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TJ36 – You-tility Marketing – Why Standing Out Online Is About Help, Not Hype With Jay Baer.

Jay Baer Header

 

Today’s guest is a 100% “hype free” marketer. On this episode Jay Baer from Convince and Convert explains why commanding attention on the web, and in the hearts and minds of your customers is created by helping not hyping up your customers.  Jay’s approach to marketing requires us to radically rethink old school practices focussed on buzz and virality, replacing them with an altogether more useful approach he calls Youtility!

Jay is an author, speaker and agency owner who’s advised more than 700 brands on their marketing strategy since 1994, including 31 of the Fortune 500. He’s been in the game a long time, and his strategy is a long-term play!

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

  • The Other Half Marketers Are Missing Out On.
  • The Hunter Vs. The Farmer Marketing Mentality.
  • What is Youtility?
  • The Most Important Thing in Any Business.
  • Convince and Convert’s Own Utility.
  • Great Youtility Examples from Famous Businesses.
  • Evolution of The Convince and Convert Website Design.
  • How Removing Post Dates and Comments from Posts Can Help.
  • Effective Podcast Promotion.

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Hey there listener! Welcome back to Traffic Jam, this is session #36 of the podcast show that teaches you how to get more traffic, leads and sales to your website and build a profitable audience online. I am of course your host James Reynolds and I am very excited to have you back with me today for another action-packed episode. Today we’ll be joined by Jay Bear from ConvinceandConvert.com and the author of the book You-tility to learn why smart marketing is about help and not hype. We also have the one minute traffic tip. This week’s news in traffic, then the part of the show that gives this show its name, the Traffic Jam, a musical jam chosen by my guest today to play out the show.

Before we start the interview, allow me to introduce my guest and co-host of today’s episode, Jay Baer is a tequila loving hype free strategist who’s advised more than 700 brands on their marketing strategy since 1994, including 31 no least, of the Fortune 500. He is officially the only licensed barbecue judge to be seated by the associated press, CBC, Forbes fast company and USA Today. He’s a podcast host, an agency founder, a spokesperson for the juvenile prison system, a brand marketer, political consultant and the author of 2 books, The New Revolution and recently You-tility. So here we go, here’s the interview with Jay.

James: Welcome listener to the interview section of the show and a big Traffic Jam welcome to my broadcast companion on episode 36, Jay Baer. Jay, how are you?

Jay: I am delighted to be here, thank you very much. I am fantastic and hello to everybody out there.

James: Awesome! You’ve got this book and a whole approach to marketing that you call You-tility where you say buzz marketers have got it all wrong and SEO and inbound marketing guys like me are missing half of the picture. What’s the other half?

Jay: Well, the other half in my estimation is to be just useful; that if you create You-tility, which I define in the book as marketing so useful that people would pay for it, that customers would keep you close. I love SEO, I love inbound marketing, I have been doing it for years and I have been a consultant for that side of the thing for a long, long time but the challenge in that is that it does not create demand, it just fulfills demand. Nobody goes to Google and says hey, I would like to buy something, I don’t really care what, just supply me. It does not really work like that. So you search when you are already in the funnel. You don’t add people to the funnel with inbound marketing that is why even though inbound and SEO are incredibly powerful and incredibly important, you should not try and only do that because you are missing out on some potential customers.

James: Yeah, and you’ve only got half of the picture as you clearly say. People don’t just go to first result and look no further. If they are in to a buying decision they’re going to spend a little bit more time researching and evaluating who, what, where before they actually make that decision, right?

Jay: Absolutely! I think the problem that we are all faced with right now in marketing, especially online marketing is that technology and the pace of change and mobile has conspired to make us think like hunters and nobody wants to think like a farmer. You have to recognize that not every customer is to go to Google, click the first result, land on your squeeze page and instantly give you money. Some will, but most won’t. We have to understand that marketing and customer relationships are typically built over the long term and not one click, and you have to be good at both.

James: Yeah, sure. Well, let’s put together perhaps some examples of You-tility marketing. The core of it is that you are useful and that the content or the marketing that you create is inherently valuable. Give us some examples at play of who might be using You-tility marketing and some of the best practices that you’ve seen out there.

