Over the last few months, I’ve been working with a few of my good friends from high school and helping them grow Warialasky, their YouTube channel. At the beginning of January, the channel had 500 subscribers and 25,000 total video views. Today they have close to 16,000 subscribers and over 3.25 million video views. Believe it or not, this was not dumb luck but actually a fairly well planned out attack on gaining views and subscribers.

Read on to the end and discover that one simple trick that will lead you to gaining millions of views!

Planning Out The Channel

As we began the channel, we sat down and wanted to come up with a general direction for the channel. After much discussion on the likes and interests of my friends, they decided that they would pattern it after Freddie Wong’s channel and focus the videos on action and video games.

Another important action that was taken to get off the ground was to make sure we had a regular posting schedule. If you plan on building a solid following for your YouTube channel, you have to be consistently producing content. If you have a video go viral and people come to your channel and see that is the only video on your account, then they will not subscribe and you miss out on the opportunity to get those viewers to return and watch new videos that you put out. We decided that once a week we were going to be putting out a new video.

The First Success

After making a few videos, the channel slowly started gaining some subscribers. Some of the videos managed to pull in a thousands views here and there and we felt pretty good about that.

One of the ways we were able to attract these first viewers and the initial fan base was finding Twitter accounts of popular YouTube channels that made videos similar to ours. We would then follow their followers, look for users that would follow us back and then engage with them. These people have been some of our most ardent and loyal supporters. As we have become more popular it is true that we haven’t been able to interact with as many of the new followers that we have gained, so we do have a little bit more of a connection with these older followers.

We finally had a video that we produced that went ‘viral’ in our minds.

One of our early Twitter followers decided to post our video on Funny Junk and it managed to have some success. We pulled in around 20,000 views on that video and a few hundred new subscribers.

Seeing where all the views were coming from for this video taught us a good lesson that we should be seeding our content. We had already tried to submit the videos to Reddit in the videos subreddit, but that place is harsh and we never have been able to gain any traction in that subreddit.

And Then We Went Viral

After that small hit, we produced a few more videos then had a great idea for a new video about a lazy jedi who uses his powers to do mundane, everyday tasks. We also had wanted to somehow get involved with some of the bigger YouTube stars and try and pull some of their subscribers over to our channel as well. We decided to reach out to a local one and see if he would star in this video for us.

We sent a message on YouTube to the guy that plays the Orabrush tongue and he was more than happy to work with us.

We filmed the video and my friends went to work on the editing. A lot of time was spent on this one, but it ended up looking pretty awesome.

We had a very targeted plan of attack on this video and submitted it to the Star Wars subreddit and had a lot of friends vote it up right as we posted it. We also had made accounts on a few different Star Wars forums and Star Wars gaming forums and made a few posts so we didn’t look like we were just trying to self-promote this video. This video ended up being the number one spot on the Star Wars subreddit for a while. Because of that it got picked up by IGN and posted on their Facebook page, which then led to it getting picked up by a lot of video game blogs, Star Wars blogs, and even some of the sites on the Gawker media network.

This video was the first truly viral hit and the subscribers and viewers started to roll in. We thought that we had it made!

One Video Does Not Make A Successful Channel

After that video, the next few did not have more than 5,000-10,000 views each. This was a little disheartening because we had expected to just launch into YouTube fame and stardom from that point on. Unfortunately, we learned that one video is not enough to make you famous on YouTube. You have to continually produce funny, engaging content.

Another Viral Video

Our next viral video came within a month of that first one. We did a real life version of the video game Goldeneye 64. We wanted to hit some of the nostalgia from a game that hadn’t really been popular for a while.

Once again, we tried to get this one to gain traction through Reddit, but saw limited success. However, it was enough to get it picked up by a few of the smaller video game blogs, which the big ones look to for new content. For this video, I set up a Google alert for the name of the video and kept close track of all the sites that posted the video. We have a spreadsheet listing each of these blogs along with contact information for these blogs. We used this for our next video to do some outreach.

Doing Something Different

For the next video, we decided to try riding the wave of what’s popular. Skyrim was a fairly big video game and there had been quite a few videos made about it, but none of them were all that great. We decided to do one that was truly going to be epic.

We spoke with the choir director at the local university and convinced her that she should let us use the choir to record a new version of the main theme from that song. Then we would combine that with an electric guitar and film some epic looking shots of the scenery. This video was the result:

This video had a couple things going for it. First, we were involved with a large choir, and they were all going to share this with their family and friends anyway. That was a good start to virality.

We also offered a free download of the recording for anyone that wanted it. We also had done something no one else had done, which was not only do a rock version of the Skyrim theme, but to do it with our own men’s choir.

