Category Archives: Social Media

My business goal for my newest travel blog

May 15, 2014 by 123outsource
Categories: Social Media | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

I like writing about outsourcing, but the audience just isn’t there. I am trying to write about general business concepts in an interest way, but the traffic just never grows beyond a certain limit. But, I started tweeting about travel topics, and got lots of new followers and great interactions right away. Maybe God is trying to tell me something. I love writing about business concepts, and I feel I shed light on important and interesting issues which others may enjoy reading about. I love writing Notary stories, and we get very healthy traffic on our notary blog. But, travel — that could reel in a huge audience if I play my cards right.

Everyone likes reading about travel, and everyone likes pretty travel pictures. I see no limit in the amount of traffic that could be generated. My notary blog has grown from 10,000 visitors per month a year ago to 18,000 per month recently. I’m not sure how much more growth is possible. But, a travel blog could get a million visitors a month or much more if it were fun to read.

I’m not a great writer, but I have a passion for travel, and make my writing quirky. Maybe the travel blog will become popular and maybe it could become huge. But, what is the overall monetation strategy here? If I have tons of traffic, I could sell programs to travel sites. A travel site could purchase a section in our blog that would be tapped into our regular flow of traffic. They could get links to their site, and lots of exposure for a monthly fee. I could sell them a few articles at some exorbitant price, and they would get lots of traffic in return. I’m not sure who would pay what for my service, but it could work. Or, I could just have my own travel site and promote hotels and travel destination while publishing lots of cool articles.

In real life, most of the travel sites are big players. I’m not sure they want to get involved with small players like me. But, you never know. Maybe someone of the medium players on their way up might want to play ball. The world of the internet is a mystery. You never know who will want to do business with you or when, and new players are entering the market place daily which adds a new dynamic to the mystery. It is like life in the cyber-jungle!

Components of a good blog

May 13, 2014 by 123outsource
Categories: Social Media | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

People think that blogging is just about writing great content. Nothing could be farther from the truth. It is about capturing an audience, and not about being a great writer — although being a great writer doesn’t hurt.

Picking a great title is something that is very valuable in blogging. I hired professional writers to work for me before. They wrote great content, but their titles didn’t really give any insight as to what their pieces were about. Additionally, their titles didn’t attract traffic. I had to go in and manually change the title so that it would be popular. The quality of their content was excellent. There were no spelling mistakes either. But, there is another area of expertise that these professionals lacked. They didn’t know how to pick topics that would consistently be popular with the readers, even though they wrote well.

Breakdown of a popular blog entry:
(1) Great Title (30%)
(2) Popular subject matter (30%)
(3) Great points of view examined (30%)
(4) Professional writing skills (10%)
(5) Writing great tweets from content within the blog entry (n/a, but important for promotion)
(6) Linking to other related content. (n/a, but helps get traffic to your other content)

I’m guessing here about the percentages. But, a professionally written piece with a lame title, an unpopular subject matter (which means unpopular with your audience regardless of how popular it is on another medium) and dull points of view regarding the topic, will be a blog article that doesn’t get much traffic.

My assistant is very knowledgeable about notary work. She is the queen of the industry and the entire community seeks her out for knowledge. She writes a few blogs for me from time to time when she has something inspiring to share. There are many technical and spelling errors, but her work is often popular because she writes about things people want to read, and makes some salient point.

To sum it up, if you want to do well in the blog industry, learn to be very refined in how you write your blog titles. You might even try different variations and check your stats to see which got more traffic. The science of title picking is fascinating. It is an art form that is endlessly complicated and will never leave you bored!

Social Media: The winning content happens by accident

May 12, 2014 by 123outsource
Categories: Social Media | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

I have read hundreds of articles about social media. The advice is very vague and looks more like a point by point and blow by blow guide to a big question mark. Yes, certain social media channels might work better with your audience than others, and yes you have to pay attention to which works better. But, it is about having winning content.

