TrafficTsar Web Traffic Generation

Twitter is still a new entity in the battle for traffic and because of their inexperience Twitter may handle things in less than ideal ways. The following is an article from ClickZ net addressing Twitter’s less than ideal handling of spam.

Pay particular attention to the last paragraph - I expect to see a policy like this implemented by the Twitter folks sooner rather than later.

 ClickZ asked Omar Zaibak, author of the Blue Falcon Marketing blog, to answer these five questions about Twitter spam and what marketers can do to avoid getting labeled a spammer.

Q. How would you define “spam” on Twitter?

A. Any tweet that is highly irrelevant and useless to the user it is being sent to. This includes both the text within the tweet itself, and any webpages it may link to. Keep in mind what one user may consider spam, another may find quite useful.

Q. What are two to three things that a business — whether it’s a Fortune 500 or a small-to-medium sized one — should do to avoid being labeled a spammer on Twitter?

A. Businesses must understand why their customers and prospects follow them on Twitter. This is needed to consistently send tweets that are useful to their followers, and avoid being seen as spammy. So what are two things to avoid?

• Avoid repetition. This includes tweeting the same or similar messages and links over and over. to a similar message, or linking to a specific webpage over and over. Repetition is often associated with spam. Keeping tweets unique, original, and useful to followers is the recommended strategy. 
• Avoid over exposure. Keep a balance between the tweets that promote your specific brand and products, and those that do not. Your followers can still find value in your tweets, even if they do not mention your company, products, or services. Just make sure they address the needs and interests of your followers.

Q. Are there innocuous mistakes someone can make that can backfire? If so, please walk through an example [real or hypothetical].

A. The biggest mistakes I see on Twitter is people following everyone they can, and following everyone that follows them. This happens to be the exact approach spammers take.

Keep your profile focused within a certain niche, and only follow people that are associated with that area. Your Twitter profile is a brand, and is shaped in part by who you follow and who is following you. If you are too loose in who you associate with, you will dilute what your profile stands for and could be viewed as a spammer.

An example of this is people using the Twitter Traffic Machine, which is an automated way of gaining followers and is appealing to new users. One of its main drawbacks is it automatically tweets repetitive messages advertising the tool to all your followers. Such tweets are a red flag for people who have used Twitter.

My recommendation is to build relationships naturally on Twitter, and to avoid a heavy dependence on using automatic tools to build up your list.

Q. Is there anything that Moonfruit, which ran the Macbook Pro laptop give away contest, could have done differently to avoid having #moonfruit (apparently) pulled from Twitter’s Trending Topics? Or do you think Twitter should have handled the incident differently?

A. Moonfruit’s campaign was highly successful and illustrated the potential of Twitter as a marketing platform. Their success was largely based on a clear understanding of their followers, and serving their needs in a clever and interactive way. I don’t consider this campaign spammy at all because it was very relevant and interesting to their followers. Could Twitter have handled this differently? Absolutely. The biggest issue I have is they abruptly removed the trending without the proper communication or feedback from both Moonfruit and its followers. However, the only way Twitter can evolve and mature as a platform is from learning from mistakes such as this.

Q. Twitter apparently just killed the accounts of an undetermined amount of spammers. Do you think that’s an effective move? What else do you think Twitter should be doing to combat spam?

A. Shutting down spam accounts is a step in the right direction, but does nothing to address spam in the long term. These spammers will simply create new profiles and start over again. This is akin to playing a game of whack-a-mole and is not effective.

Twitter should integrate a spam filter into its interface and APIs. A key advantage of this is empowering users themselves to decide what is and what is not spam. It is impractical to think that Twitter themselves can manually eliminate spam, there is simply too much for them to handle. The best solution I see is to give each user control of their spam settings, which has proven a very effective strategy for combating

Technorati Tags: social website traffic, twitter, twitter spam, twitter spam handling

My mom, who is in her mid 90’s, had some really bad news last week. She had to have her sewer replaced. At her age she was sort of hoping the next owner would have to worry about it, but alas, she ran out of time and had to have this messy, horribly expensive job done.

The sales man was trying to sell her on some extras, as salespeople and internet marketers do. After running through features and benefits, he said “And the best part is you have a lifetime warranty!”. My mom looked him square in the eye and said “And at my age THAT”S a sales point?”. She then said a very emphatic NO to the other work he wanted to have her do. 

Now the rest of the work would have been gravy for the company - the work they had to do they actually lost money on. The moral of the story is KNOW your customer! 

If you have done your homework and properly targetted your customer and are getting laser targetted website traffic, you need to be careful that you don’t lose them at the close. Getting the right people to your site is only half the battle. The bottom line is getting them to buy what you are selling.

If you adopt a “ine size fits all” approach and toss everything at your targetted traffic including the kitchen sink, you could easily lose the sale. The hottest sales point for me could be a total turnoff for another visitor. Think about setting up a funnel - taking your traffic by the hand and moving them to the page that addresses THEIR hot button based on choices they make.

