jondyer.net

Posted by Cyrus Shepard

Consider this image below from the SEOmoz Google Analytics account. Behold a site rarely displayed in SEO blogs. 

Notice the similarities to a typical Kansas highway. Both are flat, contain no peaks or valleys, and are traffic free.

Such was the sad state of SEOmoz’s referral traffic from Google News prior to April of this year. In truth, SEOmoz never pursued traffic from Google News for several reasons.

• Google News never sent us significant traffic in the past
• In our minds, we don’t consider ourselves a "news" organization
• Unlike news organizations, SEOmoz doesn’t drive revenue through advertising

What Changed Our Minds?

In April, Rand’s post on White Hat SEO went nuclear. The blogosphere exploded with commentary and traffic poured in from all corners of the Internet. We recorded 8000 visits from Google News the first two days alone. 

The drought was over.

But why that particular post? Rob Ousey from Distilled pointed out that the few SEOmoz posts included in Google’s News index all had one thing in common. They each contained a number in the URL. For example:

../blog/white-hat-seo-it-fing-works-12421
../blog/google-told-you-so-12428
../ugc/dissecting-local-seo-via-competitive-analysis-12284

Given the way Google News indexes content, this makes sense:

“Display a three-digit number. The URL for each article must contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits… Please note that this rule is waived with News sitemaps.”   
- From Google (publishers) Help

Our indexation was pure accident! By default, most SEOmoz blog URLs don’t contain numbers. We decided to dispose of our previous perceptions and chart a proactive course in gaining visits from Google News.

Here’s how we did it – and how you can too.

1. Are You Newsworthy? Yes You Are!

You no longer have to be a big news player (or a spammer) to find your way in Google News. Google clearly states both blogs and news organizations alike qualify for inclusion.

Ask yourself the following questions. Consider yourself a candidate if you meet the following criteria.

1. Do you discuss current events?
2. Is your content timely?
3. Do you offer commentary?
4. Is your blog itself newsworthy?

These are some of the same qualifications that make for great content in any context. The number of categories in Google News is staggering. It includes topics as varied as business, education, humor and even ice hockey.  

There’s room for everything in Google News. Love to write about hair? Yep, there’s news for that.

Don’t sell yourself short. If you’re not already producing newsworthy content, you should.

2. Qualify Your Site

Not everyone gets in Google News automatically. To see if you’re already included in the index, perform a “site:” command within Google News using your domain. In our case, SEOmoz was already included.

If Google hasn’t included your site in its news index, you can request inclusion.

Rand addressed how to improve your chances of appearing in Google News in a recent PRO Webinar. He recommended improving your site’s substantive metrics, including such factors as the number of inbound links and subscribers to your blog. Having a good user interface can also help.

Again, even if getting in Google News isn’t your focus, these are the same benchmarks for increasing your visibility on the Web in any market.

3. Get Your Content Indexed

Google keeps it’s news index separate from it’s regular web index. Just because Google crawls your site and you appear in search results, doesn’t mean your content is included in Google news.

There are two ways to get your content included in the index:

1. Number your URLs (see above)
or
2. Create a Google News Sitemap.

The sitemap contains a number of advantages over simply numbering your URLs. Sitemaps allow you to tag your article with proper titles and publication dates. In addition to categorizing your content more accurately, sitemaps also give you the ability to annotate your content with metadata such as keywords or stock tickers.

The downside is news sitemaps can be complicated to build if you lack development skills. Google dictates that your news sitemap should only contain articles published in the last 24 hours. So you’ll want an automated system. In our case, Casey Henry was able to build a custom sitemap generator that met these specifications.

If you run a blog using a third party platform, a number of good solutions exist for WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and more.

4. Rise to the Top

A number of great articles have been written about how Google News works and how to get indexed. Indexation relies on several factors:

1. Topic Factors – How hot is the story topic? Last week it was The Governator, but it could be anything, even kittens.
2. Story Factors – How relevant and fresh is your specific content to this topic.
3. Publication Reputation – Sort of like Domain Authority, except specific to news publication.

Timing is key to Google news. Paraphrasing from Rand’s aformentioned webinar: "If you break a big story first, you can see more traffic than you ever imagined from the first page of Google News."

But timing a great story is hard to predict.

