TJ38 – LinkedIn Strategies To Grow Your Network and Business with Viveka von Rosen

Hey! What’s up listener? You’re tuned in to Traffic Jam episode#38, I am your host, James Reynolds, and this is of course the podcast show that teaches you how to get more traffic, leads and sales to your website and build a profitable audience online. If you are a regular listener to the show, you’d be pretty familiar with the format by now; we start each show with a special expert interview and today will be no different because I have on the show, Viveka Von Rosen, for the session all about LinkedIn prospecting. We follow that with this week’s news in traffic, the one minute traffic tip, and then the musical jam to play out the show chosen by Viveka we call the traffic jam.

Now, as you’ll know, I’m not a fan of too much preamble before the interview so let me go right ahead and introduce our guest today. Her name is Viveka Von Rosen and she is from LinkedIn to Business. Viveka is the author of LinkedIn Marketing An Hour A Day. She is a contributor to Forbes, Money Magazine, Mashable.com, CNN, SocialMediaExaminer.com and a whole bunch of other popular places on the web I am sure you have heard of. She is a Forbes Top 20 Most Influential Women in Social Media not just once, but three times and get this, this should portray a little bit about her authority on LinkedIn. She’s got 29,000 first level connections on the platform and a network of over 31 million people. So there you go, I don’t think I need to give too much more of a build up because you’ll certainly portray her authority in the interview so without any further ado, here for a little chat all about LinkedIn prospecting, we have Viveka von Rosen.

James: So this is the interview section of Traffic Jam episode #38 and joining me on the hot seat today is Viveka von Rosen. Viveka, a very warm welcome to Traffic Jam!

Viveka: Thank you so much! It’s a pleasure to be here.

James: Super stoked to have you on the call! Now, of course we’re going to be talking today about LinkedIn. Tell us real quick how you got involved in LinkedIn marketing and why you like it so much.

Viveka: Sure. I was running a business at that time where I had done most of the marketing and we’ve created most of our growth just to face to face marketing and it was 2004, 2005, and 2006 and we brought in a speaker, it was a virtual office and I had a lot of entrepreneurs and small business owners office there and so I would bring in speakers and speak about what they really like to do and she just mentioned this thing called LinkedIn and for me it was kind of a no brainer for anyone in business that had a virtual aspect to it. There were only 12 million people on LinkedIn at that time but to me that was a huge number. It was before Facebook numbers, before Pinterest numbers and before Twitter numbers and so that was an obscenely large number to me of people that could become prospects for our business and I learned more about it and started taking courses there were on it which weren’t many and I think Jason Alba’s book was the only one available, You’re On LinkedIn, Now What? And yeah, just kind of went from there and entered it in to a training and consulting business in pretty short order.

James: Nice! Well, I am sure we’ll touch on some those things as we go deeper in to the interview but I want to start by asking first a little bit about connecting on LinkedIn. I think that’s probably one of the most valuable aspects of the platform. Now, I would assume, rightly or wrongly, that having a larger network on LinkedIn can probably be quite powerful, however, LinkedIn only allows you to send, if I am right, about three thousand invitations. Knowing that there is a limit to the number of invitations we can send, what advice would you have for strategically building a network on LinkedIn so that you get the most out of the connections that we have?

