Building Blog or Website Traffic With Persistence but Little Cash
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Webinar presentation on building blog or website traffic with free or very low cost PR & social media tools. Based on a case study of a blog that reached the 100,000 reader milestone in just 12 weeks.
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Building Blog or Website Traffic With Persistence but Little Cash
- 1. Master Techniques Webinar: Building Blog or Website Traffic With Persistence but Little Cash A webinar from MyPRGenie, Distribion, Inc. & The Distributed Marketing Blog – Nov. 15, 2011 Presenter: Deb McAlister-Holland Director of Marketing, Distribion, Inc.
- 2. Distribion’s Deb McAlister-Holland • Director of Marketing, Distribion • The Distributed Marketing Blog • Marketing Where Technology Intersects Life • 26 years technology product marketing experience. • Two marketing books due out in 2011, 2012: • Slimed Online: How to get your online reputation back in spite of Google • The Customer Never Sleeps
- 3. Building traffic with limited staff, budget • Find your niche • Pick your keywords • Schedule & plan • Market consistently • Social media • PR • SEO/SEM • Email • Fresh content • Link to other channels
- 4. Goals for The Distributed Marketing Blog • Initial goals, April 2011: • Google page 1 ranking, four keywords, by end of Q3 • Readership of approximately 500 per post by Dec. 31 • Consistent traffic from blog to targeted landing pages (events, white papers and content, social media) • Four spin-off opportunities from blog each quarter • Speaking engagements • By-lined articles • Pick-ups in other media
- 5. Goals for The Distributed Marketing Blog • Initial goals, April 2011: Google page 1 ranking, four keywords, by end of Q3 Readership of approximately 500 per post by Dec. 31 Consistent traffic from blog to targeted landing pages Four spin-off opportunities per quarter Speaking engagements: 7 By-lined articles: 13 Pick-ups in other media: 982 • Social media engagement. # Twitter followers, Nov. 14: 268 Average # of clicks per tweet: 114 Highest # of clicks per tweet: 3,558
- 6. How do you get 3,558 Tweets with 268 followers? • Write captivating, interesting Tweets • Tweet when the target audience is online • Use the right hashtags (#) • Ask for retweets – and retweet yourself • Tweet early & often • A tweet will get half the clicks it will ever get in 24 hours • Keep momentum going by promoting “old” content even as new content is added
- 7. MyPRGenie: Testing the idea With release No release 3000 Readership per blog post; 3X per week 2500 publishing schedule. Social media & email campaigns were 2000 identical for the blog posts with and without MyPRGenie. 1500 1000 500 0 April May June
- 8. PR Impact • Traffic from MyPRGenie • Direct traffic, 8 months: 11,750 • Stays on the site 3X longer than other traffic: 12:51 • Much lower bounce rate: 28.39% • Averages: 3 posts / pages per visit • Good mix of new & returning visitors: 60% new, 40% repeat • Doesn’t include media coverage that drives traffic • CNet: 50,000+ • Fortune: 30,000+ • Forbes: 100,000+ • Fox: 30,000+ • PC World: 100,000+ • Wall Street Journal: 100,000+ • ZDNet: 40,000+
- 9. 1st “Viral” Post • Who Owns Your LinkedIn Profile? (Hint: It Might Not Be You): June 10 – our 33rd Blog post • We weren’t prepared – it wasn’t planned • 117,000 visitors in 24 hours – 177,000 in a week
- 10. Controlling A Will Email 9 Hula Hoop Survive Social To-Do List Media? Please Don’t Compliance Feed the Trolls Lessons from Led Zeppelin What Employers How to Become Want in Social a Marketing Media Hiring Legend
- 11. Risky Business The Hashtag Or Manageable that Bit Risk? Entenmann’s Connecting the How Many Dots for Times Do I Marketing ROI Have to Tell You? 5 Facebook How Engaged Faux Pas to Are Your Avoid Customers?
