traffic – Page 2 – Small Business Odyssey

November 22, 2011

Watch the Visitors to Your Website!

A new WordPress Plugin, WPClicks, enables you to watch your website traffic. You can literally see where your visitors go on your site and in what order they visit your web pages.

This very clever and useful WordPress Plugin even produces a video so you can visually track what pages your visitors viewed and in what sequence.

WP Clicks also provides web traffic stats in terms of direct, referred and search traffic. You can see the visitors who came to your site directly (entered your web address in their browser) or were referred from some other site or found your site through a search engine. It identifies referring sites so that you can investigate where your referral traffic is coming from.

This intelligence enables you to edit your website to remove blockages, dead-ends and repetition. It also gives you insight into what pages are of interest to visitors, so that you can adapt your pages accordingly.

Now small business marketers will be able to track the behaviour of their web traffic, improve their website design and enhance their conversion rates through the new WordPress Plugin, WPClicks.

November 18, 2011November 18, 2011

Auto-Post with Posterous: Leverage Your Hard Work

Posterous enables you to broadcast your Posterous blog post (whether or not it was created by email, screen capture or onsite blogging). You can also specify a target for a specific email post, e.g. twitter@posterous.com.

You can set up the specific accounts in the “autopost” area of your Posterous site to advise where to broadcast your blog post. The above image lists the social media sites that you can auto-post to with Posterous.

Posterous, through email and screen capture blogging, gives you the power to leverage your online content (blog posts, articles, Squidoo lenses, Hub pages, videos. podcasts). The autopost facility allows you to levrage your hard work in creating online content by simultaneous broadcast to other social networking sites.

At the time of writing, I have set up my site to post my Posterous blog posts (however created) to my Affiliate Marketing Coach blog (Blogger.com) and to my Facebook site. So you can set up a sequence of auto-posting that suits your style of operating and fits with your small business marketing strategy.

Here is an example of where Posterous has created an autopost to my Affiliate Marketing Coach blog from a Posterous screen capture post I created from this Small Business Odyssey blog:

The original blog post on Small Business Odyssey was posted to my Posterous blog via the screen capture bookmarklet. I have added a comment and a link to my target URL (automatically hyperlinked) and Posterous has auto-posted the Posterous blog entry to my Blogger.com blog.

You have the option of letting Posterous post directly to each site you nominate or have it feed into one of your sites that is set up to auto-generate other posts.

You are limited only by your imagination with respect to the range of content that you can capture, and the means of achieving leverage. In this example, my AudioBoo podcast is automatically posted to my Posterous account which in turn posts to my blog, Twitter and Facebook:

So there are a number of options for using the autopost feature of Posterous. Here are three of them:

Allow Posterous to autopost directly to your selected social media sites
Allow Posterous to autopost to another site (e.g. Twitter) which in turn is set up to autopost to other sites (such as Facebook)
Allow another site (e.g. AudioBoo) to autopost to your Posterous blog and setup the latter to autopost to selected sites.

The autopost option is located under “Manage Spaces” – you need to click on the down arrow as highlighted in the image below so that the menu displays with the autopost option:

Posterous through its email blogging and screen capture blogging supports an array of options for auto-posting and creating leverage for your online content as part of your small business marketing.

November 8, 2011November 8, 2011

Advanced Podcasting with Audacity

I use Audacity for recording many of my podcasts – it’s free, easy to use and you can add music to your podcast. You simply save your podcast as an MP3 and then you can upload it to your website, blog, Squidoo lens or other social media site. Here’s the link for downloading Audacity:
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Audacity is used by music professionals for mixing and re-mixing music – it has a sophisticated range of options. However, you can use it for basic audio recording. A similar analogy is your own computer which often has lots of bells and whistles that you don’t ever use.

The above image is a screen shot of an audio capture with Audacity. You can see the simple buttons for rewind, forward, record, pause, stop and fast forward (just like any video player/recorder).

To edit, you just highlight the piece you want to delete (for example, a cough or a silence) and it is removed from the recording.

Audacity comes with full tutorial support to show you how to do any task related to recording and editing your podcast (so there is no excuse!!):

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/help/

The secret as in a lot of social media marketing is to start slowly and then expand your learning edge. Try out some short recordings first and have a go at editing. Once you are comfortable with that you can extend the recordings and/or add music.

Adding music to your Audacity podcast

You can add music to the beginning and/or end of your podcast if you want. Alternatively, you can play music in the background of your podcast.

One source of music loops that I use and recommend highly is Ginny Culp productions. Ginny also provides free access to her Instant Audio Player through the following URL:Preview

Instant Audio Player

Here’s a sample of an early podcast I produced. Here I have used Ginny Culp’s free audio player to display and play the podcast.
Instant Audio Player

In a recent post, I highlighted the value of podcasts in providing you with another channel for communicating to customers, building your relationships and marketing your small business. Audacity makes this easy by providing you with a tool to create a professional podcast at no cost.

