TJ34 – Inbound Marketing: Using Other People’s Audiences As The Source For No Sales Force with Eric Enge

Hey there listener! Welcome back to Traffic Jam! This is episode #34 of the podcast show that teaches you how to get more traffic and build a profitable audience online. I’m your host, James Reynolds, and really today, I just want to drive straight in to the content because I’m very excited for today’s guest and also for today’s topic. We’re joined today by Eric Enge, CEO of Stone Temple Consulting and if you have listened to episode#33 of Traffic Jam, you will be familiar with Stone Temple Consulting already because it is the same company that Mark Traphagen works for.

Eric Enge is doing some really great things in the area of inbound marketing in search and pioneering new ideas and pioneering a much needed change in approach to SEO so I really am super stoked to have him on the show. Alongside Rand Fishkin, guest on episode#22, he’s right up there as a leader in the SEO industry. He’s a contributor all over the web in some very well-known places like Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch and Copy Blogger and on today’s episode we will be talking about how he’s developed and nurtured those relationships with other people’s audiences.

The interview with Eric, that’s coming right up next but don’t go anywhere after that because we’ve got all of the regular segments of Traffic Jam, the ones that you’re used to if you’re a regular listener to the show, the one minute traffic tip, this week’s news in traffic, and then of course we end the show with a jam chosen by my guest today, that guest is of course Eric Enge and let’s hear from him right now.

James: So what’s up listener? You’re listening in to Traffic Jam episode#34 and jamming with me today on the topic of SEO and inbound marketing is the 1984 World Champion of Foosball. Eric, welcome to the call!

Eric: Thank you! And I am sure that 1984 World Champion is relevant to the topic of content marketing and SEO.

James: It’s right on topic! I couldn’t move past the intro without getting that little factoid in; I think it’s very fun and interesting so just before we get in to the serious stuff, tell me about how you’ve become world champion of foosball, but not only that, you’re a national champion of a sport called Goalie Wars too? Is that right?

Eric: Actually Goalie Wars is the particular event foosball that I was world champion in ’84 and I was national champion for that same event in 1985 so those are mainly different events and that was the one that I was particularly good at and really how it happened is that it kind of fit a funny role in my life and the funny role is that it was like many teenage boys I was not particularly focused and I discovered foosball and started enjoying it and started competing and I kind of get in to this mode of working to accomplish something for myself and it’s really like a key point in teenage life, that’s a whole kind of different conversation at length and when you find out you want to accomplish something, I focused on everything I need to do that and it’s kind of what happened. I just get in to it and started going to local tournaments all the time and eventually started going on the world tour and was ranked pro and all that kind of stuff.

James: It’s interesting stuff and it is a whole new topic of conversation entirely different to what we’ll be discussing today but there certainly is a lot of commonality to the guest that I have on the show, the people that I surround myself with; so many of them have been active sports people or athletes or had some form of competitive competition – that’s not really a great way to describe it but they have been involved in some sort of sporting activity or competition  as they were younger and it certainly builds up certain traits that are helpful and effective in business I think later on in life.

Eric: I agree.

James: Now let’s get to the serious introduction. You’re the co-author of The Art of SEO along with former Traffic Jam guest, Rand Fishkin, you’re the CEO of Stone Temple Consulting which is an SEO and digital marketing agency based out on Boston in the USA, and you’re a content contributor to many websites I think our guest will be familiar with such as Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Land amongst others. You’re certainly a well-known authority Eric in the topic of SEO and inbound marketing but do you practice what you preach? Are you doing all these stuff with Stone Temple Consulting itself?

Eric: Absolutely! In fact, we are a company that has no sales force, we make no phone calls to attempt to get new customers, and we don’t reach out to people and pitch our services. The only way to become a client is to reach out to us through the phone number listed on the site or the email address listed on the site or come and find me at a conference and it’s not actually something that we’re planning to change; in fact, we’ve doubled down on it. I think you’ve said this is episode 34. Episode 33 guest Mark Traphagen works with us and he’s joined us as of January 2^nd so we’re actually increasing our content marketing efforts as a way of trying to build the business and its fun and it’s exciting. To be honest with you, I know I get energized by it because you always get your creative juices going and you’re trying to figure out what’s the new strategy that we can do and what’s this great new piece of content that we can come up with and it’s a great way to go about the whole thing.