Viveka: Sure. Yes, you can only send out three thousand invitations so it doesn’t matter if you do it one at a time or if you upload your mailing list – one name, one email address equals one invitation and you can only accept up to 30,000 invitations which is actually where I am at right now so I am deleting people and adding people but quite frankly, yes it’s true that the bigger your network, the more visible you are, the more usable LinkedIn is, the more likely you are going to make money. That being said, there comes a point in LinkedIn, about five thousand connections, that LinkedIn stops being as usable. There is a lot of functionality I can’t use on LinkedIn because my network is too big! Drop down boxes don’t work, I can’t forward profiles anymore, I can’t send personal messages using the drop down, I have to actually find the person so there is some limitation having too big of a network so quite frankly, I think being able to send out three thousand invitations over time is enough and you can always ask LinkedIn for more especially if you use their tool and uploaded your .csv file with your 18,000 first level connections from your email list and now you’re stuck, LinkedIn will give you about a hundred to 200 more invitations per month so you can always do that but that being said, with 30,000 connections, I still have about 800 invitations left I can’t actually use so part of it is just creating a name. Now I am a LinkedIn expert who’s on LinkedIn, training on LinkedIn so I do get a lot of people inviting me to connect which is not as common. I do a lot of presentations and for people to invite me to connect after that, that’s not as common, but yeah absolutely, you can encourage people to invite you to connect, you can let people know that you are running short on invitations, would you invite me to connect or you could do that to people you actually know as opposed to prospects you are trying to land. Don’t make them do you the favor from out there, right?

James: It’s like – hey I want to sell something to you, would you just mind connecting to me so we can facilitate this better, right?

Viveka: Exactly! Exactly!

James: Well I do guess your situation is a little bit unique because you are the LinkedIn expert on the LinkedIn platform. I guess it’s a little bit like Martin Shervington we had on a week or two before for Google+. I mean he’s got extremely high numbers of followers but he’s the Google+ guy, right? So he’s going to be sought out in the platform.

Viveka: Exactly! Exactly!

James: So do you have any recommended protocol for what an invitation to connect might say because I am always getting invitations as I am sure other LinkedIn users do and they typically say – we know each other because we’ve done business together through this organization and seven times out of ten, that has not happened so what are the protocols? How do you recommend going about it?

Viveka: First of all, anytime you can customize an invitation, please do so. There are times when you can’t so you know people are like, I won’t accept invitation from someone who has not customized it. Well, if you’re in a conference and you’ve only got your mobile phone or whatever, you can’t customize those invitations which is I hope LinkedIn is working on that one. There are times when you absolutely can’t customize an invitation, you upload a mailing list, etc., but when all possible you need to customize it. It used to be a 300-character limit but I just got an invitation from someone not an in-mail or an introduction but an actual invitation from someone the other day that was almost a thousand characters. I wrote him back and said how did you do that but he never replied so I don’t know maybe they’ve loosened up that 300-character limit. Yeah, mention something in their profile and please make it true. If you’re not friends, you’re not colleagues, you’re not classmates, and you have a business together, groups is a great way to connect. I always tell people to choose groups. If you can’t and you choose, friends, classmates and colleagues and you’re not classmates, ‘fess up. You know, we’ve not done business together but I have been a fan for a long time or we have not done business together but I am strategically building my network with people in this type of industry or we did not work together but I heard about you and I was wondering if you’d be willing to connect. And if there is room, give them an out, just say if you feel you’ve received this invite in error, please feel free to ignore, but tell them ignore it as opposed to reporting me as a big fat spammer. And never, ever use an invitation to try and sell your wares. That just drives me up a wall. You know, Dear Viveka – I see that you’re a LinkedIn expert but your website sucks and I think we can get you better SEO. Want to connect? Uh, no!

James: Oh geez! That’s cringe worthy! Well there you go, that’s the out for not wanting to accept it right, in the same way where you go if it’s not appropriate, don’t connect. There you go, you’ve given them reason not to accept. Seriously! What about on the flip side, for receiving invitations to connect. Should we be selective on who we accept or is it kind of the case of accept all?

