively other people’s products and services.

James: So tell us exactly what you were doing because as I understand it from our conversations and what I heard of you from elsewhere; you were buying media and then to sell affiliate products. Is that right?

 Max: Exactly! So we would get paid on commission. So example a bank comes to you and says, I have a new credit card and I want people to sign up to my credit card, and I will pay you X dollars everyone that you can sign up. We would actually come out and create ads and media for them to drive those actions of sign-ups for their products. And then we could create more dollar values for those sign ups and what we bought we would be making money.

James: Got it! And then it’s just a simple mathematical equation. Good, we have set the scene on your experience, then we’ll move through to present and exactly what you’re up to right now a little later on, but I’d really like to do with you over the course of the next 20 minutes or so is really sort of peel back the layers of what media buying entails and for you to literally walk us through the process of what a typical media buy would be. Let’s get started from the beginning, what do we need to know before starting out with media buying online?

Max: Sure. There are a lot of things that you need to know before you get started with media buying. But before that, we need to short term what it is, because buying media can mean a whole bunch of things; it can mean placing advertising on websites, it can be an online media buying, buy you know, media buying is when you place an ad on a property; it can be an offline media buying, it be something like buying a TV advert, and I don’t know anything about that, all I know about are only media buys. So before you actually start doing a buy, you of course need to be doing research. Because you cannot be just throwing something onboard and hope it works. You need to be able to fix your head and be able to understand what works where and how you can really use that information to limit your risk and ultimately make more money with what you’re doing. And where that comes to is researching where other competitors are running ads, the demographic of the place that you want to buy, find competitive rates, and then also generally just what’s working, and what’s the trend over at that space. And we’ll talk about later what we’ve created, but those are the high level basics of what you sort of need to know before you start buying.

James: So we’re talking about competitor profiling, we’re talking about understanding the demographics of your target market and those types of things I would imagine. Where would be some of those places where you can go and capture that data and get that deeper understanding into who you should be targeting and where you should be targeting them?

Max: Well, I mean to me the only place you should go is whatrunswhere.com. Well, I am a little biased because that is my current company, and we provide all that information for people and really end up in a granular view help them be buying media more efficiently and limit risk because if you think about it, you can buy media based on what your competitors are doing and take what based on some cases, tens of millions of dollars on testing to figure out what works and use that as a starting point and you’re going to be more successful right off the bat.

James: Absolutely, yeah you’re hedging your risk there aren’t you? If you get that data up front, rather than testing on your own dollar as you go.

Max: Exactly!

James: Cool! We’ve established we need to do a little bit of research to make sure that we understand the what and the where; let’s talk about where we can actually go to get our media. What are some of the different places that we can make that purchase, Max?

Max: absolutely! There are three main places you can go to purchase media; a direct buy, buying through an ad network, and buying through what’s called a DSP or demand-side platform so go through either. A direct buy is a one to one relationship, I would go to your site, and I would say, hey I want to buy an advert here and I will deal with just you to negotiate a buy and put the ad to your site.  An ad network is a collection of websites where you can say I want to buy and they’ll put you across your network of sites, either on specific sites but you don’t have as much control or transparency of the things that are happening but they all of the management for you so you just supply budget and then work with them to optimize your buy. And then finally, a demand-side platform or DSP is a more programmatic way of buying which allows you to bid somewhere to how you would on adwords, or you know, any other platform for media in real time and buy across a very granular  list of  sites  that you can pick yourself. So it’s like doing direct buys but on a larger scale.

James: Got it, cool! I think it would be better to give some examples and also to kind of explain the pros and cons of each one. Direct buys, I imagine, are pretty much self-explanatory; you’re going to a single website, contacting the owner or the administrator and say, I want to buy space on your site. What are the advantages and disadvantages in comparison to perhaps some of the other methods doing direct buying?

Max: Well, the advantages and disadvantages; one is you have to sign a much larger contract- usually, when you do direct buy that’s the disadvantage, but an advantage in some cases and a disadvantage in some cases the inventory’s cheaper, in other cases, you want a premium because you’re going directly to them, the other advantage is if you can pinpoint a way that’s working, you can lock that and create a barrier through your business so you can basically pick something that nobody else can copy if you are able to negotiate with the correct terms.

 James: Got it! OK cool, let’s cover off the next one which is the network or agency buy and tell us about some examples as some networks that you can go perhaps and then move on to the pros and cons.

Max: Sure. There are hundreds of them from any way like CPX interactive to Kasala Media to Fusion. What they do is they have a large number of sites and they scale your campaign for you. If you have a manager that does the buying for you, they’ll do a lot of the work for you and help you be successful. I mean the cons are that you don’t have the options of what is happening on your ads over the network or where they are showing up, and if you don’t have a good network or representative, you can lose quite a lot of money because they don’t work for you. Without that sort of granular control you put your fate in their hands.

James: Got it! Ok, cool. And then the final example you gave is us uh, you have to repeat what the actual wording was, but it was a bidding model right, did you say it was DSP? I probably got those letters the wrong way around.

Max: Yes, DSP. Demand Side Platform.

James: Got it, you need to give a little bit more explanation to that I think.

Max: Yeah sure, these are large platforms that sell other people’s inventory on a large scale- across ten, twenty thousand publishers, and pick people you want advertising or pragmatically, buy across a large audience. The pros there are because you’ve got huge levels of control, and you’ve got huge levels of transparency and you know exactly where your ads are showing up. The cons are it takes a lot of know-how and time to do and again, there is no hand holding; you’re on your own at that point.

James: Yeah. So where would be the best place to start for someone that’s brand new to media buying?

Max: I would think it would be easier at the direct buy model because you could pinpoint sites are working, or on the DSP side model; one of the smaller DSPs that have a very low minimum to start buying on. 