Jay: One of the things that You-tility requires is courage. You have to have the courage to trust that your customers will reward you eventually. You have to be okay with eventually. And one of the examples which I talk about in the book is around Clorox. So Clorox makes a very popular cleaning product in the States and you use it to remove stains. They have a mobile app called the My Stain App which shows you what to do if you stain stuff on yourself which is very, very useful if you have in fact stained something on yourself and it is extremely useful because it breaks it down by what the material is, whether cotton or polyester or what have you and what the stain is. Is it wine, is it blood, is it ball point pen ink? And when they were developing this in the company they had two big fights in the organization. The first fight was well, should Clorox always be the answer? Should no matter what the stain was, should the answer always be Clorox? Some of the people on the marketing team said of course it should because we are trying to sell stuff here, and then somebody else said, well, yeah, but actually, we’re not always the right solution. Apparently, they told me this, if you put Clorox on butter, something terrible happens. I don’t know exactly what it is but don’t do that. So, but they are not always the right solution in truth, and also if they are always the right solution, doesn’t it change the very nature of this thing from a You-tility to a very, very complicated brochure? And the second fight that they had internally was that of course there should be a coupon in the middle of this right? Because you should be able to hold up your phone at your grocer and get a discount on Clorox because we are trying to move product eventually. And that sounds reasonable but then again, somebody said, well, yeah but if there is a coupon right in the middle of this, doesn’t it become not so much a utility that people will cherish but just a price promotion that they might tolerate? It changes the way this whole thing is perceived and what it means so in both cases they had the courage to hold the line, to produce content that was honest and authentic and produce content that was not trying to close the loop immediately. I think that is really commendable and that’s the way most good utilities are- it transcends the transaction.

James: Yeah, and this all builds trust right? If you’re not inherently promoting your own items and sometimes acknowledge that there’s actually other solutions out there that for your particular scenario might be a better fit. It certainly will build trust with the consumers and they’ll say hey, these guys are actually trying to help me, they’re not just trying to sell to me all the time.

Jay: Trust is the most important thing in business. Trust is the prism through which all business success must pass, and we don’t talk about it nearly enough. Because without trust, SEO is irrelevant. Without trust price is irrelevant, without trust marketing is irrelevant. Without trust, customer service is irrelevant. Without trust, everything we do as marketers is literally irrelevant. And one of the best ways to gain and keep trust is to be massively useful when you don’t have to be.

James: Yeah, and I guess transparency is also key to this, right? I think this is a concept that you also talk about in your book. Be overly transparent. Share everything, let people see the inside so that they can really see themselves what you are all about.

Jay: Yeah, it’s definitely the trend. I have read a few good books lately all about transparency and it is no doubt the best practice for companies now. Full transparency is very difficult to achieve especially in a corporate environment. In a smaller company environment though it is doable especially if you build your corporate culture around it. I am an investor in the company Buffer which you and some listeners may know; it is a social media sharing tool and they have a corporate culture which is 100% transparency. So they publish on their blog the salaries of everybody that works for them. They publish on their blog the same information that I get as an investor, all the financial details and everything else. That is the core principle of the organization and when you talk about something that gains trust, they literally have nothing to hide, and while that’s not a 100% doable for some companies, you can get there. There is an amazing example in Canada and also in Australia now where McDonald’s, the restaurant chain has this program where you can ask them questions about their food and they answer them in very, very honest ways. They shoot videos of the truths. Somebody asked them, hey, how come the food I get in the restaurant doesn’t look like the food I get in the commercial? And of course it doesn’t, and they said, well, here’s what happened. They upload an 8-minute video that showed everybody a commercial shoot and they showed the food stylist and how they plump up the bun and they make the ketchup as perfect and things like that. And so they sort of pulled up the curtain and say, yeah, we completely use artists to make this look perfect but here’s the thing, the food that they used in the commercial is the exact same thing. They get it from the closest restaurant. They make it look great but it’s still the same beef, it’s still the same bun, it’s all the same pickle- they just take the roundest pickle they can find.

James: Yeah, this is a great conversation. It’s actually one that I had with a mutual friend of ours, Joe Pulizzi back on an earlier episode and I guess the challenge that comes with this transparency approach is that businesses think that they have some form of intellectual property or trade secrets that may be disadvantageous for them to share openly on the market place where their competitors could find them. What do you say to that?