Viveka: No, not anymore. I used to be as a LION – a LinkedIn Open Network, you know when I first started out I just get anyone who invited me to connect to come on in because it is still true to a point that the more connections you have, the bigger your network, the more money you’ll make on LinkedIn. And there’s a bunch of spams out there now. When we first started, there was no social media the spammers have not discovered Facebook, or Twitter of LinkedIn. Now they have in a big way. So yeah, be selective. I have a list of criteria – my assistants do this for me now but I have a list of criteria of the type of person that I am willing to accept in to my network and if you fall in to that criteria or you send me a personal message. Any personal message, I’ll accept your invitation even if I don’t know you because spammers don’t tend to personalize messages and it’s really – is this person a great connection? Or does this person have a network that would be a great connection or have good connections in it for me? I am a little bit discerning. I like a picture. Again, if you personalize your invitation and you don’t have a picture, I might let that pass. Don’t throw up a photo stock photo or a logo and tell me that you are the senior recruiter of Apple and that you went to school on 2005-and 2008 and that you’ve also worked as senior recruiter over at IBM but you’re 12 years old in your photo and you’re hot! There’s a lot of those people out there so you’ll learn what to look for when you’re accepting invitations so be a little discerning. Absolutely accept invitations from people you don’t know if it makes sense but do be somewhat discerning.

James: Yeah, I guess you’ve got to have a pre-determined set of filters for you to understand who would indeed be a great connection and who’s going to add value to your network on the platform because there are certain people who aren’t going to be and I think that understanding and putting in the filters in advance to make those decisions easier would be a good thing, right?

Viveka: Well, it all rolls together with finding the right audience. When we back up and talk about creating a good LinkedIn profile, you’re going to write your profile according to who your target market is. You’re going to accept invitations according to who your target market is. You’re going to do searches and send invitations according to who your target market is and if you are not discerning enough, you know bigger is not necessarily always better. You can get more conversions if you are more targeted in who you’re speaking to so you really do need to know your audience, whether it is sending invitations or accepting invitations or even just creating copy in your profile.

James: Yeah, we’ll let’s talk about some of this stuff because then the next sort of questions I wanted to ask you are around getting found on LinkedIn. I am sure profile set up is integral to that but the first question I want to ask you is how important is the role of keywords in LinkedIn search and where in your profile, if anywhere, should those keywords be placed?

Viveka: It’s crucial. LinkedIn is like Google and you have to have the right keywords to be found. It’s not like Google and it’s much more simple than that. You don’t have to use meta tags and keyword phrases necessarily, you just need to say something about yourself enough times without it being hokey, without it looking like one of those scammy, nasty profiles that you find out there. What’s interesting is if you actually check the statistics on who’s viewed your profile and you look at how they found you, it will show you both how they found you – have they found you on LinkedIn, did they find you on Google, and did they find you under who’s viewed? It will tell you where on the web they have found you, but then it will also show you where in your profile they found you. And what was really interesting to me when they came out with these new analytics and new statistics is that it used to be that the more keywords you put in your title fields and people’s profiles could get ridiculous looking, including my own, the more likely it were to be found. Now, it has reverted down to really creating decent copy and decent contents so having your keywords naturally fall in to whatever copy you write. You don’t want to stuff it, you don’t want to just do keyword comma space keyword comma space keyword comma space keyword comma space. You want it naturally to fall in to your copy ad as you describe what you do and who you serve. At the summary section you’ve got 2,000 characters to work with there and to add some of your keywords, maybe the top 5 to 10. Your description sections of your experience is really important. Those are some of the two most important places for your keywords but also those are the two places most people skip. They might do a paragraph for the summary and one or two lines for the description section and their experience but that’s actually where LinkedIn goes to now. Unfortunately, endorsements count so make sure that you’ve listed so that you can get for those. There is a section at the bottom of your profile called interests and you can do a keyword dump there but that’s the only place that I would recommend where you can just put all your keywords, verb, noun, acronym, synonym; but really, just don’t force the issue. Have your list, keep it on your desktop or even on a sticky pad and just have it there where you can see it and then write your copy and add your projects and add your publications and add your summary and your experience and where it makes sense, plug those in. Don’t force the issue but yeah, you get more keywords in to your profile in a logical, readable, understandable customer phasing way and yeah you get found more.

James: In the same way that we might use a Google keyword tool to determine what people are searching for on Google, is there any way that we can do a similar process with LinkedIn or is it just really understanding what you do and then making sure that those kind of short tail, broader terms are mentioned somewhere on your LinkedIn profile?

