In the spotlight this week:
- how to (really) increase your website traffic;
- Penguin 2.0 hits hard in all the wrong places;
- advertorial taboos;
- Violence against women on Facebook;
- Twitter vs Tweet Adder lawsuit;
- and much, much more.
Let’s start with the news from Traffic Generation Café.
At TrafficGenerationCafe.com
Increase Website Traffic: The Ultimate Blueprint to More Profitable Web Traffic
It’s simple.
Every website wants to increase website traffic.
Profitable website traffic would be even better.
The kind of web traffic that likes you, devours your content, consumes your products, tells their friends, and comes back – hungry for more.
You know… the legendary kind.
The only kind worth getting.
And you can learn how to get more that kind of traffic right here: https://trafficgenerationcafe.online/increase-website-traffic-guide/.
Here’s a quick taste:
Loved it? Embed this presentation on your blog
(just copy and paste the code below)
A shout to Mauro D’Andrea, my Slideshare partner in crime, for creating this awesome Slideshare presentation based on my blog post!
If you’d like to learn how to rock Slideshare, don’t miss:
Slideshare Traffic Case Study: From 0 to 243,000 Views in 30 Days
SEO
Penguin 2.0 Hits Hard
Even though Penguin 2.0 didn’t hit as hard as expected, it still significantly affected a few quality sites, for instance Kim Castleberry’s Just-Ask-Kim.com - a site I personally visit quite often for quality information.
To read more on what happened to her blog, to commiserate if you are in the same shoes, or to offer advice, visit her
Also, check out this blog post at MOZ (yes, notice the new name - update below) for more:
Matt Cutts on Advertorials
Now that Google is closing in on many link building techniques, webmasters are looking for new link building venues - and many times, in all the wrong places.
Paid advertorials and native advertising, for instance.
Don’t get me wrong: advertorials are not against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Not properly disclosing the sponsored nature of them and/or using dofollow links that pass authority to the sponsor is.
Thus the new video Matt Cutts just released talking about the guidelines to stick to when posting advertorials or any form of native advertising:
Again - nothing new here, but there has been an increase of webmasters using this technique in the recent months.
Bottom line: follow these simple rules and you should be fine.
SEOMoz Makeover
SEOMoz announced they are undergoing major rebranding and changing their name to Moz.
According to Rand Fishkin:
“Moz’s current vision is to power the shift from interruption to inbound marketing by giving every marketer affordable software to measure and improve their efforts.”
Interruption marketing vs Inbound marketing:
Sounds great, but also a bit idealistic and utopic, don’t you think?
On the other hand, I am all for NOT being followed by SEOMoz AdSense ads everywhere I go…
Social Media
Facebook Verification
Facebook has launched verified Pages to help people find the authentic accounts of celebrities and other high-profile people and businesses on Facebook.
Verified Pages have a small, blue check mark beside their name on timelines, in search results, and elsewhere on Facebook.
The Other Side of Facebook
Facebook on Tuesday acknowledged that its systems to identify and remove hate speech had not worked effectively, as it faced pressure from feminist groups that want the site to ban pages that glorify violence against women.
Women’s groups have complained to Facebook about misogynous content in the past, but pressure on the company escalated last week when a collective led by Women, Action and the Media; Laura Bates of the Everyday Sexism Project; and Soraya Chemaly, a writer and activist, published an open letter asking Facebook executives to “ban gender-based hate speech on your site.”
The letter highlighted Facebook pages with names like “Violently Raping Your Friend Just for Laughs” and “Kicking your Girlfriend in the Fanny because she won’t make you a Sandwich,” and other pages that included graphic images of women being abused. (story source)
In a statement released today, Facebook addressed our concerns and committed to evaluating and updating its policies, guidelines and practices relating to hate speech, improving training for its content moderators and increasing accountability for creators of misogynist content.
Twitter vs Tweet Adder Lawsuit Settlement
Many of us thought the sky was a-falling when Tweet Adder came out with its newest 4.0 version.
Getting more Twitter followers… manually? G-a-s-p…
Here’s what went down: Twitter has settled its lawsuit against Tweet Adder, one of five companies that Twitter sued last year, accusing them of making tools that spread spam across its service.
As AllThingsD first reported, the settlement places strict rules on what Tweet Adder is allowed to do with its current software — primarily, it has to play by all of Twitter’s rules.
Twitter says its engineers also “launched new anti-spam measures within Twitter to more aggressively suspend a new type of @mention spam” earlier this week.
