Glowleaf

Using social media is a one-way street in today’s internet. What used to be a passing fad 2 years ago is now a serious marketing platform.

It depends on your site/product/service of course, but social media can push serious traffic towards you.

Facebook.

By hitting the 300 million milestone, Facebook is now a huge platform. Have you ever dreamt as a marketer “what if I could reach out a whole country? That would be awesome.”

Well, now you can. Facebook has the biggest userbase in the world. What used to be a fad, is now a must. The smart thing that facebook did was the notifications. A friend of yours signs up on Facebook? You get notified, because it parsed his email list. Someone added you as a friend? You get emailed. Someone tagged you on a photograph? The same. Someone replied on that comment on a photograph? Spam, spam spam. And the funny thing is, that it is never treated as spam. Facebook just lets you know that other people are doing stuff on your account. And since those people are your friends, you never get offended if they keep spamming you with sheep and mafia guns. Facebook is just the messenger.

Twitter.

Twitter must be the biggest fad of them all. Many have fought it and then fell in love with it. Even I did. In fact, it is so great, that its traffic must be the most valuable of them all. Twitter traffic comments on your posts, subscribes on your RSS and email list, blogs about you, retweets your tweets etc. You might not be able to directly sell something on twitter, but you are bound to get some exposure. And if your promo is worth it, that exposure will convert indirectly.

I think that twitter nailed it with the 140 word limit. People get spammed all day, every day, around the world. Ads, radio, phone calls, SMS, emails, billboards, leaflets, a whole blizzard of little spammy messages are fighting each other for your attention. And researches show that the average attention span of a person has been reduced significantly the last few years. Twitter fits that lifestyle perfectly. The way I see it, it is even better than RSS feeds. I used to go through my subscribed RSS blogs every few days, and had to read to whole posts etc. Now, I just have a twitter account, follow those people who interest me, and receive manageable chunks of info from them every day. It is a mashup of little shouts, and they stay non-intrusive because I chose to receive them!

Myspace.

Don’t neglect Myspace. Yea, its old. Yea, it sucks. But there are a lot of people on it. And the best part is, a lot of stupid people. People to whom you can sell stuff.

Ok then, how can we leverage these 3 social sites easily and effectively?

There is a little piece of software that does all that. It is called tweetdeck, and it rocks. It started out as a more useful GUI for multiple twitter accounts, but the newest version bridges Myspace and Facebook as well. I believe it is a marketer’s wet dream.

Once you set it up, you can manage each of your site’s social exposure on 3 social networks from the same interface. Lets say you have your personal blog, so you make accounts for it at Myspace, Facebook and twitter. You pass everything into tweetdeck, and voila, you can post and manage them from one location. Want to promote your service? 3 more accounts, set them up in Tweetdeck, and you can go back and forth between them all day inside tweetdeck.

Of course, setting up the accounts is an important step. Different social sites need different approaches to succeed in getting lots of victi… cough, sorry, friends.

Honestly, for Myspace I have no idea what to do to make an account popular. Google it, someone will know.

For facebook, I found this useful article on Mashable amongst the enormous pile of crap on that domain.

For twitter, a lot has been said, but it is all bloated bullshit. What you need to know is this: link periodically to interesting stuff in your niche. That is all, honestly. Either do it manually or automate it. An easy way to do this is to fire up tweetdeck (I told you it rocks!) and open a search tab. As a keyword put something in your niche, for example #php or #wordpress or #lol. Spend exactly 40 seconds every day, check that tab on tweetdeck, and retweet something that looks even remotely interesting, you don’t even have to click the bit.ly

Of course it is not as easy as it sounds. Creating a following through social media takes time, and there is no secret recipe for it. What is certain is that it does help your site, and it does help get exposure.

Now, what should you promote? Not everything works when you promote to the social crowd. Think about building/promoting:

• Viral content
• Video
• Interaction/Flash promo
• Polls
• Contests
• Interesting articles

How can you twist the above into sales? Well, that is for you to find out! It is different for every product, but there is always an angle of approach you can take to twist linkbait/socialbait into buying.  Use your imagination, and keep an eye open for what other marketers are doing on the same platforms.

Signup on my mailing list if you want juicier stuff than this.

Popularity: 3% [?]

written by Glowleaf \\ tags: facebook, myspace, social media, tweetdeck, twitter

Here is how to add a sitemap to Phpfox.

First of all, you will need a script that is now paid, but my version is an old free one. I have it available for download here, the sitemap generator.

Just unzip the file and add the generator folder as it is on your root, so that you have yoursite.com/generator

This script can actually generate sitemaps for any engine, so you can use this for other engines as quirky as Phpfox. Its installation instructions are pretty straightforward, follow those, but you will need a few hacks as well.

You will need notepad++ to edit the .htaccess file. Please note that the .htaccess usually cannot be seen from most ftp clients, you will have to get it from your host’s file manager. If you can’t find notepad++, here is a download page.

Now, all you need to do is add exceptions to the htaccess so that, one, you can access the xml generator script and two, so the sitemap.xml is accessible.

