Episode #5 is all about Facebook innovations. There’s been so many updates made by Facebook recently that James decided to invite on the show, one of the foremost experts on Facebook Marketing; Jennifer Sheahan of FBadsLab. Jennifer and her team handle Facebook advertising accounts from some of the biggest names, including none other than Barack Obama’s Democratic Party.  Listen in now and enjoy one of our most content packed episodes to date.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS

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Welcome back to Traffic Jam, this is episode #5, I’m James Reynolds, your host, and I along with my special guest each week bring you the, latest,  cutting edge traffic techniques to drive a bigger audience to your website.

On today’s show, we have an exclusive interview with Jennifer Shean from FBadlabs.com. Jen is at the absolute forefront of Facebook marketing and works with some of the biggest personalities and companies in the planet including non other than the US President himself Barack Obama. As there have been so many developments coming out of Facebook recently, I have asked Jen to come on the show to tell us what these updates mean and how you can take advantage of them. It’s a real content packed interview with a ton of tips for getting the most out of your Facebook advertising campaign so get ready with a paper pad because you’re going to be taking some serious notes on the episode.

Of course you want to stick around until the end of the show for this week’s news in traffic where we have all of the latest news from the past week in traffic generation, plus there’s the one minute traffic tip, which is about a minute long and includes a tip on traffic. OK, the name kind of gives that away.

A quick shout out to Danielle Blaker, Nick Gonzales and all the Digital Bites team who are doing a great job bringing together digital media experts in the Middle East via their website digitalbites.me and their monthly events. I’m very happy to be a weekly contributor to their website which is really building a strong reputation as a source of knowledge and best practice on all Middle East Digital. If you’re in Dubai and can make it to their next event in Dubai Media City in April, make the effort to go along, I look forward to seeing you there because I too will be in attendance. For further information in their events, visit DigitalBites.me.

Because Jen’s got so many great tips to share on this episode, let’s drive straight in to the feature interview and we’re talking Facebook innovation.

Jennifer:  Hello, James.  Thanks for having me.

James:  It’s a real pleasure to have you on. Thanks for joining us. So, before we begin, tell our listeners a little bit about who you are, where you are, and what you do.

Jennifer:  Ok.  Sure!  My name is Jennifer Sheahan and I’m originally from Chicago but I moved to Melbourne, Australia about seventeen years ago and I haven’t looked back.  I’m really happy to not have to live through Chicago winters anymore.  I own and operate a Facebook Marketing Agency called FB Ads Lab and we focus primarily on helping medium-sized businesses bring their marketing over to Facebook.  So, we help them with their ads and their ad campaigns and pages and help them stay on the cutting-edge of what needs to happen in Facebook to their business.

James:  Fantastic!  And you’re now in Melbourne. Is that right?

Jennifer:  That’s correct…!  That’s correct…!

James:  I didn’t quite what it is about the water in Melbourne but we had Victoria Gibson who’s also a Facebook Specialist on the show a few weeks back and she, indeed, also is from Melbourne.  So, you guys are obviously doing something right over there with Facebook?

Jennifer:  We sure are.  Victoria and I are good friends. We get together regularly and share tactics and stuff.  We work together quite well.  She’s very smart.

James:  She is, indeed.  Yeah.  Well, you’re also a smart cookie when it comes to Facebook and that’s exactly why I got you on today’s podcast.  There’d been so many updates recently on Facebook and I thought it’d be great to get you on the show to kinda share your expert insight into most of these recent innovations coming out of Facebook and how businesses can best maximize them to generate targetted traffic.  So, if you’re happy to follow my lead, I scribbled down some notes here with a few updates that have happened, I guess, over the last twelve months or so, and I’d like to get you to tell us more about what each of these updates is all about, and, kinda your top insider tips on how to get the most out of each one.  So, we kinda break these down into what it is and your top insider secrets on getting the most out of it.  So, are you ready to roll?      

Jennifer:  Absolutely!  That sounds like a good plan.  Let’s try it!

James:  Let’s do it.  Ok.  Well,  first one, and I guess it’s a little way back now, is the introduction of Timeline.  Tell us about that.

Jennifer:  Absolutely!  So, it was probably a year ago now that Facebook introduced Timeline which is a new format for personal profiles and business pages.  And that had a profound impact on businesses because there were a number of things that, all of a sudden, became far more important.  And, for those businesses who implement those things right away, they were able to ride that wave.  One of those things is images and the importance of images on your Facebook page and your Facebook posts because what they changed  was that images were displayed much larger and they were, kinda, front and center, and I’ve seen these nice, big, colorful images in their news feed, people were firmer likely to engage with them.  Prior to Timeline, we were all, kinda, posting little comments and thoughts, more like Twitter.  And there were images here and there but it wasn’t quite as prominent as it became with Timeline.  So, that was one thing.  Another thing that was really important is they changed the cover photo.  They gave…it was…there’s a big Timeline image right at the top of our Facebook page as now that wasn’t there before.  And this is just prime real estate and it’s really a great opportunity for brands toI guess, to express who they are.  And it’s important that you change that…that…that…regurlarly, that you change that in every month or so, you might want to have, seasonal changes, or something like that, but that Timeline image is quite large and it’s really important aspect of your brand page.  That’s… there’s a couple of other things…do you have time for me to go into it?

James:  Well…, I think let’s drill into it…Yeah…Yeah…Fire away, Jen!  This is all good stuff…  

Jennifer:  Yeah…No worry…So Timeline also introduced a lot of…insights?  So, page owners were finally able to see how many fans they had and which friends were talking and from which countries were talking about their posts, which posts they were talking about so you could see, if you posted, you know, let’s say, over a week, you might post two photos and two videos and two question updates, where you could then go in and see, “did the photos generate more interaction on your page or was it a question update”?  And you can see how…what the impact was, which is just fantastic for page owners.  And then that helps you fine tune your messages, I guess, to make sure you have the biggest impact on your audience?

James:  Yup…!

Jennifer:  And then, we get to my favorite thing, which is the ability to highlight a post or pin a post to the top.  And a lot of brand page owners don’t realize that you can pin a post to the top of your Facebook page and it will stand every seven days..?  And, really great way to use this feature is to have a post that is, kind of an introduction to your company or your brand or, you might want to say, like it might be your opt-in or it might be your, you know, e-mail capture and you might have an event coming up and you have a little short video that encourages people to click an opt-in to get more information about the event.  That’s where…where pin that to the top so that when I do come and visit your brand page, that’s the first thing I see. And for some of our corporate clients, it’s nice to have like an introduction, “who are we?”.  “This is us,” and you might have an…like a tour of the inside of their office or you might get to meet the Marketing Director on the video or something like that.  It’s really cool.  And then, you can also highlight posts that have, maybe, especially if you have, like,  eye-catching images.  It’s nice to highlight them and that means that takes up the entire width of your Facebook page…

James:  Yup…

Jennifer:  …and it kinda makes your page, when somebody else is browsing it, looks lot more interesting (?) to have different shapes and sizes on your page.

James:  Got it!  That’s an excellent tip.  I haven’t actually ever thought of using it in that manner.  So, I’m definitely take that one away and implement that myself (?)  But let’s move on to the next one which feeds on from the discussion, I guess, about (uhm) good quality images and impactful stories in your post.  Tell us a little bit about page post ad.  This, again, is a very good innovation, I guess, for advertisers.

Jennifer:  Yes…Yes…Page posts are excellent and they’re very effective.  So…most people familiar wtih market place ad, which is the traditional, sort of, rectangular shaped ads that you find at the upper right hand side of Facebook.  And…about a year ago  again or so, that Facebook introduced this page post ad concept which means that the ad starts its life as a post on your page as an update.  So, you may wanna say, you know, (uhm) “we have a special on holidays to the Bahamas,” and you post a picture of the Bahamas and a link where people can click through to get the special offer—(uhm)  a holiday to the Bahamas.  And then, once you have that post on your page, you can go into your ads manager and create an ad (!) from that post.  And so, that kind of carries that post over to the right hand side…it gets a much, much bigger picture than a regular market place ad and also has that social proof aspect of showing how many likes, how many comments and how many shares that post has had.  So, if you use the page post ad format to highlight your most popular discussions…?…on your page…?,  obviously,  the discussions where you have an image because that’s gonna be the most…give you the most impact…those discussions…you highlight those with the page post ad and you get a lot attraction for a very low price.

James:  Got it!  Excellent…cool…!  Well, what are your top tips on page post ads in terms of the best format and content to use?  And, also, what about frequency?  Is there a good amount of times to be using page post ads?

Jennifer:  Well…, the first thing to consider is you…you wanna make sure you have an image in the post.  There are some people who, you know, are everyday on my Facebook page.  I see people doing page post ads for a post that don’t have any images and  you’re kind of wasting the effort there…

James:  Yeah…

Jennifer:  …’cause you get a whole lot more real estate if you do include an image of some kind.  So, number one, is you wanna make sure you have an image.  When you’re choosing your image, number two is a colorful, bright, engaging kind of image that is going to stand out on Facebook.  One that works very, very well is a screenshot of a video.  So, we have a screenshot of a video, it looks like a video itself…it has a play arrow and sometimes these get approved by Facebook.  We’ve had a couple get disapproved ‘cause it doesn’t have the play button, but I…I have about ten of them running at the moment and so it’s not against the terms of service.  And you can advertise those and it looks fantastic…

James:  Yeah…!

Jennifer:  …because it’s just…it obvious it’s a video when people want to click it and once they click it, they go to the post and there’s your link to watch the video.  So that’s (uhm)…that’s the second tip.  The third tip is to…choose your…your posts that already have a fair amount of engagement.  You can re-activate an old topic from your Facebook page, re-activate it today, (you can) go back to something back in December, if you wanted to,  if it got twenty-eight comments from people and it’s still relevant, you can make a page post ad about it.  And that re-activates it for all of your new fans and advertise it to them.

James:  Got it!  Well, that’s a classic…classic killer strategy.  Yeah!  Fantastic…cool…!  What about the actual make-up of the post itself?  Is there a certain length of (uhm) text or….

Jennifer:  That is a good question!  Yeah…

James:  …a specific action? (laughs a bit)

Jennifer:  Yeah…!  Good…!  Very…very, very good question.  Yes, there is and (it’s) I’m glad you brought that up.  So, what you wanna do is make sure your post is short.  You want, maybe, one maximum of two sentences.  Sometimes people make, (uhm), Facebook post in their page that are three or four paragraps long.  Really, you’re much better off making a blog post and linking to your blog post, if you have that much to say.

James:  Yup…

Jennifer:  So, just say it where two sentences and provide the link where they can get more information, if you need to.  So, one or two sentences, an image, and a link.  And if you want it to give your page post a boost, you can put the link in the first comment.  Instead of putting it in the post itself, you can put the link, you know, for us to read more or to go to your blog post or to watch your video.  If you put that in the comments…below…, you’ve automatically given a page post a boost because Facebook sees it as relevant because, “Oh, wow!  It already has a comment.  This must be really popular…”

James:  Ahhh….got it…

Jennifer:  “…we’ll show it to more people.”

James:  Got it!  So, the thing is, to get it set up, get your (uhm) link, add it to your comment, hopefully get a little bit of social interaction going first and then to use page post ad to then, boost it up and get, (ahh), more leverage from it. 

Jennifer:  Exactly…exactly…!  Now, when you’re creating your page post ad, you have control of whoever sees that ad.  Now, I recommend at the very beginning, when you’re just starting out, you only advertise to your existing fans (?).  (Uhm) You…you can advertise to anyone that you want to but you’re gonna save a lot of money and a lot of frustration and a lot of wasted clicks if you only advertise to your existing fans, to start of with.  It might seen counter-intuitive because you’re advertising to people who are already your fans, but the truth of the matter is that, at this point, only seven to ten per cent of people will see your posts, anyway, if you don’t promote them or create a page post ad.  So, what you’re doing by creating a page post ad is ensuring that more of your fans do see the post (?), they click on it, hopefully they’ll like it, and hopefully they comment on it or share it and, in that way, they’re the ones sharing your content with their friends instead of you, (uh),  co-actively advertising it to their friends.  So, when you’re first starting out, (that) the great way (in) to engage your fans, (to get) and to get more fans by them being the ones to share your contact…

James:  Got it…

Jennifer:  That make sense?

James:  Absolutely!  No…it makes perfect sense!  And, (uhm), yeah, with those sort of numbers…

Jennifer:  Ok.

James:  … of only seven to ten per cent of actual reach for a typical post, I think, (uhm), and it’s almost, perhaps, a necessity if you really wanna leverage your fan base to actually start using page post ads to reach them.  That’s good!

Jennifer:  Yeah…it is! I have one more thing to say about that before we move on to the next thing, though…

James:  (laughs softly)

Jennifer:  …it’s one thing that a lot of people, this is really velvet now, a lot of people are…who are not advertising only to their fans (that) they might be advertising to, say, everybody who likes internet marketing in the United States. 

James:  Yup!

Jennifer:  One of the problems that you’re having with people who choose a broad target market for their page post ads is a little bit of, (uhm), push back from people while saying, you know, — “stop spamming me…”, “stop writing on my page…”, “stop showing your ads…”, — all that sort of stuff and it’s causing some friction for…for advertisers (?).

James:  Yup!

Jennifer:  So, you really don’t wanna be upsetting people with your ads and you have no control over how often or where Facebook show your ads (?).  So, in the beginning, it’s great to just stick to your fans and boost your fan numbers that way and then be the ones to share your content.

James:  Got it!  Excellent tips.  Good!  Well, how do you(r) page post ads differ from promoted post because that, again, was another innovation that came out quite recently, and, I guess, we should properly…

Jennifer:  Yes, it is…

James:  …just distinguish the difference between the two and, perhaps, you will also talk about sponsored stories, as well.  But, let’s start with promoted posts. 

Jennifer:  Yup!  Yeah…!  Promoted posts…!  When you go into your Facebook page and you make a new post.  So,  you upload a photo and you comment, you know, you…you make your post.  Right in the bottom right hand corner is the option to promote this post.  So, thats gives you the option to pay Facebook — you know, five dollars or ten dollars or fifteen dollars or maybe more, if you have thousands of fans — to show that post to a certain number of your fans.  So, let’s say you have a thousand fans, it might cost you fifteen dollars to make sure that Facebook show your post to eight hundred of them.  That’s a promoted post.  And you really don’t have much control over it and what is does is that it shows up in our news feed just like your post would, anyway.  It just…as sponsored underneath it.  So, it doesn’t look like an ad (?) whereas page post ads are in the right hand column and they look like an ad.  (short pause) So, everybody knows that a page post ad is an ad but with a spons…with a promoted post, it’s right there in the news feed right in the middle and, (uhm), and, again, you should promote those to your fans only.  Facebook do give the option to promote to fans and friends of fans (?) but I highly recommend you avoid that…that choice, at this point…

James:  And I guess…

Jennifer:  …so Facebook can fine tune it a little bit more.   

James:  Yeah!  And I guess that’s where you would get resistance (uhm) if your actual post started showing up in (ahh) feeds of other people who, perhaps, who aren’t really interested in your content. I guess that’s when you get haters and — ahh— (slight laugh) and the spam “riddicks” coming out…

Jennifer:  Yeah…!

James:  …and (uh) throwing abuse at you…

Jennifer:  That’s right!  Right!  In my case, if you advertise to my friends, like, you know, (uh) my aunt Dianne is, yeah!, one of my friends in Facebook.  Like, my aunt Dianne is sixty years old.  She doesn’t do anything related to business, or marketing, or anything like that.  And if you’re advetising your stuff to my aunt…aunt Dianne, just because she’s my friend, it kinda doesn’t make sense (?).

James:  Yup!

Jennifer:  (Uhm) I guess, if people are working on the assumption that all of my friends are gonna be interested in, you know, PPC advertising or something just because I am… (short laugh) 

James:  (faint off-side laugh)  Of course…good!  Well, there are…are there any kind of, (uhm), good do’s and don’ts for promoted post?  Again, is there any type of post that make a more effective and useful promoted post?  Or is it kind of following the same sort of guidelines of (ahh)…that of…(ahh)…page post ads?

Jennifer:  Well, look…I think that it’s…it’s just one of those things you wanna use sparingly.  You wanna use…you don’t necessarily have to promote every post you write.  You don’t have to promote every…you make everything into a page post ad.  So, you might post maybe once or twice a week something on your page, like, gets a lot of interaction or a lot of, you know, debate or, you know, people are just sharing it like crazy because it’s super useful and really helpful and really timely.   When those are the things you wanna look out for, and those are the things you wanna make sure to see more of, all your other posts, they can just be there.  You don’t have to use promoted post or page post ads or anything to amplify those. I don’t.  They, you know, they’re not gonna have an impact on your bottomline.   I think you should choose the…choose to spend money on things that are gonna make you more money.  Those things would be, (uhm), you know, your best, most (uhm) targeted posts, if that makes sense.

James:  Yeah…it does indeed.  Great!  Ok.  Well, next item that I’ve got scribbled down in my notepad here is sponsored stories.  How does that differ from the two we’ve just talked about?

Jennifer:  You know, sponsored stories, I know this could get a little confusing, but sponsored stories are very, very simple ads on Facebook.  Again, they appear in the right hand side but, sometimes on mobiles, (uhm) they might appear right in the news feed, as well.  If you’d see, (uhm), like suggested apps to download or you’ll see that Jennifer Shean likes this page or suggested page or that it suggested app or something like that, (uhm) that I like to post or that I’ve checked in to a  restaurant or those kinds of things and is really just the business is paying to amplify the fact that people are engaging with our brand in someway or another.

James:  Yeah!

Jennifer:  Now, this is an excellen way to get new fans on your page (?) because it’s such a simple ad and for some reason,  people (uhm) take action on them quickly.  So, if you’re looking to build your audience and you want to get more fans, sponsored stories are an excellent option.  You can set a budget for five dollars a day and set up a very targeted sponsored storied campaign that you just make sure that, you know, you just advertised five dollars a day.  It’s not a huge investment, and you’ll see, you’ll get quite a few fans every single day from your five- dollar investment.       

James:  Ok.  Got it!  Right!  Next one I’m gonna fire at you is conversion tracking.  And I know when we caught up on ‘em another podcast of mine, I guess, eighteen months ago, you were using a number of kinda external tools to track conversions via Facebook.  Have you moved over to the new conversion tracking tool within Facebook and what are your thoughts on it?

Jennfier:  You know, this is (uhm) conversion tracking is fantastic and every single one of our clients (ahh) all the way back…dating back to 2010 has said, “Doesn’t Facebook have conversion tracking?  How come?  Why don’t they?” (Uhm) Facebook is such a young platform for them and it’s growing and changing constantly.  Now, in my time, (uhm) ever since I’ve been advertising on Facebook since before 2008, (uhm) this is now the third time I’ve seen some form of conversion tracking come through on Facebook.  So, I’m a little bit skeptical about it just because it kinda appears and then disappears for no apparent reason (?) (uhm) but I’m hoping that this time, it sticks around for good.  You know, because it’s so useful and it’s really isn’t important to understand that your efforts are paying off.  So, conversion tracking on Facebook means that you can (uhm) create a conversion pixel and place it on your confirmation page and you can add a dollar value to that.  So, if each sale is worth ten dollars to you, you can, (uhm), specify that in Facebook and (incoherent word) an ad campaign to track and to…to work towards that goal, I suppose, that conversion goal.  And it’s quite simple.  It’s cut…it’s quick good ‘cause it tracks conversions that happen within one day, (uhm) seven days or twenty-eight days after a person either clicks on the ad or if they view the ad.  So, that’s quite (uhm)…that’s quite unique if, you know, if I see your ad and twenty-eight days later, I buy from you, that will still register…as a conversion…

James:  Got it…

Jennifer:  …which is typical.  

