Praveen: SEO, SEM, Online Marketing

Social Media optimization is technique which can be called as natural optimization on social networks. Promotion no social media channels does not happen often.

Traffic from Social media optimization can be tracked 

1. Google Analytics Referral Traffic

2. Number of Friends who have added you in their friends list in each of your profile in each Social Networks.

3. Frequency of updates and quality of content posted.

4. Number of votes on your content and number of people who regularly vote on your content.

5. The Amount of content in each of your profile pages and community knowledge sharing page.

6. The Total Number of Links to and from these profile pages.

7. Number of comments and frequency. How many of them are not in your friends list.

The amount of effort that is needed to market on social networks is tracked

A Facebook or an Orkut application is like an small widget which is used by the Users of social network. Since this application interacts with lot of people, it also has the ability to interact with the external server. Google Analytics for applications can be embedded into the application giving all data w.r.t the users using the application. Developers will also get an idea about the extent to which the application was spammed by users.

Developer Analytics (http://www.developeranalytics.com/analytics.php) and http://adonomics.com/ are service which is offered to developers of application to keep in touch with the traffic, demographic data, visitor data and conversion data.

These analytical tools in combination with customized tracking which you can set at application level which can send data to external server allows developers to track a lot of information about the user profiles and get useful information such as Traffic, Demographic Data, Profile Data etc.

This data has to be used to remodel and remake applications on Social Networks to make it more useful for users and make it more spam proof. A successful application can be built overtime by building more features to app based on the data, response derived from it.

Google gives details about creating a App;

http://www.google.com/webmasters/gadgets/about/developer.html 

 There are 3 phases for Gadget promotion:

Create: Develop a gadget based on idea. Hire a developer for this or try out yourself. Thinking of an successful idea is Gold, however it happens by chance. Make sure it works on all kind of sites and all Browsers including remote ones like Safari.

Promote: This is the easiest and lest effort part, just add these in various webpages, sites.  Give options to Add to iGoogle, My Yahoo etc.

Track and Optimize: This requires analytics and time. You must use Log file analysis tracking for analyzing the performance of visitor data, traffic data, demographic data, user quality data. Etc. For example your gadget is running on Orkut and Facebook. The number of users in facebook may be more than Orkut, but traffic from Facebook may not be of much use to your business. Then you must customize you App to favour more Orkut community users based on quality of profiles on Orkut. A popular web app can have an impact on Reputation Management and Brand on social networks apart from monetizable traffic.

This Article was originally found on http://www.praveenkodur.com/

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An Internet or web enabled business thrives on the user base who have access to internet, of which who are active online.

The idea of this blog posts and future blog posts is to identify problems in web based business and how analytics can help solve it?

Blogging and Blogs

You have a small blog and spend considerable amount of time updating it, also have spent some money in creating and putting it up live. Measuring the success of a blog is not just pageviews, subscribers and unique visitors count.

ROI of a popular blog can be huge, if you have rich content and have active RSS subscribers. You don’t need a resume. Every popular blogger gets job offers regularly flowing into his email. Above this you have created a brand for yourself. This is a huge economical benefit considering the money and time you spend on make your blog active.  If you have a great blog then you have separate brand and identity for yourself.

Small Scale Business Online

Concentrating on search engine marketing, seo, affiliate marketing to generate profitable visitors to site is fruitful. This is the cheapest form of advertising online. You have control over spends and will be able to monitor your ROI. Set up Google Analytics or any other analytics tool which will help you look at the visitor information.

Conversion University from google is very helpful in optimizing the website for higher conversions and sales (http://www.google.com/support/conversionuniversity/bin/answer.py?answer=77123)

Small scale business must focus their marketing efforts cleverly around geo-locations to get maximum return from marketing & advertising. The site must clearly offer maximum benefit & response to their end users as promised in their USP. Most sites initially work on small set of customer base and keep them satisfied at all circumstances.

These companies are ecommerce sites, shopping sites, travel agent sites that are looking to sell products to their websites’ visitors. They should target at long term steady and consistent growth not looking to achieve instant traffic hoping to dramatically increase page-views and visitor count hoping make revenue quickly and grow faster.

Large Businesses Online

There are various large online website who advertise heavily online & offline for the purpose of promotion. The spend a big amount of money with an objective to increase visitors, page views hoping to increase brand value. It is unwise to spend money on marketing, advertising without looking at the actual value it adds to their users (customers).

