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Saturday 31 October 2015
Friday 30 October 2015
5 Google Analytics Features You Probably Don’t Use Enough (Or Haven’t Even Heard Of)
There’s no question that Google Analytics is an essential tool to understanding your digital audience. It allows you to dig deeper into the types of content they interact with, the platforms they engage on, and the path that leads to a conversion. Businesses large and small can take advantage of these benefits, giving them the data to adjust their marketing plan as needed and make the best use of their budget.
In 2014 over two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies utilized Google Analytics as part of their data collection and marketing strategies, a 6% increase from 2013. Across companies of all sizes, over half of businesses utilizing web analytics software rely solely on Google Analytics. Despite competition from Adobe, Webtrends, and many others, it’s hard for these data providers to stack up to all that Google Analytics offers (let alone for free at the basic level).
It’s hard to believe, but Google Analytics has already been around for 10 years! Despite the fact that we’ve had access to such valuable data for all these years, there are constantly new or updated features and reports hitting the platform.
While regular Analytics users are probably well-versed in the “Audience” and “Acquisition” reporting tools, there are so many other features that tend to go untouched or unnoticed. These are tools that could completely transform how you manage your digital presence moving forward. Even if you’re among the most avid of users, here are five Google Analytics features that you may not be as familiar with.
1. Weighted Sort
When analyzing how your web pages are performing, it’s easy to sort the table by bounce rate or by the number of pageviews. You simply have to click that attribute’s heading and you’re good to go. However, just sorting by one factor or another doesn’t give you the whole picture. Organizing the pages by bounce rate won’t necessarily put your pages in order by traffic volume, but sorting by pageviews won’t take bounce rates into account.
This is where the Weighted Sort option can help. This feature allows you to see which pages have both a high traffic volume and high bounce rate, identifying where a good majority of your missed conversion opportunities may lie. To do this is really simple. On any table, click the “Bounce Rate” column header to sort the rows. Then, click the dropdown next to “Sort Type” and choose “Weighted.” The first web page you see in the list is likely the first place you should start when evaluating both design and content elements of your site, as it has one of the highest bounce rates as well as pageviews.
Figuring out why users are leaving your site from this place is crucial. Are they unsure about next steps for contacting you or making a purchase? Are they turned off by the layout or design of your website? Or have they simply found all of the information they need at this time? Utilizing the Weighted Sort option is an important first step to making these discoveries.
2. Site Search
Practically every website nowadays has a search bar for users to narrow down what they are looking for and expedite the search process. Not only is having this feature available to visitors important, but acknowledging exactly what they’re looking for and why is equally valuable. The Site Search feature in Google Analytics can help you understand all of that. Through this tool, you can see which products or services are most important to your audience as well as whether or not your website is easy to navigate.
To start using Site Search, go to the Admin section of your account and click on “View Settings” under the website you would like to begin tracking.
Then scroll to the bottom of the page and turn the switch on. Once the setting is on, the two fields below will appear. You will need to enter your website’s search parameters into the text box in order to extract the search term(s) from the custom URL.
Then scroll to the bottom of the page and turn the switch on. Once the setting is on, the two fields below will appear. You will need to enter your website’s search parameters into the text box in order to extract the search term(s) from the custom URL.
Search parameters are the letters or words that precede a query in the URL. For example, a search for Google Analytics-themed blog posts in Kissmetrics’ search bar brings you to http://ift.tt/1oIgpXs?s=google+analytics, so the search parameter would be the portion that is highlighted. All you have to do is enter those characters into the Query Parameter section, and everything but the specific search terms will be filtered out when you go to view the report.
Once the tool is turned on and tracking, you’ll find your data under the Site Search segment of the Behavior section. You can filter the data by unique search terms, time spent on the site after a search, and the number of pages viewed following the search.
This will help give you greater insight into the typical paths your visitors take once they’ve searched for a particular product or service, helping you better organize your website’s content and personalize future marketing efforts by understanding what a user is looking for.
3. Remarketing Lists
Remarketing is a valuable tactic in a marketer’s arsenal, allowing you to reach back out to potential customers that didn’t convert the first time around. Whether your initial marketing message was off, they didn’t gather enough information to make a decision, another company was recommended to them, or they weren’t in a buyer frame of mind yet, remarketing is your second chance at converting them into a customer. It’s a great way to make the most of the audience you have, without having to invest more into your marketing budget to attract an even wider pool of consumers.
The Remarketing Lists feature in Google Analytics works together with your AdWords account to help you build lists of prospects that you can target with future campaigns. That being said, you cannot utilize this feature without having an active AdWords account.
To get started, go to the Admin section of Analytics and click on “Remarketing” under the Property column.
Then click “Audiences” in the dropdown that appears to begin creating your own custom audiences. You can either let Google select your audience through a Smart List, or you can create your own based on new or returning users to your site, as well as those who visited a particular page, completed a goal, or made a purchase.
Once you’ve created one or more audiences, you can then add them to future ad campaigns in AdWords. Google Analytics does limit you to 2,000 remarketing audiences per account, but it’s highly unlikely that you’ll reach this threshold.
4. Funnel Visualization
Within the “Flow Visualization” section of Google Analytics, there are several reports that shed light on the specific path each user takes through your website to ultimately end up at their final destination. You can see where visitors may have abandoned their original path to pursue something else, went back to a previous page to get more information, and where they bounced from your site (and most importantly, if a conversion was recorded).
The Funnel Visualization report focuses on how your Goals perform overall, measuring conversion rate over time. This feedback allows you to further analyze the Goals that you’ve set for your company in Analytics, and determine whether they meet the mark or should be reevaluated. To find this tool, go to the Conversions dropdown and click on “Goals.”
You can view each Goal’s conversion rate over the course of a day, week, or month, allowing you to zoom in on the impact of a particular campaign or see how your efforts have worked throughout the month. Looking at the sample graph above, you can see that the goal of “Request Consultation” peaked towards the end of the 7-day period on September 27th.
You should compare this to your marketing efforts on that specific day to dig into why you saw this spike. Did you promote a new blog post or product offering on social media? Did you send out an email to your subscriber list? What was it about that day that stood apart from the rest of the week? Since the 27th fell on a Sunday this year, maybe that was the best time for consumers or business owners to take the time and fill out your contact form. The Funnel Visualization report is a great way to get your marketing team talking to see what strategies have the greatest impact on that particular goal.
