Web Design & Marketing – Web Advice & Tips | TWMG Blog

LinkedIn is  often overlooked by people when talking about generating traffic from social media.  Traffic-generated social media are dominated by Facebook, Twitter or Google +. In many forums, LinkedIn doesn’t even get a look in. Even if you scroll down through the main Social Media folders, you could hardly find LinkedIn.  There appears to be a common misconception that LinkedIn is just a glorified resume or CV site, this could not be further from the truth.

LinkedIn: The Statistics

Before exploring into how to fully utilise this fantastic resource, let’s have a look at some of the statistics, so you can realise just what a potent force LinkedIn, can and will play, in traffic generation.

• LinkedIn has more than doubled in size (OVER 160 million members) in the past year!
• One new user is added every single second!
• 160 Million Active Business users waiting to be contacted.

Pretty impressive eh? Especially when you consider that a large chunk of these users have their own business and are looking for new customers, new ideas, guidance.  That is potential traffic and business to your website.

Setting up and Utilising your LinkedIn Profile

Your profile is the first thing that anyone on LinkedIn will see.   So you need to make it count.

Firstly, upload a recent photograph of you. Make sure it’s a good one.  First impressions count, so pick the best picture.

Secondly, fill in as much of the information as you, a full profile is a good profile.  Doesn’t matter if you’re only just starting out and have changed businesses etc, honesty is the best policy.  Add your education, your previous work experience etc.

Now, when it comes to filling in your skills and expertise, this is when you have to make sure your clever.  You need to choose the words or skills that best suits the line of work you are in now.

If your business is based around social media marketing, make that as your skill, then expand on it a little.   If your business is based on baking cupcakes, then your skill set should be based around the skills and techniques used. The reason for this targeting, is when someone is searching within LinkedIn, just like in Google, it’s the skill sets that are being searched upon, so this is really important.  Don’t spread yourself too thin, you want to give the opinion you are an expert in your field.  Remember, this is the first line of sight.

Make sure you add your websites of blogs too, your entries will be shown in your timeline.

Getting Connected with LinkedIn

Now you’ve got your profile set up, you need to start building your connections.  The more connections you have, the more your updates will appear on other people’s home page, the more people will be able to view your profile.

If you have 2000 friends on Facebook, 5000 followers on Twitter but only 5 connections on LinkedIn, you are missing out on a massive amount of potential traffic.  Send a tweet to your followers asking them to connect, update your status on Facebook asking the same.

If you’re an active member of forums, look to try to add your friends there as contacts also.  It’s very important to get a good base of connections set up before you start joining the groups. Ask the people who know you to endorse you on certain skill sets.  This enhances your reputation massively, the more of these you can get the better.

When you do join the groups and start contributing, then those that you build conversations and relationships with, you can then connect with them as you go along.  The more you connect, the stronger you become, the more authoritative a figure you become.

How to use LinkedIn Groups to build authority and drive traffic

Once you’ve built your profile and established some connections, now it’s time to start looking into groups.   LinkedIn groups give you the opportunity to present yourself as an authoritative figure or leader in your specific market.   It enables you to put your skills in front of people who wouldn’t usually see them. What you do need to do is select the right groups.   As a free member, you can join up to 50 groups.  But don’t go joining any and every group you come across, you want to make sure that the group is of a decent size, and that it’s active.

Searching for the right LinkedIn Groups to join

In the top Right hand corner by the search bar, select Groups from the drop down box. Type in your keyword (in this case “social media”) and you will be returned with a total of groups matching this search, the group names, how many members it has, and how active it is.   It will also list the names of the connections you have if they are in the same groups.

This is vital information.   It’s so important that any group you decide to become a member of is active, but what’s more important are the underlying stats. Make sure whether a group is just active because a lot of people are post links / stories / articles, or is it a properly active group with lots of comments and discussions.   You don’t want to be joining a group where no one comments or reads your posts or articles. That’s no good to anybody.   You want the users of the group to be actively and readily engaged regularly. What you’re looking for is a higher number of comments per week than discussions started.

Managing LinkedIn Groups & Building your Reputation

When you’ve joined a group, you can’t just go in there and start dropping links to posts you’ve written.  That’s a definite “No, No”.   What I’d suggest is the following.

