Reddit seems to have things on track. In 2010 they grew by 230% according to Mashable. Here’s a short video from Alexis Sohanian of Reddit. He shares some great advice how they used their platform to make a major “splash” in social media. Enjoy!
4 Reasons Why You Need an About.me Page
Yesterday Mashable broke the news of a new start-up company About.me being bought by AOL after only four days of going live. Since AOL bought this company, I figured there had to be some sort of value in what it offered. So, I headed over to About.me and began setting up my profile. At first I thought this was just another one of the cheesy services where you put in a few links to your stuff and added a picture and you were done.
My biggest issue with all these type of sites including this one is that I would never really use the link to direct my traffic away from my site to theirs. Why would I want to share a link over to a site I have no control over? They could place advertisements to any and everything on the blog. Also, there is no way for people to actually become a consumer of my products/services from a site like that without extra clicks over to my blog, Facebook page, etc. I think you should always be handing out a link directly to your about me page on your site if someone wants to learn more about you or your business.
So Why Have An Account Then?
Well, here’s the beauty of it. The number one reason I like having an account is that it gives you a good credible link back to your website. Remember, links help a lot in determining how a website ranks in the search engines. As more people begin setting up accounts there and it continues to age, I think the pagerank of the site will go up giving you an even more authoritative link back to you. This too can help with the rankings. Any time I can help the SEO of my site I am happy.
The second reason you should set up an account is that people will be on the site using it as a directory to find specific people as it continues to grow. By being placed in the directory, there is an option of someone finding me, and following the links over to my site. There’s a possibility that it will turn into a giant people directory to find others. Think of it as a yellow pages of online profiles.
The third reason is how easy it is to set up. You can literally set up an account here in under 3 minutes time. I took longer because I wanted to do my fourth reason which was the ability to customize. I fired up PhotoShop and began designing a fun and branded background for my page. This is huge to me as i always think it is important to keep a level of conformity in all your branding online. It took me about five minutes to design, another five to tweak and load. All together I spent about fifteen minutes setting up my new profile.
So in closing, while I don’t think this new platform is any major game changer in the social media realm, I do think it is something valuable and definitely worth the three minutes it will take you to set up. Go get yours now!
Is Your Sidebar Sending Mixed Signals?
After watching the game last night between the Green Bay Packers & New England Patriots, I noticed that as the game winded down to the last minute of play, the message being sent to Green Bay’s rookie quarterback must have been mixed. He played a great game last night until the final 60 seconds. It seems as though he became completely unglued in the final 53 seconds. I think that this was caused by confusion in signals which happens when you have inexperienced people running things. As you watched the final play of the game, Matt Flynn tried to at one point call a huddle, then a timeout and then finally rushed to just get a play off that ended the game.
While part of this fault lies on the rookie QB, I think more fault should be left with his coach that had called a timeout just before that. At that point he should have given his quarterback a clear and concise game plan as to what he wanted done. If that had taken place, there would not have been so much confusion and the Packers might have won the game.
This same type of confusion takes place daily on websites across the world. Consumers visit thinking one thing to be greeted by buttons and flashy objects that simply confuse them and divert their attention. In this post I am going to give you a clear and concise road map to making your site function better.
I talked last week about ironing only the front side of your shirt and the importance of looking at more than just the visual appeal of your site. We discussed the importance of your site being shared socially easily and also having a good foundation to the search engine optimization side. I mentioned in that post there was a third element that I would cover soon regarding the calls to action on your site.
What are calls to action? They are graphics or links on your site that you wish for people to click on and use. Normally you want to set these up to drive people to specific areas of your site where they can either purchase your products or services, hire you to work with, or subscribe to your site. If they are placed in the proper segments you can help direct your traffic to the exact places you want on your site.
Sorry What Were You Saying? I’m Lost In Adwords!
Have you ever visited a site thinking it was about a specific thing, but when you start looking at the site you get confused what the site is about? I see too many sites now where the sidebars are wasted on driving the traffic you worked so hard to get to your site right back off your site to somewhere else. Here’s a screenshot from a friends comedy website:
So they worked hard getting someone to come visit their jokes and they are instantly met by Google Adwords above the post driving them to school lunch programs, nutrition schools and more. The sidebar doesn’t look much better with ads driving them to natural healing school, eating heart healthy, and other fun places. While they do receive a little bit of money from people clicking on the links, I asked them how much revenue they actually created each month. He shared it was less than $20 per month. It boggles me when someone places these types of ads on their site trying to garner riches and glory. Unless your site is seeing major traffic, you will not see big money coming from them. Instead you drive your consumers away from your product and place them off your site on others.