We were also able to get the University to post this on their Facebook page because it involved the university men’s choir.

Besides all of the promotion from the people involved, we reached out to a lot of the video game blogs that had posted our previous video about Goldeneye and told them what we were releasing. A few responded back that they were very interested and wanted the link once it went live.

Finally, we contacted the game’s creator, Bethesda, and they tweeted it out and blogged about it.

Results and Opportunities

As a result of the success of these videos, my friends have had numerous opportunities to monetize their success including the following:

• Offer to direct a 3-D movie in Poland
• Product placement opportunities
• YouTube partnership (paid a CPM)
• Offers to create corporate videos
• Second YouTube channel to do behind-the-scenes videos (is also monetized on a CPM basis

We haven’t attempted any other monetization strategies because my friends don’t want to turn off new subscribers by being overly monetized. We do have some ideas though such as video game pre-orders, and video game related affiliate offers that we might test on a limited basis in the near future. For now though, we’re just creating awesome videos.

The One Trick… And A Few Others

I imagine you are now wondering, “What is that one simple trick?!?” Well, it turns out that the one simple trick is really to create engaging, creative content and getting it out there. A lot of our success came from seeding the content, but if never would have gotten big if it hadn’t been quality in the first place.

Here are a few random tips and suggestions that we discovered while going through this whole process. Hopefully some of them will be able to help you as you move forward on your quest to dominate YouTube:

• Blogs are generally looking for content earlier in the week, so if you release videos early and reach out you have a better chance at getting picked up.
• It takes approximately 800,000 views to get onto the front page of YouTube on the ‘Popular’ section and you are much more likely to have this happen on a weekend. If you have a video you think will be big, release on a Thursday night or Friday morning.
• If you apply for YouTube partnership and get rejected, you have to wait two months until you can apply again.
• Comments are good. Even the controversial ones. If people are arguing in the comments, let it be. It means more views because people will come back to the video to respond to the comments, and other people will sometimes get involved. More engagement will help your video rank better in the YouTube SERPs.
• Working with people that have established YouTube followings can give you a big initial boost in views and helps you pick up more followers than you might otherwise.

If you have any other questions let me know and I will try and answer them in the comments below. There are some parts that we are legally not allowed to talk about regarding our partnership. Anything that doesn’t fall under that I will be more than happy to answer though!

First things first, bring the right tools to the party.

Boomerang

Bloggers and internet regulars of all shapes and sizes receive a plethora of daily emails; it’s quite easy, therefore, for an email from a stranger (ie. you/me) to slip through the cracks.  If you don’t get a response within a few days don’t give up on your target, and don’t be too proud to send it out again.  

This is where Boomerang comes in handy, this tool allows you to schedule emails to boomerang back to your inbox if you never receive a response.  Instead of combing through spreadsheets to see who responded and who didn’t, boomerang delivers a perfect list straight to your inbox and makes resending emails as simple as the click of a button.  Countless times I’ve written off certain targets after my first batch of emails only to be shocked by the second round when they not only respond, but ask for a full article.

Get Boomerang’s scheduled sending, it’s free.

Rapportive

Following the Chrome store trend, the next little tool that can simplify your outreaching life is Rapportive.

Quite often, while scanning blogs and plucking email addresses, you’ll find that actual names are MIA.

Instead of sending impersonal emails beginning with ‘Dear Editor,’ install Rapportive and instantly get a slew of information on your target including not only their name but their professional title, linkedin page, and even their latest tweet.  Use this information creatively and you’ll have a huge leg up on anyone starting their emails with ‘To whom it may concern.’

Again, free.  Get Rapportive

Ditch the Template, Get Personal

Guest Posting is all about weighing what you put in against what you get out.  It’s easy to blast off 50 emails with a pre-fab template in a short amount of time.  And if your sole goal is to reach out to as many people as possible, then by all means, go for it.

But if you only get a 10% response rate, and an even fewer percentage of completed posts, is the shotgun approach really worth the extra time you save yourself (and subsequently waste prowling Facebook)?  No. So get out the scalpel and get personal.  Use Rapportive to find out more about the Blog owner, and for God’s sake pay attention to their blog. Spend a second reading it, don’t just look at the PR and call it a day, interact with them (they’re real people, despite popular belief).

If you must, brown nose or bend the truth, but know that a little attention to detail, one little comment about their blog or even their interests, will go a long way and could quite easily become the difference between no response and a completed blog post.

Stay in Touch

Alright, so you’ve Boomeranged, you’ve crafted a personal email thanks to Rapportive, and you’ve congratulated Bob at bobsbigboytrains.blog for his impeccable selection and taste for model trains, and in response Bob has granted you what you’ve been after all along, Guest Post privileges with a couple of big, fat, juicy links.

