Tag Archive for: Traffic Generation
August 2014 Traffic Report: Finally, a Quick & Easy Look at the ROI of Content Marketing
When it comes to your website, do you ever wonder, What’s working? What content is most effective? Are we getting an ROI on our marketing dollars?
If you’re doing a great job with your content, it will be effective and engaging, and you’ll be generating not only brand awareness and traffic, but measurable ROI in the form of leads and sales.
(These are all areas we cover in detail in the process we go through with our Groove Digital clients.)
So how do you know your content is effective, and is actually leading to increased sales? How do you actually evaluate the ROI of content marketing?
To answer this question, we supplement the excellent data provided by Hubspot (which really helps us look at the leads and sales end) with data from Google Analytics (GA), which gives us an overall picture of our traffic and its effectiveness. The nitty gritty details of the GA analysis is exactly what I’m going to reveal in my monthly traffic report for August. (To see July’s report, click here.)
In the past, I’ve found GA to be overly complicated and hard to use. I always knew there was gold in the data, but GA’s poor design makes it difficult to figure out exactly what’s going on. Each month it took time and effort to dig around for the statistics we wanted to view, and each month we knew there were more that we could be looking at. This month, we began using our latest GA dashboards, and I couldn’t be happier.
The data we look at for our traffic report helps us to answer the questions of What’s working and what’s not? What’s most effective? and What is the ROI of our content marketing – how many leads is it getting us?
Here’s what we found for August:
Business Stats
Our high-level traffic and conversion data is available on our Business dashboard. Here we find out:
- Are we getting more visitors?
- Where are our visitors coming from?
- What is the trend in conversions (in our case, subscribers)?
- Where are conversions coming from?
- Who are our top social media referrers?
- Are visitors consuming more content? Are they spending more time on the site?
- What percentage of our traffic is from mobile?
Traffic & Referral Sources
Our traffic has risen more or less steadily since we started blogging regularly on Bright Ideas. Here’s a look at the month to month increase:
For the month of August, we continued our focus on Groove Digital Marketing agency activities. Even with the majority of our posts published on Groove, Bright Ideas received a lot of traffic, as would be expected from a mature site where we’ve been blogging for almost two years.
This month, our increase is due largely to increased referral traffic – we had a couple of posts go viral on StumbleUpon again (more on this in the Popular Content section below).
Subscribers & Referral Sources
To get truly useful data from GA, you want to know not just what traffic you have, but how many conversions you’re getting. In other words, how many of those visitors are you converting to subscribers? Or, if you have online product sales, to customers? In our case, we measure conversions in terms of subscribers.
In order to do this you need to set up what GA calls conversion “goals”, so that this data will be available. This was something that until recently, we didn’t have working (it’s trickier than it should be!). We finally hired someone to help with this.
Click here to purchase these dashboards for your business (includes goals setup).
We had significantly increased conversions in August. Most of the increase was from email; the numbers in the other areas remained similar to July’s conversions.
Significant Conclusions:
- We are getting more visitors. Much of our increase in August was due to increased StumbleUpon traffic.
- Conversions were significantly increased over July, much of which was from email.
Content Analysis Stats
Our Content Analysis dashboard helps us answer questions such as:
- Which content was the most popular?
- Which entrance pages got the most traffic?
- What pages had the most conversion “assists”? (A page “assists” a conversion if visitors view it before conversion.)
- Where are visitors exiting my site?
- What is our overall site engagement? (How long are people spending on each page?)
- How engaging is our top content?
- Where in the world is my traffic coming from?
Popular Content
By far our most popular pages are lumped together under ‘Other’. This is actually a really good thing as it indicates we have a lot of different content that appeals to our visitors.
After ‘Other’, the most popular content were the posts that went viral on StumbleUpon (Lessons Learned from 50 Marketing Agency CEOs and How to Start a Business with No Money). These were actually both great posts (the former is a summary of the best of the best I’ve learned from other agency owners, the latter a podcast interview where I was the interviewee and my friend Wes and I talk about what it takes to make it in business), but as we’ll see below, most of the StumbleUpon traffic was not high quality and didn’t convert well.
Click here to purchase these dashboards for your business.
Popular Entrance Pages
Again, our StumbleUpon posts showed up as popular entrance pages, as people went directly from StumbleUpon to those pages.
Similar to last month, traffic direct to our homepage increased as well. This month it was up almost 10%.
We also sent traffic to some of our new posts last month (including Tony Wright’s interview and our July income report).
The remaining popular pages are older posts that seem to be receiving significant organic traffic: my analysis of Infusionsoft vs Ontraport and Infusionsoft vs Mailchimp. With these posts, we used focused keywords and smart SEO tactics when we first published them, and our domain authority with respect to all things Infusionsoft is strong.
If we look at the pages that received a lot of StumbleUpon traffic (Lessons Learned from 50 Marketing Agency CEOs and the How to Start a Business with No Money Interview), we see that most of the people who visited those pages also left our site without exploring any further. Compare our top couple entrance pages with our top exit pages:
Conversion & Conversion Assist Pages
These are the pages that were most likely to convert a visitor to a subscriber (we also have PPC goals set). Our increase in conversions from July to August was mostly due to these PPC goals.
Significant conclusions:
- We had a variety of popular content.
- Besides our homepage, the pages that received the most traffic were those that went viral on StumbleUpon.
Click here to purchase these dashboards for your business.
Additional Information
In addition to the Business and Content Analysis Dashboards, we have Site Performance and Realtime Traffic dashboards.
Site Performance Stats
Our site performance dashboard answers the following:
- What is the average page load time?
- What is the page load time for new vs returning visitors?
- What is the average load time for popular pages?
- What is the mobile page load time?
- What is the average server response time?
- What is the server response time for new vs returning visitors?
- What is the average domain lookup time?
These page load times reveal longer loads than we’d like. Luckily the averages are a bit misleading, as there are spikes in page load times a couple of days a month. Still, we’d like to have pages that consistently load quickly. We have actually switched our site around on the back end a number of times to try to reduce our page loads. This report would indicate that we still have more room to improve.
Realtime Traffic Stats
Our Realtime Traffic dashboard answers the following:
- How many active visitors are on the site right now?
- What are their locations around the world?