Viveka: There used to be a really great tool in LinkedIn. I put out a product and immediately upon putting up a product, LinkedIn got rid of it, so what I tell people to do now is in skills, like when you start typing in a skill, there is a drop down. Just take a look at the drop down and make a note of everything- other skills/ keywords that might make sense. Look at your competition, look at their profiles, see what skills they have listed, see what kind of copy they have, see if they have listed their keywords in to their interest section. Looking at your competition and seeing what they are doing is not a bad thing. You can make yourself anonymous when you’re searching on your competition as well.

James: Oh, can you?

Viveka: Yeah, if you go in to settings, you can change your anonymity. But if you do that, it erases your history of who’s viewed your profile, those are leads, right? For anyone who looks at your profile there is a reason for it, they’re either a lead or a competition so you want to look at that first and then when you feel that you have seen everybody that you are interested in who’s viewed your profile, now you can make yourself anonymous and now I can go check out my competition to see what they are doing, what kind of media are they adding, what kind of keywords would they use if they do a basic search on LinkedIn. Are they showing up first? Am I showing up first? How are we placed against each other? Do all your competition research and then when you feel complete and you have the keywords for your search terms and ideas about your profile, then you can turn your visibility back on and again be able to see everyone who’s viewed your profile but that’s the only detriment to making yourself anonymous but I don’t even bother I just leave myself fully visible and have fun looking in. I was just on the phone with my exact competition, my friend Ivor, and he’s over in England and we’re really direct competition. We go after the same speaking gigs and even the same clients but we also a lot of partnership work together, in fact he was helping me with my sales message. He is awesome! So there is partnership capability to it with your competition so keep myself visible but it’s really dependent on what you’re doing for a living and how close you want to keep that to the vest.

James: Yeah, sure. I’d be interested to learn from you how you leverage, if at all, those people that have viewed your profile. Because I guess there would be a right and a wrong way to perhaps approach people if you know that they’ve been checking you out. I guess the wrong way would be, hey I saw you checking my profile, I am stalking you right back. Can we work together? I mean that type of approach but as you said they’ve identified themselves as potential leads. How do you transition that type of contact knowing that they have in to something that is more useful to you?

Viveka: It’s funny, you maybe don’t want to use that language but it is along those lines. I noticed you viewed my profile, want to connect? Or I noticed you viewed my profile and you worked at LinkedIn and I would love to connect with you. And the nice thing about who’s viewed your profile is you don’t have to jump to the usual hoops. If you hit the little person with the plus sign, you don’t have to say how you know the person. They’ve looked at you, they’re thinking that LinkedIn is going to let that pass so you can just go, hey James, I noticed that you’re also a trainer and if you ever need any LinkedIn help, just let me know. Do you want to connect? Thanks for the view, I noticed that you are the director for sales and marketing of such and such, let me know if I can be of service, want to connect? Want to be of service is fine. Of course if they already are a first level connection you can just send them a message, hey I noticed that you viewed my profile. Not that I was stalking you but I took a look at yours and I see that you have this new job, or you have this new position or you have this new book or I love this new post that you just published, I gave you a couple of endorsements or I am proud of your accomplishments – something like that. It takes a minute of two but I have to tell you, if you do this even a couple of minutes a day, it’s easier if you get a paid account because you can see everybody, for a free account you only see the last 5 people so you really want to stay on that daily. But it’s one of the best tools that I know for truly engaging and it does lead to work because you are top of mind with these folks. And it feels like synchronicity, it feels like coincidence but I cannot tell you how many people who have looked at my profile and I have said hi back and then all of a sudden they were like I was kinda thinking that we needed to brush up our LinkedIn so figuring that you wrote me back, forgetting that they looked at my profile in the first place because they needed someone to do their LinkedIn. It really is a powerful use of LinkedIn. If you just do it daily, it only takes a couple of minutes but the return on your couple of minute’s time investment. If you have a paid account, your $24 monetary investment per month is pretty significant.

