Hello welcome back listener! You’re tuned in to Traffic Jam episode#25, I am you host, James Reynolds, and this of course is the podcast show that teaches you how to get more traffic, leads and sales to your website and build a profitable audience online. I can’t quite believe we’re up to episode#25 of Traffic Jam. We are of a quarter of a century of episodes in and I guess at this point I’d really like to thank you, the listener, for making this show what it is. You’re the real driving force behind me getting behind the mike each week and interviewing these top guests that we have on Traffic Jam. And because of that, I really want to know how you’ve been doing with the content. Have you been able to implement any of the stuff that we’ve been teaching here on Traffic Jam? What information have you gotten hold of? What have you implemented and gotten great results with? I’d love to hear some success stories and case studies that I can perhaps share with other traffic jam listeners so why don’t you this week just shoot me an email if you managed to have some success. I’d love to hear about it. Email address is james@veravo.com or alternatively you can head on over to an episode page and leave a comment there but I really would love to hear your success stories.

A quick announcement at the top of the show and that is on the 2^nd, 3^rd, and 4^th of December, I will be co-hosting the Middle East Internet Summit 2013. This is an online event so you don’t have to be physically in the Middle East to be able to attend; as long as you have an internet connection you’ll be be able to take part. And on the 2^nd, 3^rd, and 4^th, myself, along with other 18 other presenters will be showcasing 21- minute talks along our various areas of expertise giving away some really good gifts and giveaways as some really good training sources from some of the top minds on internet marketing, well worth checking out. if you want to register, you can do for free of course at www.MiddleEastInternetSummit.com. Go check that out, if it looks of interest to you then I would well recommend entering in to that event.

So on today’s guest. He’ pretty influential in the area of blogging and social media, He is a Top 50 Social Media influencer of 2103, in fact, he is listed at #11 in the Forbes.com list, he is published in the New York Times, he’s also published in the Huffington Post as one of the Top 100 Business Leadership and technology Twitter accounts you really should follow. 2013 Social Media Examiner named his blog one of the top social media blogs online so if you’re investing your time in blogging or social media or in fact want to, I think you’re going to find this interview extremely relevant and appealing so stay tuned for that it’s coming right up next. But of course, if you’re a first time listener, I’ve got to tell you not to go anywhere after the interview because we do have our regular segments – The One Minute Traffic Tip, This Week’s News in Traffic, the round up and also we play out the show with a musical jam so stick around after the interview for all of that great stuff but first are going to go to the interview, my guest is Jeff Bullas from JeffBullas.com, he’s an Australian with a very, very influential blog that’s extremely highly trafficked- 4 million views per year and what’s so remarkable about it is that he’s built this blog with a 100% free traffic i.e. he’s not using any paid traffic at all. He’s primarily building this thing off the back of social media. So without any further ado, let’s get stuck in to today’s interview and it’s with Jeff Bullas.

James: Hello listener! You’re tuned in again to another episode of Traffic Jam and joining me today is Jeff Bullas. Jeff, how are you?

Jeff: I am very well, thank you very much.

James: Well it’s great having you on the call. I think you’re coming to us from Australia today, is that right?

Jeff: That’s correct! Last time I looked I was in Sydney, yes.

James: And still in Sydney. Cool! Well, you’ve got this blog on the domain JeffBullas.com. Now as a quick kind of intro to our listener, why don’t you just give us a quick overview of what you have going on over there and a little introduction to your business?

Jeff: We are creating premium content and we do strategic consulting. I also do a lot of international public speaking so I was actually in Kuwait early this year and then in the US after that and I have been in Turkey, Italy and also in Beirut, Lebanon in the last 18 months.

James: Wow! You weren’t too far away from me a short while ago in Kuwait; I’m just across the water in Dubai. Cool! Well let’s dig in to a little bit more about your blog. I think it is pretty highly trafficked from what I can tell, you’re somewhere around the six thousand mark and according to your bio you’ve got 4 million page views per year. How have you built that traffic to that blog?