What you can control are a number of on-page factors that improve your chances. For example, adding a good photo next to your headline increases the likelihood of Google displaying the photo, which also helps your CTR. Adding a unique video to your post (along with maintaining an active video sitemap) also improves your chances of rising to the top.

Other best practices to consider include titles, article text, and more. This great interview with Josh Cohen highlights many of these techniques.

5. What About the Results?

After we added a sitemap, Google News became the 4th largest referring traffic source for SEOmoz, bigger than Linkedin, StumbleUpon and Hacker News (but significantly behind Twitter, Facebook, and Google Image search.)

In the last month, three different posts received over 1000 extra visits. Our future posts are "primed" for more. To be fair, this isn’t a huge amount of traffic for a site like SEOmoz. The traffic has a high bounce rate and low conversion rate.

That said, SEOmoz has not changed its content one iota to gain more traffic from Google News. We don’t "chase the algorithm." Were we to optimize our content towards this goal, our traffic would undoubtedly rise higher. 

Got a success story or more tips? Please share in the comments below.

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Posted by randfish

I caught a post this week from Peter Shankman entitled "I Will Never Hire a Social Media Expert and Neither Should You." It’s not the first of its kind, nor was it the best argued, but it struck a nerve and has made a number of waves around the web. Needless to say, as someone who employs multiple team members with a great deal of social media expertise, I strongly disagree with the substance and sentiment of the piece.

Here’s Peter’s argument in his own words:

No business in the world should want a “Social Media Expert” on their team. They shouldn’t want a guru, rock-star, or savant, either. If you have a “Social Media Expert” on your payroll, you’re wasting your money.

Being an expert in Social Media is like being an expert at taking the bread out of the refrigerator. You might be the best bread-taker-outer in the world, but you know what? The goal is to make an amazing sandwich, and you can’t do that if all you’ve done in your life is taken the bread out of the fridge.

The full piece makes a passionate case, but an entirely false one. There’s no evidence, only opinion; no examples, just speculation; no data, but loads of stereotyping. The author is certainly one of the premier benefactors of social traffic and of a new, more socially-connected web (Mr. Shankman founded and sold HARO, the service that connects journalists to subject-matter experts), yet he somehow manages to ignore the benefits social media has brought him (and his clients/company) to write a scathing dressing-down of anyone who dares claim expertise in this marketing discipline.

As with my arguments against Mr. Roadruck last month, I’m worried that I’m falling for trollbait again. But, the people who do great social media marketing deserve a strong defense, and I believe the evidence is almost entirely in their favor. Besides that, as an SEO, I’ve long felt the brunt of baseless attacks by ignorant skeptics. I feel both a kinship and a duty to stand up for those who’ve had their profession ridiculed.

Let’s start by exploring the popularity of social media experts in comparison to another job role Mr. Shankman pointed out, traffic planners:

Social Media Expert, Traffic Planner trends

Social Media Expert jobs | Traffic Planner jobs

As you can see, there’s a dramatic rise in interest and demand for social media folks. I don’t think this is because companies are "wasting their money." In the current economic climate, corporate profits are at record levels and companies are hiring with a much greater eye to the bottom line than any other time in the past 20 years. These businesses are investing in high ROI projects + people, and social media is part of that.

The primary point Mr. Shankman appears to make is that social media skills and expertise are merely "common sense" that every marketing professional/department already has. Thus, there’s no need to specialists or experts to assist in understanding the tools, opportunities or nuances of the field.

I beg to differ.

Product, marketing, engineering and customer service departments can all benefit from greater knowledge and understanding of social media, and very little of it is common sense. From knowing the difference between an original tweet and a retweet (on the basic end of the spectrum) to crafting lifecycle attribution by melding tools like Bit.ly PRO and Facebook Insights with analytics packages (on the advanced end), social media expertise more than just useful, but often critical to improving overall performance.

Facebook has 600 million users; Twitter’s at nearly 200 million; LinkedIn is over 100 million; Blogs have hundreds of millions of readers and tens of millions of publishers; Tumblr alone has 250 million pageviews in a day and Disqus reaches 500 million visitors each month. Social’s driving an increasing proportion of the web’s traffic, conversions and value. How can anyone logically proclaim that experts are worthless?