Jay: It is funny you mentioned Joe because he and I did a presentation together about that topic at a New Media conference a couple of years ago – it was called why you need to open the Kimono and he and I actually wore kimonos during the presentation – probably a low point in both of our careers really but it was a lot of fun and the pictures are out there. And the premise is exactly as you say; a lot of people are afraid to give away the “secret sauce” that somehow if they have a blog or videos, they kind of talk about the truth that their competitors will steal that. Here’s the reality. One, you probably actually do not have secret sauce. It’s a little bit I think egocentric to imagine that you have some sort of knowledge that your competitors don’t. Second, even if you have that secret knowledge, your competitors already know it, somebody who used to work for you now works for them, and somebody who was your customer is now their customer. Knowledge has a tendency to get passed around very, very quickly and the third thing, and this is sort of the thesis of Joe and I’s presentation and I talk to my clients about this all the time in the consulting side which is that a list of ingredients doesn’t make someone a chef. If you write a blog post or if you do a video as to what you really kind of do as a business, that does not necessarily mean that somebody can take those blog posts and replicate your whole business. That’s really undervaluing what you add to the equation as an individual and so I am not concerned at all about that sort of situation.

James: What’s your Utility over at Convince and Convert?

Jay: I think our premise is to be in the and, therefore business. And I call it the and, therefore business and I am speaking about the media side of our business and not the consulting side, because there are lots and lots and lots and lots of blogs out there that cover the news; here’s what happened today in social media, here’s what happened today in content marketing, here’s what happened today in SEO. We’re not that, and we don’t want to be that and we can’t compete with that so we are in the and, therefore business. So our job is to say this happened and therefore here’s what you should do to in your company. And we try to adhere to that philosophy both in our blog and in our daily email and in our weekly podcast. Try and bring people lessons and advice that they can’t find everywhere else.

James: Yeah, and I like that. I mean, if you become that kind of news reporter, you do become very vanilla, just regurgitating the same piece of news story that every other site is out there right? But people really want to know and understand what your actual opinion is on that news story or that particular piece of content, right? I am sure that your engagement is a lot higher as a result.

Jay: Well it also helps because we do so much corporate consulting that the things that we blog about are the things that we ask questions about from our clients so there is no synergy there. A lot of times when clients have a question about something we say, yeah we just wrote about that a couple of days ago, right? And so there is a lot of – some of them are cross pollination there, they may not be as it could or should be on the surface but behind the scenes there is a lot of similarity to what we do on the content side and what we do on the consulting side.

James: Yeah! You’ve got some great examples of utility over at Youtilitybook.com. Some are quite obvious like Cross Fit who publish all of their workouts for free on their website but others like Kleenex’s flu prediction tool or the billboard that creates water out of thin air, they are way more creative and of course far less obvious. What are the steps our listeners should go through to identify their utility?

Jay: My favorite new one which is not on the website yet because I just found out about it a week ago but I have already put it in to my presentations is called Tweet Pee and that is from the diaper company Huggies –

James: Ah, I love it already.

Jay: Only available in Asia, right? But the way it works is that it is a little plastic device that you attach to the diaper of your child and when it senses wetness it sends you a direct message that says, hey, the diaper is wet, here’s how wet it is. Does the baby need a change? And then it tracks your diaper usage and then recommends to you when you should go and buy more diapers.

James: Love it! That’s awesome.

Jay: It is really, really good. I like it because it actually closes the loop and it actually has a commerce play in there in giving you a calendar on when you should purchase. The most important James to create great utility is to understand your customers better than you understand them today. Because the whole premise here is to create marketing so useful that people will pay for it. To create marketing that people cherish, you really have to understand the bigger story. The example is use is that nobody really wants socks, what they want is warmer feet. And in almost every case, your product is not what they want. Your product is a means to an end, you have to understand the bigger story and the challenge that we are faced here today as marketers is that we have more data than ever; we are surrounded by data. But we are in many cases starved for insights and every time you think about your customers using a spreadsheet or report or an API, you are most definitely thinking of them as a number and you are removing from that equation the bigger story. So what I tell marketers now is that you really need to find a way to have conversations with your customers, whether that’s in person, whether that’s on the phone, whether that’s via email or Skype or something else, you need that intra personal feedback more than ever and in many cases we just don’t have it because that’s where the great ideas that utility will come from. That’s where the things that would only come from insight and not from data and that’s the most important first step and it’s often overlooked.