James: Right, got it. Let’s move forward from there. Let’s talk about some of the buying models and get a better understanding of actually how these media buys are priced. What’s the model – is it CPM, CPA, CPC? And I guess perhaps, for our listener out there, we should probably give some explanation to what each of those means.

Max: Sure. Most buys are based on CPM – what that means is cost per a thousand impressions. So if you have a $1 CPM, you pay $1 for every thousand times your brand is shown. And then, some are CPC, which is the cost per click which means you only pay when your ad is clicked on and it goes to your website. And then a few others are still based on CPA, which is the cost per action or acquisition, which is where you pay when somebody does something like sign up for something or fill to specify the action that you want them to do. But the majority of the buys are based on CPM where you take the upfront risk and then you need to make your ads and your model work from the traffic that they are giving you.

James: Yeah, and I guess this is perhaps one of those questions of how long is the piece of string? What are some of the pricing ranges of a media buy, perhaps using some examples that you’ve bought yourself Max?

Max: It can honestly go anywhere depending on the website and depending on the traffic. Obviously, a large, large website with low quality traffic like, let’s say one of the torrent sites you may be able to buy on for a couple of pennies on the CPM. And also depending on the country, if you are on a premium website, or you’re on a very niche vertical website, you can be paying upwards of $10 – $15 CPM, depending on the traffic and where you’re buying. There’s a huge range. It also depends if you’re buying, remnant, unsold inventory, if you’re buying premium inventory. So premium inventory is inventory that they sell to large brands and it’s the first impression, when you come to a website that’s the first thing you see, while remnant inventory is inventory they’re unable to sell later in the trade. So they discount it, like a retailer would discount old clothes.

James: well, I guess here we’re going to have to talk about the topic of testing and actually establishing which is going to be most profitable because as you and I know, it’s not only the cheapest traffic, the most expensive is often the most expensive for a reason, but I’d like to cover that topic with you a little bit later. For now, I think we should just talk about what the order process might entail. How is this stuff ordered? Do you whack it on a credit card; do we do a bank transfer? What’s the process? Because I’m guessing the numbers are pretty big in some cases.

Max: Yeah, it really depends on the model that you buy on. For some, there is no order process. You sign up to a website and you deposit money and take care of the terms of service. For most ad networks and most direct buys, you’re going to sign an IO or what’s called an Insertion Order. What this is is a little contract that says here are the terms of my buy. And what they’ll do is they’ll turn up things like what your CPM is or what you’ll pay for the inventory. Do you have any restrictions on who you need to target? What is what’s called an Out Clause how quickly can you stop the buy if you need to be stopped? What’s your entire budget? How quickly do you need changes to be done? – all that is going to be termed up in what’s called an insertion order. And that’s going to dictate the terms of your buy, that’s where your negotiation go and where you sign it before your buy is about to go out.

James: Got it. And is there anything we need to be aware off there, or are these standard terms and pretty much good to go- sign and get started?

Max: the Out Clause is a thing that I would be wary about. An Out Clause, as I said, means how quickly you can get your buy paused. If you have 24 hour Out Clause, when you say pause my buy, somebody has up to 24 hours to stop it. Let’s say that you have a 72 or even 96- hour Out Clause, if you’re spending $5000 a day, and you say stop my buy, they can keep your buy going for three to four days, as per your Out Clause, with no penalties. So they can cost you between $15 -$20,000. So having an Out Clause of 24 – 48 hours is really important.

James: So would you make that a condition of sale Max, if you were to come across an agency who would say 4 days, you would say, wait, hold on a second here, we need to get this down to 24 hours?

Max: Yeah, one, maybe two, if I’m being generous.

James: Got it. We sure got it covered in a short and simple answer. We talked about research; we understand where we can get the media, where it can be placed, what the buy model is, and how to order. I guess the next step is we need to create some ads. What components make up an effective banner ad?

Max: It really depends on the style. As you are creating, there is no one set of components but there’s three things that people put in to their ads. One of them is the headline- it’s the thing that catches your eye. “Free Food” – you know, something that gives the general idea of what you do but is very eye catching. And then you’re going to have, depending if you have more text, a sub headline; more text explaining what you do; in the free food model, you can say, buy one, get one free, or something like that. You may, or may not have an image in your ad. And then finally, you will have the call to action or CTA, which would do something like- which drives to complete an action. So you can use something like try us today, click here – something like that.

James: Got it. And which ones have the greatest impact over the effectiveness of the ad?

Max: Obviously, the largest elements of the ad are going to be the most impactful first. So if you have an image, your image, your headline, the background color of your ad. When you create ads, you just test through everything. You can never be happy with everything. You have to have a concept. You test what you do, you start testing with the biggest elements, and you sort of move down from there.

James: so I guess that’s going to start off with the big idea, move to the headline, perhaps move to the image, seek that call to action, and perhaps your sub headline last, you know, in descending order, right?

Max: and then there are all sorts of other things that you can test: border around the outside of your ad, different border colors and all that kind of stuff.

James: Yeah, button color and all that kinds of stuff right? Cool! So Max, you obviously see a lot of banner ads, you’ve probably created a lot in your time as well. I’m sure, some effective, probably some complete flops. What design principles are common to the most successful ads?

Max: Well, the first thing is research. There is no one successful ad. If you can research what other people are doing and what other people have success with, you can spot commonalities. Sometimes, because of these trends, in all the ads we use the same style – some are creative, some have cartoons. Are they using a lot of text? You start to spot the similarities in the ads. Are they all using a specific call to action? Are they using a specific style better? Incorporate those elements back within your own ads. When I was starting – you really have to keep it simple, because you don’t want to test a different number of messages and ideas at the very beginning, so overcomplicating things, leaving few variables to test, and making it more complicated once you figure out what works is really important. And then, also, if you can make your ad match or blend in to the publisher’s website, or the website you are advertising on, that makes it really effective. If you can convince a user that it’s not an ad, it’s part of their website, people are really, really brainwashed to be immune to ads so what’s the point of making your ad jump out and defy it more.

