Hello welcome back! You are tuned in to Episode #18 of the Traffic Jam podcast, the weekly podcast show where you learn how to build and grow a profitable audience for your website. Yet again it has been another busy week here at Traffic Jam HQ and depending on when you’re listening to this show and where you listen to it, you may find that Traffic Jam has a new home. Until this point you will find the episodes posted over at TrafficJamCast.com, however depending on where you’re listening to this you may find that those episodes now appear at Veravo.com. Veravo.com is a relatively new hub site if you like, where I post the majority of my traffic tips and training on almost on a daily basis. We’ve made the move to put Traffic Jam on to Veravo.com really from the point of simplification, there is a real lesson in that. It is easier to manage one site than it is two. But also just to give you the listener the opportunity to find other tips and training that may be helpful to your own business. So from this point on forward, to find all episodes, go to Veravo.com, however if you do go to TrafficJamCast.com you will be directed to the new place on the Veravo website and you will be able to get all the past episodes really, really easily.

Now it also has been a busy week this week lining up the next guests for the upcoming shows and I have got to say, we have got some pretty cool guests lined up in the next few weeks. A couple of those guests I have been trying to get for some time now but for whatever reason we have just not been able to align diaries or work around other commitments. But we have been able to do that. I am not going to say who those guests are yet because that would spoil the surprise but what I would say is we’ve got the topic of SEO covered for the first time. It should be a good, fun interview. And we’ve got a rather big name from Facebook coming on the show which I know is always a popular topic so those are a few of the episodes that we’ve got lined up for the next few weeks, however let’s not get run away with ourselves just yet because we’ve got a fantastic episode lined up today.

My guest on today’s show is Mark Schaeffer who is a globally recognized speaker, educator, business consultant and author who has a fantastic blog over at businessesgrow.com. He’s the author of three best-selling marketing books: Return to Influence, Born to Blog and the Tao of Twitter which is the best-selling book on Twitter in the world. He’s among the world’s most recognized social media authorities. He has been a keynote speaker on conferences such as the Social Media Week, New Media Expo, and will be speaking at the upcoming Social Media Summit.

So there’s the official bio intro but basically you can read from that that Mark is a pretty big deal when it comes to social media and more to the point on how to attract a following, create buzz and influence others online and that’s pretty much the angle we’re going to be going deep on in today’s interview because I really want to get Mark’s insights on how not only to attract audience but also how to influence an audience because when you become more influential, more of an authority you can easily get people to act on your suggestions, you can of course build a loyal following who come back repeatedly to take a look at what you have to offer and read your content. And also when you become more of an influencer and a person of authority, you can charge more as well. So all of this have amazing impact not just on your marketing but also on your business as a whole. Mark also has written the most popular book on Twitter on the world as I mentioned so we also dig deep on to Twitter on today’s interview and how you can get the most return from that platform, and hey, even if it’s the right platform for you in the first place. I am not always convinced it’s the right platform for me personally but after today’s interview you can make that decision for your own business.

As always, coming up later in the show, we have this week’s news in traffic, the one minute traffic tip, and the Traffic Jam jam. Now this week’s track is one very close to heart for Mark Schaefer and you’ll find out why at the end of the show because as always the Traffic Jam jam plays out the show.

So let’s keep the preamble short and sweet, let’s end it right there, and now let’s get stuck on today’s interview with Mark Schaefer.

James:  This is feature interview #18 of Traffic Jam and joining me on the hot seat today is Mark Schaefer from businessesgrow.com who is a globally recognized blogger, speaker and educator, and the author of books The Tale of Twitter and Return on Influence. So Mark, welcome to Traffic Jam!

Mark: I am so delighted to be with you!

James: Well thank you for joining me today. Let’s get this interview off to a flying start with a bit of a crunching question to begin the show with; my guest on episode#4 of Traffic Jam Scott Stratten said that there is no such thing as a hard ROI in social media. Is he right?