James: Yeah, and of course having a utility is only going to be effective if people find it. What are some of the most effective ways you’ve seen or used to get traffic to and engaging with your utility marketing?

Jay: Yeah, you nailed it. You see this all the time where people create cool utilities but they roll them out and then nothing happens; nobody visits it, nobody shares it, nobody clicks on it and in many cases it’s not because the thing was not any good, it’s just they did not put enough emphasis behind it. What I say in the book and in presentations is that you have to market your marketing. You have to treat your marketing assets like a product and you launch them the same way that you would launch a product. That’s where social media comes in, that’s where SEO comes in and that’s where seeding with influencers comes in; that’s where all of the sort of Traffic Jam concepts come in and what I say about social in particular is that content is fire and social media is gasoline. What you want to use social media for is an amplification device to get people aware of great content. And most people do the opposite, they still treat social media like the world’s shortest social media release which is not terribly effective.

James: Yeah, and in fact I had the same conversation in – just released actually – episode 34 with Eric Enge and we were talking about content and he rightly pointed out that his best content was all created when he started his blog, his first six posts were freaking awesome but no one ever read them because he kind of forgot to promote them and tell people they were there. I think it is a common mistake. People put a lot of effort in to their content and being useful but forget why it does not take off and become useful to them.

Jay: It’s a competitive landscape and it literally gets more competitive every day and that’s tough. Now, you just redesigned the Convince and Convert website Jay, what lessons of the past six years of the convince and convert agency have you managed to integrate in to the new design?

Jay: Well, as you say, we have been doing this for a while, I think our fourth design in that period and it is much more of a company now. There was a time when convince and convert was fundamentally me. And that’s definitely not the case now, there are eight of us and it functions much more like a corporation and we work with lots of big companies and I just needed to put a little more emphasis on the consulting side and the fact that this isn’t just a blog, it isn’t just a media company but it is a very successful consulting firm as well so we changed some of the messaging and we actually have a homepage now so for the entire history of the company the blog was the home page and now we actually have a real home page. We tried to also insert more organic ways for people to get on our email list and sort of put those in streams so that people are reading content and then it sort of nudges them to sing up for the email without using pop ups and so we have that going. It’s too early to make a call on the effectiveness of that. Also tried to increase not just traffic but time on site and pages per visit by encouraging people to read the blog post and then hey, I should read another blog post and another blog post. I don’t think we are quite there yet, I think we need to make more adjustments to get where we want to go there but the thing is you’re never done, you’re never ever, ever done; it is always in the testing process and the next step is we just redesigned our email but I don’t like it and it is not performing the way I want it to so now we’ve got to go back to the drawing board on that and we’ve got our email template again.

James: One element certainly that has drawn attention again and again in the content marketing space is the exclusion of dates on your blog posts. Your decision to do so was based on your claim that it increases traffic and this is something that I am certainly interested in, how is that so?

Jay: It is funny you talked about Joe, Joe and I debate this – and we took dates off the (21:26) blog last fall so it has probably been about eight months I would say since we took them off and we certainly did not have any plan there other than that there is a lot of posts that we have that are true other than their date of publish because we are in the and, therefore business. Because we are not in the news business and so a lot of our content has a longer shelf life than other blogs in the content in the social media space and we think that we might be artificially constraining the value of the content because we happen to put a date on it and so let’s just take it off and see what happens. And if it doesn’t work or people freak out, then we’ll put them back on. And within about 30 days we started to see significant traffic changes and there are other things that have driven this I am sure but what I can tell you is that traffic has doubled since the dates were taken off. Now, is that because of dates? I can’t say the correlation and the causation but the chances of me putting them back on now is 0. It’s not going to happen. Occasionally our people will probably get two emails a week who either email me personally or are used to contact us and say hey, I really like this post on Facebook statistics, I really don’t know when this was published though, is this still valid? I do get those emails on occasions and I am sympathetic to that so what I am thinking about doing is putting in to the actual content itself like hey this post was actually written on this date but not keeping it as part of the meta data in that way we continue to benefit from the traffic gains and also make it a little bit more useful for readers.