James: Yeah, I think it’s sort of going back to the old days of direct mail and pay for insertions and people will do those advertorials that blend in to the copy that was around, I’m sure the principle that you’re speaking about is the same for media buying as well.

Max: Exactly, because if you think about those days, when you get paper mail, you just usually throw it all out. You’re like, oh, this is an ad, and I don’t want it. Now, online, you can’t throw it out, but you can ignore it. We have to figure out how to beat what’s called banner blindness.

James: Got it. Ok, cool. Alright, I’d like you to reveal some sneaky tips as well, Max. Have you got some really cool top tips that you’d probably keep to yourself and normally share, give our listeners something really good to take away today.

Max: Sure, I mean, as I said, the first thing is to make your ads blend in to the website so if you do direct buyer site or website buy where you can tell what the website looks like, if you can make it look like it’s part of the website and blend in. if you can do that, it can cause your site to be more successful. Something that we always do, we always make ugly ads, and we test those against our normal ads. Ugly works, and it’s surprising but it works because it doesn’t look like an ad. People don’t believe me but back when I was buying, I created a lot of my ads in paint. And they were ugly as anything, but they worked because they don’t look like ads. And then there are other things that you can do to sort of try and trick the user in to clicking on to your ads, because it’s not tricking them but getting them engaged with what you’re doing and then you bring them to your offer page to sell stuff in there. Even some things such as a scroll bars and even play buttons on those ads can make them think it’s a video or there’s more here, and then, as I said, banner blindness- so a successful ad, you will see eventually that the click through rate and the effectiveness of the ad will start to drop because people see that and they start to tune it out. So you need ways to capture and if you don’t want to change your creation completely, you can do things simply like changing border colors, or solely changing a couple of elements and to somebody it’ll seem a new ad and they’ll start taking notice again.

James: Got it, cool. If you think about it- this ugly works better idea, just tell us one of your most ugly, repulsive, horrible looking ads Max that was most successful for you. What did it look like?

Max: One of our best ads is simply we opened up paint, we took a square image, put it in the middle of a 300×250 ad unit, and opened up the word tool in paint and typed our headline and our call to action and put that up. And eventually put a red border around it, but you know that really ugly ad that took us literally a minute to make in paint, and did fantastically.

James: Yeah, and you can see that almost everywhere. I mean if you pay some attention for instance to Facebook advertising, you’ll see that the ads that seem to be sticking around the longest and getting the most impressions are some of the most disgusting looking ads, just with a nasty red border around it.

Max: Yeah, cause it catches your attention.

James: Absolutely! Cool! I think we understand the importance of testing, we mentioned that earlier in relation to testing different elements – headline, call to action, the sub headline, image – that type of thing, and what else should we be testing in our campaigns Max?

Max: You always have to test your ad placements. The ad and the placement are the two most important things. So once you’ve done your research, you have to test a whole bunch of different places to find the ones that work. And I compare it like if you like a certain flavor of jellybean and you have a big jar of jellybeans, you have to take a handful and you have to pick out the ones that you like. It’s the same type of thing. You have to test elements of your landing page – where you send somebody after they click on your ad, and then it’s always about testing it and improving your ad, testing new copies and ideas.

James: Cool! I think this is probably an appropriate time to talk about your service, What Runs Where because service or piece of software actually allows you to do a lot of this- research and campaign monitoring in a semi-automated fashion. Tell us a little bit about that product.

Max: Sure. What we do with online advertising is collecting intelligence on display on mobile media. So we go around and collect information from the web. So we are able to show you where your competitors, or anybody who’s advertising, what exact sites they are buying to, what networks are buying through to be successful, what banners they are using, what their most successful banners are, and a whole bunch of other statistics they have, or the demographics of the people going there. We help you do all that research in a very automated fashion where you can just go in and let’s say you’re Ford and you’re looking at Nissan, we’ll show you a 360 view of Nissan’s whole campaign. So as I talked about earlier, you can see what ads they’re buying, or hear what ad spaces they are buying on, and I might try buying on the same places.

James: Got it. So what type of scenarios can the software be used in?

Max: There are a ton of them; the first one is when you are buying, you do all the research there and you use it to sort of limit or estimate your campaign to work successfully. You can also use it if you’re pitching a client; show the client what their competitors are doing online. Because some people, they are buying, but they do not know where they are buying because they are buying to that black box network; and then it can be used for prospecting as well, new places to buy, and new client.

James: I’m just imagining about the possibilities for perhaps consultants out there to use it as a pitching tool to go and compare what steps the prospect is doing in comparison to their competitors, I imagine, it that’s a very powerful use; and of course monitoring your own campaigns and getting them started, it takes out so much of the risk I can imagine, whereas before you’d have to test those and probably waste a whole bunch of dollars in the process. You can actually alleviate some of that by just using this tool to see what’s working already.

Max: Exactly, exactly! And you mentioned consultants. If you can go and pick your clients and say, here’s what your competitors are buying, this is what we can do for you to make you more efficient. You’ll probably win that client over another agent who does not have that information.

James: Yeah, absolutely. So, how does this software work Max? Are you able to reveal what goes on underneath the lid?

Max: The way that I would describe it, it’s like the web is a highway and we are driving down the highway and there are billboards on the side of the highway, and we simply write down that and then we identify who’s selling that and where on the highway it’s showing up. So we create a database out of that then create a ton of data and make something useful out of it,  ways of how we can track it and see how well these are doing.

James: Fantastic! It’s all clever stuff. I will be diving deep in to it and checking out the exact capabilities of what runs where. Max, I think we’ve pretty much gotten towards the end of the interview. Is there any place that I should direct our listeners to if they want to come find out more about you and what you get up to?

Max: Correct! Whatrunswhere.com or anybody can always email me at [email protected] I’m always happy to talk.

