Rather Genius Blog Posts 4

Continuing in a recent tradition of list roundups as the convention goes, the following are posts or resources I’ve chewed on lately that I think are worth mentioning. Hopefully you find something useful for your own web publishing business.

If you’re online to market a brand or online as an affiliate marketer, traffic makes or breaks your business. Some say, “It’s all about numbers,” others tell us, “It’s all about targeted traffic.” For getting targeted traffic, I still say nothing beats SEO…but it’s not the only method of getting traffic.

Consider for example…

Social Media

Does Social Media Matter?

Stay in this business long enough and you become a master of sorts of your pet forms of traffic. For me it’s primarily SEO traffic – but Social Media still proves a profitable venture (case in point: my last post was Stumbled over 800 times and had various other signs of social life, or how my wife got over 3,000 visitors from one Tweet).

Most reading my blog are internet marketers or those hoping to make a living from internet marketing – so is social media really that important? Isn’t SEO enough?

Here’s a candid story about why it matters, or should anyway – and a call not to kick yourself in the process. Written by one of my fave’s online, Marcus Sheridan, “The Sales Lion,” always a great read IMHO:

A Tale of Two Bloggers: Our Individual Journey to Online Success

Google+ for Business

Personally I think Google+ is a great place to be, prefer it to most other places but if you’re wondering how Google’s new social platform can affect your business, read what Mavis Nong has to say about Google Plus and how it impacts your brand and marketing strategies.

Social Media Handbook

Neil Patel of KISSMetrics.com and QuickSprout.com is one of the world’s most creative minds in marketing online, in my humble opinion – and I don’t say that lightly. He’s not selling anything here, he runs a successful company and has here aggregated a list of 57 different resources for learning about Social Media, from blogs to books, you name it.

Confused about how to leverage Social Media to your marketing advantage? Read this:

Social Media Handbook

Non SEO or Social Media Traffic Sources

Mobile Optimization

First up: mobile. With the advent of the Kindle Fire, iPad 2, iPhones and Androids (Ice Cream Sandwich and Gingerbread)…mobile is huge.

Tablets are almost another internet – especially since mobile browsers are not your everyday affair.

What else do you need to know about the mobile web? Mostly what interests me is how to optimize existing sites for mobile traffic, since what mostly drives mobile traffic are hyper-geo-location events and local web/small business type searches. That doesn’t interest me.

What does interest me is the SEO and optimizing the users’ experience if they find my sites on a mobile browser.

To that end, I found both these to be helpful reads (neither are ‘new’ but are new to me):

The Difference Between Mobile and Desktop SEO

The Mobile Content Dilemma: Brevity Vs Optimization

Those articles speak more to general SEO and hint at things to think about. Something to consider if you’re on WordPress is to use the WP Touch plugin, which will sense your users’ browser and if it’s mobile, it serves them the mobile site.

Themes that display well on laptops and desktops may not be so well-optimized for mobile – so consider that (and by the way, the default 2011 theme for WP optimizes just fine for all mobile screens). On my sites, I install some sort of mobile plugin like WP Touch and haven’t gone much further in trying to capture mobile traffic – but it’s something I want to learn more about.

Conversion Optimization

Once you have traffic, it’s time to convert it. Conversion optimization is as complex and simple as you want it to be – but ignore it and ignore your website analytics, and you’re forcing yourself to work harder than you need to.

Site Navigation and Visitors’ Behavior

As an SEO-heavy publisher, it’s all about “targeted traffic” for me: from keyword research to matching content to my markets’ needs, finding offers that convert – but what about something as ‘mundane’ as visitor behavior?

What people do on your site, and understanding how to optimize the flow of traffic and actions people take, is pretty huge if you think about it. With nothing more than optimizing “flow” on your site, you can use the same amount of traffic and get widely different (better, more profitable) results.

Derek Halpern of Social Triggers recently published his thoughts on conversions and how to use some simple analytic research to make huge changes that pay off.

How to Fix Your Website’s Navigation (it’s really easy)

Traffic and Web Analysis Tools

Most of you reading this may be using Google Analytics. I used to, but no more – I trust Google as much as they trust affiliates (not at all). I don’t want to hand them my traffic data, even in exchange for their traffic – and I don’t want to have to pay for analytic programs if I can get away from it.

So for a while I’ve been using either StatCounter or Clicky…and I find both lacking. They’re OK, but they’re nothing IMHO compared to Google Analytics…

So rather than go back to GA (and give all my websites a fat footprint that anyone can use to track down all my sites) – I’m experiementing with other traffic/stat solutions.

More on that in a future post. Here are the posts I read for my own ideas of what to use:

4 Website Analytic Tools Better than Google Analytics!

25 Free Google Analytics Alternatives

I’m planning on either Piwick or Open Web Analytics, both open source and (I think) self-hosted solutions. What I like about the latter (OWA) is that it offers heatmaps and mouse-click/mouse-movement tracking which to me is a huge data point to even think about…

Analysis paralysis? Not me – but conversion optimization pays big bucks when you have traffic. Getting more traffic is fine, but getting existing traffic to convert is life-changing.

That’s It for Me – Your Turn

I’ve read more than these posts recently but honestly don’t do much reading as I’m generating content like a fiend. But what about you? Read anything interesting lately?