ActiveRain Tutorials: May 2010

"If You Are Only Drinking Google Juice, It May Be Time to Re-Evaluate Your Online Marketing Plan" was a statement I made the other day while doing a coaching session with a client.  I had had asked them why they were not using Facebook to optimize their online marketing and was given the typical responses: "I don't care about someone going on vacation, or that someone's dog just gave puppies," or my personal favorite, "all Facebook is good for is throwing sheep, building farmvilles, and joining mafia wars."  While there are many that get sucked into the giant black hole of Mafia Wars, Farmville and the thousands of other meaningless things to do on Facebook, what most people do not realize is the absolute power that lies within the Facebook platform.

As I mentioned in a previous post, we see roughly 1/3 of our revenue right now come from connections on Facebook.  This is a strong source of income for our online consulting business.  While drinking Google Juice remains king, social network sites like Facebook, Twitter, & Youtube are gaining traction daily.  In case you were wondering if Facebook is something you need to begin integrating into your online marketing plan. Take a look at these stats, it might be time to start mixing in another drink as well.

GENERAL FACEBOOK STATS

• More than 400 million active users
• 50% of active users log on to Facebook in any given day (200 million people!)
• More than 3 billion photos uploaded to the site each month
• More than 5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each week
• More than 3.5 million events created each month (half of those invites come to me!)

FACEBOOK BUSINESS PAGES

• More than 1.5 million local businesses have active Pages on Facebook
• More than 20 million people become fans of Facebook Pages each day
• Facebook Pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans

USER STATS

• Average user has 130 friends on the Facebook
• Average user spends more than 55 minutes per day on Facebook
• Average user writes 25 comments on Facebook content each month
• Average user becomes a fan of 4 Pages each month
• Average user is invited to 3 events per month
• Average user is a member of 13 groups

These are some very powerful statistics! While Facebook is an internal network that does not bring you the SEO value that you are used to your website or blog bringing, it is powerful.  Think about it like this: In 2009 the population of the United States was just over 307 million according to Google.  Facebook ads, show that right now there are 112, 291,180 people on Facebook that live in the US and are 18 years or older.  In other words, about one out of every three Americans have a Facebook account, and that 1 out of every 6 is on it daily!

There are many other ways to use Facebook in your online marketing plan for your business.  Hopefully by now you realize this is something you really need to start doing.  If you need help getting started, feel free to ask me for assistance, I love helping clients get their Facebook Business Page set up & optimizing their efforts on Facebook.

So I leave you with this statement: "If You Are Only Drinking Google Juice, It May Be Time to Re-Evaluate Your Online Marketing Plan." Do you agree or disagree with me?

Photo Credit

As technology constantly evolves there are always new platforms that arise and newer ways to effectively market your business.  Right now, some of the more popular networks that you are always hearing about are sites like Facebook, & Twitter.  Both of these platforms continue to evolve into more powerful networks and opening more & more opportunities for business.  Our Facebook page is our third largest source of income into our company. 

The one thing that many overlook is the ability for your blogsite to become a hub of business.  Whenever I am doing online consulting with a client,  I make sure to always enforce the importance of a good blogsite that they own as the foundation to their marketing plan.  As I have shared in previous posts, it is imperative to your business to have your own website where your content & brand is strongly displayed and that you can direct all your traffic back to.  Having just a page on a company website, or on a platform other than your own, you always stay at the mercy of someone else. 

Just under two years ago I set up an analytics tracker on one of my blogs to keep track of how many visitors I receive.  Since then I have been amazed by the stats.  There have been over 101,000 page views that have taken place during that time period.  In addition, the blog has seen over 67,000 unique visitors.  That is an average of 4,236 page views per month and almost 2,800 unique visitors per month. 

These numbers are HUGE.  There are multiple reasons why these numbers are as high as they are, but here are the top ways to get traffic to your blog:

1.  Search Engine Optimization- When I was selling real estate & trying to gain the most exposure to my site, the best way to accomplish this was to write for the search engines.  I did research on keywords that were going to be easily attainable for high rankings and traffic and then set out to write & land on the first page for those longtail keywords.  Usually I could take the top spots within only a few blog posts on a term and keep it the top spots fairly easily. Search engines account for over 76% of the traffic that come into my blogsite.  On the other hand, Twitter & Facebook only account for just over 1.5% of the traffic.