As a thought excercise, I created the following chart highlighting some of the critical knowledge areas in social media:

NOTE: As I am not a social media expert, these are likely more illustrative than they are accurate
 

I don’t see how Mr. Shankman can believe A) that these pieces of knowledge won’t help organizations improve B) that such knowledge is innate and requires no specialization, research or study.

As further evidence, I’ll call to the witness stand some exemplary individuals and companies that I’ve seen have a massive impact on improving KPIs, processes and internal use of social media. While I’m a passionate supporter of social media marketing, these are the true experts:

• Marty Weintraub of AimClear is one of the industry’s shining stars. His research, clients and results speak for themselves. No one has ever seen Marty speak and not come away in awe of the passion, dedication and deep expertise he shines.
• Dan Zarrella of Hubspot has put together some of the most respectable and useful research in the field of social media and helped to turn HubSpot into a shining beacon of knowledge dissementation across the web. His presentations, webinars and data have made him the web’s pre-eminent social media scientist, and someone whose expertise is backed by more data than nearly anyone else in the marketing field.
• Ciarán Norris of Mindshare Digital, whom I’ve known for years and who grew from a talented search marketer into an even more talented social and brand marketer. He now runs digital media marketing for Mindshare in Ireland and has helped dozens of big brands build remarkable, revenue-generating social strategies.
• Thomas Høgenhaven is currently engaged in a unique project to study and make recommendations around SEOmoz’s internal social community, analyzing how users interact with each other, when high vs. low quality behavior emerges and how to encourage the former while minimizing the latter. I fully expect Thomas’ expertise and his work will be invaluable to our community and to the long-term prospects of this part of our business.
• Jen Lopez of SEOmoz runs community management here at Moz. She’s helped to scale our social presences, stayed in touch with events, questions and engagement across multiple networks and is directly responsible for a substantive portion of our traffic, conversions, retention and brand-building efforts. Her expertise spans tools, platforms, branding concepts, social launches and more. See, for example, the recent Mozcation program she’s turned into an amazing outpouring of community effort and attention.
• Kristy Bolsinger of Ant’s Eye View has consulted with dozens of local and national firms to help devise successful social media + web marketing programs. I’ve personally heard great feedback from folks who’ve worked with her, which is why I continue to refer those seeking consultants her way.

There are remarkable people with social media expertise. Some of them even use the highly appropriate title "social media expert" or "social media specialist." They provide a ton of value to the organizations they work with and neither Mr. Shankman, nor anyone else, should belittle their profession.

In fact, I recommend the opposite. Do as we’ve done, and hire folks with social media knowledge and expertise. It will open opportunities that wouldn’t be otherwise available, and if your other processes around monetization and customer acquisition scale, social is a phenomenal compliment to whatever channels you’re currently pursuing.

On a final note:

Mr. Shankman, if you despise social media expertise and those who earn a living from sharing that knowledge with others, might I suggest that you remove your "featured" listing from this directory of social media consultants? Also, let’s get a beer sometime. I bet you’ve got a ton of social expertise that could help my company (totally serious – I’ll even buy).

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Posted by Geoff Kenyon

Check indexed pages  

• Do a site: search
• How many pages are returned (this can be way off so don’t put too much stock in this)?
• Is the homepage showing up as the first result?
• If the homepage isn’t showing up as the first result, there could be issues, like a penalty or poor site architecture/internal linking, affecting the site.

Search for the brand and branded terms

• Is the homepage showing up at the top, or are correct pages showing up.
• If the proper pages aren’t showing up as the first result, there could be issues, like a penalty, in play.

Check Google’s cache for key pages

• Is the content showing up?
• Are navigation links present?
• Are there links that aren’t visible on the site?

Homepage content

• Does the homepage have at least one paragraph?

Landing pages

• Do these pages have at least a few paragraphs?
• Is it template text or is it completely unique?

Site contains real and substantial content

• Is there real content on the site or is the “content” simply a list of links.

Proper keyword targeting

• Is the intent right?
• Are there pages targeting head terms, mid-tail, and long-tail keywords?

Keyword cannibalization

• Do a site: search Google for important keyword phrases.
• Check for duplicate content/page titles in the SEOmoz Pro Campaign App.