James: Nice! Well, let’s expand on this and talk about prospecting and how we might move people in to kind of a sales type conversation once you’ve connected with them. How would you transition assuming you are connecting with a potential prospect from just literally introducing yourself and making the connection to then moving in to more of a business conversation because that I think can be a little bit icky if you don’t get it right, right?

Viveka: For sure. First of all, just like you don’t use the invitations as a sales pitch, you also don’t use the first message as a sales pitch. You don’t use your in-mails as sales pitches. I always tell people you can’t actually sell anything on LinkedIn and they’re like but what? You’ve got this program and this book, what do you mean you can’t sell anything on LinkedIn? If you just use it as a hard sales tool- it’s like going to a bar and saying hey, you want to come home with me without buying a drink or paying the money. You’ve got to warm up that relationship first and fortunately, LinkedIn gives you lots of tools. They even have an embedded serum system so maybe you’ll invite someone to connect and maybe you’ll do a little research on it and take notes, they can’t see them. You make notes about a person in your CRM in contacts, this internal serum system which is free. You tag them, just like Facebook lists you can tag your contact to keep your network in order. You can set reminders to follow up with them and in a day, a week or on a recurring basis, and then you take that information –so I am going to follow up with this person every two weeks or once a month, I know that they have these interests because I have either talked to them on the phone or at a conference or just on my research, I see what they are posting online in LinkedIn, so when I come across an article I think they are going to be interested in, I just send it to them. It’s about top of mind awareness – it’s not about buy my stuff, buy my stuff, buy my stuff. And in fact, I hardly do any hard sales other than join my webinar but it’s not really a hard sales pitch but it’s just but I am top of mind so people need someone to help them with LinkedIn, they tend to think of me and anyone can do that, it’s just a matter of getting the connections, segmenting by tagging your network, keeping notes on those people doing your research. It takes a little work. It’s not a quick fix scheme. But it is also very effective. Once or twice a month you send them a message, an email, a link, customize it, to something that they would be interested in, it might be your content, it might not be, and then maybe an 80/20 rule. Maybe once a month or once every other month you let them know about something that you’ve got coming up. But hopefully, and this is where the power is – you are top of mind. Whether they hire you or buy your product or service or whether if friends say, hey do you know anyone who does this and of course you’ve been helpful, useful and regularly sharing this content and they think of you. I would not do it more than 2 or 3 times a month otherwise you do come across as a stalker.

James: Yeah, I can imagine that would be the case. And the way the LinkedIn algorithm works, does that make you then more visible up in the LinkedIn feed when you are connecting with someone more often?

Viveka: It’s not supposed to but I know they just changed their LinkedIn algorithm so for a while it was really nice, it was something called relevance and it was a combination of everything – keywords and connections and interactivity and sharing and then that went away and it was strictly per level of relationships and then keywords and that’s changed again, thank goodness! I think it is moving backwards towards relevance and LinkedIn just released something – I have got the e-book on it but I haven’t been able to get anyone from LinkedIn and that particular marketer respond to me but in the marketing world, they actually have a content marketing score now and they’ve got trending topics now and that will probably at some point made available to everyone or at least the more basic paid accounts. But I think that means that LinkedIn is in fact adding communications connectivity and influence. How many people are liking your articles? How many people are reading your posts, how many people are sharing your updates? I think that lends itself to find-ability. I sure hope that’s the way they are moving.

James: Yeah, well it would sure make sense that that was the case right? In the same way that Google are moving towards a web of people where individuals build up authority in the way that websites do so it makes sense that the same would apply to LinkedIn which is very individual people centric and that’s the platform so it would certainly make sense. Now you mentioned real quick the CRM, it’s not something that I have heard of before, you said it was free, which I am sure everyone likes. Where do they find it in LinkedIn?