James: Yeah, I think perhaps there’s still a scary concept to many businesses. I mean going without a sales force might seem to them that they’re doing away with some form of regular leads or putting themselves in a scenario where their flow of leads might be unpredictable because they are not reaching out. Do you think that would be the case?

Eric: I agree that it’s scary for people to do and in our case, we did have the luxury – I had a solo person consulting business when I first brought someone on to help me build and grow the company and a guy called John B who is an awesome SEO and content marketer in his own right but we were able to sit there and patiently build the business so we had some financial freedom basically working on our side, so it’s not necessarily easy for everyone to embrace it exactly the way we did it but if you have a business which has a strong component of all out sales to bring leads in that’s great! I am not proposing that you lay those people off or stop doing that, but you can actually supplement your sales to this inbound approach and use that sales channel to allow you to be patient like we could be at Stone Temple, and by the way, as you do more and more of that content marketing to drive inbound leads, you’re also building the authority online which makes those outbound sales efforts more effective because that sales person can say so and so from our company recently published an article exactly the topic you are talking about Mr. potential customer, let me send you the link to that and see what they wrote and such and such, it is a very powerful email if you do have an outbound sales component.

James: Yeah. Well it is certainly something that I would testify to in my own business. I mean the amount of content that we use in other areas of the business is huge and we’re forever pointing people to articles and post that we’ve written even if we get a question from a current customer about what processes we’re undertaking and why we are doing them. I mean it has in other effects other than just actually drawing people in right? This really transcends to the whole business.

Eric: It really does. And there is a little bit of a cultural aspect to it and the key point that I want to get to is that you can’t publish what I call BLATHER, right? It’s a technical term for you and I will highlight it this way; if you actually do high in the in title operator which basically requires the text string that you specify with it to be in its exact form in the title tag so let’s take a query in title: “how to make French toast”, you’ll get thousands of pages and I can tell you that I have not had French toast for 25 years because it does not fit what I do with my diet these days, I can still tell you how to make it. You get thousands of articles in response to the query I just tested and you don’t need thousands of answers for this, you need a few, maybe 4 or something and Google’s happy and now they have the definitive works of all the works to make French toast covered in 4 web pages and all these other people are kind of wasting their time and I know I have shared it like it is Google’s perspective but now think about it from a prospect’s perspectives, somebody who’s out there looking for articles. If you write blathers articles like a how to make French toast article, they’re never going to find you and if they do they’re not going to think that you’ve done anything in particular interest. So the big key now is what is your strategy for coming up with content which is going to attract people’s attention? How is it helping them solve their problem? How is it advancing a craft? What is it that makes you unique? What is it that triggers an emotional reaction so that they are laughing, or crying or connecting with you? These are the kinds of problems you need to solve if you are going to make a content marketing effective.

James: So how do you identify what those topics might be? Let’s get down to the nitty gritty of it, how do you determine that strategy and what type of content is going to be the right fit for your target market?

Eric: So there are a couple of ways to go about it and I think they are both important. So the first is really spend some time thinking about what makes your business and your expertise unique and different because in my opinion it really needs to come from your own passion and what makes you special because whatever business you’re in, hopefully there is something that makes you special because otherwise you have a very lifeless business in general. It is all about hustling you’re not special and that’s a hard way to live in my opinion. You know how they say that charity starts at home, it is the case that content marketing strategy start at home and you have to think about what it is that you can really put out there that might have some aspect of uniqueness perhaps just coming from your passion and your perspective and how you think about things. And then of course you can supplement that with research on what your competitors are doing and what other stuff is being written out there and that’s really important to do too. I really want to urge people to really start internally think about what makes you special. What are you expert at? So that when you put something out there and somebody makes some comments or they want to debate stuff with you, you can say wait a minute I disagree with you, here’s what I think about it. I am not talking about starting fights here but engaging and really getting in a real conversation have become really easy for you because it starts from what you know and what you are passionate about.

