I’ve got you covered.
I sift through trillions (well, hundreds) of online publications to stay on top of marketing news that might affect your online business.
In the marketing spotlight this week:
- Traffic Generation Café moves to WP Engine (and soon to Genesis);
- WordPress 3.6 “Oscar” release;
- Why you shouldn’t use press releases for link building;
- A free anchor text over-optimization tool;
- Facebook’s embedded posts and secure connection;
- New Buffer features;
- Pinterest price-reduction alerts;
- Easily create your own .gifs in Tumblr;
- New NSA leak;
- Chromecast: the rebirth of Google TV;
- and much more.
Let’s start with the news from Traffic Generation Café.
At TrafficGenerationCafe.com
As many of you know, I spent two blissful weeks visiting my Russian family 200 miles south of Moscow.
Here’s a peak at what my daughter Emma and I have been up to:
In other words, we had way too much fun to work.
Thus, my writing time was cut down to bare minimum (my weekly Marketing Skinnies really).
Fortunately, Ivin Viljoen just published an interview we did a couple of weeks ago where we talked about many a traffic generation technique I currently use to drive more traffic to Traffic Generation Café on a daily basis.
Who Did I Interview When I Wanted To Know About Traffic? Ana Hoffman – Ivin Viljoen at ivinviljoen.net
Here are just some of Ivin’s takeaways from the interview:
- Ana approached her blog to give people ‘fish’ but instead wanted to ‘teach people how to fish’. This is the basis of her success.
- Ana doesn’t pay for traffic as she believes she cannot teach about free traffic and pay for traffic.
- Ana is in the information business, so she measures ROI on her traffic by looking at subscribers to her email list, which is monetized.
- Questions you need to ask when constructing a sales campaign: What is your site about, what are you selling and why should they buys from you. Focus on design and converting traffic before driving traffic to it.
- Ana played around on Slideshare for traffic generation and generated 300,000 views on the platform.
- Even though she is pretty much a traffic guru, she is still learning about traffic generation.
- If you’re going to shell out money on a traffic generation platform, like a forum, put 100% into testing that platform and guage the results.
- Descriptive, interest garnering post titles draw more traffic and can also be optimized for search engines. You can have both great titles and search engine friendly posts.
- When you write, write for people, because they are the ones that click on titles and in search engines.
- Ana is also affected by Google algorithm changes.
- Best instant traffic tip, becomes visible to influences. Link round ups are a great way to do that. Interviews are also a great way to draw links and traffic to your blog.
Listen to the interview here.
Good-bye, Hostgator; Hello WP Engine!
Another news from Traffic Generation Café: I was finally fed up with Hostgator shenanigans and moved to my new hosting provider – WP Engine.
Just take a look at this screenshot of my downtime in the past month; abysmal!
By the way, if you are not utilizing free Pingdom website monitoring tools, you definitely should. They’ll send you an email every time your site goes down; great way to keep tabs on your site performance!
Why WP Engine?
I was looking for reliability and reputation and found it at WP Engine.
Plus, they’ve already lived up to one of their promises – site speed.
Traffic Generation Café has never been this fast; I am loving it.
I’ll keep you updated on how I find their services as time goes on, but for now two thumbs up to WP Engine from Ana.
WordPress
WordPress 3.6 “Oscar”
The latest and greatest WordPress, version 3.6, is now live to the world and includes:
- a new blog-centric theme,
- autosave and post locking,
- a revamped revision browser,
- native support for audio and video embeds,
- and improved integrations with Spotify, Rdio, and SoundCloud.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t nearly as exciting as it was built up to be, but it is what it is.
Here’s a video that shows off some of the features:
Should you upgrade now or wait?
According to Kimberley Castleberry:
While generally we are super cautious of new releases, WP 3.6 has been in the hands of plugin and theme developers long enough that you should find that near everything “just works”.
Of course you still have to be wary of abandoned plugins that are no longer supported, but you should see less conflicts than you may have seen on earlier versions.
