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TJ4 – Twitter Not Required With Scott Stratten

8 TJ with James and Scott Stratten watermarked

 

Episode #4 puts the spotlight on Twitter and today James is joined by a top 5 influencer. Scott Stratten, the man behind UnMarketing.com at the time of recording has 2 published books, over 144,000 followers on Twitter and 97,000 tweets. He’s kind of a big deal. Listen in as Scott reveals why you should be on Twitter not because you need to, but because you want to, and why wanting to may not be the right choice.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS

  • The ROI of Twitter
  • How Twitter works
  • Twitter Misconceptions
  • Good Twitter habits
  • Twitter No-nos
  • Real Time vs Scheduled Tweets
  • Measuring Twitter success

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Welcome to Traffic Jam, the show that’s jammed full of tips from the very best internet traffic experts. Hi, this is James Reynolds and this is episode #4 and this week, we are recording from a different location, we’re in Makati City, in Manila, Philippines where I’m workshopping with my superpinos and that’s the affectionate name I’m giving to my superstar Filipino based team. Production level this week are probably not quite that of previous week because I’m recording this one on a USB headset but I’m sure you’ll find the content still of the same high quality. Now if you have a remote workforce I would really recommend you go see your team. We’ve had four days so far of strategy, planning and workshopping on the business, but most importantly deepening relationships and having a whole bunch of fun too and I know we’ll take the business at even greater heights from this point forward, and we’ve had a lot of fun, mostly on my behalf I say, the team have been introducing me to local delicacies like the 7% Red Horse beer which I’ve accepted very gladfully and also balut, which is an egg with an unhatched embryo inside which I’ve got to say I was less keen to try. Anyway the Manila experience has been absolutely fantastic and I’ll be returning again in three months from now and I’m sure we’ll record another episode of Traffic Jam.

So what have we got coming up on the show? Today’s feature interview is all about Twitter and we’ve got a guy on the show who’s kind of a big deal on the platform. His stats for one are off the scale – 144,000 followers, 97,000 tweets and engagement with his audience that is impressive, to say the least. My guest is Mr. Unmarketing Scott Stratten. Now also on the show we’ve got the regular slots: this week’s news in traffic, the one minute traffic tip, and a Philippine inspired traffic jam to play out the show so stick around ‘til the end for that.

Anyway, right now is the feature interview so let’s get stuck right in.

James: Welcome Scott Stratten – The president of Unmarketing, who is kind of a big deal in a fairly irrelevant social media site that inflates its own importance. Scott, Just how important are you on Twitter?

Scott: If you ask anybody on the street, they have no idea; if you ask my mom, she thinks it’s pretty significant and if you ask me, it’s the most important of all.

James: Well of course! Awesome! Tell me a little bit more about what you do because I’m sure despite sending about a hundred tweets per day, I’m sure you don’t hang out on Twitter all day long. Tell us a little bit about you and your business activities and what you are up to.

Scott: If we were having this conversation two years ago and you say of course you don’t hang out on Twitter all day long, I would have to correct you and day actually I am cause that is all I did back then; I believe that to get noticed and build a platform, you have to be there. But on me, after doing myself marketing, I’m on marketing for almost 12 years now; I started doing traffic and everything else – I used to do viral videos before we called them viral videos. I usually created them before YouTube existed. I have been doing traffic generation and lead building for almost ten years now. My whole thing about social media, whether it’s viral or in person is that I think we should market the way we want to be marketed too –with good content and value instead of being interrupted all day, I think there’s a place for that

James: Absolutely! I’m going to open up with a question that may give you an ulcer when I ask it Scott, but I’m prepared for that. What’s the ROI on Twitter?