James: Now we’re talking really about this concept of content marketing, with the emphasis I think, at least on the point on marketing. You in your case, you’re not just publishing content to your site, you are doing that of course but you’re also leveraging perhaps other relationships, other websites that you are a contributor to, tell us about how that process has worked out for you.

Eric: Yeah, it has worked out great! The sites that I write on most often, you mentioned two of them, Search Engine Land and Search Engine Watch, those are great sites. I also write on Forbes, I write on Copy Blogger, and sometimes I will show up on other sites like Social Media Today or Marketing Land and things like that but I am a big fan of what you call OPA or other people’s audience. I can tell you when we first launched the Stone Temple Consulting blog which now has a pretty good readership, but when we first launched it, during the first two years, the best articles I ever wrote were the first six I wrote on the site, and no one ever read them.

James: Oh my gosh! I have heard many people say that. You’ve put all the effort upfront and no one comes by to read it. It’s self-destroying I think.

Eric: Yes, it can be very frustrating and very scary and this is a stage where a lot of people drop out. You really want to understand how to get access to other people’s audiences. There’s two major ways to do it. One category is engaging in social media because there’s communities and groups and there’s people influential there. You can start engaging in social media and that’s very much a content marketing strategy by the way, not just publishing articles; its publishing on social media sites – Facebook or Twitter, Google+ or what have you. And you can actually start by getting on these platforms, getting exposure to new audiences and building relationships which can lead to people coming to your site. So that’s one big part of what you need to do. The other big part of what you need to do is you need to think about let’s say, I want to write for Forbes and I haven’t been writing and I don’t have a lot of industry reputation, that might be a very tough and daunting target to think about coming out of the gate. So you don’t start by emailing them because they do not have any proof as to who you are. They are going to look for their own social proof that what you write is good stuff and that you have something special to add. So, you don’t necessary have to start at the top tier, but no matter what you’re doing but in the long term in my opinion, your objective needs to be top tier; but you don’t get to be there on day 1. Maybe you start two tiers down with some really high quality sites but they’re not as well-known and not as well established. Build a relationship with those people through social media, get to the point where they start to get willing to take content from you. Get yourself established, spend a few months doing that, and then once you have that track record and you can show the great stuff that you’ve been writing for this site that I am calling Tier 3 right now, start contacting tier 2 sites and say, I’d be interested in writing for you, here’s the great content that I wrote over at this other site and you can see the social response I am getting with my articles over here is strong and I’d love to be able to contribute content to your audience. And now you have taken a step up the ladder; and now you’re in tier 2. And when you’ve been in tier 2 for a while and established your reputation there, you’ve really gotten yourself to the point that you’re ready to go to tier 1. For me a tier 1 site would be the Forbes and I worked that process up to get there carefully and that’s great. For a local business, it might be the local newspaper. If you are in the Baltimore area, it might be the Baltimore Sun, you’re not looking for New York Times as it is not applicable to you but how you define what tier 1 is to you depends on the specifics of your business and your market but that’s the general way I think about it.

James: Good! Well I am glad you answered that question in the way that you did because that would mean our listeners out there would go, okay it is fine for Eric Enge – he is Eric Enge! He’s got a book, he’s written for this people, he’s clearly going to be able to reach out and reach in to these audiences. But what about what about for me? I have got a small little business but there will be people out there looking for great contributions in your market – newspapers, offline press, blog owners – they all want content and if you can fill a void that they have not gotten filled already, they’ll be very welcoming that you’ve approached them if you’ve got some level of understanding of your own subject matter, right?

Eric: Absolutely! And it’s really important in this concept that and the reason you want to do is that in that local market, don’t go writing for articles if you are in Baltimore using my example for companion businesses in California where nobody is ever going to see that content that could potentially be a customer. Learn how to filter what you are doing based on places where you might actually clicks to your site that could become a customer. Those are the places that are going to build your visibility and reputation in whatever your market is and if you are doing this really well, now you are putting together the kind of campaign that creates that type of signals that Google and Bing want to see from you anyway. That Baltimore business, they don’t want to see you flinging stuff all over the place in California and London and Sydney and Poland. You should be creating content that works for you even if the search engines are turning around in getting visibility for your business.

