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Monetizing Social Media Is About Targeting First, Everything Else Second

November 29th, 2009 |

Author: JYDC Admin

Article Source: The Only Yard For The Internet Junkie

About 60 days ago, my team was working on an email program with an online retailer focused on expanding participation in their loyalty program. Unlike previous programs, the call to action of this email was not to “click a link” and join the loyalty program; rather; it was to share the experience of the loyalty program with their friends and encourage them to join as well.

This was no simple share-to-social initiative. The retailer created several incentives to motivate sharing behavior. Next, they tracked the number of invitations each customer sent to their friends and attributed those that actually “subscribed” to the loyalty program back to the initial inviter.

The results far surpassed previous email campaigns; in fact, the social program described above generated three times the number of subscribers than the previously launched un-socialized programs. Major results included:

1 new member for every 1.8 peer-to-peer invitations
10% of new members went on to purchase
4.3 emails sent, on average, by each influencer

While the program clearly extended reach and subscriptions to the loyalty program, the team believed there was an opportunity for optimization — and implemented two minor yet critical tweaks, both focused on enhanced targeting of the socialized campaign.

The company looked at their loyalty program members and created a segment based on engagement metrics: for example, how long a subscriber was part of the loyalty program. Targeting based on engagement is not a new concept to email marketers. Transactional email programs garner a higher response rate than broadcast campaigns do, because they target the customer at the point of maximum engagement: during a purchase cycle or some other lifecycle activity.

In addition to developing targets based on engagement, the company did more analysis to identify “Super Influencers” within their recipient lists. Super Influencers in this case are customers who already have a defined Web presence within a specific vertical.

In the retail space, there are a number of “Discount Bloggers.” These bloggers aggregate special offers on blogs or personal Websites. These customers can have a huge impact on campaign performance, since they already have a following relevant to a specific space with people looking for new content or the next great deal. The identified “Super Influencers” were added to the segment and the optimized campaign was ready to go.

The email program was launched to the new, targeted segment with the same offer and creative. The result? The targeting impact was off the charts.

420% Increase in loyalty member subscriptions from the initial campaign
326% Increase in purchase conversions from the initial campaign
Thousands of additional subscribers and hundreds of new purchases

The lesson is a simple one: Do not abandon the best practices you have grown to rely on when developing programs in the social space. The same email strategies you have been applying for years need to be relied upon as you activate new channels.

At the same time, it is critical to understand that not all customers are created equal on the social Web. There is a big difference in extended reach between me posting an offer on my Facebook page and a serious blogger embedding the offer for their followers to take action on.

Ryan Deutsch is vice president, strategic services & market development, for StrongMail Systems, a leading provider of online marketing solutions for email and social media. Contact him here.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Monetizing Social Media Is About Targeting First, Everything Else Second

YouTube Launches Automatic Captions; Great for Accessibility and Search

November 20th, 2009 |

Author: JYDC Admin

Article Source: The Only Yard For The Internet Junkie

YouTube is introducing machine-generated automatic captioning to YouTube. The captions can also be translated. This obviously has incredible implications for the hearing-impaired and language translation. But it also has great implications for search.

Automatic captions will be generated using Google’s automated speech recognition (ASR) technology and the same voice recognition algorithms used in Google Voice.

Additionally, auto-timing is being introduced. If you provide all the words in the video, Google will automatically time the captioning for you.

Of course, having what essentially amounts to transcripts for online video means that the text can be crawled and indexed and then yes – SEARCHED. Bring on the keyword research and seo scriptwriting for online videos!

Google put together a video on how to access the automatic captioning and auto-timing features:

10-plus SEO Questions – Google Rules

November 16th, 2009 |

Author: JYDC Admin

Article Source: The Only Yard For The Internet Junkie

google This morning I woke up to someone having submitted a pile of SEO questions using our newsletter question form. At first I thought, “Yikes, that’s kind of pushy to think I have time to answer all those questions!” But then I remembered that this was a newsletter week and I still had no idea what I was going to write about. A second look at the questions made me think that you guys would probably be interested in the answers to many of them, so it worked out perfectly.

Most of these questions have been answered in greater detail in various articles that I’ve written, so if you’d like more info on any of them, I’ve linked to the relevant ones for your convenience.

Thanks to Umair R., who submitted these questions.

1. Is there any fixed rule for Google as far as SEO is concerned? If so, what are the steps?
If only! There are no fixed rules because every website is different and has different needs. There are basic things that all websites need to do in order to improve their chances of showing up in Google search results for relevant phrases, but no magic formula.

See “The Art of SEO” article for more on this.