- What pages are they on?
- What keywords brought them to the site?
- How many pageviews have there been in the last 60 sec?
- How many pageviews have there been in the last 30 min?
When we look at how our site is performing month-over-month, we like to see averages and trends. However, if you want a snapshot of what’s going on on your site right now, the real time traffic dashboard is where you’ll find it.
Want Dashboards Like These?
If you’d like to purchase these dashboards for your own business, you’re in luck! We have a dashboard package available that includes:
- The Business Dashboard
- Setup of GA goals so your conversions appropriately reflect your leads or online sales (as applicable) – necessary to make the conversions portion of your Business Dashboard work correctly
- The Content Analysis Dashboard
- The Site Performance Dashboard
- The Realtime Traffic Dashboard
- Plus a training call to be sure you know exactly what each part of the dashboard means
Click here to purchase these dashboards for your business.
Summary and Insights
If you thought this post was helpful, please be sure and share it!
Our dashboards quickly revealed that:
- We’re getting a lot more organic traffic.
- We’re getting many more conversions, a significant number of whom are interested in Infusionsoft.
Best of all, it didn’t take a lot of time to figure this all out.. have I mentioned how much I’m digging those new GA dashboards?
Click here to purchase these dashboards for your business.
[xyz-ihs snippet=”BuildGrove”]
July 2014 Traffic Report: Finally, a Quick & Easy Look at the ROI of Content Marketing
When it comes to your website, do you ever wonder, What’s working? What content is most effective? Are we getting an ROI on our marketing dollars?
If you’re doing a great job with your content, it will be effective and engaging, and you’ll be generating not only brand awareness and traffic, but measurable ROI in the form of leads and sales.
(These are all areas we cover in detail in the process we go through with our Groove Digital clients.)
So how do you know your content is effective, and is actually leading to increased sales? How do you actually evaluate the ROI of content marketing?
To answer this question, we supplement the excellent data provided by Hubspot (which really helps us look at the leads and sales end) with data from Google Analytics (GA), which gives us an overall picture of our traffic and its effectiveness. The nitty gritty details of the GA analysis is exactly what I’m going to reveal in my monthly traffic report for July. (To see June’s report, click here.)
In the past, I’ve found GA to be overly complicated and hard to use. I always knew there was gold in the data, but GA’s poor design makes it difficult to figure out exactly what’s going on. Each month it took time and effort to dig around for the statistics we wanted to view, and each month we knew there were more that we could be looking at. This month, we began using our latest GA dashboards, and I couldn’t be happier.
The data we look at for our traffic report helps us to answer the questions of What’s working and what’s not? What’s most effective? and What is the ROI of our content marketing – how many leads is it getting us?
Here’s what we found for July:
Business Stats
Our high-level traffic and conversion data is available on our Business dashboard. Here we find out:
- Are we getting more visitors?
- Where are our visitors coming from?
- What is the trend in conversions (in our case, subscribers)?
- Where are conversions coming from?
- Who are our top social media referrers?
- Are visitors consuming more content? Are they spending more time on the site?
- What percentage of our traffic is from mobile?
Traffic & Referral Sources
For the month of July, we continued our focus on Groove Digital Marketing agency activities. Even with the majority of our posts published on Groove, Bright Ideas received a lot of traffic.
Continuing the trend from last month, our traffic from organic search is waay up again! Most of the increased month-over-month traffic came from organic search, which increased by over 70% from June (in May we had just over 600 organic visitors; before that we were averaging around 400!):
Again, as in June, it appears that most of the increase in organic traffic reflects the long-term effects of posts with targeted SEO that were published in February and March (more on this in the Page Performance section, below). This data, as well as a once-again lower Alexa rank this month, indicates that – as expected over time – our domain authority continues to increase.
Essentially, we’ve hit some sort of critical mass. Strike another win for content marketing!
Subscribers & Referral Sources
To get truly useful data from GA, you want to know not just what traffic you have, but how many conversions you’re getting. In other words, how many of those visitors are you converting to subscribers? Or, if you have online product sales, to customers? In our case, we measure conversions in terms of subscribers.
In order to do this you need to set up what GA calls conversion “goals”, so that this data will be available. This was something that until recently, we didn’t have working (it’s trickier than it should be!). We finally hired someone to help with this.
Click here to purchase these dashboards for your business (includes goals setup).
We had significantly increased subscribers in July. Most of the increase was from organic traffic, which converted at 3.5% vs 2.1% in June.
Significant Conclusions:
- We are getting more visitors.
- Our visitors are coming from a balanced portfolio of traffic sources. Most of our increased traffic is coming from organic search.
- Conversions were significantly increased over June.
- Most conversions are coming from organic search and direct. We can assume that most of the direct conversions are from organic search or referral (people who typed in the website manually vs clicking on links).
Content Analysis Stats
Our Content Analysis dashboard helps us answer questions such as:
- Which content was the most popular?
- Which entrance pages got the most traffic?
- What pages had the most conversion “assists”? (A page “assists” a conversion if visitors view it before conversion.)
- Where are visitors exiting my site?
- What is our overall site engagement? (How long are people spending on each page?)
- How engaging is our top content?
- Where in the world is my traffic coming from?
Popular Content
By far our most popular pages are lumped together under ‘Other’. This is actually a really good thing as it indicates we have a lot of different content that appeals to our visitors.
Besides our homepage and our main blog page, the most popular pages were two posts that went viral on StumbleUpon (How to Attract Retainer Clients on LinkedIn, and The Dumbest LinkedIn Mistake I See Over and Over Again).
Click here to purchase these dashboards for your business.
Popular Entrance Pages
Again, our StumbleUpon posts showed up as popular entrance pages, as people went directly from StumbleUpon to those pages. In addition, we sent email traffic to our Groove Digital Marketing Agency Update page, and our June 2014 income report.
The remaining popular pages are older posts that seem to be receiving significant organic traffic: my interview with Sam Ovens, and my analysis of Infusionsoft vs Ontraport and Infusionsoft vs Mailchimp. With the Infusionsoft posts in particular, we used focused keywords and smart SEO tactics when we first published them, and our domain authority with respect to all things Infusionsoft is strong.