Formatting

• Is the content formatted well and easy to read quickly?
• Are H tags used?
• Are images used?
• Is the text broken down into easy to read paragraphs?

Good Headlines on Blog Posts

• Good headlines go a long way. Make sure the headlines are well written and draw users in.

Amount of content v ads

• Since the implementation of Panda, the amount of ad-space on a page has become important to evaluate.
• Make sure there is significant unique content above the fold.
• If you have more ads than unique content, you are probably going to have a problem.

There should be one URL for each piece of content

• Do URLs include parameters or tracking code – This will result in multiple URLs for a piece of content.
• Does the same content reside on completely different URLs?

Do a search to check for duplicate content

• Take a content snippet, put it in quotes and search for it.
• Does the content show up elsewhere on the domain?
• Has it been scraped? – If the content has been scraped, you should file a content removal request with Google.

Sub-domain duplicate content

• Does the same content exist on different sub-domains?

Check for a secure version of the site

• Does the content exist on a secure version of the site?

Check other sites owned by the company

• Is the content replicated on other domains owned by the company?

Check the robots.txt

• Has the entire site, or important content been blocked? Is link equity being orphaned due to pages being blocked via the robots.txt?

Turn off JavaScript, cookies, and CSS

• Use the Web Developer Toolbar
• Is the content there?
• Do the navigation links work?

Now change your user agent to Googlebot.

• Use the User Agent Add-on
• Are they cloaking?
• Does it look the same as before?

Check the SEOmoz PRO Campaign

• Check for 4xx errors and 5xx errors.

Hierarchy

• Are category pages set up in the appropriate way to flow link equity to key pages?

Landing pages

• Do they have landing pages high enough in the architecture to receive enough link equity to compete for competitive terms?

Number of category pages

• How many category pages are there?
• Have they been scaled out too much?
• Category pages should be built out only when there is enough demand for new or sub category pages.

Pagination/Faceted Navigation

• Is pagination or faceted navigation more appropriate? Or, should they be used in tandem?
• Does pagination exist to help long tail content get indexed?
• Is the pagination prohibitive to crawling (uses JavaScript).

Number of clicks to content

• Pages targeting really competitive head terms should be one or two clicks from the homepage.
• Pages targeting moderately competitive keywords should be 2 or three clicks from the homepage.
• Pages targeting the long tail should be 5 clicks away (obviously exceptions must be made here for sites with a ton of content).

Prioritized content

• Most important content should be higher up in the pagination

Proper use of 301’s

• Are 301’s being used for all redirects?
• If the root is being directed to a landing page, are they using a 301 instead of a 302?
• Use Live HTTP Headers FireFox plugin to check 301s.

Use of JavaScript

• Is content being served in JavaScript?
• Are links being served in JavaScript? Is this to do PR sculpting or is it accidental?

Use of iframes

• Is content being pulled in via iframes?

Use of Flash

• Is the entire site done in flash, or is flash used sparingly in a way that doesn’t hinder crawling?

Site Speed

• How long does the page take to load – Is it significant for users or search engines?
• What improvements can be made?

Alt text

• Is alt text present?
• Does the alt text use keyword phrases?
• Does the alt text reinforce the topical themes presented in the content?

Check for Errors in Google Webmaster Tools

• Google WMT will give you a good list of technical problems showing up on your site that they are encountering (such as: 4xx and 5xx errors, inaccessible pages in the XML sitemap, and soft 404′s)

Canonical version of the site established through 301’s

Canonical version of site is specified in Google Webmaster Tools

Rel canonical link tag is properly implemented across the site

• Make sure it points to the correct page, and every page doesn’t point to the homepage.

Uses absolute URLs instead of relative URLs

• This can cause a lot of problems if you have a root domain with secure sections.

Clean URLs

• No excessive parameters or session ID’s
• URLs exposed to search engines should be static.

Short URLs

• 115 characters or shorter – this character limit isn’t set in stone, but shorter URLs are better for usability.

Descriptive URLs

• Get your primary keyword phrase in there.

Number of links on a page

• 100 is a good target, but not a rule.

Vertical Links

• Homepage links to category pages.
• Category pages link to sub-category and product pages as appropriate.
• Product pages link to relevant category pages.

