Saturday, June 27, 2009

Top 3 Twitter growth and measurement tools

I was recently experimenting various ways to increase traffic to this blog. I have had a Twitter account for a while. Now and then, I summarized recent posts and inserted a tiny URL link to the blog. This drove a bit of traffic. However I quickly realized I needed a larger number of followers. Assuming a 1% click-though rate, I figured I would need at least 1,000 followers to get 10 hits a day.


Tool # 1 - Tweepme

In short, TweepMe is the 100% opt-in group of Twitter users who all chose to follow each other on Twitter. When a new member joins, every other member automatically follows the new member, and the new member follows them back. The process is gradual and happens over the course of weeks or months depending on the number of TweepMe members.


It's not free. I paid about $10 to join. I thought of it as an experiment. At first glance, it was slow. I was expecting to have 5,000 followers in the first 24 hours but then realized it would take months to get to that number. I think I have close to 1,500 followers rights now and it is growing fast. Traffic to the blog increased but not as much as I was expecting. I still think that for $10, it is all worth it.




Tool # 2 - TwitterCounter


Another good tool I recently discovered. Since this blog is mostly about measurement, I wanted to give an insight into this powerful tool. TwitterCounter is more sophisticated than most tools I have seen so far. It gives a comprehensive historical view of these 3 variables: number of followers, friends and updated. There is also a feature that looks at trend overtime and gives predictions. It's free and fun to use.


Tool # 3 - TweetGrid


TweetGrid is a Twitter search engine. I find the interface easy to use. I typed-in a number of keywords related to digital marcom (SEO, measurement, analytics etc ... ) and narrowed it down to a number of A-users which I started to follow. Hopefully they will follow me in return and drive traffic to the blog.


For more Twitter tools, check out this article from Mashable. I can't see the value of all of them but I leave to you to provide feedack to the ones you like best!

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Marketing E-mails Expected to More Than Double in Five Years

According to Forrester Research, U.S. consumers are expected to receive about 9,000 marketing email a year, which is an average of 25 / day by 2014. This advertising age article points out that close to 10% of them will not reach their recipients due to poor targeting and ISP spamming mechanisms. This touches on some of the points I addressed in the previous posts about email marketing and analytics.

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Search Engine Optimization - Top 10 positive factors

I ran across this this phenomenal article from seomoz.org:


Top 10 Positive Factors to increase serch engine optimization


Good luck!

Friday, June 12, 2009

Search Engine Optimization resources



Now that I have shared with you some of the highlights of the course, let me redirect you to some useful SEO tools:



- Archive.org: you can look at any web site look and feel over the years
- seobook.com: great resource to run keyword density
- yahoo.com: use the command: '' linkdomain:http://digitalmarcom.blosgpot.com'' (substitute with your web site own url) and enter in - the yahoo search box to find out how many web sites are linking to you
- linkdiagnosis.com: shows what links go to your competitors' web sites
- google: find out when was the last time a Google crawler visited your web site. type in ''cache:http://digitalmarcom.blosgpot.com'' (substitute with your web site own url) into the google search box


That's all for now. I will publish more resources as I get to use them!

Search Engine Optimization course in digital media at NY University

Last week at NYU, I learnt about one of the most interesting topics in the web area. For one minute or two, let's forget about social media, pay-per-click marketing and so on. During this one-day workshop, I learnt about the various techniques to get your web site on Google's first page (i.e organic search).


These are my take-aways from this class:

- Only 10 to 20% of people click on paid ads. The remaining traffic goes to organic search
- Google ranks web sites using an algorithm of 254 elements
- Google crawlers can't read flash (make sure at least a section of the web site is in html)
- Search engine optimization (SEO) efforts are 20% on-page and 80% off-page
- In other words, it's all about link building to your web site
- The SEO consultants mentioned that an average company might have 50 to 50 links to thir web site (and 10 for a smaller company)
- It's not really about quantity but more about quality of the web sites referring to you


Some optimizations techniques discussed in class (in no particular order)


On-page
1. Use anchor text for incoming link (eg: hyperlink will be 'digitalmarcom.com' and not 'click here' 2. Create good and self-explanatory titles (less than 40 words)
3. Add alt-tag feature to all images
4. Use clear image file name
5. 3 keywords max per page in order to avoid 'keyword stuffing'
6. A sitemap (or table of content with links to all pages' will help Google crawlers to organize your web site
7. Use no follow-tag for outbound links
8. Keyword density should not exceed 8%
9. Have a good ratio of anchor text and naked links (e.g www.digitalmarcom.com)
10. Link pages to each other within the web site


Off-page
1. Do not use link brokers. They can be cheap but most of the time, the links they sell you are of average quality
2. Solicit links from other web site and offer incentives (reciprocal building for example, free merchandise)
3. Only 10% of link building emails are returned. Be persistent!
4. A lot of social media web sites like wiki and facebook and have 'do not follow' tags
5. Blogpost, digg are ok
6. Use pingmaster to submit new posts on your blog
7. You can also submit your web site to registries like DMOZ, Giguides etc ...


And most of all, be patient. It takes a few years to move-up on Google ranking!