Sometimes you will write one thousand blog articles and a handful will just be popular. They might be your worst written articles, but people might just like them. And some articles might do well if tweeted on Twitter. Of five thousand tweets on Twitter, we have a lucky three that we found by trial (twial) and error (twerror) that worked like a miracle. The stuff that worked was not serious material at all and very poorly written. It was just ridiculous content we drummed up by reading facebook posts about industry specific goofy content. Funniest things that happen to signing agents is our all time hit. I write it a few years ago. It is a random assortment of rewritten Facebook commentary. It’s not even a real article. Honey, I notarized the kids is our other best seller. It has no valuable information and is just one big dumb joke — people love it.

So, my advice is, read less blogs about how to do well on social media, and EXPERIMENT, EXPERIMENT, EXPERIMENT. You won’t know what works until you find out by accident one night at 3am when you are going through your analytics reports!

Don’t let your blogs be blahg

May 8, 2014 by 123outsource
Categories: Social Media | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Don’t let your blogs be blahg.

Everybody’s screaming for attention on the internet. In this era of short attention spans, you only have a nanosecond to grab somebody. If you can’t sell yourself, who can? Make sure the stuff you have to say is worth saying, or else store it in your blahg. Never to be looked at by anyone but you.

I peruse the web regularly, and read other people’s blogs. It seems that they are in it to have quantity and to catch some SEO benefits. Many blogs will have little snipits about some news item. You will read that such and such a company bought out some other company or started a new office in a particular city. This is boring! Nobody will want to refer such a boring article to a friend.

Your blog articles need to have a point. They need to have pizzazz. They need to be about a topic your readers can relate to. They need to take facts and interpret them in a way that makes the reader say, “Wow!” Most blogs simply do not do this!

What I learned through experience is that you don’t need to be a good writer to be a good blog writer. You just need to be able to write about various topics within your industry theme, and make it interesting. If you study your stats, and learn what people liked and what they didn’t, you can figure out what to write about in the future based on what was popular in the past.

Success in blogging is about attracting visitors and keeping them coming back. You need to start off by being interesting and then keep them coming back with diverse articles that are always different and interesting. Good luck, and don’t be blah!

Imagine yourself managing multiple blogs

April 20, 2014 by 123outsource
Categories: Social Media | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Running and managing blogs is not easy. But, the challenge comes about when you are running multiple unrelated blogs. We have a Notary blog that does well. We get lots of new visitors for our Notary site from the blog. The blog helps with our SEO as well. We have established social media channels that help crank traffic into the blog. All is well. It was not easy to figure out what works, but we are experienced enough now to know what our readers like. It is about tuning into your audience.

But, the problem was more when we started a 2nd blog. The outsourcing blog. Yes, it is what you are reading now. The audience is different. Instead of being purely American, there are people from all of over the world reading this. They don’t communicate with us much, or give good comments either which makes it hard to know what to write about. We can only track what gets click on and how much. The social media channels for the outsourcing blog we run didn’t work well. We tried Twitter for years, Facebook, and Linked In. I would say that Linked In gave us the most serious browsers, but the quantity was lacking and the price tag in dollars and hours spent was hurtful.

What if you do blogs for a living and run multiple blogs with a small team of people helping you. You would need to understand multiple audiences and their behavior. You would need to understand how each social media network “behaved” with each of your blogs. You would need to find writers who could be flexible in what they wrote about and who could write about anything.

The key is to be an expert at generating traffic, and quality traffic. Good traffic can turn into big dollars. If you can write about topics that are well read like finance, travel, or sports, you could become rich doing blogging. All you need is a way to figure out how to get a million visitors a month, and your cash register will get you into a million dollar house!

Tweets:
(1) Running multiple unrelated blogs is not easy. The key is studying traffic patterns
(2) When you run a blog, it is not easy to learn what works. Google Analytics helps!

