Transcript continued from the Episode 032 Show notes
Mobile Website Traffic and Trends
The first segment I want to get into with you this week is in my reader. I’m always checking out my Google Reader and seeing what kind of cool stuff is lurking in there. One of the sites that I like to go to, as you guys know, is the Marketing Pilgrim site. They’ve got a couple of authors there that I like. Cynthia Boris is there, shout out to Cynthia, I like her stuff.
They pull all kinds of stuff from all over the place and to be honest with you, it’s stuff that I wouldn’t find on my own and that’s one of the great things about it. It’s a great strategy for a website of any kind, particularly an affiliate marketing website. If you’re building affiliate sites, curating content is a really valuable thing if you can go out and find stuff that people aren’t going to want to take the time to find on their own (that’s definitely my case) and you can collect it all together in a way that’s smart. That can be a really valuable thing and you can trade that value for clicks and make money. That’s certainly the business model over at Marketing Pilgrim.
On August 23rd Cynthia had this article about ecommerce that I thought was really interesting. She reports that one of these stat tracking operations, I think Monetate is where she’s getting this research, is reporting that website traffic from smartphones is up 100% from last year. So they’ve aggregated a bunch of data and they find that more and more people are using their smartphones to access the internet. I think that’s true. Of course, I’m sure that almost exactly or with some regularity tracks the number of smartphones that are deployed as more and more people are getting smartphones. (Even my mom has a smartphone.) Eventually those people are going to use their smartphone to access websites.
What you need to understand is some of those people are going to use their smartphones to access your website. The questions is if you’ve got an affiliate marketing or some other kind of internet marketing website out there, is your website configured in such a way that it’s tolerable to mobile browsers? I think it’s finally time to go do that. It has been time for a long time. If you haven’t done that, you need to do that. If you’re running WordPress, it turns out that there is a really straightforward and easy to use plugin for that you can use called WP Touch. This comes from the idea that this is a plugin that’s designed to make your website look good on touch screen devices, which is what smartphones are.
WP Touch is an easy plugin to find; you can Google it or I’ll put a link to the plugin in the show notes. (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wptouch/) There are an enormous amount of settings for this plugin, you can configure the colors, etcetera. A lot of the other plugins that are really important like W3TotalCache are WP Touch aware. This is a very popular plugin and a lot of people use it for mobile readiness for their sites. You can integrate mobile Adsense using this plugin and there are lots of other things you can do.
I don’t even begin to scratch the surface in using even the free version of the plugin and then there’s a Pro version on top of that, which includes special support for the iPad and theme switching, child themes, multisite support, there’s just all kinds of crazy stuff going on in the Pro version. To be honest, I’ve never even seriously looked at it because I’ve barely scratched the surface with the baby version of WP Touch that you can get in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory. I definitely recommend that you take time to go do that.
Now, I will tell you that my mobile traffic has not seen 100% increase in the amount of traffic that I’m getting from smartphones. In fact, the wild crazy vast majority of my traffic, 75% or something like that, comes from Internet Explorer. Which reminds me, I should probably go find a PC somewhere and see what my site looks like in IE because I never use Internet Explorer for any reason and I don’t use Windows unless I absolutely have to. But I should for that reason – and you should too.
Go check out WP Touch, I think you’re really going to like it. Even if you just get an extra two or three clicks from some mobile user who is indisposed and using their cell phone because they can’t get to a PC it will be worth the few minutes that you take to install that.
Mark’s Project Updates
I wanted to give you a quick update on my sites that we’ve been talking about. I’ve been doing these updates about the snoring site while driving and my intention is to keep that going. I’ve got a new update that has been in the can for awhile, it’s actually already transcribed but I haven’t done the video editing. I haven’t taught my virtual assistant how to do the video editing, that means I’ve got to do the video editing. This is not a good thing, because if it’s on my list sometimes bad things happen because I’ve got a day job and all that other stuff going on. However, I do have an update for you on that. I’m going to keep trying to update those once every week or two.
I will tell you that I’ve seen my first couple of random clicks coming from somewhere, I’m not even sure exactly where they’re coming from. But certainly no notable search engine traffic or anything like that.
I’ve started to promote the site a little bit and I’m going to reveal all of those promotion tactics, but I’ll tell you that I’m using a combination of gigs on Fiverr for part of the work, some article marketing from Fiverr, and some SENuke gigs from Fiverr, as well as Josh Spaulding’s Deep Linker Pro 2.0 just to get started and get things going. I’m also using Caroline Middlebrook’s tool IM Automator. So those are some things that I’ll be using and I’ll put links to those tools in the show notes, but you know where to go for Fiverr – Fiverr.com.
You can just dig around and look for website promotion, article marketing, SENuke, and you’ll be amazed at how many people are on that service doing these kinds of promotion techniques. For a site that’s just a fun experiment, I think that’s a really good way to go. That’s a trick that I learned from Michelle MacPhearson, very cool stuff using Fiverr for that kind of promotion. That’s a lot of fun.