Confusion In Content
Back in the late 90’s 2003 MySpace was king of the customizations and abilities to add all types of fun widgets to your profile. Unfortunately those days are over. Having a giant meez dancing or taking photos is no longer a popular practice. Also, you are once again driving your consumers off to other distractions instead of your products or services. Over on the right you can see the actual sidebar of another friends website. You can see they start off with some interesting content telling us that their site has “STUFF you NEED to know if you planning to buy or sell your home.” They do warn that they has a sense of humor by saying you will be entertained while learning. But, under the brief description we have a broken widget that should be for feedburner. It has sat like this since at least May 2009.
Following the broken widget is a PayPal Verified seal which baffles me even more. Last time I checked, consumers are not using PayPal to buy or sell a home. If they were selling an online product on the site and PayPal was their preferred form of handling transactions it would make sense. They the finish off the sidebar by adding their Meez of a girl with a camera taking photos. The sidebar to this site leaves me in complete confusion as to what the site is about. Is this a product site where I can buy things, is it a photography site, or is int an entertainment site. To the average consumer, this same confusion will take place. The search engines too are completely confused which hurts your SEO.
Creating The Dummy Button- My Top 3
The top two or three things you share on your sidebar are the most important. That is what will show up on the screen above the fold to a consumer visiting your site. This is your prime real estate space and you shouldn’t fill it with jibberish that does not help your business. Here’s a great tool to see what a consumer is going to see on their computer. I use it regularly as I work on my system with a high resolution 24″ monitor that most consumers do not own. So use Google’s simple browser size tool to test what content runs above the fold at different sized screens and resolutions.
So what makes your call to actions effective? The most effective call to action buttons are going to be catchy graphics that are predominantly displayed in prime locations on your site. I nickname them dummy buttons as I feel it is pretty simple to an consumer visiting my site they know exactly where I want them to go. On 210 we have three main call to actions. The first is to subscribe via email to our blog. Some may debate why I placed this button first, but I think this is huge to growing your readership, your influence and overall business. In just over 6 months of this being installed on our blog we have over 825 people subscribed and receiving every blog post we write directly in their email.
Our second call to action button is to one of the products we sell. By viewing my Google analytics, I found out quickly that most of the consumers who come to our site are looking for information about our custom WordPress sites that we design. So, I created a quick and catchy animated gif to place on our sidebar that linked directly to that page. I also added an image to the footer of every single blog post we write that does the same type of thing. By doing this, that page that page is now receiving four times more traffic than any other page on our site except the home page.
The third call to action button we found beneficial to our business was the button to hire us to speak. Why would I add this button? The reason was simple: The more speaking gigs we get, the greater exposure we get for our business. The more exposure we receive, the more business opportunities will arise. This button is in our sidebar and also in our main navigation to our site. Since the addition of the speaking button, our speaking page has remained in the top 10 pages for traffic on our site. It has also garnered speaking engagements in large arenas like the Coldwell Banker Generation Blue Conference in Las Vegas.
The Rest Of My Sidebar
These are the buttons that consumers have to scroll down to use. They still have good value and deliver your quality business but aren’t worthy of prime placement. This is where my lead generation button is to gather email addresses for my newsletter. I haven’t really pushed much yet with growing my newsletter list and still I get 2-3 new opt-ins daily. This is followed by our chat buttons which allows consumers to see when we are online and chat with us about anything. This chat function has been great in generating business as I have sold several sites directly through chatting with a consumer and answering all their questions directly and quickly. There was no delay in filling out a contact form and waiting for me to respond. Instant gratification is huge and consumers love it.
If you notice, our Facebook Page widget is well down our page and not as important for consumers to view. Why you may ask? To me it isn’t important to push traffic on my site off to another platform where I have no control. If Facebook shuts down tomorrow and I have all my business focused there, I would be in big trouble. I do want people to know we are on Facebook and give them the option to connect, but it isn’t near as important to me as the buttons that get space above it because I already have people on my site where I ultimately want them to end up.
Lastly you will notice we display proudly our official SOB badge. This award was given to us by our good friend Liz Strauss and was an honor to receive. It brings a level of credibility to our site so it is important to share. However we don’t want to place this badge at the top of our site as it does drive our traffic away from us and over to her site. I also place at the bottom of my page the link to affiliates I am connected with. As you notice, this is at the absolute bottom of my page under even the archive section of my blog. While I am happy when someone signs up for hosting with Bluehost through my affiliate link, I am even happier when someone purchases a Custom WordPress Site, books me to speak, or signs up for personal coaching because these are the primary sources of income for my business. Affiliates can be a good auxiliary source of income, but they should not overtake your primary source of income in terms of space given on your site.