Viveka: It’s actually in, CRM is a customer relationship management tool, it’s the contacts feature so when you go to your profile and on the top menu you see Network and you come down to contacts, that’s actually the CRM system and what you’ll notice then is when you go to one of your connection’s profile and when you click on that little star underneath their picture that expands out to say relationship and that’s then where you’ll see the notes, the reminders, how you met, and the tagging. That’s all in that one spot.

James: Nice! We’ll make sure that that’s linked to directly if we can within the show notes, I think it will be useful for people. The next thing I want to ask you about is groups because I think that is one of the most useful aspects, at least for a sales or marketing type of persons because they of course allow us to message other members of the group even if we are not directly connected. What strategies do you recommend to leverage this functionality and are there any rules of etiquette in the same way as making an individual connection might be?

Viveka: Groups are amazing because they allow you to interact with other members of your network without having to be first member connections. You can send messages and invite people to connect in your group; you normally would have to jump more hoops or have to pay for it quite frankly, which gets abused. Don’t use your group membership to spam other members. In fact, LinkedIn has something called SWAM now (site wide auto moderation). If you use groups to spam your content, other group members and the managers and the moderators can flag you. You get enough flags and you can’t post anywhere. Like never mind that one group, you can’t post to any of your groups without it getting in to queue to get moderated. So that really inhibits your ability to build relationships on LinkedIn so you have got to be very, very careful with that. There are a lot of tools out there and I love them! Octopost, Hood Suite, LinkedIn’s own sharing bookmarklet where you can share content to a group but you have got to be careful to postion that content and if it’s promotional. You have to put it in the promotions tab, don’t just blast it on the main wall. But that being said, its like-minded others, it’s your industry, and it’s your client’s industry. You already have something in common with these folks and if you comment like share their comment and if you privately reply to them there, if you do a search with the type of person, it really helps with your interactivity with other members and again, that word, engagement but it really helps make your communications more effective and much easier and it’s what you’ve got to do if you have a free account because you don’t have the in-mails. There is no other way to access these people sometimes.

James: Interesting you mentioned about self- promotional link dumping in groups. Many, many of the groups I am a part of just seem to have that as the only level of conversation if you like on the discussions tab, it’s just people dropping by and dumping a link in to their own content. How much value do you feel there is on the discussions tab because based on the groups that I am in at least they seem to be pretty dormant places at least.

Viveka: Yeah, a lot of people join groups just to get access to their members. I am a member of some very, very good groups where it is conversation, it is people asking for advice. There are some promotion but if the other group members are strident in keeping down the noise, it does keep people from getting swamped and keeps people from posting crap and I think those noisy promotion groups are not as around as they used to be. You just have to look. There is a new user interface so you can see the kind of activity that’s going on. There is a new timeline feature within groups that shows you the biggest conversations and you can see there if there are conversations that you want to have or want to contribute to. I only get daily digests from about 10% of my groups, maybe even less than that because those are the only groups that interest me. The rest I really am just joining because I own them, I helped someone set it up or to get access to other members.

James: Interesting! Staying on the topic of posting on LinkedIn. Posting articles on LinkedIn is something relatively new, what do Traffic Jam listeners need to know about this functionality and is it available to all users in LinkedIn currently?

Viveka: Not currently available to everyone but you can apply for it. In fact if you go to specialedition.linkedin.com/publishing, you can apply for the publishing platform. You’ll have to give them you first and last name, your public profile URL, your email address, and two examples of content that you’ve written or links to them, whether it’s a blog post, an online article or a journal or something like that. They want to see examples of your work before they let you go crazy with the tool but it’s fantastic! It gets crazy views, great views, great interaction, it’s searchable signal. The  keywords in content is searchable within LinkedIn search engine so a better chance of you showing up in and people reading your content so it’s all content marketing but it’s a fantastic, easy to use, very, very powerful platform in my opinion.