James:  …Fantastic!  Well, that’s very good. Now, I guess there are advantages to having all of that information within the one interface inside Facebook more than having to use multiple tools…

Jennifer:  It is…It is good…I just (uhm) (used to) caution people because I’m  not sure how long it will stick around…(laughs)

James:  (soft laughter) Going on history, who knows? Maybe..

Jennifer: (softly speaking) We’ll see…    

James:  Yeah…maybe here tomorrow…

Jennifer:  That’s right!

James:  …just don’t know…

Jennifer:   Just seeing the caution and things change…Yeah…(soft laughter)

James:  (soft laughter)  Yeah…that’s a very good point and (uhm) it’s something, I know, you and I are very much aligned on it.  You should never be single-point sensitive and just reliance on one tool or one medium.  So, it’s a good lesson there, you know.  Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket and convert over to Facebook conversion tracking.  Still use your other tools, as well.  Good!  Ok!  Well, next one on my list we have…

Jennifer:  Yeah…!  That’s right…

James:  …we have this Facebook (uhm) offers and this is not something that I view.  So, I am very keen to find out a little bit more about how the application of Facebook offers could be applied to business and how effective it is.  So, (ahh) Jen, the floor is yours.  Tell us about Facebook offers.

Jennifer:  Yeah…Absolutely…So, Facebook offers are really cool feature for certain kind of businesses.  So, if you can provide a substantial discount to your Facebook fans, (uhm), it could…it could go crazy…absolutely crazy.  It’s almost like your own little mini groupon, (uhm), right there within Facebook.  So, once you’ve got some fans and you’ve got an established presence and…and a good, solid brand page, you know, your Timeline is all set up and (in your) well branded cause you’re gonna get quite a lot of traffic from (incoherent word), you gonna make sure it’s well branded and well established.  Then, (uhm), there’s a couple of things you wanna look out for (fer) with Facebook offers. It’s…you’re offering a discount so you wanna make that discount something fairly substantial, like, at least, twenty per cent off your regular price or double the value, you know, like, if you buy one tee shirt, you get one free or (uhm) somethign like that, you know, you buy art calendar, you get free shipping or you buy one, get one to give as a gift or…that kind of stuff.  So, you wanna make sure it’s fairly substantial and fairly unique (uhm) but you also wanna make sure that it’s simple so that’s really, really unique and easy and that people don’t have to, you know, buy one blue one and one pink one and then exchange an orange one and then send in ahead for five minutes, you know…assurance, you wouldn’t believe the things that come across my desk.  So, keep it simple.  Just spend a hundred dollars with us and we’ll send you, you know, a free coffee mug or something like that.  Now, again, images come back to…to haunt us.  So, you wanna make sure you use a clear and engaging image.  Pictures of people using the product are fantastic.  (Uhm) Anything with people in it works way (incoherent word) Facebook than just, like, if you’re selling coffee mugs, just a picture of a coffe mug is not nearly as powerful as a happy, smiling woman upholding your coffee mug.  (Uhm) She…that woman with the big smile and looking directly in the camera is going to generate so much more engagement than just a coffee mug.

James:  Got it! 

Jennifer:  (Uhm) And you wanna make sure that you can see it from far away, too.  So, if it’s a little thumbnail image, don’t shove too much stuff into your image.  We gonna say something?    

James:  Yeah!  I was  gonna ask about the use of, (uhm), text on the images because I would think that a lot of people would be inclined to put, you know, the offer on the image itself perhaps, you know, big sign with twenty per cent off.  Is that effective and do Facebook even allow it right now?

Jennifer:  (Uhm) You can…You can use an image with…with that…for offers.  You can.  But I still recommend you’re much better off with a nice picture of a person looking directly into the camera.

James:  Got it.  Ok…good!  And what sort of results have your clients been getting with Facebook (uhm) offers?  Have you got any sort of success stories that you can kinda attribute

Jennifer:  Yeah…!  Well…there’s…yeah…absolutely!  it’s fantastic for events!  So, (uhm), I’m sure you’re familiar with, you know, when you have events and you wanna fill the room and you have a certain number of spots available at this price for the VIP pricing and, you know that sort of thing, it’s fantastic to advertise an offer directly to your fans and promote it on Facebook. But what you need to do to make it really just explode, like a rocket, is to cross-promote every ware at the same time.  So, we recommend that you have, like, a launch date so you want to launch it at ten p.m. on this day and, at that same time, you wanna make sure that you are also sending an e-mail to your entire database telling them to go to your Facebook page and get this offer.  You can…you’ll get a direct link to the offer in Facebook and get them to go straight there and do that before…before it’s only up for too long because an offer without many people taking up the offer (?) doesn’t show very much social perth.

James:  Yeah.

Jennifer:  So, right there on the offer it says, you know, four people claimed this.  That’s not quite as powerful as four thousand people claimed this.

James:  Yeah.

Jennifer:  So, you wanna make sure that you’ve got a blog post and a video and an e-mail going out to your audience and that you pin that post to the top and then you promote…you get to choose your budget with your offer (?) so you can choose a nice big, hefty budget and promote the daylights out of it and get as many of your existing customers to go and claim the offers as quickly as possible.  (Uhm) That really helped in keeping your product a super boost.

 James:  Got it!  Cool!  I guess this is something that is probably for ocassional use but when it’s applied, sounds very, very effective.  Great!  The next one’s (uhm) I’m really excited…

 Jennifer:  Yeah!  And most of our clients use it for — I’m sorry…— (uhm) most of our clients use it for (uhm) about once of quarter (?) or several (?).  I’ve seen it to be a good…a good amount of time to have an offer.  If you have them to often, they kinda lose their “oomph” but ever so often for different kinds of markets, it’s once a quarter and it’s a good time.

 James:  Fantastic!  Good!  Well, the next one I’ve got on my list (uhm) I’m very excited to talk to you about because I think the marketing opportunites for this (ahh) look absolutely fantastic and that’s customer audiences and, more recently, which I think is very fresh, is look-alike audiences.  What’s ther…what’s this update all about?

 Jennifer:  Yes!  Yeah!  It’s really good!  (laughs)  So, (uhm), this is just fantastic and I’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting for this option.  So, custom audiences allow you to road in your e-mail database into Facebook.

Jennifer: Once you input that database, Facebook will automatically match that encrypted data against Facebook’s active users and they will build a custom audience in your ads account with everybody that matches  your list so that means you can advertise your product or service, your ad campaign, only goes to those people who match that email list.

James: Wow! I mean that’s powerful.

Jennifer:  It’s really good, and you know that these people have already had some sort of contact with you depending on where they are in your funnel; you know your sales funnel follow up process. So if you know that you met them at a conference, or you know that all these people came from a trade show, where these all leads from your podcast, you know you can tailor that audience, you can tailor that ad campaign to speak directly to those people, they might be your newsletter subscribers and you want to offer them a special deal or it’s just that the options are unlimited, it’s so exciting!

James: Wow! Yeah, I’m just thinking in my head now as you talk about this are the opportunities you know to kind of collaborate segmented email list with Facebook custom audiences and Google remarketing, I mean the precise messaging that you can create with those three tools is just is mind blowing, I think the opportunities are pretty fantastic. Good! Have you manage to roll this out with any costumers yet or even for your own activities?

Jennifer: Yes! So what we’ve done is we recommend that you load in your custom audience and then you fine tune any further so you can speak to just people who live in the United States, or just people so you load in your entire email database and you might have you know 300 thousand are in the US, and 200 thousand are in Canada and a 100 thousand are in the UK, and you can set them up to target only those that are in UK and speak only to them about their stuff, you can also targeted even further and go to only women in UK who are 40 years, 40-45 and married. Really narrowing it down to, you know those people who work in the health care industry in the UK, you know I mean it just goes down to a micro level and it’s really exciting.

James: Wow! Fantastic and I guess if you know who’s on your list you could actually get it down to a targeting of almost an individual person if you know them that well, which would be really freaky. Oh that’s cool stuff. What about a lookalike audience Jen, I mean that’s an off shoe as I understand it, tell us a little bit about that and what the opportunities are there.

Jennifer: Right, so lookalike audiences you need to have a custom audience first. So what you could do is you could load up your custom audience of your best costumers, let’s say you have a thousand people who have spent a whole lot of money with you, they’ve been you client for years, they are committed and involved and every time you have an event they come and every time you sell something they buy it, you’ve got that email list of those ideal costumers, you’ll load them into Facebook as a custom audience then you can go in to create a lookalike audience and what that will do Facebook will then find people who are similar to the people who are on your custom audience list. Does that make sense?

James: Got it. So it’s looking at their profile.

Jennifer: Exactly! So it’s looking at all of their profile data, all the things they like and don’t like, how active they are and all some stuff, in what country they’re in and you can narrow it right down and create a lookalike audience and advertise directly to them. Yehey!

James: Wow! Good! That is super awesome. And this is just been rolled out right? I mean this thing is got some sort of global release in the last, maybe, a week or so.  Have you got any results from this?  You must have tested it all yet?

 Jennifer:  It’s…we’ve got…we’ve got two test campaigns running right now and, so far, the results are phenomenal that the click-through rates are just through the roof which means that our cost-per-click is much lower and it means that our ads stay just how much more profitable the ROI is huge because we’re not spending nearly as much money and the audience is much more targeted.  Otherwise,  you mean you’re advertising to other all men living in a particular area who like particular thing that’s kind of a  guess of hoping that people will be similar but this is just…this is just…there is…there is no hoping or guessing and this is fantastic.

 James:  Love it.  Love it.  Cool.  Alright…I’ve got the last item on the list and again it’s very topical because a lot of talk about it at the moment and that is graph search.  Lift the lid on this one.  What’s all about it, Jen?

 Jennifer:  Ok.  So, graph search is fairly new and it’s been out there.  Not too many people are not really paying attention too much on it but what it is, is Facebook is kind of linked to Bing in search engine, right?  So, they have a fairly strong relationships since way back 2008 and so they’ve always been building this database of…they know everything about us, basically…Facebook do.  And so they’ve been trying to use this information to build this search engine kind of behind the scenes.  So, now what you can do with grass search is, like, say you go into Google, right?  And you type in “photographers in Melbourne, Australia”.  You type in photographers and you get all those people who arel really good at their SEO and rank for photographer in Melbourne, Australia, right?  They may…it doesn’t say that they’re good photographers but it means they’re really good in SEO so when you go into Facebook and you type in “photographer Melbourne, Australia”,  you’re going to receive result based on somewhat the pages your friends like and pages your friends have commented on or places your friends have checked in.  So, it’s wholesome for restaurants and any sort of, like, bars and nightclubs and local businesses and hardware stores and coffee shops and all kinds of stuff because by typing those words in, everything that is optimized in Facebook for “photographer Melbourne, Australia”, is going to appear in your search.  So, you can then select whether you gonna get images or you wanna get pages or you wanna get people nand Facebook will return those results to you.  So, it’s more important than ever that “photographers in Melbourne, Australia”, are well optimized on their Facebook page and in their profiles and in their business page so that when I type that in, I find you.

 James:  got it.  Well, that makes perfect sense.  I guess the next question we should probably cover how you optimize that page.  So, we start off with the research aspect.  How do you know what key phrases to be targeting so that it works in terms of search terms as Google would do.  How do you start of with the research and then what you do in terms of page optimized for their searched terms?

Jennifer:   Yeah.  Well, I think that their search terms are fairly similar.  This is the first time I ever said that because for years, I have been saying, you know, Facebook is not Google.  Facebook is not, you know, you don’t need the same keywords on Facebook in Facebook ads that you do in Google Adwords.  Google Adwords, you know, you’re searching for words that people are going to type in the search box for your ad to appear.  If you’re on Facebook, that’s not the same.  The keywords we use in Facebook ads are demographic keywords.  We’re looking for people who like Oprah Winfrey.  They’re not gonna type “Oprah Winfrey” into the search box on Facebook.  Do you know what I mean? 

 James:  Yup.

 Jennifer:  When it comes to optimizing your Facebook page, you do need those keywords.  You do need the same Google keywords because people…it’s not, like, a context search anymore.  If I’m looking for a good coffee shop in New York City, you know, near Times Square, I’m gonna put “good coffee Times Square”. 

 James:  Yup.

 Jennifer:  And I’ll see or I’ll say, “Stacey was just here.  And she found a great spot!”   Of course, I’m gonna go there because Stacey just commented on this thing and she put a picture of her and her husband in the coffee shop.  So, of course, I will go there because I gives me something to talk about Stacey and it’s recommended by my friend which is far more powerful than an SEO optimized Google search.

 James:  Yeah.  Absoutely.  Quite’s got that social element into it.  Well, do we know…

 Jennifer:  Yes.  That’s exactly  right.

 James:  Do we know yet where we should be placing those keyphrases within our page?  Could we quite limit it to the content placement aren’t we on Facebook?

 Jennifer:  Well, you are and you are not.  It depends that you usually know where to look.  The first thing you wanna do is name your page appropriately.  So, just a simple name, using your business name and/or location.  But you don’t wanna to on and on and on.  So, it shouldn’t be, you know, “Joe’s Coffee”, “the best coffee in New York City”, ïn New York Times Square” or something like that.  It could just say “Joe’s Coffee Times Square” or “Joe’s Coffee New York City” or something like that.  And then when you categorize your page, you wanna choose your business category and you can choose up to three sub-categories.  So, you might be a restaurant, you might be a cafe, you might be a coffee roaster or coffee grinder or, you know, you can find three sub-categories, as well, and these are important than ever.  In the past, we just picked one category and really didn’t care what it was.  But you wanna choose, make sure that you choose it as closely as possible. The next step is to research relevant keywords to your business so I’m recommending that you just get your main top SEO keywords and start with that. It’s…I mean…a couple of phrases might be good but you wanted to make sense becuase you’re putting these into your posts and you’re gonna be putting it in the about section on Facebook and there’s a section about your mission, your company description…all of that on your page and in your profile.  You can fill that with keywords.  But I mean, obviously, you don’t wanna do it, like, spamming list with just keywords and commas, like, you can say, “We are just coffee shop.  We believe in the best coffee shop in New York City.  We’re located by Times Square!”, you know what I mean?  So that people can read it and make sense.  And then, you wanna expand your page.  So, you can make sure you use pictures to your page and tag your business in the photo.  This is now a lot of people are doing.  When you upload a photo on a page, you can see an option to tag someone in the photo and I recommend you tag other than yourself personally or business page in every photo you load up.  So, people are searching for coffee in New York City and your page will come up and the image will come up in the image search.  And you can also use those keywords in your posts.  Again, saying, “We’ve just been voted the best coffee in New York City!”, right?  So, that kind of stuff.  So you wanna make sure you’re using those keywords in the posts, in the comment and in the about section, in the  mission section and company description section of your page.

 James:  Wow!  Got it!  Ok…this is great stuff, Jen.  And I’m sure we’ve given people plenty of actionable stuff.  Just around graph search alone is some fantastic tips there.  Great!   Well, we’ve got for…

 Jennifer:  It’s exciting.  Yeah.

 James:  It is so exciting and i think in terms of, you know, of development of Facebook as a platform on a whole new level of usage, you know, and what it can be used for coming up with graph search.  So, this is so fantastic stuff.  I can’t believe what’s happening in twelve months since we spoke.

 Jennifer:  (laughs) It sure has!  Goodness me!  Imagine what gonna happen within the next twelve months.  It’d be awesome!

 James:  Ohhh…

 Jennifer:  it’s fun to try to keep up with it all.  That’s for sure!

 James:  I’m sure, yeah. (It) has a big job for you to keep on top of it.  Oh  , I would ask you:  what have you been doing in the last twelve months ?  I know from personal conversations we’ve had, you’ve also been up to a lot.  Tell us about some of those developments in your own  business.

 Jennifer:  Oh, yeah!  Wow!  We’ve got such a fabulous time.  Well, our agency, FB Ads Lab, has grown dramatically over the past twelve months.  We have…now we have employees on lots of different continents and we help clients internationally all  over the place.   So, we work mainly with agencies and small to medium-sized businesses who already have successful ads running on Adwords and they understand the importance of SEO and they just don’t want to, you know, hire someone in-house.  They just want to get their Facebook stuff right from the beginning.  And so we work with them to help them undestatnd exactly how to optimize their page, how to build their page, what they need to say, how often they need to say it and then when and how to introduce ads into the mix and which style of the ads formats are best for them and their company and their audience.   So, we’ve been doing all of that and it’s just been grow going from straight to straight which is so cool.  One of the big things that we do this year is to work on Barack Obama’s 2012 re-eleciton campaign.  So, that was very, very exciting times and we were able to advertise in key demographic his clean states and just the inside operations there (is) just fascinating.  So, that was very…definitely a highlight of our year.

 James:  Wow!  That’s…that’s fantastic!  I’m a little bit disappointed you didn’t mention my name as a customer alongside Barack Obama but there you go.  (laughter)  Not quite such a big name…

 Jennifer:  You were number two.  I thought we only had time for one.  I’m sorry about that.  (laughs)

 James:  Oh…that’s fantastic!  And what about what’s next, Jen?  You’ve got exciting plans on the horizon where you going with your agency from hereon?

 Jennifer:  Absolutely!  Yeah, we do.  Because we’ve been working with Barack Obama’s team and because we have several large intrernational brands on board, we’ve just, by the nature of the way the things have happened, we’ve developed a very specialist team who are expert at dealing with bigger brands.  And bigger brands with very strict brand guidelines and a large international audience.  So, we have now developed that teama and they are just rocking.  So, we are get setting up another agency directly for them to work.  It is solely in focus on those bigger brands that they’re working with now.  That’s really exciting!  It’s been fun setting that up and you’re just developing that team is just been awesome.  It’s  so fun to work with really motivated talented people.  It’s great!

 James:  Yeah.  It’s a buzz, isn’t it?   Good.  Well, I know that’s pretty close to completion so I guess…

 Jennifer:  Very close…Yes…

 James:  …I’m gonna announce that and point people in the right direction perhaps not on this episode but in forthcoming ones so I’ll make sure people will find that  new agency site.  But for now, Jen, what’s the best place for people to come find you?

 Jennifer:  The best place is to come to fbadslab.com and our Facebook page is, like, fbadslab.com and pretty soon, we’re gonna have a podcast on iTunes.  That’ll be really good.  That will be filled with quick tips and strategies for business pages.  So, just really short episodes.  Just answer the most common questions we get.  We have a list of forty-eight questions so I think I have plenty of episodes  (laughs) to get started.  Yeah!  That’s…that’s where we are.  .

 James:   Awesome!  Jen, that has been absolutely fantastic probably the most content-packed episodes we’ve had today.  That’s an absolutely awesome strategies there.  Thanks so much for coming on the show and perhaps do it all again in twelve months time and see what other developments have taken place inside Facebook.

 Jennifer:  Thank you so much for having me,  James.  It’s been great chatting with you.

 James:  Thanks, Jen.  Bye!

 Jennifer:  Bye!

 This week’s news in traffic: Okay, so some activity out of Pinterest, they’ve given their site a new design and they’ve built it at a new platform which they say is going to help them roll out more updates in the future, and the new site design features a more stylish, more ergonomic look, nothing ground breaking in terms of updates; just a couple of enhancements that allow you to find Pins that you may be interested in a little bit easier. Anyway head on over to Pinterest.com, when you log in, you’ll be faced with a prompt to  convert over to the new design, and hit yes; it’s a nice improvement and well worth checking out.