You might also like:

Google’s algorithm for blogs is harder now
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2014/01/10/googles-algorithm-for-blogs-is-harder-now/

Social media optimization: checking the effectiveness of each of your campaigns
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2013/12/20/social-media-optimization-checking-the-effectiveness-of-each-of-your-campaigns/

Twitter Stock — a good idea?

February 20, 2014 by 123outsource
Categories: Social Media | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

I love Twitter. I am a tweetaholic if there is such a thing. My new Twitter and social media manager’s name is Arielle. I joke that if your Facebook does well it goes viral, but if your Twitter account grows like crazy it goes Arielle! (Aerial). But, take a look at their stock. Twitter has been losing money, and yet their stock went from $41 to about $60 in the last few months since their stock went public. I’m not saying that you won’t make money with Twitter stock, but it is gambling when you purchase a stock that is losing money with the hopes that it will grow out of control and turn a profit.

I think it is likely that Twitter will continue to grow and perhaps make huge profits. But, social media is very unstable and new with very little track record. The social media landscape changes so quickly, it is hard to predict if the big guys will be able to adapt to market changes. The big question is whether or not Twitter can sell advertising to large companies. They are doing this now, but can they make it profitable in the long run? This is very unclear.

I think Twitter could make it big, but it could get into bad financial trouble too, and your stock has a high chance of becoming worthless as well. Buying stock in social media is a gamble in general. I think that oil companies are much more stable as an investment these days. Low p/e ratios, and very stable business models. Just close your eyes when you ponder what they are doing to the environment.

If I were a bird, I would like Twitter stock, but I’m a human who drives a gas powered cars. I’ll stick to oil stocks for now!

Tweets:
(1) I am a tweetaholic if there is such a thing, but should I buy Twitter stock?
(2) I think Twitter stock could make it big, but could get into financial trouble too.

You might also like:

Where is Warren Buffet investing his money?
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2014/02/21/where-is-warren-buffet-investing-his-money/

How to optimize your Twitter campaign
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2013/12/07/how-to-optimize-your-twitter-campaign/

Google+ is delivering already!

January 20, 2014 by 123outsource
Categories: SEO, Social Media | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

We talked to many people in the web business. Word on the street was that Google+ is good. What I have learned is that there is no such thing as a good or bad social media venue. What counts is if it is working for your particular campaign. I run several websites and Facebook works miracles for one, and was a dud for another. Hmmm.

On my Google analytics it shows up as plus.url.google.com / referral. I was excited because we finally started getting detectable clicks from our network of less than a dozen people. We just started Google+ only a month or so ago and put very little effort into it so far.

One of the clicks was from the city of Gwangmyeong-si. I’ll put it on my bucket list to go there one day. I have no idea where that is. Sounds like Nepal, Laos, or China. I bet they have good dumplings there regardless. Ooops… Just looked it up. It is in Korea — wrong again! Korean dumplings just don’t measure up to Chinese. It is the one thing that Koreans aren’t good at! We got another one of our clicks from Khulna which is in Bangladesh. Not only do I get optimization from Google+, but I also get a geography lesson!

The reality of the situation is that it takes a long time to grow a social media network. Some grow like weeds with very little maintenance. Others take endless maintenance only to grow at the speed of a snail. It will take a few years to grow our Google+ really large, but it is nice to know that it just began to sprout in fertile Asian soils! Experts say that Google+ is great for your optimization, and it makes sense. A click from within one of Google’s networks will get preferential treatment, and for good reason.

So, what do I think about having Google+? It’s a definite plus!

(1) So, what do I think about having Google+? It’s a definite plus!
(2) It takes a long time to grow a social media network. With Google+, it is growing with you!