For example - if you’re selling red, white and blue widgets, make those menu selections and on the red page, only talk about red widgets - with a buy button of course! Think about your product and your target audience. Are there several feature sets that could appeal to different groups of potential buyers? If so, set up seperate pages so your target can get to the things that matter most to them and ignore those things that matter not at all, or worse yet could lose the sale.

Targetted traffic on the front end still needs a targetted sales message on the backend or you will be in the same position as the poor sewer salesman, sending the wrong message to the wrong customer.

I live in a pretty small town that relies on one big event every year to keep the business owners afloat. We’re on the route to the big Sturgis Harely Rally and the bikers coming through put about 30% of the annual receipts into merchant coffers in a two week period. 

Gas, food, bike repairs, beer, clean dry sheets in a motel room - these folks are the difference between a good year and a bad year for a lot of people around here. It wasn’t always this way. You see it’s about 100 miles between towns and there was a time when the nearest town to the east and the nearest town to the south were stopping points for the annual road trip.

But our little town needed money, and so the business owners got together and made the bikers feel welcome. Huge banners on every watering hole, gas station, store, and hotel welcomed bikers to the establishment. Biker menu specials, townspeople taking pictures and engaging the riders in conversations - in short everything that could be done to make these folks feel at home and wanted was done.

Pretty soon they started to make this place a stop on their trip. They spent their money here, instead of another place down the road. The other towns still do ok, they get other business, but we own the biker business and we profit from it.

Your site traffic is just like the story of Sturgis week. If you have identified a group of visitors who come to your site and you do everything you can to make those people feel welcome, they will spend their money with you. That’s targetted traffic. 

Many webmasters and marketers look at traffic volume and want to collect as much traffic as possible believing that in doing so, they will get some of that traffic to buy. ANd it does work, but it’s not as effective as laser targetting a specific audience. When you look at your traffic, look at the quality of that traffic. Are they buying from your site? Are they returning to buy again and again? Or are they drive through surfers - whizzing through your front page on their way to somewhere else?

Website traffic is a good thing, but TARGETTED website traffic will be what adds more numbers to your bottom line. And of all the stats we webmasters watch, the money deposited to the bank account every week is the only one that really counts in the end.

hey,

anybody knows how to do article marketing the proper way? i would be interested to know how often i should post articles to article directories for an adsense website. let’s say that the website has 10 pages and that i write 10 articles (1 for each page of the site) and then i submit each of those articles to all major article directories like ezinearticles.com and articledashboard.com etc.
my question is this: once i have submitted those 10 articles is my work done for that website or i should write other DIFFERENT 10 articles and submit those ones as well? and if i should continue doing this, how many times should i do it and at what intervals of time?

thanks and looking forward to hearing from an expert article marketer :p

Hi John,

It actually depends on a few things:

1. What’s the topic of your site (i.e. how competitive is the market)
2. How fast do you want results
3. What results are you looking for

If you post 10 articles, the site will likely start getting traffic from the start. How much traffic it gets depends mainly on how popular your topic is, how good your article bio box is, and how much competition there is for that topic. The quality of your articles and how well your resource box is written also play major roles.

In a really competitive niche like payday loans or weight loss for example, you may not get much traffic from just 10 articles.

Even if you immediately start getting 100 visitors a day from those 10 articles though, you may only earn a dollar or so because there are many factors on your site which play a role in getting clicks. And of course the niche you’ve chosen may or may not be profitable.

So the best answer is: However many it takes to get the results you want.

If you want to earn $10 a day then keep writing and distributing articles till you’ve reached that goal. If you’re happy with $1 a day then 10 articles may do the trick.

Keep in mind that article marketing is a long term approach too. So the first 10 articles you release may not start producing decent results for as long as 3 months.

Also what do you do first, look for a niche or get good keywords?

The number of articles does not guarantee the success of a niche. You need to research keywords to find niches where there are a lot of searches, and also that those searches are by buyers. Once you find your niche, you need to either have your own product to sell or be an affiliate for someone else’s product. Then you can begin writing articles and posting them on article sites.

The more articles you publish in the niche, the better. And of course, once you publish some, continuing with a steady stream of them each month helps also.

I wrote an article about article marketing. I’ll post the link in the resource box. It should help answer some of your questions.

Iam very new to SEO. I wants my site to be on top of major search engines. Please suggest me how to do proper seo.

One thing to remember is that NOT all article directories are created equal.

As Matt Cutts, Google head of the web spam team said

"In my experience, not every article directory site is high-quality. Sometimes you see a ton of articles copied all over the place, and it’s hard to even find original content on the site. The user experience for a lot of those article directory sites can be pretty bad too. So you’d see users landing on those sorts of pages have a bad experience."