James: Yeah! I mean that’s it right? It’s knowing who your customer is and knowing where their watering hole is and then just go in to that watering hole with your content. It’s not rocket science. Anyway, it’s a nice Segway to some topic of conversation around search, it of course has been a pretty big past 12 months in search as most 12 months tend to be in the space of SEO but this time primarily due to the biggest algorithmic update since the original Google search algorithm was created – I am of course talking about Hummingbird. How is Hummingbird different to its predecessors, Eric?

Eric: Yeah it’s a great question because there’s a lot of misunderstanding about this so the first thing I want to do is to try to create a visualization for people listening. Imagine that Google search has three major components. The first is the crawler that runs around the web and brings in all the raw data. The second is I think called the index where all that data is stored after a certain amount of processing. And then the third thing, from a technical perspective, is really what we refer to as the search engine and that’s the hunk of code where all the algorithms, panda, penguin and link algorithms and stuff like that reside that knows how to pull data out of the index in response to a query so it is really important to keep those three pieces in your mind. One: crawler, two: index, three: search engine. Part three, the search engine, is the piece from which hummingbird was a complete re-write. That might make you think well ranking probably has changed dramatically at that time but they really did it because there are certain modules in Google search that they did not change at the same time. So the panda algorithm did not change, the penguin algorithm did not change. The algorithm for processing links did not change. But it was a platform change to make that search engine part of their search list more nimble so they can make changes more quickly going forward in the near future. And what this led to is at that time that Hummingbird was released, it was evidently out in the market for something like 30 days and nobody knew! Or very few people substantial changes and it was because of what I described. They re-platformed it but they did not change the basic algorithm that drive the rankings and what people did notice is there were some changes related to natural language search and this is where people get confused and they think hummingbird was just all about natural language search being brought in to google in a bigger way. The truth of the matter is we had natural language search back in May 2013 but it was only tied to Google’s knowledge graph which is basically structured databases where they are able to answer questions like how do you compare apples and oranges and the like but what they did include in hummingbird is a way for natural language searches to begin to operate on regular web results rather than pulling that data from the knowledge graph database.

James: So is there any change in strategy as far as the business is concerned? Of course wanting to acquire rankings within search and I think we need to do different?

Eric: You know it’s subtle because it does not feel like a lot changed but I think what’s really important is it breaks in to probably 2 major categories. First of all the natural language search thing is actually important because people are going to be doing more verbal typing queries and it’s going to be driven a lot by mobile devices. People will be doing searches on their smart phones is that they get increasingly comfortable that their vocal commands are being recognized; use it like star trek communicator and they’ll query that way and that’s going to have some impact. Let me cover the second part too and then we’ll talk about how it impacts people. The second part is that you can expect these new algorithm updates and new ways of improving google search results to accelerate. The whole purpose of this platform change was to allow them to do more. And to move more quickly and be more nimble in google. That was really the core purpose. What both of these things add up to, the platform change, and the natural language integration is it’s going to force you more in to a holistic way of thinking because their ability to attack the kinds of behavior and just simply rank things in their opinion better is increased. So they know what they really want – they really want to have the best possible results in the first few organic search positions and their ability to deal with the not so good results and refine and improve those things has increased dramatically as a result of hummingbird. So let me translate that in to a couple of quick tips. You have to do some real old fashioned marketing things, you have to understand the persona of your potential customers, you have to make sure not only your content marketing strategy – if you’re doing that, addresses that persona. But the content and structure of your website has to address those personas and so that is a different kind of thought process for a lot of businesses who might have been SEO-centric. They now need to unravel that and say they need to get customers in to that tier because that is going to be my best SEO.