What’s Your Sidebar Saying?
So now that I shared with you some advice on what types of things should and should not be in your sidebar, take a moment to look at yours. What does it say about you and your business? Are you sending mixed signals to your consumers? Are your call to action buttons clear as to what you want the consumers to do and are they driving the consumers directly to your services/products? Or are your sidebar buttons and widgets causing confusion and pushing your traffic away to other sites.
Remember, we work hard to get the traffic to our site to generate business, make it clear what you want them to do, and keep them with you not onto another site. If you need help with any of the things discussed, feel free to contact me for help.
Using BridgeURL to Manage Multiple Links
Found a fun little tool today that I wanted to discuss in more detail as well as share a few applications that could be good uses of it. It is called BridgeURL. We have all heard of URL shorteners in the past like bit.ly and goo.gl. While BridgeURL was described to me as a URL shortener, I look at it more as a Link aggregation tool. It possesses a ton of opportunities to help organize your online links in a unique way to enhance client experiences.
BridgeURL allows you to share as many links as you wish in in one collaborative link. It will take all the links you place together into a slideshow of all the links you placed into it. So if you want to share links on a specific subject or topic and have 10- 12 links, you can put that all together in one link to tweet, share on Facebook, and put into a blog and everywhere else.
Applying BridgeURL Into Your Online Marketing
You may be thinking, is this just another fun toy out there for me to waste hours upon hours of time on? NO! Let me share with you a few applications that immediately came to mind for using this tool.
The first that comes to mind is using this inside your Newsletters. Instead of sending an E-Newsletter that is 7 pages long, why not send out one that fits all on one page? We all are busy and who do you honestly believe will sit and read something that is that long? You have a very short window to keep that clients interest. That’s why when I teach blogging I normally suggest keeping your blog posts under 700 words. Why? Anything longer and you lose the attention of your reader and they are off doing other things. I think this same principle should apply into your email marketing too.
As we are in the process of revamping our email marketing campaign here at 210, this is something we will definitely implement into the Monthly Newsletter. Instead of posting 5-7 blog posts, we can simply insert one link like this: “View our top blog posts of October 2010” Instantly our consumers are able to see a slideshow of the top posts and pick quickly which ones they want to read. The consumer can quickly scroll through all the links and pick which posts they want to read. Also, it is getting them over to our site faster and keeping them there longer. The longer you can keep consumers on your site, normally means more chances of increasing your sales.
How about on Twitter? Maybe you are participating in a great Twitter Chat like #blogchat and the topic for the evening is All things Google. You want to share about all the great posts you have with the group. You can can either send out a tweet for each individual blog post that you wrote and like or use BridgeURL combining them together. If we did that here at 210 Consulting, we would tweet well over 12-15 tweets about posts we wrote on just Google products alone. Instead, one single BridgeURL with our favorite links is going to be much more powerful It also has a much higher chance of being re-tweeted. Lastly, sharing our content this helps keep us from looking like spammers taking over the chat with constant tweets to blog posts of ours.
What about industry specific uses? Since Jason & I both came from real estate backgrounds, I started thinking about ways that this could be beneficial to those specifically in this industry. In real estate, you have links to all kinds of different things you set up specifically for a listing. You can have things like blog posts, individual property sites, virtual tours, links to home inspections, property detail reports, and the list goes on. How overwhelming do you think it is to send all this off to a potential client? If they receive fifteen links all at once they will not know what to do. Also, how difficult is it for you as the agent to remember them all. Especially when you are away from the office? With BridgeURL, you can load all those links once, have a nice shortened easy to remember link like bridgeurl.com/address and can share that from your mobile phone, through tweets, or anywhere else you need too. Or even better, why not set up a Bridge URL for a property and then purchase a single property domain to redirect? You could in essence create your own individual property sites for under $10 and have all the information available to potential clients.
This can be a huge time saver and convenient way to compartmentalize all your different properties and all of their documents, links, photos, etc. into one easy to remember place.
I think that BridgeURL can be a very useful tool that everyone should give some serious consideration to. The organizing of multiple links into specific folders can be a huge advantage to me. What other ways can you see BridgeURL being beneficial to your online business?
Destroying Your Social Capital for a Sale
We all know the importance of being liked in business by our consumers. One single tweet, blog post, YouTube video or Facebook message by one consumer can determine greatness or failure of your business. If you don’t believe me, go ask United Airlines or the band Barcelona.