2. Do the following play important roles in website page ranking and positioning?

PR

Yes, real PageRank (PR), that kind that only Google knows, about plays a very large part in websites showing up (or not) for search queries that are relevant to it. But toolbar PageRank is another matter entirely. What you see there doesn’t correlate very well to where your page will show up in the search results.

See: “Getting Into Google.”
(Scroll down to the “Google Still Loves Its PageRank” part.)

The number of incoming links

Not so much in and of itself. Real PR, as mentioned above, is calculated not only on the number of links, but also on the quality of those links. A handful of links from authoritative, trustworthy, relevant pages should far outweigh hundreds of links from so-so sites.

See the High Rankings Link Building Forum.

Keyword density

Not in that there’s some special percentage that you need to aim for. Certainly it’s helpful to have the keyword phrases that you’d like to show up being used within the content of your page. But that’s just common sense, if you ask me. Surely, if your page is about a certain something (your keyword phrase), how could that phrase NOT be on the page?

See the various threads on keyword density on the High Rankings Forum.

Page response time

This is important only because if it takes too long to load, it might not be properly (or completely) indexed.

Bounce rate

It’s doubtful that this matters, because there’s no way for Google to know the bounce rate of every site. And it wouldn’t be fair for them to only count the bounce rates of those sites that have Google Analytics installed, so my guess is that this is not a factor.

See various High Rankings forum threads.

Time on site

Like the above answer, they don’t know this number unless the site has Google Analytics installed. That said, they may sometimes incorporate the old trick of seeing if a searcher clicks to another site in the search results after clicking one result, and how long it took them to click another. In other words, if they find that lots of people who clicked to one site in the search engine results pages (SERPs) always end up back at Google to try another site, then perhaps that first site wasn’t a great answer to the search query after all.

Domain page / page age

From what I can tell, this can often be a factor. But it doesn’t seem to be as prominent a factor as it was a few years ago.

3. Is there any special technique for content writing?

There’s no special technique, but I highly suggest hiring a professional marketing copywriter. You will see a positive return on your investment very quickly if you do. In addition, the tried and true SEO copyediting techniques in my “Nitty-gritty of Writing for Search Engines” may come in handy if you’re not sure how to integrate your keyword phrases into your professionally written content.

4. Should we cater to code-to-text ratio while developing websites?

There’s not one shred of evidence that this would have an effect on where a page would show up in the search results for a relevant search query.

5. If active scripting is a must for webpage development, how harmful can it be for PageRank and positions?

It’s typically not harmful at all because it’s usually done before a browser (or search engine spider) sees a page. To users and search engines, your dynamically generated pages are just static HTML by the time they get to them. Still, not all dynamically generated pages are created equal. There are some ways of developing your site that are less search friendly than others. For example, some JavaScript menus, some AJAX, etc.

See “Diagnosing the SEO Health of Your Website“:

6. If a webpage is ranking top for a specific keyword, if we make textual changes in that webpage, is there any chance that we lose the rankings?

Any changes you make to a page’s content can affect how relevant the search engines believe it to be for any particular search query. That doesn’t mean it definitely will change the search results, but it could. The only way to know is to try it and see. Usually, if you’re rewriting your page to be more useful to your site visitors and you don’t remove all the instances of the keyword phrase, you should be fine. Because nothing is permanent with SEO, if you don’t like what you see you can tweak it until you do.

7. Is it possible to be #1 for 20 high-volume searched keywords on Google for a particular domain?

Of course. Every website has lots of pages contained within it, each of which has the ability to be relevant for a number of keyword phrases. However, it’s important to note that what you see as the #1 result may not be what everyone else sees. A better question to ask would be, “Is it possible to get search engine traffic for 20 high-volume searched keywords?”

See “5 Reasons Why Rankings Are a Poor Measure of Success.”
8. How many good-quality links does a webpage require to be in #1 position at Google?

See the previous answer about the number of links as well as the article on rankings referenced above.

9. Is link building an ongoing process forever in order to maintain the top positions?

Like most of the answers I’ve been providing, it depends. An awesome website that is different from its competitors and that is continually developing innovative content will consistently generate high-quality links. But the site that is the same as its competitors with no real added value will most likely end up having to beg for links for its entire existence.

10. Is there any other significant factor for SEO apart from those mentioned above?

Yes, there are thousands of other factors! I’d suggest reading all the articles referenced here, as well as past issues of this newsletter. Also, become a regular member of the High Rankings SEO Forum. Keep studying, but more than that, keep trying different things on your own sites – learn what works and what doesn’t that way.

Jill Whalen, CEO of High Rankings and co-founder of SEMNE, has been performing SEO services since 1995. Jill is the host of the High Rankings Advisor newsletter and the High Rankings SEO forum.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

10-plus SEO Questions – Google Rules