Here’s more details on how the entrance pages compare between June and July:
Conversion & Conversion Assist Pages
Now here’s where it gets interesting.. here are the pages that were most likely to convert a visitor to a subscriber. Our increase in conversions from June (145 conversions) to July (347 conversions) was 202. A whopping 154 of those – over 75% – were from our Infusionsoft resource page.
Not surprisingly, this same page also had the highest number of conversion “assists” – that is, people converted to subscribers at some point after viewing these “assisting” pages.
(Other Infusionsoft-related pages that rated for conversion assists were our Infusionsoft vs Mailchimp page, and a tutorial on How to Segment Your List Using Infusionsoft.)
Significant conclusions:
- We had a variety of popular content.
- Besides our homepage, the pages that received the most traffic were those that went viral on StumbleUpon.
- The pages that converted the most visitors to subscribers were Infusionsoft-related.
Click here to purchase these dashboards for your business.
Additional Information
In addition to the Business and Content Analysis Dashboards, we have Site Performance and Realtime Traffic dashboards.
Site Performance Stats
Our site performance dashboard answers the following:
- What is the average page load time?
- What is the page load time for new vs returning visitors?
- What is the average load time for popular pages?
- What is the mobile page load time?
- What is the average server response time?
- What is the server response time for new vs returning visitors?
- What is the average domain lookup time?
Realtime Traffic Stats
Our Realtime Traffic dashboard answers the following:
- How many active visitors are on the site right now?
- What are their locations around the world?
- What pages are they on?
- What keywords brought them to the site?
- How many pageviews have there been in the last 60 sec?
- How many pageviews have there been in the last 30 min?
Want Dashboards Like These?
If you’d like to purchase these dashboards for your own business, you’re in luck! We have a dashboard package available that includes:
- The Business Dashboard
- Setup of GA goals so your conversions appropriately reflect your leads or online sales (as applicable) – necessary to make the conversions portion of your Business Dashboard work correctly
- The Content Analysis Dashboard
- The Site Performance Dashboard
- The Realtime Traffic Dashboard
- Plus a training call to be sure you know exactly what each part of the dashboard means
Click here to purchase these dashboards for your business.
Summary and Insights
If you thought this post was helpful, please be sure and share it!
Our dashboards quickly revealed that:
- We’re getting a lot more organic traffic.
- We’re getting many more conversions, a significant number of whom are interested in Infusionsoft.
Best of all, it didn’t take a lot of time to figure this all out.. have I mentioned how much I’m digging those new GA dashboards?
Click here to purchase these dashboards for your business.
[xyz-ihs snippet=”BuildGrove”]
June 2014 Traffic Report
Welcome to my June Traffic Report. To see May’s report, click here.
Traffic generation is a challenge faced by every entrepreneur. At Bright Ideas we’ve made a habit of publishing our traffic reports as a means of giving insight into how we are doing, what is working, and what isn’t. Additionally, writing the report forces me to look at what’s going on! If you think this is helpful, please be sure and share this post.
This month, we have great news – our traffic from organic search is UP.. waay up! Read on to the Referral Sources section to see why.
The data we look at for our traffic report helps us to answer what we want to know most each month.
When you are doing your own analysis, be sure you start with your own top questions. Ours include:
- Is overall traffic up or down? Why?
- Are overall subscribers up or down? Why?
- Which traffic/referral sources are contributing the most to traffic and subscribers?
- How can we adjust our strategy to increase traffic and subscribers?
Here are all the details that I found for June…
Traffic
For the month of June, we continued our focus on Groove Digital Marketing agency activities.
In fact, we created less content in June than May (12 vs 16 posts), which means that proportionally we actually generated more traffic per post in June than in May. We also started to see less traffic from StumbleUpon, where a very popular post (The Dumbest LinkedIn Mistake I See Over and Over Again) went viral a couple of months ago.
Conclusion #1: Overall traffic numbers were lower in June, which is in line with a reduced posting schedule.
Subscribers
We had slightly lower subscriber numbers for June, but only 9% lower versus over 16% less traffic.
Conclusion #2: Overall subscribers were down slightly from May, which makes sense given the lower traffic volume.
Referral Sources
Here’s where Google Analytics showed my traffic coming from:
Google Analytics reports the largest portion of traffic coming from social. However, organic traffic increased significantly in June (220%, to be exact!).
In a typical month, we usually see around 400 visitors coming from organic search. That number increased significantly in May at over 600, and increased even more significantly in June with 1,855 Google organic search visitors!
It appears that traffic is up via a number of different search phrases and landing pages, including some specifically targeted posts we created in February and March. The average search position is lower (and here a lower number is a good thing, as the higher the number, the lower down our results show up), which would indicate that over time Bright Ideas has built up enough domain authority that Google is more likely to display our links in search results.
The theory that our domain authority is increasing is further supported by our lowered Alexa rank (this is in order of popularity, so once again a low number is a good thing), which as of July 8 was 140,535 (up 67,854 from 3 months ago).
This increased domain authority is likely a result of the significant amount of valuable content available on the site – essentially, we’ve hit some sort of critical mass. Strike another win for content marketing!
Conclusion #3: In June we received a significant increase in traffic from organic search, due to increased domain authority.
Summary and Insights
- Our June traffic numbers were lower than in May, which makes sense given that we created less content.
- Our social traffic remained high in June, which is in line with our social promotion.
- Organic traffic increased significantly in June, likely due to increased domain authority.
[xyz-ihs snippet=”BuildGroove”]
May 2014 Traffic Report
Welcome to my May Traffic Report. To see April’s report, click here.
Traffic generation is a challenge faced by every entrepreneur. At Bright Ideas we’ve made a habit of publishing our traffic reports as a means of giving insight into how we are doing, what is working, and what isn’t. Additionally, writing the report forces me to look at what’s going on! If you think this is helpful, please be sure and share this post.
The data we look at for our traffic report helps us to answer what we want to know most each month.
When you are doing your own analysis, be sure you start with your own top questions. Ours include:
- Is overall traffic up or down? Why?
- Are overall subscribers up or down? Why?
- Which traffic/referral sources are contributing the most to traffic and subscribers?
- How can we adjust our strategy to increase traffic and subscribers?
Here’s what I found for May…
Traffic
For the month of May, we continues our focus on Groove Digital Marketing agency activities, and the result was traffic numbers very similar to the previous month.