Horizontal Links

• Category pages link to other relevant category pages.
• Product pages link to other relevant product pages.

Links are in content

• Does not utilize massive blocks of links stuck in the content to do internal linking.

Footer links

• Does not use a block of footer links instead of proper navigation.
• Does not link to landing pages with optimized anchors.

Good internal anchor text

Check for broken links

• Link Checker and Xenu are good tools for this.

Unique title tags

• Every page should have a unique title tag.

Keyword rich

• Pages should contain the primary keyword phrase.
• Is possible to use the secondary keyword phrase in a non spammy way?

Primary keyword phrase at the beginning of the title tag

Page titles include branding

• In most cases the brand should be included at the end of the page title to help build a brand or entice users if you are a well known brand

65 – 70 characters in length

• If the title is longer than this, the entirety will not be displayed in the SERPs.

Have they been keyword stuffed by someone else?

Meta keywords tag used

• This data should be removed as competitors can scrape this data.

Meta description is appropriate

• Each page has a unique meta description.
• Meta descriptions are representative of the content and entice users.

Rewrite meta descriptions for key pages

• For key landing pages, write meta descriptions by hand instead of systemically implementing.

Meta robots tag

• Noindex pages only appropriate pages.
• Not blocking important pages.

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Posted by Arnaud Joakim

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

A few weeks ago I launched my very first contest on one of my various french websites. My objective was to increase my Facebook fans, Twitter followers, newsletter signups and improve the notoriety of my website. The contest is now over and I’ve had time to analyze the results and I must say I am quite impressed!

It took me quite some time to plan out my contest. I read all the blog posts and articles I could find on building an online contest but what really helped me were the thousands of contest pages which already exist on the web. So many websites are currently doing contests and you notice the size of this industry when looking at specialized websites which index all the contests online. So I analyzed about 20 existing contest webpages in my niche and took all the best ideas plus added some of my own magic to condense them into one ultimate contest page.

If you want to start a Facebook & Twitter contest, you’re in the right place.

Building my contest page, I had a few goals in mind. What was my target? Anybody that speaks French (it’s a French website), that has a Facebook or Twitter account and that’s interested in laptop computers (the niche of my website). I needed to find what on-page elements had to be present in order to create the maximum amount of buzz and convert visitors into participants.

List of on page elements to include on your contest page. They are in order of how my page was built.

1. One great image at the top of your contest page. This will be the graphic identity of your contest so make it nice, include your logo if you have one. I also included a picture of the products they could win.
2. Describe your contest (in your text, include links to various pages on your site. Your contest page will receive backlinks and should have a high PR. By deep-linking to your articles, you’ll send some link juice):
   1. Why you are doing this contest? Your site’s 3rd anniversary? A new product just came out?
   2. What prizes are offered? Include more than one!
   3. How to participate? If there’s more than one way of participating, make sure you insist that they should participate using both methods.
   4. Include buttons for visitors to participate. Make it easy for them! They should need to click and voila, done.
   5. Now you can add more information about your contest. What are the details?
      1. When does it end?
      2. How many winners?
      3. How will you contact the winners and when will the prizes be sent?
   6. Add more details on the various prizes. If it’s a laptop, give the specs.
   7. Include a photo of the first, second and/or third prize. They should want it!
   8. Conclude by thanking your audience for their participation and asking them to send the contest to a friend by email. I had included a button in javascript (sharethis) they just had to hover over to get the email form.
   9. Add the comment form. If you are using WordPress be careful! By default, the comment form goes under all the existing comments. If someone has to scroll down 100′s of comments to leave a comment, he won’t. I had to modify my php wordpress template.
   10. Note: To keep the page loading quickly (speed is important for SEO), I configured WordPress to only show the last 20 comments in order of earliest to oldest. It would have been ridiculously slow if I was showing all 907 comments! WP or the plugin All in One SEO adds canonical urls pointing to the original contest page URL, so multiple pages of comments won’t get separately indexed thus creating duplicate content.

To get a strong buzz around your contest you need to use the power of social media. Luckily for you, it’s also how they should participate. Here’s where the magic happens.

To participate via Facebook

A visitor must click the LIKE button (social plugin) which you have added yourself into the page. This is linked to your Facebook page (you need one!) which receives an additional LIKE (It also posts a link on their wall).

