Online Business Hour Podcast

Ep #26 Random Tips for Better Blog traffic

Adam Saverian — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 08:11:29 +0000

Thanks for listening to the Online Business Hour. (Original post: Ep #26 Random Tips for Better Blog traffic)

In today’s show I shared some random tips for generating blog traffic from Rand Fishkin’s recent article 21 Tactis to Increase Blog Traffic.

If you’re enjoying the podcast please consider reviewing it in iTunes! It will help it rank higher so that more people can find it! If you do review the show in iTunes let me know so that I can thank you on the show and promote any project, or website, you have! Thanks!

Thanks to the following for supporting today’s show.
The makers of PocketCloud App for iPhone.
The folks at Pelletier Rug Co. Wool Carpet
Cash Making Power Sites
http://flj3weightloss.com

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Ep #25 Generating Traffic Through On-Page SEO

Adam Saverian — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 07:21:14 +0000

Thanks for listening to the Online Business Hour. (Original post: Ep #25 Generating Traffic Through On-Page SEO)

On today’s show I discussed how to generate more traffic through on page search engine optimization. I also talked about how I’m moving to one show per week for a while. Thanks for listening, may you all have a very successful 2012.

Thanks to the following for supporting today’s show:

http://www.phentermined.com

http://neweconomysolution.com/ethanp

http://www.Cashmachineprofits.com

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Ep #24 Interview With Jenna Langer of LiveFyre

Adam Saverian — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 02:34:19 +0000

Thanks for listening to the Online Business Hour. (Original post: Ep #24 Interview With Jenna Langer of LiveFyre)

In today’s episode I interviewed Jenna Langer, community manager at LiveFyre, about LiveFyre, building community, and engagement. I also talked about my recent blog post: how to generate traffic from “social video” sharing on youtube.

Here’s a partial transcript (only 3 minutes during the introduction to the interview with Jenna Langer).

Adam: Jenna, thanks so much for coming on the show today. I really appreciate it.

Jenna: Thanks for having me.

Adam: Well, you know that I wrote this post called “Disqus vs. LiveFyre”. It’s been a very popular post on the Online Business Hour website, and in fact, it’s my most popular post, because it was this in-depth review I did comparing Disqus and LiveFyre. The two commenting systems that I found to be the most compelling as I’ve been watching them both grow over the last couple years, I guess. Right after I posted it, you came in and provided a comment and started engaging with people who were asking questions on my site, and I was just really impressed with the engagement that you guys had. I wanted to have you on the show to talk a little bit about your job as a LiveFyre community manager, and the approach that LiveFyre takes to engagement with people talking about LiveFyre online, with their customers, and so forth, and a little bit also, about LiveFyre, of course. But, my review is in-depth, and so I encourage anyone to go there and check out the review if they want to learn more, and there might be some things that you want to add to the review, and feel free to promote LiveFyre, of course.

Let’s start by talking a little bit about your job at LiveFyre and Community Management. What is Community Management? What does it mean to be a community manager?

Jenna: You know, it’s funny. That word management, I think is a funny one in the term Community Manager, because I wouldn’t like say that we manage the community. It’s really more about building, and it’s about working directly with all of our users, and our community, and people that are in joining the platform, and connecting people to each other, and making sure they can get the most out of what we have to offer. For us, community management from the very beginning was a core tenant of our company, and I think that’s really what’s made all the differences. I was actually the third employee. It was me, Jordan (the founder and CEO), and two engineers. I started before we even had a product by jumping in and seeing what people were saying about comments, and conversations on the web, and how they interacted with blogs. So, really starting by learning about the industry, and then taking that, and talking directly to those people that use the products to get the feedback to build our product to what it is today. It’s always great when we get posts like yours comparing us to Disqus or any other comment provider out there, just because people have such a passion for what we’re doing, and community management is really getting those passionate people to help you, and help build that community. Because we’re all here for the same reason, to make conversations better, and to get people interacting online. I think by connecting to each other and taking in the feedback, is going to make our product…

Big thanks to FoxTranscribe for transcribing my podcasts! Check them out for the best deal on high quality audio transcription:

Thanks to the following supporters of today’s show
Quality Cheap Store
Coin Collecting
Coin Collecting on Facebook
Maryland Home Auction
New Export Market
New Export Market on Facebook

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Ep #23 Interview With Danny Iny on Engagement From Scratch

Adam Saverian — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 23:41:34 +0000

Thanks for listening to the Online Business Hour. (Original post: Ep #23 Interview With Danny Iny on Engagement From Scratch)

On Today’s show I interviewed Danny Iny (@DannyIny) of FirePole Marketing about his new book Engagement From Scratch. A partial transcript will be up shortly thanks to FoxTranscribe.