Open the .htaccess with notepad++, and add these 2 lines of code:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/generator/.*

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/sitemap.xml

to the first batch of commands, and again the same two lines on the second batch of commands. Save as .htaccess, and upload. Then you navigate to www.yoursite.com/generator/index.php and configure the script.

After you set it to spider your site and the sitemap is generated, you can submit it to google.

Popularity: 3% [?]

written by Glowleaf \\ tags: htaccess, notepad++, phpfox, sitemap generator, xml sitemap

There is a stupidly easy way to push your pages on twitter.

First of all, you will need to find a site that has some authority, but has no twitter presence. It sounds rare, but there are actually sites like that.

Create a twitter account for that site, as if it were your own, but do not claim that it is. In other words, use the same colors, the background, put the host’s url etc.

Now, go to twitterfeed and add your parasite. Add the host’s rss feeds to the loop, and also add your injection rss.

Do your usual twitter cycle for followers. If you don’t know how, here is a tool that rocks. Focus on getting followers in the host’s niche. As soon as you get to 500+ followers, start posting your links in the injection RSS feed (I suggest you use a new wordpress installation for that). It depends on the niche and your chosen host, but you can either promote your posts, niche offers, niche products or plain dating ads.

See? Easy peasy.

Popularity: 5% [?]

written by Glowleaf

I recently became involved in community building, and I must tell you, it is hard work. The time it takes to gather that group of people, to give them focus, to coordinate their efforts into a common goal, it is all hard and takes enormous amounts of time.

But the payoff is worth it. A post on Traffick discusses Seth Godin’s Tribes, but I am not talking about that specifically. Please note the part where it says:

Take Avinash Kaushik’s common-sense exhortation that “aggregate” is never the name of your website visitor. If you get bogged down in aggregate statistics, you might be overwhelmed with just how many loosely-engaged, “valueless” clickthroughs come to your website every week. Yes, but why not make an exercise out of ignoring the 80% of people who aren’t connecting with you and zero in on just the 20% of those who do? Study their characteristics. Build and grow with them. (And it’s easier than ever to study them. This week, using Google Analytics’ custom segment features, I hand-built a segment called “engaged quintile,” for the 20% of website visitors on a client’s site that stayed a long time and viewed many pages. By definition, guess what the “bounce rate” was for that segment? Yes, it was 0%! It’s heartening and inspiring when you look at life through that lens.)

When I analyzed this blog a while ago, I did the exact same thing. Note where I said, nevermind the “hit and run” visitors, look at the loyal 20-25%.

This table shows us something interesting. While 75% of the visitors barely skim the site (maybe its the big fat smileys on top that deter them, but who cares…) we have a loyal percentage of ~20% who are definately reading the posts, and when we factor in the repeat visits from the other tables, we see that they do so often.

Please note how I completely ignored the bouncers, and focused on my loyal readers right from the start. Someone might say, what, you cut out 80% of the visitors! Are you crazy?

Well, yes, I am, and apparently I am also right. Why? Because we don’t give a shit about the “hit and run’s”. I have an internet marketing blog, that does not care to appeal to everyone. Those that actually like it, stick around long time, because they recognize the real value in this. Those are the guys I want, not the visitors from random sources. A skim through the keywords that brought in traffic for me shows these irrelevant ones:

• “what is the best seo tool”, I should redirect these guys to either a dickroll or a 7$ ebook…
• sensational.com affiliate, no I am not. Nothing to see here, move along.
• avatar james cameron torrent, WTF?
• boobs that we can see, do boobs come out in the invisible version now?
• wholesale glowsticks, just proves my point.

No, I don’t need those visitors. But the more visitors you have, the better, right?

Wrong. A visitor is a liability, unless he “converts”. At the time of conversion, he turns from a liability into an asset. Until that time, he only wastes bandwidth. A conversion in my eyes can be a lot of things, here are some:

The visitor converts when:

1. He clicks an ad
2. He buys a product
3. He downloads an info product
4. He registers and becomes an active member
5. He posts a useful comment
6. He becomes a loyal reader
7. He subscribes to RSS or email updates
8. He blogs about something I said
9. He links to one of my pages
10. He recommends my content to others through other media like word of mouth or msn link sharing or whatever
11. He completes a poll/survey
12. He builds brand awareness (this one is for big time guys, you just need to grasp it, not use it)

Note that not all of the above points can be directly tracked, but most can. We can track 1,2,3,4,5,7,11. Indirectly, we can track 6,8,9. Please note that I did not include “click the digg button” on purpose.

Do you see now why I wrote in my analysis, screw the others, the 20% is the one that matters? That 20% represents any and all of the above list. That is why I care more about time spent on site, repeat visits, frequency of visit, and RSS readers. And while, yes, chaos theory does prove that the visitor who came in looking for “boobs that we can see” could be a 16 year old computer geek, who will jerk off on boobsurfer, wipe himself, take note of the Wickedfire banner, click it, have a revelation the likes of “omg I can make monies on the interwebs”, spend 200+ hours reading and posting stupid questions and get dickrolled an average of 5 times (actual statistical data), and then rise up in 2 years  as the next internet marketing genius to become rich, powerful and famous, nevertheless, I HIGHLY DOUBT IT.

