Traffic
Social Bookmarking |
I remember the old days when I’d have a set of fancy rectangular bookmarks (something I got for myself from ‘Barnes and Noble’) lying on my desk at all times. I’ve always found it natural to organize myself while I’m working or researching with simple yet effective techniques. I used to color code the bookmarks with tags like ‘to show to clients’,’ interesting event ideas’, or ‘vendor lists’ etc. Of course this was the “pre-web 2.0 era” - the era when we had to figure little productivity things out for ourselves. Come web 2.0 and I was perhaps one of the first few to adopt online bookmarks. This is not because I’m tech savvy, but simply because the concept of bookmarking is very natural to me. I do most of my research online, maintain my contacts online, I brainstorm online, I plan online and I even market my events online. What better way to manage my content than online bookmarks to organize the work.
Now this is where it gets interesting. The online world thrives on sharing and community-centric approaches. So, I can tag objects on my browser, cluster them up into categories, share them with other like-minded people or just open up the web feeds of the bookmark lists for public view. How does that benefit me as an event organizer? Well, I get to learn from other people, I get to rate and comment on other’s bookmarks, I get to collaborate to form richer information sets and, most importantly, I get to meet people interested in the same topics. That, to me, is invaluable for business since my business is all about networking and relationships. Shifting bookmarks from my home computer to the office computer; or from my laptop to my team’s computers has been as simple as exporting and emailing a single file.
Social bookmarking is like a subliminal election. People research candidates and if they like what they read, hear and watch - they vote for it. Candidates in local governments are voted for, leading to publicity from mainstream media depending on the number of votes. Like a vicious cycle, the more publicity they get the more people are drawn into reading, watching or listening to what they have to say. People tell their friends in the real world who they are voting for and why, based on the content they have consumed about a particular candidate.
It’s the same in bookmarking. Content pages are voted for whenever they are bookmarked, the more votes a page gets within specific word categories, the higher the page ranking. Higher rankings increase traffic, especially if it reaches the top page of search results. More traffic sometimes results in even more votes, thus forming an enviable snowball effect.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
Today’s tip! The first step to being super organized is to manage all of your passwords in you’re browser. Being able to share them across your team is a bonus.
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Social Networks |
Throughout my life, I have been studying and testing ways of how to effectively market events. I discovered soon enough that it all comes down to getting people excited about a thing and enabling them to build their own stories around it. It’s about building evangelists. Evangelists are people who are sold on your service so much that they go around marketing it for you, for free! I found out about the “American Idol 2006 concert” through a fan even before it was announced. I found out about the details of the “Macworld” through a fan. I found out about a local “Eastern fusion dance party” through a fan. So if these ‘fans’ are so good at marketing events to other people, imagine what they can do for your business.
Marketing events using social media tools is about creating the right campaigns that have the maximum impact. Social networking channels offer a lot of flexibility in crafting out our messages just the way we want them to be. You can measure the impact and reactions of your messages and adjust your campaigns accordingly as you go. Let’s briefly discuss how you can use one of the most popular social networking platforms these days. I’m sure most of you have heard about Facebook.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
Today’s tip! Twitter delivers Events Listed more traffic than Google search on any given day. Become immune to the Google slap by managing your Twitter campaign professionally.
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Joint Venture Partners & Affiliate Launches |
Promoting via JVs and affiliates helps increase outreach. Affiliates do marketing for you and bring you more visitors; this gives a boost to the income and makes everyone happy. It sounds simple enough but needs business savvy and effort on your part. Useful tips that we have employed.
a- It is essential that you maintain uninterrupted communication with your venture partners and affiliates. You have to build a relationship with them and win their trust. Your main focus while communicating with them should be to convey what is in it for them. Don’t make it all about you.
b- You have to motivate and influence them by keeping them updated about your progress and giving them fair warning in advance about your pre-launch and launch plans and timelines. This will give them enough time to plan their part of the promotions. We usually assist our JV partners and affiliates with swipe messages that they can use in their promotional campaigns. These swipe messages are prepared by content writers and can be slightly customized according to the conversation - they help in getting the message out…
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Traffic Through RSS Feeds |
Back in 2006, it was reported by Rok Hrastnik, owner of MarketingStudies.net that “RSS is currently used or is planned to be used within the next 12 months by 63% of consumer product marketers, 65% media and communications marketers, 37% retail marketers, 37% financial services marketers and 38% equipment and tech marketers.” This was two years ago and the trend has certainly not petered out.