On the corn sheller site, it’s doing better and better. It’s not back up to the post-Panda levels yet. I have not quite finished promoting that, I haven’t done nearly as much as I know I need to. As you’ll recall, my big goal there is to get the keyword density and variation worked out as far as the anchor text for backlinks are concerned. You’ll recall that when I originally did that site I put way too much emphasis on the keyword “corn sheller” and that was exactly what the Penguin update was all about was finding people like me who had the same keyword over and over again in the anchor text and crushing those sites.
I’m trying to fix that by introducing a wide variety of other anchor text into the backlink profile and I’m hoping that site will continue to pop up. On Saturdays I’m up to almost 100 visitors per Saturday. The only thing that’s a little different is the traffic that’s coming in is not converting on eBay, at least in the last several weeks it’s not converting as well as it has in the past. That’s something that I’m going to have to look at, because that suggests that the traffic is coming from somewhere else. Maybe from some keywords that don’t convert as well, so I’m going to have to look at that.
That’s the update on those two sites. Look for a blogging while driving video update on that on MasonWorld.com in a couple days. By the time you hear the sound of my voice in your automobile or your iPod headphones, wherever you may be listening to me.
Why I Podcast
The next segment here is a little interesting. Cliff Ravenscraft, who is a good buddy of mine over at The Podcast Answer Man and a lot of the reason that I try to make this podcast as good as I possibly can is because Cliff is kind of the standard that I hold myself to. I can’t even see Cliff from where I am, he’s up so high from where I’m podcasting. Still, it’s something to aspire to in the long term. Cliff has been talking recently about this ancient spoken text thing called The Strangest Secret.
This is not The Secret that you hear about, although some of the ideas are kind of similar. This is not The Secret, which is think happy thoughts and money flows to you. I know I just upset a lot of people and I’m sorry. If you’re a big Secret disciple, I apologize. This is something different. This is Earl Nightingale’s recording from the 1940s or 1950s called The Strangest Secret.
Cliff looked at an excerpt of that where Nightingale did a survey or some people associated with Nightingale did a survey and found that 19 out of 20 people didn’t really know why they were doing what they were doing every day. They didn’t know why they went to work, they didn’t really have any mission or purpose in life. Here’s what Cliff has to say about this with regard to podcasting and it made me think about this podcast…
(the following snippet of audio is “stolen” from Cliff’s podcast)
What’s amazing to me is the number of podcasters who do not have any idea of what they desire to accomplish with their podcast. They have no big picture, they have no real understanding of their target market, they have no understanding of why they’re podcasting.
Nightingale mentioned that there was a poll done where they asked all of these men, a lot of working men, “Why do you go to work every day? Why do you wake up in the morning?” And 19 out of 20 had no idea why they did it, it’s just because everybody else does.
I wondered just how similar it would be if I were to ask podcasters, “Why do you hit the record button for each of your podcasts? For what purpose do you hope to accomplish with your show?”
It’s interesting. The question “why this show” is a really good question. Of course, I know the answer because I think about stuff like this. The first thing I will say is I think Cliff is absolutely spot on, there are an enormous amount of podcasters out there and just people starting small businesses in general that don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing and the result is failure in every case.
You’ve heard this term “pod-fade” which happens in the podcasting community. The root cause of pod-fade, I’ll guarantee you, is that people don’t have a real purpose for their podcast and so after the excitement of the first few episodes wears off they fade out. That’s something that really happens and you can go look in the iTunes directory and you’ll see all of these pod-faded podcasts. A large reason that’s happening is because people don’t know why they’re doing their podcast.
So why am I doing this podcast? It’s a question that I get often, “Why MasonWorld.com blog? Why this podcast?” The original answer was money. It’s funny, that’s not the answer anymore.
But in the very beginning in 2007 I was in a job that gave me the responsibility of laying a lot of people off – for some very good reasons, some reasons that made a lot of sense for shareholders of the company that I worked for at the time. It was an excellent business decision and it impacted people and that’s just nature of business. But it put me in this situation where I had to sit down with people, some of whom I had eaten dinner with their families, many of whom I knew the names of their children and knew what sports they played, and I had to tell them, “Hey, I know I’ve known you for 15 years, but you no longer have a job.”
At that time that made me think, “I really need a Plan B.” So I started digging around on the internet looking for something that could be that Plan B. That’s why I say originally it was for the money. At that time I didn’t have the podcast, but I got involved in internet marketing.
I learned that internet marketing existed – and I’ve told this story before – because my wife saw something on The Today Show and she said, “Wow, you should check into this, this looks really cool. It’s right up your alley, it’s electronics and websites and computer geek stuff plus business. You ought to enjoy that.”
