Pinterest.Com Is The Next Big Thing!

It’s Facebook!  It’s Stumbleupon!  It’s Flickr!  It’s WHAT IS HOT!

Two months ago I had not even heard about Pinterest.  Today I can’t turn-around without reading more about it and according to Alexa, (a decent barometer of website traffic) Pinterest is going through the roof!

The Pinterest terms don’t allow outright spamming and I doubt the spammers would be successful anyway because nobody would follow them – but if done properly Pinterest can be a good way to increase your brand recognition especially if your brand/product/website is visual in nature.

Don’t miss out on the next big thing, jump in before it’s too late!

 

Drupal: Integrating Your Site With Facebook

After avoiding it for years, I’ve finally added some Facebook integration with the website. I don’t know why I avoided Facebook this long. I’m not sure if thought Facebook was just a ‘fad’ or I just didn’t think it would help in any way or maybe I thought that the integration would be too difficult. So far it turns out I was wrong on just about all counts.

It’s fairly easy to integrate things like Facebook “Like” buttons, “Facepiles”, etc. There are several Drupal Modules for Facebook to choose from. Which one you decide on depends on what you want to do, and compatibility with your existing modules – I started with the Facebook Social plugins integration module which is pretty simple to setup and gives you instructions for creating your Facebook App ID, etc. I had Facebook Social plugins up and running in just a few minutes – so much for being difficult.

It’s hardly been 48 hours since I built a “Facebook Page” for the website, and we’ve already gotten a few “likes”. Also, by adding the Facebook “Like” button to all of our pages I am now able to see how many times those pages had been ‘shared’ or “liked” over the years. I was shocked to see many pages that had been shared or liked hundreds of times! Facebook also has a great little analytics package called “Insights“, that once setup provides a webmaster with some startling demographics information about the people visiting your page.

 

Perhaps the most surprising of all are the results of the Facebook advertising campaign I setup. I was able to buy a CPM ad for only a few cents per 1,000 views. Even more surprising is that according to Adsense & Google Analytics, the CTR and earnings for visitors coming from Facebook is incredibility high! Man.. I was really wrong about that one..

As far as Facebook being a ‘fad’.. This is the one I was most wrong about. Over 600million Facebook members and still growing proves me more wrong every day!

If you haven’t setup a Facebook presence or at least tried/testing running a Facebook ad campaign I recommend you give it a try. You can see/follow/”Like” our new Facebook page (above) or my “public” Facebook profile (using my middle name instead of last name) here:

My Personal Page |

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Increase Traffic With Comment Notifications

In the last few months I activated “comment notification” modules/add-ins at both the website and here in the blog.  I was using these modules long ago but deactivated them due to problems I was having with my email server.  I never got around to reactivating them and now I’m kicking myself.   “Comment notification” modules like Comment Notify for Drupal and Comment Notifier for WordPress give members and anonymous visitors the option to receive an email any time someone else replies to a post that they have commented on.  These email reminders bring visitors back to your website and can spur additional comments/conversation.   This can not only help keep your traffic numbers up, but the additional comments posted are more user-generated content to feed the ever-hungry Google Bots.

It may take time for the number of visitors being notified (and coming back to your site or blog) to “ramp up” – It’s been about 90 days since I activated the Drupal Comment Notify module at the site, and we’re now sending about 500-700 notifications per day.  Here at the blog which gets less traffic than GrownUpGeek.com, about 100 notices per week are being sent.  Assuming that 75% of people that get the comment notifications (that they opted-in for) return to site to check the new comments, that’s several thousand visitors per month that we would not have otherwise.

Using comment notifications to keep visitors engaged and returning to your website or blog may be one of those common-sense “no shit Sherlock!” ideas, but if you are a new webmaster/blogger, just hadn’t thought of it, or ‘forgot’ about it like I did, you might want to give it a try.   If you already have comment notifications enabled on your blog or website, post a comment and let me know how it’s been working for you, and be sure to add your email address so you get notified of followup posts!  :-)

Know Your Traffic And Make The Best Of It

Website Traffic

  • Do you know what pages are the most popular on your site?
  • Do you know what keyword(s) bring you the most search engine traffic?
  • Do you know what IP’s hit your site most often?
  • Do you know how many visitors are at your site at any given moment?

 I do.. and a whole lot more – and this is probably one of those secrets to my success that so many people ask me about.  Since day-one, I have always obsessed on my traffic.  Where it was from, who it was, how/why they came, how long they stayed, what they did, etc – to this day, I still spend more time looking at and sifting through traffic stats than anything else.

In the early days I looked through my raw-logs and mostly paid attention only to the referral strings.  When raw logs got too tedious to fish through, I moved up to using the information that the Drupal Statistics Module provides.  The Drupal stats module is actually much easier to use than raw logs, and provides real-time info like top referrers, top visitors by IP, hits/referrers by page, and more.  Not long after that, I also started using Google Analytics which really lets me drill-down through my visitor data, but it also has a ~3 hour delay before I can see the information that it collects.

What I Do With All That Data

As with most things, I keep it pretty simple.