2.  Establishing Yourself as an Authority-  With the increasing amount of exposure the internet provides for businesses & their online marketing, there are more & more competitors that try to gain business via the internet.  The one thing that will bring them back to your site & sharing it with their friends is if you give them more creidlble information on the subject they are interested in.  While many fear that if they share too much information, they are giving it away.  Businesses fear that the consumer will not contact them if they share too much. The reality of the situation is that being an authority builds a layer of trust with the client that makes them decide to work with you over your competition.

3.  Sharing Your Experience- Sharing that knowledge gives you an increased level of credibility that will drive that consumer to work with you.  Also, even though you have shared how to accomplish something in detail, consumers will still call on you for your professional experience.  Remember, we are the professionals that work in the industry daily.  That experience is invaluable to most consumers & will bring them in to work with you for that reason alone.

4.  Consistency & Regular Updates- If consumers know that they can find your content on a regular basis, they will come back to read regularly because they are always met with new content.  Writers like Chris Brogan have been able to gain over 38,000 subscribers because he writes daily new unique content.  If you can write at least 3 times a week or more, solid high quality content, you will gain a readership that will return regularly to your page. 

5.  Relate to Consumers- One of the biggest mistakes I see people make in writing blog posts is that they do not try to connect with the consumer.  They write using the terms of their industry or the way they would talk when trying to sell something.  Readers of your blog do not like being sold to!  Instead of trying to sell, try to connect, it will be much more profitable to your blog.  If people feel it is nothing more than one GIANT ad, they will run for another source never to return to your blog. 

If you apply these 5 simple steps into your blog, you will see an increase of traffic and subscribers like you could never imagine.  Trust me when I say, it works!  Once I applied these into my blog I saw my numbers grow exponentially to the place they are now!  If you have any questions or would like some help in achieving these types of numbers for your blog, feel free to contact me directly to schedule some personal coaching.  I'd love the opportunity to assist you in getting your blog the traffic it deserves!

Yesterday I read an article on Mashable that YouTube recently passed 2 Billion views a day on their network.  YouTube, a company that recently celebrated their 5th birthday has become quite the major component to any businesses online marketing strategy.  Whenever I am doing online consulting with a client regarding their social media marketing strategy, I always try to encourage them to integrate video as a main component of the online marketing strategy.

Next to behemoth search enging Google, YouTube (which is actually owned by Google) is the second most used search engine in the world.  Companies can gain instant notoriety by establishing a solid video online.  Examples: Remember the Social Media Revolution? This video regarding some statistics on the power of social media gave a businesses YouTube channel an instant jolt of traffic.  Or maybe you remember the infamous song of how United Breaks Guitars? The band Sons of Maxwell became overnight successes because of their catchy tune about how United Airlines broke a guitar and refused to pay for it.  They created a quick video poking humor at the event & within no time the video had been viewed over 8 million times.  Their success was so great they even created another video United Breaks Guitars Breaks My Career that basically says thanks for destroying our gear, you made us famous!

So how does someone optimize their efforts on YouTube & other video sites? Well, there are a few things that if done consistently will help you to get the best results.

1. Tagging & Title of Video. Just like when you write a blog, the title of the video is one of the most important parts.  I had a client who had a video that was really good on something that people would want to see, but the title was done all wrong.  In fact, it had just the basic random title that the video camera named it when they downloaded the video.  When the client uploaded it to YouTube, they never took time to change it and could not understand why their video was not getting much traffic.  So, we renamed the video to a term people would search for & the video started to take off almost instantly.  Now, that video has over 1,100 views!  The tags are also important on a video because they help to categorize your video properly to be searched.  I find myself going to YouTube now for answers on a question rather than search engines.