October 25, 2011

Flickr – Photo Sharing to Build Your Small Business Profile

Flickr is the premier, dedicated photo-sharing site on the Internet. It provides an ideal medium for personal branding and a great source of images for content creation. So you can approach Flickr, a social networking site, as both a contributor and a consumer.

Why would you bother with Flickr?

Flickr is ranked the 35^th most visited site on the Internet (26^th in theUSA)
Flickr has a PR 9 ranking (Google Page Rank – 9/10)

These statistics highlight the potential of Flickr as a medium for marketing but there are some caveats (warnings) which I will explore shortly.

Demographics of the Flickr audience

Here are some interesting trends in user behavior on Flickr that are relevant to marketers:

Flickr visitors view an average of 9 unique pages per visit and spend about five minutes on the site
Visitors tend to be disproportionately childless women under the age of 35 who are highly educated and view Flickr from work and home (see source below)
Compared to the general Internet population the age groups 18-24 & 25-34 are over-represented on Flickr while the over 55 group are considerably under-represented
Flickr as a source of traffic is ranked higher in thePhilippines,UKandSpainthan in the US (Alexa ranking by country)
US accounts for 29.3% of users andIndia (5.7%), UK (5%) andGermany (4.3%) are the next highest users

Source: (used with some statistical license): http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/flickr.com

It is important to take these demographics into account when developing your marketing strategy. Does your target demographic frequent Flickr? Alternatively, are there areas of interest to your own customer demographic that you can portray on Flickr? When considering your marketing strategy, you need to remember Google’s universal search focus and the fact that Flickr images rate highly on Google’s image results.

Warning – Flickr’s Guidelines

Flickr has a strong anti-commercial stance and, in this respect, differs greatly from the Facebook’s Fan Pages option. This position on commercial use of the site is stated very clearly and unequivocally in the following Flickr guideline:

“Don’t use Flickr for commercial purposes.

Flickr is for personal use only. If we find you selling products, services, or yourself through your photostream, we will terminate your account.”

This guideline is consistent with the rules covering most social networking sites – they are not designed for direct marketing of a small business or products/services. They are designed to enable you to create connections with people who share a common interest, such as photography, a hobby, sports or a location.

But there are things you can do as a marketer that fall within the Flickr Guidelines and that are a natural consequence of a site which involves sharing photos/videos and personal interests.

If you use direct selling on Flickr, you will stand out “like a sore thumb” and also eventually have your account terminated. People will avoid you as you will have broken the established etiquette of the site.

The secret to credibility on Flickr is to develop quality, topical, non-marketing images. The emphasis here is on quality – because your quality photos lead to Flickr users adding your photos as favorites (for others to see), adding you as a contact (so that your updates are shown to them) and sharing via other social networking sites.

The Flickr site facilitates return visits and enables viral marketing through other people creating online content with your photos. So as always with social networking sites, the idea is to share something valuable and personal. In this way, you can present

yourself as a real person with interests that are shared by others. There is a real synergy when using Flickr where your interests align with your small business focus.

The promotion side is achieved indirectly through your profile and your participation in groups who share a common interest. So your images and your contributions to groups determine whether or not people will explore their curiosity about you and visit your profile.

A key strategy on Flickr is to share photos of the locality of your small business – this enables visitors to relate your business to that location (a form of local business marketing). As 80% of customers for a small business tend to come from within 5 miles of the business location, this could prove to be a productive strategy.

As your profile is your dominant indirect marketing message, it is critical for marketing on the Flickr site. So in the final analysis, Flickr is a great tool for establishing your personal brand – enabling people to get to know you and your interests.

October 22, 2011

Commenting on Blogs and Social Media Sites

One of the most effective means of small business marketing is commenting on blogs and social media sites. However, commenting is something that has to be done consciously, not as a “throw away” activity. It should be done with full awarness of the impact of your comments on your brand, on the receiver and on the social media site.

Central to this small business marketing idea is the notion that when you comment on blogs or social media sites, you are branding yourself and your small business in the eyes of your reader (potential customer).

When you comment on blogs, for example, you are not only displaying your knowledge and expertise (or lack of it) but also who you are and what you value. This disclosure (intended or unintended) flows over to your business brand.

I have written more extensively about the impact of commenting on branding in the following article:

Branding You, Branding Me, Branding Wizzley

There is an art to effective commenting and previously I have identifed three core strategies:

Consider the author
Share something of yourself
Consciously add value

These guidelines for effective commenting are developed and illustrated in another article I wrote earlier:

How to create quality comments

In the final analysis, when you comment you should be attempting to add value for the originating author, the social media site and your own brand.

There is strong evidence that effective commenting on blogs and social media sites can build your brand, create connections with customers, increae your web traffic and boost your sales as a small business owner.