James: Fantastic! Well, I’ll make sure that those two references are placed beneath this interview, wherever it appears. It will surely go on TrafficJamCast.com and we may be posting it elsewhere. So wherever you find it, you should find links beneath. Max, thanks for your time today, you’ve shared fantastic stuff and I just want to thank you for coming on the show and sharing your time.

Max: My pleasure!

This week’s news in traffic: Well our news from the past seven days comes from the two big players, Facebook and Google. Let’s first of all deal with Facebook. They’ve established new restrictions for how many invites a user can send. With the latest update, you cannot now send more than 100 event invites at a time. And an event can only have 300 pending invites at once. This could hinder the efforts of some event planners and marketers of events, but on the flip side of the coin, Facebook users can avoid getting too many invitations for events that are not relevant to them. Let’s face it, over the past year or so, it has become a complete pain in the butt. We get so many events invites sent out for things that don’t really qualify to be an event. So I think this is a good move in behalf of Facebook.

Let’s move to Google. Google, who ironically rely on advertising for some 95% of its revenue, doesn’t want ads on its hotly anticipated Google Glass augmented reality eyewear product. This prohibition came in the fine print of a policy made public on April 15th, which says Glass wear developer may not serve or include any advertisements and they may not charge users to download apps to the device. This announcement, which coincided with the news that Google glass explorer edition prototypes, are about to ship, and this indicates that the Mountain View Company behind the development of Google Glass is proceeding very carefully, even slowly, when allowing third party developers to access the head mounted display’s full capabilities. It also means that developers won’t have an obvious way of making money from their apps, and marketers will not be able to tap in to the traffic from this channel, at least in an obvious manner initially.

I have another five-star iTunes review this week, and it’s from Chall, who says. “Great content James, thanks so much for sharing your knowledge on traffic, please keep the podcast going, I’m learning so much. “  Well, Chall, we are full steam ahead with a whole bunch of great interviews lined up with experts in YouTube marketing, and email in coming weeks, so stay tuned for those- we’ll absolutely keep them coming. And if you are enjoying this, then I recommend my other weekly traffic tips over at SEOSherpa.com, the home of my search engine agency, where I publish a short weekly video on how you can optimize your websites for higher search engine ranks. And over at ClickJam.com, home to my Google adwords management agency, you’ll learn pay per click marketing techniques. Subscribe to both of those, and you’ll be a traffic whiz in next to no time. And of course we do offer complete managed services from both of those sites. So to get your traffic done for you, contact the teams over there. On upcoming shows, I’ll be answering listener questions so if you have one for me, head on over to TrafficJamCast.com and leave a message using the voicemail, or leave a message option. I really would love to hear from you.

The one minute traffic tip; okay so this week’s tip, if you are using YouTube as a traffic channel which of course you should be, given the average user watches 21.8 hrs. of online video each month, which is nearly one full day. While people do watch a lot of video, my own research, watching closely my YouTube and Wistia analytics, is that engagement drops significantly after about the 2 minute mark and very few people have the patience to watch videos more than 5 minutes in length. So if you have a longer video you are using in your marketing, post the long version in to your website, and then break that video in to shorter versions of one to two minutes in length. You want to use this videos to engage viewers fast so pick the best parts of your video footage and then cut them short on a cliffhanger, a bit like you see on soap operas, leave the viewer wanting to know what happens next, at the end of the video, put a call to action, telling the viewer where they can see the full video. That of course will be a link to your website, where they’ll find a full length version. All that remains then is for you to upload your videos to YouTube, optimize it for the keyword terms you want to rank for, and include a nice, easy clickable link in your YouTube description box. And there you have it, a nice, easy way to pull viewers away from YouTube to your own site.

That completes another episode of Traffic Jam, I’ll be right back next week with another expert interview and all the very latest traffic tips and news. If you’ve enjoyed the episode, please leave me an iTunes review, I really would appreciate it, and I will probably give you a little shout out on next week’s show too.

Playing us out this week is a funky little jam from Breakestra, the LA based soul jazz band, and it’s called Hit the Floor.

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THIS WEEKS NEWS IN TRAFFIC

ONE MINUTE TRAFFIC TIP

THE TRAFFIC JAM

Breakestra – Hit the Floor

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When it comes to social media sites LinkedIn is undeniably where all the money is at. With the average family income of LinkedIn users estimated at $109,000, 4 times that of Facebook users, there is surely money to be made on the platform .  This week, James is joined by Los Silva, Digital Branding strategist and co-author of Local Marketing for Busy People, who reveals his LinkedIn traffic hacks, including a very powerful LinkedIn Groups strategy.

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“LinkedIn’s main purpose is business, you talk to people about business. ” @los_silva
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Welcome back to Traffic Jam, the show where you access world class traffic experts every single week and learn how to build and grow a profitable audience for your website. I’m James Reynolds and this is Episode#6.

In this week’s show, all focus is on LinkedIn, and I’m speaking with Los Silva about leveraging LinkedIn groups for strategic prospecting, community building online on LinkedIn, and setting up your LinkedIn profile to get more LinkedIn search traffic and maximize your conversions.

Following my chat with Los, we have this week’s news in traffic where we have all the latest news in the past week in online traffic generation, plus there’s the one minute traffic tip and this week’s Traffic Jam track, so stick around until the end of the show for that.

But for now, let’s dive in straight in to this week’s interview with Los Silva.

James: Today I’m welcoming on the call, author of the book Local Marketing for Busy People, international speaker and considered one of the top LinkedIn Marketing and business trainers in the world, Los Silva. Welcome to the call Los.

Los: Hey, what’s going on, how are you?

James: I’m good, I’m good. How are things for you?

Los: Good, good, busy as always.

James: Ace, that’s great to hear. Let’s kick things off Los, let’s first of all give our listeners a little bit of a background on who you are and what you get up to as a LinkedIn Marketing and business trainer and any other activities you might have going on right now.