James: Well this is nice, this ties right in with what David Amerland talked about on episode 30 so I am going to include that in the show notes so that people can go off and find that episode as well. I guess what we are really talking about is this kind of change in approach to things like keywords. Google now encouraging this kind of common language with natural language search. Also our technology is also encouraging the use of more natural language search be on mobile or whatever else, are keywords and keyword research on their way out as far as SEO is concerned Eric?

Eric: I don’t think so because imagine if we go back 20 years in time and you are a traditional marketer and you don’t have search as an option. Those traditional marketers would die for keyword data because keyword data tells them the language that their perspective customers use. Now you can tailor your advertising and your messaging to be in a common language to your potential customer. That’s powerful stuff! And it feeds very well in to a semantic search, you mentioned David Amerland got in to that term in the conversation. It’s very well in to the semantic search because Google still needs to know what your web pages are about. It’s still problematic for them to read images and videos and that kind of content. They do need text on the page to help them get the context of what you are relevant to. And if you are using the common language as your prospective customer, that’s a stronger match. The prospective customer might say hey I want to find the closest place to get a t-shirt made and get delivery tomorrow. That might be their long sentence right, and if you have a page in your site with custom t-shirt delivery tomorrow and you happen to be in the local area, bang!

James: Well, that’s it right? It goes well beyond search ranking itself and it really goes right in to conversions. If you can match those language patterns that your prospects you are using in search both in the search results and on the page of your website. There is far more chances that that prospect is going to convert in to a customer because they find what they are looking for. I mean that is really it, right?

 Eric: Absolutely!

James: How about the approach to link building? I think I have actually quoted your interview with Matt Cutts where he said link building is not bad and it’s still the best indicator google has of a website’s authority. It seems clear that links are still getting very important but what the approach to getting your content linked to?

Eric: To me content marketing is the approach that we use as we talked about in the beginning – how do you get your content linked to? There is a potentially complex set of thing that you can do but the first thing to do is to get out there and to get known. If you have an opportunity to pitch, to speak in a conference in your industry, or if you are a local business to get an opportunity to go to a local meeting of some sort, people in your community are sponsoring and a chance to present a couple of minutes just to talk about what you do to get known. There is an opportunity to jump in social media and really focus on adding value for people in social media and be known as someone that solves problems for other people. These types of reputation building activities all feed the potential for you to get links to your content and it’s a very powerful thing to do it. And the way I describe it I’ll give you an analogy just as a sort of way to frame this. Traditionally, people have used link building like hunters. And by the way I mean critical hunters here. C-target, pointed target, shoot target, kill target, and every single link they got was some direct activity on their part is the philosophy for link building today needs to be like a farmer philosophy. You have to do some planning, you have to set some things in motion which will bring you a great yield at the end of the season, right? This notion is how do you go out and build your brand and reputation while publishing great content and getting great exposure to your audiences and then getting good content on your site as well all working together and people are going to keep going to find your stuff and come after you and ask you to do interviews and podcasts and HLA events and speak at conferences or whatever the case may be. You kind of have to go to a process of creating demand for yourself.

James: Yeah, absolutely! This interview itself would be a case in point right? I mean I’ve reached out to you because I feel that you’ve got something that’s a value to offer to my audience and of course when we do feature you on the website we are going to link back to you and reference all of those places that you’ve talked about thus building your authority further and potential ranking in the search results. I mean that’s it! It really is a classic case study here in play.

Eric: Yeah, absolutely! And what will happen is because you have been kind enough to have me on the show, I will promptly turn around and roll it in my social media feeds. Mark Traphagen will probably do the same since he works for us and this will generate exposure back for you so we are effectively working together to help your audience and it is building both of our reputation and visibility in the process and it’s a great way to do things.

James: Yeah, exactly. I am glad we touched there very briefly also on social media because again we’ve had this line of conversation running through the undertones of this interview throughout this social driven web. What’s your take on social signals and their contributions towards and impact on search results?