Thanks to the following who supported today’s show financially.
Web Design Surgeons
Best Digital Storefront

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Ep #22 Social Media Plugins, Dashboards, & Tools for Generating Traffic

Adam Saverian — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 06:08:39 +0000

Thanks for listening to the Online Business Hour. (Original post: Ep #22 Social Media Plugins, Dashboards, & Tools for Generating Traffic)

I want to thank David Winchell (@golfwinch) for reviewing the show in iTunes. Check out his podcast over at Stocks and Golf Podcast. He’s also on Google+.

I will be interviewing Danny Iny from Fire Pole Marketing pretty soon so look out for that show!

Here’s a partial transcript of the show:

Alright, well we’ve been talking about generating traffic through social media as part of our traffic section of the better – Blog Better series. And today I wanted to talk about social sharing plugins, social media dashboads and other tools. I posted an article again on 70 of these – over 70 of them and so I’m going to talk about a bunch of those right now as well as share with you some social sharing tips that I collected and so let’s jump into that.

Alright, well first let’s talk about some social sharing plugins for WordPress. Everything I’m going to be talking about is going to have to do with WordPress as far as plugins go because I really don’t waste my time with anything else and the marketplace that WordPress has is just insane. So we’re going to focus obviously on WordPress. And I wanted to start by just mentioning a few of the plugins that I like for allowing your users to share your content on social networks bookmarking sites and so forth.

So, the first is “share this” and there’s “add this” and there’s “SexyBookmarks” which is really nice and I’ve talked about in previous episodes and on my website why I like SexyBookmarks. Then there’s the share bar, the Sleek Social – I think it’s called Sleek Social Share. I’ve got it here somewhere, I’ve got – my list is huge. So those are some that I like. My favorite as far as speed goes and I do want to promote this one in particular because of the fact that it’s so fast, I mean I mentioned this before it’s RT Social. I’m using it right now for just my Twitter and Facebook share buttons, they have not implemented Google plus yet.

And RT Social will load before any of your content on you page, I mean no contest, it’s immediate, supper fast and it’s a lot faster than any of the other sharing buttons. So if you want to check out RT Social just Google it and if you want to see how it looks or how fast it loads you can to my website and you’ll notice that it will load before the content – before the text on the page even load, so it’s really good plugin to use.

What I like about SexyBookmarks by the way is when you – if you have more than one row of icons it will automatically collapse the plugin so that it only shows one row and then when the user mouses over the plugin in a…

Thanks to the following people for supporting today’s show financially:

Great Host Network

Prescription Drug Card

Frederick Gomes at the Web Wis Shop

Seth Solomon at Success Pump

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#21 2011-12-10 Headway Themes 3.0 Review & Traffic Generating Headlines

Adam Saverian — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 10:38:05 +0000

Thanks for listening to the Online Business Hour. (Original post: #21 2011-12-10 Headway Themes 3.0 Review & Traffic Generating Headlines)

On today’s show I discussed 3 things: 1) Why Forrester research is wrong about the future of social networks. 2) A review of Headway Themes Framework. 3) 45 Traffic Generating Headline Tips and Examples. Of course, I also covered some news. And I said that it was Tuesday, December 10th during the opening of the show. In fact, it’s Saturday, December 10th. Oops.

If you would like to support the show and have your business, or website, promoted on every show please check out the benefits of contributing.

Here’s a partial transcript of my discussion of traffic generating headlines.

“So if you’re going to be sharing your content on social bookmarking sites, social networking sites, social bookmarking sites and so forth, then you are going to need to write good headlines that are going to generate traffic when people see them and can’t help but click on them. Headlines are very important obviously – if you don’t already know this, only 2 out of 10 readers are going to click on a good headline, so if you write great headlines, you might get 2 or 3 or 4 people out of 10 to click on your headline, and that’s a maybe, you’re not entirely sure.

But headlines are really important, because if you write poor headlines, they’re not getting any clicks. And there are lots of other things that come in to play as far as you know, getting traffic and writing good headlines, you’re not going to get hits if other things aren’t in place as well. So you can have good headlines, but still not have great traffic. But you at least need to have good headlines that capture people’s attention.

Here are some of the things that your headlines need to contain:

They need to be attention-getting, like I just mentioned.

