LinkedIn Can Be One of Your Most Valuable Traffic Sources
LinkedIn is often discussed as a powerful social networking tool, particularly for business professionals, employers, and jobseekers. What is not discussed as frequently is the site’s ability to simply drive traffic to your site. We talked to entrepreneur Lewis Howes (who claims that LinkedIn is one of the top traffic sources to his blogs) about how powerful LinkedIn can be for driving traffic.
Is LinkedIn part of your strategy? Comment here.
We asked Howes why he thinks people don’t generally associate LinkedIn with driving traffic like they would with other social networks like Facebook or Twitter. “Their perception of LinkedIn is of a resume, or a way to get a job, but they don’t see all of the powerful tools within LinkedIn that allow you to drive traffic back to your site,” he tells WebProNews.
LinkedIn has announced that it is now being integrated into Microsoft Outlook, in one of the numerous convergences of social media and email that are increasingly taking place.
“Anytime you can increase the size of your network on LinkedIn, it will give you the opportunity to distribute your content to more people, therefore driving more traffic back to your site,” says Howes. “The Outlook integration is a way to connect more with your current LinkedIn contacts, and also help you grow you network as well.”
In some ways, LinkedIn traffic may even be more valuable than traffic from other social networks and sites. This is simply due to the generally professional nature of LinkedIn itself.
“You need to take into consideration that LinkedIn has the highest average household income per user over any other social networking site (even NYTimes.com and BusinessWeek.com readers),” Howes tells us. “That being said, these are business decision makers you are targeting with your traffic from LinkedIn. The network is for real, and it will only continue to grow in time as there are currently 60 million professionals.”
Now consider that LinkedIn could be one of your top traffic sources if you put enough effort into cultivating it as such. On a scale of 1-10, Howes says he’d rank it as a 7 or 8 on importance level for using it. “For me it is always one of the top 5 referring sites that drives traffic to my blogs,” he says.
Howes went through ten steps in a post at ProBlogger.net. While the post is geared at driving traffic to your blog, you may find the advice helpful for other types of sites. In summary (he goes into much more detail about each of these in the post), the ten steps are:
1. Complete your profile.
2. Increase you connections.
3. Customize your website links.
4. Answer questions.
5. Update your status.
6. Join niche groups.
7. Post comments in groups.
8. Add RSS feeds to groups.
9. Create a group.
10. Add the blog application to your profile.
Now that LinkedIn can be integrated into Microsoft Outlook, I would suggest looking at getting that set up as well (steps here), if you want to get serious about including LinkedIn in your traffic strategy.
Of course there are plenty of other ways to use LinkedIn as a tool to increase the success of your business. As Howes lists, you can sell products, find new clients/employees, generate leads, receive funding, obtain sponsorships, sell tickets to events, as get press coverage to name a few.
Have you considered LinkedIn’s potential as a significant traffic source? Do you already get significant traffic from LinkedIn? Let us know.
Monitoring Your Reputation with Google Buzz
Google Buzz is the new kid on the social media block, but like networks that have been around for a while (your Facebooks, your Twitters, etc.), it is critical to reputation management. WebProNews discussed monitoring using Google Buzz with Google’s Rick Klau, who used to run the publihser team at Feedburner, and is currently the Business Product Manager for Google’s Blogger.
Klau says Buzz monitoring is “definitely” as important as monitoring another critical component of reputation management, Google Blog Search. “As a product manager on Blogger, I regularly monitor Twitter and Buzz in addition to blog comments to look for users having problems or sharing interesting ideas,” he tells us. “It’s important to go where the users are – otherwise you’ll miss out on conversations that are happening, and miss the opportunity to help solve a problem, learn about an issue that needs attention, or share a tip that deserves a broader audience.”
“The real-time nature of tools like Buzz, along with the ease with which users can share and redistribute info, makes the amplification of information even more powerful than it was before,” adds Klau. “News has the opportunity to spread virally, very quickly.”
“That’s great if it’s good news, but potentially damaging if it’s bad news,” he says. “That’s why it’s so important to both look for conversations happening about topics that matter to you, and to engage where appropriate. When users know you’re listening, and in a position to help, they can go from angry to appreciative pretty quickly.”
Klau discusses Buzz monitoring in more detail in a post on his personal blog. In it, he provides more information about specifically how he uses Buzz for monitoring purposes, and provides steps to do it like he does.
First, he says to enable Gmail’s “Quick Links” tab, which puts a box below Labels in Gmail. Then he says to go to Buzz, type in a query, and click “Add Quick Link” in the Quick Links box. This creates a bookmark to the query, allowing for easy access to the latest “buzz” on a query.
Are you using Google Buzz as part of your reputation management strategy?
PleaseRobMe Hits Foursquare Users with a Dose of Reality
Update: Fousquare has issued a respons to the attention PleaseRobMe has brought to potential privacy issues associated with location sharing. What it boils down to is that Foursquare “takes privacy seriously” and it’s “really a bigger question about the pros and cons of location sharing in general”. Read the company’s entire response here.
Original Article: Yesterday at about 2pm PleaseRobMe went live. PleaseRobMe is a site set up by a few developers who want to spread awareness about how easy it would be for people to rob your home if you share too much information about yourself online, specifically your location…even more specifically through Foursquare. The site displays a list of messages asking people if they know the whole world has access to their location. All of these are drawn directly from the PleaseRobMe Twitter account.
We asked Boy Van Amstel, one of those developers if they were concerned that followers of PleaseRobMe’s Twitter account could actually be interested in robbing people. Van Amstel responded, “With just the information [from] pleaserobme.com it would be almost impossible to do so. However as people share more information about themselves, such as their home address, it might become a possibility. We think it’s important to think about that and what it means if you share location information on services like Twitter…it’s very easy to get it, even directly from Twitter’s search page.”
