Alert Blog Reviews

How many times have you heard it said in business (or anywhere for that matter) that how you respond to a problem is more important than the problem itself? It’s said over and over again because it’s simply good advice. Well, Google had a chance to practice that principle last night when it began sending out e-mails to those with listings in the Local Business Center. Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz reports of the issues that occurred . Starting last night, Google began sending out the monthly (or so) Google Local Business Center updates. The updates go out via email and contain analytical information about how many times a listing was viewed, clicked on, and other miscellaneous analytics. The analytics are a summary of what they would see in their Google LBC analytics dashboard. But instead of these emails going to their actual business owners, they went to the wrong business owners. Schwartz received information for a business that was 1,500 mile from his location and he was not the only one having the experience. To Google’s credit they recognized the error and set things straight as quickly as one might expect. The following was sent to Barry so he could help the rest of us get some clarity on the issue. Of course, it doesn’t hurt your ability to get these kinds of responses when you are the News Editor of Search Engine Land. In other words, not everyone received the following explanation right away. As you’re aware, we send a monthly newsletter to our Local Business Center users, featuring product news and a glimpse at the Dashboard statistics which show the traffic Google properties drive to their listing. Shortly after sending the newsletter to a small portion of our users last night, we discovered that some emails included incorrect business listing information. We promptly stopped sending any further emails and investigated the cause, which we found to be a human error while pulling together the newsletter content. We’d like to sincerely apologize to all the business owners impacted and assure all our users that we’re working hard to ensure that nothing similar will happen again. Oh no! It appears that there may be a Googler who is, gulp, human and made a mistake. Of course it would never be one of the thousands of faithful servers around the world, it had to be one of those pesky human thingys. All kidding aside, as Schwartz points out, the data is pretty innocuous. It could even be looked at as a sideways form of advertising to a very small market because now people know about a business somewhere else that they never heard of before. Google later sent an automated reply to all those impacted by this glitch and it appears that all is well in the world again. While I would rather not have something like this happen I have to give Google credit for calling themselves on the error and working to make it right. Hopefully, any of the business owners who got the wrong data would treat one of their mistakes with the same approach. Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

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For Google Maps It’s Not the Problem but How You Handle It

Most people on twitter want to increase the number of people that follow them. I currently only have about 170 followers and so gaining 1,000 new followers may seem a little ambitious. But I am up to the challenge! Here’s my 10 point plan to get 1,000 new followers this year. (This works out to about 85 new followers per month.) 1. Tweet about new blog posts Whenever I post something new on my blog I will also tweet about it. This may sound obvious but it’s worth mentioning. If you have great content you need to make sure that it gets tweeted. 2. Tweet More Often In 2009 I didn’t tweet every day. There were some weeks where I didn’t tweet at all. I need to change this and make 3 tweets every day. If every tweet garners me 1 new follower then tweeting 3 times a day should give me 3 new followers each day or over 1,000 followers by the end of the year. I could tweet more often than 3 times a day but I fear that it will irritate some of my followers. Since I seldom add new stuff to my blog more than once a day I have made a list of old but valuable blog posts. It is from this list I will pull from to tweet about. 3. Develop a schedule and Tweet at the best times I have found that some times of the day are far better for tweeting than others. It seems that 9 AM to 5 PM Pacific Time are the best times to tweet. I don’t really have any strong empirical evidence and I haven’t run numerous controlled experiments. It’s just what I have observed with my own tweets. So I have developed a schedule to ensure that I tweet about a couple things around 9 AM and again at noon. Hopefully tweeting at the right times will result in more retweets and more followers for me. 4. Make it easy for visitors to tweet about my site If you use WordPress there is a simple plug-in that puts a “ReTweet This” button on every blog post. It allows visitors to retweet your post with a click of button. It also displays how many people have tweeted about it. It’s called Tweetcount and is a free download. 5. Invite people to follow me at the end of each post When people finish reading a post on my blog they ask themselves, “What should I do now?” It’s at this point that you should have a link inviting them to follow you on twitter and get more fabulous updates about the topic at hand. 6. Put a link to my twitter account in my e-mail signature I receive e-mails every day from different people asking me how to get traffic to their website. And I respond to everyone of them By putting a link to my twitter profile at the bottom of these e-mail responses I can get more followers. I have no idea why I didn’t do this before. 7. Have a contest with the winners being picked for my twitter followers I’m not sure exactly how I plan to do this but I hope to have it figured out in a few weeks. The first thing is to find a prize that people actually care about. It has to be something that they would be willing to follow me for the chance to win. I run a blog about how to get traffic to your website (My blog is called Nick’s Traffic Tricks) and I tweet about things related to traffic generation. So I want to gain followers that are interested in this topic. As a result I want to select a prize that will attract these kind of people. If I simply give away an iPod I will probably get lots of followers and most will not be interested in what I tweet about. The results will be that I will gain lots of followers in the short run but most of them will eventually drop off. So the prize I select has to be something that entices the type of followers that I want. (If you have any suggestions on how to successfully run a contest on twitter please leave a comment below!) 8. Write for TwiTip I wrote a guest post for TwiTip a month or so ago. That was probably the single best thing I ever did to get more followers on twitter. Within a few days I had 40 new followers. I’m going to try to write for TwiTip twice a month. This should result in 80 new followers each month. 9. Leverage my email list I have an e-mail list of over 1,000 people that receive my traffic tips on regular basis. And I plan to leverage this list to get more followers on twitter. I will add link to my twitter account at the bottom of each e-mail that I send to my list. I just need to think of a way to really entice them to click the link and follow me. I will also e-mail my list every time I post something new on my blog. At the bottom of each blog post is an invitation to follow me on twitter and that will result in a few more followers. 10. Submit each new blog post to StumbleUpon and OnlyWire Submitting your website to StumbleUpon and OnlyWire will result in more traffic to your website. And more traffic means more people are reading your blog posts and seeing your invitation to follow you on twitter. I’ve personally seen a viral effect with StumbleUpon that increased my twitter following. A couple months ago I posted a fantastic way to get backlinks to your website quickly with little effort. (This was something that my readers loved!) Without my knowing, many of my readers stumbled the post sending a ton of traffic to my blog. A side effect of this was that there was a jump in the number of people following me on twitter. If you do nothing else make sure you stumble your content. I believe this is so important that I will actually stumble your content as well. Just go to: http://nickstraffictricks.com/can-i-stumble-your-site/ © 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips . How I Will Add 1,000 Twitter Followers This Year