James: Yeah, I have heard very good things about that. I mean those that I have interviewed the last few weeks I think have been using the platform and some of the reports back on the levels of comments and interactivity on them seem sky high and we’ve seem to have a great time to get involved right? If we are going to be doing this stuff?

Viveka: Yeah, apply for it, and if you’ve got it you can tell because you will have a little gray pen on your update box and Linkedin will send you an email but yeah if you have got that little gray pen, make use of it. Because of course, the more people who get it and use it, the more it will be flooded and the less likely your content is to be viewed but if you can get access to it right now that’s a good thing.

James: Awesome! Well we’ve gone for a little over 30 minutes or so, I do have a ton more questions but based on the number I have got I’d like to perhaps invite you back if you’d like to come back on sometime in the future to do another round, so I think it’s sort of a good point to leave it that. What sort of piece of parting advice do you have Viveka for those traffic jam listeners listening in that perhaps you have not shared so far?

Viveka: The thing is, like Twitter, like Facebook, like Pinterest, like Instgram and Google+, they are just platforms. You are still going to use the same business practices knowing who your audience is, you are still going to use the same business practices of showing off the benefits of your products not just features of it. You’re still going to use best practices for engagement. Heck, it’s the rules our mothers taught us, right? Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. You wouldn’t want to get a spammy letter, why would you send that to someone you did not know? Use those common sense business and marketing tools that you have always known in your business and just apply them to LinkedIn. I think that’s probably the best piece of advice and don’t let the website intimidate you, it’s just a platform with some different features and some different tools but there is no reason to avoid it, it is a very, very useful business social network.

James: Good! I am sure we’ve only just touched the surface of what’s possible with LinkedIn, so let’s give some links for people to check out to kind of further education and to find out a little bit more about you Viveka, linkedprospecting.com would be one I guess. Do you want to tell our listeners a little bit more about what that is?

Viveka: Yeah, if you want to see what we talked about today, if you go to our website, LinkedProspecting.com, we have a free video that actually kind of shows you a lot of what I talked about today, and it’s free. All that you have to pay is your name and your email address. I have got my blog site which is LinkedIntoBusiness.com so if you want the latest changes or you want to learn more about showcase pages or publisher, whatever, I have lots of articles in my blog there. We have a tweet chat for those of you in the US, I guess in England too, but you have to stay up really late or get up pretty early but it’s at 8PM Eastern on Twitter every Tuesday night so if you ever want to join up with a bunch of other LinkedIn experts, it’s not just me we’ve got fabulous guests on there and other chatters who are probably smarter than I am when it comes to LinkedIn, we are always sharing information, we’ve got a LinkedIn experts group in Google+. In fact, I think that’s my newest favorite platform – Martin got it first – but I love our community there, we’ve got a lot of experts in our community there and you are welcome to join our community. So there are lots of great places to get information on LinkedIn and I’m @LinkedInExpert on LinkedIn so please feel free to also ping me there as well.

This Week’s News in Traffic

The first story this week, it is an interesting one to say the least. I have picked this up from TechCrunch.com and the story’s that the European Union Court that Google must give individuals the right to be forgotten or essentially not to be found on Google. The European Court has ruled that Google must respect the right to be forgotten and at the request of private individuals, remove irrelevant or outdated information that contravenes an EU Privacy directive concerning the way personal data is processed. Of course, as you can imagine Google is furious about this and extremely disappointed about the court’s decision. For all intents and purposes, the EU regard Google now on par with or more responsible than the original publisher of the potentially privacy offending data and it can be made to remove content from its index even if it has been legally published by the originating site. I can imagine that complaints and requests for removal of content by individuals could get quite out of hand so it would be very interesting to see how this impacts the search engine going forward.

A new survey from Global Web index shows a slight reduction in usage for Facebook and Twitter for the past six months down 8% and 6% respectively. Also declining in monthly usage are YouTube, down 8% and Google+ down 1%. As usage shifts ever so slightly from the bigger networks, platforms like Instagram and Tumblr and mobile messaging apps like Snap Chat and WhatsApp, they’re gaining. Instagram showed an active usage increase at 25%, Tumblr at 22% and Pinterest at 7% – all showed healthy increases. So if you are considering where to spend your time and energy on social media going forward, that little report may give you some clues.