This feature also helps you see which Goals are working well and which ones may need to be reconsidered. From this point, it’s helpful to make a pit stop at the Goal Flow report to dig deeper into why certain goals are more effective than others. You can choose items from six categories: Acquisition, Advertising, Behavior, Custom Variables, Social, and Users. This helps you laser in on user behavior broken down by traffic type, actions completed on your site, social network, or even custom factors that you identify.
In this example, you can see that the majority of the “Request Consultation” goal completions can be attributed to organic traffic, and email had almost no impact. This is a clear indication that your website content and SEO strategies are proving to be effective, while you may want to take a look at how you’re approaching email marketing. Starting off with the Funnel Visualization report to get an initial look at your Goals and then digging deeper with Goal Flow will allow you to ensure that your priorities are in line to convert visitors into customers.
5. Trackbacks
It’s so easy to get caught up in the search and website elements of Google Analytics that you might forget that there’s an extremely valuable section dedicated to social media and its impact on SEO. The Social segment can be found within the Acquisition dropdown, allowing you to see how your social media presence drives web traffic and ultimately conversions. The Trackbacks feature takes a look at everyone who has linked to your site’s content, whether it’s a blog post, piece of downloadable content, or even one of your services pages.
What’s most helpful here is that you can see how many sessions on your website resulted from that particular link or how many times the same URL has linked to you, separating more passive users from those that are truly engaged with your content and message. For example, if you see that an industry publication has linked to one of your ebooks multiple times, that could indicate the potential for a future partnership. Maybe they would be interested in having you contribute a guest post to their blog, or they have a tool or piece of content that would be useful to you.
Regardless of the industry you operate in, partnerships are vital to making a name for your business and standing out as a thought leader. Whether it’s an opportunity to share content, services, or to co-sponsor an industry-related event, link building continues to prove its importance in both SEO and business in general. Don’t miss out on these individuals or companies who are taking note of what you have to offer; they could lead to valuable business propositions.
Keep Up With What’s New
Google Analytics is constantly adding new features and enhancing old ones, making it difficult for even the most experienced of users to keep up. It’s important that you take some time to look around your account every so often and see what’s new. You’ll likely stumble upon a feature that you never knew existed, perhaps even some of the examples above. From simply sorting current data in new ways to setting custom goals and analyzing sources of web traffic, there’s a seemingly endless number of ways to put Analytics to work for your business. And don’t worry, you don’t have to do it all to gain the insight you’re looking for. If you’re able to zoom in on a specific target market or goal that is top priority, you can cater your approach accordingly.
Are there some new or lesser-known Google Analytics features that you’ve recently discovered? We’d love to hear about them in the comments!
About the Author: Kim Speier is an inbound marketing specialist at Mainstreethost, a digital marketing agency in Buffalo, New York. She frequently writes about social media, content marketing, user experience, and web design for the Mainstreethost blog. Connect with Kim on Twitter at @krspeier.
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RankBrain and Artificial Intelligence: Weekly Forum Update
If you haven’t heard, RankBrain is an artificial intelligence. It uses machine learning to to process searches that people make and attempts to show pages that contain words related to, but not necessarily included in, the query. There’s other news too, of course.
Bing has achieved profitability, John Brown dropped by WebmasterWorld to talk with webmasters about his new position as Google’s head of publisher outreach, and on Cre8asiteforums users are talking about comment sections and bandwidth hogging ads. You won’t want to miss a single link – this week’s update is jam-packed.
Google: Not Too Late to Get Ready for Penguin
Let’s start off slow with some news about Penguin. Gary Illyes responded on Twitter to a user who wanted to know, “Is it too late to clean up my backlinks? Can I be ready for Penguin?”
Is it too late to clean up my backlinks? Can I be ready for Penguin?Click To TweetIllyes answered that it’s certainly not too late – but his answer brings up new questions. The next Penguin update is predicted to make Penguin “real-time,” meaning that it would never be too late. Does Illyes’s answer mean that “real-time” might have a different definition to Google than the one we understand?
Microsoft was tooting its horn earlier this week – Bing is finally profitable!
A Threadwatch reporter has gathered some news articles and a discussion on SEO Chat where webmasters consider increasing their investments. Bing converts higher, and is rising – and with Windows 10, the number of users with Bing has risen considerably.
Ad revenue grew 29% according to a report from Search Engine Land. Maybe it’s time to start taking Bing more seriously.
Google Search Powered by AI – RankBrain
Folks on WebmasterWorld are discussing what RankBrain means for the future of search. It’s seeing a mixed reception. Writes user ogletree,
“I have been seeing this and I’m sick of it…I think all it does is take a zillion searches and boil it down to a much smaller number of searches. The only problem is some of us know what we are searching for and don’t want Google to rewrite our search.”
Other users have also noticed that specific searches are returning lower quality results. A huge shake-up for longtail is predicted – whether that will be positive or negative depends on the individual, and the direction RankBrain will take in the future.
“This to me sort of suggests targeting long tail search terms may become less effective,” writes user gazzahk. Dr. Marie writes, “I am wondering if this is perhaps why we did not see a rerun of Panda or Penguin for so long… I also wonder if RankBrain will impact Panda. I feel that in the past, a HUGE component of Panda involved technical site issues,” but, she continues, RankBrain could add more data to Panda and make it more about promoting high quality sites than small technical changes.
For a third perspective, try Cre8asiteforums where users are discussing Bill Slawski’s RankBrain investigation.
Kim Krause-Berg worries that as Google becomes more focused on AI, it will undermine Google’s “intent towards giving us search results we desire as opposed to those they think we should get based on who paid the most or how its machines decide what we see, or not.”
User iamlost writes, “Never forget that Google is an ad network and their search is their main ad server.”
Still, they continue, RankBrain is called an AI, but it is nowhere near a true AI. To conclude, EGOL adds
“I don’t think that anybody is going to make any money trying to do things that fit the pattern of RankBrain.”
And who knows, maybe that’s a good thing – it will leave all of us more time to focus on quality, useful content!