Los: Yes, so basically I have been doing online marketing and things like that for about ten years. I started testing things on Facebook, and when everyone became a Facebook guru I just moved on to LinkedIn. I started really realizing the power of LinkedIn on a B2B level and just really focused all my attention on it for a significant while and we helped business to business corporate heads redevelop good relationships on LinkedIn, strategic one on one messaging, also building communities, which is a little bit different than just doing groups, and just doing LinkedIn stuff forever and kind of moved on to a lot of other things, I’m a partner in various other companies and softwares including Digital Marketing companies, we do digital publishing, it’s called knowledge.ly and a lot of other cool things really – the online world has been good.

James: Fantastic! Let’s drive straight in this topic of LinkedIn and let’s start off with a bit of an overview of what it’s all about. What would you say, to a novice starting out, are the key pillars of becoming successful on LinkedIn that we should probably cover in today’s interview?

Los: Yeah, so the key things are really understanding who you want to target demographic wise and  who your niche is and who you’re trying to send your messages to. Also something that most won’t probably say, but patience. It’s not immediate – you’re not going to make a hundred million dollars in the next five minutes, push button style. You are going to develop great business relationships and you are going to be able to capitalize those in to long term relationships and authority and niche as well. Those are the main things. A lot of people focus on your bio, but it’s not as important as really putting the time in to LinkedIn. Yeah, you have to have a strategic message and it’s important to have the keywords, but it’s not 99% of it. A lot of people think, oh yeah, if I just fix this then I’ll have flood leads that come in everyday and I’ll don’t know what to do with – but that’s not the case. It’s really an overall structure in developing the whole higher system with LinkedIn from the bio, to the messages, to the groups you joined to, possibly if you are looking to build up your own community as well.

James: Excellent good! Well, I’d like to start off by talking about getting the basics right and perhaps we could start by talking about the profile section, because I’m sure we need to get that right before we start engaging people and pushing people towards our LinkedIn page. What are some of the essential elements to setting up a profile on LinkedIn that’s going to convert people looking in that profile or to perhaps interested parties who later want to do business with you?

Los: Well, the first thing is we want to have an all-star profile. And what I mean with all-star is LinkedIn will actually tell you, it has this little circle and it keeps filling up as you keep filling up your profile and when you are at the top, you’re at the all-star level. So you want to make sure that everything is congruent – you have the proper message in their in your bio, from the headline to the previous and current work positions, your education, all the way to your background and businesses that you have done or are doing seals an expertise section and is also something that you can have figured out. And focusing on adding maybe a little bit of your personality, so adding slide shares or adding YouTube connecting back to your blog, really having the entire brand of you essentially, visible on your LinkedIn profile.

James: Got it, cool. What about getting your name and summary section right? I see a lot of people on LinkedIn who actually kind of change the way their name is position and add in you know, a sort of description alongside their name on what they do. In my example, it might be like, James Reynolds SEO Consultant. Is that advisable or not?

Los: It is not something I would advise, I definitely think you should have something about your services on the headline, but that’s not the way I would word it.  Because essentially, you are competing with people, if I am going to do a search on LinkedIn, because LinkedIn is essentially a search engine, and I am looking for people and I am looking for SEO consultants, a hundred and fifty of them- way more than that, but you know, I’m going to see a huge list of people that all say they are SEO consultants so I don’t know who to go to, I’m just looking at the top three or four and kind of browsing through to get an idea but if yours says, we get you to the top and we keep you there! Inquire for more details. That’s what I want, I want to be at the top and I want to stay there. I mean, what do you do? Maybe then I talk to you and you give me a free report and you show me how you’re not a fly by night company and we start that relationship. It all started really because your headline was something that grabbed my attention rather than just something bland and generic.

James: Fantastic! Are you willing to share an example Los, like what would be a good headline, perhaps using me as an example, and I might just go and swipe this on my LinkedIn profile by the way so if you come up with a good one, I’ve got rights to steal it from you. What would be something that would catch attention and be very effective?

Los: So off the top, something with Click Jam, which is PPC, I will basically say something like “Saving you Money While Growing Your Brand in PPC”. I will have to think about it a little but something that says saving your money while at the same time just boosting the conversions so that – “Saving Your Money, Boosting Your Conversions, Ask Me How”  or maybe you were featured somewhere, let’s say you were featured Tech Rancher, any publication, it does not matter if it’s a local publication – you can say, saving you money while building your brand as featured in xyz publication. Ask me how. You are forcing people to say, okay, I will ask you how, because we also like to be lead so if you position it that way, it is more likely to get someone to inquire on your services and say, hey, so what exactly do you do? Because it’s a little bit blind and it’s a little bit attention grabbing. So you want that. You want someone to go, oh who’s this guy? Cause they’ll be searching for someone like you so its good that you create something that creates that conversation internally for them.

James: Got it man! Sorry I put you on the spot there. But what we’re really saying here is open a loop, create some intrigue and just move away from the ordinary resume style in your profile listing. That’s really the crooks of what we’re talking about is stand out, be different and create some intrigue to those viewing your profile.

Los: Yeah, and when you’re developing your profile. It is important, because as I said, it is a search engine so you should have strategic keywords placed in your background and in your past and previous position, but don’t go crazy spammy. A lot of people that are actually in the SEO, if you looked in to people that say SEO consulting in LinkedIn and you actually look at their previous positions they don’t even have a niche in, they just say SEO a hundred and fifty thousand times. And that alone, I would not want to work with you if that’s what you have cause you’re a spammer so if you are getting me good SEO, it’s probably the shady kind, and I don’t want that- you know what I mean. So be strategic, speak of things that you’ve done and it’s not that difficult to rank on LinkedIn to be honest with you because people are doing it wrong. So just fill up you current position and previous positions and have some stuff on your expertise and in your summary as well and you’ll be fine. I think that when you get recommendations and people add keywords in there as well, it actually boosts your ranking. Also, If you are very well connected, If you have x amount of connections, it also boosts your ranking as well.