Conclusion #1: Overall traffic numbers were very similar in April and May.
Subscribers
We had slightly lower subscriber numbers for May. Given that we had roughly the same amount of traffic both months, this might not make sense at first glance. However, a closer analysis shows that much of our social traffic in May came from StumbleUpon, much more so than in April, and therefore a higher portion of traffic overall. As I mentioned in last month’s report, this traffic was due to a very popular post (The Dumbest LinkedIn Mistake I See Over and Over Again) going viral on StumbleUpon; however, much of the traffic that came from it was fairly low-quality and didn’t spend much time on the site.
Conclusion #2: Overall subscribers were down slightly from April.
Referral Sources
Here’s where Google Analytics showed my traffic coming from:
Google Analytics reports the largest portion of our traffic coming from social; in fact more than twice the number that typed in the URL directly or accessed our site due to emails we sent to our subscribers. We did receive over 600 visits due to organic search, which is almost 50% greater than average (which is closer to 400).
Google has made it more difficult to see where this traffic is coming from (thanks to “keyword not provided”), but from what data we can see it’s possible that some specifically targeted posts we created in February and March may be providing the traffic.
Some of the social traffic that was reported was due to a post going viral on StumbleUpon, which began to happen in March and bled over into April and May (we reported this in more detail in our March Traffic report).
Conclusion #3: In May we received a significant amount of traffic from social media.
Summary and Insights
- Our May traffic numbers were roughly the same as in April, which makes sense given that we had a very similar production schedule these two months.
- Our social traffic remained high in May, in large part due to a post going viral on social media.
- Organic traffic increased significantly in May.
[xyz-ihs snippet=”BuildGroove”]
April 2014 Traffic Report
Welcome to my April Traffic Report. To see March’s report, click here.
Traffic generation is a challenge faced by every entrepreneur. At Bright Ideas we’ve made a habit of publishing our traffic reports as a means of giving insight into how we are doing, what is working, and what isn’t. Additionally, writing the report forces me to look at what’s going on! If you think this is helpful, please be sure and share this post.
The data we look at for our traffic report helps us to answer what we want to know most each month.
When you are doing your own analysis, be sure you start with your own top questions. Ours include:
- Is overall traffic up or down? Why?
- Are overall subscribers up or down? Why?
- Which traffic/referral sources are contributing the most to traffic and subscribers?
- How can we adjust our strategy to increase traffic and subscribers?
Here’s what I found for April…
Traffic
For the month of April, we shifted down to 3 podcasts per week, so that we have an opportunity to focus on our Groove Digital Marketing agency activities.
Conclusion #1: Overall traffic was down slightly from March.
Subscribers
With the lower traffic, we also have lower subscriber numbers for April.
Conclusion #2: Overall subscribers were down slightly from March.
Referral Sources
Here’s where Google Analytics showed my traffic coming from:
Google Analytics reports the largest portion of our traffic coming from social; in fact about double the number that typed in the URL directly or accessed our site due to emails we sent to our subscribers. We did receive over 400 visits due to organic search, which is on par with what we have been averaging.
Some of the social traffic that was reported was due to a post going viral on StumbleUpon, which began to happen in March and bled over into April (we reported this in more detail in our March Traffic report).
Conclusion #3: In April, we received a significant amount of traffic from social media.
Summary and Insights
- Our April traffic and subscribers were slightly lower in April, primarily due to a decreased podcast production schedule.
- Our social traffic remained high in April, in large part due to a post going viral on social media.
[xyz-ihs snippet=”BuildGroove”]
March 2014 Traffic Report
Welcome to my March Traffic Report. To see February’s report, click here.
Traffic generation is a challenge faced by every entrepreneur, at Bright Ideas we’ve made a habit of publishing our traffic reports as a means of giving insight into how we are doing, what is working, and what isn’t. Additionally, writing the report forces me to look! If you think this is helpful, please be sure and share this post.
The data we look at for our traffic report helps us to answer what we want to know most each month.
When you are doing your own analysis, be sure you start with your own top questions. Ours include:
- Is overall traffic up or down? Why?
- Are overall subscribers up or down? Why?
- Which traffic/referral sources are contributing the most to traffic and subscribers?
- How can we adjust our strategy to increase traffic and subscribers?
Here’s what I found for March…
Traffic
Mar 2014 Traffic
As you can see, our traffic was significantly higher in March than in February (13,429 vs 7,351). However, pages viewed and visit duration were down, and bounce rate was up.
This makes sense, given that we received almost 2,000 visits as a result of one of our posts (The Dumbest LinkedIn Mistake I See Over and Over Again) going viral on StumbleUpon, which is one of the sites we use to promote our content. The StumbleUpon traffic had a very high bounce rate, and most visitors spent very little time on the site, likely because most of the visitors from StumbleUpon weren’t a good fit with our audience.
We also received some additional traffic due to an Infusionsoft webinar we hosted on March 11, since Infusionsoft sent some of their leads to our site during the week leading up to and including the 11th.
However, most of the additional traffic was almost certainly due to an increased podcast production schedule that we implemented in March. In March, we went from approximately 1 podcast post and 2 text-based posts per week to approximately 5 podcast posts and 2 text posts. The additional content led to more reasons to visit the site, as well as more content promotion and social sharing.
For the month of April, we have shifted down to 3 podcasts per week, so that we have an opportunity to focus on our Groove Digital Marketing agency activities.
Conclusion #1: Overall traffic was up significantly from February, due to significantly increased podcast production and also to one post ‘going viral’.
Subscribers
Mar 2014 Opt Ins
As I’ve mentioned in the past, I believe the conversions in Google Analytics are a rough estimate of actual conversions (opt-ins), and should be only loosely considered. According to GA, conversions in March were at 302 compared to 107 in February. These don’t agree precisely with my more reliable subscriber numbers from Infusionsoft, but are within 10-20% and are good enough to indicate trends.
Clearly, our additional traffic led to additional opt ins. We had also run a split test in February on an alternate main landing page header, and it didn’t convert as well as our original header. So in March, we returned to using the original header.