In its simplest form, RSS allows content distributors to syndicate a web feed which allows users to subscribe to it. A web feed is a data format that provides updates on frequently changing web content. A number of web feeds can be made accessible in one place, like Friendfeed’s service. Blog readers and services like Friendfeed are a good examples of the useful implementation of RSS.
We’ve submitted our blogs to various aggregators in our industry - thus making the content available to relevant prospects in an on-demand or opt-in basis. Only those people searching for such content can get their hands on it, thus driving the right kind of traffic to the sites. Also, we have accounts and active followings on friendfeed - where we regularly send out links to our posts, twitter messages, bookmarked pages and so on…
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Traffic Through The Media |
Most of our traffic is coming in from social media sites. I dare say, we’ve learned how to master the ride of directing useful prospects using online tools without having to spend money on risky advertisements. We have videos up on youtube, we have blog posts going out in three different blogs. We have active participation based interactions on social networks like facebook, linkedin, twitter and more.
The thing that I want to stress is that all of this traffic is useless if it isn’t channelized properly. Its better to not have traffic at all rather than wasting the opportunity to covert curious onlookers into customers. Our sales funnel goes through multiple paths (tubes, if you like) all leading to our platform. During the journey through the paths, the prospects are introduced to a multitude of things (depending on the path type); such as surveys, blogs, email campaigns. We’ve put a considerable amount of time to make sure that our funnels are without leaks and are optimized as much as possible - we don’t intend to waste anyones time, just the way we wouldn’t want our time to be wasted.
If there is one thing I strongly believe in, its mutual benefit. Finding and offering value to all stakeholders - whether they are vendors, prospects, promoters, customers, staff, anyone…
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Traffic Through Press Releases |
Press releases - well-written ones - draw people from all spheres of life and serve as a common ground where all are welcome. A well-worded release needs to be based on a story which is the key element.
We build stories around the release, covering all the key areas that we want to highlight. We know that the key point while writing such a release is to remember that it should be story-based and not announcement-driven. Stories make them interesting, easy to remember and easier to repeat.
An important step is finding a catchy headline. Catchy here means memorable and appealing and not some flippant and frivolous one-liner that undermines your story. Our headlines are worded so they bring instant notice to an upcoming event.
We build our announcements into the story. Our stories are the vehicle for our announcement instead of it being the other way round. We build our plot and link all the sub-plots and then develop the story. When the story becomes a good one then we work a way of hiding the announcement into the story. While writing the story for the release, we use keywords and phrases so they come up in search.
We believe in showing people that we are real and mean business. To do this, we give them basic facts, e.g. stating when was Events Listed established and what does it do…
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Traffic Through Pay Per Click Ad Campaigns |
Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising uses search engines, online advertising networks and content sharing websites. Through PPC advertisers only have to pay when a visitor actually clicks on one of their ads in order to visit their website. Keyword phrases play a vital role in all this.
We take our keyword list and build out two campaigns in Google pay per click:
1. We place our ads on the Google search pages and pay per click.
2. We source web pages in our industry that have Pay Per Click ads on the pages and we set our ad campaigns to be placed within these specific pages and pay per 1000 impressions. We aim to pay $2 to $3 per 1000 page impressions so at a conversion of 0.1% click through per impression we are paying 20 cents per click. The better the click through rate the less we pay per click knowing how much we are setting as our budget.
We have already got our landing pages optimized per keyword phrase so we place one ad campaign in Google per keyword and we link that ad campaign to the page on our site with the same keyword in the title and in the headings; we also make sure that the text is dense with the keyword.
By directly matching the ad campaign to an optimized page with the exact same keyword phrases in both, we tell Google about our ad and also where we are sending people to if they click it and find a perfect match.