• Introduce yourself to the Group – Tell a bit about yourself, your background and what you’re looking for from the group.  It should trigger a few responses.  Make sure you respond to each.
• Browse through the posts, look to see who the key contributors are, find out who is the most active.
• Read what they are saying
• Comment on there posts, try to engage them, ask leading questions to get a response back.

What you are trying to do here is create a good first impression, if you do this right, then you will get noticed.   If you do this for a week or so across the 10 groups you’ve joined, you’ll soon have an impression of who the key people are in each group, and what the main type of posts that are getting the comments are.

Creating your first LinkedIn Discussion

Now is the time to start creating your own discussions.

Again, rather than just posting an a link to an article, try to engage once more, create a post that asks a question or look for an opinion between 2 sets of answers.

Make it to the point and relevant, but also interesting enough that you’ll get responses.  Once more, make sure you respond to each response, either thanking them, or doing a little more digging or challenging their view in the right manner.

You’ll soon create an authoritative presence within the group.

By this time, fellow group users will wanting to know a little more about you, they’ll probably look at your profile and pick up your blog posts from there.   It’s about this time that you’ll start to see the traffic coming into your site.

Posting your own articles on LinkedIn Groups

What you don’t want to do here is post the article to all 10 of your groups.   Be selective, see which groups best match your article, just 2 or 3 first of all, and post the article, along with some comments asking for thoughts, feedback etc.

By now, you should have developed enough of a reputation for others to take the time to read what you say.  Make a note of the traffic flow to your site from these 3 groups.   This is the first indicator of just how useful each group is in providing traffic.

If you get a few responses, again, make sure you respond in kind.  This is also the time to start increasing your connections, now you’ve engaged a few of the more active users, you can try to connect with them.

If successful, any update that appears on your timeline / wall, will now appear on theres.   If they are the major contributors, chances are they will have 500+ connections.  All 500 x (number of connections you have) will now see your article and links.

This is where you can start to see a real surge in your traffic.   

If you stick to these rules and continue to add a couple of groups at a time, following the same principles you’ll soon find yourself with strong following, people will then be looking to you as the authoritative figure and the circle continues.

Summing up LinkedIn

LinkedIn is such a powerful resource, should you utilise it in the right way, it can have a massive beneficial effect on your business. It is often overlooked in some circles when it comes to Social Media, but it really shouldn’t be. LinkedIn is the 2nd biggest Social Media Traffic provider, claiming a staggering 29%, which is more than Facebook, Twitter and Google+ together. Don’t make the mistake that so many do when they turn to Social Media, LinkedIn is a force to be reckoned with, and one that’s only going to get stronger.

It might sound crazy, but driving increased traffic to your website through SEO and paid search may be damaging your brand, rather than helping it. SEO and paid search efforts can be valuable ways to increase site traffic, but launching these efforts without first developing a solid business and marketing strategy is risky. If done incorrectly – without a winning strategy in place – SEO and paid search could actually threaten your marketing efforts and possibly erode your brand name. You also risk wasted time, money and effort – and may also alienate prospective customers.

But there’s a solution! By conducting the following five assessments of your business prior to launching an SEO or paid search campaign, you’ll build a bullet-proof business foundation while greatly increasing the chances that your SEO and paid search campaigns will thrive.

1. Branding Assessment

Before launching your SEO and paid search campaigns, determine whether your branding is truly effective. Many companies skip this step, but the right branding will serve as a solid foundation, generating greater results for your SEO and paid search efforts. If your brand is in good shape, you’ll drive more revenue for the same (or even less!) effort. That’s just smart business. Yet, companies often plow ahead full-force with SEO and paid search campaigns with brands that are taped together with rubber bands, silly putty and band-aids.

A B2B e-commerce company was eager to launch their first SEO campaign and had earmarked a large percentage of their marketing budget to the endeavor. Yet their online business had no identity, mission, personality, positioning or differentiation. In contrast, their competitors looked far more professional, reliable and credible. Regardless, this company insisted on moving forward with SEO, hoping to drive more traffic to their site.

This is a doomed plan. Even if the company increases traffic to their site, there’s no compelling reason for site visitors to trust them or purchase from them. The company’s poor brand image is apparent. Their time, funds and energy would be better spent on building a strong brand first, and then launching an SEO campaign. Otherwise, their revenue results will continue to lag far behind their traffic numbers indefinitely.