Sure enough, I got into that and started realizing why money moved around on the internet and I found that fascinating. And I still do to this day. I think all of the cool stuff that goes on with a successful internet business is incredibly fascinating. That’s one reason. It goes to this passion thing, it goes to the idea that I really think this stuff is neat and I like to talk about it. So that’s one reason for the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.
But, that’s not the secret real reason. Let me tell you the story about the secret real reason.
One time I was at an internet marketing conference, The Niche Affiliate Marketing Seminar in Atlanta, and I ran into a guy there who stopped me in the hallway and said, “Mark Mason,” (I didn’t know the guy) “I listened to your podcast and you’re the reason I’m here at this conference.” It turned out this guy was from another country, he and his wife had come to the conference and while he was at the conference he actually won a big affiliate marketing contest that was live at the conference, he won like $20,000 worth of free internet marketing training and just had this crazy successful conference. He was really trying to change his whole life based on the fact that he had heard my podcast.
I thought, “Wow. Here’s this one guy who heard my podcast and figured out maybe he could do something to change his life, to make things better.” That’s why I do the podcast, because I really do believe that if you put your mind to it you can start a small business on the internet. I think the right way to do that is with fundamental techniques like affiliate marketing and list building, especially when you are getting started. Then I think making your own products in your niche that you care about is really great.
I believe that you can do that by adding value to the internet. If you do that, I think you can really make your life better. If it’s that $100 a month that you need so you can afford the new car that you want, or if it’s quitting your 9:00 to 5:00 job and doing that kind of thing and it allows you to spend more time with your kids if you’re a stay at home mom, and something that I say on my podcast makes that possible I’m stoked. That’s why I do the podcast.
There you go, Cliff. That’s why I do my podcast. It used to be for the money, at least it was for 10 minutes, then it became for the coolness of the internet, and finally it’s all about helping people and that’s the thing that keeps me going and that’s what I turn on the microphone for every day.
So that’s a little peek inside what I’m doing and I hope that helps you understand why I am doing this.
Coming Soon to the Podcast…Affiliate Marketing Pillars
Really, the real reason that I’m in internet marketing and doing this podcast is so I can hear that theme song music over and over again, because I’m addicted to it, it’s like a drug or something. Sorry for hitting that button so much.
The related topic to this is we want to spend more time talking about fundamentals of affiliate marketing. For a long time I’ve been wanting to offer a course on affiliate marketing. The real truth of the matter is, at least right now in my life, I don’t have time for a course on affiliate marketing.
So, I think what I’m going to do over the next five or six episodes is I’m going to start with what I consider to be sort of the five basic pillars of affiliate marketing and break those down episode by episode and start talking about exactly what I think it is that I think you need to do to build an affiliate site in today’s economy, how to do it, what the tips and tricks are, and just kind of go through that in several 30 minute chunks here on the podcast. Of course, we won’t spend all 30 minutes every episode on that, but I think it’s a really good idea to go back and cover all these fundamentals in this sort of post-Panda, post-Penguin era and see if we can convince ourselves that affiliate marketing is still a viable business model, talk about how I think it should be done, and go through that.
So that’s what we’ll be doing on the next several episodes of the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.
That brings me to my next and final topic, which is I want to get some feedback from you guys. One of the things that I’ve been considering doing is rebranding this whole thing and changing it from the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast to Late Night Internet Marketing with Mark Mason, because the branding is kind of too much Mark Mason centric and doesn’t really tell people exactly what’s going on here. So I’m interested in your feedback on the switch from MasonWorld.com to something like LateNightIM.com or LateNightInternetMarketing.com. The second one is a little longer, but I’ve been thinking LateNightIM.com, I’ve even got a draft test junky looking placeholder site up there and I’ve been experimenting with some stuff. You can pop over there and take a look at that, it’s pretty ugly as it sits right now.
If you want to test out my new feedback gadget at MasonWorld.com/feedback, that would be really cool. You can tell me what you think or you can drop a comment on the end of this episode and tell me what you think about Late Night Internet Marketing. Just to get a feeler out there and see what you think about that kind of thing, I’d really appreciate your feedback on that.
One last thing with regard to feedback while you’re on the line there or in the comments. I’m having dinner with Cliff Ravenscraft this week, he’s coming into town to give a keynote address at the Catholic New Media Conference and we’re going to hook up for dinner. So if you’ve got any questions for Cliff that you want me to drop on him while I’ve got him pinned down in a one-on-one situation, give me a holler there. I’d love to hear if you have some questions for Cliff, that would be great and I’ll share Cliff’s answers on the show.
Thanks very much for listening, I really appreciate it. Think about what it is and why you do what you do, whatever it is that you do, why you’re listening to this podcast, why you want to build a small business, why you’ve got the business that you’ve got. Think about that and make sure you know what the reason is, because I think that is really important.