Second, they have to click the Facebook Share button. This posts your contest link onto their Facebook wall. Make sure your page TITLE and the first paragraph of text are well written and attractive because all their friends will now see your link in their activity page. Some say using LIKES and SHARES are the same, they both post something on their wall. It’s up to you to use just LIKE or both.

Finally, I asked visitors to post a comment on the page. This will be useful to get their email address to contact them. They will give you a valid email!

Everybody that participates via Facebook will advertize your contest on their wall for all their friends to see. You’ll get a lot of additional participants, people who would never have found your page otherwise!

To participate via Twitter

A visitor must Tweet your specific message. You need to include a few important things within the 140 characters. ex:

Win a #laptop! Retweet this message & follow @YOURNAME to participate! #YOURHASHTAG http://www.bit.ly/YOURCONTESTURL

Include the prize(s). Explain how they can participate via Twitter. Include your own unique Hash Tag (awesome for statistics). Shortened URL to your contest (Great for stats also!)

It’s pretty easy to create the Twitter link. Start with http://twitter.com/?status= then add your tweet. You mustn’t have any spaces or special characters. Spaces should be replaced by %20. Search for an online tool to convert your tweet if needed.

Secondly, I asked them to follow me via Twitter. Follow @yourtwittername linked to my Twitter account.

Lastly, they needed to leave a comment on the page with the URL to their tweet. You also get their real email addresses this way. Note: Because of the #! inside the Twitter URLs, WordPress is unable to convert into a working URL. The only active part is http://www.twitter.com. I couldn’t find a fix for that.

Everybody that participates via Twitter will have a tweet on their feed for all their followers to see. If you get a few big fish, you’ll get loads of RT and new followers that way.

Tip if using WordPress. You’ll have a lot of various codes inside your post (javascript…). WordPress might modify your code when you switch to VISUAL mode so it’s important to stay in HTML mode. I built my entire post inside notepad and I’d paste the HTML code from there. This saved me a number of times because WordPress had modified my code in some way.

Sources

Visitors found my contest page through these sources:

• On my homepage and in my sidebar I included a big red banner telling people to participate. My site gets 3,000 views per day.
• About 7,000 people signed up to my newsletter in the last six months who are interested in laptops (my niche). I sent them three eBlasts dedicated to the contest over the two-and-a-half weeks. My newsletter CTR is pretty bad at 10%.
• A friend of mine accepted to send my contest eblast through his email signup list (an extra 5000 emails).
• The same friend (thank you!) accepted to add a banner on their homepage (targeted) linking to my contest.
• Twitter users clicking through their followers tweets.
• Facebook users who are friends with someone that participated.
• Google indexed my contest page pretty quickly and I was in fifth place in the SERP for a popular query similar to "Win a laptop".
• I submitted my contest to ALL the websites specialized in indexing contests.

Top Six Entrance Sources to the contest page (Google Analytics):

The Aweber email lists brought in 63% of the visits! That’s huge! Twitter came in 13th place. I received a lot of traffic from contest specialized websites but generally their audience mass participates to contests. Meaning they will be low engagement and it’ll probably harder to make a buck from them as they will not convert. It’s still nice to get the extra Facebook LIKE or Twitter RT.

Tip: A few days before the end of my contest, I changed the title and first paragraph on my page to add a sense of urgency. Two days left to participate! All the new Facebook Shares now had the updated title and description which prompted users to participate right now. Same with Twitter, I updated my tweeting message to let everyone know it was their last chance to participate. I noticed my old Twitter message was still being tweeted 80% of the time! I suppose these are people which ReTweeted their followers message. That means the buzz on Twitter really worked well!

Results and statistics

My contest lasted two and a half weeks. Here are the statistics from the various tools I used to track the success.