2. Audience Assessment

It’s critical to understand your audiences prior to launching SEO and paid search campaigns. Certain companies rush to create online campaigns without fully understanding their priority populations and crafting customized marketing messages targeted to defined personas.

An online apparel retailer believed that their audience included all mothers. Market research showed, however, that fashionable, upscale, metropolitan moms wouldn’t even consider shopping on their site, but budget-seeking moms would. By changing their approach – and messaging – accordingly, this company’s search campaigns performed more efficiently and increased revenue.

3. Analytics Assessment

Because SEO and paid search are so data-heavy, you’d think that all search marketers start with a major analytics analysis. However, all too often, they don’t, which is a problem. Analytics reveals important marketing insights, which can be key to a successful search campaign.

A national food brand was optimizing their website and launching a new paid search campaign. After reviewing their web analytics, it became clear that driving additional traffic to the site would actually create poor brand experiences. Their analytics revealed that their average site visitor came to the site only 1.1 times. There were hardly ANY repeat visitors. People clearly didn’t like what they saw on the site, so they never came back. Before driving more visitors to the site, the company needed a major site overhaul to help attract and retain their customers.

A B2B documentation company wanted to launch a new search campaign, hoping to drive additional traffic to the site. Their web analytics showed that their website had a conversion rate of 0.3%. That’s not a typo! It was truly that low. The source of the visit didn’t matter – the conversion rate was consistently dismal. Clearly, they needed to fix their website prior to focusing on SEO and paid search. After creating customized, redesigned landing pages, the company was able to increase both their conversion rate and revenue. Subsequently, their search campaigns generated much greater business results.

4. Business Model Assessment

Struggling companies often assume that their business models are working, but their marketing campaigns are underperforming. But what happens if the business model is weak and/or outdated?

Every industry can go through disruptive innovation. At one point, Smith Corona was the world’s leading typewriter company. Over time, they believed their marketing campaigns were failing them, but in reality, their business model had become outdated. Tweaking their marketing campaigns didn’t matter. They needed to blow up their business model, switching their focus from outdated typewriters to innovative computers. Amazon is an example of a company that disrupted the book industry in the 90s, introducing a revolutionary e-commerce model. They’re doing it again with the innovative, timely Kindle today.

Is your company focusing as much attention on your business model as your SEO and paid search campaigns? Tweaking a campaign can lead to improved marketing results, but to maximize your business performance, you need a current, competitive business model.

Sometimes, adjusting just one aspect of a business model prior to SEO or paid search can make a huge difference in your campaign results. A music studio wanted to grow its revenue. Instead of incrementally capturing more students to take music lessons under its existing pricing system, the company needed to overhaul its business model to perform more like a membership-based health club. Changing that one element of the model improved their financial performance dramatically. Consequently, their SEO and paid search resulted in an increased profit per student and the company grew in an accelerated manner.

5. Website Assessment

Assuming you’ve defined a solid brand, identified your audiences, gained insights from your analytics and created the optimal business model, the next step is conducting a website assessment.

If you’re driving traffic to a site that doesn’t satisfy visitors’ needs, it doesn’t matter how much traffic you generate. As more traffic visits the site, more people suffer through a poor user experience and associate that negative experience with your brand. Therefore, you need to first ensure that your site is fully satisfying your site visitors.

A B2B corporate gifts company wanted to launch an SEO campaign. Their business model centered on an audience-segmented approach, specializing in the education, healthcare and government sectors. Even though their business relied so heavily on segmentation as a competitive advantage, their website felt “cookie cutter” and didn’t spotlight their customized solutions. The company redesigned their website, focusing on different offerings for their core audience segments. Their subsequent SEO campaign increased traffic in line with their differentiation, producing better financial results.

Maximizing Results

If you hope to maximize business results through SEO and paid search, remember that these efforts do not work in a silo. Instead, they’re part of the overall business and marketing strategy, and without solid foundations, any SEO and paid search campaigns will fall short of its potential. Therefore, it’s critical to first build your brand, understand your audiences, measure their online behavior, build the right business model and launch the right website. Only then can you maximize your SEO and paid search results.