Eric: We’ve done many studies on this and your listeners are probably very familiar with the correlation studies published by Moz and by Search Metrics that show a very strong correlation between social signals and ranking and search results but I do want to caution but I do want to caution listeners that that’s a correlation and there is also a very strong, very well-known correlation between eating ice cream and drowning death and the reality is that both of those things happen because it is hot outside and think it through if I produce a great piece of content that people might link to which nobody would argue would drive search rankings. While people might actually share and +1 that, like that and tweet that. Those kinds of signals are probably going to happen also for that content because it is great content so just to tell you what we’ve done, we’ve done actually three studies that are very extensive. Instead of measuring correlation. We went out to try to measure causation of whether or not Google+, Facebook and Twitter drove search rankings. And we did some very extensive studies to actually take some content and do a hard number of social events for those and see if rankings move in any material way and in parallel we’ve had some baseline pages we worked with so if there was some movement in the test pages and the baseline pages had some kind of similar movement then we’d know that it wasn’t really a ranking and social signal. Bottom line, no real evidence with social signals directly driving SEO but I don’t want to leave it there because there is a huge reason and there’s actually huge SEO reasons to do social media and that’s because you create this wonderful synergy when you have a strong social media presence when the content on your social media’s similar to what you are publishing on your site or your third party articles. When you publish that content, you share that in your social media and hopefully that content is so good that it helps your social media grow and in turn your social media sends traffic – your readers and links, back to that content. So you’re still doing social media when you’re doing SEO. Just don’t take it with this hunter mentality where see-shoot-kill, you don’t get to eat it before you kill it, you know what I am saying?

James: Exactly!

Eric: There is tremendous amount of people on social media almost certainly are making a mistake.

James: Yeah. We bring it back to simplistic terms. What do search engines want to do if they want a place at the top of the results- the best quality, most authoritative content and if you are building your brand and your personal brand elsewhere. That is going to have implications one way or another, be it direct or indirect on your search results. It’s all integrated together, right?

Eric: Yes! Absolutely! And it is perfectly safe to eat ice cream, you’re not going to drown; or in this case, it is great to do social media because it will inevitably correctly drive the signals that drive SEO and that’s awesome.

James: Awesome! I think we should wrap it up there. In addition to some great insightful commentary with what’s happening with inbound marketing and search, we’ve certainly had a fact-filled episode, too. Ice cream and drowning have a very strong correlation and of course we’ll draw back to the Foosball world championship in fact we entered the show with. Eric, thank you so much for coming on and sharing what you’ve had today I am sure Traffic Jam listeners are eager to connect with you and find out more about what you’ve got going on. Where should they reach out to you?

Eric: So three places are the easiest: that’s StoneTemple.com as the website, @StoneTemple is the Twitter handle and +EricEnge is the Google+ handle. Those are the ways to try and reach me. Or if they want they can always email me at eenge@stonetemple.com.

James: That’s awesome! So listeners that was Eric Enge from StoneTemple.com. All of Eric’s social links and the resources and the full transcript of today’s interview will of course be found on the center of the web that is devoted to Traffic Jam and that is TrafficJamCast.com so head on over there for all of the resources and I’ll just close out once more by thanking you Eric for coming on the show. It’s been a lot of fun and hopefully we can do it all again sometime in the future as well.

Eric: I’d enjoy that and thanks so much for having me James.

This Week’s News in Traffic

For the first story this week, I am going over to TechCrunch.com who’ve reported on a story that’s been released via Disqus which are the commenting people that actually power the comments over at my veravo.com website and underneath the Traffic Jam episodes. The story is that Disqus have announced a new ad unit called sponsored comments. The Disqus general manager David Fleck actually this new ad unit stems from their newly launched featured comments about a month ago and went on to say that the featured comment is actually a sponsored comment that advertisers pay for therefore allowing them to occupy the same spot at the top of the comment thread. Now of course I realize that Disqus have got to monetize their platform somehow but I don’t think this will be feature that I will be subscribing to either as an advertiser to be featured on someone else’s blog or as a content creator having advertisements featured on my own site. I really feel that the comments section is where all of the open discussion should happen and it should not be disrupted by advertising. It really should be a clean platform, a clean area on your site so it’s not going to something I would subscribe to. I suggest it’s probably something that you don’t subscribe to yourself.