An Interview and Conversation With Google’s New Head of Publisher Outreach
John Brown, Google’s new Head of Publisher Policy Communications, was kind enough to drop in a WebmasterWorld thread for a brief conversation. Users there were discussing an interview between Brown and Brent Csutoras in Search Engine Land.
The main concern of webmasters is whether increased transparency and communication will bolster failing Adsense revenues. Writes user MrSavage,
“It’s like a gold necklace. I’m always careful with it because losing it would be costly. However, the one made of silver? That’s how concerned I am about policy. I care, but this is not keeping me up at night any more.”
Consolidating Content and Ranking Factors
There comes a time after performing a site audit that you sit down and tell yourself, “It’s time to cut the fat.” It’s not always about getting rid of pages, but sometimes it’s about putting content together in new ways to make it more easily delivered to your users.
User LTParis is a welcome site on SEO Chat – this time, he writes “I think in total I would be shedding about 12-13% of the total pages on my site…” and wonders how to preserve his rankings. 301 redirects are the commonly suggested solution, but as fathom replies: “301 redirects do nothing if there are no incoming external links to the pages being redirected… Just losing pages (numbers) isn’t a positive nor negative thing… losing unique phrases become one issue and losing depth of topic becomes the other.”
A Useful New Tool from a Senior SEO Chat Member!
SEO Chat user Chedders has been with us since 2011, and he’s come to us this week with a neat little tool of his own design. It’s a simple page explorer for analyzing onsite attributes, and more features are being added as time permits.
Give it a spin and let him know what you think! Your suggestions could help add to something that’s already pretty great.
Not Sharing Articles Because Comments Are Rude
Sharing articles on Twitter and Facebook is great in one way because it can open up avenues for enlightening discussions. But in another way, it can be very stressful. There’s an astonishing amount of negativity on the web.
Kim Krause-Berg writes,
Have social sites like Facebook become a wasteland of negativity?Click To Tweet“Is it me or have social sites like Facebook become a wasteland of negativity?”
Users on Cre8asiteforums are discussing how to find positivity in your online discussions. Bill Slawski has some great advice for sharing conversation and photos. Politics and religion, as always, seem to be the things you definitely want to avoid! What has your experience been with online discussion as we approach the second decade of the 21st century?
The Sneakiest, Bandwidth Hogging Weasel Ads
Have you ever gone to one of your favorite sites, browsed happily for fifteen minutes, only to watch as your browser lags and freezes up all of a sudden? It could be because of their ads.
“These ads,” writes EGOL on Cre8asiteforums, “appear as a mundane static image, but then, often minutes later, they start pulling in video and sound. They play for a few seconds and then go back to a mundane static image.”
These sneaky little ads can suck the life out of your bandwidth without you realizing it. Other ads will invite their friends to join them if you stay on a page for too long, flooding your browser with junk. What’s your experience with ads like this? Cre8asiteforums users are particularly interested in hearing how they function on mobile devices!
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The Pros and Cons (and Hows) of Using Stock Video
You’ve probably heard the phrase “A picture is worth a thousand words” more than a thousand times.
It’s true; imagery can explain in a heartbeat what it could take paragraphs or pages to explain or imply. It carries power, and elicits emotions and reactions from audiences. And we’re used to taking those emotional cues, having those reactions, and forming decisions and judgments about what we see pretty much immediately.
That includes photography and graphic imagery of course, but it also includes video. So what am I trying to say here?
When you’re creating a video, it needs to feel authentic.
Whether you’re shooting your whole video yourself or looking to include stock video to add that special something, you need to consider what the goal of your video is, the feel you’re going for, the time, effort, and money you have to spend, and more. Because at the end of the day, the point of your video is to connect with your audience and get them to take action.
Both footage you shoot yourself (or with the help of an agency) and stock footage can help you achieve a strong video if you know how to use it correctly. So with that in mind, here are a few pros and cons to think about when you’re trying to decide if stock footage is right for your project.
Take stock of the downside of stock footage.
Stock footage can get pretty pricey.
Check out some of the sites that offer stock video footage. We’ve seen 20-second video clips for $80USD and $180USD (and if you’re wondering if the cost goes up for better, less ‘cliched’ shots, yes, yes it does). That bill can add up if you’re looking to include more than one stock shot in your b-roll footage.
Speaking of cliches…
Stock video footage can be quite full of cliched, or overly staged shots. Stock video can often pander to the most requested footage, like street shots or office meetings. And because they’re so often searched for, that means everyone is using the same boring footage.
Take this image, for example. Would you want to watch a video filled with these kinds of scenes? They feel too staged, set up, and unrelatable, with everyone wearing similar expressions and outfits, in a perfect setting of a cool, clean, glass office building.
In comparison, check out this video created by our friends at George Briggs Media. The office space in the video definitely isn’t staged – in fact, it’s Vidyard’s very own office! Whether you use a production house to shoot your video, or you film it yourself, you can end up with an atmosphere, and a ‘feeling’ of your video that feels much more authentic and inspiring.
Want a different image? You might not be able to find it.
With stock footage, you’re stuck with what you can find. If you want an office scene, you might just get similar results to that footage, or the same buildings in the same cities over and over, or the same demographic group sitting at a bar or coffee shop. If you want something really specific that fits perfectly with your target audience, you would probably have to shoot something yourself.
What if you want a downtown city center shot in your video? Well, here’s an example of a cityscape image. Pretty generic, eh? And maybe a little hard to tie in with the feel of the rest of your video (more on that below).
If you choose to shoot the video yourself or with the aid of a production house, you could use your own city, and take shots that feel so much more authentic and relatable, like this video from George Briggs media.
Stock footage may not jive with the rest of your video.
Our in-house video experts are adamant that using stock footage well isn’t an easy task. It’s difficult to match the visual picture style with the rest of your video. What if the lighting is different, or the colours don’t contrast well, or the focus or blurriness of the background scenes isn’t consistent, or even the quality of the equipment you’re using differs? Even if you find stock footage that you think looks “cool”, might indeed make the rest of your video look poorer in comparison.
The story you’re trying to tell might get lost in translation.