Jeff: It really comes down, I’d say to 2 things: one is you create the best content that’s relevant to the audience and I seem to have got that right from Day1 and I got better doing that. The other thing too is in building a tribe around that so work very early on with Twitter and Twitter is a special network that a lot of people didn’t get but I found that it actually drives a lot of traffic, in fact, today; it’s my biggest driver by far than Facebook so Twitter I went really high in building an audience and I have a following of just over 200,000 at the moment so there are two key things, creating the best content you can and doing that relentlessly and also build your following on social network. Those are the 2 key things. There are a lot of other things behind that but if you want to sum it up that would be how I’d do it.

James: Sure. And I’m sure we’ll dive it in to some of that other stuff during the next 20 or 30 minutes but just diving in to Twitter, what are you doing differently that you feel has got that traffic source to be so successful for you?

Jeff: When I discovered Twitter and when I decided to start tweeting and I worked hard to get followers what I found was that all about three or four years ago was that social oomph that allowed me to load my tweets and make it recurring you can load them once and just let them feed tweets to the Twitter stream and what I did originally was I automated early; I have automated about 4 years ago and social media purists would say it’s not real engagement, it’s not real social network and you’re right but from a marketing point of view it worked brilliantly so I didn’t follow what I call I purist traditional path of doing manual tweeting and engaging with anyone that tweeted back because I just can’t do that, especially now so that’s what I’m doing differently so I don’t have to tweet every fifteen minutes and I don’t have to because it does it for me. I also discovered about 2 years ago what I call the power of ever growing content so what I tweet is what I call news because news is old news tomorrow. So I create mainly evergreen content; content that is about social media marketing or search engines or Twitter or whatever. It is basically about principles and solving problems that helps them grow their business and their networks. So those are some of the things that I did a little bit differently; I focused on evergreen content and tweeted a lot. And I got given a fair bit of grief a lot, well not a lot but occasionally but I see it’s working so I’m not going to listen to you and it has proven to work.

James: So has there been any dangers or repercussions with automating your tweets? I know as you said certain social media would say, under no circumstances should you automate? But I know on the flipside of that you are arguing, which I think is a super valid point, in all of these, maintain a consistency of content has got to be a real big factor in your success, being ever present, putting out content regularly is a major, major thing, but just on the flip side, what have been some of the risks, if any, that have been involved in automating that aspect of your marketing?

Jeff: I think they’ve been quite minimal. Some people don’t like it and so they have not followed me and that’s their choice but the thing is, you can’t please everyone all the time. We’ve had much more positive feedback because I treat Twitter as a string and not as an inbox. And as you know with Twitter it’s not like you’ll go in and read my tweets for the last two weeks, don’t do that. You can go in your inbox in your email; we just don’t do that on Twitter. It’s a string, it just strings past you at a time. So, the reality is that, to be ubiquitous and to be top of mind, you need to be popping those tweets in to the string all the time. So that was my strategy and yup. I got a big of flak, it wasn’t big, but it was there and if I had listened to it I would have stopped it and I don’t think I would have created the audience in Twitter.

James: Yeah, fantastic. Well if we were to dive in to your Google Analytics I guess we’re going to see some pretty telling numbers from Twitter as a traffic source. What else could we find if we dive in to your analytics? What are the numbers would be telling for you and your blog JeffBullas.com?

Jeff: Okay, the one things is that the past 18 months is that I have built some authority online is my organic Google search results’ huge now because I create a lot of long form content which Google now actually really likes with the rise of Hummingbird recently and unique content so every piece of content is unique like don’t do copied curate but then it’s wrapped with words and link back and if you look at my stats it’s well over 50% now of my traffic to my blog is organic search traffic.

James: What are you doing to promote those from an SEO stand point? Is it purely powered through social media just announcing those posts across various social media channels?

Jeff: Yeah, that’s the main driver; it’s social and as we know, with the rise of Google+ and web development of Google+ is that Google is the one that catches the social signals so what’s happening is that Google’s valuing social signals highly now, much more than it was three or four years ago so what happens is that then people discover your content through a tweet, through a Google+ update or post or Facebook update and then they actually link back to your blog so what they’re driving is actually what I call Link Building; being relentless by posting content as you can, especially long form content where people are referring to your posts in what I call offsite link building back to your website or blog and well at the webmaster tools recently I think I was approximately 300,000 inbound links. That drives a lot of referral traffic.

