Category: getting audience

finding targeted audiences

why i decided to create facebook page.

I aint a subject expert to tell you what needs to be done, i am here to share my experience with setting up facebook page for the another project i am working on.

first why i wanted facebook page, i read this infographic at marketinconfessions , it states by the time we read these lines (average 1 min) , the following happens inside facebook

• 510,404 Comments
• 382,861 Posts liked
• 231,605 Messages sent
• 135,849 Photos added
• 98,604 Friendships approved
• 82,557 Status Updates
• 79,364 Wall posts
• 74,204 Event invites received
• 72,816 Pages liked
• 66,168 Photos tagged

that’s a lot of activity online, and all these activity carried out by engaging audience, all these numbers are already convincing to have a presence in facebook for the brands, but if you still wondering why, let me explain, as a business you need your own audience and connect with the right people and then engage those audience with your brand, that is were we need to create facebook page, a platform to engage customers along with the brand.

As of now i didn’t do much to my facebook page, just the page has been created, added admin details, linked twitter to the page wall, filled info section. Once i am satisfied with all the information i have provided in facebook page, it is time to get many fans/likes, that’s another milestone, as of now i have no idea how to go about it, will share once i find any.

how do i have a constant targetted traffic for my niche blog?

I have a blog on a specific niche(software testing), frankly this blog hardly crossed any traffic beyond 10 visits per day, bounce rate is nearly 100%, average time spent on website is less than a minute, but in recent times its touching 60 visitors per day, bounce rate is nearly 60%, and average time spent on website is nearly 3 to 4 minutes, so what I did differently and getting traffic?
Well I am not getting any exceptional traffic to sit here and give guru kind of lecture, I am just sharing what I am doing different from previous attempt.

At first the visitor count is low(10), well, let me tell you what I am exactly doing to grab that 10 visitors,
1. I was stumbling the links using various users I have created.
2. I would tweet with random and relevant hash tags using my pseudo twitter id’s
3. Share the link in facebook
4. Comment and leave the link behind

If you see this 10 visitors per day is good for very little effort I spent(listed above), and visitors count can be scaled up, if I have spent some more time on that, but the result is:
1. I was getting some 100+ comments all spam (how is that possible even without visiting a blog?)
2. Sky high bounce rate
3. Average time spent by visitors on website is merely in seconds
4. Almost no returning visitors.

If you see there is no visitor commitment, this model of random visitors works perfectly well for the websites running pay per click or pay per visit advert’s mostly from adsense etc. but my focus is not that, I want to make that website as authority in the niche(software testing), that means I want to build my audience, a.k.a targeted traffic, I will try to explain the benefit of targeted traffic a little here, and detailed post later.

What I did different later that drop bounce rate, increase time spent on website increased, and finally start getting comments on the posts, free retweets and facebook sharing???

1. Instead of spreading my blog at random places, I chose few sure target, where similar minds(or information seeker) hangout, Note: I didn’t hangout where information providers hangout but information seeker hangout, eg I choose couple of forums and blog, that’s where I will be leaving a crisp note that I have updated new blog post, possibly tease with information, which will get you decent number of targeted visitors, but most importantly, when you are in the group try to help at first place and redirect to your blog for detailed information. Also there is one of the trend I have noticed in this sector is, be controversial that is say something really against the common idea within the community and defend it, this will flood your comment box.

2. Use the lingo the information seeker will use, eg: the blog title ‘how to start a career in software testing’ vs ‘software testing career’, first one has the most winning edge with respect to organic search traffic, these are targeted traffic too.

3. Will scan through relevant tweets and facebook updates with my actual account itself for relevant conversation happening, will reply/mention/comment my opinion on the conversation, again I will provide information but I will leave link pointing to the post for detailed information.

These are the things I am doing differently recently and seeing good results, the growth seems very organic and promising, because when I flood with random traffic I did before, the traffic flow will almost become zero in couple of days and I do nothing further, but in the later case, the traffic is constant.

like I read somewhere – write epic shit and be useful :)

stumbleupon new explore feature how it works? what’s in it for website owners?

Today I received a invite from stumbleupon for testing out their new feature “explore”, that’s not really new its always been there but its available only with the toolbar in the name of “search” now they have created a page for that purpose, and like google does it is suggesting results, once you select your search term and hit enter/submit – it will start suggesting relevant websites for you, it is simply like clicking “I am feeling lucky” in google search instead of “search” button, only difference is with google when you press “I am feeling lucky” and land in the website that is dead end, if you want to try another website search again in google but with stumbleupon you can press “stumble” button unless you get the exact website you want to see.

Capture

whats impressive with stumbleupon explore is, the relevance of the website to our searched term is very high and best of all the quality of the website is high too as if it was hand picked, actually the results are handpicked with stumbleupon.

let us explore how stumbleupon works, stumbleupon provides us users a toolbar that can be installed for web browsers, it has three main buttons “topic selector”, “like” and “dislike” whenever we select a topic it will suggest us with the websites, now based on the searched topic and users need they will press either “like” or “dislike” button, image millions of users doing this, that is for a particular topic, you will first see the content suggested by millions of people in the topic. and time goes by you will get even more suggestions based on your previous searches, friends, and interest and I am not sure about this I heard they have this algorithm “what time what you like” pretty cool rite?

now back to my actual blog topic, it is very important we rank our website for stumbleupon for the relevant topics, and most of all, we should have the relevant quality content in the website.

stumbleupon is very smart enough to find out if you are using same id and suggesting same website for too many topics, initially you might get couple of 10’s traffic initially, but that never picks up and slowly goes down, if you are wondering what happened, users visited your website and clicked “dislike” button and stumbleupon is suspecting if ur website is good for the selected topic and stopped suggesting when searched. so be smart enough to create decently good and useful content, and build stumbleupon network to perform likes.

why my website isn’t getting any traffic from search engines?

i had nearly 7+ blogs in different niches in the past, i have always written hell lot of blog post on those topics but i never saw even a single visitors to those blogs, its always either me or my friends visiting those blogs, what i did is,i would post my blog url in my car rear, email signatures, facebook url etc, i didnt see any significant change, i was on wrong side of the road, i didnt know the traffic should happen from either search engine or social media(viral marketing) initially, because you are not the dominating force in the particular topic yet, that is decided based on the people visiting your blog site, but for that to happen you need visitors, yeah it sounds like a never ending circle, but there is a slightest entrance for this circle, that is your traffic should be from two sources – only two sources, initially:

1. search engine
2. social media

to realize this it took me really long period, if we need traffic to our blog we need to optimize our blog for search engines, for that we need to understand how search engine operate, search engine is trying very hard to provide more appropriate websites for our search terms, most relevant with respect to content and most popular or trusted websites are kept first, and we normally click and visit the first 2 or 3 websites and find our answers for the searched term.

as a first step, when you have the blog, do not write literally school book kind of title for the blog posts i.e boring terms or something no one is searching at all, you need to try to understand the searchers mind set and guess what search term will be used by the visitors in the search engine to see your blog post, then try to have that search term in your blog post title.
eg:
instead of writing blog on “searching engine working” – write “why my website isnt getting any traffic from search engines?” that is we are having a content exactly how customer will search for chances are our website will land in first page of the search results.

there is more on search engine optimization.