Increase in page views and visitors may not proportionally be related to increase in revenue and profit. There are definitely smarter ways to reduce cost of marketing & advertising without impacting the bottomline.

I read about many large advertisers in US & worldwide who have decreased spends on search marketing as it has become unprofitable after a certain limit. They have found search engine optimization, social media marketing ways more effective to gain relevant traffic to their websites for increasing their sales.

Measuring ROI through every channel and making them profitable is very essential and must be the key factor

EXAMPLE:

The traffic to my blog has constant traffic from social media sites like stumbleupon and other social network sites. Few days it has huge spikes of about 2000 hits in a day from stumbleupon alone, totally free traffic.

Blog attracts about 16% of overall traffic from social media sites of which 48% contribution is from Stumbleupon alone.

The cost of promotion on stumbleupon is consuming few hours of time in writing rich useful content and building a network of bloggers, friends & general users. Comparing this with search marketing campaigns, same amount of traffic might have costed me few thousand dollars.

Never be afraid to use new format of media, content for promotions such as Videos, Apps, Images, podcast, audio files, flash files etc. It is just a new form of content by the underlining principle of promotion remains the same.

Reading:

Measuring ROI from SEO : http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3625973

Measuring ROI from Social Media Marketing: http://www.pronetadvertising.com/articles/measuring-the-roi-from-social-media-marketing.html

This Article is originally found on http://www.praveenkodur.com/blog/

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How to get traffic from Social Media sites

Remember yourself in school, in school, there are various sections/classes for the same batch and each section/class had set of students. Now think of how popular you were among your entire batch students. How many of them knew your name, how many of them were your friends.

Now the question is suppose you join a school today, how long do you think it takes to become popular among your batchmates. What would you do to become popular among batchmates?

If you have answers to these questions, you have answers to promotion on social media network site.

Almost all businesses are looking to promote their business online. All of them are looking to tap the potential of traffic present on the social media sites. However most of them do not have clear strategy or method to proceed.

This method of marketing on social networks is essentially a form of Direct Marketing. I have participated in social networks and would like to share my experience on starting a community on a social networks and media sites. It requires 100% involvement & participation for making it successful just as you would need to start a new business. There is very thin line of difference between communicating to a community and communicating to a single user. You should be clear of what your site has to offer to the audience. Why should people join your community?

Once your community is built to a stage where it can sustain by itself. It requires minimum participation from your end and will reap maximum benefits. However in initial stages it requires all your time, effort, dedication and careful reputation management.

Social Networks & media sites are best place for reputation management and image building activity for big companies.

There are various smart ways to attract audience to join your community. Link Baiting is very hot topic among webmasters, SEOs, link builders.

If you are good at link baiting then you should know want content to be distributed to attract audience.

• Use various content formats such as Videos, Images, Content for keep your community happy

• You can organize contests, puzzles, quizes for engaging the users.

• Understand & know your community group members, their preferences, geo location, profession, Interests.

• Mostly the mode of communication is Email, Scrap book(Message Boards) or Chat.

• Two main areas of management: Managing Content, Managing Users

• Advertise you community on Blogs, Social Media sites and even on PPC program works good. Nobody has tried advertising
  
  References:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2002/10/21/community.html
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/holy-mother-of-linkbait

http://www.fullcirc.com/community/communitytypes.htm

This Article is originally found on http://www.praveenkodur.com/blog/

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Social Media Optimization and Social Media marketing is a phrase used to increase the popularity of your website on various social media sites such as Digg, Flickr, Facebook, The Objective for SMO can be very different such as:

1) Brand Building: You want your website to be popular among Social media users, The idea is there is lot of people using Social networks, Social Media sites. How do you become popular among the users?

2) Reputation Management: To attain leadership in industry. You participate in forums, answers program to build an image of your company.

3) Networking with people in the same industry or related industry again for brand building and reputation management.

4) Building Backlinks and Traffic: Social media optimization’s biggest benefit is backlinks and traffic. Traffic directly from social media sites and traffic search engines due to backlinks from social media sites.

Advantages:

1) Ability to target your Market segment

2) No Media costs

Method:

It is form of viral marketing technique, 3 Success Elements in SMO: Linkability, Visibility/Discoverability, Popularity

It is 50% what you do and 50% what your users do. What your users do will depend on how you build your relationship with your users. For example: By providing an easy access to submit your content on social media sites there is good chance your users will post it, if your content is worthy.Therefore the process of making your website social media complaint is known as social media optimization.