We created a new Infusionsoft-specific landing page prior to our March 11th Infusionsoft webinar. We received a significant number of opt ins from people who visited this page (according to GA, 94). This makes sense since people who are interested in Infusionsoft are more likely to be a good fit with our target audience. A number of these were associated with the webinar promotion, and others were as a result of an Infusionsoft Google PPC advertising campaign that we ran.
We received significantly more opt ins as a result of emails that we sent announcing posts (82 vs 3). This is one area where again I’m not sure I trust GA, since most of these folks should have been subscribers already, but it’s also very likely that there were more emails forwarded to people who then subscribed. We actually sent the same number of these types of emails in February and March, so I’ll attribute this more to the nature of the popularity of our March posts (the LinkedIn and marketing agency posts I mentioned above, as well as a post updating you on our agency activities).
Here are some other highlights with respect to opt ins:
- Our opt ins as a result of Google organic traffic increased almost 3x (20 vs 7). We actually had slightly fewer, shorter organic visits on average, although this was not statistically significant. Unfortunately with keyword “not provided”, it’s difficult to analyze and the reason for the increased opt ins is unclear. It’s possible that it’s as simple as the return to our original landing page header.
- Our opt ins that could be tracked directly from social networks and syndication increased 5x (26 vs 5).
Conclusion #2: Overall subscribers were up significantly in March, due to increased traffic, and targeted traffic as well.
Referral Sources
Here’s where Google Analytics showed my traffic coming from:
Mar 2014 Traffic Sources
Once again, the largest portion of my traffic is from people typing in the URL directly. This is followed by our emails to our list, and in this case StumbleUpon was a larger referrer than Twitter.
As far as other social referrals, as it has been in the past, Twitter is our major source of referral traffic, followed by LinkedIn and Facebook.
Conclusion #3: In March, we received a significant amount of traffic from StumleUpon. Other than that, our major sources of traffic (and conversions) continue to be the major social sites (Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook).
Other Metrics
In addition to looking at traffic and subscribers on a monthly basis, you want to be sure you’re periodically looking at your pages viewed, landing page conversions, and SEO acquisition reports.
In March, the first two of these were unremarkable, but there was something interesting (if not especially remarkable) in the SEO reports.
SEO & Acquisition Reports
Google has definitely made it more difficult to see which keywords you are ranking for (instead giving the unhelpful “not provided” result). However, you can still look at acquisition reports both in terms of queries and landing pages, and for your top queries, make some educated guesses about which landing pages your keywords are taking people to.
In March, Google did show that we ranked for “how to start a business for under 100,000 dollars”.. again, Google makes it a little difficult to know for sure, but it appears that this search led folks to the somewhat unrelated podcast on how to launch a podcast and get 100,000 downloads a month.
That’s a little unfortunate, since I do believe that a marketing agency is a great business to start, for those with under $100,000 to invest (and with some marketing knowledge, of course).
Summary and Insights
- Our March traffic was almost double that from February, primarily due to an increased podcast production schedule.
- This increased traffic was the main reason that our subscribers were up almost 3x from February to March.
- Going viral on social media may or may not be significantly helpful, depending on whether that traffic is converted to subscribers.
- Targeted traffic that you direct towards a high-converting landing page can lead to much more long term benefits (subscribers).
Additional Resources
What Do You Think?
If you found this traffic report valuable, and you don’t want to miss out on future reports, be sure to become a subscriber now.
If you have anything you’d like to share or ask, please take a moment to do so in the comments section below, and I’ll make sure to respond.
In particular, I’m curious: What other questions would you like to have answered when looking at the traffic report for your own site?
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5 Ways to Increase Twitter Promotion Part 5
This is Part 5, the finale of my 5-Part Series on Increasing Your Twitter Promotion.
Twitter is my website’s number 1 source of social traffic and an integral part of my digital marketing strategy. It’s well worth the time to watch this brief video series to make sure you’re optimizing this powerful social platform.
Take a quick listen to this episode where I discuss:
- How To Get Influencer to Promote Your Brand
- Tactics to Get Influencers Attention
- Importance of Using Influencers
I hope this gives you more ideas on how to effectively use Twitter.
This is the final post in this series that gives you easy to use tips to continue to grow your referrals from Twitter. You can check out the other episodes in the additional resources section. You can also Subscribe now so you won’t miss out on my upcoming shows featuring more strategies and industry experts.
Resources Mentioned
More About This Episode
The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.
It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.
Listen Now
Transcript
Hey there Bright Idea hunters!
Welcome back to episode number 113 of the BrightIdeas podcast. I’m your host Trent Dyrsmid and this is the podcast where we help entrepreneurs to discover ways to use digital marketing and marketing automation to dramatically increase the growth of their business, and I have yet to meet an entrepreneur that doesn’t want to do that. So if you’re an entrepreneur looking for proven tactics and strategies to help you increase traffic, increase conversions and profits, well my friends, I’m happy to say that you are in the right place.
In today’s episode we are going to dive into part 5 of my 5-part series on 5 ways to increase twitter promotion. So, why is that such a big deal? Why is twitter promotion such a big deal?
Well as I mentioned in previous episodes, the one thing that is so wonderful about twitter is that it is a very frictionless social media platform. It’s dead easy to use. If you are following the strategies that I have been explaining in the prior episodes, you have learned how to create pre populated tweets and you’ve learned how to create widgets that show real time social proof.
All of this stuff works because if you do this right people, we don’t have to type anything, we don’t have to think. All I have to do is click the mouse once or twice. So that’s pretty frictionless.
So, when there is a lot of people just taking an action that is almost effortless for them to take, get enough of them doing it and as you might imagine the aggregate value of that can be quite significant to increase the buzz for your product or your event or whatever it is that you are trying to draw attention to. If you’re in business, which we all are more than likely, that is going to increase your profits.
In this episode, we are going to talk about how to do a pre crafted tweet so that you can get influencers to help you to spread the word and there’s a process that you need to follow. To do this right, you don’t want to just call him up and ask him because that’s probably not going to work.
Before we get into that I got 2 announcements. If this is your very first episode of the BrightIdeas podcast, welcome!
If your listening to this on a mobile device right now, text the word podcast to the number 96000 and you’re going to see some real cool marketing automation trickery which I talk a lot about here on my blog, plus gives you an easy way to opt-in and make sure that you never miss a future episode.