They also need to arouse curiosity.

They should also be focused on benefits, and if you don’t know what a benefit is, a benefit is how is this blog post, this product, this article on this website, again these apply to really anything, even though we are on a series talking about blogging, you know how is it going to benefit me. What is it going to do? Is it going to save me time, energy, effort? Is it going to save me money, what is the benefit? Not necessarily the functionality of the article, or the tool or the product or the website they are trying to convince me to go to, but what is the benefit to me, how is it helping me.

Your headlines should also make an offer or a promise, so you want to present some sort of promise, otherwise, what’s the point.

Your headlines should also be simple, short, and punchy. None of these, you know, 20-word long headlines, or even 10. You want to make them as short as possible.

You also want to make sure that your headlines are focused on your reader, so you’re using words like you, you’re, you are, and you are really attracting talking about your reader, not about yourself. Headlines that, when you talk about yourself, you can often turn your audience away. Now, some headlines where you talk about yourself can work, like “How I made $5000 overnight”, or something like that, although that might be overpromising, so you might not get as many clicks as you think with a headline like that. Especially, if you’ve lost credibility already.

Also your headline should contain superlatives: easiest, fastest, the fastest way to do this, the easiest way to do this, the easiest method, whatever.

Some of your headlines – notice I’m saying some here – some of your headlines should utilize a hot or popular topic. This is something that some bloggers just love to do, they love to bring up some modern, you knew fresh, relevant topic.

Some of your headlines should also contain an answer or a question, raising of course a question that you assume your potential readers are going to have…”

Thanks to today’s contributors:
Steffanie Lyons http://www.steffanielyons.com/
Seth Solomon http://successpump.com/
Doug Muraski http://blogcertified.com/does-the-auto-profit-machine-work
Mark Copeland http://mac52.chipin.com/furnace-for-a-friend
T Stewart http://empowernetwork.com/join.php?id=kash

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Interview with Tammy K. Fennell on Social Curation & Social Inbox, & Generating Traffic Through Social Media Pt 2

Adam Saverian — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 05:25:12 +0000

Thanks for listening to the Online Business Hour. (Original post: Interview with Tammy K. Fennell on Social Curation & Social Inbox, & Generating Traffic Through Social Media Pt 2)

On today’s show I interviewed Tammy K. Fennell (@tammykfennell), CEO of the social media marketing dashboard MarketMeSuite, about the concepts of social curation and the social inbox. I also covered a little news and continued the Blog Better series by looking at Generating Traffic Through Social Media Engagement.

If you would like to support the show and have your business, or website, promoted on every show please check out the benefits of contributing.

Here’s a partial transcript of the interview:

Adam: The reason I wanted to have you on this show was because I ran across this article that you wrote on social curation, which caught my eye, because I’m a big curation nerd, so I love the whole concept, and I love tools that help you curate. So I saw the article, read it, learned about the MarketMeSuite, which I hadn’t heard about before, and also the social inbox concept, which I do believe I’d heard about before. So, I wanted to have you on to talk about social curation, the social inbox concept, and then the MarketMeSuite, and how it’s going to provide functionality for those things. So, if you could, I’d love to just start by asking you to explain a little bit about social curation-what that is.

Tammy: Sure, so social curation I think it’s becoming incredibly important, because I think social media, social networks are becoming incredibly cluttered. So, when I look at social curation, because of the nature of MarketMeSuite and that it’s a business tool, I look at it from a business perspective. So, my article that you read was all about social media curation, because there’s a lot of places that businesses (small, medium, and even large businesses) can go to connect with their customers, but they have to be able to then manage what it is that they find. So, our emphasis and our turning point right now for MarketMeSuite in its current forms in social inboxes is really emphasizing that need to curate social needs, and I think we may have just cracked it you know, the way to really do it effectively, because there’s been – We’ve all been trying to figure it all out, and I used to run a small business and MarketMeSuite was born out of the fact that I felt there is a necessity for a way to turn essentially followers and fans into actual customers, viable leads.

Adam: Okay, how was lead curation done, how has it been done traditionally in terms of online businesses and social media marketing?

Tammy: Well, I think a lot of it has been awfully manual, and you’d be surprised. It’s amazing how many larger companies even just have a tiny social media department. So, you use the tools that are out there. You’ll even use TweetDeck for the Twitter side. You’ll go right into your Facebook page and engage with people, and I’ve heard of companies exporting things from Facebook or making spreadsheets–

Adam: Yep.