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How I Will Add 1,000 Twitter Followers This Year

One of my favorite uses of Google is as a dictionary. Seriously! I don’t need it so much as spell-checker–it fulfills that role too–but if I want to look up the definition of a word, or make sure I’m using it in context, I turn to Google. Well actually, I turned to Answers.com–which used to supply the definitions if I clicked on the top right link in the search results: It’s no coincidence that I used the word “screwed” in the above screen capture. That’s what Answers.com will likely be, now that Google has decided that those links should go to its own dictionary : Not that Google’s dictionary is new–you were always able to search “define:” and get to it–but now Answers.com is out the door. How much will that hurt Answers? Well, the first glimpse of the effects will be seen when the stock market opens today. Answers is publicly traded and I suspect that its stock may not fare so well today. What do you think of Answers.com’s chances of continued success now that the Google lifeline has been cut? UPDATE: Answers CEO Bob Rosenschein tell us that Google wasn’t that big of a chunk of its traffic: “ While I’m sorry to see it go, it is not material — under 5% of our traffic.” Wow! I’m shocked that more people weren’t clicking on that link.

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Google Ditches Answers.com, Raising Questions About the Dictionary’s Future

The end of what you ask? The end of the newspaper industry? Sure, why not? That’s an easy one and we talk about that probably way too much. The end of free content? Now we’re getting warmer. Earlier this week we told of Rupert Murdoch’s master plan (or is that disastrous plan?) to remove his News Corp. content from the search engines like Google. That’s pretty big talk. Crazy talk possibly but big talk nonetheless. So do you just make that kind of threat then wait and see or do you then draw the line in the sand? You know, set a date as to when this grand gesture will occur. Well, let’s not get totally crazy or at least clear on that one. That smells too much like reality. So what am I driving at here? It’s the continued blustering of News Corp. about pay for content models. Now, they are talking about a sort of uprising that they will lead so that all media outlets will follow. The Telegraph reports Jonathan Miller, News Corp’s chief digital officer, said the media mogul was ready to block Google’s access to his sites soon and that the company would lead the media industry in this direction. “There is real tension surrounding the free versus pay debate,” Mr Miller told the Monaco Media Forum on Friday. “It will play out in the next two years. We believe that the value of high quality content is not recognised online [by giving its away for free) so something needs to happen. “I don’t believe the media industry can continue to exist in this way.” Soon. Well, that’s definitive. In an attempt to further clarify this threat of a pitchfork and torch uprising by the media industry Mr. Miller then gave the ominous threat of when this will all hit the fan. When asked how long it would be before Mr Murdoch took the step to block Google, which every media company relies upon to send them high levels of web traffic, Mr Miller said it would be soon – “months and quarters – not weeks” Pack up the plantation! They're going to remove themselves from the search engines in a couple of months or maybe like 6 or 9 or 12 months. I don’t know. Do you? Are you worried yet? Even Murdoch himself is back-pedaling on his own claims about when this grand gesture might / may take place. Last week Mr Murdoch warned that his plans to charge for access to content across all of his newspaper sites, by the end of next June, could now be delayed. During a conference call to discuss News Corp first quarter financial results, the media magnate said he couldn’t promise to meet his own deadline – but did say it remained a work in progress and “we are all working very hard” on delivering the pay solution. Oh for Pete’s sake! This is sounding more and more like the ramblings of a mad man than anything else. Why would you rile up the biggest boon to traffic that any news site has then be wishy-washy on the details and even throw into doubt if they have the nerve or, even worse, the backing of the rest of the media industry to pull this off? Also, in all of this talk they are confusing people about pay walls and search engine access. Will that happen together? Are they all part of the same plan? Here’s the final piece that is interesting. News Corp. is even calling out the quality of the traffic that comes from the engines as inferior because it may be one time visitors. Excuse me? What if that one time visitor actually had never expressed real interest in your publication but through the engines landed at your site and thought “Hey, not bad. I’m gonna keep coming back.”? This quote from Miller says a lot “The traffic which comes in from Google brings a consumer who more often than not read one article and then leaves the site. That is the least valuable of traffic to us… the economic impact [of not having content indexed by Google] is not as great as you might think. You can survive without it.” Ok, if you can survive without it then just do it already. Well, that wouldn’t be prudent now would it. However, Mr Miller admitted News Corporation could not make the bold step alone but was prepared to lead other media companies in this direction. “We will lead. There is a pent up need for this. There has to be a resolution for the free versus pay debate otherwise we cannot afford to pay for things like news bureaus in Kabul.” Looks to me like this whole thing is just keeping News Corp. in the news because there may not be any real news here since there is no plan and no definition coupled with vague threats and dates of even more vague threats. I say do it and let’s see what happens. There’s no way to predict how this will play out and some game of cat and mouse will just tick off more people than it’s worth. As Henry Rollins shouted years ago “Don’t think about it …. Do it!” Amen. Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

