Weekly Marketing Skinny: April 21, 2013

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get the skinny on marketing events of past week In the spotlight this week:

List building week at Traffic Generation Café;
How do you know if your email marketing is working?
Google Analytics, Blogger, Affiliate Network, AdSense, and yes – airport;
Does exact anchor text in internal links hurt your SEO?
What NASA can teach us about social media;
and how to protect your blog from the recent WordPress hack attacks.

On to your weekly marketing skinny:

At TrafficGenerationCafe.com

Last week turned out to be a list building week at Traffic Generation Café.

First up:

orange check 21 Powerful List Building Tips Rich Man and Poor Man Style

Have money to build your list quickly?

Are most of your assets in pizza coupons, so you have to build your list slowly but truly?

Either way, this post is great to give you some creative ideas to put your list building on overdrive.

Plus, here’s my newest list building Slideshare presentation:

Loved it? Embed this presentation on your blog

(just copy and paste the code below)

My guest was Shane MeLaugh and he definitely delivered some of the best list building content I’ve even heard – bar none.

Don’t miss it!

Also, there’s a special discount offer for one of the best list building plugins – Hybrid Connect.

You can get it at 20% to 35% off (depending on the license).

To apply your Hybrid Connect discount, simply follow this link.

Again, it’ll be available to you for the next 7 days only – till Monday, April 22, if my calculation are correct.

Get your Hybrid Connect at 20% off here.

Email Marketing

How do you know if you are doing well with your email marketing? orange check Email marketing automation provider Silverpop released its 2013 Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark study, analyzing key metrics of fourteen different industries in the U.S. and Canada, as well as countries in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific.

What’s a good open rate? Click-through rate? Unsubscribe rate?

That’s why I found the following study so useful.

You can see more images in this post at MarketingLand.com.

Google

Quite a few Google news this week, but most of them are just small tweaks or curiosity bits that won’t affect too many of us.

Google Analytics

orange check Real-Time Widgets Now Available in Dashboards

google analytics real time

The Dashboards feature in Google Analytics is a great way to arrange a set of related custom widgets into a report you look at frequently.

Now it’s been expanded with four new real-time widgets that you can and plug into any dashboard (new or existing) of your choosing.

Great feature for analytics junkies.

Blogger

You can now incorporate Google+ comments in Blogger.

Great feature indeed; however, the thought of using Blogger platform for your business should not even cross your mind.

It might be interesting to test it as a content aggregator of sorts though directing traffic back to your main site…

Thoughts?

By the way, notice how the comments that get the most interaction on Google+ are pushed to the top – what a smart way to stand out!

And looks like Ms. Ileane Smith of BasicBlogTips.com is rocking it on Google+, huh?

Google Affiliate Network

orange check …will soon be retired.

Long Live Google Graveyard!

Google Glass

orange check TOS says no reselling or loaning early versions.

Google Glass, the Internet-connected glasses, are now starting to be delivered to their first customers.

Interestingly enough, their TOS states that if anyone resells or loans the device, Google “reserves the right to deactivate the Device, and neither you nor the unauthorized person using the Device will be entitled to any refund, product support, or product warranty.”

Wired reports that a Philadelphia man who had put his not-yet-shipped Explorer Edition glasses up for sale on eBay canceled the auction — the bids had gone as high as $90,000 — lest Google finds out and revokes his right to buy the glasses. (He had been selected as part of a promotional campaign by Google that expanded the field of testers beyond developers.) (source)

What does Google Glass do?

Google AdSense

orange check AdSense Announces Upcoming Changes to Terms & Conditions

Nothing major here either.

Other than some design tweaks, the only points of note are:

With mobile being one of the big trends in 2013 and beyond, we’re expanding our Terms to cover mobile properties more specifically.
We’ve also incorporated guidelines for using the AdMob SDK and other publisher products.

orange check Google AdSense and YouTube

Google AdSense also announced that they have started calculating and reporting on earnings from YouTube slightly differently.

Starting April 1, 2013, AdSense will no longer calculate and report AdSense for Content Host earnings for YouTube partners. Instead, AdSense earnings from YouTube videos will only be calculated by YouTube and displayed in YouTube Analytics.