You might also like:

Active vs. dormant followers on Twitter!
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2013/09/27/active-vs-dormant-followers-on-twitter/

Social media, the analytics are deceiving
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2013/05/27/social-media-the-analytics-are-deceiving/

Google’s Algorithm for Blogs is Harder Now

January 10, 2014 by 123outsource
Categories: SEO, Social Media | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

I wrote another article about how Google changed its algorithm regarding how blogs place in search results. Please keep in mind that this change happened in September 2013 and it was very pronounced. I do not do SEO for a living. I just noticed because I track my statistics for my notary blog and outsource blog regularly and train myself to notice things. The first relationship is between how good your blogs are and how you place on Google. The trick here is that a good article is not enough. You need to have incoming links and a way to get seen as well.

Blog tags are a wonderful invention, but are they all they are cut out to be? Using blog tags you can link up lots of blogs to each other in all types of ways based on keyword frequency. You choose tags based on whatever keyword you are trying to accentuate. The problem is that an incoming link is only given credit if several conditions are met:

(1) The link needs to come from a page with similar keywords. If you have tagged certain keywords, then we will assume you have the keyword relevancy. That is easy.

(2) The page that you link from needs to be indexed by Google. If a page gets low traffic, Google might not index it, which means you might get zero credit for an incoming link from that page. What I found is that Google will ignore a page which gets less than about 25-35 clicks per month. This problem wouldn’t affect a larger blog, but for small blogs getting less than 40,000 visits per month, your tags will only do you any good if they are for unusual keywords, or for particular entries which for some reason get lots of traffic. Newer posts that have been recently promoted might get a few hundred visits right away, but your older blog entries might get very little traffic even if your newer posts link to them. My outsource blog is tiny and my tags will not get me much play until I grow. A sad fact of life.

(3) If people actually click on a particular link, the value of the link becomes tremendously bigger. Very few people click on tags, but people would be more likely to click on a link in the body of an article, especially if it were dressed up in such a way that they would be encouraged to click on it. I often put suggested reading links at the bottom of articles and they get clicked on a fair amount, especially if they are highly relevant.

The value of a visit from Google
I noticed that despite how much harder it is to get blog traffic, for each additional click to my blog, I get many additional clicks to my site. Roughly 8 site visits per 1 blog visit. What an amazing correlation! I also learned that visits directly from Google give you much more reward in site visits. How does this work? I think that Google tracks how much traffic it gives you and then rewards you by giving your site higher placement as a result. It is a very helpful cycle, but you need skill to manage this relationship.

What is the solution?
Honestly, I am so overworked, that I make this mistake often — I do not put enough links on my posts until after the fact. Since blog entries on my blogs are generally only popular when they are initially promoted, putting the links on after the fact doesn’t help much. The solution is to pre-publish your blog articles and put as many quality outgoing links to other content as possible BEFORE you promote it. Put lots of good tags, and optimize the content so that you can put more tags as well. You can find creative ways to insert more of your essential keywords into the article to gain relevancy for your keywords.

Google is a wonderful tool. Try hard to master the art of blog promotion with Google. Facebook and Twitter have done miracles for me as well and should ideally be used to promote articles with good tags and outgoing links.

Tweets:
(1) #googleanalytics Google’s algorithm for blogs is harder now. It’s harder to get traffic period!

You might also like:

Social Media: The analytics are deceiving
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2013/05/27/social-media-the-analytics-are-deceiving/

The Google algorithm has some serious issues
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2013/08/04/the-google-algorithm-has-some-serous-issues/

Social Media Optimization: Checking the effectiveness of each of your campaigns

December 20, 2013 by 123outsource
Categories: Analytics, Social Media | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Social Media Optimization: Checking the effectiveness of each of your campaigns

It is a bit baffling these days with so many social media campaigns. Which ones should you use, and which ones do you understand? New ones come out every month too which adds to the complexity. Some are better for targeting younger folks, while Facebook is great for the 40-60 year old age segment. There are several analytics you need to understand when comparing social media venues.

(1) What is the cost of growing a particular campaign?
Do you spend three times the effort growing your Twitter campaign as your Facebook profile? Is your Stumbleupon or your Google+ a little faster to grow? Pay attention to how much effort goes into growing each type of campaign. On the other hand, if you really like a particular campaign, you will enjoy growing it which is another factor to consider.