About the Author: Tom Shapiro is the founder & CEO of Digital Marketing NOW, a full-service digital marketing and design firm that offers strategy, web development, design, SEO, conversion optimization, social media, email marketing and more. Tom cuts through all the hype and develops clear, differentiated marketing strategies focused on real results for his clients. Throughout his career, Tom has worked with dozens of Fortune 500 companies including P&G, HP, IBM, Sears and Kraft Foods.

After nearly six months of waiting, word is out that Google has just pushed out new PageRank values.

This is the first update since January 2011 and the first since the now infamous Panda update clawed through a long list of sites. While many have questioned the value of PageRank in the past (some even very recently), the update might just provide site owners/webmasters/SEO’s an indication of just how Google currently perceives their site’s authority and standing.

Because of the rapidly evolving search landscape, WM believes this might just be one of the most important (meaningful) PR updates in a very long time. It is also interesting to note that the recent PageRank update closely follows Google’s release of a new Google Toolbar a few weeks ago.

The Time Has Come to Increase Your Time on Site

Most online marketers and website owners tend to measure the success of their online business by the amount of traffic they are able to generate (and, of course, revenue).

While increasing the number of unique visitors is most definitely important (and something that everyone should be concerned with), it is arguably only half the battle. Unique visitors and visits alone should not be the only means by which you are measuring success.

It is easy to understand that there is little in the way of benefit from attracting a visitor to your website that quickly clicks the back button and leaves. Often, website owners and online marketers spend more time thinking about how to attract people to a site and less on how to encourage those visitors to spend considerably more time on your website. Take heed – there is a a direct correlation between the amount of time spent on a website and its success. So how can you increase time on site (and profits)? Follow these three simple strategies.

- Design Smarter (and Write Longer) -

Of all the different site types, it is the content marketers that either have the best or the worst time-on-site averages. While one suggestion might be to simply write longer-form content, another option would be to take the longer-form content you have or will develop in the future and commit to splitting it into multiple sections. This is a common approach that has been used on sites like About.com and many newspaper sites for years. For example, a 1,000 word article could be split into four sections of 250 words each. Some content management systems have this functionality built in, so explore that feature if available to you. Another benefit of splitting content is that it gives publishers the ability to generate more advertising impressions – a big draw particularly for those selling on a CPM basis.

- Create More Relevant Jump Points for Content Showcasing -

Would you rather feature content that is timely or timeless? There are arguments for and against both, but those publishers that concentrate on identifying areas where they can showcase their best information are those that often have the highest time-on-site averages. These jump points are areas where publishers can profile/push the most popular pages, the most heavily commented upon content items or most linked-to items. There are, of course, many places to do this, including at the end of articles/posts, within sidebars, and within the content itself. There is actually some SEO benefit to creating links to this type of content on your site as the number and relevance of links to internal pages is (arguably) an important factor in search engine ranking.

- Introduce Supplemental Formats: Multimedia & Applications -

Many content publishers, to their own detriment, opt to stay with the content format most familiar to them – whatever that may be. Consumers, however, often have very different demands when it comes to their consumption preferences – offering just one only gives you one chance for one type of visitor. Start introducing supplemental formats and you’ll be surprised about the positive effect it has on time on site. For example, if you’ve got a long-form article, why not fire up the webcam and produce a short-form video about that article’s key points or takeaways. If you publish a list of events, why not introduce a calendar application which is a terrific way to increase the number of clicks on your site as well.

When it comes to increasing time on site, remember the following: your website visitors are willing to be engaged with your site (and spend more time on it), but content publishers absolutely must commit to repurposing content into new design formats, providing jump points wherever necessary to expose them to content that should be showcased, and they should introduce supplemental formats to satisfy the Web’s diverse content consumption needs and wants.

Make no mistake – increasing time on site is no easy task. Keep these three simple strategies in mind and you will not only see significant percentage increases in time on site, but revenue as well.

It is common for search marketers to become so consumed with Google that they often forget about another reliable traffic source in Bing. While Bing and Yahoo combine for roughly 25 percent of search traffic, perhaps that index warrants closer attention. Let’s look inside the Bing Webmaster Tools area and see if we can’t improve our chances of appearing in some competitive searches.