News out of Facebook, they’ve rolled out their look a like audience which is a development of their custom audiences and gives advertisers an opportunity to reach potential customers who share the same similar differences with their current ones. Now although we’ve discussed this earlier on the show with Jen, I want to mention it again and because this really is an extremely strong feature that you should be getting a hold of right now. If you missed the section of the interview where Jen gave her insider tips on look a like audiences, hit rewind on the podcast, this is a big update.

In other news, watch this space for a new brand and traffic news portal that I’m going to be releasing real soon. If you’ve enjoyed the weekly SEO news I release over at SEOSherpa.com and the PPC news updates I put out at ClickJam.com, this news site is going to be a powered up version and a central hub where I release my core video content from now on; the domain has been chosen, the site designs are in process, and we’ll be sure to announce the release here on Traffic Jam in the coming weeks.

I’ve got some really nice listener comments this week and the first one is from Jason who says, “listening to this while having my breakfast. I’ll be tuning to the next episode when I finish my toast. Loving it!” Thanks Jason,enjoy that breakfast of yours!

I’ve got a comment from Alvin, who says, another great podcast James, loved the Filipino Jam this week. And that is in response to the tune that played out last week’s episode Bebot by the black eyed peas. Alvin, thanks for stopping by.  And Pointer drops in to say this is the first time I’ve listened in and absolutely loving it.

Thanks guys, appreciate the feedback, download’s really growing up to about 25% growth per episode and we’re still sitting stong in the top few percent on the new and noteworthy section, at least for the UAE anyway so thanks guys for your support, really do appreciate the comments there. Really what makes the show so rewarding for me so keep them coming!

Of course if you want to comment or post your ideas and feedback you can do so on iTunes, just search for Traffic Jam Podcast by James Reynolds and of course on the website, TrafficJamCast.com

The one minute traffic tip; I mentioned at the top of the show that I’m a regular contributor to DigitalBites.me and I also provide regular content for ehulool.com, the Bahrain based social blog, Ernesto Verdugo’s amazing websites.tv and from next week I’ll also be contributing to another regional based site interactiveme.com. Guest posting, where you supply content to blog owners who have similar content target market to your own is a very effective way to get yourself in front of a relevant audience.

There are many website owners who are looking for quality content to place in their blogs, in their forums and in their members area and if you can supply real good content, it’s a win win situation – the website owner gets good content and you get in front of a great audience who may find out about you for the very first time.

So how do you find such sites? One simple way to reach out to site owners from your market who you think might benefit from your content or, #2, pop on over to guestr.com which features a directory of sites which accept contributor content.

Okay, it’s a wrap on another episode of Traffic Jam, I’ll be back next week with another featured guest and a whole show packed full of traffic tips. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, leave us a review on iTunes, leave us a comment on TrafficJamCast.com, and I’ll be sure to mention you next week.

Playing out episode #5 is an old school classic hit pop track, it’s by Run DMC called it’s tricky and I happen to know that Run DMC is one of Jenn Sheahan’s favorite acts so I hope she enjoys this one – here we go, Run DMC, It’s Tricky.

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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.

Episode #4 puts the spotlight on Twitter and today James is joined by a top 5 influencer. Scott Stratten, the man behind UnMarketing.com at the time of recording has 2 published books, over 144,000 followers on Twitter and 97,000 tweets. He’s kind of a big deal. Listen in as Scott reveals why you should be on Twitter not because you need to, but because you want to, and why wanting to may not be the right choice.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS

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“If you want to be in Twitter, then you need to be there and continue to be.” @unmarketing
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Welcome to Traffic Jam, the show that’s jammed full of tips from the very best internet traffic experts. Hi, this is James Reynolds and this is episode #4 and this week, we are recording from a different location, we’re in Makati City, in Manila, Philippines where I’m workshopping with my superpinos and that’s the affectionate name I’m giving to my superstar Filipino based team. Production level this week are probably not quite that of previous week because I’m recording this one on a USB headset but I’m sure you’ll find the content still of the same high quality. Now if you have a remote workforce I would really recommend you go see your team. We’ve had four days so far of strategy, planning and workshopping on the business, but most importantly deepening relationships and having a whole bunch of fun too and I know we’ll take the business at even greater heights from this point forward, and we’ve had a lot of fun, mostly on my behalf I say, the team have been introducing me to local delicacies like the 7% Red Horse beer which I’ve accepted very gladfully and also balut, which is an egg with an unhatched embryo inside which I’ve got to say I was less keen to try. Anyway the Manila experience has been absolutely fantastic and I’ll be returning again in three months from now and I’m sure we’ll record another episode of Traffic Jam.

So what have we got coming up on the show? Today’s feature interview is all about Twitter and we’ve got a guy on the show who’s kind of a big deal on the platform. His stats for one are off the scale – 144,000 followers, 97,000 tweets and engagement with his audience that is impressive, to say the least. My guest is Mr. Unmarketing Scott Stratten. Now also on the show we’ve got the regular slots: this week’s news in traffic, the one minute traffic tip, and a Philippine inspired traffic jam to play out the show so stick around ‘til the end for that.

Anyway, right now is the feature interview so let’s get stuck right in.

James: Welcome Scott Stratten – The president of Unmarketing, who is kind of a big deal in a fairly irrelevant social media site that inflates its own importance. Scott, Just how important are you on Twitter?

Scott: If you ask anybody on the street, they have no idea; if you ask my mom, she thinks it’s pretty significant and if you ask me, it’s the most important of all.

James: Well of course! Awesome! Tell me a little bit more about what you do because I’m sure despite sending about a hundred tweets per day, I’m sure you don’t hang out on Twitter all day long. Tell us a little bit about you and your business activities and what you are up to.

Scott: If we were having this conversation two years ago and you say of course you don’t hang out on Twitter all day long, I would have to correct you and day actually I am cause that is all I did back then; I believe that to get noticed and build a platform, you have to be there. But on me, after doing myself marketing, I’m on marketing for almost 12 years now; I started doing traffic and everything else – I used to do viral videos before we called them viral videos. I usually created them before YouTube existed. I have been doing traffic generation and lead building for almost ten years now. My whole thing about social media, whether it’s viral or in person is that I think we should market the way we want to be marketed too –with good content and value instead of being interrupted all day, I think there’s a place for that

James: Absolutely! I’m going to open up with a question that may give you an ulcer when I ask it Scott, but I’m prepared for that. What’s the ROI on Twitter?

Scott: You know what, I’ve been asked that so much that the ulcer kind of that goes away and I just become numb for a few minutes when people ask it and my answer has shifted a little bit over years but it still remains the same and it’s that – it’s not the ROI of Twitter, the question really, is what is the ROI of a conversation? It really boils down to that. A lot of times when people ask what’s the ROI on Twitter what they’re really saying is I don’t buy into it and until you convince me, I’m not going to use it. That’s what it comes down to. Because I do believe we need ROI on things, we certainly do. We’re on business! The whole point of business is you have a return on your time investment, monetary investment, so I get that. I think it’s a timely question. What I don’t think is fair is when we judge conversation to a higher standard that any other marketing tool we’re using, we don’t hold classical advertising to the same standards as we do our social media questions. I can turn around and ask somebody what is the ROI on the 5,000 golf balls you bought with the company logo on it? And if he looks at me and says, well it’s just an expense. I’m like what is conversation? What is networking? And I really don’t think that we should be belittling our customers down to the point of saying- what is the value of these next 7 words that I’m going to say to you? Because I don’t know, I don’t know what is the value of our ROI is it looking like you give a damn about your customers? And I don’t know about the ROI of not giving a damn, I really don’t because it’s subjective. Like I don’t care if that toilet paper company that I use talks to me, it may be funny, but I don’t care but it leaves the opportunity for another company to come in and for me to get to know them so I don’t know what is the answer because James, if you go on Twitter tomorrow, and you Tweet a hundred times, and I go and tweet tomorrow a hundred times – let’s say we both start from scratch we can both get totally different results because of personality, because of our goals, because of our skill set, because of our time, and that’s the difference. There is no such thing as a hard ROI in social media because if anybody tells you what it is, like here’s the number, they’re making it up because ROI in advertising is the same. You can’t tell me what’s the ROI of an ad you put in the newspaper because it’s so subjective, so many variables that are in play. It’s actually why I hate seeing studies about Twitter that say the most retweeted words are or How to get the best time to post in Twitter because it’s all subjective. We’re data driven freaks now and we don’t realize that is a very contextual, very individual circumstances.

James: Sure, sure. Well, you’ve obviously done very well using Twitter as part of your tool set and I think you have mentioned that Twitter  has been an influence much of the success that followed you getting involved in the platform. What would you consider to be the success that you have been able to attribute to Twitter?

Scott: Well, if you – for me – and I’m just going to flip back to what I just said for you to remember right before I answer this; you ought to understand that this is a context meaning I become a very successful keynote speaker and author by using something – especially Twitter but here’s the rub, they don’t hear this whenever I say it; when I tell people I have earned over a half million dollars over 2 years on Twitter personal, that when I say something like that, people just stop listening right after I say that – Oh! It’s a gold mine and I ought to do it! What they’re not understanding is that I’ve made a living and a lot of it has to do with Twitter but it’s because I talk about Twitter and that’s a disconnect. People don’t realize that as an author and a speaker, even other authors and speakers, it’s like being in the kitchen and talking about food, it’s going to work, it’s in the right area, it’s in the right circumstances, it’s the right environment. But if I talk in Twitter and I talk about plumbing the whole time, my success would be greatly different. Most of my retweets through the years when I was really trying to aggressively build a following, the tweets were about Twitter like it’s so matrix, made out to be that. My tweets were about Twitter that got retweeted. That’s how it worked for me so my success needs to be taken, like anybody says, needs to be taken with a grain of salt, it’s fun for social media experts and we all think we know what we’re talking about  so for me – but I did not go on there to build a business. You have to understand that too- I did not go on there and say I’m going to build a business and get revenue in Twitter. I got on Twitter in 2008, because I did not have a water cooler, as an entrepreneur, as a business owner I did not have a place to go to talk to people. I really didn’t. And I couldn’t go there and ask questions about running a business, I got on there to find my water cooler, I got on there to find my peers and I was in a lack of place to go online, I have been online since 1994. I’ve done every reddit post, I’ve done every forum, you know all the geek stuff. But I never found any into business support for business owners than I did in Twitter back then.

James: That’s interesting! Well I’d like you to tell me a little bit about how you got started on Twitter because in January 2009 it went Boom! and something happened.

Scott: That’s right. It went from a casual stroll to a speed bike. What happened was when I joined in April 2008, I did it casually. Like everybody else, you know what happens; you hear about this thing and you’re just like, ah I’ll try it too. And I just dabbled and I thought I was kind of stupid and I did not really care. Somebody said they have a tuna sandwich for lunch and I’m like I really don’t care about that, and I just dabbled then I realized in January 1st, 2009 and I said to myself if I’m a marketing person, if I’m trying to position myself as an authority in marketing, I need to use this platform for at least a month and give it my focus, then I can either write it off and say it’s not worth my time or it is. I did not want to be that marketing guy to not use it and not recommend it because I’m not using it. So I went on there and I lived on Twitter for 30 days. When I say I lived on Twitter for a day, I did. You saw stats – I tweeted almost 7,000 times in 30 days and I literally lived on Twitter and I went from 1200 followers to 10,000; but those numbers don’t mean anything. I now have about 145,000 followers, I’ve tweeted over 95,000 times but those numbers really don’t have any meaning to me and the only number I only want people to walk away with is that 75% of my tweets are replies and that number has been the same from a thousand tweets to 95,000 tweets. And that’s the real secret on Twitter. You want Twitter to work with you and you talk with people and don’t talk at them. Twitter is a conversation, not a dictation.

James: Absolutely! We’ll talk about the whys and hows in a short while but I want to sort of just continue with your early success with Twitter. Do you think if you started again from scratch today do you still get the same traction now as you did back then?

Scott: I really want to say that it’s the same and while we’re talking to each other it’s all fine. It’s not totally the same. It’s still 140 characters, it’s shifted a little bit though that my big momentum when I did grew the bulk of my following and did most of the tweeting, I call it PB which is pre Bieber; pre – Justin Beiber day – there were no real celebrities on Twitter and in a way, in 2009 you were on Twitter because you wanted to be. You were not on Twitter because you had to. And there’s a huge difference between those 2 things and it’s that the voluntary audience versus the mandatory audience is a big shift. Because nobody was spamming Twitter then, nobody was spamming it with crap and doing auto this and auto that or Tweeting and scheduling an ad and broadcasting. It was like Lady Gaga wasn’t talking about her meat dress, her bacon earrings and whatever else she was wearing. We just talked to each other and so it has changed, there’s a lot of noise. The nice thing about Twitter though is you can control the amount of noise by filtering who you follow. So if I start again today, I’d be much more selective of who I’ll follow and I’ll kind of pin point who I want to talk to and get around the noise. Traction’s less, the response is less now but Twitter’s also become a great public megaphone. I love Twitter now differently for different reasons that I loved it in the early days. I love it now because at a time of crisis or natural disaster, so many people can connect and they help each other out, I love the support system on Twitter, I love the fund raising point on Twitter but it was a little bit different than the kind of a geek club than it was 5 years ago that we’re just thare to connect with each other. Each truly a different world.

James: Yeah, I know when you first started out you used sort of the strategy that follow and follow back. Would you do that again? I heard you mention you want to kind of do things slightly different on that note.

Scott: The answer would be a hell no; I would not do that again. Here’s the problem; it’s that when I started doing the big push in January 2009, I made 2 mistakes I would have changed and one was auto following back. I did not have an auto following, I did not have a way to find and follow people, what I did was if you followed me, I would automatically follow you back. I thought it was being sincere, I thought it was being nice, I thought it was courteous; and all I did was cloud with my Twitter stream of tweets, to be honest, I did not care about it or with spam or with inappropriate content; that was a mistake, I really think people should follow not out of obligation but out of interest that you should not follow one back because it’s nice in particular. I follow 34,000 people or something right now, I don’t follow 34,000 people, I can’t follow 34,000 people, and nobody can. I actually have a hidden list, a private list of a 102 people on and called my awesome sauce list. And that’s who I follow and that should be my following number. And my second mistake was I auto DM’ed everyone I followed initially, auto direct messaged them and all I said to them was thanks for following me, how’s Twitter treating you? I did not push anything, I did not spam anything, say join me on Facebook, and half the replies I got back was is this auto DM? and people were more questioning than anything else and the reason I stopped both was actually people started thanking me for following them – they write hey thanks for the follow or thanks for the follow back and I’m sitting there thinking I didn’t, it was just the computer doing it and I start really realizing that’s nonsense here. And that’s not to me what social media is about and I cut that off but unfortunately I cut that off about 34,000 people too late. But I cut it.

James: Cool, let’s continue the conversation on how Twitter can be done badly and tell me about – I shall not use the abbreviated version because this is a family show – this is F.U.C.C.- Friendly Unsolicited Commercial Content, what are some of the most criminal acts of social spamming you’ve been sent?

Scott: This to me is pretty much the epidemic of the social media problem here;  I don’t think people realize how impactful it is – it’s warm spam; this could be Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, you pick your platform. And these are when people are now your friends, your connection, your following and they send you spam! And a lot of times it’s not just liking spam, it’s not just you know you buy something; your new business contact may now be sending you a Viagra spam email or something that you used to get back in the email spam days but the way that they’re doing it, they’re just blanketing invites to events, they’re tagging you on photos about their multi-level marketing opportunity that has nothing to do with you, I just had one today! Somebody sent me an invite to an event – the event was booked for me in this contest, it’s not an event! And this guy invited 4,900 something people and what happens is they use a program that automatically invites your whole friend list up to 5,000 people. Actually to me it killed Facebook events. The most tragic thing to me that happened to Facebook was that we killed the momentum of Facebook events. A lot of people I know, but I’ve killed occasions for invites and event invites, right? I don’t get them. And the problem is now the real events don’t get noticed. I threw a party in Las Vegas; this was 2 years ago, so even 2 years ago this was happening. During blog world conference I threw in an open bar party and I’m paying for it and we’re throwing a party and I’m going to buy a hundred of drinks for the people that I like. And what happened was like 40 of them never responded at all. And I was like, how do you not respond to an open bar party in Las Vegas? How do you not do that? And what happened was, I talked to a lot of them before the event and they said they turned off notifications a long time ago because they cannot stand the event spam. My soul hurt because you missed a party of mine because some jerk wants you to vote for the 19th contest that they’ve been in, or even better, their website launch party, that they’re updating their website so it’s a party and come to my party and stuff. That’s what happens when we’ve taken for granted our social connections and people are like, when do I sell, when do I do this? I’m like just calm down for a second. It’s like a networking event. How often in person would you sit there and bring your product and push it in people’s faces? You wouldn’t do that in an event because somebody will punch you in the face! It wouldn’t happen that way. But we think we can do that in social because it’s virtual, it’s easier and it’s easily scalable. When my book came out, I’ve got two and we have another one coming out soon and when the book comes out, I promote it on my own wall in Facebook, I promote it on my own tweets; I don’t tag, I don’t invite, and what happened was people like it and I built up my social currency with my audience. They’re more open to me talking about what I sell. The more you give, the more people want to take from you as well.  And I’ve obviously done very well, I’ve never tagged a soul on a book cover trying to sell it, I’ve never invited a person to my virtual book party that doesn’t actually happen. What is do is I give to the network and they give back.

James: I guess it’s a travesty right? That the people still consider it to be the social inverted speech marks media. I mean they just kind of like that social factor.

Scott: Somebody just called it like two days ago a gorilla marketing that tagging people this is a gorilla marketing style. It’s a jerk marketing; it’s not what you need to do! If you have to tag people in to a post or invite them to a fake event, you need to give back your business key and work for somebody else because it’s not right. 

James: Yeah, you’re a big believer Scott of real time tweet. What is biggest scheduled tweet faux pas that you’ve witnessed?

Scott: I talk about it in terms of very black and white about scheduling tweets. My whole thing is simply don’t do it. I know there’s a gray area there I understand that sometimes people, you’re not the devil id you schedule tweets once in a while but for me, I always ask somebody, when I’m on a panel, when I talk to people, and somebody argues to me about scheduling tweets because like they need it, I just look at them and say, what content is so important that it has to go out at an exact scheduled time but not important enough for you to be there when it goes out? And nobody’s ever had an answer to that. Because to me, especially on Twitter, the main 90% of the reaction to a tweet is within the 5 minutes of after you send it. That’s the main reaction to Twitter and unlike me, most people don’t sit on Twitter all day. Most people will be there with little windows. And if you post some content James, let’s say you post this interview, you post it up, but you schedule it, and it goes up in a post at 11:00 in the morning your time but you’re not there and somebody at 11:03 writes to you and says, hey it’s not working; especially that, when the download link is not working, not your mistake but it can happen, and you don’t come back until 1:00 let’s say. And now, you’ve had these people helping you out and all they know is you tweeted something saying hey listen to this but it doesn’t work. So you’re saying hey listen to this but you’re not listening to them, you see the problem here? And I’ve seen a lot of really big screw ups which is great for me because I need content for books and stuff but I’ve seen some really bad screw ups, and the biggest thing to me that I see that makes brands look stupid is that when they have their scheduled tweets going and then something like a natural disaster happens, or a shooting, or something else that – like when Bin Laden was killed, companies are retweeting about the 5 ways to refinance their mortgage! We need to understand that – to me, relationships engagement do not mean automation. You can’t automate authenticity. And if you’re talking to people right now who thinks about traffic conversions and everything else, you have to understand that social media is probably the poorest converting platform in classical traffic speak; the poorest converting platform you can find. I really believe that because we do a fractional reaction in social media that even myself, I have a hundred thousand followers, 10,000 of those are online at any given time, a thousand of those may see my tweet and probably a hundred of those will do something. It’s very, very fractional. You can do the old school link farms, will get better click throughs on social so I don’t understand why we automate content for any reason because it doesn’t work like any other social media marketing platforms.