Tammy: –based on—

Adam: Yep.
Tammy: – people that are coming in, and potential customers, and then trying to siphon them off into your email funnel, and all those sorts of things. So, I think it’s been a slightly condeluded approach, because that’s just the way it is, just like when I first started doing MarketMeSuite, one of the emphasis I was doing was on location marketing and niche marketing. Because I was running an antiques and collectables business, so I was trying to find people on Twitter who were tweeting about potentially wanting—

Adam: Sure.

Tammy –to buy certain collections that I happened to have, so again, manual process. I was on search.twitter.com, which at the time wasn’t even owned by Twitter. It was like a third party that –

Adam: Right, yep, yep.

Tammy: – you know, and I was making these lists, then I had these Excel spreadsheets, then I was contacting people, and then I never really knew how replied to me, but it worked! I mean to an extent, it worked, and so I think that’s what people continue to do it even though it’s hard, because it’s cheap, but a fact – So, what we’re aiming to do is make it still cheap and easy to do, but more effective and just more manageable.

Adam: Right, absolutely. So, how does that relate to Social Inbox, and what is a social inbox?

Tammy: Sure, a social inbox — when MarketMeSuite right now is an Adobe era and my co-founder and CTO, Allen Hamlin we were discussing. We said we know we love Adobe era, but the time has come. We need a web version of MarketMeSuite and we hit a crossroads. We said we can rebuild exactly what you see on the Adobe era version, but just make it on the web, and have like two versions of the same thing, or we could see if now is the good time to approach it from a different way, and all of the sudden it dawned on Allen. He says “You know, I love MacMail.” Everyone knows email. Everyone understands it, the new person to social media —

Adam: Yep.

Tammy: – the old social media. They all know email. Email’s, you know that’s the one thing. I don’t know if there’s very many people left in this world without an email address. So, email is a concept that people are comfortable with. So, the Social Inbox arose from the fact that up until now dashboards tend to be very Twitter-centric, ours included. We are Twitter-centric and we have Facebook functionality and LinkedIn, but it’s always been Twitter was the lower hanging fruit. It’s easier to develop for us. So, pretty much people develop for it and then try to fit everything else into the Twitter model. So, the Social Inbox is the idea that if you take the email approach, there’s no network bias. It’s a sandbox square and you can just call in leads, call an engagement, and all do it from one uniform place, where it just makes sense. So, that you could just create a filter like you would a smart mailbox in MacMail or Outlook, or even in Gmail and you can have the most relevant things to you come through first…..

End Transcription

Special thanks to Happy Skinny Me and The Black Bat for supporting today’s show!

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Interview with Tea Silvestre on Creating an Addicting Brand, and a Traffic Generation Tip

Adam Saverian — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 05:34:33 +0000

Thanks for listening to the Online Business Hour. (Original post: Interview with Tea Silvestre on Creating an Addicting Brand, and a Traffic Generation Tip)

In today’s episode I interviewed The Word Chef, @TeaSilvestre, on creating an addicting brand. And shared a tip on generating traffic from your social media profile pages. I also mentioned some news stories and the release of a new version of the killer Headway Theme Framework,

Check out Tea’s five week seminar on creating an addicting brand coming in February.

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Interview With Ruth Burr on Link Prospecting via Social Media

Adam Saverian — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 06:39:58 +0000

Thanks for listening to the Online Business Hour. (Original post: Interview With Ruth Burr on Link Prospecting via Social Media)

In today’s episode I interviewed Ruth Burr (@ruthburr) about link prospecting via social media. I also discussed demographics and traffic generation strategy along with some news. Ruth Burr is the senior manager of search marketing at GameHouse.com. She loves SEO, PPC, quality content and grilled cheese sandwiches – who doesn’t love grilled cheese sandwiches? On Saturday I will get neck deep in traffic generation tips. Until then, enjoy the show! The transcript will be available tomorrow!

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OBHR 2011-11-23 Interview With Tom Treanor of Right Mix Marketing Inc.

Adam Saverian — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 04:16:37 +0000

Thanks for listening to the Online Business Hour. (Original post: OBHR 2011-11-23 Interview With Tom Treanor of Right Mix Marketing Inc.)

On today’s show I interviewed Tom Treanor of Right Mix Marketing Inc. I also covered the news and suggested Tungle.me, the “SEO Auto Link” WordPress plugin, and DesignModo. Sorry about the less than stellar audio in this episode. Luckily the interview sounds great.

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