The metric I watch the most is what pages are moving up in the SERPS and starting to bring in traffic.  If I see that a particular page is beginning to rank well for a term I may “optimize” that page a bit by adding a bit more text with the high-ranking keywords in it, changing the keywords in the page to bold, or modifying the title to include the keywords, etc.  If the page starts to bring in a lot of traffic I might throw in an additional Adsense unit (with a channel so I can track it) or I might put an afilliate link on the page if appropriate.  I may also add more pages with similar content and keywords.

When I first started the website, and noticed traffic trickling in from a few specific keywords I did these things (above), particularly adding more related content – doing this made my traffic jump from a few hundred visitors per day to over 4,000/day in just a few weeks.  This was a huge accomplishment and the funny thing is that the keywords and content that we started to focus on (and get traffic for) had nothing to do with what we had in mind when we first created the website – but “following the traffic“  has helped to get us where we are today.

Another metric I like to watch is referrals (who’s sending me traffic).  I can easily view referrals in either the Drupal stats or Analytics, but I prefer Drupal’s ‘Top Referrers’  becuase it’s fast, simple, and always current (no delays).   There isn’t a lot I can do with this info, but it lets me know who’s linking to the site which tells me what other people find interesting or helpful.  I also use the Drupal stats to watch what IP’s are hitting the site most often.  This lets me see what members are the most active and also tips me off to scrapers that might need to be blocked from the site (they are the anyonmous IP’s that have 10x more page-views than anyone else, and tend to originate from other countries).

I also dive into Analytics to see things like browser type, country of origin, time of day/day of week trends and about a million other things, but none of these are as helpful to me as just knowing why people are coming to the site – and building on and capitalizing on what is already working.

Do YOU know what your most popular content is and more important – are you capitalizing on it?

How Can I Increase My Website Traffic ?

The owner of Finance-Maker.com contacted me with a few questions:

I get roughly 30 unique’s a day from google. My question is how can I increase my traffic but before you answer this question I would like to say please don’t tell me to submit articles and link build and leave a footer on forums and do press releases and so on.

I can only tell you what’s worked for me, which was a combination of link building, SEO and a bit of creative forum-posting and blog-commenting.  When I first started GrownUpgeek.com I sent out hundreds of link-requests to webmasters of websites with content related to my site.  I sent these requests the ‘old fashioned’ way, with a personalized message including why I thought a link from that site would benefit his visitors.  I sent several of these requests each night for months – and the ‘hit rate’ was very low, but the links I did get were from quality sites with related content (which is important).

I didn’t know much about SEO back then, but I knew enough to know that I should cross-link the site heavily – which I did.  Virtually every page had links with my keyword anchor-text to two or three other pages on the site, and I also added one outgoing link to a very high PR website with content related to that particular page.

I also went on a comment and posting spree at blogs and forums.  I was always careful not to “spam”, but to only post comments on blogs or forums that were related to my site and the posts/comments were always genuinely helpful.  On most of these comments I left “deep links” into specific pages on the site, not just to the home page.  I also watched the “upcoming” stories on Digg.com looking for upcoming stories that were related to the content of my site – I went to every site, and if it was a blog that allowed commenting I left a comment with a link.  After dropping hundreds of comments on these blogs that had been submitted to Digg, ONE of those blogs hit the front page of Digg.com.  That very helpful comment that I left on the blog sent hundreds of visitors per day for months and I noticed very soon after that my Google ranking for searches related to the anchor text I left on that comment skyrocketed – maybe coincidence, but I doubt it.

Early-on I read that leaving signatures with links in forum-posts might be considered ‘spammy’ by Google so I never did that with my site – and only recently started doing it with my blog, and only on ONE forum.  I would be careful about over-doing it with forum signatures.  As a matter of fact, for a new site I would recommend not doing it at all.

Article submission: Now with Article submission why would people come to “your” “my” site if your articles are posted on another site and ranked in the SERPS higher than you and then on top of that WHY wouldn’t google just punish “you” “me” for duplicate content.

I have never submitted an article – partially because I’m just not good enough of an article writer, and partially because I don’t see how it can be very helpful as you’ve pointed out.  I suppose that if you can write an awesome enough article to get it posted on a high-traffic, high-PR site and you are able to give just enough information in the article to get people’s interest, then give a link to your site it might work – but I am the king of lazy-webmasters and that just seemed like too much effort with too-little (guaranteed) return on my investment of time.

In general if you keep your content unique and update it often you will give people a reason to visit, and hopefully come back for more.  I also noticed that you had a finance forum, which is a great way to build some user-generated content.  I would suggest building your forum by seeding a few interesting posts, replying to other posts, etc.  You might also consider allowing anyone to post without having to register.  I have found that if someone has to take 30 seconds to register before they can make a post they just wont bother.  The first few months after creating our forums we left them open to anonymous users to create new topics and post comments, then slowly locked it down over time.  Opening the forums this way generated a lot of posts & comments (food for the Google bot), but it was also a lot of work to delete the spam which slowly began to crop up.  Do everything you can to make the forum look as busy as possible.  Increase the window of time that shows how many people are online, show a (big) number of members, be creative – make it look like a place that people want to be.

Good luck and I hope you don’t mind the free links I gave you.. Maybe a few of my readers will check out finance-maker.com and post a few additional comments/suggestions.