James: Yeah, that’s interesting. So for you, is it the organic search traffic that seems to have increased since the taking off of the –

Jay: Yes. Other traffic – referral traffic and email traffic and social traffic is going up but the organic search traffic in Google is a hundred and something percent since it came up.

James: It is very interesting, you’d think that based on the date that it was first indexed, Google would know when it’s from so the date should really not make a difference but –

Jay: Yeah, and again, I want to make sure people recognize I don’t and I cannot prove it. It could have been Google and we’ve just reached our tipping point when it happened when people have got enough traffic which gives you enough authority from the past five years and we’ve got a lot of links from a lot of other blogs, you just sort of get to that magic page all of a sudden. Also, I should say that that was essentially contemporaneous with Hummingbird too and we took dates off at about the same time Hummingbird rolled out and we do have great content, we have been doing it for a long time so I am sure there is multiple factors at play.

James: Yeah, sure. One other thing that I heard that you may be following suit on is copy blogger’s lead on potentially removing blog comments as well. What are your thoughts on that?

Jay: Yeah, it is tricky, in fact, I had a terrific conversation with Brian Clark from copy blogger in my podcast social pros about three weeks ago right after he announced that decision and we talked for about 45 minutes to an hour, quite a bit in depth, so if people are interested in his thinking there, kind of like our baseball conversation about it, they should listen to that episode or read that transcript but we sort of have the same situation that they have just a little bit smaller and if you need to convert a lot traffic now, the comments that we get are not always but largely insignificant in terms of number and also of quality, there’s tons and tons and tons of people either putting in dumb comments which usually gets removed automatically but it’s the pretend to spam comment, it’s the pretend comments that are actually spam. Those are the ones that we don’t really and those are the ones that Brian discourages as well, and like copy blogger what we find is that most of the best conversation around our content don’t take place on the blog; it takes place on Facebook, it takes place on LinkedIn, it takes place on Google+, and I am okay with that. To me that is good news, not bad news. So we have not pulled the comments off yet, and we may not, but I am certainly thinking about it.

James: Yeah, interesting. Well, we’ll make sure the link to that conversation is placed within the show notes of today’s episode. A whole section of your book YouTility discusses the various metrics by which your marketing can be measured, in this digital world where almost every action online can be recorded – clicks, paid views, time on site – all of that good stuff; what are the best ways to accurately keep score and know whether the marketing we are doing is effective.

Jay: It really depends on what you are executing and what your goals are in your business but the most important thing is you can now customize the content metrics to business outcomes. The goal is not to be good at content, the goal is to be good as business as a content. Those are not necessarily the same things, right? Just because somebody downloaded your slideshow presentation doesn’t mean shit. It doesn’t make you any money. And that assumption that this makes you money is wrong unless you can prove it, so in some cases, you can’t prove it right? You don’t sell online and you’re not a B2B company that you know that when somebody buys – you can’t necessarily prove it mathematically right? The trail goes cold. And if you are selling licorice and you are a licorice manufacturer, you can’t say this Facebook post manufactured this much licorice, all you know is you go to the store, there is lots of licorice there, and you have to restock the shelves. So in those cases you really have to rely on correlation; survey work is really important, there is really not enough survey work being done right now- do you buy from us? And by the way do you read our content? Do you watch our videos? Do you watch our social? And then compare the lifetime value of those people against the customers who are not connected with you in that way and then make some financial calculations there but in general, when I talk about the book, there is 4 categories of metrics. I think this is helpful for people; you have consumption metrics, so views and those kinds of things right? Then you have sharing metrics, so that’s what we usually call sharing or tweets and +1 what have you’s. Then you have lead metrics which is like, did they fill out a form or did they go to your pricing page, for example. Which in many cases you could consider a lead because no one is going to do that for fun. And they are only doing that because they are interested. And then of course you have sales metrics. In some cases you can actually track, did somebody actually buy something from you? Those are the four categories. All you need to do is have some representation in each of those categories that make sense for your business. If you can do that, you’d be better at content metrics than 98% of the companies out there.

James: Yeah, for sure. Cool! I think as we draw to a close Jay, let’s talk a little bit about your podcast. It’s called the social pros podcast. How effective a marketing channel has that been in your business because I think you have been investing a fair amount of time in it recently?