That means when you do article marketing, submit only to QUALITY article directories — otherwise you will just be wasting time because you won’t see any positive results. Look only for those article directories that actually review submissions, not accept every single articles including the crappiest ones.

When a newcomer to promoting a web business or starting a work at home business online begins this venture what are the most common mistakes they make? This would include any business that involves internet marketing but especially the work from home income opportunity type.

The failure to modify, and test.

You MUST, and I do mean MUST… Test your strategies, looking at the results, and then make modifications again and test again.

Also, most people come into the business with the theory, I’m going to start making $10,000 this month. Unless they have a huge budget to start with, it’s not going to happen.

Internet marketing is a game of education, practice, testing, and as my fiancee tells me "Try and Try Until Success".

I spend a fair amount of money on education every month, simply because I don’t want to learn all of it by trial and error.

But even with everything I’ve learned, I still test, and test, and test.. and try new things, and change that, and keep on keeping on..

I’m doing market research on several sites to determine the feasibility of a new business I’m working on. Since my project will be web-based, I need to gain good information on the amount and kind of traffic that goes to some other websites.

The question is, what’s the best way to do this? I have tried Quantcast, Alexa and a slew of other sites but they each seem to give differing results, which in turn makes me doubt the validity of the information?

Research tools:
1. Alexa, of course. This will give you Alexa’s score of the site’s popularity. Anything >100,000 is useless since the sample of traffic is too small to discern a proper placement.
2. Compete - also scores the site. Different algorithm, same idea.
3. Quantcast - another score, different algorithm.

Alexa and Domaintools.com will give you a geographic breakdown of the traffic sources to the domain, useful when looking for int’l bizdev.

Compete offers some keywords users use to find the site on search engines.

Quantcast tries to estimate #s on demographics of users (male, female, income, etc)

If you build a matrix of sites you are interested in and then figure out where you can target and be successful, you can turn the matrix into a sales dartboard.

I own a web site (I don’t want to be accused of advertisings so I won’t say which one) and I have tried everything I can think of to increase traffic..

PLEASE HELP!

The best way is to have good, useful content. If you don’t have content, nobody’s going to want to go to your site.

Other ideas (most of which you probably already tried):
Submit your domain to search engines.
Trade links with high traffic related sites (this gets people from other sites to your site and also may raise your pagerank for search engines, making you show up earlier.)
Have relavent keywords for your page, so that it shows up when people search for a topic related to your site..

If you decide to pay for a SEO, make sure you READ your contract VERY CAREFULLY. Some have been known to promise to "try" to raise your pagerank, not promise results.

Many internet marketers make a simple mistake when doing video marketing. They forget that views on a video sharing site are not the only reason to engage in video marketing. There are three reasons to post videos and video views are only one of those reasons.

Here’s quick explanation of how video marketing works. You make a video, upload it to the video sharing site such as YouTube, write a good, keyword rich description and wait until it’s posted. Video sharing site visitors watch your video and are counted as “views“. 

It’s possible that viewers will visit your site. Some sharing sites allow you to post your site url and you can always include it in the video itself. But unless you are fortunate enough to have produced a really cool video that viewers bookmark, add to their own pages and share with friends, you probably won’t get that many views. If your video does start to make the rounds of the net through “sharing” it’s called “going viral“. You really have no control over this, it’s done by your viewers. If they think someone they know would enjoy it, they’ll share it. If they think it will be something THEIR site visitors will enjoy, they’ll embed it on their pages. Viral videos can get millions of views, especially if they are picked up by major news sites such as CNN and USA Today.

So you see, views are not a great source of web traffic. They can help, but you won’t see 500 web visitors because you post a vid to YouTube.

The other two parts of video marketing are what really count. On any given day it’s probable that 3 of the top 10 most visited sites on the entire web will be video sharing sites. How much is a backlink from those sites using one or more of your targeted keywords worth? Pure gold! You can’t buy that sort of link love!

How much is getting ranked in hours not weeks worth? Google hits the vid sites often. I think they actually have an army of search bots sitting on the major video sharing sites. They sit there sipping coffee and munching donuts until someone posts a vid, which is when they grab the keyword tags and put you into the rankings. Google seems to give emphasis to videos. When you look at a typical search results page on Google, you’ll often find normal site rankings, along with videos in their own section, and sometimes images. 

The videos are always highly placed on the search results page. I’ve had videos ranked on page one for my keyterm within two hours. This doesn’t always happen, of course, but it happens often enough that I know from my traffic increase when it does. 

In my own humble opinion, I don’t really care if not one single person views my video on YouTube. What matters to my web traffic and sales is the website ranking and the web traffic I get from it. And that lovely backlink on my keyterm from the number 1, 3 or 5 site on the entire net.

As internet marketers we must always remember that what counts is the bottom line - how much money we put in our pocket at the end of the day. Getting even 100 video views on on file sharing site is not going to put that money in my pocket nearly as fast as a first page ranking for my keywords.