Scott: You know what, I’ve been asked that so much that the ulcer kind of that goes away and I just become numb for a few minutes when people ask it and my answer has shifted a little bit over years but it still remains the same and it’s that – it’s not the ROI of Twitter, the question really, is what is the ROI of a conversation? It really boils down to that. A lot of times when people ask what’s the ROI on Twitter what they’re really saying is I don’t buy into it and until you convince me, I’m not going to use it. That’s what it comes down to. Because I do believe we need ROI on things, we certainly do. We’re on business! The whole point of business is you have a return on your time investment, monetary investment, so I get that. I think it’s a timely question. What I don’t think is fair is when we judge conversation to a higher standard that any other marketing tool we’re using, we don’t hold classical advertising to the same standards as we do our social media questions. I can turn around and ask somebody what is the ROI on the 5,000 golf balls you bought with the company logo on it? And if he looks at me and says, well it’s just an expense. I’m like what is conversation? What is networking? And I really don’t think that we should be belittling our customers down to the point of saying- what is the value of these next 7 words that I’m going to say to you? Because I don’t know, I don’t know what is the value of our ROI is it looking like you give a damn about your customers? And I don’t know about the ROI of not giving a damn, I really don’t because it’s subjective. Like I don’t care if that toilet paper company that I use talks to me, it may be funny, but I don’t care but it leaves the opportunity for another company to come in and for me to get to know them so I don’t know what is the answer because James, if you go on Twitter tomorrow, and you Tweet a hundred times, and I go and tweet tomorrow a hundred times – let’s say we both start from scratch we can both get totally different results because of personality, because of our goals, because of our skill set, because of our time, and that’s the difference. There is no such thing as a hard ROI in social media because if anybody tells you what it is, like here’s the number, they’re making it up because ROI in advertising is the same. You can’t tell me what’s the ROI of an ad you put in the newspaper because it’s so subjective, so many variables that are in play. It’s actually why I hate seeing studies about Twitter that say the most retweeted words are or How to get the best time to post in Twitter because it’s all subjective. We’re data driven freaks now and we don’t realize that is a very contextual, very individual circumstances.

James: Sure, sure. Well, you’ve obviously done very well using Twitter as part of your tool set and I think you have mentioned that Twitter  has been an influence much of the success that followed you getting involved in the platform. What would you consider to be the success that you have been able to attribute to Twitter?

Scott: Well, if you – for me – and I’m just going to flip back to what I just said for you to remember right before I answer this; you ought to understand that this is a context meaning I become a very successful keynote speaker and author by using something – especially Twitter but here’s the rub, they don’t hear this whenever I say it; when I tell people I have earned over a half million dollars over 2 years on Twitter personal, that when I say something like that, people just stop listening right after I say that – Oh! It’s a gold mine and I ought to do it! What they’re not understanding is that I’ve made a living and a lot of it has to do with Twitter but it’s because I talk about Twitter and that’s a disconnect. People don’t realize that as an author and a speaker, even other authors and speakers, it’s like being in the kitchen and talking about food, it’s going to work, it’s in the right area, it’s in the right circumstances, it’s the right environment. But if I talk in Twitter and I talk about plumbing the whole time, my success would be greatly different. Most of my retweets through the years when I was really trying to aggressively build a following, the tweets were about Twitter like it’s so matrix, made out to be that. My tweets were about Twitter that got retweeted. That’s how it worked for me so my success needs to be taken, like anybody says, needs to be taken with a grain of salt, it’s fun for social media experts and we all think we know what we’re talking about  so for me – but I did not go on there to build a business. You have to understand that too- I did not go on there and say I’m going to build a business and get revenue in Twitter. I got on Twitter in 2008, because I did not have a water cooler, as an entrepreneur, as a business owner I did not have a place to go to talk to people. I really didn’t. And I couldn’t go there and ask questions about running a business, I got on there to find my water cooler, I got on there to find my peers and I was in a lack of place to go online, I have been online since 1994. I’ve done every reddit post, I’ve done every forum, you know all the geek stuff. But I never found any into business support for business owners than I did in Twitter back then.