Verify Ownership of Site in Bing Webmaster Tools
A pretty straightforward process is required to claim a site in Bing Webmaster Tools. Bing provides two options to do so – via an XML file or by copying and pasting a meta tag. Once you have decided which option and completed that process, simply select the Verify file.

Wait for Bing to Crawl & Index
Once a site has been verified, data will start to show after a few days. Based on my experience, that actually takes between 12 and 72 hours for newly added sites.

Manage From the Dashboard
When Bing is able to show site status and the recent trends of a site’s activity within Bing, from the dashboard information on the pages crawled, the pages indexed and data on impressions and clicks will be available from the dashboard.

Check Out the The Crawl Tab
Bing’s Crawl Summary provides up to six months of crawl data enabling webmasters to identify any problems that were encountered during Bing’s crawl of the website submitted and verified.

This section of Bing Webmaster Tools also enables SEOs and webmasters the ability to indicate to Bing which query parameters can be ignored by the crawler. Preventing duplicate content from appearing, and directing that a page’s index value will not be split between several URL variations is certainly an SEO best practice and one that should definitely be used if your site uses query parameters.

Information provided by Bing also includes details about errors, redirects, malware and exclusions detection during the most recent crawl of the site. Much like Google Webmaster Central, SEOs and webmasters are able to add a sitemap and indicate to Bing how the site submitted and verified is structured. Should you have a large website (lots of pages), then submitting one or many sitemaps will help Bing find sites it was unable to locate.

Analyze the Bing Index
Once everything is successfully crawled and indexed, Bing provides users of the system the ability to see how the site is performing. Using the Index Explorer, users are able to see how many pages are within the index, filtering by HTTP codes, crawl date ranges, discovery ranges, what, if anything, was designated as malware, and what, if anything, was excluded by the robots.txt file.

Bing also provides the ability within Webmaster Tools to submit URLs that are not in the index (a day and month limit of 10 and 50, respectively, is currently in place. Users of the system can also block (and of course unblock) indexed URLs from appearing in the search results – the ability to block the URL and the cache, or just the cache, is also available and should also be noted. Finally, Bing offers up a way to track the inbound link counts to a site and for individual pages within the site.

Monitoring Traffic & Exposure at Bing
The Traffic summary option will be the most interesting to many. Once all the right pages are indexed and we have successfully removed all the barries to a successful crawl, we can start reviewing traffic data and analyzing search query performance. Two reports are available – the impressions and clicks report and the queries report, which should not indicate just the impressions and clicks per query, but the click-through rate, the average impression position and the average click position.

How does Bing Webmaster Tools compare to Google Webmaster Central? All in all, pretty well. While there is some room for improvement, for the amount of traffic that an average site can expect from Bing, setting up a site properly and correcting any problems Bing finds will increase the likelihood of receiving more exposure and activity within that index.

The time in which your website uploads is crucial not only for retaining your site visitors but also for improving your online website ranking. Each and every millisecond of loading time matters.

No matter how good your site is, people don’t have patience to wait even for minutes to see if your site is loading or not.

There are some really useful online Free tools for checking your website loading time that we have listed here. Besides telling you the loading time, some of these tools also gives you comparison facility to check your stats with your competitor and even tells what object (CSS, Flash, Heavy images, Frames, Javascript, Feeds etc to name a few) is stopping your website to load perfectly on desired time.

Pingdom Tools – Full page test

The Full Page Test loads a complete HTML page including all objects (images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes). It mimics the way a page is loaded in a web browser. The load time of all objects is shown visually with time bars.

More Information on Pingdom Tools – Full page test

OctaGate SiteTimer

OctaGate SiteTimer aims at web site developers that needs to get a birds eye view of their work.

More Information on OctaGate SiteTimer

Uptrends

The full page-test tool lets you test the load time and speed of a complete HTML page of your website, including all objects such as images, frames, CSS style sheets, Flash objects, RSS feeds and Javascript files.

More Information on Uptrends

Internet Supervision

Free Internet Web Server Monitoring Tool. Check how your site is getting loaded in different geographical areas.

More Information on Internet Supervision

Link Vendor

The website speedtester shows the duration of a given website. This value can be used for showing how long a website take to load and if it is better to optimize the website or change a (slow) ISP.

More Information on Link Vendor

Read More…