If part of your video feels too posed, too staged, or inconsistent with the rest of your video, your audience will have a harder time feeling like they’re a part of your story. The video won’t feel candid, and will lack a sense of authenticity. A highly polished stock video scene isn’t always the best way to tell your story and share your message because, as Mat King, our Video Production Manager put it, “High production value does not equal a real moment.”
Without a strong story, engagement will slide.
Need I say more here? You want people to watch your video and then take action because of what they saw, so they need to experience an authentic story. Stock footage has an upward battle to fight if it wants to feel as authentic as footage you shoot yourself (or through an agency). As Alex Marshall, Founder of George Briggs Media, puts it, “If a video can’t affect your audience, there was no real point doing it in the first place. Working with a video agency [or shooting footage yourself] is like performing an operation with a scalpel, whereas sometimes stock footage can be like trying to perform the same operation with a bat.”
Well, that was blunt.
There were supposed to be “Pros” in this list, right?
Okay, I didn’t mean to scare you. But now that you know how stock footage can go wrong, you’re better prepared to make it go right! Stock footage definitely has its place in the video marketing landscape, and here are a few solid reasons for using it in your video.
You can’t get the shot.
What if you need to include footage of your server room in your video, but it’s in a different location, or locked down for any reason? What if your video has a space theme but you aren’t an astronaut so you can’t take video from your rocket ship as you shoot into space? What if you want to promote an event but you don’t have the right footage with the necessary feel or branding? That’s when stock video comes into play. It is a good source for getting the shots that would otherwise be impossible (or very expensive!) for you to get.
Our video promoting our presence at this year’s Dreamforce event included stock footage of coffee being made. Why reinvent the wheel? Our coffee makers don’t look as great, and this footage gave us exactly the feel we were going for.
It might save you money.
I know I listed the cost as a con. Which is true. But sometimes stock footage can also save you money. How? Well if you only need a short shot of stock footage, that can be cheaper than having your whole video shot by a production house. Before you start your video project, you may want to consider how many shots (and what shots) you want in your video, and how best to achieve those goals.
It can save you time.
It takes time to source a great stock video footage, but it can take even more time to set up production, film, and edit every single shot. Sometimes stock video (when it’s blended into the rest of the shots well) works perfectly under tight timelines.
If you choose to use stock video for your project, how should you use it?
Here are a few things to keep in mind if you want to go the stock footage route:
Look for shots that are consistent with the look-and-feel of the rest of your video.
Look for similar colour tones, angles, background treatment, lighting, and more so the whole video feels like it belongs together rather than hacked together.
Look for stock footage that doesn’t feel as posed or set up.
Search for video that feels candid, like it was simply a moment in time that happened to be caught on film. After all, this is what people relate to these days – content that’s shared all over social media is shared because it feels real. And that’s because it is real. People don’t want to see a guy in a suit smiling like the Cheshire cat at his computer screen.
Make sure footage is complementary to the script.
What is your script talking about? Don’t have your actors or voiceover talking about what it’s like to work for an innovative company and then show shots of the outside of a building. Stock footage shouldn’t be used simply to give someone something to look at while your script drones on. Footage should always bring your script to life, and if it isn’t doing that, rethink your footage (and potentially, your script!).
Establish a story or journey.
Use stock footage carefully to connect what happens in scene A to what happens in scene B to what happens in scene C. You can do this through using footage that includes the same characters, for example. That way you’ll follow one person (or group of people) through their journey (like in the George Briggs Media video above, which includes the same woman throughout the story) rather than feeling like a bunch of random scenes were glued together in post without any real sense of purpose.
There you have it! If you’re considering using stock footage, just keep in mind what your goals are, and make sure you’re using it (or not) to make your video as strong as it can be. Your audience will thank you!
The post The Pros and Cons (and Hows) of Using Stock Video appeared first on Vidyard.
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Thursday 29 October 2015
How to Force Google to Crawl More Pages of My Site? #JimAndAnn Show
It’s a very frequent question: How do I get Google crawl more of my site pages?
The basic answer is: There’s nothing extra you need to be doing except for creating useful content and building a clear website architecture which would be easy to understand to both search engines and users.
How does Google discover websites and URLs?
Google crawls the web by following the links. The crawl from page to page taking snapshots of each page and saving them in their Cache.
Then they use the variety of signals to understand how important, useful and trusted each page is:
- Is the content unique?
- Is the content indepth?
- Are there external links to that page?
- How are users interacting with that page?
Which tools can I use to find out if my page has been crawled by Google?
Use Google’s operators:
- info:http://ift.tt/1odfM9N
- cache:http://ift.tt/1odfM9N
- site:yoursite.com
Google Webmaster Tools offer crawl statistics too. It also signals of any errors if there were not able to crawl a particular page.
Where do I submit my site to get it ranked?
Don’t take the trouble… Google is very good at finding new sites and URLs very fast provided they have backlinks pointing to them from elsewhere for a search bot to crawl.
If your page has no backlinks, getting it crawled won’t help you. It won’t show up in Google search unless it’s linked.
If you have a page that Google hasn’t found, there’s a problem with that page: It must be hidden somewhere deep in the site with few or 0 backlinks. Submitting that URL to Google won’t help: Diagnose and solve the underlying problem.
Generally, you want to make your site smaller and flatter to get everything crawled well.
If I did find the page or directory which is not cached by Google, which tools should I be using to diagnose the problem with it?
Here are the tools that will help:
- Look at http://ift.tt/1h4oU6r and see if you are blocking any pages
- Look at your site code (CTRL/i in Firefox on Windows and CMD/i in Firefox on Mac)
- Website Crawler and XML Sitemap Generator: Identify which URLs cannot be accessed by Google and see the error
- Web Page SEO Analysis Tool: Get a quick snapshot of your page and see the basic issues it may have
- Use Google’s cache-only version: Using these Greasemonkey scripts (called Google Cache Continue Redux) you can also browse your site using Google cache
Bottom line: It’s not about how many pages of your site get crawled, it’s about how many of your site pages rank in Google!
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Watch the whole video: How to get Google Crawl My Site? #JimAndAnn
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How to Put Eyes on Your Content on Day One
The day has finally arrived!