Another reason why social bookmarking traffic sucks big time is this.  Do a tracking experiment, and see how many visitors with social site referrers slide into any of the spots above. Very few usually. And while you may see RSS subscriber numbers going up, it will deflate as fast as it came. Most of the time, social traffic is a big waste of time and effort.

In summary, focus on your loyal readers, on the active members of your community, on those people that are real assets to you. It takes hard work and lots of time, but the rewards are huge. Focus on what matters, and create a little part of the world that is your own little tribe. It is the apotheosis of being an alpha male.

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Popularity: 26% [?]

written by Glowleaf \\ tags: loyal visitors, online communities, seth godin tribes

 

No, this is not a fake pic. And it has nothing to do with 9/11. It is a real advertisement, an old one, presenting the Pakistani airlines ability to fly you to NY in 16h 30.

I put it here so I can prove to you how powerful an emotional responce can get, and how important symbols are in marketing.

Some things never change. The basic needs for a man, of food, sleep, sex and shelter are all hardwired since the dawn of the human race.

And there has always been a strange breed of humans, that studied their fellow people, and tried to manipulate them into buying or trading.

The basic stuff does not change. Whatever techniques marketers used 200 years ago still apply today. Only the products and the tools change, not the methodology.

So, lets examine some classic tricks marketers used for centuries, and see what tricks we can learn from these old advertisements.

Plants

Do you remember Doc from the classic Lucky Luke cartoon? Sure, this is a kid’s movie, but the character is a mockery of real shady marketers of the times.

What Doc did was to create a miraculous hair growth potion. He scoured the Wild West looking for people to buy his stuff. If I remember correctly, the potion was plain water. He had an assosiate, posing as a regular bystander. After his sales pitch, he would call upon a volunteer to come to the stage, and show the miraculous effects of the hair growth potion. The plant would go behind the scenes and wear a big wig, and people believed that the potion was amazing. So they bought it.

Ok, people are not that stupid anymore. Or are they? Hmm…. Acai Berry *cough*.

The lesson here is to show the effects of your product to people, and if it is possible, to show a “regular” person using it, and of course being left satisfied by it. Then the mob mentality kicks in, and everyone buys it.

Desires

See the expression on those faces? It is so far stretched it does not even seem real. The point is not to make it real, but to transfer an emotion to the viewer. A face expressing desire instantly has a mimical effect on the customer. The appropriate sections in his brain fire, and endorphins are pumped into his bloodstream.

If you can create such a strong emotional responce, the world is your playground.

Laconic

It doesn’t get more straightforward than this. Absoluteness “Best you ever ate”, price is up there, image to show what it is like, and “Hot soup” to describe the product.

Eye catching titles

Do you think linkbait is something new? Check out these titles. Especially the “Drop Dead” one… Pure fucking genius.

Emotional hammering

The first one is not that old, but it has a very powerful message. Note that it is delivered in “Sin City” style. White, black and red.

“To be killed in action” and shows a baby. No parent can ignore this ad.

“Feeling Blue?” catchy tagline, and the classic before and after trick. We don’t make ads like this anymore, but they work. Note the smile in the last picture. The marketer is trying to intertwine that image with the memory of the product. If I were to make that ad, I would put the bottom 2 pictures the other way around, to preserve the antithesis structure. Ivory Soap, it floats!

“Cough, you chump”. It’s your own fault, you didn’t use listerine. You all know how big that brand is now. Note the bullshit scientific data “66% reduction shown in tests”.

“Be first in your gang/ Leaders go for Dinky toys”. This one targets the alpha males, and the beta who are wannabe alpha’s. Always worked, and always will.

“Their hero arrives on the next bus”. Powerful emotional message targeted to father figures. I believe the advice to wives part should be omitted. This is a pathetic attempt at reaching the whole of the audience with a single ad. Wrong. The idea is good, but needs to be separated. This is a man’s ad.

Died and buried

Indeed, the day has come. All beer cans open easily now. But no one knows Schlitz beer. I am sure this is due to the stupid name. This is a classic example of good ideas but no marketing skills.

Authority recommendation

Most of the times this is used, the authority person has nothing to do with the product. It does not matter, the more well known that person is, the more sales this ad brings. Michael Jordan advertised half the US products, and of course he had nothing to do with any of them. Except maybe Nike Air Jordan.

Scientific Bullshitting

The first comes from the era when cigarettes were starting to prove bad for your health. It is nicely pictured in the movie “Thank you for smoking”. This marketer tries to convince customers that their smokes are less smoky than the others. The cigarette companies had managed to bullshit their way with bought scientific data through years of denial.

Yes, this is a real Max Factor ad. Makes you think how stupid today’s products will seem in the future. Scientific bullshiting at its finest.

Sexual Innuendo

This has been used for sooo long. It works, that is the reason. Coca Cola and many alcoholic drinks have used this technique, of putting sexual images inside their ads. Even straightforward sexual messages work. You can be subtle or straight ass dirty, like the last one. Which, by the way, is not that old, but nevermind that.

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Popularity: 29% [?]

written by Glowleaf \\ tags: advertising, marketing, old ads