James: That’s interesting! Well I’d like you to tell me a little bit about how you got started on Twitter because in January 2009 it went Boom! and something happened.

Scott: That’s right. It went from a casual stroll to a speed bike. What happened was when I joined in April 2008, I did it casually. Like everybody else, you know what happens; you hear about this thing and you’re just like, ah I’ll try it too. And I just dabbled and I thought I was kind of stupid and I did not really care. Somebody said they have a tuna sandwich for lunch and I’m like I really don’t care about that, and I just dabbled then I realized in January 1st, 2009 and I said to myself if I’m a marketing person, if I’m trying to position myself as an authority in marketing, I need to use this platform for at least a month and give it my focus, then I can either write it off and say it’s not worth my time or it is. I did not want to be that marketing guy to not use it and not recommend it because I’m not using it. So I went on there and I lived on Twitter for 30 days. When I say I lived on Twitter for a day, I did. You saw stats – I tweeted almost 7,000 times in 30 days and I literally lived on Twitter and I went from 1200 followers to 10,000; but those numbers don’t mean anything. I now have about 145,000 followers, I’ve tweeted over 95,000 times but those numbers really don’t have any meaning to me and the only number I only want people to walk away with is that 75% of my tweets are replies and that number has been the same from a thousand tweets to 95,000 tweets. And that’s the real secret on Twitter. You want Twitter to work with you and you talk with people and don’t talk at them. Twitter is a conversation, not a dictation.

James: Absolutely! We’ll talk about the whys and hows in a short while but I want to sort of just continue with your early success with Twitter. Do you think if you started again from scratch today do you still get the same traction now as you did back then?

Scott: I really want to say that it’s the same and while we’re talking to each other it’s all fine. It’s not totally the same. It’s still 140 characters, it’s shifted a little bit though that my big momentum when I did grew the bulk of my following and did most of the tweeting, I call it PB which is pre Bieber; pre – Justin Beiber day – there were no real celebrities on Twitter and in a way, in 2009 you were on Twitter because you wanted to be. You were not on Twitter because you had to. And there’s a huge difference between those 2 things and it’s that the voluntary audience versus the mandatory audience is a big shift. Because nobody was spamming Twitter then, nobody was spamming it with crap and doing auto this and auto that or Tweeting and scheduling an ad and broadcasting. It was like Lady Gaga wasn’t talking about her meat dress, her bacon earrings and whatever else she was wearing. We just talked to each other and so it has changed, there’s a lot of noise. The nice thing about Twitter though is you can control the amount of noise by filtering who you follow. So if I start again today, I’d be much more selective of who I’ll follow and I’ll kind of pin point who I want to talk to and get around the noise. Traction’s less, the response is less now but Twitter’s also become a great public megaphone. I love Twitter now differently for different reasons that I loved it in the early days. I love it now because at a time of crisis or natural disaster, so many people can connect and they help each other out, I love the support system on Twitter, I love the fund raising point on Twitter but it was a little bit different than the kind of a geek club than it was 5 years ago that we’re just thare to connect with each other. Each truly a different world.

James: Yeah, I know when you first started out you used sort of the strategy that follow and follow back. Would you do that again? I heard you mention you want to kind of do things slightly different on that note.

