I saw an ad disguised as a newsletter the other day for something I desire greatly. Funds weren’t an issue, and my desire had begun to feel like a pressing need.

I had an opportunity to buy- and I didn’t. Guess why?

It wasn’t that I realized that particular issue of the newsletter was an ad. As a web traffic specialist, I actually admired the fact that even though it was clearly advertising, it spoke directly to a desire I had and offered me a solution.

In web traffic sales terms, everything had gone right. Here are the elements you want.

You want a targeted person to end up at your site. Preferably through a referral from a trusted source, be it a friend, or search engine.

Once the visitor arrives, you want them to like the information on your site enough to sign up for a newsletter. Some people will even say to risk an immediate sale for the permission to follow up, because it’s better to have 20% of newsletter subscribers buy something within 7 contacts, than 1.5% of people to buy on first visit (the industry average).

Then, during some subsequent follow up, as soon as possinle, you hopefully hit on something they want to buy, timed to coincide with when they should have the money to do it.

Everything had gone right. A friend sent me a link, so I arrived at the site, not just by trusted referral, but by a glowing one.

I signed up for the newsletter. While waiting for the next issue I researched the company and decided to trust them.

The thing that went wrong is that I didn’t trust the vendor whose product they were reselling. I’ve even corresponded with her once. Nice enough lady but when it comes to the item in question, I have read my fair share of reviews and have had my own experiences with her product that resulted in distrust.

There’s so much more important to web traffic and website promotion than getting people to your site. Next time: How to Build the Trust Element Into Your Traffic Trail

The Network Solutions sponsored TwitterChat I was talking about last week is today at 1 pm Eastern/New York time, and will last until 2:30 pm or until we get to as many questions as possible.

Highlights:

1. The event is completely free. .

No charge, really.

2. All you have to do is click here to register for Keep Them Coming! How to Increase Traffic to your Website.

(Both web traffic and SEO will be discussed.)

Update: Two prizes are being given to registered attendees.

One will be a free prize from me. The other is a surprise. One is a random registered attendee, the other is to the registered attendee with the best question.

3. Every person who registers, even if they can’t attend at the last minute, is getting a special freebie to help with their Web Traffic.

And no, it’s not 366 Traffic Methods.

4. Free tips on search engine optimization

Answering questions like “Why is SEO critical to increasing web traffic?”

5. Free tips on web traffic

Key information, such as: “Top 10 tips on how to increase web traffic”

6. You get to send me questions through the moderator.

I won’t be answering any questions about naked pictures, or accepting marriage proposals. Stay on Topic, People!

If you’re a Twitter Chat newbie, there are some tips on the post about the Women Grow Business Inbound Marketing Twitter Chat from April.

You don’t need  a free Twitter account to attend, but that sure makes it a lot more fun.

One more thing. I have a bet going with someone that I can get 100 people to register and attend.

So if you know people on Twitter or Facebook who you think would enjoy this free session or help save them money in their business, retweet this message or share it on Facebook. You can even email it your subscribers, or republish this whole post on your blog.

I’ll owe you one retweet or Facebook share that you cash in tomorrow morning, if

1. you’re one of the first 12 people, and
2. you respond to this message with your Twitter handle  so I can make arrangements with you.

Once again, I am honored to be a guest speaker in a Twitter Chat series.

This one is being hosted by Smallvolution from Network Solutions, next Thursday on Twitter, from 1 pm to 2:30 pm Eastern/New York time.

I tell you.

If someone had told me I’d be working closely with the company I first registered my domains with, it would have been inconceivable.

Can you imagine starting a public access TV show then one day guest star on NBC? That’s what it feels like. And as always, I want to share my blessings.

Here’s what’s in it for you.

1. The event is completely free. .

No charge, really.

2. All you have to do is click here to register for Keep Them Coming! How to Increase Traffic to your Website.

(Both web traffic and SEO will be discussed.)

Update: Two prizes are being announced shortly. They’ll only be available to those who register for the event – so even if you’re not sure you can attend, REGISTER NOW.

3. Every person who registers, even if they can’t attend at the last minute, is getting a special freebie to help with their Web Traffic.

And no, it’s not 366 Traffic Methods.

4. Free tips on search engine optimization

Answering questions like “Why is SEO critical to increasing web traffic?”

5. Free tips on web traffic

Key information, such as: “Top 10 tips on how to increase web traffic”

6. You get to send me questions through the moderator.

I won’t be answering any questions about naked pictures, or accepting marriage proposals. Stay on Topic, People!