2. Distribution of Video. The second thing most people is load their video to YouTube but nothing else.  Nowadays we all have Facebook, Twitter, websites, blogs, Posterous accounts & more.  YouTube has now made it really easy to distributet your videos out to other networks.  When I take my reach of all these networks & add them together, it is well over 8,000 people.  Why not share those videos with that audience?  The more exposure you can give to a video, the more likely it is to be viewed by masses.  Not to mention, those who watch the video & like it will then also share it on with others. Each person has a wide net of connections and you can see quickly how your video can then spread like wildfire!

3.  Keeping it to the point. Have you ever clicked on a video to watch & as it starts you see it is 8:39 and you just do not want to sit there that long?  Videos that drag on longer than 3-4 minutes normally have a lot higher viewing level than those that are 8-10 minutes.

In addition to these three tips on how to optimize the use of YouTube & other video services, here is a post I wrote a while back on how to create effective videos.  This post shares with you 5 really basic tips on how to make videos that people will actually sit & watch without having to spend thousands of dollars to have the videos produced.  It covers things like music, how to pan shots properly, and much more.  It is a great beginners guide to starting on video.

In closing, if you are not yet using video in your marketing strategies, it is definitely time to start exploring this.  One final piece of advice:  You do not need to be a professional videographer to create good video.  Most videos that go viral are ones shot with basic digital cameras, flip cams, and most of the times are not even edited.  So do not allow things like that hold you back from getting started.  Raw video can be just as beneficial for your business as one that is shot by the pros.  If you want some assistance in getting started with this, feel free to contact me and I can help you.  The biggest key however, is to just get started!

PHOTO CREDIT

I wrote a blog a few months back here at ActiveRain that was very well received titled "3 Tips to Getting Your Website To The First Page Of Google" in which I shared three really basic principles to help move your website/blog to the first page of Google.  They were

• Write good quality keyword rich content.
• Be consistent with writing.
• Link, Link, Link!

The last point about linking seems to be an area of confusion to people, so I wanted to explain this point in a little more detail as well as share a really easy way to help get some awesome SEO benefits from a feature here at ActiveRain. 

The Basics To Linking

The biggest confusion seems to always revolve around reciprocal links.  Back a few years ago, the search engines used to give major SEO juice to links of any type.  So, at that time, some learned quickly that they could increase their ranking by simply adding a few links to their page & get a bunch of links in return.  The owner of Site A would put a link to Site B on their page, and in return, the owner of Site B would put one to Site A on their page. 

This practice worked well for regular consumers who knew friends with websites and were just trying to help each other out with some linking.  Friends shared links, and everyone was happy. 

UNTIL people decided to take this practice to extremes.  Suddenly there became places online that you could go and "register" your site.  After registering, you then were given a list of links to add to your page and after it was completed, you would then have a few hundred links pointed toward your site. So site A would link to Sites A-1,248 and in return, the 1,248 sites that you placed links on your page would return the favor.  Of course, this was all for a nominal fee.

This new spamming practice where you could buy your way to the top of the search engines quickly caught on and hundreds of sites with thousands of links came along which quickly forced search engines to change the way they looked at links.  Search engines recognized that there wasn't as much quality anymore in the high quantity of links and decided to not give credit anymore for reciprocal links.  Instead, they changed it that only links from one site to another without the reciprocation would get full credit.  Reciprocals don't harm you, but they do not give you the SEO benefits like they used to. 

Now for a website to get the full benefits of links, you need to have them all going in one direction.  Meaning that if you have a page link to you, you do not want to put links back to them on the same site they are linking to, or you are forfeiting some really good SEO. 

Using ActiveRain For Powerful Link Juice

So how do you use ActiveRain to optimize the link juice?  The first way to use ActiveRain to get the most potent Google Juice is to not fill your website with links to every single post you write on ActiveRain.  It is fine to have a link on your personal website back to your ActiveRain Profile and blog, but some go a little extreme by placing links to every blog post they write on their website.  Or, they reference and link to blog posts they write here on ActiveRain on their Website blog.  When you do this, you are in essence creating reciprocal links from individual blog posts on ActiveRain with your website and lose a bunch of the potency in your link juice. 