James: Got it! And I’m sure this new sort of feature that has come onboard quite recently, endorsements has perhaps got to influence where you rank within the LinkedIn search engine. If, again, someone was to endorse me or people would endorse me many times over for the skill SEO, I’m sure that it will have some weight as to where I’ll appear in a search for the phrase SEO consultant. That would make sense anyway.   

Los: Yeah, I totally agree with you, so being strategic, from your whole perspective of the profile from skills and expertise to the background, previous and past positions, to the summary, even the headline, that whole thing strategically placed keywords and really building more about yourself – not a bland I do PPC management and this is some companies I’ve worked for- you know, kind of just putting a little bit of who you are in there really works with people as they read that.

James: Excellent, cool, and what about some of these more ninja strategies? You mentioned earlier embedding YouTube videos, and embedding slide shares. How do you go about doing that?

Los: There’s a section in LinkedIn which is basically the more section and you can go out there and you can add different things to your LinkedIn. You can go out there and add polls; you can add your blog, YouTube, Slide share. It’s just at the top of LinkedIn at the top, right next to the search bar so just going in there and there’s a lot of other sections, there are a lot of other sections so just go in there and look at what else you can add to help your LinkedIn kind of grow it. Actually, I am looking at LinkedIn now and I could not find it, which is weird, because LinkedIn has been changing a lot of stuff, I’m wondering if they’re actually changing this about them as well.

James: Yeah they move fast right? They seem to be updating a lot of stuff quite recently.

Los: Yeah, they took events off and they took LinkedIn answers off. And I don’t know why they did that because LinkedIn answers was very good. Now everybody who used to use that will just go to Quora, but I guess they know what they’re doing.

James: Got it, okay, let’s just have a little summary at where we’re at: We said to complete the profile info, we mentioned some form of benefit driven title and summary to stand you out, we talked about strategic placements of keywords to make sure that your profile is relevant for search. Is there anything that we’ve missed in getting that perfect profile set up?

Los: That is it. Just finish every single detail and add all your information. LinkedIn will continue to tell you, hey you’re missing a little section would you like to fix this section? I noticed here that you did not put a notification, something that I always test, I’m always testing different things and one of the things that I always test is on my previous and past positions. I always test, basically add a different location, or I will try different locations because on a keyword a lot of times people could search Orlando SEO, so I am more likely to be the first person to pop up than just a guy who has SEO. So I’m always changing things like that as well and I’m always changing my keywords. LinkedIn is actually cool with giving you a lot of data and you can see who’s searching for what kind of keywords, who’s viewed your profile and what kind of keywords have been ranking. If you go at the bottom of your profile page you can see the top keyword searches and demographics, so always switch that out and you can see what can be working better. Some words are not working great and you need to be consistently testing to see if better words are working for you.

James: Got it. One question I wanted to ask before we kind of move on to a different topic, is there any strategy around connections? What’s your strategy around who you accept and who you invite to be a connection? You kind of being like an all-in guy and just accept whoever requests to be a connection or are you more selective? Is there any strategy around that?

Los: I’m an all-in guy and the reason is that I’m in an identity business with people. If I already know you, it’s either I’m already doing business with you or there is not something in common that I would do with you. So I need to get new people in the door. Essentially, you can look at it as you are getting a lot of inbound leads. And something that you can do differently in LinkedIn as well, you can see as you add people, you can view who among them has viewed your profile. So you can go to that section in profile like I said, and see what they do, what their position is. And if it’s a match to what you can offer, I approach them and then I say, hey I noticed you’ve viewed my profile, how can I help you? Is there anything? I have looked at your website and I saw XYZ. – start conversations. You might not even get him as a client, but they might know someone who does. The thing about LinkedIn is that everyone is out there to run a business. No one is looking to see who ate what as a sandwich, pictures of a cousin; the average person makes about $150,000 on LinkedIn, so they’re there to do business -to broaden their networks and do business. So it’s pretty cool when you start developing relationships, you can basically get to a phone call to see if you guys have something, it’s like that, rather unlike Facebook, it’s way a lot more than just fun. Everybody there is thinking about it secondary, like hey let’s do business, but with LinkedIn it’s the primary purpose. You’re there to see messages, to see what else is out there, to read business news and to talk to people about business.

James: Yeah I guess people are already on that business mindset so they’re ready for that sort of kind of thought pattern, somewhere unlike Twitter or Facebook where it’s a socially orientated platform you have to kind of change their mindset and to talk about business rather than what they’ve just eaten for lunch or dinner before you can move on forward. Good! This is good stuff Los and I’d like to explore the conversation that we’ve just started about prospecting and how we would identify good people to engage and how we would engage them using LinkedIn search. What are your strategies around that?