Sort of like what they did to my brand new Twitter account?
If you are wondering if there’s anything you can do to cut down on the tedious Twitter tasks, read my post on the best Twitter tools.
Twitter Chats
Twitter chats can be a great way to show off your expertise, make connections, find influencers in your niche, or even become recognized as one yourself.
This week, I spotted a post a MarketingProfs.com that lists the best chats for marketers - something I definitely recommend you check out.
WordPress
Happy (Sweet) Birthday, WordPress!
Yes, WordPress has turned 10 and thousands of fans celebrated it with a vengeance: 646 cities with nearly 5,000 people having a great time, all in the name of WordPress!
More delicious creativity at WPDaily.co.
Matt Mullenweg, WP founder, writes an ode to “Dear WordPress”:
“You’re so beautiful… I’m continually amazed and delighted by how you’ve grown. Your awkward years are behind you.
Best of all, through it all, you’ve stuck with the principles that got you started in the first place. You’re always changing but that never changes. You’re unafraid to try new things that may seem wacky or unpopular at first.”
ManageWP’s WordPress Birthday Giveaway
Here’s your chance to capitalize on WordPress Birthday.
ManageWP is hosting a huge WP birthday giveaway with big players like WPMUDev, Elegant Themes, Sururi, and more pitching in.
The giveaway ends (by my calculations) on Sunday at 8 pm PST, so you need to hurry if you want to put your name in the hat.
Marketing This and Than
Log in with Amazon
Amazon launched Login with Amazon.
Third-party developers can implement Login with Amazon on their web and mobile properties in the same way they integrate social logins like Facebook, Twitter and Google.
Unlike those social logins, however, Amazon has the unique appeal for ecommerce and transactional developers as it allows users to sign in and checkout using their Amazon accounts.
Login with Amazon let’s users by-pass long registration and checkout processes, making it that much more appealing to make a purchase or trial-run an app with one click. (story source)
Gmail Inbox Gets Better
Gmail is getting a brand new inbox on desktop and mobile that puts you back in control using simple, easy organization.
Hope you’ve got your dancing shoes on!
How To Report Someone Calling A “Do Not Call” Number
Kim Castleberry reports on what to do when you get those annoying sales call even after your phone number has been registered (for more than 30 days!) in a national “Do Not Call” registry.
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:
5 Ways to Promote Your Small Business Online for (Mostly) Free - Ivan Widjaya at bizpenguin.com
Penguin 2.0, Search By Voice, Google AdSense TOS, Speedlink 21:2013 - Francisco Perez at iblogzone.com
If You Wait for Perfection You Might Miss The Boat - Ileane Smith at basicblogtips.com
MYF Approved Weekly May 31: niche website, MOZ, model trains and web traffic - Iain Robson at marketingyourfarm.com
Blogging Is Not Dead. You’re Just Doing It Wrong - John Gibb at bloggerspassion.com
Why My Colleagues and I Trust Aweber - Greg Narayan at dearblogger.org
How to Improve Sales with a Killer Autoresponder Series - Mauro D’Andrea at blog-growth.com
Also, a huge THANK YOU to my Triberr “Other People’s Influence” Automatic tribe for sharing my newly published posts with your Twitter followers.
These awesome folks automatically share Traffic Generation Café blog posts via Triberr, helping me reach more people than I could ever reach on my own while providing their Twitter followers with quality content and, by doing that, commanding respect in their respective niches AND getting even more followers as a result.
Win-win, I’d say.
If you’d like to join my tribe, we’d love to have you. Just click on the banner to go to Triberr.
Want to learn about Triberr? Read this post:
Triberr: Your Step by Step Guide to Being Heard
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!
To an even better next week,
Weekly Marketing Skinny • August 31, 2013
Weekly Marketing Skinny • January 25, 2014
Weekly Marketing Skinny • January 18, 2014
Partner in crime? I feel a little like one of the protagonists in Mission Impossible
Thank you for the mention, Ana!
lol - you are very welcome, Mauro.
Victoria
Thank you for wonderful reading list - it actually made my day. What is strange - I’m using Facebook for a long time already, but haven’t met such terrible pages. With all my free speech love, think they should be banned, but the problem is to stop Facebook from banning other just political pages
You are very welcome, Victoria.
And you are right, it might be simple for us to say “Of course, they should ban them”, but then where’s the magic line?
You and I have never seen those pages because we never looked probably…
Thanks for including me in the marketing skinny.