At this point you may think that your outreach is finished, kaput, but you’d be wrong.  The real players in this industry know that outreach is an ongoing process, they recognize guest posting not as something one sided that needs to be convinced, but as a mutually beneficial relationship to be grown.  The real guest posters provide articles and simultaneously initiate relationships, they understand the value of creating an online database of blogs and bloggers, a virtual rolodex accessible at any time should they need to call upon it. They utilize Twitter Lists, Google+’s circles and hangouts, they connect via Linkedin and Facebook, they recognize their accountability and approachability are their livelihood.

Matt Cutts just announced his team was working on an over optimisation penalty to punish the sites doing too much SEO and not enough good content. While this may seem like a good idea in the first place. After much reflection during my trip back from Austria this week end I now think this is a terrible idea. Here is why:

This opens up the realm of negative SEO

Since people can now be penalized for having too many links, too many anchors or just keywords mentioned too many times in their content, I can clearly see competitive markets becoming more about negative SEO than positive SEO.

All the existing spam tools that were used to acquire a lot of junk links like Xrumer or Scrapebox will now be promoted to premium negative SEO tools and people will start blasting each other’s sites hoping to knock their main competitors off the top of Google. Not only will that create a lot of junk but it will also blur the boundary between good and spam sites for Google since I could see a lot of legit sites being blasted after that change.

This will also open the door to user generated content spam. Especially if penalties applied site wide. I could see people writing forum posts or questions in Q&A or blog comments stuffed with keywords which might look relevant at first but could eventually hurt you. Not only can panda hurt you for that now but this penalty also could.

This will dishearten people that invested so much in SEO

I know that creating good content should be a priority over spending hundreds of thousands in SEO. However I’m thinking first of big brands here with thousands of pages that invested in SEO to optimize their pages according to best practices at the time IE put your keyword in your titles, meta descriptions, inside your content and it’s now seen as bad practices if you over did it without any clear guideline of what overdoing it means. I can see a lot of marketing managers pull the trigger off SEO to reinvest it in more reliable forms of marketings like PPC (Which is exactly what Google wants I guess).

I’m also thinking about a bunch of small businesses who took a leap of faith into SEO and did it without knowing much about it and could have easily over optimized their site without  knowing or just following old best practices. These businesses often rely heavily on the business they get online without much SEO Intelligence system to warn them of what’s coming.

So what’s the solution?

Well, if Google can detect over optimisation then they could simply set a threshold after which extra links, extra anchors or extra on page optimisation doesn’t help. If the content is really spammy and low quality, Panda will take care of it and it’s well deserved. But penalizing people for what used to be good practices and what worked is going to end up with a lot of unjustified penalties and thousands of people’s lives will be turned upside down for the good, and the evil.

SEO is a very profitable traffic-generating channel when it is worked in a ROI perspective.

Though, the main issue is that SEO results may take a while to be seen.

On particular tough requests to work on, it is common to wait 3, 6 up to 12 months, if not more, to see results.

Moreover, many websites structures are too stiff. Therefore, the slightest modification to increase conversation rates is very hard to implement.

If the “worked keywords/efficient landing page” combo does not show good results, you just lost some precious time. It is a lot more complicated to re-work on your landing page which got ranked in SERP’s without fearing losing some of those precious results already earned through G Square…Yes…God Google. You will feel like you have just wasted all your time.

This lack of efficiency is not allowed on an affiliate-based business model. You have to be able to test, as quickly as possible, both the strength of your landing page and your conversion rate, to see if your infoproduct actually sells well.

If it does not sell well, you need to try other products in a similar niche. You also need to be enough creative to adapt your landing pages accordingly.

There is a rather quick and diabolically powerful way to work on a certain amount on requests for a certain type of landing page (that you would have to isolate beforehand). This might be one of the most efficient ways of seeing quick results in SEO affiliate marketing.

It will allow you to make sure that your SEO work was worth it and to minimize the risks of trying positioning an affiliate product.

The aim is to work on a certain number of requests, on a specific topic, and to deliver the appropriate answer to the search engine, with the appropriate landing page. The game consists in precisely identifying the request that will prompt a conversion action, and work its optimization in terms of natural traffic and conversion.

Therefore, the aim is to quickly identify the requests that have the biggest conversion potential and to just focus on these.

For instance: most companies will try to position themselves for the keyword “lose weight” which is a very hard keyword to work on. If we would go for this keyword, it would probably take years to see any result.

A much simpler SEO technique would be to focus on other requests. Ones that are a lot less used and looked for, aka the long tail.

