Marketing No Brainers » Social Marketing| Cost Effective Internet Marketing |

My Social Marketing Experiment Took Traffic Up Thirty Per Cent

August 1st, 2008Social Marketing, Traffic 2 Comments

Social marketing is the buzz now. But does it work? Here are the July results for my social marketing traffic project for the site you are on right now, Marketing No Brainers. These are straight from my AWStats for July 2008.

Web Site Unique Visitors - Up 35%
Number of Visits - Up 30%
Pages Viewed - Up 20%

In addition, I ran a Google Analytics report last week that showed traffic from all social marketing resources was now 42% of my total traffic. So obviously social marketing works for getting traffic.

I’m delighted to know that such great results were had from something that is essentially fun, as that is how I designed my social marketing traffic project to be. The method I’m using is extremely simple, and I’ll be releasing a free report to all subscribers on the exact how-to in a few days. So if you’re not already subscribing via email, just go up to the right corner and submit your info.

Social marketing traffic is real, the visitors are targeted, and they convert as well or better than other targeted traffic. Stay tuned for your report.

Share This

More »

Put Twitter To Work With Tweet My Blog

July 22nd, 2008Blogging, Social Marketing 1 Comment

Put Twitter to work with these two free tools:

Tweet My Blog is a painless to install plugin that does two things very well.

Gathers your Twitter Posts into a sidebar widget and makes the links back to Twitter clickable. This is the feature that the Twitter badge, provided by Twitter itself, is missing.
Posts to Twitter automatically when you post to your blog. There is no excuse now to forget about posting to Twitter for days on end, unless of course you don’t update your blog on a regular basis.

I like the first feature the best, as forgetting about posting to Twitter is not a problem I have. But it is nice to know that I don’t have to manually tweet my blog posts.

And let’s not forget the Twitter Counter. As you can see in the sidebar, I have this above my Tweet My Blog widget. It’s just a piece of code that goes into a text widget and you get the Twitter Counter at, where else? TwitterCounter.com.

So get to work and put Twitter to work with these two free resources.

Share This

More »

Stumble Rush How To Get Traffic At StumbleUpon

July 17th, 2008Social Marketing 2 Comments

If you’re stumbling around trying to get traffic, StumbleUpon is a great place to get some.

What’s StumbleUpon? It’s a social bookmarking and rating site that rates sites thumbs up or thumbs down. But StumbleUpon has its learning curve. And like all social networking sites there are rules, boundaries, limitations, and site etiquette. So I was happy to learn that Caroline Middlebrook has polished up her free Stumble Rush course and made a public offering for it.

I’ll be the first to admit, though using it for a while, I am a relative newbie at StumbleUpon. For me, Caroline’s Stumble Rush course has been a big help for effective use of the site and a real eye opener for all of the things that can be done there.

One of the things I really like about this course is that in addition to being a great how-to course, it comes to you every three days in manageable sections, so you can learn and really apply the current lesson effectively before you move on to the next.

There are advanced tactics that are an upsell to the basic course, but that is optional. I’m honestly not ready for them yet, but you might want to consider grabbing them while you’re thinking about it.

Follow along like I am with the Stumble Rush course and you’ll be stumbling and getting more website traffic from StumbleUpon in no time.

Share This

More »

Blogging, Facebook, Social Marketing, and You

June 18th, 2008Social Marketing No Comments

A few years ago blogging was “out there.” Bloggers were people way ahead of the Internet curve. Now blogging is taken for granted. You hear about it on the evening news. You read blogs whether you realize it or not.

The real revolution caused by blogging was that anyone could have a website where they could share their ideas, opinions, and products with the virtual world. Platforms like Blogger, Typepad, and WordPress.com made it easy to instantly start blogging without paying a penny - no need for a domain name, no need for web hosting.

When WordPress made their software public and free of charge, the real blogging revolution started. Now bloggers could have a blog that they were in control of, on their own domain and on their own hosted server. This site was originally a Blogger blog, and two years ago I imported it into my WordPress install at this domain.

Now it has come to my attention that some of you aren’t blogging yet. Why not? A blog is just a website with a unique type of formatting. It is the outright easiest way to get a site up and running quickly. But here’s the important part:

If you’re going to do any kind of Social Marketing you need a (preferably WordPress) blog.

And why would I want to do social marketing, you might ask? The answer is that social marketing is the best way to get people who are actually interested in what you are doing. Let’s say you are in the self improvement niche. Social sites like Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, etc. let you interact with others who are also interested in the topic. And one of the original types of social networking sites would be forums in your chosen niche.

Sites like Facebook allow you to put your blog’s feed, intact, into your profile page. There’s an application you can add to your profile that basically does it for you. How cool is that?

I avoided Facebook for a long time until smart marketers I knew started using it. Even then I dragged my feet because I thought of it as another mySpace. It’s not. You have total control over who your friends are. And if they are not your friend they can see your picture but not your profile.

Social marketing got its legs when people decided that the search engine results that they got in Google, Yahoo, and MSN were really not relevant to what they were looking for online. It’s grown from the original bookmarking idea to full blown people oriented gathering places for sharing information.

If you’re not already into Social Marketing, I recommend you start. You can see my Facebook profile here, after signing up - it should take you to a simple sign up page.

http://profile.to/lowellrieger

If Facebook is too much, start at Twitter -

http://twitter.com/lowellrieger

After a while, say a couple of weeks doing one, the other or both, then there is FriendFeed - aggregates Social sites and your blog’s rss. And you can integrate it back into your Facebook profile.

http://friendfeed.com/lowellrieger

These are by no means the only social sites you should have a presence on. But there are way too many social sites to do all of them. I’ve picked these two because they bring me the most value for the time spent. In my opinion they are the first places to start. I’ll be featuring additional Social Marketing sites in the future, as well as tools for using them.

If you spend some time learning the ins and outs of each site you add to your marketing mix before moving on to the next site, you’ll avoid burnout and overload. And in a couple of years, when Social Marketing is as commonplace as blogging, you’ll be on top of the mountain, instead of crawling around in the valley waiting for the next big thing.

It’s already here.

Blogging Facebook Social Marketing and You
.

Share This