- 12. $12 Agent-X.com.au Free
- 13. $12
- 14. Top Posts (And Why) Title 1st Main Sources Week Traffic Who Owns Your LinkedIn Profile? 117,000 PC World, BNet, CNET feature Happy 40th Birthday, Email! 102,000 Bild, ZDNet Asia, CNN Who Owns Your LinkedIn Contacts? 84,970 Forbes.com 2012 Budget Survey Results 55,700 Twitter, 673 blogs Basic Google+ Cheat Sheet 53,200 ZDNet, Computerworld, All Things Digital 4 Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead 35,200 Twitter, Scoop, Paper.li 4 Avoidable Marketing Metrics Mistakes 35,000 SEOMoz, CMO.com
- 15. Timing marketing for best results
- 16. Current thinking: Timing B2C messages
- 17. Current thinking: Timing B2B messages
- 18. Thanks for joining us! www.distributedmarketing.org www.distribion.com editor@distributedmarketing.org
Notas do Editor
- Distribion is a leading provider of multi-channel marketing solutions for distributed marketing organizations in regulated industries (insurance, financial services, healthcare, hospitality, pharmaceutical, franchise). www.distribion.com The Distributed Marketing Blog is an educational blog for corporate marketers. It focuses on tips, techniques, news, and information for marketers in complex distributed multi-channel marketing organizations, especially those in regulated industries. www.distributedmarketing.org We’re a small company that sells products and services to very large companies. So we have to be a kind of puffer-fish marketing organization that looks bigger than we are. Deb McAlister-Holland is a leading technology-industry marketer, author, and self-described marketing geek. She’s been involved in technology hardware and software marketing for more than 25 years, and has had email marketing and online advertising campaigns running every day for more than 20 years. Deb can be reached via email at debh@distribion.com, phone at 214-206-3468, or Twitter @debmcalister.
- Technorati says that just 8% of the blogs on the web are corporate blogs. That’s a real shame, because blogs represent one of the best channels for corporate marketers like me who need to build SEO, leadership, and awareness with limited spending.I work off an editorial calendar that includes working titles, keywords, and marketing objectives. (That is, what we will cover in the webinar.) The editorial calendar is absolutely essential for me – if I blogged when I have time, I suspect posts would happen once or twice a year instead of 3X per week.I went to a Hubspot webinar once where they talked about “raisin bran” blogs. Have you heard that term? It’s a blog with “two scoops of keywords” and a tasty flavor that doesn’t get old even if you eat it every day. I like that. I’m not going to claim that I manage that with my blog – I admit that sometimes I get busy, or I don’t take the time I really need to do it right. But that’s the goal.On the promotions side, we have a small marketing team – two full-time, one part-time person for: product marketing, trade shows, webinars, social media, PR, advertising, SEO, PPC, web, and sales support. We also have a small budget – when we started the blog, I knew I couldn’t hire a PR firm or SEO expert to get it going. I put in a budget request for a media database I’d subscribed to in the past, and the chairman of our board said, “Why don’t you try MyPRGenie instead? They’re less expensive, and if you don’t like them after three months, come back with that budget request.” Did you ever get one of THOSE suggestions from your boss? How often were they good suggestions? So the first time I contacted Miranda Tan at MyPRGenie, I wasn’t exactly excited about the idea.
- If you have Google Analytics enabled, be sure to put your goals – especially page rank, traffic, and link goals – into your GA set-up page. Doing so makes the analytics you get back much more useful.If you’re using Blogspot or WordPress, and don’t have access to Google Analytics, you may need to install a plug-in like Jetpack or Clicky to get meaningful numbers.
- These were my goals – yours may be different. But you definitely need goals, even if the goal is to lower your blood pressure by giving you a place to vent your creative spirit so it doesn’t stay bottled up inside. You also need consistency. Blogging is a marathon, not a sprint. So is PR, marketing, and social media. You build your reputation and your audience over time. Having content “go viral” is nice – but it isn’t going to matter if you don’t have the supporting marketing infrastructure to do something with all that traffic.
- Additional information on increasing retweets by third parties is available in the Distributed Marketing Blog article titled: Baiting Your Hook for Retweets . http://distributedmarketing.org/2011/11/21/baiting-your-hook-for-retweets/Additional details on Twitter timing and scheduling is in this presentation, on slides and notes pages 16-18.