You’re ready to launch your site off into the endless expanse of the internet. You content is polished and beautiful, your site delivers an amazing user experience—after all, there’s no point in driving traffic to a site that no one will like!
You wait, ready to answer any comments, thank everyone who shares your content—and spend all day refreshing your site stats, as a tiny trickle of people come and go, with barely a word to say.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Sure, everyone starts at the bottom, but that doesn’t mean you must start at zero. There are ways to make sure your reach is as large as it can be from that first day—and the faster your start, generally, the faster your rise.
So how do we go about making sure your site has the absolute best debut it possibly can?
Assess Existing Assets
Starting Big
You probably recognize the name Neil Patel. If not, he cofounded Kissmetrics, and has since created several very successful blogs. He clearly works harder than most people, and he knows his trade, so chances are good he would have found success regardless of his base. That said, the name recognition, authority, and readership he gained from working here on Kissmetrics probably didn’t hurt, right?
The bigger you want to build a skyscraper, the wider and deeper you have to design the base. Likewise, if you want to build a huge following quickly, the best thing to do is to start with as many people as possible looking at you.
Starting out, you probably don’t have a blog with hundreds of thousands of subscribers to pull from, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have anything at all.
Today, almost everyone is active on some sort of social media, and most of those who aren’t make up for it by having friends out there in the real world. It’s worth saying, don’t be obnoxious about it, but most of your friends and acquaintances well be happy to give you a boost if you ask them. Your primary goal out the gate is to get people signed up to your email list, because that will bring people back, and your secondary goal is to convince them to share your content, because that will bring new people in. Even a few dozen or hundred people will make a big difference in the short run. We’ll get into why in a minute, but for now let’s talk about how.
Where to Amass Followers
First off, if you aren’t familiar with the ins and outs of conversion, it would be a good idea to read up a bit. Your goal here is to create that wide base to build off of, so you get the most out of every post. Different networks offer different advantages, and you can certainly, if you don’t have time for setting up and growing all of them, mix and match to focus on those aspects you believe will be the most important to your specific situation.
Facebook Friends
Facebook is great for starting a site out, especially your first, because they let you invite people to join your business/fan page, where you’ll hopefully have a nice conversion button to take them to your site. User engagement with your posts is higher on some other platforms, but no one else lets you bug people in quite as direct and friendly a way as Facebook. Better yet, people are used to getting invited to random things, so they’re not going to hold it against you.
Likely you’ve already seen the big problem with this, though, which is the nature of your social network on Facebook. Simply put, your friends, family, and acquaintances are not likely to be your actual target market. That’s okay, because, hopefully, a few people in their networks are.
Don’t underestimate the value of joining Facebook groups in your target area, either. These are often very active, but overlooked and underutilized by major players, meaning you only have to compete with other little fish for attention. With any luck, you’ll make some new friends struggling with the same issues you are, and help each other grow into medium-sized fish.
Twitter Followers
Twitter is a fickle beast. Unless you’re very good or very lucky, you will probably see only a trickle of traffic from this site. Even tweets that do very well from a retweeting perspective tend to have low conversion.
Somewhat ironically, given that it’s such a large and impersonal site, what Twitter is best used for early on is building relationships. Follow and reach out to established authorities in your niche. Not only are you genuinely likely to have interests in common, but many are happy to offer advice and support, and a single share of your content from a known authority can open you up to dozens or hundreds of new connections.
To put it another way, your focus on Twitter isn’t bringing floods of people to your site, it’s about bringing a handful of the right people.
Google Plus
Google Plus is another oddball. It might be important for SEO rankings, you need a profile on it, but it’s so convoluted in some respects that it’s hard to grow yourself there. One particularly great thing about it is that anything you share on G+ is almost instantly indexed.
I don’t know entirely why Google Plus is such a mess. Part of it is no doubt the learning curve for G+; while most social media platforms have a clear and obvious thing they do, G+ is trying to be everything to everyone. They want to handle the comments on your blog, they want to merge with your YouTube channel, and so on, so it’s not clear entirely what you’re there for at first glance.
Most of the people who use it fall into one of two categories:
Power Users: These people really get a lot done with G+. They’ve taken the time to figure out how to take advantage of its strengths, and they’re reaching other experts. This, oddly, makes G+ a great place for interacting with other people who are serious about what they’re doing.
Autoposters: These people set their blogs to autopost to their G+ page and have never, ever, been back. This is almost everyone who could be described as a beginner, novice, or casual blogger.
In other words, most people either get a lot from it, or nothing at all. If you’d like to jump into getting the maximum from Google’s own take on the social network, start with the basics, and work out from there.
Pinterest and Instagram
This is a wildcard. If you are operating in a visually engaging niche, Pinterest and Instagram are both incredibly powerful. If you happen to be able to create small montages of eye-catching images, Instagram is possibly the easiest social media network to gain a big following on.
Pinterest doesn’t amass followers as quickly, but has been show to have a high conversion rate compared to most other social media platforms. In other words, if you can get people to look at your stuff on Pinterest, there’s a relatively high chance they’ll follow it to your site.
On the other hand, if your niche doesn’t lend itself to pretty pictures, these sites will be of somewhat diminished value to you. It’s also important to note that while both Instagram and Pinterest rely primarily on visual content, they are not created equal. Pinterest is a great place to share infographics and other more complex posts, while the structure and culture of Instagram reward collages and photographs more strongly. Including infographics in your articles is a great way to expand the reach of your content on that platform.
LinkedIn has been making big, and very overdue changes lately with how they deliver content. It now functions as something of a hybrid of Facebook’s News Feed and Tumblr, where you have a feed delivering content generated or shared by people you follow, as well as items LinkedIn thinks you might like – or was paid to show you.
One aspect which has not yet been overhauled, but is hopefully on the list, is the groups feature of LinkedIn, which is reminiscent of the forums that have existed on the internet since nearly the beginning. Like-minded people can gather together, create topic threads, and discuss those topics, to their hearts’ content. It should be an extraordinary tool for outreach to your target market, but in its current iteration is just a kind of okay one. By posting often, and linking to good content (yours and others’) you can usually bring in a pretty steady trickle of new people, with a relatively high conversion rate to subscribers, since they’re already interested in what you’re talking about.