Key features of Social Media Sites:

A) Social Media sites have large number of users, therefore increasing the visibility of your website on these sites will surely have marketing benefits.

B) Social Media sites have lot of information such as user profile data which can be effectively used to rank users, or target a specific set of users for advertising.

C) Social Media sites have high user activity, due which fresh content upload happens at frequent intervals sometimes faster than News & PR sites.

D) Most social media sites has the ability to measure the quality of user generated content/users quantitatively and are transparent to general audience and search engines.

For example Digg gives details on how many diggs on content, who has dug, who has blogged about the content, what are their user profile data. All these details are transparent due to which the quality of the site, quality of users and quality of content can be measured both by users and search engines.Elaborating the points stated by Rohit Bhargava on social media optimization.

· Increase your linkability: Linkability is definitely the first step of optimization wherein users must be able to link to your rich content from other websites/blogs. Every successful website/ online business inherently is aware of this.

· Make tagging and bookmarking easy, submitting content easy: In short this means encourage to people to link to your website or post your content on other sites. As website owner you must encourage your users to link to your content and make the overall process of linking simpler, by few clicks.

· Reward inbound links: When you reward your users by giving a link to them in return of their link, you will encourage them to write more about you. This is very nicely practiced by Google blogs, you can find Google blogs(Adwords blog, Webmaster central blogs etc) linking to every blog who write about them. This encourages blog writers to write more about Google and their latest news.

· Help your content travel: This is another important optimization. If you allow your content travel, you are also generating backlinks wherever your content is published. RSS feeds are great example.

· Encourage the mashup: Mashup is simple algo in which inputs one or more content and outputs a new content using standard functions. Do you know the behavioral pattern of users who visit your website? Find out the behavioral profile of your users:

A) Are they tech savvy?

B) Are they first time internet users?

C) How many of them have a blog?

D) How many of them have Orkut profile, facebook profile?

E) What is their Internet Usage frequency?

F) How many of your website users, have a profile in social media sites?

A website like irctc.co.in may not currently need a social media optimization, but a website like rajshri.com definitely needs one currently. It also depends on how you want to grow as online business and which market segment you want to target in future.

1. Create Valuable and useful content, junk content can never be able to achieve the traffic, rankings you desire. The content must be useful for the users in your market segment, so that your attract quality traffic.

2. Help the social media users to post, rate and review your content.

3. Participate in relevant social media site, and network with people.

Types of Social Media Sites

Various types of social media sites are reviewed on SEO, Traffic, Ease of Optimization: For actively promotion and building your community high participation levels are required in each of the below sites.

1) Bookmarking Sites: Most bookmarking sites are open for crawling; hence getting as many pages in other users bookmark list is beneficial.

2) Social Media Content Rating Sites like Digg, reddit, propeller etc.: The work has to be done in building your network, friends’ circle that diggs your content, only way to attain top rankings is high level of participation in combination with posting high value content.

3) Image Sharing Sites: Upload images, tag effectively, form groups & networks for sharing and tagging.

4) Video Sharing Sites: Sites like Youtube.com, Dailymotion host videos as well allow users to post them on blogs, link to them etc. Additionally there are users viewing your video & posting comments on your video.

5) Social Networks such as Orkut, Facebook etc: Very little SEO value, as most sites are not open for search engine crawlers. Ideal for reputation management.

 

Social Media Optimization cannot be separated with Search Engine Optimization as SEO reaps significant benefits from SMO activities. Moving forward Social Media optimization will be the way to optimize sites, as sites will focus more on personalization, local and building relationship with niche audience.ROI of SMO activities is dependent on what you measure as success. If generating backlinks and ranking on search engines is success for you then you must invest in SMO activities for generating backlinks only.

The question is how do you measure success?

If you have a small website you can measure traffic and backlinks. For this you can set up Google analytics with e-commerce tracking and goal conversions. Look at traffic from referral sites and you can find traffic from social media sites. Also, you can find increase in rankings for top keywords on search engines.For more study on Social Media Optimization you could find these links useful:

• http://www.pronetadvertising.com/articles/introduction-to-social-media-optimization.html
• http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/060829-150053
• http://www.searchenginejournal.com/social-media-optimization-13-rules-of-smo/3734/
• http://www.toprankblog.com/2006/08/new-rules-for-social-media-optimization/
• http://blog.seoptimise.com/2007/02/ultimate-social-media-optimization-list.html
• http://rohitbhargava.typepad.com/weblog/2006/08/5_rules_of_soci.html

This Article was originally found on praveenkodur.comCopyright 2008, All rights reserved by praveenkodur.com.

