Internet Marketing Support

Make sure you are getting the most out of your link building and PR efforts. You put in so much time and effort, don’t let great linking opportunities slip between the cracks. I’ve found that on occasion an online media source might reference a site in an article, but not link to that website. It’s a strange phenomenon, but it could be happening to you. Here’s a quick way to find out if it is.

Go to Yahoo.com. In the search box, type in:

intext:yoursite.com -site:yoursite.com

The results will bring up all the instances when someone has mentioned your website, but didn’t link to it. You may have to sift through the results a bit, because in some cases they may have linked to your website, but not every time they mentioned your site.

If you find that you are in fact missing out on some linking opportunities, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to send a kind email to the source and ask if they would link it for you. They’re already giving you credit and supporting your site, so there’s no reason that they wouldn’t want to link to you.

If you know of any other great ways of uncovering potentially lost links, I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.

Everyone knows what a great tool Twitter can be. You can network with folks in your professional space, keep in touch with friends, learn of news happening all over the world (before you see it on TV), and tweet about the ridiculous conversation you just overheard. Before jumping into the Twitter world, remember that Twitter offers a great opportunity for you to brand yourself or your company.

Lately I’ve noticed many tweeps with usernames that don’t resemble their actual name at all. By not using some form of your real name, I feel that you may be missing out on a great branding opportunity. It is extremely hard for people to remember you when your username is a series of numbers, letters, and special characters. Unless you have already built your business around a screen name similar to what @shoemoney has done, I feel that your best chance of building a name for yourself is to use your real name or some shortened version. A few quick examples of people who have used Twitter to aid them in their branding efforts: Guy Kawasaki @guykawasaki, Mike Volpe @mvolpe, and David Meerman Scott @dmscott.

While Twitter is super entertaining, remember that it is an extremely powerful, free tool. Take full advantage of it. What are your thoughts on using Twitter as a branding tool?

Recently, I had the opportunity to test out StumbleUpon.com’s advertising platform for a project I was working on. I was skeptical at first, because when you sign up for a StumbleUpon account it states that each visit will only cost $0.05. I was previously unaware of many places where you could buy traffic for that cheap.

What is StumbleUpon? As you may know, StumbleUpon is a tool that allows people to discover great web pages that match their interests and hobbies. You can click a Stumble button on your browser, and StumbleUpon will open up a web page that should be relevant and new to you. You then tell it whether or not you like that particular page. With millions of web pages on the internet, StumbleUpon aims to make it easier for you to discover new sites that are relevant to you. Tour StumbleUpon Advertising.

Create a Campaign: I would like to focus more on the results of my campaign, so in the interest of saving time, here is a link to promote your page with StumbleUpon. A few pointers when setting up a campaign: I recommend appending a source code to your page URL, so you can track the results more easily with your analytics package. A source code looks like this: http://yoursite.com/?source=1234. I also recommend using the Advanced Options when setting up the campaign. This will allow you to filter your campaign to be displayed to stumblers based on geographic region, age, and gender.

Campaign Results:

Unique campaigns – 4

Campaign duration – 12 days

Campaign budget – $1,014

Total visits – 20,413

Cost per visit – $0.049

Results from one of the four campaigns

Conclusion: After looking at the results, I was pleased to see that StumbleUpon delivered traffic for $0.05 per visitor. Another bonus was that once the campaign was over, I was still seeing a significant amount of traffic from those links used in the campaign. If you include the extra traffic, you could say that the cost per visitor was considerably less than $0.05.

I could only find two drawbacks with this ad platform. One, my bounce rate went up quite a bit. This is due to the nature of StumbleUpon. Stumblers typically land on your page, take a quick glance, and then leave. Two, I had to add new campaigns every once in a while. It seems like campaigns can become stale.

Overall, I would highly recommend StumbleUpon Advertising to young web sites looking to get quick cheap traffic. Have you used StumbleUpon Advertising before? I am interested in hearing what your experiences were.

BilBraur.com