If you are listening to this on iTunes, some other place, wherever it might be. If you’ve never been to the blog before go to brightideas.co and you can become a subscriber, you can let people all about it and get a lot of free stuff there and ton of free content and ton of interviews, and I absolutely know that if you’re an entrepreneur you are going to love it.
Announcement number 2. If you are in B2B sales, something that I have spent all my prior life for a 15 years’ worth of B2B sales sold millions of millions and millions of dollars’ worth of stuff. The key, or one of the keys, is being able to get your foot on the door. That’s a huge problem for a lot of people. Once they are in the door they can ask right questions and get the business done but get in the door, man that can be such huge challenge. If that is a challenge for you, I have a course that will help you to improve significantly the results that you are getting back by 15 years of my experience. It’s called the best buyer formula, you can learn all about it at brightideas.co/bbf.
Okay with that said, let’s get in to it. I want to talk about pre crafted tweets–as I mention before the objective of this is to get important people to share your content for you.
You want to provide them with everything that they need to make it dead easy for them to do. Ideally, you want make it so they can do this and maybe 30 seconds or less. So, the way you want to do this is–I’m going tell you what you need to do but after I tell you how you are going to be able to make this work.
What you needed to do is write the tweets for them, send them off an email, and say, “hey here’s 5 tweets, if you wanted to pick one just cut and paste it” Boom! Send it out!
Great! Right? Well, it is very simple but there are some important things to understand about this simple concept and that’s in the how you do this.
DO NOT email somebody for the first time saying, “hey man I love your stuff can you send another tweet for me?” No, that’s not going to work.
What you need to do first is you need to find out who were the influencers that have the audience that I want and start following them and reading their stuff, share then sign up in their newsletter list to put in your RSS reader. Pay attention to their work; share their content with your tribe for a while first. Make lots of comments on their blog, make sure you do lots of tweets and make sure that their @username is in those tweets where you’re basically say, “man, your stuff really rocks and I’m telling my crowd about it”. They are going to like that. Not only that, they are going to start to know who you are.
I speak from experience because I have a pretty big tribe of people and got a lot of emails but there are certain people whose names… “Owen” …who I’ve come to know over a long period of time simply because they’ve reached out and they become active participant in my community.
Now, the next thing that you can do if you happen to have a podcast and if you don’t–man I encourage you to start one immediately–is reach out and ask to interview.
My first professional network is better than it has ever been in my entire life and it’s not from going to conferences or going to launches or swapping business cards.
It is because of my podcast. It is hands down the most powerful personal networking tool I have ever discovered. Here’s why: when I send a tweet or an email to a stranger that says something to the effect of, “how would like to be on my show” or “I’d like to have you as a featured guest on my show?” The ego — and I have one too, I’m not calling out other people I’m calling out all of us — it simply prevents us from ignoring an email like that in most cases.
Now if I, reaching out to Richard Branson, he’s probably going to ignore me because he is a whale and I’m a fish, but I find reaching out to someone who’s a slightly bigger fish than me more than likely I’m going get a reply.
So once you’ve interviewed them, start to build the relationship. No tricks. Just bee real. I’ve tend to friend people on Facebook and I like to see what’s going on in their life and they like to look what’s going on with my life and we have opportunities to comment. One of the things for people who know me is that I’m going to be a Dad in about another 2 months. Depending on when this episode airs, so at the end of April. So if there are new Dads in the audience, I need some advice man. So feel free to reach out and tell me what I’m in for cause I’ve never been a Dad before.
The point is, you want to be real. You want to connect to these people and then once you’ve done all of that, then you can send them an email with your 4 or 5 pre crafted tweets and because you have a relationship with them and you have goodwill with them. They are going to cooperate with you and the impact that an influencer can have on your stuff can be quite significant. So, it’s very, very, very worthwhile to put the time and effort into doing this.
Another idea by the way on how to make an influence looks good is when you’re blogging and you’re writing about a topic–and this is actually in our checklist of things to do when we write a blog post, and yes we have a checklist for almost everything that we do–is that you find a way to mention other people and make them look good and then of course once that post has gone live you can tweet out to them and say I’ve mentioned you in this post and more than likely they are going to read it and when they do, if they like what they read they’re more than likely they’re probably going tweet out that content if it was a good post. If it is a crap post and you mention them you’re wasting your time, you’re wasting their time but of course you making yourself like an idiot so don’t do that.
There are definitely specifics on how to write a post as matter of fact, I have written a post on how to write a post so if you come to brightideas.co and search around you’ll find it and if you can’t find it, send me an email trent@brightideas.co and I will send you a link or a member of my team–say if I can I’m too busy to — have a member of my team reply to you and send you a link directly to that post.
Alright, if you do all this stuff, you’re going to be one step closer to having influential people promote you. To get the show notes for this episode, all you are going to do is go to brightideas.co/113. If you’ve missed the previous four parts of this 5-part series, there’s going to be a link in the show notes or links I should say, to all of the previous episodes. I really encourage you to check this stuff out.
Twitter is my number one social referral source and I still have plenty to learn about twitter and that’s why I’m doing these episodes cause I’m learning new stuff and I’m implementing it on my blog and I’m sharing it with you while I’m doing it so make sure that you go and check those all out.
If you been enjoyed this episode I would love it if you go to brightideas.co/love where you’ll find a pre crafted tweet that you can automatically just click on and send out and I would thank you very much for that. There’s also a way to leave the feedback for the show in the iTunes store. If you feel like doing that I’m going to be one of your biggest fans.
So that’s it for this episode. Thank you so very much for tuning in. I love doing this podcast and I love all the questions and feedback that I get so you as an audience member are someone that I appreciate immensely.
That’s it! I’m going to keep on trucking and will see you in another episode soon.
Additional Resources
- 5 Ways to Increase Twitter Promotion: Part 1
- 5 Ways to Increase Twitter Promotion: Part 2
- 5 Ways to Increase Twitter Promotion: Part 3
- 5 Ways to Increase Twitter Promotion: Part 4
5 Ways to Increase Twitter Promotion Part 4
This is Part 4 of my 5-Part Series on Increasing Your Twitter Promotion.