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Direct traffic is that traffic which has no referrals recorded by your analytics tracking system, therefore there are certain factors which directly or indirectly impact Direct traffic to your site: Direct traffic is generally considered as the type in traffic, Traffic due by BRAND VALUE, they are users who are influenced by TV, Radio, and Print Ads. These users reach your website by typing the URL in the address bar. This is not entirely true, as any traffic which is not tracked (has no referrals) are considered as direct traffic:

1. Emails Marketing campaigns with no referral tracking

2. SEO traffic has no referrals in some analytics tools

3. Traffic from Bookmarks.

4. A Viral Marketing Campaign

People who take advantage of direct traffic:

Domain name purchasers, typosquatters, cybersquatters whose intention is to purchase a domain name with typo mistake of popular brand, hence hoping to generate traffic. For more information please visit SEOmoz

Affiliate Marketers, Adsense money makers whose main intention is to make money through arbitrage.

Tracking Direct Traffic

Tracking Radio Ads and offline advertising internally: Some advertisers advertise their brand in Radio and give out the URL such as “http://radio.example.com” which is 301 redirected to URL “http://www.example.com/xyz.php?trackingcode=number”. This way the impact of advertising on the channel can be tracked. This will help in comparing the effectiveness between

1. Two different Ads..

2. Impact on other channel due to advertising on this channel and its co-relation

3. Same Ad performing differently in different cities, regions, geographies.

4. You could further extend to record Page Views, Time on Site and other details..

Google has launched tracking of Adwords audio campaigns in Google Analytics..

Below is an Interesting Example of my blog: The search engine traffic, referral traffic to my blog can be easily analyzed and explained as they are fairly straightforward. SEO, Referral traffic analysis requires no expert, even a layman can understand if they look at Google Analytics Report. However, the interesting part is the Direct Traffic Analysis, which initially I failed to understand until a few months back, hence I have decided to share this analysis in this Direct Traffic post.

Traffic Details

Traffic Share – Medium Wise

Direct Traffic User Details

What can we analyze from the given data?

What Google Analytics says?

1. 13.97% of users are direct, how are they finding my blog even though there is no offline Ads, no TV Ads, no Radio Ads whatsoever?

2. 49.37% of Direct Visitors are new visitors. How could this be explained?

3. Blog has 80.38% bounce rate (for direct visitors) which is high Can we figure out where the problem lies? What is wrong with the site?

4. Average Time by Direct Visitor is 41 seconds. This is a time taken for glancing a webpage, not even reading it.

This means half my direct visitors are new, they glance the page in 41 seconds and most of them leave without doing anything. Not sure how they are finding my site. They mostly visit 1 page of my site and bounce off the site like it was yuck.

Google Analytics does not give any details apart from the above.

Analysis from the above data

The direct users are landing on inner pages of the site. Its very unlikely they are typing the entire URL in the address bar…These Direct Users must be from RSS feeds, bookmarks.

Another data to look at is number of comments.. I get about 12-15 comments in a day most of which are junk and some genuine ones.

1. Users could be clicking on blog posts on their RSS feeds and land on specific page.. They then read and/or post a comment and leave the page.

    

   This is the reason for bounce rate being so high. The users read the blog post and leave; hence bounce rate is not relevant figure to look at.

 

2. Users visit one page and leave, therefore the Average time spent calculated is wrong. Google can only track time correctly if users visit more than one page.The reason being that when a new page is requested from the server then the log files records the time at which the new page was requested from server by the same user.The difference in time at which the page 1 was requested and page 2 was requested is calculated as time spent on the site. So, consider a example when a single page was requested then time spent by user on that page is cannot be determined. Hence average time here is the time spent on site by the users who browsed more than 1 page divided by the total number of users who visited the page.

 

3. Users are finding the blog through blog search engines, blog directories and other blog sites.
   1. They subscribe the RSS feed after which they click on blog posts in RSS Feed.
   2. Users may be finding the site through Book-marking sites, Social media sites add it to their own bookmarks, where users directly find the link to inner page of the site.

Direct Traffic is the most targeted traffic, as these visitors really read the content on your website.
Most returning visitors return through Direct Traffic, especially when you are not advertising offline. They are ideally the best source for returning visitors, hence business can sell their content easily.

This Article is Originally found at praveenkodur.com

Copyright @ 2007 Praveenkodur.com

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