Cut out these constant links and have them all go in one direction.  You can choose which place you want to give the SEO to.  My opinion is to use the power of ActiveRain and the page rank 5 it possesses to help your website that probably isn't ranking as high.  Also, if you are like me, you want the consumers to end up at your website because there is normally much more content & offerings for a consumer there that you are limited from doing here on ActiveRain.  If ActiveRain is the only place you work online, please STOP reading immediately and click here to email me to discuss getting you set up with your own online presence. 

The second best way to optimize links from ActiveRain is to add an effective Automatic Signature to your posts on ActiveRain.  What the automatic signature does is place the exact same footer at the bottom of every single post you write.  I am sure by now you have seen several here who have the awesome little bottle cap buttons for different social media sites.  Others have photos of themself or their company logo in their signature. Whatever you decide, be in love with it, because there is no way to choose which posts it does or does not go to, so keep things on the generic end.

The one feature that gets overlooked a lot in these signatures is the ability to place anchored text hyperlinks to anywhere you wish.  This means every post you write can become SEO juiced links back to your website.  I placed a link to my website in my automatic signature.  It is the link that says 210 Consulting- Social Media Advisors.  This actually serves dual purposes.  It gives me a link to my site, but it also helps with my keyword ranking for the term Social Media Advisors. ALSO don't forget the fact that this also goes along with any re-blogs of your posts or any ActiveRain outside blogs your content gets syndicated to.

So does this work?  I think it works pretty well, checkout these stats:

3,182 Inlinks to my website predominantly all from ActiveRain addresses & outside blogs.

Taking Over Page One of Google

One of our main keywords for our business is Social Media Advisors which we regularly hold several positions on the first page of Google for the term.  One of the things that helps us do this is the link juice from our ActiveRain automatic signatures.  Between my business partner, Jason Crouch & myself we have written well over 1,500 public posts here at ActiveRain all with a link pointing to our website. 

So if you have not yet set up your Automatic Signature, I suggest doing so immediately.  You are losing some major SEO benefits by not having one.  If you do not know how to set one up, I wrote a tutorial when ActiveRain Announced Automatic Signatures. It will show you how to go about setting up your signature. 

As I stated in that post, Please Do Not Abuse The Signature! This is not a license to place six inches of jargon at the bottom of each post you write.  The other warning I would make is to not place a video or dozens of graphics and animated things.  If you place too many things in your signature, it will slow down the loading of your page which will hurt all the good efforts that your signature is designed to do.  Page load speed is another factor that Google uses to determine ranking of a page, so keep it simple!

Now that you realize that this is a necessity, go set your automatic signature up NOW!

I want to start by saying that this post is not a post about griping about the recent headaches we all experienced here at ActiveRain.  Nor is this post about how wonderful I think ActiveRain is.  What this post is about is simply one thing, the people of ActiveRain.  While we have all experienced deep frustrations over the past week and many have already voiced opinions about ActiveRain on Twitter or Facebook. This is not my post ranting about things, it is a post about the people who run the network.

I get the point that some of us are paying for a service that was not working 100% for the past few days.  I get that by the servers being down may have cost some of us some potential money.  Heck, I even get the complaint that you couldn't get online to leave your 10 comments/day and 10 posts/week for points.  But, the thing that many do not realize is that the down time was not something ActiveRain wanted either.

Let's take a moment to actually look at the daunting task that ActiveRain is accomplishing at this time.  At the time of writing this blog post, there were 1,628,526 other posts on ActiveRain.  In addition there are 180,822 profiles. And approximately 5,000 outside blogs per a conversation with Bob last week.  So lets say that each of those outside blogs have 100 posts, that means another 500,000 pieces of content.  In addition, we have localism with another 180,822 profiles, and another 800,000+ posts.  The other big piece of data that would need to be moved would be all the pages for each state, county, city, channel, & group.  Easily that can account for other 1.5 million pieces of content.  So, if we were to add this all up, there would easily be over 4 MILLION pieces of content to be moved. To put this into perspective, it would be like trying to move the entire population of the state of South Carolina in a week's time.