In a different story this week, I head on over to MarketingLand.com who’ve reported on a big push by Twitter to introduce a whole new number of ad units to their advertising platform. This is not just a small push but a massive push of 15 new types of products in the next 6 months. This first ad unit to be released will of course be especially popular with game developers such as Candy Crush maker King who according to some industry experts believe they account is half of Facebook mobile’s ad revenue. So that I think is the story here. Twitter I think have realized that their ad platform kind of does suck a little bit and if they are to regain some of their market share from Facebook they’re going to certainly improve their catering and certainly better for ad developers that seem to make up a large proportion of Facebook’s advertising revenue.

And that really is it for the news this week. Very much a slow week in the world of traffic, not much else to talk about other than a slight update to Google analytics and AdWords account linking, you can now do that in bulk. I’ll make sure that that news story is linked to in the show notes and also a non-new story from Tech Crunch that Bing is here to stay, quashing rumors that seem to be circulating about the possibility of Microsoft selling Bing off to Facebook. So that really is it. Remember that you can get the links to these stories in full by going to the show notes page of episode #34 at TrafficJamCast.com.

A shout out and a thank you to Chall who left a five-star Stitcher review and she said highly recommended. I love Traffic Jam, from the interview, to this week’s news in traffic and the 1 minute tip, James and his guests bring it every episode. The caliber of guests is second to none, and not just the usual old faces either. Keep up the standard James and I’ll certainly keep on tuning in. Thank you Chall! I really do appreciate you stopping by and leaving your comments. I appreciate every single comment that I get for the show and certainly welcome receiving yours too so if you’ve not left a review or comment for Traffic Jam so far. Please do as it really is the best possible way that you can not only show your appreciation for the content that my guest share each week but also to help the show up the iTunes and Stitcher rankings and get this content out to more people. There’s a few places you can leave your review. iTunes is one. Stitcher is the other but also you can do it on the site itself, TrafficJamCast.com and if you scroll down to the base of the site in the footer, you’ll find a leave a voice message link and that will open up Speak Pipe where you can actually talk your feedback in to your microphone on your computer which I will probably read out on a future episode if you do that. So if you want to get yourself some airtime, get yourself heard on the Traffic Jam podcast, that’s exactly the way to do it.

The One Minute Traffic Tip

Today’s tip may be an obvious one if you’re doing it but it’s still amazing how often this small tip is overlooked. So what is the tip? It’s to install social sharing Chiclets, or widgets or whatever else you want to call them on the content pages of your website. The main Chiclet to install would be the Facebook Like and Share buttons, Twitter retweets, Pinterest pin, Google +1, LinkedIn share or whatever other social media network is relevant to your business. Note I said install on the content pages of your website – that would be your blog. Refrain from installing them on your service or your contacts pages because no one wants to share those pages on your site. The point is to make sharing of your hard worked content easy. When you create useful and engaging content, you want your audience to share that content to their own audience in term helping you help more people. Test the placement of the Chiclets in different places in your page. The main objective is to have them placed in a prominent place that will prompt people to share your content, of course, assuming that it is deserving of a share.

So as I almost wrap on this week’s show, I want to thank you for listening in to episode#34 and to remind you that I will of course be back for episode#35 next week where I will be interviewing Martin Shervington all about Google+ and that’s a not to be missed episode.

Remember you can subscribe via iTunes and Stitcher radio and thanks to two very helpful short links you’ll be able to find those places super easily  now and those links are dsafand surprisingly enough, TrafficJamCast.com/stitcher. So that’s where to find the show subscriptions and also to leave your review and feedback for the show. You can also visit TrafficJamCast.com to join the discussion on this week’s episode and to get links to all the resources mentioned in today’s episode as well as heading over to veravo.com for more traffic tips and training and learn how I can help you get more traffic via the search engines.

I close this week’s show with Eric Enge’s chosen jam which is called Roll Over Beethoven, not the original Chuck Berry version by the way but the version by Electric Light Orchestra which were a 1970’s brome band from Birmingham in England, just down the road from me and I am sure you’ll recognize the track, hope you enjoy it. See you back here in about seven days from now.