Of course, this sounds easy, but there is a good number of reasons to this and this is what we are going to see next.

Obviously, most people say “I’d rather work on fewer bigger requests for more traffic instead of dedicating my precious time on lots of smaller requests that generate less volume”

To us, this thought process in somewhat wrong.

What is the question you should ask yourself?

•  “Should I rather work 15 days on a generic request that will bring 1000 visits a day with a 0,1% conversion rate?”

or

• “Should I work on a long tail request for 5 hours that will bring 10 visits a day with a 15% conversion rate?”

• In the first case, you work for 15 days to make 30 sales a month.
• In the second case, you work 5 hours to make 45 sales a month.

See what I mean?

The nice Google Analytics traffic curves are only here to make your ego shine J

A smart affiliate – and a lazy one too – will do everything in his power to make sure the time he spends is as profitable as possible.

We have a high traffic request with very few sales versus a long tail request that sells a lot. And why is that? Simply because specific long tail request usually carry a lot more purchase intentions.

What are the benefits from using a long tail for your infoproduct?

Infoproducts are part of the most profitable affiliate programs for one reason only: they are cheap to produce and the maintenance and shipping costs are low or innexistent.

The seller can therefore give away a large part of his commission. Sometimes up to 75% of the selling price!

However, even though an affiliate finds great financial compensation on these kinds of products, one must be aware that these products are harder to sell.

The difference from traditional e-business is the persuasion aspect. What brings someone to buy e-books, not even printed on paper, often above $30, when a printed, nicely bound book only costs $10 at the nearest bookstore?

You will have to go through the basics of copywriting and convince people!

But you shouldn’t think that this might be a problem, especially if you are not a naturally gifted copywriter. This is precisely where SEO comes into play to help you a great deal.

Selling an infoproduct is bringing a solution to a problem. And this goes for all products sold. But the stronger the problem the more money you will make as an affiliate! For example, take universal problems like relationships, being good looking, being desired, feeling healthy, aging well… Those are key to high volumes!

And the more you are focused on a specific problem, the more chances you have of increasing your conversion rate!

SEO fits perfectly for this strategy, as the “search engine” is the tool where everyone will try to find a solution.

How to work on the requests that carry the strongest purchase intention?

Rather easy to find, they are those starting by “How to…”

The Google keyword tool is, as always, a very good way to start listing them. You can find a lot of them of forum boards, websites like Yahoo Answers or special interest magazines.

For example, “losing weight” is hard to reach, but requests related to this topic are much easier to find. Among them, as examples…“How to lose my belly” “How to reduce hips” etc…

For every request that you found, make sure they have enough of a traffic volume via the Google keyword tool.

Then, make up themed categories to order your requests.

The best would be to create a landing page for each theme. For instance the same landing page will appear for “How to lose my belly” “How to lose belly fat” but not for other requests such as “How to lose hips”…

Writing the title according to the main keyword and having a few backlinks should be enough to do the trick for long tail requests. About 50 backlinks on content websites can show quick results.

It is often useless to issue Blackhat linkwheels for that kind of strategy.

How to increase your conversion rate?

Once all themes have been identified, it is much easier to work on an efficient conversion funnel.

Now that you have identified the specific problem that bothers the visitor, you can bring the perfect answer to his problem.

You could obtain results by proposing a product directly on your landing page. However, it is not the best way to operate for an infoproduct. Don’t forget that you are selling information. The web user is above all else looking for an advice that will help him with his problem.

Your visitor does have a problem. And you should take advantage of this incredible opportunity to issue him a specific solution.

Unlike some SEO strategies aiming for volume by any means necessary, we direct our traffic obtained through SEO as we want to by gathering our effort on a specific request panel.

The best way to convert this kind of traffic is to convince that we are capable of giving away the right information.

A very good strategy to increase your credibility and having people think that you are the best person to talk to about a subject is to establish a close relationship, full of trust.

Build a landing page for each themed-targeted request. This landing page will allow you to collect emails. The incentive that will motivate the web user to leave his email address could be a small free guide, or the promise of delivering thorough information on a specific problem (lose fat, lose your belly, lose thighs…)

The opt-in rate on these kinds of operation is usually pretty high (above 25%) as long as the page is built in a proper way.

Moreover, as the response is perfectly linked to the question asked by the user on the search engine, the rebound rate actually lowers. Which sends a positive signal to Google in terms of SEO.

Then, an autoresponder, like Aweber, will allow you to go all the way through the conversion step.

Here is an example of a strategy that usually gives very good results over a 2-week period.