James: Well, let’s flip the coin now. Let’s talk about Twitter done well. What are your top Twitter tips for businesses because I guess that’s primarily the audience that we’ve got listening in to the podcast today?

Scott: I think consistency one of the keys to Twitter is that; consistency or frequency – that if you’re going to hang your shingles in Twitter as a business, then you need to be there and continue to be there. You don’t want to open your store Monday 11:00 – 11:05 once a week. It does not work that way. If you only have a limited amount of time in social, try to even it out within the week. If you only have, let’s say, three and a half hours a week to dedicate to a platform, I’d do a half hour a day, once a day rather than three and a half hours once a week. That consistently over time will help you out. I think the key of social is actually the opposite of it. If you have a dormant account, if you don’t use it, delete it. It’s actually dangerous to have a dormant account in social because people think you’re there. That’s a big problem. And have those search terms set up using all the tools out there that has your company name not just your Twitter name because most people will tweet about a brand without adding their @name to it so you want to keep your ear open. And even the spelling, or product name; I actually was angry at Delta Airlines once. I was so angry I tweeted Detla, like I misspelled Delta. I was so angry I misspelled a five –character word. And they actually have a search set up for misspellings of their name and so they found it, and they saw and they replied. And they fixed the problem within five minutes. So always keep your ears open because the mouth never stops moving at a time, so keep your ears open and listen. Big train wrecks happen on weekends and brands haven’t responded until 48 hours later because it’s a weekend, outrage does not take the weekend off; it’s always going and the response time nowadays isn’t five days, it isn’t a week. It isn’t even two days! It’s within hours. That’s what you are expected now, that’s the way we live now. Before this thing gets out of hand, before the momentum builds on, you want to be able to have your bombs ready.

James: Awesome, good! I’d like to touch on Twitter as a traffic channel because the cause of this podcast is kind of traffic focused, tell me about your concept of platforming and tell me about your influence on Twitter to direct your followers to other areas of your business.

Scott: Well that’s the thing about platforming because there is just so many places you can go and that’s a problem, especially in social media that there’s too many platforms to be on. What I try to do when I originally joined Twitter is that you stand on one platform and you build it. You build it until it momentum starts taking over, you can then step to the next platform and so what I do, I chose Twitter first, I was using Facebook already, but it was to talk to people; friends from high school I never liked and I was already on LinkedIn talking to people I used to worked with I never liked, so Twitter was to build a new audience. What happened was I tweeted 10,000 times before I ever sold anything, before I ever pinched anything. Before I even launched my blog, I really created a community first. And then what happened is I expanded it and went to the next step and the way I kind of break it into Twitter is like here is latest blog post, I went also on to Facebook that I announced it to Twitter but I didn’t overdo it. For every self-promotion tweet, I tweeted a hundred times between those things. But if I have a blog post now, I’ll tweet it probably, 4, 5, or 6 times over a couple of days and bring them to my site because I’d rather really have a thousand newsletter subscribers than 10,000 followers on Twitter, there’s your headline right there. That’s what I’d rather have because I still think email is king. And even though social media is sexy right now and shiny, one of the talents of social is pulling over those people into a list that you reach out to within your own control.

James: Cool. One kind of question to finish up on influence because you did say that you are one of the most influential people on Twitter; l I’ve seen a number of lists published here in the Middle East, one of them is  Whammed Up and another is Arabian Business and they’ve ranked the most influential Arabs on Twitter. They use some stats such as following numbers, then cloud scores but some of the people on the list were somewhat dubious contenders in my eyes. What‘s the best way to measure influence on Twitter?

Scott: There’s the million dollar question really is what is influencing and can actually be measured? When I got named one of the top 5 social media influencers on Twitter they used analytics on the site, they used all types of things like tweet reach; when you tweeted something how far it got out, some other influential people that you are influencing, stuff that I don’t even understand. But to me, at the end of the day is even influencers are contextual. You know at the start of the conversation I was talking about how you have to understand that these things are within a certain context that influencers you want to reach out for your business may not be on that list that you described. You have to define what’s an influencer for you. To me when I worked with clients over this is like it wasn’t just following or reach cloud score, it was kind of an all play in one: forums, forward count is more iffy now than it ever has been; you could buy followers, you could be auto follow – follow back type of stuff that it’s not the size, it’s the quality of the connection. I think that cloak and cranes and everything do have some weight to them, it’s not beyond and all but to me the best way to do an influencer outreach and find them is to look for a handful of people who do have a somewhat of a follower count, they have resonation in them meaning when they say something people talk but at the end of the day the biggest question asked is that are they a good representation of our brand? That’s really what it comes down to influencers. If I want to bring in influencers in to my campaign, I have to say they are representing my brand. You have to read their stream to see that. Are they making off colored jokes? Are they doing things that would not represent you? You know what they’re saying on Twitter has to be able to go to a billboard with your logo on it. So make sure that you find the right fit, not just the “best” person out there.

James: Awesome. Great stuff Scott, we’ll we’ve got about pretty much 30 minutes now so I think we’d kind of draw things to a close. What would be your final word of wisdom that you’d pass on to anyone who is listening into this podcast?

Scott: I’m going to go against the grand floor and say that nobody listening right now has to be on social media. There’s a great advantage to it, there’s a great ability to use it, but the first thing that you have to realize is that mandatory engagement is a bad turn. Use it because you want to use it, don’t use it because you’ve been told you should.

James: There you go, pretty here first, the Twitter expert said you do not need to be on social media. There you go. So where can listeners find out more about you?

Scott: My world’s under the name Unmarketing, so Unmarketing on Twitter, Unmarketing on Facebook, unmarketing.com, The first book is called Unmarketing, the second book is called The Book of Business Awesome and the third book coming on September is called QRCodes Kill Kittens, so stay tuned for that.

James: Great stuff, well, I’ll make sure I’ll post some links beneath this recording to make sure that everyone can find unmarketing really easily. Scott thanks for coming on the show and I hope to see you again soon!

This week’s news in traffic; Pinterest is a hot topic around here since my interview with Jason Miles here a couple of weeks ago, Pinterest this week have introduced Pinterest analytics which gives side tones as insights as to how people are interacting with pins that originate from their website.

Now if you have a verified website you’ll get information about how many people have pinned from your site, how many people have seen these pins, how many people visited your site from Pinterest; go check that out.

Facebook has quietly updated their rules about what content you could have on your fan page cover image. Everything but the 20% text rule for text has been scrapped so you can now reintroduce some call to actions pointing to your website, or blog or opt in to your email list from your fan page cover image. Now I’ve already updated my cover image in light of these changes and you can go see that by going to www.likejames.com.

Now in Google news, they’ve announced closure of Google Reader from July 1st, 2013 and this is really a reminder not to be reliant on 3rd party services and be single point sensitive in regards to the tools that you use. Now if you’re using Google reader for your RSS, then you’ll find another option before the summer.

Now also in Google news, Matt Cuts the head of Google spam division has indicated that there are major Panda and Penguin updates coming this year and in fact the latest Panda update we think was rolled out last weekend. Now I reported about this over at www.SEOSherpa.com so check out the news section there and I reveal there exactly how our cool websites have benefitted from every single algorithm update to date and how you can too, so go check out that news update over at SEOSherpa.com.

I’ve received a very nice comment from Alvin this week who said “fantastic podcast James, kudos!” he then went on to say completely direct, no unnecessary chatter and we’ve also raised the bar on the podcast arena – so thank you Alvin! He also requested some classic tunes from the past; the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s for the traffic jam and specifically held by The Beatles, so Alvin, we’ll see what we can do on that, stay tuned in the coming weeks.

If you have a comment or even a question you’d like me to answer on the show, head on over to www.TrafficJamCast.com; there’s two options – speech pipe and there’s leave a message they’re the places to do it on the website.

The one minute traffic tip: Measuring your traffic sources is of course critical to know what’s driving your results. Most people know about Google analytics and I guess majority of the people listening to the call would probably be implementing that in their website. But one tool you may not have heard of is Live Chat by livechatinc.com. It is really a chat software that integrates real time analytics, that means you can have an interface open on your computer and you can see who’s on your site at that precise moment. From that interface, you’ll see who’s on the site, what page they’re on, you’ll say where they are located based on their IP address, and you’ll even see the referring source of traffic, i.e. where they were before they came to your site.

Now some of the reasons why I like this is one, it ensures you are not solely reliant on Google analytics and you get a secondary source of data. But also I like it because you can engage visitors on relevant chat, knowing what page they’re on and how they found the site which is absolutely killer for conversions. I’ve got to give a mention to James Schramko who put me on to this bit of software and it’s absolutely awesome, go check it out.

Ok that’s it for another episode of Traffic Jam. I’ll be back next Friday, if you’ve the episode, please leave me an iTunes review, and I’ll give you a shout out on next week’s show.

Playing us out this week is a track picked by my team here in Manila, and it is of course a Filipino inspired tune it’s the Black Eyed Peas’ Bebot, which incidentally, in Tagalog means Pretty Woman. Enjoy!

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THIS WEEKS NEWS IN TRAFFIC

ONE MINUTE TRAFFIC TIP

THE TRAFFIC JAM

Bebot by Black Eyed Peas

Enjoy the episode? Please post your comments below.

In today’s show, James is joined by Ezra Firestone, who believes that now is the right time to get started in e-commerce. He explains how he uses Channels to deliver diverse traffic to his sites and shares the secret to consistently achieving 60% return traffic.

Ezra Firestone is the man behind SmartMarketer.com, a master of e-commerce traffic and owner of several e-commerce businesses.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS

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“Create recognition for your brand and get fortified from Google updates.” @ezrafirestone
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This is the Traffic Jam podcast episode #3. Thank you so much for listening in, my name is James Reynolds and I’m here each week along with my special guest to give you as much information and inspiration as possible to get your website traffic cranking.

Now talking of special guest I’ve got a very hippie dippy master of e-commerce on the show today and that is Ezra Firestone. Ezra is kind of like the New York yogi of traffic, he’s such a cool guy and a very interesting character and we’ll be discussing on today’s show how to leverage on multiple traffic channels to drive a huge abundance of traffic to an e-commerce store. Stay tuned for that.

And of course, coming up a little later in the show we’ve got this week’s news in traffic plus the one minute traffic tip.

So without further ado, let’s dive into this week’s feature podcast with Ezra Firestone.

James: Welcome to the call my special guest for today, Ezra Firestone.

Ezra: James, thanks so much for having me on the show man, I really appreciate it.

James: Now before we get stuck right into the meat and potatoes as the guys at lifestyle business podcast would say, let’s paint a little bit of a picture for our listeners of who Ezra Firestone is. Now apart from eating 20 bananas a day and a little bit of a yoga fanatic, tell us a little bit about your background and what makes you tick Ezra?

Ezra: Oh, man did you catch that episode already? I don’t know where that came from! We just recorded that last night! But I’m a bit of a strange dude. I’m really, really in for this marketing stuff. I quite enjoy the science and the psychology and systems behind what makes things work, what makes the body perform at its highest level, what makes the business perform at its highest level and I spend a lot of times putting attention on that, that’s what I’m interested in, and I grew up I a hippie commune, got a background with some pretty far out viewpoints on lifestyle and viewpoints on mindset and business and I really enjoy talking about that stuff and I appreciate about having me on.

James: Alright, this is going to be a little bit of fun today so tell us about your business activities, I know you’ve got one thing that you’re a little bit focused on which is your smart marketer website, and you’ve also got an e-commerce store as well, which I’d really like to focus on today because really the topic of conversion I want to discuss with you is all about e-commerce traffic. First of all, give us an overview of a little of those and things that you’ve got in play right now.

Ezra: Sure. Let’s roll with those. So Smart Marketing is my information hub; it’s where I share my research where I share with the community what I’m up to in business. I’m talking about everything from traffic, to conversion, to e-commerce, info products, all that different stuff I’m doing I share in a free video blog just like I’m publishing what I’m up to and you know at the beginning of this year I was kind of looking around for another business project and I considered doing another business store because that’s my background and that’s what I do and I have a network of e-commerce stores and the one that you’re alluding to that I’m focusing on is a company called Boom by Cindy Joseph. The first e-commerce store that I’m a part of that is not a drop ship store. So it’s not a store where I’m retailing another manufacturer’s products and they’re warehousing those products and shipping them for me. We are actually manufacturing these products, warehousing them ourselves and shipping them out. So it’s a different from an e-commerce sort of model, it’s more of a real asset; it’s a step above drop shipping as far as ownership of the product line. So I have e-commerce stores and I’ve got my smart marketing blog and boombycindyjoseph.com is really the main focus for me as far as e-commerce goes, and it’s even a bit different than other e-commerce that I have been doing before because standard e-commerce when people think about it think about the sort of the big box store with a thousand skews and that’s a different model than what boom is about.

James: Got it! Now let’s focus on it a little bit for now because I think e-commerce is a very hot topic of conversation and everyone seems to be jumping on board with it and having a little bit of research what I like to do for these interviews. Some of the numbers that I was looking at is just absolutely mind blowing and I’ll share some of them with you: e-commerce, last year 2012, surpassed $200 billion which I thought is flabbergasting. The third report of last year, PayPal recorded revenue per second of $4500. The numbers are absolutely mind blowing and it’s obviously changing fast. What are some of the big changes that are happening in on and how it’s actually done right now.

Ezra: Here’s what’s going on: e-commerce got really popular 10 years ago. And then in our community of marketers and entrepreneurs, it kind of fell from grace; people sort of stopped having interest in it and were more interested in publishing e-books and selling information products and information service businesses. Those were sort of the hot and popular business models to get started in, so we have sort of these stages of entrepreneurs got started in the online marketing world and when I got started e-commerce was what was hot. And then a few years went by and this whole info product and affiliate marketing and CPA and all that stuff was hot, and now we are seeing resurgence from the entrepreneur interest level- so what entrepreneur was interested in what e-commerce and what is going on is: e-commerce is now the technology adoption curve, we’ve sort of crossed the chasm, there’s a book called “Crossing the Chasm” that I recommend that people read. But there’s sort of gotten to the point where people are now comfortable, it societally okay for people to purchase products online. You know, ten years ago you couldn’t convince people to buy something with a credit card online. It just wasn’t as widely accepted and so we’ve gotten in a place where everyone is doing it and the statistics is that for the last ten years, quarter over quarter, e-commerce has grown and right now if you look at total retail sales, only 8% of them are done online. And that number is just going to go up, up, up and this year, say something crazy happened, China, what’s happening is that other countries are sort of picking up on e-commerce and internet sales of physical products, and the equivalent to the Chinese valentine’s day, whatever that holiday is, they did $3 Billion gross domestic product in a single day and just to give you context, in America, on Black Friday, we did a billion, and China’s like only 2% of their total sales are done online. So it’s exploding in all other countries, to those just starting out, it is the time. You’re not too late, it’s not too late to get in the market, it’s like right now is the time to get into the e-commerce business because 10- 15 years from now, it’s going to be just enormous! Teri Lynn likes to say it, he’s the guy from buildmyonlinestore.com; they say that the internet is at its infancy or e-commerce is a baby; it’s so small compared to where it’s going and we are sort of lucky enough to be at the forefront of this movement, we’re the pioneers and it’s just a really cool time to be involved with e-commerce.

James: So we’re kind of just reached or close to reaching that tipping point where it has just become an acceptable way to actually buy stuff. Again, I’ve read some stuff on this; it’s what I really like to do when researching on stuff like this, something like 70% of people know or think that they can get a better deal online than they can do on their high street store so they are actively looking to make purchases online whereas before they might have been a little skeptical about it. Is it not really kind of adoption that we’ve got to the tipping point of?

Ezra: People are going to Best Buy to look at the product and look at it in person, and then from the store, in Best buy, they just purchase it online in Amazon at a cheaper price. So they are using big bucks store as way to just see the products. So what’s happening is that these stores are closing down their big retail locations, only housing a few other products like the bigger stores are now starting to recognize that they need to change their model and that filling warehouses with products that fill the country is not necessarily the best model anymore. So now these bigger brands are sort of starting to adopt e-commerce retail. If you go out right now in New York city, I’d say about 20% of the stores that sell products and stuff have the ability for you to purchase online, while you’re in there having an online component and I’m going to go ahead and make a prediction and say that within the next 5 years, 60% of all these stores will have the ability for you to shop online and the ability to buy the product online and then pick it up. Retails stores are going to start embracing e-commerce. They just have to.

James: Yeah absolutely. I guess it goes further than this; it goes almost through these virtual stores you see nowadays. I saw a great video clip I think it was the other day that was this sort of virtual touch points that was in a train station I think and people just kind of scan past, hit a few buttons and a few hours later their products would turn up at their doorstep without having really to go out there to get them. The development of this stuff is absolutely mind blowing.

Ezra: It is! I can’t sleep at night sleeping about it sometimes. I’m that excited about where things are. So I guess the question is: how can people leverage this? How can they take advantage, what’s available to them? What channels are available to small e-commerce owners who are just starting on this? What sort of in for them from a traffic standpoint?

James: Well of course you are leveraging this yourself. Tell us a little bit about Boom by Cindy Joseph, because I sort of want to use it as a case study in our conversation today. What is boombycindyjoseph, what is the website like, and what guys do you sell?

Ezra: boombycindyjoseph is a line of pro age cosmetics. In America, in Europe and in Australia, pretty much everywhere, the way that societal value works is that men are valued for their production so as we make more money and as we get older, we get more social power. While women on the other hand are valued for youth and beauty and that stems back to a hundred years ago when women really were valued on society in their childbearing years and so as women get older and the youth goes away, society sort of cast them aside, and ignores them and gives them more power and in America we have the baby boomer generation and 79 million baby boomers, have of which are women, and they are all having this experience collectively of their skin wrinkling, and their hair turning gray and their bodies aging on the outside, faster than they are on the inside and society is treating them differently as a result and they don’t like it. And though every product line out there, everything that is anti-wrinkle, you know, you’re wrong the way you are now. Our messaging behind our products is: you are fine the way you are, you are beautiful, you are the right age, the right size, the right shape and you shouldn’t be taking stuff to cover yourself up. Yeah you can use cosmetics to celebrate yourself and celebrate who you are. And so when Cindy and I started this company, I came to Cindy and said, hey you should- Cindy’s a genius, let’s throw that out for once, but she’s also an amazing person. She was a makeup artist for 25 years, and she then was asked to begin modeling. The day that she cut off her last bit of dyed hair at the age of 49, she became a supermodel on some billboards in Times Square and all that stuff and she sort of became the face of this generation of baby boomer women and when we first had the discussion of should we create a product line around this it was like, the world does not need another tube of lipstick, so it’s not really about the product – and of course our products are organic, and they’re handmade and they’re amazing and all that stuff. It’s more about the messaging and it was the right time, and we’re talking about e-commerce, which we’re at the right time, it was the right time for this message. This group of people- nobody was giving this group of people reality on the viewpoint that they were right, and that they were fine and that they were good. So it was the right time for this message to this community which is why it’s working so well, the timing was just impeccable. I don’t know if it was just a rant or…

James: No that was spot on Ezra, and I agree with you, we don’t need another stick of lipstick. I want to look at the mechanics of how the store or the retail model works. First question for you is: do you guys just purely retail online or do you have any sort of form of offline component for the boom?