Jay: Yeah, I have been doing it for almost two and half hours taking time and we are now at episode 113 – 114, something like that, because I am going to record two shows this afternoon. It has been great, we each week interview somebody who is a social media marketer, or good at marketing manager, director and officers for typical companies. So we have had dozens, and dozens and dozens of Fortune 500 companies in the show and it is really a useful podcast because those stories don’t get told. It’s not like you’ve got a million places where you can go and figure out what the guy who manages content for Delta Faucet does every day, what’s their strategy, what software they use and what their KPIs are. Those stories just don’t get told and the reason we started the podcast and the reason for the show is real people doing real work in social media, and we are really dedicated to that, telling stories of people who are in trenches who are managing these programs in companies who never have an opportunity to tell their stories. So it has gone really well and it’s had a huge impact on the business because most of the people we’ve worked with in the consulting side, either end up on the show or have been on the show first or things like that and that’s a good thing. The kind of people that we want as clients or the kind of people that we want to listen to the show.

James: Yeah, and I can see that, I think this podcasting space is filled with kind of hobbyists who are just doing this to entertain themselves without any real thought as to how useful it might be for their business, it is very clear that your podcast is totally aligned with the target market that you want to reach.

Jay: Well. It is a tactic that many business can employ and we actually tell people this all the time. Create a podcast that interviews your future clients. That works in every business and it is not that hard, you just have to commit to it.

James: Yeah and what better way to connect to your potential customers than just connect them on your show and give them a bit of airtime and a bit of spotlight in the right channel right?

Jay: It is a lot easier to build those relationships when you say hey can you be on this very, very popular podcast as opposed to hey can we sell you something? Which of those is an easier email to send?

James: Yeah! No contest. Now let’s close up with a question on how you’ve built the podcast. From one podcast to another, what are the strategies that you have implemented that have been successful for you growing social pro’s audience?

Jay: we’ve always had very detailed show notes. We used to do full transcripts so each podcast has a blog post and it shows up on the blog and that definitely helps because getting found in Google and people sharing it in social and those kinds of things certainly encourage in people who are guests on the show to talk about the show. We actually have badges that we give each guest that they can put in their own blogs that says that they’ve been on the Social Pros podcast. We send each guest a very nice USB headset as well to make sure that the audio quality is strong and that is theirs to keep. We started doing a series of e-books, the first one rolled out last month called the Social Pros All Stars where we compound information about each guest and to make that in to a real focus on them and kind of gets people excited about it and we also do quite a bit of retargeted advertising so we have retarget pixels set up in the convince and convert blog, also specifically on the social pros podcast pages and so each week we change the creative of the banners that says who’s on the show this week so if you are kind of surfing around and you might see it on ESPN or who knows where you’re going to see it and say hey social pros this week’s guest is XYZ just to king of keep the show top of mind and that has been real helpful as well.

James: That is nice! It is actually something I have thought of myself but not yet implemented so I am glad to hear you are using it with great success Jay! Now if our listeners want to find out a little bit more about you and connect with you, where will you be hiding out on the web?

Jay: You can find me pretty easily, you can go to JayBaer.com and that’s coming from a page about me and speaking about our side of the business and then the ConvinceAndConvert.com contains our blog and our podcast, and out daily email and a bunch of e-books and all kinds of other stuff.

James: Fantastic! All of the resources mentioned by Jay can be found in the show notes for episode 36 on TrafficJamCast.com along with links to Jay’s various homes on the web and the full transcript of today’s episode. Just before we close out Jay, I want to thank you again for your time and expertise. I thoroughly enjoyed our session today and hopefully we’ll get to do it again sometime soon.

Jay: I would love to do that, great job and congratulations on the show, it’s a terrific podcast and we’ll see you down the road.

This Week’s News in Traffic

It’s quite a light week of news this week but I do have two stories both of which are coming out of Google, the first of which I picked up from TechCrunch.com and the story is here that Google are introducing some new products relating to the marketing of applications, so these are products for app marketers. Google seem to be very much following in the steps of Facebook and others with this new introduction and certainly realize that app marketing is driving new growth and they have got to be a little bit more nimble in producing products that better fit us marketers so I’ll give you a little run down on what they’ve added. The first product is an in-app install app and this will be displayed on the display network where advertisers can target users based on the apps that they have already installed and the usage patterns that they’ve got on those apps. Now as an example given by Google, someone that is marketing a calorie counting app, could target someone who’s already installed a running app.