Mark: No. And I like Scott very much and I respect Scott; and I certainly understand his point. But look, ROI is a very simple, straightforward financial calculation. Sometimes, obviously you can figure out the return on investment. There is a company here in the United States that created a community that featured their customers, their brand advocates; this community decided to start having live events, they had live events in their stores, and they could track that every time that they would have one of these live events that they would triple sales in that store that day. This is a community that is held together by social media, was created by social media, the event’s entirely are publicized through social media; there’s no advertising expenditures whatsoever. So it’s a very easy calculation to say look, everytime we have one of these events created by social media, publicized by social media, we triple sales in the store. That’s ROI. I think the point that Scott was trying to make is – and it’s a good one, is that what most businesses miss the qualitative value of social media in addition to the quantitative value. And I think he’s right in that most cases calculating the financial ROI is difficult. But that doesn’t mean you should not do it! What’s the ROI of a traffic billboard along a highway? That is something that businesses have used, at least in my part of the world, for many, many years. And they’ve been comfortable with the results of those billboards without finding the financial return so you need to look at social media in the same way. In my classes James, I give examples of case studies and I’ll ask the students to list all of the benefits of a story that I tell. And I turn to them, well, which of these can fit in an Excel spreadsheet? And almost none of these benefits can. So the point is, look at these tangible important benefits like creating impressions, creating awareness, finding a new business partner, finding a new supplier, finding an inter to hire, what’s the ROI of that? You can drive yourself crazy trying to calculate it; my point is, don’t! Just find a way to acknowledge the qualitative benefits of social media instead of just the quantitative benefits.

James: Let’s talk a little bit about quantitative and how probably we can draw attention to something you speak about in your Return to Influence book which the platform is called KLOUT. I checked in a couple of days ago on my profile and I see that my score is somewhere in the 50’s or thereabouts. Yours of course is much higher than that. What does this data actually mean and based on what you just said a short moment ago, should we actually even care about it?

Mark: Well, I think that you should, and it’s a very controversial topic and I think that this company Klout brings a lot of that controversy needlessly upon themselves. So let’s step back a minute and see what is this company trying to do. Their website says we are the standard for influence. Now, are they the standard for influence? No. Will they ever be the standard for influence? I doubt it. Can they tell you how influential you are at work? No. At work? No. With you children? No. However, this is what they’re trying to do; they’re trying to identify people who can move content and engage an audience on certain topics. So let’s say you blog about sports; let’s say you’re a cricket fan. And let’s say that every time you blog about cricket, it ignites. People tweet about your articles, they comment on your articles. Now, say you have a neighbor who also blogs about cricket and nobody pays attention to it, on a relative basis, your Klout score should be higher than your neighbors’ because you are creating content that is igniting. That is a very small sliver of influence in the world, and yet, this is very important because you’re creating buzz. And a lot of companies and business and brands would like to get to know you. Maybe Nike would like to get to know you, maybe one of the local cricket clubs would like to get to know you because you are seen as an expert creating content on this topic. So the revolutionary piece of this is- we’ve always known that there are highly connected influencers who can help sell our stuff. Either advocates, people in our community who say, you know, I love this product and I am going to recommend it to all my friends. But how do we find those people, how do we nurture those people? It’s almost impossible to do until now. Klout and some other companies have created these algorithms that can very quickly and can very inexpensively find people who are talking about your products, your companies, and areas that you are interested in. Is it 100% accurate? No. it’s a blunt instrument; but sometimes a blunt instrument is all you need to make progress. Again the billboard reference; a billboard along the highway is a blunt instrument and yet it works really, really well. and in a world where traditional means of communication like television, newspaper and radio are dying, marketers are eagerly embracing new ideas like identifying and connecting with these influencers to borrow those powerful communication pipelines to help spread their message that’s why this is a very significant trend for businesses to understand.

James: So what we’re really saying is Mark, is that it’s probably something that we should not care about too much in terms of our own influence, but in terms of reaching out to identifying influence who could be beneficial in our own market place it’s a really useful tool.

Mark: Well it depends on your goal. I agree with you. For some businesses and some products it is being used today in very creative ways; I think my favorite chapter in the book that I wrote Return to Influence is a chapter filled with case studies of how businesses; big businesses, small ones, even non-profits and universities, how they’re starting to use these tools in very creative ways. On a personal basis, let’s say I want to get a job at marketing, sales, PR. Today, the ability to move content online and engage an audience, that could be a very important skill set on jobs, maybe even in HR, maybe in customer service. So I think it is like an indicator, it’s like a financial credit score. If you have a credit score, that doesn’t indicate what you can do with your life. It doesn’t indicate whether you are going to pay a loan back or not. But it’s an indicator of something that is still very useful for businesses to see. So basically a Klout score to me is a representation of – is this somebody who creates conversational content that ignites on the internet and if I am trying to hire somebody who can do that I think it would be foolish to at least take a look at that score.

James: Well let’s talk about that for a second and talk about that as a skill set. Is it something that is inherent between individuals or is it something that people can actually learn like can you learn to be an influencer online and create buzz?