Ezra: You know we’re in a couple spas and a couple stores here and there throughout the country and we’ve been on HSN, which is the Home Shopping Network and we’re looking at the channel of television network to retail these products. 95% of our sales are done through the website, and that’s deliberate. When you want to start looking at selling products to channels like Costco and Wal-Mart, these are sort of the bigger box retail stores, the margins that they take- it’s not a very good model from a profit margin standpoint, when you want a model and you want to build a brand and you’ve got a bunch of money and you don’t mind losing money on the front end because what they do is they realize, the exposure that they’re giving you, they realize what it’s going to your brand to be on the shelf of Wal-Mart. Not that we really want to be on the shelf of Wal-Mart honestly, but they make it expensive you don’t get a profit from that that experience, you do make a profit, and the thing about these products is better than it’s like, if you’re just sitting on a shelf of Wal-Mart and someone walks by, there is no information about your product, they’re not necessarily going to take your product, they’re really just going to be engaged with it. This is the thing that I think business owners, our whole business is based around: building a community, building a relationship with our customers and engaging them so that they become a customer each and every month, and that we have repeat sales. So we’re not just focused on driving traffic, and we’re not just focused turning that into customers. What we’re most focused on is once we have a customer, creating a relationship with them, and providing relevant and useful content and information that’s relevant to the problem and conversations that they’re having so that they are interested in engaging with us for the long haul. If you’re in a spa, or if you’re on a small grocery store and the owner or the employees of that store take the time to educate people who come in about your product line, now it’s worth being in those places because what’s happening is you’re actually having somebody talk to people about it and it’s not just having the product sit on the shelf somewhere.

James: Got it. And all this stuff really is interesting to me looking at the actual website itself because to kind of naked eyes, it isn’t what you would consider to be a typical e-commerce store. I mean for instance, you go look at it and you don’t lead with the products. I think the first item in the navigation is in fact your blogs section; the site index has about 250 pages, only I guess about half a dozen are product pages. You’ve just got a content monster there that builds up the story about who Cindy and the message behind the products. I’m hearing now this is actually intentional and this is not an accident and it should work out that way. Is this a strategy that you see now as being the new way to do e-commerce?

Ezra: I think definitely. I think it’s the only way that you can survive in our social economy. I think that the day and the age of the faceless e-commerce store which is what I used to build when I first built one, it was just a store with a bunch of products on it. It’s got no message behind it, no face behind it, nothing, no value behind the products themselves. I think the key now to building an e-commerce store – if you want to build asset, if you want to build a brand and be around for the long haul, you need to figure out ways that you can add value to your marketplace beyond the products that you’re selling and this could go like informational guides about those products, educational content, your viewpoints because the thing is, people like products, let’s take in example our products, we have a very specific community of people who purchase our products but we are not talking to them about our products very often. In fact, we very rarely talk about our products; we talk more to them about the conversations and topics that are more relevant to their lives- menopause, gray hair, and wrinkling skin and all that stuff that is relevant to our community, so no matter what your product line is, you can have a look on who is the community of people who are engaged on this product line. Like take you and I for example, we’re in the marketing and entrepreneurial community so we talk to people about mindset and things that you would not necessarily consider to be 100% relevant to marketing but they are because it’s a whole person beyond just the product that they’re interested in. I think it’s absolutely key and intentional and deliberate and it’s how we’re differentiating ourselves and its working really well because when we do talk about our products, when we do make offers, people take us up online because we have a relationship with them, because they trust us because we are engaging with them on a consistent basis.

James: Excellent! Let’s talk a little bit about some of the ways in which you’re building this community. What are some of the mechanics in play in terms of the content on the content that you are putting out and where you are actually putting that stuff?

Ezra: Sure, it’s really, really simple actually. Here’s the thing about community, in order to build a relationship with someone. You need consistent interaction, you need consistent relating. You have to do things on a regular basis like if you want to make a really good friend with someone, schedule a weekly date for you guys to do stuff together like a friend of mine, we go and we train Muai Thai kickboxing once a week; one of my best friends, I love this guys because I see him all the time. We’re relating over something, we have common goals and the way that you build relationships with other people is by interacting with them on a regular basis so with regard to building a community, it all starts with one piece of content on some kind of scheduled basis like what you are doing through your podcast. You’re putting on your podcast once a week; we are putting on a video once a week. We create a video, it’s a video where it’s Cindy, she’s talking- it’s really simple, no frills, no production video, no music, just Cindy, in front of the camera looking about life and talking about whatever is of interest to the community. Then we take that video, we post it out to all the different channels and I’ll talk to you about channels because it’s very, very important on a traffic standpoint when we get to e-commerce. Each business model has channels that it can occupy, has channels that it can leverage to generate traffic; if you think about, this is what Google is doing with universal search, so Google figured out a couple of years ago now that different groups of people prefer to consume media in different format; some people like to listen to mp3, some people like to watch video, some people like to read text and so in their search results page they give in query, they have all these media formats and also they understand the queries based on user intent so they understand whether or not someone is searching for information so if it’s an information query, Google will display blogs and news websites and press releases and videos right? And if they’re searching for an e-commerce product or if they’re searching with commercial intent query, you’ll get a display of shopping centers on images and so they understand these different channels and these different media formats based on these query and they display that so we take our piece of content and we syndicate it to all the different channels people are hanging out. People are hanging out on Google right? So we optimize it and upload it to YouTube so that it ranks in Google. People are hanging out on YouTube and watching videos there. People on Facebook engage with us there, and there’s people in Twitter and people on Pinterest, there’s people on iTunes listening to Podcast and consuming media in this format. So when you understand all this different media channels, you can take one piece of content and you can set it up so that it’s relevant for that channel and they’re extracting the audio on your video and then on iTunes, having your video transcribed and posting it on your blog, uploading your video on YouTube on posting it on Facebook. So we syndicate that piece of content out to all the different channels and then we boost it by running advertising into that content and running search engine optimization into that content so that it ranks in Google so that we’re running ads to it in Facebook so that we sort of ensure and I think there’s no community out there right now in the world that I can’t get in front of and it’s a little bit scary when I think about it because it used to be that the bigger brands that the bigger companies, the government had control over the messaging and the only medium was television, and radio and newspaper. Those were the mediums of consumption for information but now with Facebook and the internet, anybody can spread a message and it’s really scary when you think about that because there’s people out there influencing mass groups of people through this medium and we’re doing the same thing, we’re just influencing them with the goal of bettering their lives but not everyone is doing that so it puts of an interesting time that we’re in again back to this time.

James: Perhaps we’ll go on and talk about that in a short while because I know with regard to podcasting especially you, you’ve been getting some fantastic results there and you’ve been able to outrank big, burly, large sort of businesses who you think would control that space, so we’ll come on to that topic of conversation as you’ll get in a short while but let’s look at the specifics of preparing content and promoting it using different modalities, and I know you and I will be well aligned on perhaps how we do  it so in the case of Cindy Joseph, what do you do first? You create a video, and then what are the other parts and processes are involved for a typical process each week for that site?

Ezra: Sure, let’s take the content creation for Boom, video gets created, we edit that video and throw a bumper on to it; write a little branding biz, do a little music, a little logo on the front and the back. We take that video, we post it on to our blog, we have that video transcribed through a service called speechpad.com, and we post that transcription to our blog. We take that video; we upload it to our Facebook and post it out to our community there. We share it on Twitter, we share it on Google+, we share it on LinkedIn so anyone who’s following us on all of those mediums can see it. We extract the audio from that video and upload it to iTunes through a podcast. The podcast has actually not been launched we’ve got a huge bank of episodes waiting to go because it was one of the later additions. I just recently got into podcasting so I’m just learning the new syndication method and so I’m getting my old content to put it out in that channel. We pin it over to Pinterest so our followers can see it, and then we set up Facebook ads and then we run those ads. We actually take our video and we upload the video to Facebook itself. We upload the video files right to Facebook so people can watch the videos right in Facebook, not a link to a YouTube video, and we do this because it gets a lot more engagement and the cost per click is much cheaper when we’re running ads through the videos that are running through Facebook rather than when we’re running traffic straight to a YouTube link through our blog post page. We have a custom image created and we make that the thumbnail on our YouTube channel and then we do some press releases and some SEO to promote that video and that blog post in the search engine. And that’s really it. It’s just one piece of content; it’s transcribed and uploaded and syndicated and spread and advertised. The syndication of the content is the simple part; the hard part is the message match. So consistently having messaging that having your people that the easiest way to create that is to trust your own viewpoints on the community on the topics that are relevant to the community and then talk about them, speak from your viewpoint on what’s going on, people want to know what you think, what your brand thinks about these products, about these topics, and as controversial as it might be, like our podcast, this new podcast that I’m going with Schramko, thinkactget.com is a really cool and controversial and far out strange podcast about lifestyle and marketing and business but it’s what we believe and we’re really enjoying it. And because it’s authentic and it’s truthful and its coming from our viewpoint people like it. I think that the key here is not trying to reel things out or create extra stuff but to really just speak from your viewpoints on the marketplace, if you have a business, if you’re selling a certain kind of product, you have viewpoints on this. It’s actually really, really a simple model.

James: Excellent! Good! Well I like to talk about some kind of traffic numbers and the result in this exercise in respect to boombycindyjoseph. I guess in that site, you’ve got to be building up a strong brand now and a real good following. What percentage of your traffic is kind of repeat and return traffic and what percentage are traffic to the site?

Ezra: 65% of our sales are return visits; so someone who have visited us sometime in the last month. 58% of our traffic is direct; either someone typed in our URL, they typed in our brand name, or they go directly to our website. And the other thing about branding if you open up a store, having a presence, and having people know about you and having recognition and visibility for your brand; you fortify yourself from Google rankings, you fortify yourself from your adwords account slapped because people are actually like if we lost all of our rankings, if we lost our advertising account, it doesn’t matter because half our traffic is coming from people specifically for us. The key is for traffic to be diverting right? So you want to make it with this community building model but you don’t want not to be doing remarketing and retargeting, you don’t want to not be doing Google adwords, Facebook ads, and Amazon ads, then LinkedIn whatever you are using to advertise on. And the thing is take on at a time, get one, get your search engine optimization campaign down and running, optimizing and going well and then move on to setting up your paid advertising campaign. I am a big proponent of paid advertising I know we are talking about organic, and social and all that stuff but how are we boosting this content that we are putting out there, are we actually getting it out in front of people? We’re buying that; we’re paying for Facebook ads and this content go out in front of all the women in America, it’s not just like it’s happening for us for free. And the cool thing about buying visibility is that if people- if you’ve got something good, you only need to buy that visibility only once because they’ll come, they’ll hop on, they’ll like your Facebook page, they’ll hop on your email list and then you’ve got a customer for life.

James: Wow you’ve got that pretty damn tight by the sound of it and if 60% of your traffic is sort of typed in or brand searched sort of traffic, people obviously know about that brand and are looking out for that brand. Once you say you get people into the system, they’re there. They’re obviously becoming..

Ezra: Sorry to interrupt, I think that the key is, with your business model that you have some reason, like if for example, you’ve got this bar stool store, people will only buy bar stools once. They don’t really come back and buy more bar stools so the question on the table is: what other things can we offer? What other product lines are complementary? Maybe pub tables maybe lamps, who knows, but some other offers so that these customers that we’ve generated on the work that we’ve done to create a customer doesn’t go to waste; it’s not a one and done type of deal. That’s why services are so good because when you’re selling services, it’s a subscription model. When they’re getting benefits and subscription from your services, they’ll come back. And the cool thing about a cosmetic or skin care business is that this is stuff that’s consumable, people consume it and then they want it again.

James: Excellent! Now we’ve spoken about the traffic source in play, we’re doing search traffic; we’ve got different paid traffic as in Facebook and Google or wherever, what about social traffic? What’s effective on the social arena?

Ezra: Sure, I just want to throw in another traffic channel for e-commerce, another traffic source and that is channels. Google Shopping, price grabber, The Find, Bing, Amazon, e-bay, you have these channels on the physical products space where people are actively going and looking for products and so for people who are doing the multiple item e-commerce store models, channels are a huge, huge opportunity. And again the easiest way to get your products out on a channel is to run advertising so you upload those products to Amazon or Price Grabber maybe or whatever it is and every single one of these channels allows you to buy advertising within that channel and promote your items within their channel. People are searching on Amazon; you’ve got Amazon product ads from external websites. You’ve can set up an advertising campaign in Amazon and run what’s called external product ads. Basically when someone’s looking at a dog bed if they look down the page underneath the review section that’s gonna say products from external website, you can list your products there. You can upload your products in to Amazon, run ad directly to your products in Amazon. So you can run ads in these channels and those are often the sources of revenue in terms of conversion and profitability because people are actually specifically looking for products better than a Google search and it’s even better than Google Adwords because they’re actively engaged in the search for a product on a more intense level than just searching for it in Google.

James: Good, last week I had on the show a guy called Jason Miles who is the author of Pinterest Power, he’s actually got a small online e-commerce store that’s sells patterns for dolls and dolls clothing, he was of course topic of conversation; with Pinterest he’s got really gotten good results with Pinterest. How’s your Pinterest as a channel for for boombycindyandjoseph?

Ezra:  You know, it’s a decent channel, we post stuff out there and we see sales coming in from Pinterest, people are pinning our stuff but it’s not something – in fact, I’m going to listen to that podcast because it’s not a channel that I really have much attention on or done much with. We see sales coming in from it, which is cool, we’re not seeing significant results in Pinterest which I think is probably just because we don’t have significant amount of attention on this channel.

James: Alright, what else in the social area, because I know you guys are tapping into Facebook, you already mentioned you’re doing Facebook ads.

Ezra: I think Facebook is the social channel. The thing about social is, how do you define social? Is social when someone buys your product and opens up the box and may see a coupon code in there and they give it to their friend and they say hey you check out his product line? Is social when people are at a dinner talking about, you know – is social defined to the online world on the social media channels? I don’t think so, I think social is people relating about your product and recommending them to one another and that we do better than anyone because we have a message because when you’ve got a message, when you have a topic of conversation that is just beyond your product itself, and the product relate to it, that’s when you’re really doing social. As far as social channels go, Facebook is our channel. Yeah we’re on Twitter, yeah we’re on LinkedIn, yeah we’re on Google+ but people don’t come together the way they come together on Facebook on any other social channel out there on my experience so I think if you’re going to focus only on just one, Facebook is the channel.

James: Cool, well let’s kind of bring it towards a close now but I don’t want to do that until we’ve touched a little bit on podcasting cause I’m indeed getting very excited about it and you are too with your new podcast Think Act Get. Tell us more about the podcast, I have been enjoying it but tell us more about the results you’ve been getting.

Ezra:  So let’s just talk about podcasting as a channel, iTunes right? I think the reason why podcasting is such a fantastic channel is because people listening to podcasts, everyone listening to this podcast. You’re really smart people, you’re actually, you know, when you look at the demographics of podcast listeners, they’re more highly educated, and you know these people own apple devices, just on average, an apple customer is a higher value subscriber than just someone who randomly finds your blog on Twitter or whatever. And that’s not to make any judgment or that kind of stuff, it’s just like when you look at the hard facts based on who’s consuming what forms of media, these groups of people are really good people to be engaged with because these are people who are actively engaged in self growth.  They’re consuming information that is either entertaining for them or educational for them. And for that the podcasting channel is fantastic. Earlier in e-commerce, nobody was doing these things. There’s nobody out there any market you can throw a podcast and it’s the easiest thing to do in the world. Just get a plugin called blueberry, you record your audio, you upload it with an image and you’re done. It’s really, really simple to put up a podcast. The key to having a successful podcast is again having people engage with it and come back and listen to it and download it and our podcast Think Act Get is a little bit out there, it’s a really, really fun podcast. The press release behind is: What you think determines how you act and, how you act, and how you act determines how you get. And so it’s covering life in business and it’s really, really fun because we’re exploring your mind and it affects the results that you see in your life. And what you think and what you do actually has a result on your universe and what you create in the world and it’s a really fun podcast, we started out in the self-help section of iTunes and we very quickly got up to #7 in Australia iTunes and #3 in America, whatever. Well we beat out Oprah in self-help which was really, really fun and kind of cool and then we move over to the business and we got to the #1 in Australian iTunes and the #6 spot in US iTunes in the Business, and Marketing section for a while there and now I think we’re sitting at #14 or something but it’s really cool and people are actually liking it and it’s just a fun way – obviously, as you can tell I like to talk, you know James likes to talk and it’s a really cool and fun podcast. And yeah, I am very excited about podcasting as a channel.

James: So are we going to be seeing the Ezra Firestone chat show ousting Oprah on the TV coming up? That would we be absolutely awesome!

Ezra: I’ve got another podcast actually, the smart marketer podcast, my blog’s smartmarketer.com. I’m starting a podcast which actually I’m going to interview you on though, you know, anyway you’ll probably send that out to people whom you know.

James: Excellent! Good stuff. Should we just mention all those sites then as good places to connect with you as thinkgetact.com and smartmarketer.com?

Ezra: Yes. Come, say hi, let me know what you’re up to, I would love to hear from you. If there’s a way I can be of service, let me know. One of the things that I really like doing is- this is what I’m passionate about, is talking to other business owners and entrepreneurs who are in to the same stuff that I’m into, about what’s going on with them and where you are in your business and what business you’re having and how your viewpoints differ from mine and I’m like that’s the fun stuff, that’s the good stuff, it’s what I enjoy, so please come by and say hi and let’s engage.

James: I’m sure we’ll have a few people listening in right now who’ll fit that profile so head on over and connect with Ezra. Thanks buddy! It’s been a lot of fun today and I look forward to catching up with you again on your show and hope to catch you soon!

Ezra: Thanks James! I appreciate it man.

This week’s news in traffic: well it’s been a busy 7 days in social media this week, LinkedIn, Google+ and Facebook all releasing announcements. Let’s start off with LinkedIn; we’ll they’ve just come up with tips on how to better manage your LinkedIn company page, so if that’s an area of responsibility for you, go and check out their recommendations over on the LinkedIn blog. They’ve also announced this week that their endorsements feature has reached a total of 1 billion endorsements across profiles. And I’ve also noted that since adding endorsements that recommendations in LinkedIn have also increased. If you’ve not taken of endorsements, it’s probably a good time to get your LinkedIn profile moving up a gear or two.

Google+, we’ll they made some updates to their profiles which now feature a much bigger cover image and some easier ways to go and edit your profile. They should already be live on your own accounts so if you want to check those out go to plus.google.com/new to your own profile or if you want to check out mine because I have already updated my cover image, go to circlejames.com and you’ll be redirected to my Google+ page. Of course, while you’re over there, make sure to connect with me as well.

And finally, in news coming out of Facebook, they’ve made some updates to their news feed which now features bigger images in the stories that are shown in there and the opportunity for you to select the type of feed that you view from your own profile. So go check those out over at Facebook, I think they’re slowly integrating them over the profiles in the coming weeks. It may not be available for you yet but it will be coming soon.

I’ve got to give a bit of a whoop out at this stage because after a couple episodes in to Traffic Jam we’ve got our first 5-star iTunes review and it’s from Alice in Cambridge, England who said, love the first two episodes on Traffic Jam. Anyone responsible for marketing their business should tune in to the show. Looking forward to seeing how the show develops. Well thank you Alice, we have some big guests lined up on Twitter, LinkedIn, Media Vice and much more coming up in the next few weeks. Keep on listening in; I know you’re going to love what we’ve got coming in for you.