Last night I was shocked by a specific sales call I received from one of the major real estate networks. I was on my way to church at the time so I did not answer the phone as I thought it might have been one of my new clients calling with questions and I did not want to be late because of being on the phone. After service, I grabbed my phone and began listening to my messages. The message though was not from a client, but from this company.
In the message they stated that they saw I was registered for an event in New Orleans this week and they were also having an event there the next day. They knew I had attended their conference the week before in Charlotte and thought I would want to come back again the next day. My wife looked at me as my face began to get fire red. It really bothered me that this company was using the RSVP list of another event to try and sell theirs. To me, that is a really bad move.
The reason this bothers me so much is that my name was on the #REBCNO list was because we were sponsors of the event. See, Jason & I are big fans of the barcamp movement and like the fact that they are unconference type events where you can learn great information for free. Because we believe in them, we gladly sponsor and help with many of them around the country.
When I got home I sent a tweet out about my displeasure of this network using this poor choice in judgment to try and sell their event by calling other events RSVP list. What shocked me even more was when the CEO replied back to me saying why not? I replied because I didn’t feel it was right to use other lists to try and sell your event.
I then sent out a tweet asking if others had received calls and was instantly met by several others who felt the same way. Some of those responses included:
I was pretty surprised to have gotten the same voicemail especially since I’m not really active on there! I didn’t either & its quite annoying! – Vickie Wyman
Wasn’t sure how they got my info… interesting, but doesn’t make me want to go!- StephanieSells
So for the CEO that asked why, this is the reason why not. People do not like being called for sales pitches for things they did not opt into. If #REBCNO had been partnered with your company and you said you were going to call all the RSVP list trying to sell, that might have been a different story. But since you didn’t have permission to use their list to sell your product I feel it was out of line and not cool.
In the social media world there is such a thing called social capital, or as the whuffie factor as Tara Hunt called it in her book. The reputation you have online is only as good as your last tweet, email, or blog post. Before you begin using poor judgment and calling those who you do not really have permission to call, it is important to weigh the consequences. Personally I think they were not weighed properly this time and the results I feel might be a little more negative than the few extra ticket sales that come about from it.
Next time please have permission to use a list before you begin using it.
Social Media Winner of the Week: BlogTalkRadio!
Keeping our series on social media winners we come across, today I wanted to share about a great story that happened to me recently. As many of you know, I participate in an online radio show called Social Media Edge with Ken Cook, Jason Crouch, & Mike Mueller. The show airs every Tuesday at noon and we have been blessed with some really awesome guests in the past. I have been actively participating in the show now for well over a year. We broadcast online at BlogTalkRadio every week.
During our last broadcast, I had several people in the chatroom complaining about the ads that kept running on the screen. These ads would take over the sound of the broadcast and you would miss important parts on topics we were discussing. Since I normally call into the show instead of just listening online, I didn’t know what they were really talking about. Then later on that same day I was listening to a friend on a different broadcast on BlogTalkRadio.
The person being interviewed has a soft voice so I had to crank up the volume on my computer to hear. Now one thing that you must understand is this. Since I work in my home office all day long, I like to have music playing at louder than normal volumes. To accomplish this, I have connected my computer up to it’s own home theater. Might be a little overkill, but I love it. So I had the volume for this particular broadcast maxed out to be able to hear the guest.
All of a sudden music started blaring and almost made blood come out of my eardrums from the loudness as a commercial for Tide Detergent started playing. I immediately searched for a mute or pause button and after about 7 seconds I could quiet the ad. In my frustration, I sent out a tweet to @blogtalkradio saying the following:
Hey @blogtalkradio the auto player ads on the radio shows is really annoying. It interrupts the show! Please fix it!
Jeremy Blanton
jb140
To which the promptly replied:
@jb140 Hi Jeremy, Thanks for ur feedback. Would it be possible to have a quick convo with you about your experience? Can u DM us with a #?
blogtalkradio
blogtalkradio
I sent them my contact info and within minutes my phone rang. I had an awesome conversation with Amy and she apologized for the inconvenience as well as asked if she could help with anything else. She was beyond friendly and helpful. She even gave me her skype ID to contact her if we had any other issues in the future.
Paying attention to what consumers are saying about your business is vital. You need to constantly be monitoring what consumers are saying both positively and negatively. More importantly, you need to have someone handling the social media aspect of your company that can make you a winner and not a loser. In this example, BlogTalkRadio has done very well by having Amy handle their social media monitoring and because of that has won our Social Media Winner of the Week award!