(2) What types of results do you get after spending “x” amount of hours?
If you spend 100 hours on Twitter (did you count the hours?), how much gain did you get in your SEO? Can you measure that?

(3) What types of results did you get with $100 of pay-per-click on various mediums?
You can see how many clicks you got, and if there were any conversions that lead to traffic to your sales area in your site or actual purchases.

(4) How do you judge the quality of a click?
Not all clicks are created equal. Some lead to new followers, while others lead to sales. There are endless metrics you can use to compare click quality. If you are just starting out with a new network you can looks at: (a) How long each visitor spent on your site in seconds, (b) How many pages the average new visitor spent on your site. I learned that Facebook was better for one of my blogs while Twitter was better for another. So, there is no right answer. There are only answers that are right for specific situations. Also, consider which particular blog article you are promoting. Each different article will get different analytics, so get at least 40 clicks before you compare. Most new visitors will only skim your articles. Only a few will really read. The point here is to find out what percentage of your new followers will do some serious reading and clicking around.

(5) Sometimes the posts that did well on one network will do well on others
I noticed that some of the posts I had which did well on Google did well on Stumbleupon. We’ll see how that pans out in the long run. It is a little early to tell.

Good luck!

You might also like:

Active vs. dormant followers on Twitter
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2013/09/27/active-vs-dormant-followers-on-twitter/

The Google algorithm has some serious issues
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2013/08/04/the-google-algorithm-has-some-serous-issues/

Optimizing your Twitter PPC Campaign

December 10, 2013 by 123outsource
Categories: Of Interest, Social Media | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Optimizing your Twitter PPC Campaign

Many of us use Twitter, but how many of us use the pay-per-click program? It is a different animal. You have to be careful not to overspend, but also be careful about how your structure your adgroups. Twitter PPC has adgroups. You might put a bunch of different tweets in the same adgroup, or you could divide them. You can bid a different amount of cents for each adgroup. You can also bid for getting new followers. It is complicated.

My recommendations

(1) Keep separate adgroups for each tweet.
This might take more time. But, you need to see which tweets are getting clicked on, and at what price. If they are all bunched together, your google analytics will tell you which one is getting traffic — that is all you will know. If you raise the bid, then maybe the other ones will get traffic. It is complicated. If you keep your campaigns separate, then you can see the price breakdown for each tweet and see if it is worth it. You might get very cheap clicks on certain tweets which might do miracles for whatever those tweets link to. If a particular tweet doesn’t get many clicks, you can abandon promoting that particular tweet. My experience is that you should choose your tweets carefully before submitting them. Of the ones you think might do well, only 20% will actually do well. But, 20% is enough. As time goes on you can continue testing new tweets to see how they do.

(2) Paying for followers
It is hard to know what a follower is really worth. For each 1000-4000 followers, you might get a single click for each link you put in a tweet. That is not a good average. This is why you need huge volume to do well on Twitter. You also need really interesting content. Most Twitter followers are extremely dormant and are following so many people that they are not paying attention to any of them! You can start bidding low for followers and see how many you get. If you don’t get too many, then experiment bidding higher. Keep records of how you did at various levels. Stay at each price break for a week before going to the next level and keep very careful records with dates and times of price changes. Once you find your ideal price range that gives you good output without destroying your bank account, then stay there for a while.

A good PPC campaign on Twitter can give you a huge account in a year or two. Niche accounts might get 10,000 followers in that time while more general interest accounts could get a million. To get ahead in business, networking on Twitter is a powerful source of SEO power. The actual new visits to your site you get from Twitter is only the tip of the iceberg of what it is worth. The SEO value of having a big Twitter account tweeting links to critical pages on your site and blog is huge! Whether it is price effective or not is up to you to find out, but don’t underestimate the power of Twitter.