If you’ve got a comment or a question that you’d like me to answer on the show or perhaps even a suggestion on the types of topics that you would like covered on forthcoming episodes, head on over to trafficjamcast.com and also remember we’ve still got open our competition from last week which was to win a signed copy of Jason Miles’s Pinterest Power book and that’s going to go to the best comment or question on last week’s show so again head on over to the site and submit your comments and question beneath last week’s episode to be in with the chance of winning that book.

The one minute traffic tip this week is a really sneaky invisible stalking strategy that’s called Google Remarketing. It’s the ability to tag people who have visited your site and then served them up advertising by the Google adwords display network as they browse around the internet. Now my good friend Mike Rows describe this as having invisible email list and essentially it is because you’ll have all of these prospects who have sometimes paid interest in your products and services that you can tap in to anytime in the future with a message that’s timely and relevant to them.

Now what are some of the opportunities? Well you can serve up a set of advertising to people who have visited your page with a second chance or discounted offer to try to get them over online and make a purchase. You could also send seasonal promotions to people who already know about you. For instance you got a January sale or a summer discount. Send promotions to people via Google display advertising. They already know about your company and they’re very likely to convert. We’re getting some great results with Google remarketing ourselves and in fact we do offer it as a service over at clickjam.com so shameless plug: If you’d like to know more about Google Remarketing then hit us over at clickjam.com and we can get you stalking your prospects on the internet right away.

Ok so that rounds up another episode of Traffic Jam. If you’ve enjoyed this episode please do head on over to iTunes and leave us a review I really would appreciate that. Playing us out this week is another classic track, this time from the year 1992 from a band who actually just reformed last year and I was lucky enough to hear them a couple of times, both of which were phenomenal sets. The track is Pennies from Heaven and the band is Inner City.

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THIS WEEK IN TRAFFIC

ONE MINUTE TRAFFIC TIP

THE TRAFFIC JAM

Pennies from Heaven by Inner City

The fastest growing social media platform ever; Pinterest has taken over the field and changed the way things work for social media marketing. In the second episode of Traffic Jam,  Jason Miles of Marketing On Pinterest joins James Reynolds.

Jason is the author of the best-selling book titled Pinterest Power: The Definitive Pinterest Marketing Guide.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS

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“Social discovery now competes strongly against search-based discovery.” @mrjasonmiles
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Welcome back to Traffic Jam, the show that mixes interviews with internet traffic experts together with funky musical jams. I’m your host James Reynolds and this is Traffic Jam episode #2.

In today’s show, my feature interview is with Jason Miles, the Amazon bestselling author of Pinterest Power, The Definitive Pinterest Marketing Guide. Jason has been getting astonishing results for his e-commerce business, Liberty Jane Clothing using Pinterest. Not only has Liberty Jane’s Pinterest page’s got an exceptionally high following and level of engagement, but Pinterest has become the number one source of referral traffic to the Liberty Jane website. The online store has over 200,000 digital downloads to date, many of which Jason has been able to attribute directly to Pinterest traffic, if you’re ready to tap into the hidden power of Pinterest, then stay tuned for the interview with Jason coming right up.

Later in the show, we’ve got the regular segments, this week’s news in traffic, plus the one minute traffic tip, where I’ll be sharing a strategy that’s working particularly well for me right now. You want to make sure you stick around right ‘til the end because I’ve got a very special giveaway courtesy of my guest today, Jason Miles. All of that before we close out the show with a classic Traffic Jam Jam.

A big thank you to everyone who listened in to and shared the first episode of Traffic Jam, thanks to you all, we’ve entered the iTunes rankings at #4 in the new and noteworthy business section which I think is pretty cool. Thanks for your support, and continue listening.

Ok, so let’s jump in to today’s feature interview with Pinterest traffic specialist, Jason Miles.

James: Welcome to the Traffic Jam podcast Jason, glad you’ve been able to make it on the call today. Why don’t you start off by giving a little bit of background on who you are and your real interest in Pinterest?

Jason: Sure, thanks so much- happy to be here. My name is Jason Miles; I’m the Vice- President of Advancement in the Northwestern University in Seattle, WA. Advancement for our university includes Marketing, Social Media, Fund Raising, and Human Resources. So I’m responsible for the Corporate Brand, Social Media Strategy, and those types of elements. I also started a company of my wife around her skill set called Liberty Jane Clothing, and it’s a thriving six-figure business, it’s growing incredibly fast- last year’s revenue has doubled, and before that revenue tripled. This year we think we’re on track to double revenue again, and so it’s completely on fire, and it’s really from Liberty Clothing’s experiences that we got into Pinterest and got very, very excited about it. I serve as the Chief Marketer for that company and although I only work evenings and weekends on it – that’s how I help her and her team. So Pinterest became a very, very big deal to us about a year and a half ago now, almost 2 years, and I can describe to you why it’s a big deal to us, what it does for us, and the ways in which we use it. A book came out of that effort, which is published by McGraw-Hill this last fall. That’s been very, very fun, it’s a best seller and we’re excited about that.

James: So obviously you’re a big believer in Pinterest Jason, you’ve got a lot of success with it, but why Pinterest, what’s the real attraction to it really as a marketing medium for businesses?

Jason: It’s a good question, I guess just to sort of verify why it’s an interest to us – we are pretty involved in social media strategy for Liberty Jane Clothing. We’ve actually started on YouTube – right when we started our business five years ago, we started leveraging on YouTube as our social media platform; we’ve got about 9,600 followers in our YouTube channel now, about 1.7 million video views, so we know YouTube really well. And then we added Facebook, and it right at 25 or 26,000 Facebook fans for our page now- so we know Facebook really, really well, and we know what the numbers look like out of those two sites, in terms of referral traffic from them to our e-commerce site, our primary e-commerce site is LibertyJanePatterns.com you can we get like, last month we had over half a million page views, somewhere around 85,000 visits, around 45 to 50,000 unique visits. So YouTube and Facebook were big deal to us, but in the summer of 2011, we started to see Pinterest come up in our analytics actually for our site traffic, just with some amount of visits, not very much. We did not know what it was, we did not know a thing about it, had not heard about it, it was kind of a fore that hit everybody’s radar and so we just sort of ignored it for a month or two. As it got into August – September 2011, the traffic started really to double or triple every month and started to get serious, and so we looked into it, we figured out what was happening, as it turns out, all of our fans and followers, or a lot of them, were joining this new site Pinterest and they were pinning items from our website and sharing them on their pinboard collections and driving a good amount of traffic to our website. We could see sort of the handwriting on the wall and realized that within a few months this thing was going to surpass the traffic we were getting from YouTube and then surpass traffic we were getting from Facebook and for that to occur without us even being in Pinterest was just crazy- I mean we were on a sugar high, realizing how much traffic was going to come out of this thing and so we started to figure out how to jump into it. So that was the journey.

James: On Pinterest, I mean the growth of that site on its own, I mean I think I even heard you mention that the numbers have exceeded any other website previously in existence in terms of increasing subscriber rates and traffic volume, do you really kind of manage to hit the top of the wave here and jump into Pinterest while you are sort of peaking and take advantage of it for your own business?

Jason: Yeah, we did and the truth is, our business, our e-commerce site was just set up properly to sort of take advantage, or have our customers take advantage of Pinterest. So in that regard, we got kind of lucky, and then obviously we’re in a visual space, and in that regard we got kind of lucky. So, there’s no doubt that we sort of got the stars aligned for us for our business, and that’s what really peaked our interest initially. But in December of 2011 we’ve decided to set up our own Pinterest profile for the business and really jumped into it, we’ve created a marketing plan, and I’ve published the marketing plan, and I have decided to start blogging publicly as well about our work in Pinterest, and I have blogged on and off before, and we have a group of people who use our patterns, we produce patterns, and they use it as a basis when they’re sewing from home and they sell it on Etsy or on e-bay. And so I decided to blog for them and decide what was occurring with our work in Pinterest- and that was really the basis for the marketing side of this where I decided to write the book and the blog and started stuff like this interview. That month that we launched our Pinterest profile, our traffic doubled out of Pinterest, it was from just December 2011 to January of 2012.

James: Wow! You said that you got lucky Jason with the fact that your business extremely visual being one thing, also an e-commerce business which – I could be dumb in saying this but I think e-commerce suits Pinterest quite well, what about the female demographic? Because I think that your product at Liberty Jane is obviously aligned very much to the female market and some people do say that Pinterest is sort of kind of like female dominated knowing the stats are that around 70% of people on Pinterest are women, would you also have that as a consideration to why you managed to do well with Pinterest early on?

Jason: Certainly! Yeah! And that is a fact, the way in which they describe what’s occurring in Pinterest is that- Ben Silbermann, the founder- described it as, being initially accepted or adopted by Midwestern moms and Mormons. In Iowa, a Midwestern city he grew up in, and it’s where it kind of caught on. It was adopted almost in a city-by-city way, almost a viral wave like that. He has said that at the very beginning it was growing like a 40% month over month growth, in fact, Fortune Magazine and Tech Crunches described it as the fastest growing site, from 50,000 users to 17 million. That happened in over a year ago now and so it’s certainly the case that it’s a female seen centric site but the way I describe it to people is that it’s like saying that Facebook, a year and a half into it, was a college scene centric site. That’s true because that’s the initial user community, but as it scales, and it’s already becoming more and more true, the gender mix on Pinterest will go to basically what it is for Facebook which is like 58% female. It has to, if it’s going to continue to scale. So it was an initial issue, but I think more and more as it grows, men are finding a place on it.

James: I want to just read out some stats to you that I found while I was kind of researching for today’s interview. This is kind of around the topic of Pinterest being suited to e-commerce business. I was just flabbergasted by some of these numbers, I think I read somewhere that Pinterest users get inspiration for what they’re going to buy by looking at Pinterest and that 70% of people go to Pinterest to get inspired on what to buy and 47% of US online consumers have made a purchase based on recommendations from Pinterest. Those numbers to me, as a non Pinterest user is pretty amazing. One more stat that I would like to read also is that conversion rate are deemed to be 50% higher than most of the traffic source, I think that was socialmediatoday.com that said that. Why do you think Pinterest is so good for e-commerce and driving sales?

Jason: Yeah, what those stats say to us marketers or social media professionals is that social discovery as a concept, is taking over, or is now competing strongly against search- based discovery. It is the case that users now are preferring to look on Pinterest for something and searching Pinterest for something because they know they can see an image of it, they know that it will be their social circle that would be documenting it, or curating it as an object or as a topic. And then they know that that link will drive back to an e-commerce site or a store location where you can buy the item. Now just think that 2 years or 3 years ago, if you wanted to find something that you heard about, you would go to Google and text based search for it, right? And then if you clicked on the images result in Google, you would see a hodge-podge of sure crap, and the Google search function for images just doesn’t work! And the reason that it doesn’t work is because it’s thought based, it’s algorithm based. It’s not being curated by human beings – and as soon as you get in Pinterest, and as soon as you start figuring out that all your friends, connections and people you like in the industry or following are curating things that are really, really cool, they have great image, they have a great link to trusted websites, and there’s a reasonably good search function – you can search for in that way, that just makes Google search looks stupid.

James: I guess it makes Facebook look stupid as well from that angle, I mean, Facebook has the social elements and the recommendations but you can’t use it currently as a search engine, you can’t use it to find information or services really because the search sucks so would you say that’s one of the hooks that Pinterest does as something that really works for e-commerce: search married up with social?

Jason: Yeah, for sure, and the visual nature of it.

James: Cool, well let’s talk a little bit about how to get things set up right with Pinterest. What’s the first place to start- are we really just looking at the profile and what to fill in there or is there something that precedes that Jason before we get started on Pinterest?

Jason: Yeah, it’s always a great question and my answer always surprises people. If you want to do things right on Pinterest with your audience and crowd, you actually don’t want to get started on Pinterest. You’d want to start on your own website, and what you need to do is audit your website to make sure that your site is set up to work well for Pinterest users. So, you know, and this is sort of a different part about Pinterest from Facebook or YouTube. With Facebook, you can pretty much guarantee as a marketer, if you don’t go in there and start pumping out content, finding people and getting fans, nothing’s ever going to happen- and that’s true of Twitter, YouTube, and all that. With Pinterest, it’s not actually that way. What occurs with Pinterest is that your fans and followers will do the work for you- they really will, if you set up your website properly to support them. And so what you need to do is look at your website and ask a couple of primary questions: the first one is- on every page or post, is there an image that’s unique, that references that page/post/ topic? And so for e-commerce sellers that’s very easy because generally what you would have is you have your catalogue of products and each page generally would have that unique image for that unique product and then Pinterest users can hit your site and start pinning things from it. For content marketers, it’s a bigger challenge and content marketers have to think through this. It’s not difficult though. Basically what people are doing now is creating what almost looks like a little display ad that is almost like a small infographic that describes the content on the page in a visual way and it’s very easy to make those in Photoshop elements. So if you have an article about using 10 tips for using Pinterest, you don’t just have some picture of some lady because that has nothing to do with ten tips for using Pinterest. So what you want to do is go and just Photoshop elements, make a simple little graphics that says literally “10 Tips for Using Pinterest” and you embed that to the post, and then when someone comes to your site who’s in to Pinterest and uses Pinterest they will have the tool in their browser called the Pin Marklet Tool, they will click that and they will pin that for you, and it will make sense in Pinterest immediately when someone sees it. And sometimes for content marketers, they stumble to that and they cannot get this right. Even huge socially media sites right now are screwing this up and I told a couple of them, they need to change to do this and they don’t seem to want to change their process. So the first place to start is your own website.

James: Got it! I think they need to read a copy of your book, perhaps pop one in the site through them. So what makes a good Pinterest image? You’ve mentioned sort of summarizing if you like the content of the page on which the image is displayed. What about getting into about types of images, are you best to stick with just a photographical picture, or perhaps should we use those images with text and quotes laid over them, is there a right or wrong way to do it or an effective and ineffective way to do it- what have you found with images?

Jason: Yeah, there’s two camps. One camp is the physical products sellers and I’ll describe that -so physical product sellers you really just want to focus on your very best photography and making sure that your photography is fully dialed in very, very legitimate and you’ve got multiple images – two or three, in every post, in every page of your website that can then choose from when they’re going in. For content marketers, there are some tricks that work very well. Infographics work really well, so if you have an article and you make an infographic embedded into that article, that’s fantastic. How To’s work very well where you actually build the image that has the 1,2,3,4,5 steps on it. I did a very fascinating study one time with a photographer who had Photoshop actions that she was trying to write about and she had a picture that was brilliant- her photo was beautiful and her tagline was like Photoshop actions to make any picture beautiful. And it got repined through her customer, her followers in Pinterest are relatively well. I took her picture and then I looked in her article and she had the original before image and I just put them next to each other, side by side, and then the thing said the same thing 5 Steps to make any picture beautiful. And then in Pinterest, you can see an ugly picture and then that same image really look amazing and that got repined like wildfire. So you just have to just think about the visual nature of Pinterest, you have to give people a reason to stop and click through. You have to think of it like a display marketer, a billboard marketer almost.

James: Got it. And what about best format or shape? I think read on your blog about your long form Pinatorial, I think – these massive long king tutorials of infographic that literally when three miles long down. I was blown away by the fact that that would actually upload to Pinterest. I guess I’m answering my own question here. You can work on literally any format, can you or can you not, on Pinterest?

Jason: Well, not exactly. That’s the interesting part. The way it works, if you’re not used to seeing this in Pinterest, the way it works is there is no horizontal constraint. You can make an infographic, or what I call an Pinatorial, which is like an advertorial, old school thing where you have, make it 20 inches long and you just write paragraphs, tags or images, or step-by-step guides, and in Pinterest, there is no vertical constraint, so you can make a very tall rectangular image and pin it. Lengthwise, you can have a very tall rectangular image, you cannot have a very wide rectangular image. So you can format elements in Photoshop elements to be extremely tall rectangulars like infographics generally are, and they go right into Pinterest no problem at all. So that’s really the format constraint.

James: One other thing that I was surprised about – because I am kind of like a Pinterest novice Jason, I use it a little bit but clearly don’t use it to the full extent of which it can be used, I understand that you can actually pin a little bit more than images, Is there some sort of file types that can be added to Pinterest? What are they?

Jason: That’s right. Pinterest started with photos and video, now there’s actually four- I guess you can call them modalities, or four types of objects that you can pin. Obviously photos, and YouTube videos, and the tech guys will know there is a difference between YouTube videos and other platform videos; so YouTube works but other platforms like vimeo don’t. It has something to do with the type of encoding. And then the third type of object you can pin is slideshow, a slideshare slide, and they play very well in Pinterest. So you can have a whole presentation on slideshare and put it into Pinterest and it will play straight in. And then the fourth type is soundcloud audio recording. And so any mp3 can be put into soundcloud and then shared on Pinterest and it will play right in Pinterest, it won’t drive people out of it to work. It will just play straight in. A lot of marketers have the opportunity to use different modalities.

James: So do you just take the embed code for each of those modalities and then just plug it in to the URL option where you put your pin in option to upload or select to URL is that where those embed codes would go?

Jason: Yup, pretty straightforward.

James: got it, simpler than I thought. There you go. Well let’s jump back to getting these things set up correctly. We’ve talked about website element. I’m a search guy so I’d be particularly interested in setting your profile up to benefit from potential search traffic within Pinterest. What are some of your tips for getting your profile set up in term of keyword placement and really tapping into that available traffic inside Pinterest?

Jason: Sure, there are two parts of it. One would be search within Pinterest, and one would be Google organic search. The primary question is what the profile name is going to be, whether you have a business name, a corporate name you are going to use, or you have your own personal account. What we did for Liberty Jane Clothing was, my wife’s name is fairly distinct – her name is Cinnamon and so her profile name in Pinterest is pinterest.com/cinnamonmiles. But then, once you set that as your profile, you can actually change the name of your account and so on hers on the name we said Cinnamon Miles @ Liberty Jane Clothing so when you search for Liberty Clothing at Pinterest you’ll see Cinnamon Miles pop up so the names that you choose matters. The other thing that matters is Google organic search. I have noticed for my own profile, I did the same construct, my profile is Pinterest.com/jasonmiles then I did for my username Marketing on Pinterest with Jason Miles, and this is fascinating for a search guy maybe, my first pinboard in Pinterest is Marketing on Pinterest and the description of it is all about using Pinterest for marketing blah, blah, blah. Now when I had that pinboard, that first one be that topic, my search results in Google are stronger for that keyword Marketing on Pinterest. Then if I move that Pinboard somewhere else, I am not a search wizard or anything like that, but I do know that those elements matter in your search results for Google organics, so those are the questions, you want to have your username that have a description, you want to have a description that makes sense to people who might find you when you’re all about podcasts for example and you obviously want to say who you are and what you do, have a great headshot, people are following people, I always think that a personal profile is stronger than a corporate profile, I always think that a person’s picture is stronger than a corporate brand or logo, then the real trick is – what do you curate or collect? That’s where you need to think through a strategy: how do you put together content that will be exciting to your prospective followers?

James: I guess from a content standpoint, your own content is surely going to be the most valuable, what value is there of repining other people’s content on your own pinboards?