The thing that really makes me curious is the MOZ change. They announced a new analytics dashboard which could be quite interesting. Perhaps it could compete with Google Analytics, but I suspect it won’t because it’s not free.
However, I wonder what type of data they are going to show and how they will differentiate it from GA.
I am curious as well, Iain. Of course, there are plenty of paid analytics options (kissmetrics, etc), so I wonder what will differentiate theirs. We’ll have to wait and see.
Appreciate you stopping by my blog with the reassurance and reminders Ana. You know all too well how crazy the nonsense of an update can feel! Any time one writes an algorithm change that affects millions, there are always going to be accidents. Fortunately, Google usually does a pretty good job about coming back around a few weeks later and sorting out the mess, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed!
Kim
I surely hope that will be your case, Kim.
Hey Ana, thanks for the great roundup. Certainly makes a good weekend read for me and you take much of the research load off my shoulders giving me the “skinny”. Hate to talk about Penguin and see all the good sites getting hit. Hoping for the dust to settle soon!
You are very welcome, Lisa.
I’ve been hit by Google before without apparent rhyme or reason; it’s never fun, but that’s the price we all have to pay to show up in their search.
Loved your site, by the way!
Hey Ana,
I don’t get around to commenting much on anyone’s blogs these days, but yours is the exception
I do enjoy your weekly marketing skinnys, and this week’s was top notch. So I just wanted to say thanks! Keep it up dear, you’re doing a great job. I do read your weeklys even though I don’t always comment.
On a side note - Sandy, you mentioned about Fantastico but lately I’ve seen a trend where it’s disappearing from the control panel in many hosting accounts. I’ve asked the customer service reps and even they don’t seem to have a clue why.
Thanks for letting me know, Sam - sometimes it gets a bit quiet around here and thumbs up are always appreciated. LOL
Just checked my Hostgator cpanel; glad to see Fantastico was still there.
I know and the one question that keeps popping on my mind is “what if”, and that’s a big “what if”, I just clicked on the thing and go about it. I think that it could be bad to the advertisers, because I’ll click it not with the intention of wanting to know more, but rather to leave me alone, lol
I don’t think that would work, unfortunately. I’ve seen ads follow me around even after I actually bought the product - that’s a complete retargeting flop.
A very interesting week then!
Was it really 10 years ago that WordPress waas born? When I first decided to set up a blog I remember hearing how difficult it was to set up and use WordPress unless you knew HTML. Everyone advised beginners to use good old Blogspot as it was known then.
I did eventually manage to set up a WordPress blog but only after I bought quite an expensive step by step video course on it. Well worth the money as it happened.
It’s hard to believe that Fantastico has made installation of WordPress so simple now and that there are so many themes and plugins for it. Where would be be witout them?
Sandy
I know, Sandy - WordPress has involved significantly, just as well as it should’ve. Now everyone and their dog can start a blog…
Thanks for the mention Ana..
BTW, I totally nodded my head quite often when I saw this… “On the other hand, I am all for NOT being followed by SEOMoz AdSense ads everywhere I go…”
Haha, they have been following me too.. hate them now, lol.. Really, I’m not sure I like re-targeting. It’s getting into my nerves already
You’d think they’d figure out that if I haven’t clicked on the ad the first hundred times I saw it, it’s time to move on, right?
You are very welcome, Francisco; a “thank you” right back at you.
This is great Ana! Officially a part of my weekend reading.
Thanks for the mention
You are so very welcome, Greg; love seeing your face around here.
Hi Ana, thank you for yet another great skinny. I had no idea about the WP birthday. I haven’t been able to click on the links or videos as yet, but will come back to do so. One thing I have to say before I proceed is that many of your images aren’t showing up for me. I’m using Chrome, maybe this is why, but it may be worth checking them to see what you see.
Thanks for letting me know, Anne. They are showing up just fine for me and I use Chrome as well. Might’ve been a temporary glitch?
Thanks for coming by! Is it summer in your neck of the woods yet?
I’ve actually been in LA for the last 2 months. We have four more weeks to go. My husband has a visiting professorship at UCLA, so we all came here with him for 3 months. It’s well and truly summer here in LA. In Bristol it’s apparently still cold and wet - no change there then
I totally forgot you’d be in the U.S., Anne; enjoy the rest of your stay!
The main what not to do is blackhat seo, because whatever good blackhatter may be you Google at one day obviously catch you. Every staps has their own order in SEO. Thanks for your quality information Ana.
True, Ilia - staying away from black hat SEO could be the first huge step to being ranked. Too bad it’s not enough.