Scott: The answer would be a hell no; I would not do that again. Here’s the problem; it’s that when I started doing the big push in January 2009, I made 2 mistakes I would have changed and one was auto following back. I did not have an auto following, I did not have a way to find and follow people, what I did was if you followed me, I would automatically follow you back. I thought it was being sincere, I thought it was being nice, I thought it was courteous; and all I did was cloud with my Twitter stream of tweets, to be honest, I did not care about it or with spam or with inappropriate content; that was a mistake, I really think people should follow not out of obligation but out of interest that you should not follow one back because it’s nice in particular. I follow 34,000 people or something right now, I don’t follow 34,000 people, I can’t follow 34,000 people, and nobody can. I actually have a hidden list, a private list of a 102 people on and called my awesome sauce list. And that’s who I follow and that should be my following number. And my second mistake was I auto DM’ed everyone I followed initially, auto direct messaged them and all I said to them was thanks for following me, how’s Twitter treating you? I did not push anything, I did not spam anything, say join me on Facebook, and half the replies I got back was is this auto DM? and people were more questioning than anything else and the reason I stopped both was actually people started thanking me for following them – they write hey thanks for the follow or thanks for the follow back and I’m sitting there thinking I didn’t, it was just the computer doing it and I start really realizing that’s nonsense here. And that’s not to me what social media is about and I cut that off but unfortunately I cut that off about 34,000 people too late. But I cut it.

James: Cool, let’s continue the conversation on how Twitter can be done badly and tell me about – I shall not use the abbreviated version because this is a family show – this is F.U.C.C.- Friendly Unsolicited Commercial Content, what are some of the most criminal acts of social spamming you’ve been sent?

Scott: This to me is pretty much the epidemic of the social media problem here;  I don’t think people realize how impactful it is – it’s warm spam; this could be Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, you pick your platform. And these are when people are now your friends, your connection, your following and they send you spam! And a lot of times it’s not just liking spam, it’s not just you know you buy something; your new business contact may now be sending you a Viagra spam email or something that you used to get back in the email spam days but the way that they’re doing it, they’re just blanketing invites to events, they’re tagging you on photos about their multi-level marketing opportunity that has nothing to do with you, I just had one today! Somebody sent me an invite to an event – the event was booked for me in this contest, it’s not an event! And this guy invited 4,900 something people and what happens is they use a program that automatically invites your whole friend list up to 5,000 people. Actually to me it killed Facebook events. The most tragic thing to me that happened to Facebook was that we killed the momentum of Facebook events. A lot of people I know, but I’ve killed occasions for invites and event invites, right? I don’t get them. And the problem is now the real events don’t get noticed. I threw a party in Las Vegas; this was 2 years ago, so even 2 years ago this was happening. During blog world conference I threw in an open bar party and I’m paying for it and we’re throwing a party and I’m going to buy a hundred of drinks for the people that I like. And what happened was like 40 of them never responded at all. And I was like, how do you not respond to an open bar party in Las Vegas? How do you not do that? And what happened was, I talked to a lot of them before the event and they said they turned off notifications a long time ago because they cannot stand the event spam. My soul hurt because you missed a party of mine because some jerk wants you to vote for the 19th contest that they’ve been in, or even better, their website launch party, that they’re updating their website so it’s a party and come to my party and stuff. That’s what happens when we’ve taken for granted our social connections and people are like, when do I sell, when do I do this? I’m like just calm down for a second. It’s like a networking event. How often in person would you sit there and bring your product and push it in people’s faces? You wouldn’t do that in an event because somebody will punch you in the face! It wouldn’t happen that way. But we think we can do that in social because it’s virtual, it’s easier and it’s easily scalable. When my book came out, I’ve got two and we have another one coming out soon and when the book comes out, I promote it on my own wall in Facebook, I promote it on my own tweets; I don’t tag, I don’t invite, and what happened was people like it and I built up my social currency with my audience. They’re more open to me talking about what I sell. The more you give, the more people want to take from you as well.  And I’ve obviously done very well, I’ve never tagged a soul on a book cover trying to sell it, I’ve never invited a person to my virtual book party that doesn’t actually happen. What is do is I give to the network and they give back.

James: I guess it’s a travesty right? That the people still consider it to be the social inverted speech marks media. I mean they just kind of like that social factor.

Scott: Somebody just called it like two days ago a gorilla marketing that tagging people this is a gorilla marketing style. It’s a jerk marketing; it’s not what you need to do! If you have to tag people in to a post or invite them to a fake event, you need to give back your business key and work for somebody else because it’s not right. 