Definitely not an easy task.  But, that also is not the point behind writing this post.  The point of writing this post is to shed some light on the team at ActiveRain.  Since I used to work here at ActiveRain, I was given the pleasure of getting to know the team fairly well and thought it was time to share a little bit about them and what your team is really like.  I know sometimes members feel that there are better things that ActiveRain could do to handle situations, and that is probably true.  Are they perfect? No, but if you can find someone who is, please send them my way to meet me, because as soon as they do they will become imperfect.  Anyways, the next four people I am going to talk about are solely responsible for keeping this network where it is today.

First, there is the newest community builder here at ActiveRain, Kerrie Greenhalgh.  Kerrie has probably one of the worst jobs here at ActiveRain.  She is in charge of handling answer every help ticket that comes into the network.  After doing this job for a year, I know how much of a task this job is. 

On a normal day, there are anywhere from 200-500 tickets that can come in.  During this last week's downtime, I can only imagine what the numbers were like, so if you submitted one with a problem, please be patient with her as she tries to dig out from this.  Hopefully by now most things are back working properly, so you will not need to wait on the response.  But, if you are needing help, I promise if you give it time, her smiling face will either be emailing you a response, or possibly even a phone call!

The second piece of the team that keeps this ship running and who has probably put in the most work over the past ten days is the head developer here at ActiveRain, Jorgen.  I doubt that this man has slept more than three hours a day during the past week as he has taken on this major project of moving things.  Normally when something this major is going on, there is a full team to make this type of move.  A team of several people, not just two or three other people.  Personally, I cannot believe they were able to accomplish things as fast and as quickly as they did.  This guy just astonishes me with his skills and ability to get things done. In addition to handling the major tasks like this one going on, Jorgen is the one who single handily keeps the entire network running by himself behind the scenes.  He probably would not like the fact I said all this because he prefers being unseen, but please go send him some appreciation on his page.

Lastly, the two guys that have probably come under the most fire over the past week have been Bob Stewart & Brad Andersohn.  The reason that Bob & Brad have taken so much heat is due to the fact that they are the faces of ActiveRain.  They are the people that you turn to when you have a question or need help with something on the network.  From working along side these two for almost a year, I learned very quickly their work ethics and dedication to members.  Many mornings when I would awake and start work, I would already find them online at 5:30 AM their time! When I had started here at ActiveRain, I remember Bob saying to me this: "Jeremy, to work this job, you have to realize you do not get time off."  Never before were such true words spoken.  I used to receive phone calls at 7AM from my good friend Lenn Harley and also at as late as 11:30PM from people like Lisa Hill.  We have all become so used to their prompt responses and instant troubleshooting of our issues that when there comes a time that we aren't getting the immediate fix we get a little frustrated.

There is nobody on this network more passionate about ActiveRain than these two guys I promise you.  Unfortunately though, when you are the mouthpieces for an organization, you are also the persons who take the abuse when something goes wrong.  The past week I have seen all sorts of comments directed at both Bob Stewart & Brad Andersohn for the things that happened here.  The part that most do not realize, is that neither had control over the network going down, or control over bringing it back up. 

Both Brad & Bob have zero connections to the technical back end of what makes things run here.  Their jobs are to build our community and make this the most successful real estate network in the planet.  Really and truly, just as T Boardman said today in her post, "There is no such thing as a never fail blog or web site or a site that is never down."  She is 100% correct.  It does not matter what the site is, there are times that things happen.

I remember a few months back when Google & gmail completely crashed.  There have also been those infamous times where Twitter & Facebook have had their issues and gone completely down.  In fact, today we were all ready for our weekly radio show, Social Media Edge on Blog Talk Radio and right as we began the show, the entire thing crashed.  We had special guests lined up to speak but could not host our show. Unfortunately these things happen. 

So, take a few moments go visit Bob, Brad, Jorgen & Kerrie to let them know how much you appreciate their work here.

Photo Credits: http://www.flickr.com/photos/a2gemma/1448178195/sizes/l/ & http://www.flickr.com/photos/wwworks/1384952210/sizes/o/