-      1^st followup : quick presentation of the author + giving a free guide on identified problem (Day 0)

-      2^nd followup : sending the first free advice. Don’t hesitate to give a strong added value advice. Give away a lot and you will build greater credibility and reassure your prospect (Day + 1)

-      3^rd followup : sending a second free advice (Day+2)

-      4^th followup : showing stories of people who actually used those advice to get rid of their problems + a third free advice (Day + 2)

-      5^th followup : show figures (statistics) of people who successfully used those advice + 4^th free advice (Day+3)

-      6^th followup : warm up your prospect by explaining that the product that allowed others to solve their problem is now available “for a short period of time” at a lower price (Day +3)

-      7^th followup : Remind that the discount expires soon (Day +3)

This conversion strategy shows good results because it is less “immediate” than a direct rebound on a website. You have time to convince a prospect that you are a credible expert. Furthermore, unlike general products, you answer regarding a specific need that HE or SHE expressed in the first place.

This type of strategy allows good conversion rates, well above 10%! While the average conversion rate on a direct-sale landing page is rather located around 1%.

And all of this is continuously fed by SEO traffic, which has been a lot easier to obtain J

Note: Infoproducts are still an extremely profitable sector within affiliate programs. However, latest tests have shown that Google is not very keen on opt-in (or double opt-in) emails collecting promotion methods.

In most cases, this can be explained with overpromising copywriting methods and fake customer stories. Plus, Google said they want to balance website which “above the fold” zone is too “ad” oriented.

Be creative when creating landing pages. Do everything in your power to distance yourself from traditional landing pages that we see all over the web.

First and foremost your goal is to reassure the visitor. You will end up having his attention anyway as your page is designed around the theme he is interested in, just like you would have done via a PPC strategy.

Don’t forget that all best practices of PPC can be applied to SEO.

In order for your landing pages to last as long as possible, don’t forget to implement all following elements:

• Legal notice
• Contact page
• A visible and clear anti-spamming policy
• Content pages, located elsewhere on the domain, even though they are not as optimized as the landing pages you care about

The more you will elevate your domain global quality, the longer your campaign will last. Even with affiliate products.

Julien, La MarkeTeam

www.lamarketeam.com

Follow Jordan Fried as he talk about internet marketing, among other things, at JordanFried.com

Let’s be honest – we all want more traffic, right? Regardless of whether you’re a website owner, a blogger, an internet marketer or a business owner, we all have wanted some additional web traffic at some point. However, more traffic to your website is most likely not something you need. All too often I meet domain owners who feel inadequate or insecure about their web traffic and for no good reason.

After all, like a beautiful woman’s age, traffic is nothing but a number. More importantly however, it’s not the size of your traffic that matters; it’s what you do with it (let’s call this rule #1 of web traffic).

Not only is this true – it’s something to live by.

Let’s setup a “Would You Rather” scenario to hit this point home.

Imagine having 10,000 visitors come to your site this month. Each visitor checks out 2 or 3 pages and then leaves.

Now imagine having 1,000 visitors come to your site this month. 680 visitors leave your site after viewing 2 or 3 pages but you manage to capture 320 new subscribers to your mailing list.

Which would you rather have? The 320 new subscribers of course!

The thing about traffic is once it has left your site – it’s gone forever unless you’ve managed to complete a sale or capture some form of user information. This could be a name & email, a phone call to your toll-free line, a mailing list subscriber or even a new facebook fan or twitter follower. Without some action from your visitors, what good is the traffic?

So, let’s get rid of the common misconception that we all need more traffic to achieve all of our online goals. Instead focus on the many ways you can turn your current traffic into something of value. This way, when you do finally get that traffic spike you’ve been hoping for, you’ll be able to convert as much of it as possible.

Here are some very innovative ways of capturing and converting traffic.

#1 Chatting With Your Visitors

If you’re selling a product or service online, you may have visitors who have questions but are too shy to ask, or too lazy to figure out who to contact. HigherClick.com provides premium SEO services to companies. No doubt some of their visitors will have questions about the service that HigherClick provides and thanks to the chat box in the bottom right hand corner of the site, visitors can interact with the company. The chat box is provided by Zopim.com which is a great tool if you feel your visitors could benefit from this added service. Another alternative to Zopim is Olark.

#2 Optin Box Header

Powerful headers are another great way to interact with your traffic and capture it in the form of a name or email address. Take a look at what Heather Allard does with her site, TheMogulMom.com.

The header is a bright call to action that entices visitors to sign up to receive a free daily email. It’s colorful and it’s the first thing you see on this site. It’s a great way to convert incoming traffic.