Los: Well, if you are, let’s just say a consultant looking to do consulting for companies, my favorite way to do prospecting is using groups. Rather than creating my own group, which you totally can and I’ll get to that in a minute, but rather than doing that, it’s a little bit more time consuming and a longer strategy, I go out and I look for the best groups that are already out there. I do research and I look at the demographics and the data on these groups and basically from there and start prospecting. So say I’m a consultant. I’ll join groups, not so much about consulting, because I am one of them so it will be just the same group of people looking for the same opportunity for people who offer the same service, it doesn’t make sense. But so many people out there would go and do that; I would go out there and attack different markets. I would go in to a group of doctors. Why? Because there is no marketer there. So I would go in there and I would give them education on marketing strategies and different things to do with corporate recruiters, and marketers don’t really go in there. So I go in there and I dominate in there, because I show them different stuff that we can do with LinkedIn, show them different stuff we can do with Facebook and give them strategies to give their branding. So this niche that I sort of develop from looking outside the box. I also like to target different countries; I like to get in to speaking and do different things like that and the best way to do it is get it all paged for free, so I go out there, I go in to groups, you take groups that do real estate. Most marketers are going to be in there therefore if I go in there I have to educate them enough so that I can become the head position in that group, an influencer, so to speak, that everyone’s going to look for me and get guidance because they are in that group to look and see how they can improve their business. So it makes sense that I will educate them. Another quick way is to also leverage the group by creating a relationship with the group owner. I look at groups that have a significant amount of groups on them already so what I do I become an influencer of the group. Then, when I have already given value, I go out there and I approach the owner and say, hey, I’m an influencer in your group, I love what you guys are doing, I know it gets tiring to get a proper content. I’d love to see if I can give you guys a presentation, of course not to pitch anything, I’d like to teach you guys how to be the best real estate agent using LinkedIn or Facebook and if you guys love it then you guys can message me and if not, I’m happy to do it because this group has helped me significantly. Most people are not going to say no I hate great information right away and they’re going to love it and they’re going to say sure, but what you need to think is that if someone has a 35,000 person group, which is very common in LinkedIn, that’s an email list. That is potentially an auto responder. They can go out and they can send that, hey guys Los is going to do a great presentation on how to be a great XYZ and it’s going out to all 35,000 people so it’s a quick way to build a following and get new prospects coming in that are business minded, so that’s something I really love doing and there’s a plethora of groups so if you guys want to steal this strategy it will literally result in money for you.

James: Got it! Well, I am sure there are plenty of people listening to these who would go and steal that strategy Los, so let’s just review some of those criteria for groups: you mentioned A, looking up verticals and one that’s not your own so for a consultant, not to enter a consulting group, and you also mentioned the size of a group, you mentioned 30,000 – is this the ideal criterion or is it some sort of model filters that we should be using in selecting the groups to enter?

Los: I will give you exactly what I do, step by step. I go in, step 1, and I search for groups, one, I search for a local group, two, I search for an international group, and three, I search for a large group in a particular niche. So I focus on three groups at a time, because I don’t have time to go into 50 groups and go crazy. It wouldn’t be realistic. So I focus on these three groups and l look at the metrics on each group – LinkedIn gives you this for free. LinkedIn, if you go in to the groups and go in to the more section, then you can look at the activity in to the group, you can see if they have a lot of people or if they have a little bit of people, you can see the engagement, you can see all the activities in there, are they directors? Are they managers, entry levels, senior position, or vice presidents? I can see the demographics, I can see the growth of the group, I can see the activities and the active members that engage and if there’s none, I’m going to get out of there and I’m going to get a group that has a lot of people, and it’s growing and it’s active – that’s the goal so I’m going to join that group and I will put my time and effort in to that group because LinkedIn is going to say, hey this is a great group; it’s growing and it’s got a lot of engagement. So that’s the kind of groups I’d focus on and basically I’d go to work. I’d start giving value, create relationships, another thing here is that if I had a third party connection, I actually can’t message them. But if I’m in the same group as them, it’s like a hack, you can message them directly. So I start seeing people who are also active on the group and I start messaging them for inbound relationships. So it’s a simple strategy but the more you test LinkedIn, the better it’s going to be.

James: This is good stuff Los! So what sort of activity then are you posting in the group? You mentioned kind of value. In your case you would perhaps be posting about sort of marketing advice and things relating to internet marketing- is that what you’re doing?

Los: Yeah, basically, I’m posting content that I may have, or content that is relevant from other sources, I’m posting questions and asking people what question they have so I can just sit there in the actual group and answer them so most of all my stuff is just giving people content and giving and giving them slowly by connecting people personally starting with a small conversation and seeing how I can help, usually taking that to a phone call. You can, most certainly, if you don’t like making phone calls, you can take to an email, and sort of continue the relationship there. But it’s easier for me to just build a relationship from a phone call because you can get a lot from a phone call than between emails.

James: And you also mentioned building your own community and strategy. When that might be appropriate? Give us an example on how that might look.

Los: It’s appropriate for a variety of people and companies so if you are a small enterprise and you guys have the personality, you guys have the time, then it’s great because you can put other people in charge of that and they can do it. If you are a solo entrepreneur, it’s something that’s going to be a little bit harder and it’s going to take some time, so I do not suggest you do that. I would suggest you just listen to the part where I basically told you to hack groups and connect with the owner to do webinars. That’s better for you. But if you are a small, medium business, you do a lot of B2B stuff, it’s great to essentially build a community – it’s initially the funnel for your social cycle because you’re cherry picking people that come in to your group, you’re giving them information that’s relative to your content, or your service or product, and then having someone manage your group, follow up with them, see if they have questions, see if they have issues, obviously building relationships in that community, and then basically building the initiation of your normal sales cycle or into whatever you have. Maybe it’s into webinars, maybe it’s straight in to phone calls, maybe its rapid fans who are engaged in 100% of the product and service that you are trying to deliver.

James: How do you invite people in to your own group? Is that only through your own connection or is there other ways to go about it?

Los: You can invite people to your own group through your own connections; you can invite people to join your group, basically through any way. You can just give them a link, hey join my group, you can connect people individually and say hey guys join my group, you can connect with people in other groups and say hey if you like this group then you might want to try this other one which is very similar a lot in engagements and relationships and like that so it’s unlimited ways to invite people. You don’t need to be connected to me unless I make the group private but if I’m looking to do business with new people I would never make the group private.

James: Alright, what about LinkedIn advertising? There are a few people I know that have started doing it with mixed results so what’s your experience with LinkedIn ads?

Los: I would not put my money in to it, I would rather put my money in to Facebook ads or Google, but you certainly can if you are a larger corporation is more about branding yourself and developing a certain kind of position in the marketplace because then that gives a significant number of people more on that kind of the B2B market, but if I want more immediate results, I just can’t get the money on LinkedIn. I can get my clicks so much cheaper even on Google for certain terms, so it’s just much better. You can create a much better Facebook sequence I think, in my opinion. I think majority of the people that are spending money on LinkedIn are bigger corporations and I really do think it’s for branding. If the break down the numbers, I don’t think the ROI is there, but you know, I most certainly can be wrong in certain cases.