We at Events Listed use the Peal and Flick advertising method in Google. We write two ads per keyword phrase and we run them both. The ad that secures the best click through rate every 4 days to a week stays. The second best ad is changed for a new ad to challenge the current best ad…
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Traffic Through Video Marketing Campaign |
So we all know that Google is huge. But if it is King Kong of the online world then think Godzilla - something that’s twice as big and effective, we are talking about YouTube. It is all about videos, an element that can also make your site more visible, increase its ranking and generate at least 20% more traffic to it.
However, like every other tool to be effective, you have to follow some best practices in order to make your video marketing a success. Your video should have a good title and description with your URL in it; tags are equally important as they determine the search results. Presentation is the key and good quality video can do wonders for you. Make sure it’s a reasonable sized video so it doesn’t lead to poor streaming. Remember to submit your video to multiple sites as this can lead to 3-7 times more traffic.
An amazing fact is that only half of the videos are watched through video sharing sites. The other half is watched on other people’s sites or blogs where these have been embedded. So if your content is good, other people end up doing free advertising and promotion for you.
At Events Listed, we have made our event launch guidelines podcast videos. We have about 17 weeks worth of videos at 6 videos per week. We post this content onto the video platforms across platforms. We syndicate the video feeds into other social networking platforms and we podcast the sound track into itunes so our videos are on as many pages across the net as possible.
Our application intros are also in the form of video tours that lead the viewers through our sales funnels. The videos are designed to cover different elements of the business and are introduced one by one in our email campaigns. These videos therefore become an integral part of our hype generation strategies…
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Traffic Through Social Bookmarking |
Social bookmarking allows you to save, organize, search and share web pages. The sharing can be both private and public or a combination of both. The people allowed to view your bookmarks can do so by tags, categories, chronological order or through search engines. Web feeds are now provided by many bookmarking services to keep you and all those who share updated. Visitors can also rate and comment on these bookmarks.
To get followers;
- We communicate - we reach out to people and have built a niche area of expertise. We comment on other bookmarks, take part in discussions and bookmark stuff that others have bookmarked
- We provide fresh and unique content - we know that it has to be worth sharing and should provide value. Our content is varied, cutting edge and all industry specific.
- We bookmark frequently - we do it several times a day.
- We offer the best stuff - in order to make others aware and keep them interested, we share our best stuff.
- To generate traffic, we bookmark every link that we twitter, while we bookmark every blog post we publish in a 10 to 1 ratio with twitter.
- We do this daily across all our bookmarking accounts (delicious, stubleupon, digg, etc) which attracts followers in our niche as it works in the micro-blogs…
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Traffic Through Micro Blogging & Link Baiting |
Micro-blogging services allow you to write short messages to your friends and anyone you want. These can also be synced up with instant messengers and cellphones. The reason behind their increasing popularity is that they let you share personal updates even if you don’t have the time to update your site or blog. This way you can stay connected with those in your social network.
We have accounts at 12 micro-blogging sites. We set up a http://www.tweetscan.com account where you can add keywords and have them email us all the tweets within twitter that contain our pre-set key words. This gets us a direct feed of emails from active twitterers and helps us narrow down a target audience.
We actively network with these prospective customers by responding to their posts. Over 60% will follow us back which is how we build our twitter network and as this list grows it filters down through the lesser known micro-blogging accounts we also have accounts with.
We believe that conversation is the key to building trust and relationships so we allocate a certain amount of time each week to network with the members in each of these sites.
We then set up hellotxt.com to feed all 12 networks through one syndicated feed via sending an email through our gmail account. We subscribe to our own blogs and using an RSS plugin of aweber.com (our auto-responder email system) we set up a campaign just for us to evaluate - to have the headings and first 140 characters of each of our own new blog posts sent to us via a dedicated email account each day.
We also use Google news to send us posts from blogs across the net that provide tips and tricks regarding event planning. We can set Google news to send us the heading, a snippet of the content as well as the links to the full posts of blogs that offer latest news for your target audiences…
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