Mark: That is an excellent question! I don’t think I have been asked that before James, that’s an excellent question. I do think that it can be acquired and it can be learned, and I’ll tell you why. In the real world, how do we acquire power and influence? It might be from the University we attended, how much money we have, who, even what family we married in to, it might be from a title from an organizational chart. Guess what? On the internet, none of that matters! Nobody cares. James, I don’t know what university you went to, I may be able to dig down and find it out –

James: I didn’t. There you go.

Mark: Beautiful example. When I was writing my book two-thirds of the way, I realized, every case study of a power influencer in my book James, none of them have a college degree. And I think that’s amazing because in the real world, influence comes through chucking boxes, it comes through knowing the right people, it comes through knowing hurdles. So we have a new opportunity now, just as you are doing, you are creating value through the content of this podcast. You have chosen yourself. You are not waiting for a university degree, you are not waiting for someone to say you’re the anointed one. You are choosing yourself and you are saying I am doing this, I am choosing my authority and explore how far I can take my influence by creating great content that gets shared, and I think that is a great example; you’re a living example of this- you’re creating your own destiny. It doesn’t even matter if you are an introvert or an extrovert, techie or non-techie, or college graduate or not. It doesn’t matter anymore. What you need to do is help people create value that informs, entertains, educate and help people and that is real root of power and influence on the web today.

James: Well I guess we are talking about a couple of things within that. I guess there is the reach of your audience, the size of it, but there’s probably also the quality of the influence of those people that you are connected with. Is there a way to kind of reach out to those influencers, I may be giving a clue away with the fact that I am interviewing you on this week’s episode but is there a way to kind of reach out to influencers in your market to improve the quality of your reach if you like?

Mark: That’s a really key idea, and obviously you are correct. That is the way it works in real life and that’s the way it works online as well. And let me give you an example first I think of how people are doing it incorrectly. An example I will use is that I had a company call me last week and if you have seen my blog at all, I write about business marketing and kind of the human intersection with social media technology. And that’s what I love, that’s what I am passionate about. So a company called me up last week and said, I have never heard of this person before and they said, I represent a shoe company and I want to you to blog about our shoes. Oh really, well who are you? I have never even heard of you before, why should I blog about your shoes? I don’t care about your shoes, I don’t care about your companies, it’s not a fashion blog but this is typical of all most relationships trying to live out of desperation. This person has woke up one day and realized, oh my gosh, we have got to connect with these powerful online influencers, this is really where the world is going. But business is built on relationships, it’s built on trust – it always has been. If you and I were in a live business networking meeting, and I came up to you and said hey James, on your next podcast I want you to feature my shoe company. You’d think what a bizarre person this is. You just don’t do that. So if it doesn’t make sense in the real world, why would you do it on the online world too? We still have to build relationships. Here’s the trick, it takes time and it takes patience to build these relationships, we need to help each other, we need to support each other. And there is no guarantee of a payback. There probably won’t be but there’s no guarantee. And so in a world basically built around advertising budgets where the money goes up and the money goes down, how do we now create programs built on building relationships where the money can’t go up and down? The money has to stay the same because we are building relationships and that doesn’t go away. So there are challenges, for budgets, for businesses, for ad agencies trying to figure this stuff out because it’s a whole new channel, it’s a whole new strategy and companies are struggling with that.

James: So what would have been the correct approach of that shoe company if indeed their product is aligned with what you talk about at businessesgrow.com?

Mark: There’s an antithesis to this. There is a young lady who’s been coming on to my blog for six months now. She leaves a comment on my blog almost every day and she adds some useful value to the community so I am starting to get to know her. After she left a comment a few times, I clicked on her link and I thought, who is this person? So I saw that she’s from a marketing and communications company and I thought, well that’s interesting. And she starts following me on Twitter, connected with me on Twitter and she subscribed to my blog. Well, after about six months, she sent me an email and she said, hey Mark, I wrote this blog post that I’m really excited about, can you give me some feedback on this? So I looked at the blog post and honestly there were some things that were fundamentally wrong with it so I told her, I said, you know, I really don’t kind of agree with your approach here. And she said, I feel so disheartened now and I said, you know what, you don’t need to feel disheartened, let’s have a phone call, let me help you walk you through you this. What’s happening here is she has been making an authentic attempt to connect with me as a person to get to know me, to help me, to support me, to support my blog, to leave value through comments and at some point, it’s okay to ask for help, and when she did, I can’t wait to help her. And in fact, I’m not just going to give her an email feedback, I’m going to reach out and say, hey you’re a young person that could benefit from some coaching here. I am not going to charge you any money from this, but I’d do this because this is my opportunity to be authentically helpful. At some point, her blog post is going to be great, and I’m going to tweet it, I’m going to support it, and maybe even ask her to do a guest post to my blog. And that’s how the world works.