Jason: I think there is value in it, I think the fundamental mindset that you want to bring to Pinterest is that you want to act as a curator of content for people in your niche, industry or possibly your product line. If your niche or industry is podcasting, I’m just choosing that for fun, then you could curate the world’s best podcast recordings. Yours would be front and center, but you would also have podcast from other well-known people, those that are really great, the best of the best, so that if someone says, hey I’m looking for somebody who’s really helping me understand the best of the best in terms of podcasting, they stumble into you and they feel like they hit a gold mine of content. That’s the fundamental mindset you want to bring into this. You want to serve your prospective followers and curate content that they will find extremely valuable. And the world is just so fragmented and there’s so much content, so much value of information that if you really, really laser beam focused and serve a niche market you can do really, really well in terms of getting people interested in following you. And obviously for Liberty Jane Clothing, my wife’s business that revolves around sewing and fabric and patterns, obviously for my own work on Pinterest that revolves around marketing on Pinterest, and marketing in general. And that’s why people would find me and follow me.

James: Got it, that makes perfect sense, looking at it as a curation exercise and understanding what’s going to draw your audience in and then try to transfer them into your own products and services and putting your own content out there front center makes sense to make conversion strategy, I guess. And I’m really interested into looking deep into some traffic tips because obviously this show is all about traffic. If my understanding is right, I guess we have to look at Pinterest from two angles in terms of traffic; one would be to increase your audience on Pinterest so that you’ve got more people following you, also that using it as a referral engine and then moving people from Pinterest to your own products and services and website. Let’s talk about that first part – first of all, what are some good strategies to increase your following and getting more people to find your Pinterest profile?

Jason: Yeah, there are a couple of things that we found that work well, wouldn’t claim that we’re gurus at it, we don’t have any magic, there are certainly people who have done a phenomenal job, there are people who have millions of followers in Pinterest organically – no games, it’s not rigged, it’s not bots, it’s not fake, so it is possible to have a massive following. For Liberty Jane Clothing right now, I think we have around six thousand followers, and we started in December of 2011, and so just 13 months ago, something like that. So we are excited by that, our best suggestion is that it’s kind of counter intuitive. What you want to do, what we recommend that you do is set up a good Pinterest profile, curate content that you think your followers will like – 8 to 10 pinboards with selection of content and then use your other social media or other media channels to invite people- your existing people; your fans, contacts and customers – to follow you on Pinterest. So basically setting up your Pinterest profile and then inviting everybody and have a grand opening and invite them to start following you. Now, here’s what will happen: they’re already on Pinterest and they’ll start following you and then when they repin your content, their friends will be exposed to you, or- if they’re not in Pinterest yet, and you provoke them to joining it, they will like you, as one of the first people that are following, they’ll go and they’ll find all of their friends in Facebook and Twitter and follow them as well, and their friends will find them, your friends will be exposed to their social circle. So either way, setting up a profile and sort of inviting all of your Facebook fans, those kinds of people, to follow you is sort of the very first step, and that will launch your site. If you do that step well, you’ll get a pop at the beginning of followers. And you can obviously continue that over the coming months; continue to inform people about your Pinterest work. So that sort of is Step 1 and then going from there, it is a function of curating content, the more frequently you pin an item or repin someone else’s content, and it’s good content, it’s a good item, the more people will like it, repin it, and will automatically follow you. So there is a certain degree of just time onsite and work onsite that influences your overall followership. But I would say first thing, the most important thing is set it up and then throw that grand opening party.

James: I’d be interested to know Jason, as a kind of a Pinterest- holic, how much time do you spend on Pinterest yourself?

Jason: Not that much. Last year, when I was really learning everything, it was maybe, 20 -30 minutes a day. Now it’s maybe 20 -30 minutes, 3 days a week. It really runs itself. The beautiful part about Pinterest, the amazing part, is that it is not conversation centric. There is very, very little commentary people are throwing on my collection right now that I have to respond to, there’s very little communication – it’s like a social media nirvana, you get tons of traffic out of the site but you don’t have to answer question after question or the drama or the jerks or that kind of thing. So you can be there very quickly and elegantly if you know what you are curating based on what you’re pinning and what you’re looking for, you can do that very effectively.

James: And I guess it’s not too time sensitive either, it’s not like a Facebook or a Twitter that is very instantaneous. You put that post or tweet out there and you ought to be getting a response there and then or you’re not. Pinterest kind of seem a little bit more long term, doesn’t it?

Jason: Yeah, what I describe that as the difference between a real time sharing site and a curation site, in that regards, Pinterest is a lot more like YouTube, where you publish something and they’ll just sit there for years. And people will find value in it for years. Pinterest is more like that, the people at Bentley, the chief scientist there is Hillary Mason, and they’ve done research to describe what they call the half-life of a socially shared item and as you might guess, on Twitter, it’s like a few minutes, and on Facebook it’s not very long, on YouTube it’s much, much longer, and then they haven’t released the full findings yet about their Pinterest data but I would believe that it’s much, much longer than even YouTube. So the half-life of the objects are extremely long. And that phrase means how long does it take to get half of all of the socially shared interactions – comments, like, repin, retweet.

James: Got it. That would make perfect sense. Let’s look at the other side of the coin and talk about how we’d move people from Pinterest to our website or products and services. What are some of the strategies that you put in play, perhaps with Liberty Jane to move people from Pinterest to move to the Liberty Jane website?

Jason: This is really to us in terms of marketers, you know, this is really what it’s all about. Are you getting referral traffic and is it converting? And so just the basic stats for us, when I described our founding story on Pinterest and we started to pay attention to it, we would get referral traffic out of YouTube, about 800 visits a month, out of Facebook it was over 1200 to 1600 a month, well Pinterest came along and started to creep up slowly close to that. Now it’s been a year and a half later, and Pinterest drives 5 to 6 times fan page, and it drives at least 10 times more than our YouTube. We still just can’t believe how good a source of referral traffic we found in Pinterest. You know, you work your brains out to try to build up a YouTube account or a Facebook account and we know how long it took us, how hard it was to get traction on those sites, and then have Pinterest come along and just obliterate them, and I want other people to leverage it. It is painful to me when I see people aren’t using Pinterest – seriously it is, like man! So let me describe what’s happening, I mean basically, if you look at it one way it’s really funny, Ben Silbermann was on the display ad team at Google. And he wasn’t and engineer and he felt stymied in his career there – he was there for several years, and so he left to start his own thing. Well what did he start? First he dabbled in apps, but then he got the idea of Pinterest he started Pinterest- he basically built a display ad system that’s free, that drives more traffic than display ads, cause I use Google display ads for marketing, I know exactly how the math works, and on top of it, if I would have said to him when he worked at Google, hey, can I have no horizontal constraint on my display ads?, he’d go, no, like the full length size of a website’s left hand side, you know like, of course you can’t do that! You have the 250×250, your skyscraper. But he basically built a system of display ads that is a social construct that people are just crazy over. So the way the referral traffic works specifically, when you pin an item, you have a URL that’s associated with that item. And when that item is clicked on Pinterest, then it takes you to that URL. So as an e-commerce guy, or as a content marketer, obviously you want to have a unique image for every post or page. So that URL that’s associated with the image, drive back to the specific unique page, you don’t want all your images in Pinterest to be just to your top level domain, you want it to drive to the specific item, whether it’s an article or product, and that’s the mechanism by which traffic is driven, and there aren’t a lot of tricks, you pin in your best stuff and if people are interested in it, they go through it. The top source of traffic going into Pinterest is generally from Etsy. People from Etsy go and look at the stuff in Pinterest. The top source of traffic leaving Pinterest and going to sites- the top sites are Etsy and Amazon. So from the very beginning, it is the case that this is all about e-commerce and so you can ride that wave along with lots of other companies.

James: Nice! And have you been able to track down to conversions, Jason? You know very well that the traffic stats, how much of that traffic converted into sales?

Jason: It’s a good question. We set up our Google Analytics just last year and we’re still learning how to do this exactly but we have some guys help us so that we can track the source of the traffic and then how it converts. We know that Pinterest traffic converts well for us compared to the other social sites. Other companies are claiming that it converts like Sephora. I just saw a thing in LinkedIn I think a couple of days ago and I believe it was Sephora. I believe they made a claim that Pinterest converts at an astronomically higher rate than Facebook. Ours is not crazy like that – it converts but it does not convert like that. But the difference for us, and I keep using Facebook because it’s our biggest social media site that we can compare it to, the problem we have in tracking and compare to Facebook for us is we advertise in Facebook. So we’re deliberately paying to find brand new people who will see us for the first time and then will buy. I think that inflates the conversion stats for our Facebook traffic compared to Pinterest. But Pinterest still wins, in Pinterest when your customers and followers start pinning stuff, those referral links, or you call them backlinks, they’re on hundreds and even thousands of Pinterest accounts. For us, for our business, the last time I looked I think we had over 9,500 – 9,600 referral links in Pinterest pointing to our e-commerce site. If you look at your friends in Facebook, what you’ll on your friends and what we see on ours, is you’ll have just a couple referral links that drive all your traffic and that the reason that that’s of interest is because last August of 2011, Facebook shut our fan page down and they were doing some huge clean up or sweep and thought that our account was, like it was fake. But that traffic from Facebook immediately vaporized. It went to like nothing. And it took us several days to go through the process of authentication and they were cool, and they turned it back on, and there was no foul but it took several days and our traffic was obliterated That literally couldn’t happen on Pinterest unless they block our top level domain but, if someone’s account gets closed, we don’t care. If our account got closed, it wouldn’t be that big a deal because we have 9000 referral links spread across Pinterest pointing back to our e-commerce site.

James: Yeah, and again for an SEO guy that I am, that’s some nice levels of social signals that you have. That beautiful backlink diversity, that’s the sort of stuff that get me as an SEO geek, so it’s definitely unique in that regard. Jason, I think we should kind of wrap things up there. You’ve been extremely generous with your information there. I’ve learned quite a bit as a Pinterest novice. Where can our listeners go to find out more about you?

Jason: Sure, a couple of things: marketingonpinterest.com is the blog, and I’m not as active as I was last year to be honest because I’m writing a new book on Instagram and it will be coming out later this year- Instagram is the new craze for us, so that’s fun. Maybe we can do a session on Instagram sometime in the future, but marketingonpinterest.com is where I blog, and the book that’s out now is Pinterest Power, it’s a best seller, it’s on Amazon, and in paper bookstores, in paperback in Kindle. I have another book in Amazon; the number 1 best seller called Craft Business Power and it’s really designed for home-based businesses because it’s on Google, craft based, fabric stuff and jewelry stuff, those kinds of people. But you know, you can find my profile in Amazon, and my book’s there, and that’s about it.

James: Awesome, well, I’ll make sure that the links are on the show notes wherever this episode appears. Yeah perhaps we can get you back on sometime in the future when we can do an episode again concerning Instagram. It will be a lot of fun!

Jason: There you go, sounds great man!

James: Excellent Jason thanks so much and I’ll catch you soon!

Jason: Alright James, take care.

Okay, so this week’s news in traffic, the big news coming out of Google in the past 10 days or so is the official announcement by video of their forthcoming release of Google Glass, and these are the kind of cool, augmented reality glasses. I reported about this over on my SEO news videos at SEOSherpa.com and these glasses are really kind of a mix of I guess like Apple Siri voice activated technology along with Google search and everything that comes with that. Now it really is a big move for Google further into the technology space, and the technology as we can see it is absolutely amazing. Everything is activated by the command Okay Glass, and the technology includes video, photo, video conferencing, directions, Google search, all of this appear on the tiny little screen on the inside of the glasses, now it really does bring Google search and all of the functionality that comes along with that right into our everyday lives. And more importantly, it moves Google further in this information engine that started out as few years back to becoming just kind of knowledge engine that really does integrate into our everyday lives. It’s making Google search much more accessible and that really is interesting if you’re an SEO marketer or a Google ads marketer, I’m sure there’s going to be some great advertising spin offs forthcoming that really will tie in to Google glass so keep your eyes peeled for developments: release is planned for later in the year, 2013.

In other news, well, you might have heart about it first here on Traffic Jam and my interview here with Victoria Gibson, Facebook are really starting to push their Graph Search facility is in beta, people are getting access to it right now, this is the integrated search engine that’s inside of Facebook. Facebook have published a promotional video all about Graph search and because it’s in beta, you can request access if you’re lucky enough to be in the United States, so if you are, go and check it out and tell us about the functionality of graph search.

I’ve got a shout out on the web and it’s a big holler to Ernesto who mentioned us on Facebook and he said “Traffic Jam Cast, wow! I really recommend you listen to the show, the content is killer!” I would have to agree with you Ernesto, just kidding! Thank you my friend and again, please keep listening.

If you have a comment or even a question for me you would like me to answer on the show, head on over to TrafficJamCast.com<%2

Facebook traffic is the hot topic of discussion in this inaugural first episode of  The Traffic Jam podcast. James Reynolds is joined by Facebook marketing specialist Victoria Gibson from Marveo.com.

Victoria’s expertise is in creating effective brands on Facebook, helping businesses reach out to large audiences of hungry buyers, and create ongoing and valuable dialogue with customers and prospects.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS

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“Facebook’s a relationship platform; don’t expect to make immediate sales.”@VictoriaGibson1
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Welcome to the maiden voyage, episode numero Uno of the Traffic Jam podcast. The show that blends traffic chat from the world’s leading traffic experts with cool musical jams. Coming up on the first episode we have an interview with Victoria Gibson from Melbourne- based Facebook Marketing Agency Marveo. Victoria is someone I have known very well as we are buddies inside James Schramko’s Silver Circle, which on a side note is an absolutely killer business mastermind group and at the time of recording this is actually open for new members so if you’re doing 6 figures in revenue and need to take it to seven, I suggest you check out silvercircle.com.

Anyhow, Victoria is a totally switched on marketer and an expert in Facebook ads and Facebook engagement, so stay tuned with my interview with her a little later on.

 We’ve also got this week’s news in traffic where I’ve got updates across all traffic channels as well as the section I’m calling The One Minute Traffic Tip and that is exactly what it says on the title. All of these is coming towards the end of the show, so don’t go anywhere, stay tuned.

 Before we get stuck into the main course, I’d like to give a shout out to Paul Thomas, he is my good friend, DJ extraordinaire, and producer who supplied the opening track for the podcast. The track is titled Skaramooshand it’s out on Tall Room Records. To find out more about Paul, checkout www.djpaulthomas.com

 So let’s get right into the main section of the show and that’s the special feature with Victoria Gibson.

 James: Victoria, welcome to the Traffic Jam Podcast.

 Victoria: Thanks James, it’s great to be here.

 James: Victoria, obviously, I know you and you know me, but would you like to share with our listeners a little bit more about yourself and what you do as a Facebook marketing specialist.

 Victoria: Sure, so I have an online presence where I interact with the community and a list of people wanting to know more how to use Facebook for marketing their own brand or for their clients. I provide advice and tips on my website and my blog and my Facebook page, my website is marveo.com and my Facebook page is fb.com/wearemarveo. I have a business where I manage clients’ campaigns so I take an integrated approach across Facebook using Facebook ads and pages to get the best results and the most effective campaigns that connect with my clients’ target customers. I’ve got those two facets where I coach and help people online but I also deal with clients one on one with their campaign management too.

 James: I’ve observed what seems to be a real growth in Facebook business pages of late. I’m getting almost daily requests to like my page, sometimes on businesses that on the face of it are not really suited to Facebook marketing. Would you consider Facebook a platform still more suited to social or lifestyle businesses or is it a case now where anyone can get their business on Facebook and get success?

 Victoria: I think it is getting to a point now where pretty much anybody can, it is all in the execution and most people are not doing execution well. Big brands obviously, straight ahead as far as that’s concerned and a couple of smaller brands by virtue of the fact that they don’t have big marketing budgets are doing a great job too. But, I am sure you’ll agree that when you browse around on Facebook really good pages are, and Facebook presence, are few and far between. Great looking and effective Facebook ads are even harder to find but it’s getting a lot better. There are definitely some things that not, people even approach me and say things like, the things that come to mind, there are people who approach me, cabinet makers and I am like I don’t even know what you’re doing, you know industrial cabinet thing, I don’t know it does not interest me at all, and I am sure it does not interest the bulk of people on Facebook either. And I just said to them, well that is going to be one hard thing to sell on Facebook. So something bland and boring like that is going to be difficult to sell. I think you can pretty much put anything on there but there’s going to be things that work a lot easier than others, I mean even if you think about it, something as unsexy as a purse, Facebook is a brilliant channel for them, if it’s not about selling, it’s about customer service, and hearing your customers and responding to their queries, concerns and creating advocates across Facebook. And you know, even something as unsexy as taxation has a place on Facebook. It’s in people’s live and that gives them something they can interact with. The things like well-loved brands, consumer brands and musicians and as you said some restaurants lifestyle venue these are going to do better than taxation firms. But as I said before, selling this on Facebook to really, well a lot of the B2B stuff is a lot more difficult to get moving on Facebook.

 James: You’ve got an agency, right? Over at Marveo.com, why don’t you give us some examples? I’m sure a breadth of different types of businesses and entrepreneurs, who have you been able to, without giving names if that’s private; you have you been able to get the best results for?

 Victoria: You know what; it’s not so much the specific product or service that makes the difference as the brand and the marketing and setting up the channel the right ways. If people had created their branding well and if they are recognizable or people come to their brand, it’s easy what they stand for and that they can be unique. Then that’s a great set- that client will always do better than those who really have a traffic website and they’re trying to drive traffic on Facebook. Those that have an established brand or at least an established brand identity if they’re new are going to do much better on Facebook with their Facebook marketing than those that don’t. Things like shopping malls are great because they are a part of the community so they have already got a natural kind of community thing going on so it’s easy to replicate that in Facebook. And also by virtue of the demographic targeting you can really get to their audience very easily. Things that are visual, things that are easy to share, imagery, or brands that have a lot of images that are great to share are easy to market on Facebook as well. Because you know photos are really the half of the success of Facebook and why people love to interact so anything that can be quite visual. So we’ve done live events, we did a big 3 day Halloween event or festival or something. So things like that got a lot of support. Little did I know that there are a lot of Halloween freaks, Halloween is not that big in Australia so there is almost like a subculture of horror fans and vampires and zombies. All these subcultures were then finding their little community on this events page, they are all drawn by the common dread of Halloween and these sort of spooky attractions and rides and I think the most surprising things can happen on Facebook and when I landed on marketing the Halloween event on Australia I was like, oh this is going to be a stretch, but in fact, it’s not once you tapped into the right people and that’s what I love about Facebook is that it takes all kinds and generally they are there. So definitely things that still have an element of their own physically in the community can do well – so shopping mall, events, online companies that have a good personality attached to them, and that use video, those work extremely well. And anything in fashion and music is bound to skyrocket on Facebook as well.

 James: Got it, okay, so we have established that pretty much all those businesses, other than those cabinet makers can do something on Facebook even weird and wacky stuff, but I guess before people jump on board they do want to jump on Facebook right now, let’s face it, there has got to be some sort of strategy behind it, you just don’t go in there, create a page, start posting some random stuff and creating ads that are not targeted or don’t have any thought behind it, what should be a good question to post to get the strategy right for a business wanting to do this?

 Victoria:  Well, obviously, as with any good marketing, it starts with a strategy and keeping that one goal in mind: What is going to be your prime goal? Is it going to be getting more targeted leads which is really what I advocate for where appropriate. It also depends on what you sell, your price point, product, service or what your program is. But it’s what’s most appropriate, and generally, the best kind of approach that I would recommend because it does vary from client to client, but the best approach I would recommend is to think okay let’s think how we can capture people’s email addresses because no matter what you’re really selling, a great way to really establish a relationship aside from obviously aside from their Facebook page is getting their email address. So if you can be building a Facebook page and at the same time growing an email list, that’s going to serve you well for whatever you’re selling. The reason why I tell people that is that you don’t expect to go to Facebook and make immediate sales. Facebook is a relationship platform so it’s like dating a woman, you date them first, take them out and you get a fair exchange in the relationship before you get to that point. It’s very much the same in terms of marketing, you want to be wooing your customers and Facebook marketing can be a great way to woo your customers especially if you have a high priced product to service, don’t be expecting that you’re going to get straight conversions right away. It’s got to be framed at the right way and the relationship has got to start at the right foot, they have to get an idea on the kind of community that you’re cultivating on Facebook., they have to be able to identify with that community so that’s why Facebook pages is absolutely essential to get that right and for me the success of Facebook ads is totally intertwined with Facebook pages and using the platform in its entirety rather than just popping on some random ads for a couple of months and sending them to your website. That’s not the best approach, you want to start creating a great presence for your brand in Facebook and there’s no better time to do that than now.