The good news is that LinkedIn is the absolute easiest network to grow your network on. Everybody is there to, digitally speaking, exchange business cards.
The first step to creating a big following is to contact people you actually know. LinkedIn will then help you out by importing your contact lists and so on. You want to get about one hundred followers, so you look like a real person rather than a bot. Of course, one hundred people is way too small a number to really expand the reach of your content, so you’ll want to acquire more followers.
What should you do next? Well . . . This is sort of bad form, so don’t tell anyone I told you to do this, but what you should do is use the “People you may know . . .” feature to send out invitations to connect to as many people as you can. Target peers in your field in and your target audience—you want shares from the former and clicks from the latter.
Once you have five hundred friends on LinkedIn, your count simply shows as 500+ and you never have to send out a request again to grow your network, because you’ll get a steady stream of requests indefinitely.
Is this abusing the system a bit? Absolutely. Is it the best way to get something valuable out of LinkedIn? As far as I’ve been able to tell.
Other Websites
One of your biggest assets isn’t social media at all. Do you have any friends with blogs or websites? Acquaintances? Cousins of friends of friends?
Ask them to link to your new site, even just a mention. This will help you rise through the SEO page rankings by growing your domain authority.
If they have a more popular site, this can really translate to a huge bump.
Guest Posts
Even better than a link, reach out to people and ask for a chance to guest post. Many sites will be happy to extend at least the opportunity, and if you do it far enough in advance, they’ll be happy schedule the articles for your site launch or soon after. This is a three-fold win for you. It raises your domain authority, and it sends people your way, which is great. The big thing it does, though, is give you an opportunity to interact with the users of the other site, answer their questions and create rapport.
In fact, commenting on other blogs and websites is another great way to gain followers!
Many of the people you interact with (assuming the interactions are positive) will check out your own site. Even if they don’t, though, they’ve got one more reason to remember your name. If you’re showing up on a number of sites, they’ll see you again and again, and they’ll start thinking of you as someone whose advice is sought. An authority. Someone to pay attention to and follow.
Just remember to write insightful comments. Generic comments like “hey great post” won’t help. Since a lot of commenting systems allow readers to rank (thumbs up/down) comments, it becomes even more crucial to write something that will get the attention of readers. If you have nothing to say, don’t write anything.
There is some debate over whether the value of guest posts is deteriorating, but they certainly remain invaluable to sites in their early stages.
Don’t be afraid to ask
How do you get guest posting opportunities? You ask. Ask on Twitter or through email. However works, but do ask. Most sites, even relatively low traffic ones, get many, many, requests for guest blogging opportunities, but if they know you’re a real person, and you can show them you’ll do a good job, then at least a few of them will likely acquiesce.
This isn’t about taking the internet by storm, it’s about opening a door. As your name recognition increases, you’ll get more opportunities—that’s a long term concern though, and we’re talking about putting eyes on the page on day one. What you’re doing by guest blogging is diverting a tiny portion of as many larger sites’ traffic as you’re able to towards your own site. Many small streams make a river.
It should probably go without saying (but won’t) that your social profiles should be polished. You want to be wearing the digital equivalent of a nice suit, so that you look professional. Perfect formatting and grammar are necessary. The picture you choose is also important – people will judge you by this. Choose a professional photo – something you’d put on a resume.
Why Leveraging These Platforms Matters
I did promise to tell you why all this matter. Well, in all honesty it’s not critical that this all happens on day one. That’s just what this article is about, and there’s no reason you can’t have it all ready to go, so why wouldn’t you?
Blog growth tends to be happen slowly, if the blog’s doing well. You have ten in month one, twenty in month two, forty in month three, and so on. Give or take, of course, there isn’t some industry-standard growth curve. That said, you’ll have some average rate of conversion of visitors, and the more visitors you convert, the more visitors there will be to convert, so things gain steam. In other words, if you’re going to grow at all, in two or three years it won’t really matter whether you started with one subscriber or one hundred, because you’ll have thousands. However, there’s a big difference between a three month growth curve starting with one, ten, and one hundred followers.
Let’s look at a very simplified growth rate of 10% per month for twelve months.
Starting with ten followers, you’ll end the first month with thirteen, and the year with thirty-three. Starting with three hundred thirty. The math on this isn’t exactly hard. At this arbitrary growth rate every subscriber you have at the start is an extra tenth of a follower each month.
Does it really work this way? Of course not! This example is simple, and reality doesn’t have time for simple. Your growth will probably follow something close to this pattern at first, after that, things get complicated. At some point you’ll hit plateaus or viral spikes, and there will be good months and bad.
The point is, the more people you start with, the faster you’re going to grow if you’re doing everything else right. And that’s why we care about starting strong.
Followers are just the start, though, because, “. . . if you’re doing everything else right,” is a very big if.
Test All Tech
You’re going to have some technical difficulties. It’s going to happen. Still, it’s better if you don’t shoot yourself in the foot at the start of the race.
Technical difficulties can break a launch, and often do
Make sure everything is working. I can’t give you a real checklist for this, because it’s a big, complex topic, and since there are so many ways to build, host, and run a site, anything specific I wrote would be 90% irrelevant to everyone who read this. That said, there are some basic items which should be in the forefront of your mind.
Make sure your site works for all major browsers
Even Internet Explorer. There are very few things more frustrating when designing a site than making something very cool and discovering that it works in Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and . . . not Internet Explorer, because if one browser is messing up, it’s always Internet Explorer. IE is still the browser of choice for about 10% of the internet (which is millions of people). So, if you don’t support it, that’s ten percent of your potential market, poof, gone. Maybe that’s worth it to you, maybe it’s not, but be aware.
Ensure Everything Works Properly on Mobile
More and more people are visiting sites from mobile devices, so it’s very important to make sure your site renders properly on these devices. If they have to pinch and zoom or try to adjust your site so that it is readable, it will leave a bad impression and most visitors will likely leave and never come back again. Even worse, it hurts your SEO with Google. Use Google’s mobile friendly test to make sure your site works properly.
Get Open Graph Working Correctly
You know when people share an article on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook and there’s a catchy image that appears? That’s no accident. Their Open Graph is working properly.