So far, Van Amstel says Foursquare is the only service it watches to determine who is sharing their location with the world. “It’s not about the service, it’s about the information that’s being shared. We think it’s important to realize that something you post on Twitter isn’t necessarily private. Everybody is able to read it, unless you protect your messages.”
One can only assume that FourSquare isn’t entirely pleased with the launch of PleaseRobMe. That’s the second time the service has had a not-so-positive light cast upon it this week. Earlier in the week, there were reports of Foursquare cheating. This could have an effect on the decisions of businesses to give Foursquare users special offers, a practice that is becoming more commonplace.
Regardless, PleaseRobMe bluntly delivers an important reminder to socially active people that just because they’re using the “virtual” world, that doesn’t mean it can’t potentially have real-world consequences.
Facebook Users Set Up Fan Group(s) for Suicide Pilot
Update: Ok, make that multiple Facebook groups…(via Business Insider)
Original Article: By now, you’ve probably heard the news that Joseph Andrew Stack intentionally flew a plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas. He appeared to have left a rant at EmbeddedArt.com before he did it, but the site has since been taken offline, and replaced with the following message:
This website has been taken offline due to the sensitive nature of the events that transpired in Texas this morning and in compliance with a request from the FBI. To see an archived version of the original letter, please go here: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2010/0218102stack1.html. Please visit our forum if you wish to discuss anything related to this incident: Texas crash pilot left suicide note on Web site – embeddedart.com.
Regards,
T35 Hosting – www.T35.com
Stack has already had a Facebook Fan Group set up in his “honor” by people admiring what he has done. At the time of this writing, it already has over 160 fans. Some on the page are praising what he did, while others are calling him and his fans names. Social media at its finest.
On an interesting side note, Google doesn’t appear to be displaying its real-time search results for “Austin” or “Texas”. I just find this slightly odd, being how it is one of the day’s biggest news stories. To be fair, the results do show up for queries like “IRS”, “plane”, and “crash”. This shows another example of where the feature still has some room for improvement.
Grading Google’s Marketing Practices Based On Google’s Standards?
The following is a guest post by Slaven Radic.
The Google Buzz team has had quite a week. Their new product quickly lived up to its name, though mostly for the wrong reasons, generating buzz about its own privacy issues. Calling the original Google Buzz privacy settings lax would be a gross understatement. It created a storm of complaints, best put in perspective by Harriet Jacobs in her F*ck You, Google piece.
In short, when you logged into your Gmail account Google simply took all of your frequent contacts and mashed them up into an active social network without much input from people they were connecting. If you exchanged a lot of emails with your editor and your under-cover sources from the same Gmail account, now they were connected through your public profile if you didn’t happen to catch the Buzz opt-out checkbox. Or what about using the same Gmail account for emailing your husband and your boyfriend? Well now they’re introduced – you’re welcome.
Yes, sounds like a pretty naïve and reckless way to implement a major feature but Google protested that they just wanted to help and meant no evil. After all, their CEO Eric Schmidt had an interesting take on expectations for privacy online: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place”. That was said nary two months before Google Buzz launched – I guess people like Harriet Jacobs and her abusive ex-husband just didn’t listen.
Oops, Our Bad: Thanks For All the Users…
Since the launch, Google has done an amazingly quick about-face and pledged to do better. The latest set of changes make signing up for Buzz a tangibly more transparent experience, probably what it should have been at launch time. The press has mostly applauded their quick response and patted Google on the back for their responsiveness and keen focus on Gmail user experience.
But let’s see what Google’s naiveté about privacy issues meant for Google Buzz:
- 9 million posts and comments
- 300,000 mobile check-ins per day
- Buzz already rivals Twitter for sheer network size
Those are some pretty impressive numbers for any online launch, but to achieve this in under three days is just unheard of. Actually, there are businesses that do generate this level of interests from their prospects in that short of a time-frame and Gmail deals with them on a daily basis: spammers.
The ‘9 Million-Post’ Question
The question is did Google simply make a “mistake” and not consider these fairly serious privacy issues, or did the massive amount of spam Gmail churns through each day actually demonstrate effectiveness of a new business model?
The former is hard to believe when you consider the army of privacy lawyers Google has and their job to review privacy considerations in revenue-generating AdSense programs. This is especially critical in Gmail, where you are shown ads based on emails you exchange. Gmail achieves this by reading through all your email and matching you up with advertisers interested in addressing your daily struggles. After the initial outrage over this concept a few years ago most users have resigned to trust Google that they have their best interests in mind.
Your Trust, Google’s Toilet Paper
Google Buzz violates this trust in a serious way. In light of Google’s experience in this field, it is hard not to take Google’s mea culpa with a huge dose of skepticism. After all, if Google had made Buzz an opt-in service – something that users had to enable rather than be tricked into joining – they would be just another social network trying to compete with Facebook and Twitter.
Leveraging millions of Gmail users was a shortcut simply too tempting to avoid. The fact that Google decided to revise Google Buzz activation process over the weekend is simply a red herring: they only needed a few days to convert some of the hundred million plus Gmail users into millions of Buzz users, and become the de-facto Twitter competitor over a single long weekend.
Google “fixing” this privacy snafu a few days later is equivalent to spammers adding an “Unsubscribe” link to an email that’s already done its damage.
The strong impression from the last few days is that Gmail users were a pawn in a very cynical game: Google trying desperately to become a player in the social networking space, after the Orkut launch and their acquisition of a handful of other companies in this space failed to produce results.
We’re Not Evil
This is a tough act to pull off when your motto is Don’t Be Evil. It’s been said that eventually Google’s shareholders will push it to make product moves and decisions that end up hurting its brand in a quest for monetization. It will be interesting to see if Google comes out of this with their motto intact.