James: Yeah, and I am guessing very few of those are actually built per se by you right? I mean this is proper organic, referral based SEO where people are linking to your stuff hopefully because it is a pretty good resource that they actually want to promote and refer it, right? I mean, it is SEO as it should be, right?

Jeff: By doing that in the last four and a half years is I’ve actually converted in to Google+ and Google has actually rewarding now. Long form content, resource based, valuable, unique – that has a lot of social signals so I have not paid for one link in my entire blog career and I very rarely do guest blogging because I don’t have the time but when I am home based I do but only occasionally. I think for me, I got the strategy right which is more about what drives me which is actually creating content for my site and Google’s rewarding of that has proven to be very, very fruitful.

James: Yeah, and you’ve got a few years of content cranked up there that is indexed and will probably be rewarded I guess with the new Hummingbird update. Well let’s talk a little bit about the success of your blog Jeff because you’ve got pretty well known, you’re seen in pretty high esteem, I mean Social Media Examiner regularly ranked you in kind of top 10 social media blog and even Forbes have put you down as being one of the top few social media influencers. What do you think that you are doing differently that others perhaps in your space are not to get that sort of recognition?

Jeff: Relentless content creation. I blog 45 times a week I wake up at 4:30 and I write and edit. I have guest bloggers now so that’s fine but I quite often write myself and I have done that for 4 and a half years so it’s not like I blog once a month or once a week so if you are going to be recognized you need to put the hard work and it’s not overnight success, it’s just persisting and I think to that I write with my own voice so if you actually read my blog post and then you went and read something else again that I am not writing that today, it was a guest blogger, So I think you have to find your own voice online; how you write – be conversational and structure it well. There are a lot of elements that go in to the mix but I think finding your own writing voice and being persistent about writing good content, that’s really, really important.

James: I want to just ask you a couple of questions around domains itself. You’ve actually chosen to blog on JeffBullas.com and then I was a little bit surprised to see that you do now accept contributions by other people, you have guest posts there. So I have got two kind of questions I guess in relation to that. Firstly, why did you choose your own name .com as the domain for your blog? And then on that basis why did you then allow others to essentially undo your name on your website?

Jeff: There was no grand plan. I’m what you call an accidental blogger and I am sure there may be other few blog sites that will emerge around that JeffBullas.com ecosystem but I did aspire for it to be a personal brand feeling a little bit of personal branding it means I really can’t sell my blog because it’s really me but that’s fine. I can build blog properties around that can be in the interesting topics and subjects in the social media or digital space that I am working on at the moment. So there was no grand plan; JeffBullas.com was accidental. The .com was not accidental. I realized that the .com is an international domain name. The other thing too is that a large part of my audience is American so I do not write as an Australian, I write as a global citizen so I think you have to write for the world. You don’t write for Sydney, I don’t write for Australia, I don’t write for Jeff. I’m writing for what I call a digital world because if you do that, then you actually touch a lot more people.

James: Yeah, so how do you get that balance right between finding your own personal voice and being true to Jeff Bullas and then also getting that balance that you’re not alienating the biggest market in the world, the US being an Aussie guy down under. How do you get that balance right in terms of the actual voice of your content?

Jeff: You may think when you’re creating content that you want to reach all this audience so with the biggest audience being the US, my spelling is what I call US English and I did it on purpose. In my location and I am always keeping in mind what who someone who might be struggling with social media or they want to go to the next level what they want to know so I am always asking what are their problems and I have that always at the back of my mind, is this something that would fascinate, educate, entertain, inspire? You just have to keep those questions sitting always at the back of your mind in creating your articles and when you’re writing.

James: And at what point Jeff did you decide to bring on guest bloggers- people that are going to be contributing content to your site?