If you’ve never been to a Twitter Chat before, after you register, see our last post regarding the Women Grow Business Inbound Marketing Twitter Chat from April. You don’t need to have a free Twitter account to attend, but it helps if you want to be able to ask questions and join in the fun.

And stay tuned, I’ll be reminding you again soon, with more tips and pointers about Twitterchats.

From an article in Search Engine Land Google Analytics Adds New Features:

Following October’s release of Google Analytics new features, Google has just released another set of very cool new features. Among them is “Annotations,” a tremendously useful new feature both to analysts as well as executives, who are usually not up to date on granular details about website activity.

The annotations feature basically allows users to make comments on graphs regarding events that happened on specific days.

I can think of several ways in which this would be handy. I could keep track of when I started an article marketing campaign focused around a certain topic, and see how it affected traffic. I could put in a note about, really, any of the different items I’m using to increase traffic, and have a better idea on how they affected my search results, even IF they affected them or not.

It could also make it easier to look at a snapshot of information across a period of time that Google Analytics doesn’t measure. Let’s say I made 10 sales on Tuesday, and 25 on Thursday, yet traffic was lower on Thursday than Tuesday. If I have those notes in, it can be a cue for me to measure the difference between what results I experienced on Thursday vs. Tuesday.

There’s all kinds of possibilities for this one feature. I’ll have to think about this some more, but in the meantime, I thought it was something you’d want to know about.

Somewhere in a town far away (unless you live near Prince George’s County, Maryland), I’m getting ready to transport these Christmas gifts to my cousin’s Christmas celebration.

This other part of me, though, is thinking about the New Year already, and what you need to know about the coming year.

This past year, I’ve noticed that the people who are the most resistant to social media are the folks who claim that they can’t measure their return on investment, either because the returns on investment aren’t measurable, or, more likely, because they don’t know how to measure it.

Then there’s the camp that is worried about having 100% complete control over how people see their content and what they can do with it before they will use social media. These are the folks you see mostly in larger corporations who don’t want to start a Twitter account because someone might quote or retweet their trademark tagline.

There’s no way to prevent this whether you start a Twitter or Facebook account or not. You already have less control over your content. By using social media tools and sites, you can lead the discussion and guide it, but you can’t control it. Whether or not you participate, social media has taken off to the point that ll media is social, and it seems archaic to those of us who’ve been using it all these years to even use the phrase “social media”.

These two groups are the remaining stragglers who are getting left behind.

My prediction for the next year is that the successful companies will let go of control in favor of online and offline visibility and higher profits. Those who do not will struggle to grow, if not fail.

Some things that bring great benefit in social media are untrackable until they come to fruition. How do you track a relationship that leads to a profitable venture until the venture comes about? How do you track the word of mouth that results when someone sees something on Facebook? How will you know each person told 12.8 friends, even when it results in 100 new sales overnight?

Most of your content is protected by copyright law, no matter what Facebook’s new privacy policies says – indeed they probably came up with this new wording in an attempt not to get sued for redistributing your information in the ways you’re allowing when you sign up.  How can you stop 2000 people from updating their status with your slogan or a quote from your new commercial?

Even if it’s negative, why would you want to? Now your customer service department can approach dissatisfied people one on one and solve their problems, and perhaps get those people to be just as vocal about how you 1-listened and 2- fixed their problem.

You can’t control or track everything. Stop trying and enjoy the benefits. Get in there and maximize what benefits you can.

This may sound crazy coming from a track-happy, test-crazy, traffic strategist and traffic systems engineer. But the simple truth is that there’s only so much you can track.  Sometimes the best you can do is isolate whether or not the action you are taking helped or hurt. If it helped you keep doing it, if it didn’t, you stop doing it, and keep moving.

Secondly, there’s a point at which waiting until you can track something costs you money.

For years before I began to get super success from article marketing, I wanted to be able to track where every single click from every single article came from. My theory was that if I knew exacly what to track and where the traffic was coming from, then I could just stick to those places when submitting my articles.

It sounds really intelligent in principle. But in reality, there are too many variables. So many factors go into a successful article marketing campaign. You would have to be able to track:

• time of day the article was released
• time of day where it is when the article is received
• whether or not that was the most-read day for that publication
• how timely your topic is
• how compelling your article is
• how many other solutions there are to the problem you seek to solve
• whether the resource box fit in with the article
• what else was on the page or in the ezine where your article was printed
• whether there’s a demand for your solution among the audience who read your article

If you had a good day in a publication, and all of these factors were spot on, they could all be completely different on another day in a different publication. Something as simple as the time of day the article was released could get you poor results one day, and you’d end up discounting this publication, when on another day, the publication of your article would have made you thousands of dollars.