You might also like:

Active vs. Dormant followers on Twitter
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2013/09/27/active-vs-dormant-followers-on-twitter/

Types of tweets that win the game!
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2013/08/15/types-of-tweets-that-win-the-game/

How to optimize your Twitter campaign

December 7, 2013 by 123outsource
Categories: Of Interest, Social Media | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

How to optimize your Twitter campaign

Twitter is an interesting beast. It is hard to tame, and hard to harness. But, some people have figured out how to use it optimally and almost effortlessly with great results.

SEO benefits of Twitter
I have learned that the actual new traffic we get from Twitter is negligible. However, the SEO benefits we get on Google derived from our use of Twitter is unbelievably good. Twitter as a tool should be used to link to your important pages on your site and blog. My experience that a link to each important page every four months is perfect. You basically get points with Google every time you post a link on Twitter, and then get even more points each time the link gets clicked on by someone other than you (they know if it’s you). If your Twitter account is large, you get points for having a link from a larger account. Twitter is powerful in optimization, so don’t underestimate its strength.

How to grow your Twitter the easy way
Twitter requires daily care just like a plant, or a pet. You have to water a plant regularly, otherwise it withers. You have to feed your pet and scratch its back and talk to it, otherwise your pet gets lonely. Twitter is just like this! The secret is to use the suggested other Twitter accounts on the left, and follow a few of them every day. Pick the more interesting and relevant ones.

(1) Follow new accounts every day, but don’t go overboard or the Twitter gods get mad. If you like over 1000 people in the same day you will get into trouble.
(2) Find all of the new people who followed you and say, “Thanks for following”. This is important because it engages not only the person who followed you, but is visible to those who frequent that person’s account — and those people might follow you too after they see your icon.

(3) Make thoughtful, interesting, and unique comments on the tweets of people who you follow. Those comments are visible to anyone visiting their page, and those visitors will retweet you and follow you if you are intelligent enough. This is a skill that requires daily refinement, so start today!
(4) Study what types of tweets other people respond to, and make more of them. Learn to do “profiling” or “segmenting” of types of tweets. Avoid downers and give relevant information, shockers, and entertaining information in your tweets.

(5) Retweet others, but don’t retweet the same account more than once in two weeks unless it is 200% relevant to your material. The purpose of retweeting is that it is a great way to get your icon seen. Retweeting general news issues, or things of general interest is a good idea.

(6) Your tweets should be a mixture of industry specific, social media, and current events / news. This is what the professional marketing managers use as a mixture. The exact percentage of the mix might vary from account to account. By social media, we mean interesting commentary that one of your Facebook friends might have made on Facebook or Twitter, etc. Don’t tweet boring stuff, but people love a cool quote — this is what the experts do. I tried this approach and got results from it.

(7) Filter your tweets. I might write 200 tweets and pick the best 80 if you want to keep your fans happy. It is about quality if you want to get retweeted and followed.

(8) Pay-per-click is not for everyone, but that is a fast way to get followers. We get 500 new followers per month on our notary twitter and that is a very tiny niche market. It took us four years to get 3500 people, now we can get double that in around one year — now that is speed. PPC is time efficient. Instead of spending lots of time following others and commenting on their posts, PPC gets you 10x the results in 10% of the time! If you have more money than time, use PPC.

It takes time!
Expect to spend 15 minutes a day on Twitter. Don’t waste time on it. Go through steps 1-7 daily. It should become a fast routine. If you are bored, then you can read through your entire inbox for three hours and make responses to 100 tweets that other people wrote. If you spend 15 minutes a day, you can realistically expect to get about 60 new followers per month if your tweets are any good. In a little over a year, you might have 1000. If you want to have results faster than that, you need to either spend an hour a day on Twitter, or use the PPC program.

You might also like:

Optimizing your Twitter PPC campaign
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2013/12/10/optimizing-your-twitter-ppc-campaign/

Twitter Stock — a good idea?
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2014/02/20/twitter-stock-a-good-idea/