Jeff: I realized the pace of keeping that writing up is pretty tough and I also wanted to give myself some time to create premium content such as write my book and I’m really rubbing it, Social Media Marketing Toolbox guide which will be 2 to 300 pages which is really intense. So I need to bring myself up to actually create premium so I started basically giving other people a platform so they can actually write for the audience and also what’s great about that is that it gives you some perspective about things, I sometimes feel that I am writing the same thing week in week out, even though they’re not but I feel that I am. So I started giving other people a platform that they can write and also I think what’s good about that  if you get guest bloggers like Social Media Marketer and Mark Schaeffer, as long as you keep the quality up to scratch. That’s the challenge. Quite often the challenge is that they have to write to a similar standard people are expecting from what I have been doing over the years. It’s tough sometimes. It may be not quite there but you edit it where you rewrite the headline name and you put tougher stands in place from an article submission.

James: Yeah, and full disclosure- I mean, when you have people guest posting on your site while it’s on JeffBullas.com it is pretty clear on the post itself that it is written by someone else. It has a different author’s name and other stuff there so I think from the actual visitor standpoint there is no illusion that it’s you or not you. They are pretty clear about it. Jeff, you did say that you kind of got in to this as an accidental blogger, I do now though see that on your site that you are offering services around the topics that you talk about – social media, marketing, etc., what came first, did the blog come first and the passion for social media marketing or did the services come first and you then built a blog around it?

Jeff: The passion came first, the blog was the platform for the passion. And the passion is not a singular word, it’s not social media. A passion is actually the intersection of several passions and they are writing, I discovered once I started the book, 12 months in to it I said hey actually, I love this writing thing. I have always loved learning so blogging basically is about reading to write so you’re actually researching then writing then publishing. I do love marketing and I was intrigued by social when I stumbled upon Facebook and then Twitter in 2008 and I just noticed how it seemed to touch people’s psyche globally; people are obsessed with it they just dive in and they were tweeting and they were Facebook updating. I went well there was some power in there so I was intrigued so I was curious. And I said I wanted to write about something that intrigues me and I am curious about so I started from a passion and also what was on the back of my mind was – when I get a bit older what will I have left behind? What will I have contributed to the planet? So this  legacy question was just bubbling very quietly at the back of my mind so the blog was actually an intersection of quite a few things that happened. And it gave me a voice and what I found is the art of creation and publishing has actually been a huge personal driver so I encourage everyone to start a blog and if you do for the right reason, for the right passion and purpose then the other stuff sort of shows up so the services have emerged out of that and the premium content because if you send packaging and the knowledge of doing it and that then gives you the freedom to keep doing what you love doing and just discover things which are fun and there’s work travel and … but yeah, that’s why I am an accidental blogger with no grand plan and actually no money to do it on my own.

James: Good, well I wanted to kind of ask you that question because having read your stuff it is quite clear that you do kind of advocate and people find what gives them a bit of fire in their belly with what keeps them passionate and then find a platform to kind of write to contribute around it. There is going to be that listener out there who is perhaps in a business that doesn’t really excite them that much. What do you say to the person? Should they go and find something else to blog about and perhaps build a personal brand attached to their business or do they just bite the bullet and actually write about what is relevant to their target market?

Jeff: Well I would hope that if you’re in business you’re actually do it for the right reason which is not to make money but actually because you love doing it.

James: Well I think that’s fair but of course there are still going to be people out there that for whatever reason they found them in a job.

Jeff: Exactly! It’s going to be hard then for them to sit down and blog every day at 4:30 in the morning and I don’t understand it then they are going to look at you seriously and say how you are going to leverage the content. Whether it is getting guest bloggers in that are stake holders in your business or your business ecosystem that are suppliers. There are a lot of businesses that actually have guests authors in them that are stake holders in their business and their ecosystem that surrounds their business. Do that, go and find some great writers on e-lance or freelance and outsource your writing and edit it. Get community managers to look after the tribe. You’ve got to get smart and sometimes you’re not going to be actually be able to do it yourself and I think automation and social media management tools which are evolving quite rapidly now because it’s very hard to get to social scale.

James: Yeah, and I guess to pick up something that you said very early in this piece Jeff, you’ve got to be consistent with this stuff. Building a blog that’s successful is not something that’s going to happen overnight and if you have not got someone driving that beast who’s at least a little bit passionate about writing and contributing content. It’s going to fall a pretty steep death early on, right?