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News Corp. Getting Ready to Get Ready

While it remains unclear whether Google Voice should be treated the same way as other telecom companies, the search giant isn’t taking any chances with the rather unpleasant probing it’s receiving from the Federal Communications Commission. Thanks in part to the finger-pointing of AT&T , Google has to answer the accusations that it does not connect calls to certain rural areas. AT&T believes this is unfair–Google should be made to connect calls to any location, regardless of how expensive it is to the company–but Google is firing back , claiming that it’s only blocking calls to obvious "traffic pumping" numbers. Now, Google has gone one step further. In a letter to the FCC , it claims it has isolated less than 100 numbers that are responsible for the practice, and is now only blocking those specific numbers. If you’re short on time, here’s the pertinent text from Google’s letter: In June 2009, Google Voice began noticing extremely high cost calls to a concentrated number of destinations. Our internal investigation revealed that the top 10 prefixes to U.S. destinations (NPA-NXX) accounted for l.l percent of our monthly U.S. traffic by volume – an unusually large number, and some 161 times the expected amount by prefix. In tum, this traffic accounted for 26.2 percent of our monthly U.S. cost – again, an unexpectedly large number. In addition to these grossly anomalous call patterns (which include the frequency and duration of calls to rural areas), we also were aware through various industry sources of certain in-bound traffic stimulation practices, and the identities and locations of some of the carriers in question. Many of these businesses are located in rural areas with local carriers that charge unusually high rates for terminating traffic. Our own underlying carriers would assess Google Voice up to 39 cents per minute for some of this interstate traffic. As a result, based on an application of these data filters to the total universe of our outbound traffic, in August 2009 Google Voice began the practice of restricting calls to certain high-cost destinations. Currently, fewer than 100 U.S. telephone numbers are restricted based on an application of these filters. For a couple of technology giants, they sure are good at tennis. The ball is now back in AT&T’s court!

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Google Fires Back Over AT&T’s Call Blocking Claims

While we all like our sites to have visitors, a loyal visitor—one who returns for later visits—is especially valuable. And while search engines do send a lot of visitors, a study issued by Chitika earlier this month shows that the most loyal site visitors come from social sites, as eMarketer reports today. Studying 33 million uniques across its publisher network last month, Chitika used the criterion of four or more visits over the course of a week to indicate a loyal visitor. They found that Facebook and Digg had the best loyalty rates: Facebook showed 20.69% of its referrals became loyal visitors. Digg had slightly over 16% of its referrals visit four or more times that week. Interestingly, Yahoo had a slightly better loyalty rate than Google.: Next came the search engines, Yahoo! leading the way with over 15% [15.89%] of referrals being loyal. Google and Bing were practically even at slightly below 12% [11.84% and 11.74%], and Twitter came in last place overall with barely over 11%. I’m a little surprised that one in eight Google visitors return four or more times in a week. Considering that Google sent 76% of the traffic in the study, even with the lower retention rate, it’s still numerically more loyal visitors. But, as Chitika puts it, if you had the option of sending 1000 visitors to your site from Google or Facebook, if you want loyalty, Facebook is a better bet. It’s also interesting that Twitter visitors were least loyal. You might argue that links in Twitter get pushed down in the feed so fast that it’s hard to dig them up again later to return, but the same is probably true for Facebook. (Note, too, that Twitter is falling rapidly in referral rates: eMarketer says, “In July, Twitter was No. 24 on Chitika’s list of top referrers, with 0.05%. By September, it had moved down to 44th place, with just a 0.02% share.”) But probably most interesting is that one-sixth of Digg visitors are loyal. The site has become notorious for one-off traffic spikes that don’t do a whole lot for long term gains—but maybe the dynamic has shifted as the site has aged. What do you think? Do you see more loyal visitors from Digg and Facebook? Have you seen a change in your visitors from Digg?

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Social Sites Send Fewer, but More Loyal Visitors than Search