James: Yeah, got it. Well it’s no coincidence that you’ve featured a piece of Return of Influence from Robert Chaudiny who talks about the whole concept of reciprocity. That’s exactly what was at play, that this girl was giving value at the point there were she actually may be needed some help her in return that you almost feel indebted to return the favor.

Mark: Brilliant point! And that’s exactly reciprocity at work and reciprocity makes the world go round. I mean, it’s a constant exchange of favors, it’s an economy of favors. And when those favors add up, even if it’s a Facebook like or a Facebook comment or a comment on a blog post, at some point, if that person comes to me and asks for a favor back, you’re going to say yes.

James: Yeah, Mark let’s talk about Twitter for a moment because that’s another area where you have expertise, you have written a book called The Tale of Twitter. Me personally, I am just not good at Twitter and have not experienced any pay off in actual business terms, however, if I look at the likes of you and some other guests that I’ve had on Traffic Jam like Scott Stratten and Chris Brogan, you guys have really built strong businesses with Twitter as a driver. Now with all of the other long lasting forms of social content like blogging and podcasting, even Facebook and Google+ that kind of have a longer life span than the 140 character tweets that go out. What’s the real benefit of investing so much time in Twitter?

Mark: Well, let’s take a step back and say that I think the foundation of your social media presence for almost any business has to be something that I call rich content. It can’t just be LinkedIn, Facebook, Tweets; it has to be something with substance so that could be a blog, a podcast, a video series, maybe something like e-books but generally those three: blog, podcast, or video so you have to start there because that’s the engine that drives your social media presence. That’s the deep content that creates voice of authority and gives you the opportunity for vast exposure. And that’s really what drives the Klout score, right? It’s original content that gets attention. If all you do is tweet, that’s not going to drive your Klout score. If all you do is post on Facebook, that’s not necessarily going to drive your influence because you’re just sending links from other people – something like that. So that’s got to be the engine. Now, how does Twitter fit in to this? Twitter fits in to this in that I believe it’s the fastest and most effective way to build a targeted audience. It’s very difficult to build a targeted audience on Facebook or even LinkedIn because to connect with someone to connect with you back. Not so on Twitter, there are lots of ways to find relevant, interesting, motivated people who might be interested in your business in Twitter and then you go out and follow them. In my book, you mentioned the Tale of Twitter, in Chinese they call it the Tao of Twitter, Tao in Chinese means path and in the book I’ve got an entire chapter teaching people how to find those people. So Twitter is kind of like the movie trailer for the movie that’s your blog or your video or your podcast. So you cast the net, find all those people, start building relationships with those people and if you do that through Twitter and say once in a while, hey I wrote this new blog post I think you might be interested in this. Then they’ll click and they’ll read your blog post. Now you’re starting through Twitter to build your blog audience, you’re starting to engage with them in a deeper way, in a richer way. They’re now reading your blog posts and listening to your podcasts, maybe now they’re looking at your website, they’ll say what else does this company do? And that’s sort of how it all connects together.

James: Got it, got it. Cool! Well I want to ask you about a specific chapter in your book which I saw was listed called the secrets of influence on Twitter, what are your top tips that you’d allow me to share today on the interview for Traffic Jam listeners in terms of actually creating influence on the platform?

Mark: Well, I think it’s really this simple: the thing that most businesses miss James is that they look at social media as just another place to put their advertising and their press releases and social media is a entirely different channel and we need to treat it differently. People do not go on social media to view your ads or view your press releases, they go on social media to get away from that. They go on social media to play Farmville or to see pictures of funny cats. They don’t want to see your press release about your new line of ball bearings or a picture of your company president handing a cheque to a local charity or something like that. That’s just not interesting to them! But what people will do, they may not spend any time on your advertising, but they will spend time with people and ideas and content that will help them, help them make money, save money, have a more interesting life, have a more entertaining life, help them save time, or do something in a new way, help their health, help their self-image and every business is geared towards that in some way and I have a favorite case study of a medical clinic that I work with in my area and they took one of my classes, they read my book and they said, we have got to change! We’ve got to stop selling, selling, selling and start helping, helping, helping; and that’s what I call the social media mindset. You’re creating this mindset and if you can embrace that, if you can adopt that, and have a strategy of creating content that truly is helpful, then that is the key to truly giving in this space, creating influence in this space, creating real advocates and loyalty in this space.