The second addition for this suite of products for app marketers is the YouTube true view companion for apps. And this is where Google are trying to add some functionality to the True View ads that appear at the start of YouTube videos that as a consumer you can skip past, where they will be adding an additional app install call to action which will be shown just below the video.  As an example, I will link off to this in the show notes for episode 36 so you can go and look at what this might look like.

To promote re-engagement and app usage, Google have added for advertisers the option of deep links for search and display ads that can be shown to users who already have a related app installed. Advertisers can take user who have already had the app installed directly to the most relevant page within their app from their ads on the search or on the Google display network. This feature is essentially the same that exists for regular search and display ads where advertisers can add an extension and link to inner pages of their site. All of these features are expected to be rolled out in the next few months.

Going to our second and final story of the day but staying with the search giant, we can announce that Google+ post ads. Don’t be alarmed! We are not going to start seeing our Google+ feed fill up with ads. Instead this new ad format gives us the ability to turn our Google+ posts in to ads that feature in the Google+ display network. So it is a little like a Facebook page ad post that does not appear in Facebook itself but on the internet elsewhere. That is the concept. There are minimum requirements for these ads, I believe that you have to have a page with a certain size following or have a profile with a certain size following so you’re going to need to have a well-established Google+ account before you get hold of this ad but I certainly like the sound of a native install, very much the craze of where advertising is moving and well worth checking out.

It is normally at this point in the show where I thank those people who have left either an iTunes or a Stitcher rating but just as it happens this week, we’ve had no new reviews on either of those two platforms so I really just want to say thank you to everyone who’s either left a comment, a review, a rating, or any form of feedback for Traffic Jam so far. I really do appreciate every single one of your comments. If you are a regular listener and you haven’t left either a comment, a rating, or a review or any form of feedback for the show, I really appreciate if you leave a comment or a review on the two major platforms, iTunes or stitcher rating or just a review there or just leave a comment over at TrafficJamCast.com. Your comments help me better understand what’s good and not so good about the show so I can build a better show for you going forward so if you have a spare one or two minutes this week I really appreciate it. Head on over to iTunes or Stitcher, and leave your rating and feedback for the show.

The One Minute Traffic Tip

In the same way that I put my guests here on Traffic Jam in front of my audience, you can get more exposure to other people’s audiences by getting interviewed. But unless you are a real household name, interview requests can be few and far between. So in order to get more interviews, I found that by adding a PS in the footer of my email broadcast saying something like PS I am available for podcast interviews come and subscribe to ask. And as long as that person requesting has an established website or podcast show with at least a few episodes, I will accept because it puts me in front of a new audience and gets more traffic to my own site. So if you are knowledgeable to a particular topic or have an interesting story to tell, your action step this week is to add a PS to your email footer mentioning that you accept interviews.

Thank you listener for tuning in to this episode#36. I will of course be back in about seven days from now with episode 37. On the agenda is going to be a concept called content shock, tune in next week to find out what that is all about because I am going to be discussing that and how to better leverage content distribution by my guest next week, Mr. Chad Pollits so I look forward to welcoming you back for that episode, remember in the meantime to subscribe via iTunes and Stitcher radio and to get direct links to all Traffic Jam episodes, go to TrafficJamCast.com where you can join the discussion on this episode and get links to all of the resources and social media profiles and all of that good stuff mentioned today by Jay Baer. Also check out Veravo.com for more traffic tips and training and to learn how I can help you get more traffic, leads, and sales from the search engines and to help you take your business to the next level. We end this week’s show by Radio Head. The track title is 15 Steps and of course chosen by my guest today, Jay Baer. So enjoy the track, I look forward to welcoming you back in about seven days. See back here then.

 

RESOURCES

MENTIONS

THIS WEEKS NEWS IN TRAFFIC

ONE MINUTE TRAFFIC TIP

  • Get Invited to Other People’s Podcast By Letting Them Know You Are Available to do Interviews

THE TRAFFIC JAM

  • Radio Head – 15 Steps

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TJ 36 Jay Baer

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