Jeff: Exactly, you need some fuel and that fuel is passion. You only have to look at the likes of Nike and Red Bull, they create fantastic content and it’s passion for their brand so I think brands are passionate on purpose because they’re actually true to their brand and then their whole reason why their product exists Red Bull is just the best content marketing company in the world because they understand the power of content to drive results to actually get conversation. Coco Cola’s a strategy which is based upon the content excellence, not creative excellence anymore. And they are all about creating liquid content- it’s getting content to flow around the web, not a lot involved not in hardships. And that’s where the real power comes in- it’s actually unleashing the power of content and drive conversations about your brand because I tell you what, your tribes in the social network can create much more conversation that you can ever hope to pay for for good live words or a Facebook end so I am a very big exponent and advocate of what I call organically earned social media.

James: Yeah, well it is interesting that you picked up on Red Bull being a leader and forefront of the pack with this stuff. We had just had Joe Pulizzi of the Content Marketing Insititute on an earlier episode and that was really one of the if not the number one case study of a business that really does content marketing well because they live with their brand but really if you look at the basis of it yes they sell drinks but what is that business about, it’s just all about content and everything they do has all revolved around this content marketing machine, right?

Jeff: Yep, and they don’t create content without their brand, their conversation’s around their brand.

James: Yeah, well I want to pick up on this kind of brand being related a little bit to design, of I am right, did you have a background in web design and web development Jeff, is that right?

Jeff: No.

James: Oh, really? You were link to a business marketing firm I thought?

Jeff: I did some part time work for a digital agency, and part of that work is the design and development of an e-commerce site so I am not a designer, my original focus and career in life was being a teacher so I actually just changed to being an online teacher who just happens to be a blogger.

James: That’s right! Now you get to travel the world and I guess teach also from the comfort of your home as opposed to traipsing in to schools or universities or wherever you were before.

Jeff: Yeah, I teach people who want to learn because as a high school teacher I was teaching kids who did not want to learn and that’s much more exciting. You talk with a bunch of people who are just hungry to learn and then they go well it’s just great to learn about this today and that might have some change, so I am still an educator but just online.

James: Well let me still ask you the question I was going to ask you around design because I wanted to sort of get your opinion on how important the design of a blog is to a blog success because you’ve got a beautifully simple that’s got it’s caricature graphic in the header, but aside from that there is not a whole lot more going on visually. It’s plain, it’s white it’s got some banners going down the side. You’ve still manage to get a massive audience so how important is design? Should it be something that our listeners should be investing in or does the content matter far more?

Jeff: Content’s the focus! Don’t get distracted by bells and whistles when doing a blog and going what do I read? It doesn’t mean you can’t have what I call great resources under tabs but you’ve got to focus on the content front and center because that’s the purpose, it’s presenting content that’s easy to read and easy to share, that’s adds values to people’s lives and you just have to keep giving until it hurts so that’s really about creating content and that’s the focus. And guess what. The other stuff turns out, that’s where the magic happens, that’s where the secret sauce so you could really over complicate it and I have seen people agonize over the design, in fact my design wasn’t done by any designer, it was just actually an artist friend who did the caricature that was actually quite different so that was an accidental branding success again so I think you really need to be really careful that you don’t overdo design and there’s certainly the likes of design trends that is there a trend with design but you have to make sure especially if you drive people to a landing page – you want only one thing, buy a book or buy a course or subscribe to a monthly membership. So you have to work out what the objective is to the page and to the blog and be true to that.

James: Yeah, and one thing that you have got quite a lot of is banners and social media links, etc. in your right hand column, do you ever worry that after putting all of that effort in and marketing your website on your social platforms and getting people to the site or you risk bleeding people off to other platforms?

Jeff: A little bit- my bounce rate is quite the same over the years. I am in the middle of doing a redesign and it’s going to be much more responsive WordPress templates. I don’t agonize too much about taking people off, I’ve got a few ads there that’s about content or information that’s about trust and know but if you write really good content then you’re going to keep people on to it so it’s basically just working hard just creating that content that gets some tuning up every time.