James: Yeah, well I checked out the CPC’s and comparative they seem to be quite high, somewhere between $2- $5 per click, compare that to Facebook which is a tiny fraction of that amount and definitely delivers results. Perhaps it is better to stick your marketing dollar in Facebook.

Los: Yeah, exactly. And Facebook is doing so much more for you to market. You can do sponsored stories, you can do promoted posts, and you can do just Facebook ads, then you can target them with a custom audience, I mean you have so many more options and things like that so I’d much rather do Facebook ads.

James: Excellent! Well Los, we’ve gone on for almost – thirty minutes have flown by. What sort of final words can you leave for everyone who is listening in to this podcast?

Los: If I can pass on some words of wisdom, I would say be patient with LinkedIn and really focus with developing your network. A majority of people on there are truly in there to do business, you just need the right approach and really make it about them at first, because no one wants to be sold on the initial conversation, so just think that you don’t want to be sold on the first initial conversation that starts with you so don’t try to sell people, try to offer value and good relationships and that network will take you very, very far.

James: Excellent! Where can our listeners find out more about you?

Los: If you want to find out more about me, you can go to LosSilva.me.

James: There you go, that’s nice and easy. I’m sure we can all remember that nice short link, and I’ll make sure of course that it’s posted beneath this recording on TrafficJamCast.com so wherever you’re listening to it, head on over there and we’ll make sure the links are placed there for you to easily find Los and connect with him after. Los, thanks for today, you’ve shared some awesome stuff and I hope to catch up with you again soon.

Los: Happy to help man! Thanks for having me.

This week’s news in traffic, beware! Your Facebook ads targeted to an American audience may be reaching Nigeria and other places. Dr. Harlan Kilstein has revealed in a post in AllFacebook.com how is US targeted Facebook campaign was attracting a large number of people from Nigeria opting in to his email list. How did this happen? It’s been revealed that Airtel Nigeria has recently begun offering free Facebook connectivity to its subscribers without using the internet. Just by dialing *688# the Nigerian Facebook user has free and unlimited access to Facebook. Apparently, Facebook marketing does not detect Airtel’s Nigerian subscribers who click on ads and subscribe to things they are interested in. But since they are unable to pay for the products or services they have signed up for, it’s putting a drain on the advertisers account. This was the situation that happened for Dr. Harlan Kilstein.  If you have ads targeting the US market also, then just beware because you too may have ads that are not reaching the people that you think they are.

In other news, LinkedIn introduces mentions. Linkedin has a new way for you to engage with your network through the ability to mention your connections and companies in conversations on LinkedIn. So how does it work? It’s pretty straightforward. Begin by typing the name of the connection or company in your status update box or in the comment field in the homepage. Then select someone from the list of your connections that appear on the dropdown, complete your status or comment, and post it. The person or company you mention will then receive a notification, alerting them that they have been mentioned.

So the function is essentially a replica of Facebook mention functionality so we should expect this to increase conversation on LinkedIn and should catch on pretty fast because people are familiar with it. It has rolled out from English speaking countries on April 4th and other countries should follow shortly.

I’ve had some really nice comments this past week and thank you to everyone who sent me emails, Facebook posts or visited the site and added comments.  Here are just a few from the past seven days; first of all there was Nancy who checked out the Scott Stratten interview and she said, “James this was the first time I’ve listened to Traffic Jam, I have enjoyed it and will be back.” So thank you Nancy.

Barry Cumming says, “Phenomenal content from Traffic Jam. If you’re using Facebook in your Digital Marketing strategy, you have to listen to this and then implement.” He was checking out the Jen Sheahan interview from last week, which seems to be a popular episode, because it had also a really nice comment from Ernesto Verdugo who said, “James Reynolds never ceases to impress me, he has one of the best podcast I have heard about the latest of the latest, happening on Facebook. I would surely recommend it.” Thank you Ernesto, I always value your comments and I value everyone’s comments and if you have one, please head on over to TrafficJamCast.com, leave a comment there in the comment section, or leave us a review over at iTunes, I would appreciate that.

The One Minute Traffic Tip; wherever possible, we should of course be building an email list from our website, perhaps using a service like Aweber, or Office Autopilot because when you have a list of subscribers, each time you add a new blog post, or perhaps a new product or service to your website, You can inform your subscribers and instantly get traffic to your web pages. This of course is traffic 101. All simple stuff!

But how do you get the highest number of click through rate from your emails? Here are a few quick tips. First of all, keep your email body brief. The aim is not to place all the content in the email but just to evoke curiosity and to encourage the click through so keeping it short and sharp is best.

Include several hyperlinks to your target page and use a different call to action each time so you can trigger the click in a different manner. Those links should be in a larger text so they stand out from the rest of the email, perhaps H1 or H2 tags. H1 does work really well! The bigger the better I find.

Also include an image in the email which too, should be hyperlinked to your target page, and the best performing is an image of a video player with a play button so it actually likes you can play a video within the email, that gets a lot of curiosity and people clicking on it.

So there are a few quick tips. If you want to see exactly what template I use for my emails, and want to swipe it over for your own use, head on over to TrafficJamCast.com and subscribe to my email updates. I’ll send you an email each week when I announce a new episode using this exact format I describe here and of course get some free goodies too so well worth doing.

That rounds out Episode#6 of Traffic Jam I’ll be right back next week with another interview and all the very latest and greatest traffic tips and news. So if you’ve enjoyed this episode, please leave me an iTunes review and I’ll give you a shout out next week.

Playing us out this week is the MK Dub version of the 1992 classic house track, Can You Feel It.

RESOURCES

MENTIONS

THIS WEEKS NEWS IN TRAFFIC

ONE MINUTE TRAFFIC TIP

THE TRAFFIC JAM

Chez Damier – Can U Feel It

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