James: Yeah, you’re a big believer Scott of real time tweet. What is biggest scheduled tweet faux pas that you’ve witnessed?

Scott: I talk about it in terms of very black and white about scheduling tweets. My whole thing is simply don’t do it. I know there’s a gray area there I understand that sometimes people, you’re not the devil id you schedule tweets once in a while but for me, I always ask somebody, when I’m on a panel, when I talk to people, and somebody argues to me about scheduling tweets because like they need it, I just look at them and say, what content is so important that it has to go out at an exact scheduled time but not important enough for you to be there when it goes out? And nobody’s ever had an answer to that. Because to me, especially on Twitter, the main 90% of the reaction to a tweet is within the 5 minutes of after you send it. That’s the main reaction to Twitter and unlike me, most people don’t sit on Twitter all day. Most people will be there with little windows. And if you post some content James, let’s say you post this interview, you post it up, but you schedule it, and it goes up in a post at 11:00 in the morning your time but you’re not there and somebody at 11:03 writes to you and says, hey it’s not working; especially that, when the download link is not working, not your mistake but it can happen, and you don’t come back until 1:00 let’s say. And now, you’ve had these people helping you out and all they know is you tweeted something saying hey listen to this but it doesn’t work. So you’re saying hey listen to this but you’re not listening to them, you see the problem here? And I’ve seen a lot of really big screw ups which is great for me because I need content for books and stuff but I’ve seen some really bad screw ups, and the biggest thing to me that I see that makes brands look stupid is that when they have their scheduled tweets going and then something like a natural disaster happens, or a shooting, or something else that – like when Bin Laden was killed, companies are retweeting about the 5 ways to refinance their mortgage! We need to understand that – to me, relationships engagement do not mean automation. You can’t automate authenticity. And if you’re talking to people right now who thinks about traffic conversions and everything else, you have to understand that social media is probably the poorest converting platform in classical traffic speak; the poorest converting platform you can find. I really believe that because we do a fractional reaction in social media that even myself, I have a hundred thousand followers, 10,000 of those are online at any given time, a thousand of those may see my tweet and probably a hundred of those will do something. It’s very, very fractional. You can do the old school link farms, will get better click throughs on social so I don’t understand why we automate content for any reason because it doesn’t work like any other social media marketing platforms.

James: Well, let’s flip the coin now. Let’s talk about Twitter done well. What are your top Twitter tips for businesses because I guess that’s primarily the audience that we’ve got listening in to the podcast today?

Scott: I think consistency one of the keys to Twitter is that; consistency or frequency – that if you’re going to hang your shingles in Twitter as a business, then you need to be there and continue to be there. You don’t want to open your store Monday 11:00 – 11:05 once a week. It does not work that way. If you only have a limited amount of time in social, try to even it out within the week. If you only have, let’s say, three and a half hours a week to dedicate to a platform, I’d do a half hour a day, once a day rather than three and a half hours once a week. That consistently over time will help you out. I think the key of social is actually the opposite of it. If you have a dormant account, if you don’t use it, delete it. It’s actually dangerous to have a dormant account in social because people think you’re there. That’s a big problem. And have those search terms set up using all the tools out there that has your company name not just your Twitter name because most people will tweet about a brand without adding their @name to it so you want to keep your ear open. And even the spelling, or product name; I actually was angry at Delta Airlines once. I was so angry I tweeted Detla, like I misspelled Delta. I was so angry I misspelled a five –character word. And they actually have a search set up for misspellings of their name and so they found it, and they saw and they replied. And they fixed the problem within five minutes. So always keep your ears open because the mouth never stops moving at a time, so keep your ears open and listen. Big train wrecks happen on weekends and brands haven’t responded until 48 hours later because it’s a weekend, outrage does not take the weekend off; it’s always going and the response time nowadays isn’t five days, it isn’t a week. It isn’t even two days! It’s within hours. That’s what you are expected now, that’s the way we live now. Before this thing gets out of hand, before the momentum builds on, you want to be able to have your bombs ready.