Make sure key features work
Like I said, I can’t really give you a definitive guide, but there are some critical growth opportunities that you’ll lose if you don’t have the following features working: comments, follow, share, and subscribe.
Fully Integrate Your Social Media Platforms
Speaking of following and sharing, since you have gone to the trouble of growing your potential readership through social media from the outset, it would probably be a good idea to make sure your site can properly leverage these media. This is another good reason to grow your following in advance, as you’ll have to set up the various accounts to connect them to your site anyway.
Make sure all the buttons work. Seriously.
So speaks the voice of painful personal experience! Make sure every single button you have on the site actually does what it’s supposed to be doing. Don’t just assume it will.
Make it Easy For Users To Give You Their Email Address
Remember, the prize bit of user engagement (aside from actual sales) is the email subscription. You don’t want users to leave without giving you their email. Look at Kissmetrics. What’s the first thing you see in the top left, right where your eyes look when you start reading the page? A box for your email and name . . . and this is a site which is all about the science of conversion. What does that tell you about how important email subscriptions are?
So make sure they can give you their email address! Any funnels you have for convincing people to give them to you are well constructed, but also don’t put up any barriers; if the user wants to skip your pitch and just commit, don’t force them to click through a million reasons why they should do exactly what they were already planning to do.
And make it clear what they’ll be getting when they sign up. An email every time a new post goes live on your blog? Will this be everyday, a few times a day, once a month, etc? Make it very clear before they signup. And, of course, tell them that you’ll never spam them (assuming you won’t).
Ensure all content is optimized to share easily
This is another tricky one, because “optimized to share” is different for different platforms, and, also, changes for each platform from time-to-time. While individual platforms change what sizes and types of content look best only rarely, with all the platforms out there, it’s a pretty constant trickle.
What you want to consider are the sizes of the images, the length and content of your excerpts, and the length and content of your titles. There are other aspects to consider, but basically you should put some real though into making people want to click on whatever stub you’re showing them.
Keeping track of those details is a huge headache, but luckily there are sites dedicated to doing just that.
Observe Some Simple Best Practices
There are a few more miscellaneous things you can do to really maximize your return on investment right at the start, simply by avoiding missteps.
Don’t include content which will anger people unless that’s what you’re going for.
Making people angry is actually a great way to make money, judging by the number of big sites which seem to specialize in it. That said, don’t do it accidentally. What a mess that is. Just think before you post.
Don’t get too fancy
Bells, whistles, buttons, video intros, etc. There is always a new next big thing, and it’s okay to indulge now and then, but you should, especially right at the start, be focusing on strong fundamentals. You look better sinking one from the free throw line than barely missing ten from the half court.
Don’t mislead
Honesty, honesty, honesty. If people don’t trust your brand, you are sunk. You’ll be shopping for office space on the lower deck of the Titanic. So don’t be sketchy. Even if it pays off immediately, it will hurt you in the long haul.
Don’t Spam
People are trusting you with their time, their contact info, and their attention. Don’t abuse it, simple as that. Treat their time as your own. If you’re good about it almost all the time, most people will forgive you when you slip up.
Project Professionalism
This is sort of an extension of everything above. Perception is important. If you want to look like a business authority, maybe use an “about me” photo featuring yourself in a type of suit that doesn’t begin with any of the following words: swim, jump, gimp, or birthday.
An exception would be the word “space”. If you’re an astronaut, play that up.
Have a Post Bank Saved Up Prior to Launch
Start Your Organic Rise
Okay, let’s touch on the organic search results, because you should start building your domain authority right at the start. We’ve already mentioned how to position yourself to squeeze out lackluster competitors, but there are a few more things to consider.
Ensure your content is at or above the quality of top competitors in your niche.
I won’t go into this too deep, because everyone who’s even sort of an expert in internet marketing and SEO has already written an entire post on it, but the best way to rise in your niche rankings is to find searches where the top result is mediocre or worst, and answer the same question better.
Write several articles on topics related to your niche.
You want to have several articles, perhaps half a dozen, populating your site right at the word go. This way, anyone who arrives has few things to read or share—and, better yet, link back to. But take your time with writing. To write something truly insightful and useful is a lot of work. Quality over quantity.
Establish (and Keep) a Schedule.
One of the biggest predictors of whether or not a site will grow is whether or not someone keeps creating new content on a schedule. Now, this probably isn’t a perfect correlation, because the people who are busy creating content are also the people who are going to be working hard at all the other aspects of making a site fly.
Advertising
How much depends on your budget, but let’s be honest here, advertising is still an amazing way to bring people in, and expand your reach. Services like Outbrain are specialized for content.
Always Be Learning
Creating great content that gets shared and has great SEO is tough. It requires a lot of learning and practice. Don’t expect to know it all from the start. Begin with reading Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Read it and live it.
It’s also worth reading up on Bing’s guide to building quality content and even Wikipedia’s guide to writing.
Additionally, spend time learning why other sites rank well and are well-respected. What do the New York Times, The Atlantic, and even Pitchfork have that gets them the respect, authority, and traffic? Know what makes good content and what makes bad content.
Conclusion
This is all a lot of work, I know. Running a site is a lot of work.
Momentum takes awhile to accrue—that’s both the pleasure and the pain of it, but, generally speaking, if you follow these guidelines, you’ll have tilted the ground in your favor. All you have to do now is push as hard as you can, as long as you can, to take advantage of the friendly terrain. There’s no road to easy success, because, if the road is easy, you’re going to get lapped by all the people giving it their all.
What advice do you have to help people put eyes on their content from day one?
About the Author: Anja Skrba has been blogging for over five years. You can find her at FirstSiteGuide.com whereshe shares tips on blogging basics and trends.
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They’re Geeky and They’re Kooky: The Vidyard Family
Duh-nuh-nuh-nah. *Snap-snap*
At Vidyard, our team is really important to us. Some might even call us a family. We’re all a little kooky, but hey that’s what makes us great. Sometimes we can get a little grizzly, but it’s only because we’re so busy!
Neat.
I’m not making any sense, am I? Just watch the video, you’ll see what I mean. *Snap-Snap*
Sing along with these lyrics!