James: And Mark, does the same apply in blogging? I mean I go over Business Grow, your blog there it gets a huge amount of interaction. I mean I am seeing shares and retweets and dozens of comments on each post whereas most businesses really struggle to get any form of interaction going on their blog at all if anything. Is that your secret there as well? I mean literally it’s all about creating value and helping and as probably most businesses are doing – sell their latest products or a picture of the company director cutting the ribbon, is that it? We see a lot of that right?

Mark: That’s exactly it! I mean I am trying to think back to the last time I tried to actually sell something on my blog and I would say it was probably at least five months ago, I had a new book come out called Born to Blog so I had a podcast saying hey I have a new book, you might like to read it, I think it’s really good, I think it’s really interesting, you might enjoy it. That’s as close to selling something as I have gotten on my blog for the entire year of 2013. It seems strange to people that I am spending all this time giving away my ideas, giving away my advice on this blog, sending them on the comments section, engaging and helping people. If someone is really struggling, I’ll send a let’s get off the comments section go ahead and give me a call and let me see if I can help you with this problem. But what happens is people get to know me and they trust me and a few months ago I got a call from a gigantic company here in America and they said, we’re having a national conference and we want you to be our guest speaker and we’re going to pay you a good sum of money to do this. And I said if you don’t mind me asking, why me? How did you find me? They said, our executive vice president is a huge fan of your blog. There you go, and that’s how it works. I am building a presence, I’m building a brand, I am building a voice of authority. Now, if that executive vice president came to my blog every day and on my blog I say here’s my newest product, now comes lemon scented. Here is my latest donation to the local charity. Here’s a picture cutting the ribbon. Is he going to keep coming back to my blog? I am not running a blog, I am running an infomercial; it’s a long series of advertisements. I’m not being helpful, I’m not being compelling, I’m not being interesting and so it is really difficult to make that transition to say I am going to stop selling, I’m going to start helping. It’s scary, because as business people, we’ve been conditioned to sell and we’re scared because if the selling stop. And I mean you still need to have sales people, you still need to service your customers. But as far as another way to angle your marketing, this really works. I have seen it work with dozens, probably hundreds of my customers and my students so I know it works.

James: Yeah, it’s interesting I had Joe Pulizzi on the show I think a couple of weeks ago; we had a conversation around a very similar type of topic where we spoke about how business owners become almost afraid of sharing and helping because they almost feel like they’re going to give away their secret sauce or their special knowledge by actually trying to help people rather than selling them the product or service and then offering to help. But it’s counter intuitive it actually works in the opposite way, doesn’t it?

Mark: It does, and one of the examples I use is I have written well over a thousand blog posts and the last I looked I think I have written about 90 different blog posts about blogging; best practices, ideas, how to’s. You could go on to my blog and you could click the category of blogging best practices and click all those for a couple of hours and have a pretty good idea of how to start your blog and what to do. And yet, people still buy my blogging book. They still call me every day saying can you help me with my blog? Can I hire you to be a coach to get me through this while I’m starting to do this to help me get it on the right direction? And so it is counter intuitive. I’ve shared all my secrets, I don’t hold anything back. I’m going to help people and share as much advise and content as I can, it’s all out there if you look hard enough for it. But people don’t want to look for it, they want me. They still want me, they want to talk to me about their specific idea, their specific problem and I am happy to do that. So it seems counter intuitive but it actually works really well.

James: Well Mark let’s end on that point because your information today has indeed been truly helpful, I’m sure our listeners have got a huge amount out of today’s session but I don’t want to leave it just as a great interview which it has been. I want to ensure that our listener out there has some actionable to walk away from today’s session with. What one piece of advice that our listener can go and perhaps implement in the next 24 hours can you give to us today?

Mark: Well if you’re really struggling with how to get started with social media the best thing to do I think is to start with my book the Tao of Twitter because it talks about this path, this framework, of how to get your business ready to succeed. You can read it in 90 minutes, it costs $8 USD or something like that on Amazon. It is incredibly cheap but for many businesses, that turns things around, that really gets people started in the right direction and I think that is the best action a new business or someone struggling with this to take to kind of get pointed in the right direction.