James: Awesome, good! I’d like to touch on Twitter as a traffic channel because the cause of this podcast is kind of traffic focused, tell me about your concept of platforming and tell me about your influence on Twitter to direct your followers to other areas of your business.

Scott: Well that’s the thing about platforming because there is just so many places you can go and that’s a problem, especially in social media that there’s too many platforms to be on. What I try to do when I originally joined Twitter is that you stand on one platform and you build it. You build it until it momentum starts taking over, you can then step to the next platform and so what I do, I chose Twitter first, I was using Facebook already, but it was to talk to people; friends from high school I never liked and I was already on LinkedIn talking to people I used to worked with I never liked, so Twitter was to build a new audience. What happened was I tweeted 10,000 times before I ever sold anything, before I ever pinched anything. Before I even launched my blog, I really created a community first. And then what happened is I expanded it and went to the next step and the way I kind of break it into Twitter is like here is latest blog post, I went also on to Facebook that I announced it to Twitter but I didn’t overdo it. For every self-promotion tweet, I tweeted a hundred times between those things. But if I have a blog post now, I’ll tweet it probably, 4, 5, or 6 times over a couple of days and bring them to my site because I’d rather really have a thousand newsletter subscribers than 10,000 followers on Twitter, there’s your headline right there. That’s what I’d rather have because I still think email is king. And even though social media is sexy right now and shiny, one of the talents of social is pulling over those people into a list that you reach out to within your own control.

James: Cool. One kind of question to finish up on influence because you did say that you are one of the most influential people on Twitter; l I’ve seen a number of lists published here in the Middle East, one of them is  Whammed Up and another is Arabian Business and they’ve ranked the most influential Arabs on Twitter. They use some stats such as following numbers, then cloud scores but some of the people on the list were somewhat dubious contenders in my eyes. What‘s the best way to measure influence on Twitter?

Scott: There’s the million dollar question really is what is influencing and can actually be measured? When I got named one of the top 5 social media influencers on Twitter they used analytics on the site, they used all types of things like tweet reach; when you tweeted something how far it got out, some other influential people that you are influencing, stuff that I don’t even understand. But to me, at the end of the day is even influencers are contextual. You know at the start of the conversation I was talking about how you have to understand that these things are within a certain context that influencers you want to reach out for your business may not be on that list that you described. You have to define what’s an influencer for you. To me when I worked with clients over this is like it wasn’t just following or reach cloud score, it was kind of an all play in one: forums, forward count is more iffy now than it ever has been; you could buy followers, you could be auto follow – follow back type of stuff that it’s not the size, it’s the quality of the connection. I think that cloak and cranes and everything do have some weight to them, it’s not beyond and all but to me the best way to do an influencer outreach and find them is to look for a handful of people who do have a somewhat of a follower count, they have resonation in them meaning when they say something people talk but at the end of the day the biggest question asked is that are they a good representation of our brand? That’s really what it comes down to influencers. If I want to bring in influencers in to my campaign, I have to say they are representing my brand. You have to read their stream to see that. Are they making off colored jokes? Are they doing things that would not represent you? You know what they’re saying on Twitter has to be able to go to a billboard with your logo on it. So make sure that you find the right fit, not just the “best” person out there.

James: Awesome. Great stuff Scott, we’ll we’ve got about pretty much 30 minutes now so I think we’d kind of draw things to a close. What would be your final word of wisdom that you’d pass on to anyone who is listening into this podcast?

Scott: I’m going to go against the grand floor and say that nobody listening right now has to be on social media. There’s a great advantage to it, there’s a great ability to use it, but the first thing that you have to realize is that mandatory engagement is a bad turn. Use it because you want to use it, don’t use it because you’ve been told you should.

James: There you go, pretty here first, the Twitter expert said you do not need to be on social media. There you go. So where can listeners find out more about you?