- When something is new to me, I always test it. And even when I’ve picked a marketing communications channel, I try to use A/B testing as often as possible. For MyPRGenie, we started with the idea of a simple 50/50 test – half the time we added a new post, we did a short press release on MyPRGenie, and half the time we didn’t. In the beginning, I wasn’t very smart about how I used MyPRGenie. I’d just post the release and forget it. No photos, no real work on the headlines or the copy – I literally just threw it out there. And, guess what? It worked. The first two months we had the blog, we consistently got twice as many visitors on the first day we posted a new blog post with a release on MyPRGenie as we did on the days when put up a new post without a release. So, towards the end of the second month, I decided to get serious. I started adding photos, and tweaking the headlines -- and I started using the social media sharing options that I’d been ignoring up until then. You can see the results for yourself. The third month, both our aided and unaided traffic was where we had hoped it would be after a year. And on June 10, one of the releases we posted on MyPRGenie “went viral” – getting over 117,000 page views. I pulled that post out of the total for the month of June, by the way, in order to give you an unbiased view of our results.
- Note: Remove this slide before making the deck available for download.
- We launched our blog into a crowded market – and we put it onto its own domain – www.distributedmarketing.org. – rather than putting it directly onto our website. Why? SEO In-bound links to our resources and collateral Thought leadership for our executives Cost-effective – more brains than budgetWhen I write the blog, I start with the headline and the image. Then I write the first paragraph. I write four things for every blog post:The post itself.The BlogGenie or MyPRGenie press release.A series of 5-7 “tweets”.An abstract to use on sites like StumbleUpon to help me drive traffic back to the blog.I’d like to do more with each blog post – guest blogs, cross-posting, by-lined articles, video & audio streams. But I only do that with about one in 10 posts now just because of the limited time I have to work with.
- The most common question I get from other bloggers or even from casual friends is, “Where do you get your photographs and cartoons?” Let’s start with where I DON’T get them. I don’t get them from other blogs, Google searches, or anywhere that can get me into copyright litigation. I write a lot about copyright law in my books and personal blog, so it’s important that I take care because I have a target painted on my back. Six places account for the bulk of the art I use.Photographs I take myself, or photographs that friends give me written permission to use. A digital camera and some creativity will take you a long way – people love photos of children, dogs, and unusual landscapes, and they lend themselves to a lot of different posts. You do need model releases unless the person shown is a public figure. My son, Geoff McAlister, a professional stunt man is a frequent “guest” on my blog and in my collateral. So is my dog – several of my grandchildren have also appeared on my blogs.Photographs or illustrations that are available under a Creative Commons License through Flickr, Morgue File or other legal photo sharing sites. Flickr tip: Always use the “Advanced Search” feature and check the Commercial Use, Creative Commons boxes. ALWAYS include a photo credit.Free cartoons available under from sites like cartoonaday.com, sangrea.net, or Flickr. Geek and Poke has great cartoons for technology bloggers.Cartoons and photos I purchase or license – I have a very small budget for photos and art, so less than 10% of the items I publish were purchased. Cartoonstock, iStock, Getty – you name it, I’ve probably bought something there at some time or another. Graphics I create myself – charts, graphs, icons from our marketing collateral, clip-art. I don’t own a copy of any graphics program – I use PowerPoint or Excel, drop the chart into Paint, and save it out as a vector file I can scale for the blog. Fast, easy, eye-catching, and FREE. PR photos provided by other marketers.
- We launched our blog into a crowded market – and we put it onto its own domain – www.distributedmarketing.org. – rather than putting it directly onto our website. Why? SEO In-bound links to our resources and collateral Thought leadership for our executives Cost-effective – more brains than budgetWhen I write the blog, I start with the headline and the image. Then I write the first paragraph. I write four things for every blog post:The post itself.The BlogGenie or MyPRGenie press release.A series of 5-7 “tweets”.An abstract to use on sites like StumbleUpon to help me drive traffic back to the blog.I’d like to do more with each blog post – guest blogs, cross-posting, by-lined articles, video & audio streams. But I only do that with about one in 10 posts now just because of the limited time I have to work with.