James: Yeah, and of course for your content you seem to be seem to be kind of predominantly text focused. You don’t seem to have too much video or audio on your site, is that by design or you just kind of just favor writing over the other mediums?

Jeff: I prefer writing; I think there is magic in the written word. I have tried some video stuff and it just doesn’t seem to draw as much traffic. I think a lot of people like to skim and scan around information very quickly. Maybe it’s a generation thing, I am not 23, 24, or 25 so maybe I am comfortable with writing, but I have tried. I’ve actually had some audio podcasts, I tried it in a year, traffic didn’t increase, and I can put together a text blog, I think it adds a lot of value and takes quite quickly so I am more comfortable with writing I suppose and that’s the main reason. I’ve looked at social media examiner with its podcast and other guys doing podcasts, that’s fine, but it’s a lot of work to do a really good podcast and create graphics and upload a guide and it’s efficiency and I suppose it’s my voice.

James: Yeah and I think it’s clearly working for you, not only has it worked in your favor now with the Hummingbird update, with this nice long rich text post but it’s also getting you the maximum result for the minimum dose right? I mean you’re totally right to put together a podcast requires a whole team behind you really – we’ve got a transcriber, we’ve got an editor here that put these things together though of course I’m recording now with you and then I’ll record some intro and outro sections to go with this and then we’ll put it up in the site. It doesn’t happen in a couple of hours in the morning at 4:30 it’s probably a hard day’s work so yeah, I am feeling you, I understand why you’ve gone for that format and it’s clearly working for you.

Jeff: Yeah, it doesn’t mean I won’t do it in the future; I had a chat with a friend and asked how long does it take for him to put together his podcast, he said a day, I went, wow! It’s a fair commitment, it doesn’t mean I won’t do them in the future, and it doesn’t mean I won’t be doing more, I have done a few videos, but I will do videos maybe for squeeze pages basically as intros to premium content as part of the strategy so I think you start with the content that’s what your more comfortable with and what works for you so I think that’s part of your voice as well.

James: Yeah! And for now Jeff whilst you’re not doing a podcast, we’re very happy for you to come on and share your wisdom with our listeners on this podcast so it’s all worked out nicely enough anyway. So let’s finish up with one question and then we’ll draw things to a close. One other thing that I’ve noticed with your content is that you seem to put a good amount of effort to sort of crafting impactful that’s going to draw readers in. How important is your headline to the success of your posts?

Jeff: It’s a big part – I don’t know what percentages but if there’s one thing you learned to do is learn to write headlines and if you can do that it might be turned in to successful blogs; I’ve read some horrendous headlines and I don’t even want to click on that, it’s going to be boring. So reality too is online, no one has bought anything yet, you don’t have a commitment so the trick online is two second or less and you can go I want to click on that link because of that great headline. So when you buy a book for $20 and you buy it on paperback, but when you buy it online, the only temptation you’ve got is only the headline. So you’ve got to get them and you’ve got to get them in two seconds so five times as many people read the headline as to reading the content so you’ve got to get that right and it’s part art part science you’ve got a lot of great resources around to write a great headline, read those that are really good, there’s a bunch, you can google them, but yes, get your headlines sorted and learn to write a good headline and it will help a lot.

James: Yeah, and I can see definitely Jeff for your particular strategy that’s influenced heavily by Twitter which is the shortest social media platform on the planet. You literally have as you said a second to grab people’s attention or you’re going to die. It is incredibly important. On that note, let’s share your Twitter handle cause you are very active on Twitter Jeff, where would people find you on Twitter? And then perhaps we’ll share some other links if there is anything else you’d like our listener to check out other than JeffBullas.com.

Jeff: My Twitter name is simple; @JefffBullas. Luckily I’ve got a strange name so it really helps, I was able to get my name both as a domain name, as a Twitter handle and a few other things so that’s great. My book Blogging the Smart Way How to Create a Killer Market with Social Media, that’s on my blog so check that out if you have time, that’s where you’ll find me, my blog, my Twitter; you’ll also find me on Facebook and Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube, I try to be everywhere, I’ve got this mantra, to be ubiquitous.