#3 Sidebar Optin

Here you see CopyBlogger.com offering up their impressive social proof numbers to entice new visitors to join an already large community of subscribers. Here they’re offering free updates as well. Everyone loves freebies!

#4 End of Post Call To Action

Another great way to capture traffic is by a call to action at the end of a new blog post of page. Take a look at this example from ViperChill.com. After reading an awesome post on this site I’m likely to respond to a call to action like this by sharing with friends or signing up to get free updates.

#5 Popup Optin Box

A great way to capture your traffic is to throw a free gift in their face. A wordpress plugin called PopupDomination helps create a popup like the one you see above. This “lightbox” popup offers a guide called “The Blogging Profit Formula” to visitors for free as a way to build their list. This is a very popular incentive.

Could offering a free ebook or ecourse to your visitors help capture some of your existing traffic?

#6 HelloBar

HelloBar.com allows you to add a top bar to your site to direct your visitors to where you want them to be on your site. Definitely a useful tool!

These are just a few of the many creative ways to turn your website and existing traffic, however small, into something tangible. Remember, the worst thing you can do is let your traffic come and go freely without somehow interacting with them.

Have other ideas on how to better convert traffic and get more optins from your visitors? Would love to hear from you below!

]]> http://www.higherclick.com/blog/do-more-with-less-traffic/feed/ 0 http://www.higherclick.com/blog/shortage-of-developper/ http://www.higherclick.com/blog/shortage-of-developper/#comments Sun, 19 Feb 2012 19:25:24 +0000 Breanden Beneschott http://www.higherclick.com/blog/?p=126 This post is a guest post from Breanden Beneschott, Co-Founder at toptal.com. Toptal is an exclusive, global marketplace for top software developers and top companies. The author’s views are entirely his own and may not reflect the views of Higherclick KFT.

The software development industry is both enormous and rapidly growing. DataMonitor predicts that the global software market will reach  $299.1 billion in 2014—an estimated increase of 32.6% from its 2009 statistic. The growth in this industry is fueled by innovation and the creation of new companies as well as from the successes of older and more established companies.

Along with the rapid growth of the software industry is the ever-increasing demand for software engineers. However, this intricate industry consists of more than high tech start-up companies in need of able developers. Today, almost every company needs … Read More

Social Media protagonists would have you believe that email is dead… well I have some news for you… email isn’t dead at all, far from it!  Those that are out there saying that it is are overwhelmingly uninformed. For some, and the list is getting longer by the day, it works better than anything other direct marketing mechanism.

Of course the introduction of Social Media has seen the landscape change and at Hiya we have been working hard to look at ways in which email can dove tail into social media to accommodate this. There are however, distinct differences between email marketing and social media.

With email the recipient receives a message, it sits in the inbox and they have to act on it. Where as with the flow tools that are prevalent in social media the flow moves past you whether or not you actually see the message or not. This re-enforces the power of email, it is a direct message and not just a piece of paper floating past in the wind.

Those companies that are getting the best out of email are creating precise and unique email campaigns. Those who still “batch and blast” have found their open rates drop and their lists growth slowing down.

The focus on Social Media is creating a conundrum for companies with budget restraints and the increased furore and reach of social media at the centre of all the trouble:

According to eConsulatncy’s “Email in Action Survey”

> 75% of respondents describe competition with social media as “somewhat” or “very” challenging.

> In a similar vein, 69% believe that young people are abandoning email as a primary channel.

> 65% report that it’s a challenge to get the budget that their email programs deserve.

Yet agencies report that the majority (60%) of their clients who use them for email are increasing their email usage.

It asks that with social media pulling focus and resources from email, how well are companies integrating the two channels? Less than one in four organizations has a documented plan to integrate email and social. Other than the widespread use of sharing icons (69%), only 35% of companies have incentives for email subscribers to join their social programs.

Companies need to accept that online behaviours are changing in a profound way and on a massive scale. Certainly this means that email strategy will need to be re-evaluated within the context of social media and forgotten at it’s peril.

If you would like to discuss how you are managing the balance between email and social media please contact Hiyamail on 0207 047 8110 or inspired@hiyamail.com

Feel free to reshare on social networks

Gael

I’ve been a long way since then and as my SEO knowledge progressed I started to see creative uses to it, especially when google reported they were now accepting cross domain rel canonicals:

And rand fishkin’s cross domain rel canonical experiment where clearly it seemed like totally identical content was not necessary :

In this post I’ll share 4 of these creative uses with you with the hope that it will give you more ideas (If you do come up with new ideas, please share them in the comment section)

1. Guest posting

Guest posting is a great way to do link building, you can get awesome links from high authority sites like us recently posting on the elance blog. However links pass very little link juice to your site overall and rel canonical can help you get your guest posting on steroids. Here is the method to do it the white hat way:
Write an amazing piece of content that is both relevant to what you do and the business you want to promote and the targeted website you want to get your rel canonical from.