They’re awesome and they’re geeky,
Creative but not cliquey,
They’re altogether cheeky
The Vidyard Family.
Their office has been busy,
That’s why they look so grizzly,
With hair a little frizzy,
The Vidyard Family.
Neat.
Tweet.
Elite.
Their business has been booming,
With products for consuming,
They really are a-zooming,
The Vidyard Family.
From all these ghouls and witches,
And yes, us Vidyard …,
Oops, sorry for those glitches,
Enjoy your Halloween!
—
Want to add some extra spooky to your day? Check out last year’s Halloween video here.
Happy Halloween from the entire Vidyard Family!
The post They’re Geeky and They’re Kooky: The Vidyard Family appeared first on Vidyard.
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Wednesday 28 October 2015
How to Get More Customers in Your Sales Funnel with Engaging Lead Generation
In business and in marketing – it’s all about the leads. But today, with so many choices, options and research available, getting the average visitor to take action is a lot more challenging than it used to be.
The core concept of the sales funnel itself hasn’t changed much: you’ll always get more interested prospects at the top than at the bottom. But how you engage with those prospects at every step of the funnel has changed dramatically. Let’s take a closer look at how you can not only entice more users to take the first step, but also brainstorm new and innovative ideas to keep them interested as they make their way through to becoming loyal brand advocates.
The Big Top-of-Funnel Mistake that Nearly Everyone is Making
By far the biggest problem I see marketers and companies of every size and scope making with regards to filling the top of their funnel is this:
Mentioning your product.
“But Sherice!” I can hear you saying, “They need to be aware of the product before they can take action!”
I understand your concern – but let’s look at this from the customer’s perspective. Say I’m looking to invest in a system that provides scalable, cloud-based hosting for my website. Much to the impulsive marketer’s dismay, at this point in the funnel, I don’t want to download a white paper about “How XYZ Company Delivers Scalable Cloud Hosting Solutions”, yet that’s exactly the kind of thing that’s thrown at me from every website.
Educate at the Top of the Funnel First
Take a step back and look at ways to educate, rather than persuade the customer. At this point in the funnel, they’re not looking seriously at solutions. They’re involved in the discovery process – learning what’s out there and what options they have available. You need to prove you’re even worth listening to by illustrating your expertise in a way that’s helpful and knowledgeable, not pushy.
This means filling the top of the funnel with bite-sized, visually scan-able tidbits of content in the medium and format your users prefer. And don’t just wait for the prospect to be the first to act – make sure that your content is hosted anywhere they might go as part of their research and discovery track, whether that’s video, infographics, podcasts or slide shows. They shouldn’t have to go to your site in order to learn more.
Here again, the information you send them shouldn’t be talking about your company directly at all, but rather acting as a guide to help them solve whatever issue or question they have. Going back to my previous example about cloud-based hosting, I may want to know about things like:
- Which apps/services are supported?
- What type of platform is best for my needs?
- What are SaaS, IaaS and PaaS?
- How close is the server to my location?
- What options do I have for databases and storage?
- How much of the server can I control or access myself?
And so on. Even at this “Awareness/Interest stage of the funnel, it’s best to educate and guide rather than push for a sale. Once the interest is piqued, the question then becomes, how can you carry over more of your prospects to the next level of the funnel?
In short, how do you tie this education and guidance to your brand without pushing the consumer away?
Going from Prospect to Purchase
This is the point at which many marketers jump ravenously on the sale, but too often, the pressure is too much, too soon. Remember, they’re considering your offer among many likely competitors so how you differentiate yourself (in a way that’s meaningful to the consumer) is what’s going to warrant them giving you even more serious consideration.
This is where you put your email marketing muscle into action – reach out and learn what your prospect’s biggest concerns are. What do they specifically have questions about? Then set your content and marketing teams about forging relevant, personalized drip campaigns that answer those questions in such a way as to position your product heads and shoulders above the rest.
Common techniques that work best at this time are things like feature lists, comparison charts and pricing breakdowns. Once the consumer sees exactly what they’ll get, what it costs and what it includes, it’s time for the sales team to make their move and reach out to the customer to start planting those “loyalty seeds”.
Things like a free, one-on-one demonstration of the product, a fully featured trial account and tutorials can go a long way in showing the customer that you’ve got their best interests at heart. If you’ve got new features lined up for release, invite them to be one of the first to see how these new updates will benefit their business and how to use them effectively!
Follow Up After the Sale
After the sale may feel like the time to celebrate – but resting on your laurels at this point just makes it easier for competitors to swoop in and convince your newly hard-earned customer that your product or service isn’t the best choice for them. This is why every customer should be looked at more as an ally rather than another notch on your sales belt.
Always be looking for ways where you can create the kind of experience that the customer just can’t help but talk about. It sounds cliché to talk about delivering a phenomenal customer experience, but doing so at every stage of the process – from the website to the technical support to the newsletter and every outreach avenue and touch-point in between is what creates unbreakable loyalty.
Here, things like reward/referral programs, loyalty exclusives, how-to newsletters, social media coupons and other incentives can solidify that loyalty. Don’t just throw sale after sale notification at them – make them an integral part of your brand, and your brand a part of their lifestyle. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling shoes or scalable hosting.
Always be looking for ways to add value – not what you think is valuable, but what the customer finds valuable. Every marketing initiative at each stage in the funnel should continually ask “what can we do to make this even better?”
By asking the right kinds of questions at the right points throughout the sale funnel process, you’ll not only win over more prospects, but you’ll be creating an iron-clad foundation of loyalty and communication that people (even your competition!) can’t help but admire and try to duplicate. Always look for ways to refine your funnel at any point where you find “leaks”. Seek out disconnects where the message doesn’t match the intent or where the content isn’t meeting the reader’s needs. An engaging sales funnel isn’t made of stone: it’s a fluid, ever-changing and adapting product that demonstrates precisely how you put customers first.
Have you created some unique, engaging or compelling content for your sales funnel that customers just can’t stop talking about? Tell us more about it in the comments below!
About the Author: Sherice Jacob helps business owners improve website design and increase conversion rates through compelling copywriting, user-friendly design and smart analytics analysis. Learn more at iElectrify.com and download your free web copy tune-up and conversion checklist today!
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