You can also watch “The State of the Word” from Matt Mullenweg.
SEO
Press Releases and Link Building
If you do press releases for link building, don’t.
In the following video, John Mueller from Google makes it clear that Google wants all links in these press releases to be nofollowed. He did say having a URL at the end should be okay, but when he was grilled about it again, he said it is best to nofollow the links.
John even said press releases should be treated as advertisements and thus links in those releases should be nofollowed.
Reported by Barry Schwartz.
Anchor Text Over Optimization Tool [FREE]
Find anchor text over-optimization and review your anchor text diversity to determine if you are at risk of a penalty from Google Penguin – a great free tool from +Mark Traphagen at +Virante Search Marketing.
http://www.removeem.com/ratios.php
Here’s what my report looks like:
Surprisingly, Traffic Generation Café is over-optimized for “traffic generation cafe“. lol
Social Media
Facebook’s Embedded Posts
Good news: Facebook has FINALLY introduced embedded posts!
Bad news is, unless you are Bleacher Report, CNN, Huffington Post, Mashable and PEOPLE, you might not see this feature for a while – considering Facebook track record on rolling out new features to the public.
Update:
Thanks to a tip from +Ileane Smith, I found this workaround to embed your Facbook posts NOW.
Facebook Turns On Secure Browsing
All Facebook users are now connecting to the site via a secure connection. That’s good news.
The issue from a marketing angle is that secure connections don’t pass referrer data, unless the site getting traffic is also using a secure connection.
But Facebook’s announcement yesterday included mention of the company’s plan for “controlling referrer headers.”
Browsers traditionally omit the referrer when navigating from https to http. When you click on an external link, we’d like the destination site to know you came from Facebook while not learning your user id or other sensitive information. On most browsers, we redirect through an http page to accomplish this, but on Google Chrome we can skip this redirect by using their meta referrer feature.
In other words, webmasters and marketers should continue to see Facebook listed as a referrer despite the switch to default secure browsing. And that’s good news all around.
Story source.
Buffer
Two new Buffer features to report:
1. Custom Scheduling: The easiest way to schedule your social media updates into the future
You can now custom schedule anything you like.
2. Schedule Bulk Updates
Instead of hand selecting updates for your Buffer account, this Bulk Buffer Beta tool lets users upload a text file for bulk updates.
First Twitter Experience Hotel
If your idea of paradise is mingling with other Tweetaholics, then the “first Twitter experience hotel” is for you.
Located on the Spanish island of Majorca, the Sol Wave House harnesses the power of social media as a way to enhance its overall hotel experience.
Full story.
Pinterest Introduces Price-Drop Alerts
Pinterest introduced price-drop notifications on pinned items. The company will now send an email when prices on user-pinned items decline.
You don’t have to do anything to get notified – just keep pinning the things you like and leave price-drop notifications to Pinterest.
Create .GIFs with Tumblr
Tumblr now allows you to create your own .gif images – with a click of a button.
All you need is a Tumblr account and a computer camera.
Here’s a quick tutorial:
Marketing This & That
New Leak: NSA Can See Everything You Do Online
The latest leak shows that the NSA has far more power than previously thought.
The Guardian reports today that it has obtained slides that detail a NSA program called XKeyscore.
The program, much like PRISM, allows the agency to collect the Internet communications of foreign and domestic targets.
It sheds light on one of Snowden’s most controversial statements, made in his first video interview published by the Guardian on June 10.
“I, sitting at my desk,” said Snowden, could “wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email”.
What makes this latest leak so worrisome is that it seems to be held to even less oversight than the other surveillance programs.
Story source.
Speaking of NSA, do take a look at the lighter (or at least funnier) side of it in my previous Marketing Skinny, like this:
Google Recruiting “City Experts”
Looks like Google is trying to get more quality local reviews by recruiting “City Experts“, their version of Yelp’s Elite Squad - a community of trusted high-volume review generators.