Google Airport

orange check Google’s $82 Million Private Airport Terminal Approved

It’s good to be the King…

How to Contact Google

orange check Have you ever had a problem with a Google product, but didn’t know where to turn?

Found this great post from Kristi Hines that you definitely want to bookmark for future use:

How to Contact Google - Kristi Hines at IAcquire.com

SEO

orange check Exact anchor text in internal links

One of my readers recently asked me if using exact anchor text to interlink posts within your blog might hurt your SEO.

(You probably already know that Google definitely frowns upon using exact anchor text in backlinks you get from other blogs – that was a big part of their Penguin update.)

However, using exact anchor text within your blog is different and much more acceptable – that was my response to my reader’s question.

And now Matt Cutts confirmed my hunch:

Social Media

Social Media and Government

orange check NASA’s official Twitter account, @NASA, picked up its second straight Shorty Award for best government use of social media.

And NASA’s@MarsCuriosity account won a Shorty Award as Foursquare Mayor of the Year. (The rover has been checking in as it explores the Martian surface.)

The agency has almost 500 different social media accounts spread across multiple social networks and, if you are curious as to how on earth they manage them with such success, read to MarketingLand’s 5 Questions With NASA’s Social Media Managers.

Twitter IPO?

orange check According to MarketingLand.com, Twitter has been busy diversifying services in what looks to be a clear path that leads to an IPO.

It’s in the process of featuring television content online with partnership talks with Viacom and NBC Universal.

I surely hope they won’t repeat Facebook’s biggest business blunder of 2012.

WordPress

orange check If you keep up with WordPress news (or at least read my Marketing Skinnies to help you stay updated – sign up here to get it in your inbox on Saturdays), you know that a massive botnet of tens of thousands of machines is attempting to hack in to weak password protected “admin” accounts of the popular blogging platform.

And according to ZDNet, the worst is yet to come.

Solution? Simple, as to WP founder Matt Mullenweg:

“Here’s what I would recommend: If you still use “admin” as a username on your blog, change it, use a strong password, if you’re on WP.com turn on two-factor authentication, and of course make sure you’re up-to-date on the latest version of WordPress.

Do this and you’ll be ahead of 99% of sites out there and probably never have a problem.”

Thank You

To all of you who mentioned Traffic Generation Café in any share or form in the past week, my whole-hearted THANK YOU.

Traffic Generation Café would NOT be what it is today without you.

Here are just some of the mentions I came across in the past week:

orange check MYF Approved Weekly: April 12 - Iain Robson, MarketingYourFarm.com

Iain must really like Traffic Generation Café… ; here’s another mention:

orange check MYF Approved weekly: April 20 - Iain Robson, MarketingYourFarm.com

orange check How to Design a Custom PowerPoint Theme - Carol Bates at CarolhBates.com talks through creating custom PP themes step by step.

orange check Fetching Friday – Resources Mashup & ElegantTheme Contest Winners - Kristi Hines at Kikolani.com; one of her famous weekly link roundups.

orange check The Friday Most Excellent – Crazy World Edition – Larry Deane at SideIncomeBlogging.com

orange check 5 Content Ideas To Increase Visitors To Your B2B Blog – Tasia Gonsalves-Barriero at tgbcopywriting.com

orange check Content Marketing 101: Definition, Channels and Success Stories – Ann Smarty at AuthorityLabs.com

orange check Boost Your Blog’s Traffic & Profit with Blog Engage – Nicole Fende kindly mentions Traffic Generation Café in a comment at smallbusinessfinanceforum.com

orange check 28 Ways to Increase Traffic to Your Website – Matthew Rupp at sawwebmarketing.com

orange check CASE STUDY: HOW TO AVOID WASTING TONS OF MONEY TO GROW YOUR ONLINE AUDIENCE [LU08] – Dee Copeland Patience at lipstickunplugged.com

Have I missed your mention? Let me know in the comments!

Want to see your name here? Mention Traffic Generation Café in your next blog post!

To an even better next week,

traffic generation cafe

Social Media Magazine