James: Well guys if you’re listening to this episode on iTunes or your media player, head on over to TrafficJamCast.com and you’ll find a link to that resource in the show notes as well as a link off to Mark’s website, businessesgrow.com. Mark, you’ve been a fantastic guest, you’ve been generous with your time. Thank you so much!

Mark: My pleasure!

This week’s news in traffic: I am really glad to say that Facebook have updated their page guidelines to now allow contest and sweepstakes on Facebook contact pages. For a long time the page owner had to use a separate tool or even host their contest elsewhere such as perhaps on their website or their blog or otherwise risk having their Facebook account shut down. Of course, when hosting contests on external tools or websites, it did limit how successful the contest could be. However from now on you can run a contest on your page itself and even use the Share, Like and Comment features as part of your contest. This is something I personally will be trying out as part of my own Facebook campaign in the next few weeks and I will make sure that after making that I will report the results back to you here on Traffic Jam.

Google+ have confirmed that they are going HD with Hangouts. Over the next weeks they will be rolling out high definition to Hangouts on air initially and then to all desktop hangouts video calls over the next few weeks. My eyes have really been opened up to the possibilities that Google Hangout holds for us marketers, things like informal Q & A sessions, online seminars, product demos, they’re all possible with Google Hangouts. If you’d like to get more ideas for yourself on how you can use hangouts on your own business, then I’d recommend you check out episode #10 of Traffic Jam which was with Chris Brogan.

And lastly on what is quite a short news round up this week, Google and the Hershey chocolate company have announced a co-branding deal. In an about turn from Google, they have named their brand new operating system KitKat and not Key Lime Pie as expected. With the naming of the new operating system, Google and Hershey have announced a co-branded deal by the new android operating system will be marketed on KitKat chocolate bars and vice versa. Reportedly, there was no cash exchange between the parties for agreement.

The one minute traffic tip: Okay, so I have a super simple and really quick to implement tip this week for generating cross promotion traffic by using your email footer. In the case of my business I have got my email contact divided up within my database according to the news that they’re subscribed to and the products and services that they purchase. In my particular business that’s really two categories; those people that are interested in Google Adwords update from my Click Jam pay per click management agency and those that are interested in SEO Updates from SEO Sherpa. Whilst I ensure that those people that are subscribed to the list only get the updates they requested, it is also true that someone interested in Google Adwords news would also be interested in SEO News as well. So everyone getting that Google Adwords news will see in the email footer a little P.S. that says, to get SEO news too, click here. And by clicking on that link, they’re then subscribed to my email database for my SEO updates. All of these can be managed in your email management system. For a system like Aweber or Mailchimp you have to get people to opt in and subscribe again however with a system software like InfusionSoft or OfficeAutoPilot, just by clicking on that link on the email you can have them subscribed on the sequences, have tags added to them or subscribed to an entirely different list. This PS Section is really a very simple way to inform your customers and prospects about the other products and services that you offer so it doesn’t need to be intricate, you don’t need them to be subscribed to other email lists, you can simply use those links or a banner to the issue in the PS section to promote other stuff that you’ve got going on. So my task for you this week is to get creative with your PS section, find another product, service or event you want to promote in your business and then add that to your email auto responder sequence or the broadcast that you have coming up this week. I’d love to see how you’ve gotten on with this so once you’ve gotten some results post them over at Traffic Jam Cast beneath episode 18 and let’s see who’s come up with the most creative idea for their PS Section.

That rounds out episode#18. I will be back next week with another episode of Traffic Jam so stay tuned for that.  If you’ve enjoyed this episode please log in to iTunes and leave the show a review and rating. I’ll more than likely read that out on next week’s show. You can of course leave a comment and feedback over at Traffic  Jam Cast as well, you can do that by leaving a comment beneath that episode itself or hitting a leave a voicemail message at the base of the site. Also this week, go check out the traffic training and tips over at veravo.com. I’ve got a post this week with a tip on how to speed up your SEO results and I’ve also got my reaction to a controversial video ad banned by Google from the Australian Sex Party. In that ad appears numerous censored reference to the F word so you’d probably get a good idea on the type of idea that may be but it’s clever advertising nonetheless, I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether Google made the right decision to ban it. That’s all over at Veravo.com.

Playing out this episode of Traffic Jam is a track called Waking Up Weird by the Royal Bangs. It is of course picked by my guest today Mark Schaefer and the reason that it’s so special to him is that Royal Bangs is his son’s band. To play out the show, Royal Bangs, featuring Ryan Schaefer, son of Mark Schaefer, Waking Up Weird.