Negotiate the guest post with them and try and get them to post the blog post on their blog/site and agree on adding a rel canonical to another copy of the blog 3-10 weeks down the line.

Once they agree, send them your amazing piece of content and let them share it with their readers/followers and let the piece earn natural links and shares.

4-10 weeks down the line, post the same post on your blog mentioning you posted it on that other big website (you can even link to it) and apply the rel canonical as agreed on the guest site.

Collect over 90% link juice from that post (much more powerful than a backlink).

Some of you may consider this a little bit grey but really you’re using the rel canonical as intended, to avoid duplicate and post a copy of someone’s content on your website, just with a little time lag. This is also a win win strategy. Big sites get amazing free content to post on their website and the search traffic for it for a period of time. On the other hand, you get to earn great links you wouldn’t have earned because your site may not be as big as the guest site.

2. Product reviews

This one is great for ecommerce stores that are usually poor in content when it comes to product pages. This is particularly useful for bestseller products/products with a lot of searches. Here is how I do it:

First of all, find your best seller products/products with a decent volume through a regular keyword research.

Once you’ve identified them, write a nice yet controversial/unique perspective review about it and post it on your (or someone elses’s) blog (linking to your product page).

Do regular link building to it, find conversations about it, twitter convos etc and drop the link to that review (making it a lot more legitimate than a product page on an ecommerce store)

Apply the rel canonical to your product page.

You just earned high quality links on a deep ecommerce store page and stand good chances to rank for its name and make sales ☺.

3. Filling your site with content that’s not yours

So you just got started with your website and have very little content yet no money to spend. This probably results in you providing a poorer user experience than the competition? That sucks, but there is a free, easy solution to try and fix that problem (temporarily, you should always get your site some more good content).

You can simply browse other websites about your topic, take their content, post it on yours and rel canonical to the page you took for them (preferably asking them first and explaining the advantages for them). This way, the users coming to your site feel you have a deep, rich site that can really answer their query while the people you took content from stand a fair chance of earning links through that tactic you’re using. Once again it’s a win win if the other party understands the advantages of it.

This tactic also allows you to display more of your ads/increase the page view and overall improve user metrics, which is great to avoid any kind of panda penalty.

4. Legacy pages

So you write good content? Great! You update it often? Amazing! Now that freshness is a major ranking factor, updating your content is a great way to take over engines real estate. However, it’s kind of sad that you have to erase old content that may have been good to update it or create a new url and start it’s link building from scratch ☹. There is a solution. As you update your content, feel free to place it on the new page and point a rel canonical to it! So that the old ones do not stay on the engines but pass their link juice to the most updated one while still letting the users access the old ones for legacy purposes.

A word of warning with that tactic. Avoid chaining rel canonicals because I expect Google to act the same way they act with 301s with it, which means they’ll stop following them after 2 or 3 redirects as you can see in the following video by Matt Cutts:

Apart from that, using your rel canonical this way is a totally legit way of keeping good content on your website while optimizing your link equity for the most updated information.

That’s all for this post. I’d love to hear how you guys use rel canonicals in comments so feel free to share it with us!

Prelude – Show real bounce rate in Google Analytics

A lot of people refuse to use Google analytics for many reasons, one of them being the stupid way GA treats bounces. Basically if someone visits your page, even for a while, and takes the time to read it entirely but does not visit a second page on your website, this is considered as a bounce. Pretty stupid since that visitor was clearly engaged, found what he wanted and then left because he had something else to do. By default the bounce rate in GA is close to useless but here is a little trick to make it meaningful again :

Just add the red bit (identical for everyone) in your analytics script the way it’s done in this example :

<script type="text/javascript">

  var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-9903060-19']);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
setTimeout('_gaq.push([\'_trackEvent\', \'NoBounce\', \'Over 10 seconds\'])',10000);

  (function() {
    var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
  })();

</script>

What this will do is this will set “bounced” visits to anyone that stayed less than 10 seconds on the website and only saw 1 page which is the most commonly agreed definition of a bounced visit. Here is what your GA bounce rate should look like once you’ve inserted the code :

From 75% fake bounce rate to 7.22 real bounce rate, now we’re talking Especially when you’re a content rich site and people find your site through search typing “how to” keywords, you will experience this kind of drop because your users find the answer they were looking for and leave most of the time which is perfectly normal .

Now that we’ve set Google Analytics straight, let’s dive into advanced segments!