James: To our listener if you can’t remember all of that if you just simply go to Google and search for Jeff Bullas you’ll find that Jeff does dominate the entire first page with his own content so I guess that’s kind of proof. Good stuff! You’ve been incredibly generous with your time and your content today Jeff. Traffic Jam thanks you for coming onboard and perhaps some time again in the future we can repeat this for another episode.

Jeff: Thanks James! It’s been a pleasure. Have a great day!

This Week’s News in Traffic

It’s kind of a light week in traffic again, not too many stories out there, we do have a couple though. The first one’s from Twitter and they’ve announced a little bit flexibility around mobile targeting for their ad platform. Mostly these new targeting options they’ve introduced allow advertisers based on device type and also connectivity so you can now target iOS users or you can pinpoint say Samsung users as well and this is really going to be ideal for those people promoting mobile apps, or perhaps telco marketers who want to offer discounts or coupons to people on certain devices or plans. I don’t think it is going to affect really the average marketer but if you are in either of those segments – apps or telco – the only two that I could think of right now, you may find this useful.

In our second update, out of Google, it seems that the search engine is now rolling out a new look to search engine results, at least testing to this stage. A test that they were doing on mobile devices about a month or so ago is now being tested on desktop devices too. And this new look to the search results is essentially a merging of the look and feel of the organic results with the look and feel of the ads. Whereas before ads at the top of the page be boxed in a yellowy- orange box to make them very distinguishable, now they’re also against a white background like the organic results with a yellow label that says ad right next to the ads listing. It is in testing stage but I think it is the swinging of the pendulum towards advertisers and more likely than not will encourage a higher click through rate on ads and probably the lessening of links on organic results so we’ll see if this is rolled out for sure but for now it is being tested in the UK and in America on quite a large scale so this may indicate that it is close to a large roll out. We’ll wait and see.

Here comes that point in the show where I feature you, the listener and there’s a couple to read out this week, both from the United States and the first one comes from Anthony Tran he says, website traffic is a hot topic and his comment is alright let’s get some traffic, love this topic about SEO and other ways to get traffic to your website so thank you for that Anthony. And also for Andy Gray who as I said is also in the United States. He said actionable and inspiring. Well worth the time and an inspiration for traffic building in each episode, great stuff James so thank you to you both for those 5-star reviews. As always I’d love to get your feedback and reviews on Traffic Jam and the way to do that is on iTunes. Head on over to your  iTunes player, search for the Traffic Jam podcast, hit the review and rating button, give it a star rating out of 5 and then add your comments. It’s more than likely if you do leave a comment and it’s relevant and also nice I guess, I will read it out in future episodes so make sure you include your name and also your website address as a good little marketing tip for you, I’ll make sure that it gets mentioned on an upcoming show.

The One Minute Traffic Tip

Okay, so the tip this week is to set up a referral program who pays commissions to people when they refer customers to your product. You can do this the quick and simple way, i.e. you give me a referral and I credit you when someone becomes a sale and of course you send me your name. or if you have a high volume online product or service, you may want to use specialist affiliate solutions that uses links and IP tracking to effectively track who’s sending you traffic and sales.

Now here’s the key to a successful affiliate and referral program, you want to make sure that you reach out to affiliates and offer them help with content and affiliate use and webinars or anything else that will drive traffic and sales for you, because when you help them make more commission, here’s what will happen, you’ll make more sales yourself. That’s the way a referral program works and of course you’ll be getting customers who wouldn’t have had otherwise access to.

Okay so that brings us to a close on episode#25 of Traffic Jam. I’ll of course be doing it all again next week where you should join me in the next 7 days from now for a deep dive in to the topic of Google+ with my extra special guest so come back listeners for that one, in the meantime, head on over to Veravo.com for more traffic tips and training and to post any comments and questions that you have for this episode. To play out this week’s show we have a track by Linkin Park which is a favorite band of Jeff Bullas. The track is called Castle of Glass and here it right now, see you next week!