- The most common question I get from other bloggers or even from casual friends is, “Where do you get your photographs and cartoons?” Let’s start with where I DON’T get them. I don’t get them from other blogs, Google searches, or anywhere that can get me into copyright litigation. I write a lot about copyright law in my books and personal blog, so it’s important that I take care because I have a target painted on my back. Six places account for the bulk of the art I use.Photographs I take myself, or photographs that friends give me written permission to use. A digital camera and some creativity will take you a long way – people love photos of children, dogs, and unusual landscapes, and they lend themselves to a lot of different posts. You do need model releases unless the person shown is a public figure. My son, Geoff McAlister, a professional stunt man is a frequent “guest” on my blog and in my collateral. So is my dog – several of my grandchildren have also appeared on my blogs.Photographs or illustrations that are available under a Creative Commons License through Flickr, Morgue File or other legal photo sharing sites. Flickr tip: Always use the “Advanced Search” feature and check the Commercial Use, Creative Commons boxes. ALWAYS include a photo credit.Free cartoons available under from sites like cartoonaday.com, sangrea.net, or Flickr. Geek and Poke has great cartoons for technology bloggers.Cartoons and photos I purchase or license – I have a very small budget for photos and art, so less than 10% of the items I publish were purchased. Cartoonstock, iStock, Getty – you name it, I’ve probably bought something there at some time or another. Graphics I create myself – charts, graphs, icons from our marketing collateral, clip-art. I don’t own a copy of any graphics program – I use PowerPoint or Excel, drop the chart into Paint, and save it out as a vector file I can scale for the blog. Fast, easy, eye-catching, and FREE. PR photos provided by other marketers.
- Over time, some other posts have rivaled these in terms of traffic. And all of these continue to get traffic every single week since they were originally posted. If you don’t already have the option of putting your own banner ads on your blog or website to promote your content, events, or products, you might want to consider it. We didn’t do that at first – and it was a mistake. We were, frankly, caught by surprise when the first piece took off. But not anymore.
- Journalists get an average of 300 “pitch emails” per day. Your headline / subject line has to grab their attention in <10 seconds. Remember: The average half-life of a link on Facebook is 3.25 hours; on Twitter, barely 3 hours. On YouTube, it’s 7.4 hours. That means that a link will get half of the clicks it’s going to get in during its “half-life”. Source: Bit.ly analyzed more than 1.5 million links.The average half-life of a hashtag is 24 hours – less if it’s a “trending” topic. If you worry about offending your Twitter followers with promotional content, then start a new Twitter feed for your blog – that’s what we did. Our @distmarketing Twitter account is used solely to promote content on the blog, and we do it with a minimum of 6 posts on each blog post, then we rotate older tweets through the feed with appropriate hashtags to drive traffic to older posts. This means that you have to retweet, re-pitch, and repurpose your content to get the most out of it. We don’t always do as much as we can. The smart people over at HubSpot point out that one great idea can become:Blog postPress releaseBy-lined article(s)Interview subjectGuest postWhite paper or downloadWebinarPodcastEmailSocial mediaV-logVideo
- Your results may vary from mine. And mine vary from day to day, and topic to topic. So don’t take my word for these times – test them, and use the times that work best for you. I use a tool called Buffer (www.bufferapp.com) to schedule my Tweets. It adjusts the timing for my scheduled tweets based on when the majority of my followers are online or logged in. When it comes to MyPRGenie, the difference between scheduling the release to go out early in the day and later in the day is the most dramatic. It’s something like 5:1 on the open rate.
- Timing is similar – but not exactly the same – when we compare B2C messages to B2B messages. These tables summarize a tremendous amount of data on things like click throughs, comments, “likes”, retweets and reposts, and so on. It would take HOURS to go through it all, so remember that these are GENERAL stats drawn from many sources. Use them as “rules of thumb” and test, test, test. Don’t be afraid to retweet and resend at different times.If you have to pick a single time of day to tweet, it would be 9:00 am PST (Pacific Standard Time). Why? Because you are hitting three major break times,1. People arriving at work on the West Coast of America and Canada, ie Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, etc2. It coincides with lunchtime (12:00 pm EST) on the East Coast3. It coincides with the end of the business day in London (5:00 pm GMT)Sources – the tables were compiled based on multiple sources; no single source accounted for any of the channels listed above. Primary research sources included: Distribion review of its email platform, and a July 2001 survey conducted for our blog. Slimed Online: How to Get Your Reputation Back In Spite of Google, by David Coursey and Deb McAlister-Holland. (Facebook, LinkedIn data).Dan Zarella, The Science of Social Media, Hubspot Webinar (Email, partial Twitter data)Fast Company (August 22, 2011) , “single best time to tweet”.IDC Research, Google+ data.