Scott: My world’s under the name Unmarketing, so Unmarketing on Twitter, Unmarketing on Facebook, unmarketing.com, The first book is called Unmarketing, the second book is called The Book of Business Awesome and the third book coming on September is called QRCodes Kill Kittens, so stay tuned for that.

James: Great stuff, well, I’ll make sure I’ll post some links beneath this recording to make sure that everyone can find unmarketing really easily. Scott thanks for coming on the show and I hope to see you again soon!

This week’s news in traffic; Pinterest is a hot topic around here since my interview with Jason Miles here a couple of weeks ago, Pinterest this week have introduced Pinterest analytics which gives side tones as insights as to how people are interacting with pins that originate from their website.

Now if you have a verified website you’ll get information about how many people have pinned from your site, how many people have seen these pins, how many people visited your site from Pinterest; go check that out.

Facebook has quietly updated their rules about what content you could have on your fan page cover image. Everything but the 20% text rule for text has been scrapped so you can now reintroduce some call to actions pointing to your website, or blog or opt in to your email list from your fan page cover image. Now I’ve already updated my cover image in light of these changes and you can go see that by going to www.likejames.com.

Now in Google news, they’ve announced closure of Google Reader from July 1st, 2013 and this is really a reminder not to be reliant on 3rd party services and be single point sensitive in regards to the tools that you use. Now if you’re using Google reader for your RSS, then you’ll find another option before the summer.

Now also in Google news, Matt Cuts the head of Google spam division has indicated that there are major Panda and Penguin updates coming this year and in fact the latest Panda update we think was rolled out last weekend. Now I reported about this over at www.SEOSherpa.com so check out the news section there and I reveal there exactly how our cool websites have benefitted from every single algorithm update to date and how you can too, so go check out that news update over at SEOSherpa.com.

I’ve received a very nice comment from Alvin this week who said “fantastic podcast James, kudos!” he then went on to say completely direct, no unnecessary chatter and we’ve also raised the bar on the podcast arena – so thank you Alvin! He also requested some classic tunes from the past; the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s for the traffic jam and specifically held by The Beatles, so Alvin, we’ll see what we can do on that, stay tuned in the coming weeks.

If you have a comment or even a question you’d like me to answer on the show, head on over to www.TrafficJamCast.com; there’s two options – speech pipe and there’s leave a message they’re the places to do it on the website.

The one minute traffic tip: Measuring your traffic sources is of course critical to know what’s driving your results. Most people know about Google analytics and I guess majority of the people listening to the call would probably be implementing that in their website. But one tool you may not have heard of is Live Chat by livechatinc.com. It is really a chat software that integrates real time analytics, that means you can have an interface open on your computer and you can see who’s on your site at that precise moment. From that interface, you’ll see who’s on the site, what page they’re on, you’ll say where they are located based on their IP address, and you’ll even see the referring source of traffic, i.e. where they were before they came to your site.

Now some of the reasons why I like this is one, it ensures you are not solely reliant on Google analytics and you get a secondary source of data. But also I like it because you can engage visitors on relevant chat, knowing what page they’re on and how they found the site which is absolutely killer for conversions. I’ve got to give a mention to James Schramko who put me on to this bit of software and it’s absolutely awesome, go check it out.

Ok that’s it for another episode of Traffic Jam. I’ll be back next Friday, if you’ve the episode, please leave me an iTunes review, and I’ll give you a shout out on next week’s show.

Playing us out this week is a track picked by my team here in Manila, and it is of course a Filipino inspired tune it’s the Black Eyed Peas’ Bebot, which incidentally, in Tagalog means Pretty Woman. Enjoy!

RESOURCES

MENTIONS

THIS WEEKS NEWS IN TRAFFIC

ONE MINUTE TRAFFIC TIP

THE TRAFFIC JAM

Bebot by Black Eyed Peas

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