• Google Analytics stats for the specific contest page:
  • Pageviews: 11,709
  • Unique views: 6,264
  • Time on page: 1:21
  • Bounce Rate: 36%
• Bit.ly Stats (mainly Twitter):
  • Clicks: 164
  • Tweets: 97
  • Facebook Shares: 776
  • Facebook Likes: 174
  • Comments: 145
• Blog Comments on WordPress:
  • 907 comments added on the post
• Aweber (I use the lightbox popup email form)
  • I doubled the number of signups from 900 to 1700 for the 2 weeks.
• Facebook
  • My Facebook page went from 300 to 1,600 LIKE so 1,300 new LIKES in 2 and a half weeks!
  • According to sharethis, there’s 1100 SHARES.
• Twitter
  • Increase from 1,700 to 2,100 followers, 400 new followers.
  • Tweeted 334 times (How do I check stats on RT?)
  • How can I get stats on the Hashtag?

Some charts

Pageviews during the contest:

These are the pageviews to the specific contest page recorded by Google Analytics. You clearly see when I sent my 3 newsletters to reach a maximum of 1750 pageviews in one day.

Visits coming from each of the newsletters I sent (3 total – GA Goals). Sent to 11,000 emails using Aweber. To track inside Google Analytics, you can add a tracking code to all your newsletter links using: ?utm_source=aweber&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=YOURCAMPAIGNNAME

The email list isn’t very high quality (CTR 10%) as I do not ask for a double-optin so there’s a lot of garbage emails. I regularly clean the list removing emails which haven’t opened my newsletters. A lot of people recommend to use double-optin but I decided not to use it as my list grows faster. I’d rather just manually clean my list.

Aweber new signups in last 30 days:

I sent the first eBlast to the targeted emails on April 26th. The more visitors landed on my contest page, the more users would see the lightbox email form which converts to 3.8%. It appears for all new visitors after 10 seconds.

New Facebook Likes in last 30 days:

As you see, there are 3 peeks which correspond to the three eBlasts I sent to the email lists. A lot of people decided to wait the last minute to participate so the highest peek was on the last day of the contest. Also, you’d be surprised how many people actually go back to your Facebook page to unlike it after the contest has passed.

How could I have improved my contest?

If my site was a little bigger, I would have prepared a nice video with a pretty lady explaining the rules and asking people to participate. Video marketing is huge and if done properly it would have been a great source of visitors.

I’m not very familiar with tools to analyze the Twitter activities. I’d love to see the Buzz that was generated by Twitter users, number of ReTweets, statistics on my unique Hash Tag… Maybe someone can recommend a few free services?

I believe only one blog spontaneously wrote an article about my contest. An extra backlink and a few additional visitors but that’s not enough. I should have spent some time contacting blog owners in my niche to ask if they could advertize for my contest. In exchange, you could offer the same when that blog launches their own contest.

Maybe next time I’ll try Facebook ads and other PPC campaigns to promote the contest. The cost can rise pretty fast so set a budget and stick to it.

Conclusion

The results of the contest surpassed my expectations.

The three prizes cost me around $1000 and that was my only expense. I monetize my niche using Adsense and eBay and my revenue did rise during the contest but I didn’t make an extra $1000. I still think it was worth it because of the additional 800 targeted newsletter signups, 1300 Facebook Likes and 400 new Twitter followers. I’ll be able to market products and services to these new leads and in the long term, I’ll make a lot more than $1000.

Facebook is a lot more powerful than Twitter mostly because there are just so many more people using it. Twitter users often have a Facebook accounts but the opposite is not always true. With both platforms, I was truly impressed at how easy it was to create a buzz. If they have something to gain from sharing your message, they’ll happily complete the actions you request of them as long as you don’t make it too complicated.

By requesting that users leave a message on the blog post to notify that they have participated, I got to read a lot of great comments from users complimenting my site and the contest initiative. It felt quite nice to read so many positive comments and I read all 907 of them! Some users regularly visit my site but never left a comment before so it was great to get their feedback. This contest has definitely increased the number of loyal readers.

If your site doesn’t have much traffic and if you are lacking access to a newsletter email list, think twice before starting your contest. It does take some time to setup and manage properly. Offer prizes which people will want to win but which will not cost you an arm and a leg. Certain electronic products can be cheap, easy to buy and will get people participating.

This was a great experience which I will definitely do again. I’ll make sure to come back to this great article to remind myself how to do it right. Hopefully some of you will contribute your own tips & tricks.

Note from Moz: Remember to check the laws regarding contests and emailing in your country.

About Arnaud Joakim – Helping businesses in Montreal reach their web objectives  - http://emarketelite.com/

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