But first, how do you create advanced segments in GA? Follow the guide :

Part 1 : Basics of Advanced segments

In this part we’ll go over the basics of advanced segmentation, I’ll take a few examples of things I’ve personally used and explain how they are useful and what action you can take to improve your user experience using them.

Platform type

The mobile web growing more and more and offering a totally different experience compared to the desktop/laptop web, it is good to see how users using mobile platform interact with your website as opposed to the desktop users.

Here is the segment :

I know, pretty basic and you could go in users > mobile to see the mobile stats but when you try to cross it with other types of data such as source+landing pages the data gets hard to read. If you have an advanced segment on the other hand, this is extremely easy. In order to only select the desktop users, simply replace the include part with exclude.

English Speaking Vs Rest of the World

This one can be useful say if you run Adsense on your pages (and most affiliate offers) you want to mostly focus on your english speaking countries traffic. I would largely ignore the rest (and no I’m not racist) if you use any of these 2 monetisation methods which is the case for most content websites in english. Here is the segment :

Social Traffic

If you haven’t already engaged in social to earn traffic (and you should), you should know that when they come from social media, people usually interact in a very different way with your website. They didn’t actively search for you most of the time, they stumbled upon your content. That doesn’t mean the traffic is less valuable. In many cases, especially for content sites, social is a prime source of traffic and monetisation. It simply needs to be treated differently which is why creating an advanced segment for all social sources can be a good idea. Here is what the segment looks like :

Branded/non Branded search traffic

Because users interact with your pages differently wether they heard about it before or not, it’s good to separate branded traffic from non branded traffic. Non branded traffic often times discovers your website and it’s an occasion for you to convert them into recurring visitors. You can set specific goals for them and track the success of these through an advanced segment. Here is how I set it up :

Question keywords

More and more people type questions in Google, to know if your content actually answers their question, creating an advanced segment for these people is a great idea. If you drill it down per landing page and then check the time on site, you can easily find the content that does not answer people’s question, fix it and enjoy increased site engagement here is the segment credits to my personal Ninja Than Pham for this one :

That’s all for the basic ones, if you have more to suggest, hit the comment box, I’ll be happy to add them and give you credit and links for it. Now let’s dive into some more advanced ones.

Part 2 : E-Commerce application

Alright, this part is still experimental but I’ve tried to apply the basic theory to more advanced and real life (understand money oriented) situations.

For the first case study I took one of my E-Commerce stores selling a very specific type of shoes. I decided to stop for a minute and brainstorm the different scenarios possible that would lead to a conversion, I came up with these ones :

• Source : Organic, 1 visit => bought 1 or more than 1 pair (easy buyer)
• Source : Organic, More than 1 visit => bought 1 pair(window shopper)
• Source : Organic, More than 1 visit => bought more than 1 pair (future loyal customer?)
• Source : Direct, More than 1 visit => bought (loyal customer1)
• Source : Organic, More than 1 visit => bought (loyal customer2)
• Source : Direct, first visit => bought (real life referral)
• Source : Organic Brand keyword OR Referral , first visit => bought (real or or online referral)

Now that I have established these profiles I could pull some great data out there. My goal being to not only convert once, but convert as many buyers as possible into loyal customer1 and 2. through that path :

Easy buyer or window shopper or referrals => future loyal customer => loyal customer

some sort of super long term conversion funnel, and using these segments allows me to see how I’m doing at creating more and more loyal customers. Using each segment, you can see which type of customer constitutes most of your sales and see where most drop off in the “funnel”, you can then take action to ease the process of converting into a loyal customer.

Creating these segments also allows me to ask fundamental questions about my business. If my % of repeated purchases is low (under 5%) over 6+ month, is my product up to my customer’s expectations? Should I change my product provider? Was the buying experience detrimental to my buyers? Do the window shoppers convert enough ? Are my competitor’s offer more appealing ? How ?

You can answer most of these questions setting these advanced segments up and analysing the data.

An example, a cool insight I could extract from this is the following :

According to this set of data, 44%+ of my “window shoppers” take 4 or more visits to eventually convert. 10% of them take 15+ visits. Clearly if I find a way to pull them back on the website frequently (through social media ? Or retargeting ?) I will probably be able to increase my share of window shoppers (and they are over 30% of my sales)

Now if you cross this data with the recency data :

Over 80% of my window shoppers convert in the 3 days following their first visits, which means that if I say, setup a very short retargeting of 3 days, my repeated visit number will increase and chances are my sales will too. This is the kind of cool data you can pull from Advanced segments in analytics.

If you use these, please tell me how it’s working for you, I’d be interested to see what you guys can come up with when it comes to “advanced” advanced segmentation .