The third story this week is from Twitter that have rolled out a new feature that I think certainly at this point in time was definitely due and the feature is that you can now mute people that you follow while still retaining followership of them so that means that they’ll still show in your follower count but you won’t get updates from them. This feature update is being rolled out, however at this point in time I am not seeing it at my own Twitter account. When it is there, apparently you can access it by the little more section which you see next to each tweet and there will be an option then to mute that particular person. I should mention, whilst you are muting that particular individual, they won’t be aware that you are muting them so you can retain some courtesy towards them and not worry that you’ll offend them by turning off their update so I think it’s kind of a cool feature especially if you’ve got a large number of people on your account that you follow. It allows you to be a little bit more selective about who features in your feed.

Elsewhere on the web, there is a report out from Tube Mobile that states a 350% increase in video ad auctions last quarter. That’s certainly some evidence that video ads is certainly hot right now so perhaps something to consider for you.

I have one review to read out this week and it comes from Clint Lawton who left a review at Stitcher.com and he says my favorite pick of the marketing podcast. I love Traffic Jam; actionable traffic grabbing advice that is free from fluff and filler. One of the few podcasts I listen to every single week. Thank you to you Clint, I really appreciate you popping by to leave a comment. To you the listener, as always, there are two places that you can submit for a review on the show, one is at Stitcher.com as Clint left his review, and the other is iTunes. In both places, select a star rating for the show and then your comment and feedback along with that. I really, really would appreciate it. I know I say it every single week but it really is the best possible way that you can show support for the show because it helps move the show up the rankings on both platforms and gets the content on to more playlists which I know will mean that will help more people.

The One Minute Traffic Tip

Okay, so I have another SEO tip for you this week. Now I bet if I look at your traffic stats that 50% of your search engine traffic probably comes from people typing in long tail search terms. That’s phrases with three or four or even five words in them. But are you optimizing for this longer, more obscure terms? Well, you can if you follow this process. the first thing you need to do is identify the most popular short tail terms by logging in to your Google webmaster tools and then seeing which phrases get the most clicks for your website. Then, using Google search, enter those short terms into the search box and Google will suggest other associated phrases before you’ve even finished searching. This will happen in a little drop down box and is often known as Google Suggest or Google Instant. These phrases that appear in the drop down box Google deem as being related to the short tail term that you’ve typed in. Where appropriate, what you can do is use this associated phrases Google suggest to you and then see them in to your existing content in to your website. What will then happen over time is you’ll start to pick up search engine traffic for these associated phrases as well as the short tail terms too. This is not a quick fix. It does take a little bit of time but if you pick through the most popular phrase and the most popular pages on your website, over time you can get quite significant results.

Thank you for listening in to episode#38 of Traffic Jam, I really do appreciate the time that you take out of your day to listen in to the show and I hope you get as much enjoyment out of Traffic Jam as I do. I will be back with another episode next week where I will be talking to Dan Fagella about how to automate your online marketing so tune back in for the next episode. In the meantime, remember to subscribe via iTunes and Stitcher radio and for a direct link to all Traffic Jam episodes, go to TrafficJamCast.com where you can join the discussion on this episode as well as get the links to all the resources mentioned in today’s show. Also head on over to veravo.com for more traffic tips and training as well as checking out our Traffictoon series where we take a comical look for all things online marketing.

I’ll end this week’s show by a track by the Arctic Monkeys which are a band from Sheffield in the UK and a favorite band of Viveka’s and the track I am going to pick is I Bet You Look Good On The Dance Floor. It is from 2005, at which point I was still in the UK so I have quite got some fond memories of this track. I hope you enjoy it too and I’ll see you back here in about seven days from now, see you then!