Twitter is my website’s number 1 source of social traffic and an integral part of my digital marketing strategy. It’s well worth the time to watch this brief video series to make sure you’re optimizing this powerful social platform.
Take a quick listen to this episode where I discuss:
- How to Create a Shout Out Tweet
- Benefits of Using a Shout Out
- What They Look Like and What They Do
I hope this gives you more ideas on how to effectively use Twitter.
The next and final post in this series will give more easy to use tips to continue to grow your referrals from Twitter. Subscribe now so you won’t miss out.
Resources Mentioned
- Shout Out Tweets Screen Shot
- Interview With Mike Stelzner About Some Things We Discuss in the Episode
More About This Episode
The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.
It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.
Listen Now
Transcript
Hey there Bright Idea hunters!
Welcome back to episode number 112 of the BrightIdeas podcast. I am your host Trent Dyrsmid and this is the podcast where we help entrepreneurs to discover ways to use digital marketing and marketing automation to dramatically increase the growth in their business. I know we all want some of that.
If you’re an entrepreneur looking for proven tactics and strategies to help you increase traffic, increase conversions, and ultimately increase your profits, I am very happy to say that you are in the right place.
In this episode, we are going to dive into part 4 of my 5-part series on 5 ways to increase twitter promotions.
Now, if you’ve missed those other episodes, you can get to them starting at brightideas.co/109 and just keep on increasing that number one way up and you will get to all of the other episodes that proceed this one.
Okay, so we are going to talk about how to create a shoutout tweet and I want give a shoutout to Mike Stelzner from the Social Media Examiner—If you haven’t check it out you probably should–because I learned this little trick from him and I’m sure he learned it from somebody else.
The way that Mike uses it, is that when someone registers for social media marketing world, they can see this list of presenters and then next to the list of all the presenters names is a pre-crafted tweet like we talked about how to do in the previous episode–the episode number 111, the transactional tweet–but he does something that is pretty cool and I’m going to walk you through it.
Basically, the purpose of this tweet is it gives someone the ability to click a link and say–Hey Chris P we’re really looking forward to meeting you in person at social media marketing world.
So, what’s the big deal about that? Well, there are two things that are kind of a big deal.
Before we get into the big deal, I’m going to explain how I’m going to use it. As you know, I interview countless entrepreneurs here on my podcast. Now that I’ve discovered this little shout out tweet idea and every one of the posts that I do to host those episodes, those interviews, I’m going to create a shout out tweet.
So, why would I do that? There are two reasons.
Number 1 is that I want a person who is my guest to feel the love for being my guest. So the people listening will click that shout out tweet with their name and I mean there’s a specific detail–I’m going to give it to you in just a second.
They are going to give a notification and gives my guest the opportunity to interact with the listener and of course, they are going to love that, so that helps them. So what helps me?
What helps me is I’m going to put a hashtag in there–you remember I talked about the importance of putting hashtags in. And that’s the very first episode, in episode number 109 or 110, or the both short episodes and you should listen to them both.
Anyway, so what’s the big deal about the hashtag? Well, if I have that hashtag I can then populate a twitter widget with all this wonderful stuff that the listeners are saying about all these episodes that I do. So the hashtag was #thebrightideaspodcast and each time they are tweeting this shout out, I’m going to have this never ending stream of peoples on twitter saying how much they love the so and so episode of the podcast.
So, there’s really good reason to do this, its super easy to do. You use Click to Tweet just as I described in the previous episode–that’s episode number 111–and if you go to that post you see the screenshot and everything of how to do that so I’m not going to cover it again.
But here’s the one detail that is super important. When you start to tweet to someone, let’s say you’re going to tweet to me. If you just write @TrentDyrsmid-“Hey men I really like your show” or whatever. I’m the only one who can see that tweet. That is not really doing a lot and that is not as effective as if you put the word hey or whatever before the @trentdyrsmid. If you say, “hey @trentdyrsmid, I’m really digging the BrightIdeas podcast”– which I hope you do by the way and if you do please go and tweet that.
That way it goes into the public twitter streams. Obviously, you want it in the public twitter streams so more people see it cause that’s the whole idea right? We are talking about ways to increase twitter promotions so we don’t want to keep this stuff all over ourselves, we want the whole world to know.
So make sure that you do that and then of course, if you’re going to put the URL in there–which you might want to do– that’s a way to get people back.
So, in my podcast I’m probably going to put a URL back to the homepage of my blog because that’s where people come when they learn about the podcast if they are not familiar with it. They can become the subscriber and so forth.
So then you just again, like I did in the previous episode, you take this little bit of code or hyperlink rather. Put it in the blog post. You guys see this actually when you’re listening to this very episode.
Actually, there won’t be this one because there’s no one to shout out to so maybe I make a shout out to me–yeah that’s we all do!
Anyway, so that how you do. We got one more episode to get on this five part series.
So please make sure that if you haven’t already become a subscriber that you do so that you don’t miss any episode, you can subscribe on itunes or if you want to get an email notification just head to brightideas.co and become a subscriber.
If you’d like the show notes, a link to the screenshot, and the links and everything to this and other episodes go to brightideas.co/112.
That’s it for this episode, I am your host Trent Dyrsmid. Thank you so very much for tuning in.
Additional Resources
- 5 Ways to Increase Twitter Promotion: Part 2
- 5 Ways to Increase Twitter Promotion: Part 3
- 5 Ways to Increase Twitter Promotion: Part 4
5 Ways to Increase Twitter Promotion Part 3
This is Part 3 of my 5-Part Series on Increasing Your Twitter Promotion.
Twitter is my website’s number 1 source of social traffic and an integral part of my digital marketing strategy. It’s well worth the time to watch this brief video series to make sure you’re optimizing this powerful social platform.
Take a quick listen to this episode where I discuss:
- How to Create Transactional Tweets For People Who Purchase on Your Site
- Getting People To Populate Your Tweets
I hope this gives you more ideas on how to effectively use Twitter.
The next 2 posts in this series will give more easy to use tips to continue to grow your referrals from Twitter. Subscribe now so you won’t miss out.
Resources Mentioned
- ClickToTweet
- MasterMind Group
- Screen Shot For Transactional Tweet
More About This Episode
The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.
It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.
Listen Now
Transcript
Hey there Bright Ideas hunters!