In 10 Ways Social Media Will Change in 2010, the author writes that two of these things are measurement of ROI (return on investment) in social media, and the desire to own your own content.

My advice would be to go in the exact opposite directions of these two trends.  Just because you can measure return on investment doesn’t mean you should obsess over it. Depending on what you’re selling, knowing you’re engaging 100 CEOs or 10,000 college kids might be good enough.

And we already own our own content. According to the US Copyright Office, anything that can be created, including the words you write, are protected from the instant they are fixed in a tangible form.

The battle for control, and the invention of tools to track results, will play themselves out next year or in the coming one. In 2010, focus your energy on increasing your level of engagement with as little unnecessary effort as possible.

photo credit: bitmask

I’m looking at what feeds to keep or delete in Google Reader and I discovered something.

I can pretty much tell what a site is about if I look at it in list view, which just lists the headlines in a feed. That’s helping me categorize un-categorized feeds. Which blog I’m writing in determines what I’ll prioritize reading that day, so being able to tell at a glance what a blog’s “voice” or “message” is strikes me as important.

You know how I think — would my blog pass that test?

And sadly, (though not surprisingly, given that I’ve been quiet in anticipation of my “retirement” next month), even if I take out our special Friday editions, I can only give a qualified yes to answer that question.

IF the person subscribing already knows a bit about traffic, they can tell my posts are on that topic from the headlines. If not, you can’t really tell.

Granted, I like to get creative with my titles. But headlines are everything. Am I losing the core audience this site was built for by leaning too much towards witticisms?

Could you gain more visitors by tweaking your titles?

Try this exercise on your own site and tell me what you found out.

In today’s Social Media Issue:

• The First New Traffic Test in a Year
• Our New Facebook Group
• Where to Get Free Help with Linked In
• A Social Media Whitepaper from Jeremiah Owyang
• Another Social Media Whitepaper from MotiveLabs
• Add Us to Google
• Links to 69 Articles on Web Traffic
• The Traffic Methods Series #229 – 239

Whew! Are you as pooped reading it as I was writing it?

Read it here.

How do you reach more people with your content? Maybe you need an IA, or at least to listen to one.

Why should you watch this? Here’s an explantion from the post:

What is Information Architecture?
Why is it important?
What role should they play in content creation?
What’s the difference between Big and Little
Online resources: Boxes and Arrows”

Another absolute must-read/must-subscribe blog, if you’re into web traffic, anyway. And… Jeremiah, that intro to your video is smokin’. Very classy.

I JUST turned the page back on for more Traffic Reality memberships, with immediate access to the site and the last two newsletters. And some people must have those notifiers turned on that tell them when a page has changed, because the first 12 are already gone! I was preparing to announce it in the newsletter in a few hours, but okay – go get ‘em if you want ‘em!

(And if, by chance you really don’t know what I’m babbling about, you can click the link. )

… You have a realistic goal.

Which is why it really irks me when I see a traffic program/software package/course that promises you thousands of visitors when it’s done. What if I already have thousands of visitors? How many thousands are we talking about anyway?

Whenever these things come out, I know that within a week to a month, someone is going to write me saying “I used x product and I’m failing. Can you help me?” And there are potential clients I turn away because they want to get 10,000 visitors a day like this program promised them, when they aren’t going to get much more than 2000 a day with their site the way it is.

This isn’t to say that some high-yield traffic programs don’t work if used properly. And to be sure, sometimes failure is about the fact that the person failed, not the program.

Some work (and I’ll make a post about evaluating these programs another time), but in my opinion, most of them

1. Make the whole idea of increasing traffic organically too hard
2. Behave as if raising traffic, as opposed to profit, is the one and only point
3. Don’t tell you that the quality of traffic you’ll get might not be what you want
4. Lead you to believe you’ll never have to spend a penny to increase your traffic.That’s BS. Sooner or later, someone has to advertise, or make an improvement to your site, products, services, sales pages, etc that is going to cost you money.There WILL be a traffic-related expense. The trick is to minimize it, or shift the cost elsewhere. And faced with a consistenly converting product, your affiliates will probably be happy to foot the cost of advertising, but you will still have to improve your web design, or hire a copywriter, something.Even if it’s the phone call to an expert to JV with you, at some point you will spend money. You can bootstap your way a surprisingly significant part of the way without funds.

I do believe that a million visitors or a million page views even, is a realistic goal for traffic.

However, for someone who is starting at zero, or getting one hundred unique visitors a day and actually converting some of those people into sales, on your way to a million, you have to start somewhere. What do you think is a realistic, starting-out goal?