Here’s the text of the Google message:
Do you love to review places around your city and share your opinion with others? Our new Google City Experts program gives top reviewers (users with at least 50 high quality reviews, and at least 5 reviews in the current month) special perks like event invitations, custom swag, special access to contests and more.
The following cities are currently available: Austin, Birmingham (UK), Bristol (UK), Chicago, Edinburgh, London, New York, Portland (OR), Phoenix, Raleigh-Durham, San Francisco and Sydney.
Source.
Enhanced AdWords
In case you run AdWord campaigns to drive paid web traffic to your site, you need to be aware of this change.
Also, read Google’s Quality Score Change: What Marketers Need To Know for more AdWords updates.
Chromecast: The Rebirth Of Google TV
Google TV was launched a few years ago to much hype and fanfare. But it was a big, expensive hardware proposition for most consumers, and it failed.
Enter Chromecast - a tiny WiFi-enabled device that plugs into existing TV HDMI ports. Perhaps most significantly, it’s also $35.
Chromecast permits video from YouTube, Netflix, Google Play and other online video and music apps to stream to TV from any device (PC, tablet, smartphone) via the Chrome browser. That includes iOS and Windows (PCs).
I like it!
Reported by Marketing Land. Read more at Google’s Official Blog.
Google’s Stop Watch/Timer
Did you know Google has a built-in timer? I had no idea.
All you need to do is to do a search for [set timer for X] and you are good to go!
Marketing Tool of the Week
Facebook Timeline Slicer
This free simple and easy to use Facebook app, built by my brilliant web designer Ian Belanger (who’s working on the new Traffic Generation Café design as we speak – I highly recommend him for your next design project) will help you slice and dice images that will fit perfectly in your Facebook Timeline.
In the screenshot below, I simply added the first photo I came across on my desktop, and even that one looks interesting with Timeline Slicer:
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:
Creating A Link Roundup – How It Will Get Traffic To Your Blog – Ian Knabel at ianknabelonline.com
Reasons Why You should Start A Blog – Prince Molak at onlinemoneydon.com
The low-down on anchor text and referencing other people’s content – Karen Wilson at wellmanwilson.com
WordPress Reading List – Tommy Miller at wpadvocate.com
6 months after my Backlink Experiment – What works for Google and what doesn’t – Servando Silva at stream-seo.com
The Writer’s Weekly Wrap-Up (Issue #10) – Kimberley Grabas at yourwriterplatform.com
Thankful Thursday: Money, Security, Triberr, Slideshare & Content – Adrienne Smith at adriennesmith.net
The Positives and the Perils of Monitoring Your Brand on the Internet – Ileane Smith at msileanespeaks.com
71 Ways to Promote and Market Your Book – Kimberley Grabas at yourwriterplatform.com
Blogelina Roundup for the Week Ending 8-02-13 – Tanya at blogelina.com
5 Helpful Tips For Business Growth Through Socializing Online – Eric Pangburn at snitchim.com
Why I Finally Said Goodbye To Organic Traffic – Ivan Widjaya at smbceo.com
MYF Approved Aug2: improving your business, and conversions rates – Iain Robson at marketingyourfarm.com
Use Twitter To Boost Your Blog’s Search Engine Visibility – Jane Sheeba at probloggingsuccess.com
7 Common Web Design Mistakes that Cost You Money – Mauro D’Andrea at blog-growth.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!
Subscribe to Stay Ahead
I share a lot of marketing news as well as the best posts I read throughout a week on my Google+ profile.
To read them as they come out and stay ahead of your competition, as well as become a social media star and share the best with YOUR followers (you’d be surprised how much it’ll do for your credibility and online presence!), join me there:
You can also subscribe to my G+ feed through your RSS reader of choice; just add the following link like with any normal blog RSS feed: http://tgcafe.it/gplus-feed
To an even better next week,