Welcome back to yet another episode, episode 3, number 111 of the BrightIdeas podcast. I am your host Trent Dyrsmid. This is the podcast for we help on entrepreneurs to discover ways to use digital marketing and marketing automation to dramatically increase the growth of their businesses. Who doesn’t want some of that?
If you’re an entrepreneur looking for proven tactics and strategies to help you increase traffic, to increase conversion and ultimately increase profits, well, I’m very happy to say that you are in the right place.
In today’s episode we are going to talk about part 3 of my 5-parts series on 5 ways to increase twitter promotions.
Now if you want to get episode 1 and number 2 its brightideas.co/109 and /110 and will take you to two other episodes.
So in this episode we are going to talk about how to create a transactional tweet. Before we dive into that, I want to cover in case you miss the other two episodes.
Why is it so important to use twitter to get people to help you bring awareness to your brand?
Number one reason is that, it is really really easy to do. For the people who are going to do the clicking for you, you don’t even have to really type anything, they don’t really have to do anything, if you do it the way I instruct these 5 part series. People literally only have to click a mouse button and they are going to send a pre populated tweets and all sorts of other wonderful things for you making it very easy for people to do – that collective power of all those people doing that very simple little thing can translate into very big boost in the buzz for your product or for your event, and obviously that can help you to drive profits.
A couple of quick announcements before we get in to this. If this is your first time listening to the BrightIdeas podcast, and you are on mobile device, go ahead right now and text the word podcast to the number 96000. You’ll see some of my marketing automation trickery in action and ultimately you’ll be able to get a notifications of every episode that we produce from here on in and plus some other special surprises in the store for you. You’re in front of your computer and you’re listening to this on iTunes, just go to brightideas.co and enter your details and you can have the very same thing happen.
And the next thing that I want to tell you about; in the last two things that told you about my digital marketing handbook, this one I want to talk about something a little different.
If you’re a solo entrepreneur and you’re feeling a bit stuck or alone – not an uncommon feeling – I strongly encourage you to check out the BrightIdeas mastermind for you will be able to start spending time around other very motivated entrepreneurs, all dedicated to helping each other succeed and sounds like a very wonderful thing to be a part of that, I can assure you that it is. You can learn more about it at brightideas.co/mastermind.
So with that said lets kind of dive right into this and give you yet another golden nugget.
So a transactional tweet: what’s it for, why did you do it? The purpose is you want to be able to give people a very easy way to share their excitement about a transaction that they have just completed. The reason for that when the people buy something they typically pretty excited they want to tell other people.
Let me give me example. If someone signs up for my mastermind group – which I just mentioned – or they buy my digital marketing handbook or they buy the best buyer formula or they do any other things or buy any other things or register for an event, right on the thank you page, I’m going put a transactional tweet and typically it all say that something like “please click to tweet” and it will be the words that would show up in twitter and they just click it and that’s it! It’s done! They don’t have to type anything, they don’t have to do anything, and they don’t have to put hash tag in. Nothing and it’s all done for them!
The benefit of that is, remember back on episode number 2, I was talking about those widget boxes that you can use to accumulate real time social proof. If you write this tweet and you include hash tags every time someone buys your stuff, you’re going to be sending out these tweets, you’re going to have this constant stream of people saying all these wonderful things and that going to show up in that twitter widget, that you could put that on your page, on the side bar, wherever you want to put it.
So let’s get in how to do this and man, it is so incredibly easy, easy, easy, easy!
Alright, go to clicktotweet.com it’s free, you can pay more if you want to like extra stats and stuff like that. But I find free version is just fine. So here’s the thing, you are going to do number 1. You are going to write your tweet – you want to craft it in a way that it would be something that they would say. So, think about you’re the user that just bought the book or sign up for the course or attended the event or whatever it was.
What would they say? What would they say after that?
So, in my case of the digital marketing handbook – I just bought a digital marketing handbook and recommend you check it out – or something to that effect. So then you’re going to include in that tweet, very important, you going to include a link to the sales page for whatever it was that they just bought because if you forget that pieces really doesn’t do you any good at all. Then the next thing that you really want to put in there if you have enough room and you don’t have too much volume to drown you, you may want to put @your-username, so that you can get a notifications on your mobile device or whatever it is that you used to monitor twitter. Then you are going to reach out to this people say hey thanks. And that’s something I really recommend that you do because it does help you to build relationship with your new customers. And then, the hashtag! Don’t forget the hashtag because if you forget the hashtag then you can’t create the widget later on that’s going to show these wonderful tweets from all these people that have bought this stuff and registered for your events. So, make sure that you get the hashtag, that you hit the create tweet button and it’s going to give you a little URL.
So, now all you do is go over to your wordpress site on your thank you page. You type out – what I typically do – is in bold italics. I go “please click to tweet” and then I put colon and then take off the bold, take off the italics and write out whatever the tweet was.
I don’t need to include the URL. I don’t need to include the @TrentDyrsmid and I don’t need to include the hashtag – hashtag in the words that are shown on the screen – and then I highlight it then I turn it into a hyperlink with the URL that I got from ClickToTweet.
So now, when you’re done, all someone has to do is click that and it will populate up a tweet with a hashtag in the URL. Everything, all in it, cause you crafted it that way and they hit the tweet button and whamo! And that’s it! The tweet is sent and you my friends now are taking advantage of all that excitement that your new customers, or your new subscribers, or whatever it is that they just did whatever transactions they just completed, you give them a way a frictionless way to easily share their excitement with their tribe.
Alright so that is for this episode. If you would like to get to these show notes and I’ll include some links to all this stuff and some screenshots and so forth, just go to brightideas.co/111.
So that’s it and I’m your host Trent Dyrsmid. Thank you so very much for tuning in. If you enjoy this episode, I would love it if you would go to brightideas.co/love where you will see a transactional tweet where you can tweet out and say – “yeah brightideas podcast is pretty bad ass and you should check it out too”! I don’t think that’s exactly what it says but it’s something similar to that.
Okay, thank you so much and I want you to comeback for another episode soon. Take care
Additional Resources
- 5 Ways to Increase Twitter Promotion: Part 1
- 5 Ways to Increase Twitter Promotion: Part 2
- How Michael Gass Gets 30,000 Visitors a Month