 James: You mentioned building up the rapport between the business or the individual and the target audience, what do you advocate in terms of good content to post about on Facebook and what sort of frequency should that content be posted at?

 Victoria: Short posts are the best, people are really just wanting quick interaction, so it doesn’t mean that their mainly was, people just like to quickly scan something, seeing the news, say oh, yes, and then evoke a response in them. So the way it can evoke a response is it can be a question you ask to them, it can be a quick direction, you would see many of those post pages that things that ask that you like directly, they’re okay to interweave into your schedule once in a while, you don’t want to be doing those all the time, they can get a bit tiring. If you can get more original content then do, but try and limit yourself to two lines, try and make it a question, a thought starter, a handy and relevant fact, funny is always good, there’s a lot of people sharing funny videos and pictures and all that kind of stuff, the reason why they are so ubiquitous is because they work. I was just having a look actually at a website yesterday and most shared photos. The ten most liked photos in Facebook last year were at a commonality and aside from the fact that the top 2 were from Obama because of the election, what was the common trait among those was that they were emotion pictures of him and Michelle Obama embracing and one was actually a photo of him and her 20 years ago and she or obviously her social media managers had put on there and you that you know, after twenty years she’s still got great smiles or canning a human element to someone who obviously is a celebrity and is a very well-known figure in world and that’s why he sort of has a global reach and power.  The rest are music celebrities, you know like Gaga and others, it is very American leaning actually, as most of the users are in the US but what you can see is that with those there were big musicians and celebrities, all of the photos have an emotion human element to them, another one that comes to mind is Shakira posting a photo at her Facebook page, the likes that these photos get just blow my mind. She had posted a photo of herself pregnant. So even though they are celebrities they are creating this sort of human element and if you can do that with your brand in whatever way, tied in to some sort of human emotion or story, then that really get attention on Facebook and really forge a relationship.

 James: So these things that we can take lessons from in terms of actual page set up as well, should we be looking for emotive type of pictures for the timeline cover image and the profile picture? Do you follow the same kind of recommendations?

 Victoria: Yeah, absolutely! The great thing since timeline was introduced nearly a year ago is that you can be changing your timeline as often as you want. Keeping it fresh, seasonal, relative to your promotional and marketing calendar, move it as much as you would if you have a physical store, and many listeners here might have clients like that that have a physical store. We know that you need to be changing window frequently if you are a retailer for example, keeping it fresh, inviting people in and making them feel that there is something exciting to be heard on your Facebook page. And you can really bring it to life with those branding elements so I absolutely recommend that you incorporate that new imagery rather than just having boring logos and and headshots. Just sharing that interaction with friends and highlighting whatever event, you know making it two ways, and then people say that’s all well and good, how do we then make money from it? If you create that following on Facebook, that’s a ready-made audience that you could be tapping into with Facebook ads. So people have seen a lot of conjecture as well about Facebook ads showing my posts don’t match anymore. You know what, welcome to that world, let’s face it, Facebook had an amazing platform, and even if you are paying cost a fraction of traditional media, like people working in ad agencies would know, what a great opportunity for brands, it still is cheap and effective and a highly targeted form of media that you can be reaching all of those fans using ads. So it doesn’t really matter if you aren’t reaching a hundred percent of people’s needs organically, you can reach them with the Facebook ad platform and it’s really really powerful, and it doesn’t have to be excluding traditional media, you can weave it in beautifully with your traditional media and that just strengthens everything. But I think what most of my clients are finding good even is rather than spending more on Facebook, shifting their media spend from other channels to Facebook is giving them a much bigger return.

 James: This is all trackable right? I mean especially with the most recent announcement from Facebook that we can test or track conversions directly in the Facebook platform, we should get a good indication actually what ROI Facebook is giving us I guess.

 Victoria: Yeah, absolutely! I mean that’s the interesting thing especially talking with many offline clients still suspect about Facebook particularly, I mean I’m in Australia so if you talk to an Australian client, definitely some of the clients down here are unfamiliar and should I say scared of Facebook and don’t believe that it has an ROI and it’s quite interesting and I was like sorry I think I just saw you buy a full page in Metro Press last week and last time I checked it’s very difficult to measure that ROI on a newspaper ad, how many people would exactly see it and purchase if you’re not tracking that online. And how many years have people been putting money into that because at the end of the day, marketing and advertising done well works. So we don’t need to argue the point there, this way you have the ability to actually have ads and pages track how many people are visiting your page, clicking on your ad, and if  you go get them to your website, you have your conversion resources there to see how that converts for you whether there or on Facebook, then you can absolutely track your ROI if you have an online business, or even if you have an offline business, getting leads or tracking Facebook likes, Facebook give you so much information for free, it’s a great kind of brand health check as well and an excellent source of free market research. You can test ideas, new products, ask questions, all those sort of things that you used to have to hold together focus groups that cost tens of thousands of dollars before. This is something that you can be leveraging for free and in my mind, what marketer wouldn’t want that?

 James: Absolutely! And one of the great things that I like about Facebook is that they are always innovating and coming up with new stuff. What’s some of the stuff that’s really working right now on Facebook?

 Victoria: Well, as I said, I really like integrating ads with the pages and over the last 4 to six months, I’m using page post ads so a lot of people would probably think promotion posts, where you can post on your page and click promote at the bottom of your page and that goes to fans and supposed friends of fans and that strategy is fine but there is a much more targeted way to get really cheap clicks and get some good cut through on Facebook and that is using page post ads. And in order to do that you need to create a nice two line post preferably with an image or link or video, and then go into your ads manager and choose your Facebook page as the destination then click on promote a page post and then you’ll get a drop down of all your recent posts. So choose the one that you’ve created an image and obviously a good call to action in that post and there can be a link to a website. So whether you want to have that as a page that you put in on your Facebook page or what we call your Facebook app where you can take web content and add it to your Facebook page in one of those little squares at the timeline, or you have another landing page, so put a link in there and add your call to action and then you can turn that into an ad using all the beautiful targeting options that you have with regular ads. The reason why this works better is that you get firstly more real estate in Facebook with these ads, you get bigger ads and you also have the ability for them to show up on people’s news page rather than just on the site of the news page. So you’re getting more real estate and more exposure, it also looks less like an ad so that tends to appeal if structured the right way, it gets more clicks, which we all know the more clicks you get on your Facebook ads, the less you will end up paying as a cost per click, so I recommend that as a really good strategy to get traffic on an actual landing page or website. Eventually you give thought about the type of landing page you want to use, keep it very clear and one clear function or outcome that is really obvious. Don’t bombard users with too much information on one page otherwise they won’t take any action. To make it really simple for them to take an action whether it be entering an email, whether it be entering for a contest, downloading a white paper or a report, all of those things work really, really well and you can be driving a ton of traffic at an average cost per click of anywhere from 2 cents to sort of 50 cents each and it still is really, really good and fair, safe to say on Facebook. That would be my strategy and what I would be recommending. It might not work in another three months, I think more and more people are tapping into it but in the last few months it’s been an amazing success for the firm and my clients .

 James: Fantastic! And what about the landing page itself? I guess we have the option to send that traffic off Facebook to a website or keep it on Facebook with a tab you suggested. Is there a preference, should we split test or are you finding that one is just outperforming the other right now?

 Victoria: I love keeping the pages on Facebook but one of the limitations to that is that some of the Facebook apps can have bugs with certain browsers so say, you know, God forbid, they’re using Internet Explorer, I know some people do use the browser and I don’t know why, it’s like using Yahoo for search, Internet explorer does have some issues with the apps and sometimes videos if you’re on that landing page it can be slow to load and things like that so that can affect your conversions, but I prefer to keep things in Facebook I think it sort of nice that you keep that consistency and generally you get triple clicks by keeping it on Facebook. If you have a highly converting landing page already, and you’ll start driving it to that you’ll find that it should translate to Facebook, if not do more. So one of my clients has been running a hundred thousand dollars in Google ad, that’s to a landing page, and the landing page converts better on Facebook than it does on Google too, you’d think that Facebook can be just as good if not better and even more better for sure because it’s cheaper. So pretty cool!

 James: Interesting stuff! Good. Victoria I always get confused between a page post ad, a sponsored ad and a promoted post. Can you give us some overview between those different options because there are multiple ways that you can advertise on Facebook?

 Victoria: Yes, the main choices are you can use the regular ads which is the one most people are familiar with and you see on the right had side of your screen. They have small picture a 100 pixel by 71 pixels high with a headline and four lines of text and when people click on them they can go to a URL maybe on Facebook but also may be off. They’re not really a seller ad, they’re designed mainly that when people click on them it gets them to a landing page. What they then discover is why do we want to send traffic off Facebook? We’d rather be making more ads like the rest of the platform so that people will be less disgruntled, it’s all about enhancing the user experience. So they wanted to make ads that look like they were meant to be there and where they are helping people find the things that their friends are interested in. so what I love about those ads is that you can use a page post ad which is what I just described before where you create a post and then you go into your ads manager and use the traditional ads creation techniques and targeting to create a page post ad. A promotion post is just clicking promote at the bottom of your post. Not all pages have this option; you have to have at least 400 fans to have this option come up. The reason why this was created, this came about shortly after the IPO, they’re obviously looking to increase their revenue as quickly as possible and what their finding is just Facebook users who as Facebook customers are completely daunted by the ads manager in creating an ad in that kind of environment. So they created basically, as this is an easy button for just people who just want to press one button and away they go. That shows up in people’s news feeds only, it doesn’t put an actual ad on the side of the page, it shows up in news feeds but they also spin it out to, if you select an option, to what they say are friends of friends. What happens is that they’ll serve that in very low end or cheap market so you’ll find some kind of foreign people seeing those kinds of ads. You might and a lot of people comment on my website about how you’re getting spam on your promoted post and that came about because a lot of people are saying that they are choosing friends of fans as the option to promoting to, although you can do some extra targeting in terms of that, you’re still not taking advantage of what you could be on Facebook so the promoted post can be easy you know, just chop $20 and that you’ve got 20,000 people to see your post. It’s still better to put the $20 to post a page post ad in my opinion so I would be using page post ads over promoted posts. The last one there that you talked about is promoted stories. What Facebook recently done is created automatic sponsored stories when we create an ad. This is to give you added exposure and news feeds exposure and the sponsored stories really I’m sure most people have seen them there are social ads so for example it’s your page James and the sponsored story showed up at my news feed it would show me at my friend’s Facebook that liked your page. It would show as James likes James Reynolds or James liked a page at James Reynold’s page or an app or a video or a link you shared. So it’s trying to amplify that friend activity so that we’d naturally get curious about what people we know do so it’s part of this inbuilt layers and social brief in there, and also they are a lot cheaper than regular ads because they enhance the user experience, so that’s the brief overview and I know some people would be just like, what? But it is very complicated and I do live in a world of Facebook so it makes sense to me but I understand that it may not make perfect sense to everyone else.

 James: Well I’ve got it from the explanation Victoria, it was spot on and perfect! It’s interesting that you touched upon something there. Facebook advertising to a novice can be quite complex based on all the different options that are available. Do you probably see from time to time big mistakes being made? What would some of those big mistakes be?

 Victoria: People who are creating ads just go to their website homepage especially if their website homepage isn’t really optimized for conversion to lead to more sales is a big mistake and one I see frequently. People using really poor image in their market ads or their page post ads just using images that are smaller than the actual size being given, or they’re blurry, or they’re not really relevant to the landing page or perhaps the message isn’t really relevant to the landing page. One of the big ones I see is targeted copy. They have not used the targeting in the ads correctly so I might see an ad that says for example do you live in Sydney and plays football and I’m like I clearly do not leave in Sydney my profile does not say that at all, or perhaps there is a date and they let the ad run on, you know just sort of sloppy mistakes just like that I see a lot from people, I think one of their disadvantages to Facebook ads compared to traditional media is that even though every ad is manually approved, the quality control can be a little lax sometimes and you can see really just dodgy quality there and people are going to be seeing ads that don’t really make sense and are not targeted. And even if Facebook ads are cheap that’s just a waste of money so … Yeah those are really most of the mistakes I see.

 James: I think most people listening to this podcast would resonate with that and that better use of their time would be to actually employ an agency or know this stuff and keep up to date with all the latest trends in Facebook in which there are many of course. What would in your mind be the next trend in Facebook, what would you see coming up next?

 Victoria: that is a good question actually, I think we are going to see the impact of, this is not a major prediction, I have seen this in action and this is probably their strategy and either someone looking at the crystal ball but we’ll probably be seeing the new grass search coming out, you may have accessed it to your profile as now it’s in testing. I was lucky enough to see it last week, and if it comes, cause one of the things that Facebook doesn’t do well, which is probably a lot of people are aware of, is search. So when you are trying to search in Facebook, it’s just totally painful. Even trying to search for someone you know is very difficult so they really haven’t got search ironed out and I think they know that and this grass search is to A – address that but also B to create a whole lot of new social advertising opportunity. So what it basically does is that you can pop in grass search restaurants for example, so it’s going to come up with the restaurants of your friends liked or checked in to so but it has this layer of social element a little bit like what Google will do on Google Plus. It’s trying to make it more of a one stop shop so there is less need for you to go to Google and Facebook’s number 2 and obviously they’d love to be number one, I doubt they can do it but it will be great if they can improve that sort of search landscape on Facebook and that creates a whole lot of advertising opportunities that were not previously there. You know being able to have sponsored feeds when people search for restaurants in grass search is pretty powerful. And that creates a whole new target advertising in there that is obviously more keen to what we can do in Google but that to me is pretty exciting, getting to involve products like that so that grass search is what I am pretty excited about. Those things like the actual advertising products may not come out for another year and that depends, I’m pretty sure they are rushing things as quickly as they can, one of the things they come up against is resistance to change on Facebook and people slow to change because people find it very difficult to work out their English the new features and work out with it, I don’t think people will get as angry as changes in Google as they would in Facebook. Facebook is the place where they can get really angry about change. To me it’s not just something I’m thinking they might do this, they’re doing it, it’s exciting and I think it’s the next logical evolution for Facebook ads. Obviously they need to expand their revenue and maintain the user experience, and I like that philosophy, I think that that’s what makes it a valuable place for marketers. It’s a place that people want to spend their time and you know when you think of one of the largest populations, China is not even on Facebook yet, so there’s a lot of options to go even bigger on Facebook. Obviously China has limitations in terms of how many of that population would be participating and how relevant that is to the western world, but the potential is still really mammoth and I really believe in the platform. You know people can be like, oh no what are you doing in the business, Facebook might not be there next year! To me that’s just not, I mean obviously, Australia doesn’t thrive around that, but to me I just can’t see that happening. I think it’s just woven into our social environment now and hopefully it stays that way.

 James: I’m sure it will though, I think it’s firmly placed there now. So you heard it first, grass search, check that out, sounds very interesting. Fantastic! Victoria, I think we should probably close things out there, we’ve mentioned your website marveo.com a couple of times, is that the best place for people to go out and find out more about you?

 Victoria: Yeah, on there I’ve got quite a few blog posts, a couple of years’ worth really of just, there’s a lot of information that people can access there. I’ve also got a Facebook page which is Facebook.com/wearemarveo people can ask me questions while on the page and interact with me as well there. I’m always present interacting with my fans as I recommend with my clients. And there’s also a video series that I do on which people might get some more information on using page posts and promotes posts and that’s at marveo.com/socialmediastruggle, so you might want to pop that in below the podcast wherever that is, but hopefully people can go and access as much values as they can from my web presence and of course I do campaign management, as well as coaching so if you are looking to hone your skills into this area, I can definitely help you with that too so feel free to reach out.

 James: Thank you well I’ll make sure those links are placed in the show notes beneath this recording so they can pop over and find you there. Victoria, thank you for your time and I hope to catch up with you again soon.

 Victoria: Great! Thanks James

 Okay, so this week’s news in traffic: first item, Facebook as reintroduced their conversion tracking to the ads manager now this means you can now track conversion that originate from your Facebook advertising right from inside your ads manager panel. Facebook have tried conversion tracking in the past, but for a long time it has been unavailable. Many had to rely on external software or Google Analytics Goals to track your conversions from Facebook. Facebook conversion tracking works in the same way as conversion tracking inside Google Adwords, and that Facebook give you a piece of code that  you paste on your website’s thank you page that appears after a purchase or opt in and when a visit occurs to that page, a conversion is measured. This reintroduced feature has been missing and it really is the welcome addition to Facebook ads. That said, I also suggest you track via Google Analytics Goals as this will give you a secondary measurement, perhaps a more rounded view of Facebook conversions comparative to other traffic sources inside Google Analytics.

 In other news, Google have released version 24 of Google Panda. Panda is the series of algorithm updates focused on weeding out poor quality websites that appear high in the search results and they should probably deserve to be. Google reckon only about 1.2% of queries have been affected and if your site has good quality content on it and delivers a good user experience then you should probably have not experienced any dip in results.

 So how do you stay safe? Try some of these things: you might want to focus on creating a quality website and that means rich media on your site, lots of pictures, quality audios and videos really help make a really good strong user experience.

 Also, look at your navigation, try and make it as simple as possible, making sure that your users find the content that they want to find quickly and easily. Also look at things like footer links and also removing any extreme volume of ads that might appear on your site. These are all things that are going to harm you in the Panda era. So the lesson is, create a website with lots of rich quality media, multiple pages and focus on building your authority.

 Wherever you’re listening to this and whatever your area of interest is when it comes to traffic I would love to receive your questions so head on over to www.TrafficJamCast.com and we’ve got two places where you can send us a message, the first is the send voicemail button which appears on the right hand side of the screen, you can literally just speak into that and we’ll pick the audio up for featuring on future episodes and we’ve also got a leave a message button at the top of the screen, that’s a good old text input, just pop your question in there and I’d love to answer that in the coming weeks.

 Also, if you’ve enjoyed this podcast leave us a comment over at the website www.TrafficJamCast.com or if you’re listening on iTunes we’d love to get your review or recommendation so head on over to iTunes and pop in your review over there.

 This week’s one minute traffic tip: Now conversion tracking has been featured on the show numerous times today so I’m going to stay right on theme here. Whatever channel you’re using to drive traffic to your site, use Google Analytics tracking links in combination with Google Analytics Goals.  What’s the process? Well, instead of pointing a link to your clean URL use, Google Analytics tracking links to essentially add a modify to the end of your URL which in turn allows Google Analytics to recognize the exact traffic source which you can track down to source, medium, campaign type and a few other variables. When you use Google Analytics packing links in combination with Goals, you’ll quickly be able to see what specific traffic sources are resulting in conversions and once you know which traffic sources are resulting in conversions, what do you do? You just do more of it.

 Alrighty, that’s it for episode one, remember to leave me a comment and head over to iTunes and leave a review, what’s more, if you leave us a review I’ll be sure to mention you on next week’s show, so that’s it for now. Playing us out this week is another track by Paul Thomas and this one is called Buzz Killington. Enjoy!

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