How Effective are Facebook Adverts

Posted on September 25, 2011 by JPM

In this previous post I looked at the the effectiveness of Microsoft Ad campaigns using a free voucher I received, and I thought that I would compare a number of pay per click advert systems (where you only pay when an advert gets clicked) to see how they compare, and I’ve been testing Facebook PPC Adverts to see how they perform.
I created a campaign based around the same test website (a small and basic health insurance advice site) using the same wording as I used in the Microsoft Advert. So how did the Facebook campaign compare?

Facebook shows relevant ads by knowing the demographic details and interests of it’s members, whereas the Microsoft system picks relevant ads based on search criteria, and from my testing the Microsoft system works much better then the Facebook system.

My Facebook ad generated 33,028 impressions but only received 8 clicks with an average cost of £0.68 per click, whereas the Microsoft ad generated 33,500 impressions and received 111 clicks with a much lower average cost per click of only £0.09.

There may be an occasion where Facebook serves a specific purpose, eg where you need to target a specific demographic, but as a pure advertising platform Facebook looks to be expensive and not as effective as other ad platforms.

How Effective are Microsoft Adverts

Posted on September 21, 2011 by JPM

I recently received an email from Microsoft Ad Centre inviting me to trial their service with a $50 free voucher. I had difficulty using the voucher as I’m based in the UK, but Microsoft Customer Services were excellent is finding me a voucher code for the equivalent amount for UK based Website owners.

So with my account credited I thought I would try their service to see how well it worked for bringing traffic to a website devloped specifically for the test.

Using a campaign of 4 hours as a testbed and with a maximum limit of £0.30 (although my average CPC ended up at £0.09) 34.5K advert impressions generated 111 clicks.

It will be interesting to see how Microsoft Ads compare to other Ad sources, I might use some other free vouchers to see if a comparison of services is possible. I’ll report back on my findings here.

How to get Traffic from Twitter and why Twitter is like TV Adverts

Posted on September 14, 2011 by JPM

In this previous post I discussed how I was finding that the content of the articles I was linking to was more important then how the actual tweet was written.
What I also started to notice was that when I sent a tweet the effect on traffic to my site was generally pretty instant rather then sustained.
This might be because when you catch a follower online your tweet appears at the top of their timeline but if they login sometime after the tweet is sent then can get hidden within dozens of other tweets.

With this in mind Twitter could be compared to TV advertising in that it’s at it’s most effective when people actually see the advert at time of broadcast, if it’s missed then it’s message is lost.

So how then can Twitter be used to it’s most effective to share your links and drive traffic to your site? Following the TV advertising example I tried sending multiple tweets linking to my iPhone site across my Twitter networks.
My Twitter network is shared across 4 Twitter accounts each focused on a technical theme so tweets about the iPhone should be of interest to some of my followers.

Rather the retweeting the same link several times in 1 day, I decided to pick a number of popular articles and schedule a Tweet linking to each at regular intervals throughout the day. Each time the tweet was published it was sent out across all 4 accounts, this allowed frequent visibility of links to my site without boring my followers with repeated identical links.

As seen in the graph below Using this method really boosted the amount of traffic to my site, nearly doubling the amount of site views.

By going deeper into the hourly stats following this method the individual traffic spikes (the blue line) matching the scheduled tweets can clearly be seen.

Does how a Tweet is written effect the number of clicks

Posted on September 5, 2011 by JPM

In this post I explained how I had Tweeted a link to my Twitter Network and wanted to see if there was a difference in the amount of traffic sent to the article, if the post was written in a different manner.

A link to the exact same article was sent out at the exact same same ‘optimum times’, on the 31st of August the Tweet was basic and too the point, on the 1st of September the Tweet was more descriptive and tried to sell the article more.

The results can be seen in the Graph below which shows traffic to the Article. Little if any difference was noticed.

Compare the results to the following graph which shows what happened when a tweet was sent out to all my Twitter networks at the same time and ignoring optimum tweeting times.
The Tweet was describing a way to find out how to find cheap iPhone games, so there was a natural incentive for my followers to click on the link.
Even though optimum posting times were ignored, the article attracted more readers.
Perhaps content is king over style.

How Tweeting Links can Improve Traffic

Posted on September 1, 2011 by JPM

In this article I wrote about an experiment I was running with Twitter about scheduling Tweets to tie in with when the majority of your Followers are online, and here are the results.

Twitter sent 21 visitors to the article, which from a potential pool of about 4.5k followers is a little disappointing as that it equates to not even 1% of my followers clicked through to read the article

However whilst the results weren’t as good as I was hoping the traffic to the article did double, but is there anyway that I can improve the traffic further using Twitter. This is a copy of the Tweet I sent: How to view iPhone Photos on your PC http://t.co/3e7zxLg

In all honesty the Tweet I sent wasn’t particually exciting or catchy, and could have probably have used a couple of Buzz words.

So with a bit of re-wording and polishing the tweet becomes: The iPhone can take great photo’s & heres a Great Article on several methods for viewing your iPhone Photos on your PC. http://t.co/3e7zxLg

I’ve scheduled the Tweet to be published to my Twitter Network at the same times as the previous Tweet.

I’ll report back here on the results

How to See when your Twitter Followers are Online

Posted on August 31, 2011 by JPM

Twitter is a great tool for sharing a message with many followers at the same time, however how do you know when the best time to Tweet is.

Given that most Twitter Users have busy timelines where older tweets can be missed, to reach a maximum number of followers it’s best to post when most users are currently online and looking at Twitter, so that they see your Tweet Arrive – but how can you tell when the optimum time is to reach your Followers.

Tweriod is a free service which will analyse your Twitter Followers Twitter usage over the previous month and generate a report of the optimum time frames when most are online. It’s free reports cover Sundays, Mondays, Weekend Averages, and Weekday averages. I tend to use just the average results.

Using one of my accounts from this twitter experiment it’s clear to see that the optimum time frame is around 4pm. You could then either manually Tweet or schedule a Tweet for that time frame knowing that as many of your Followers as possible will see the message

Tweriod is easy to use, all you do is log in to the site using your Twitter account details and they do the rest, you can get an updated report for free once every month, and whilst there are some premium facilities that you can pay for the free service will be fine for most Tweeters.

To put the results generated by Tweriod to the test:

I’ve used Google Analytics to pick a popular article from my site.
Write a Tweet about the Article.
Schedule a Tweet to each of the 4 accounts and also my iphonehints twitter account for their optimum time.

I’ll post the results here.

Quick Twitter Followers Update (29/07/11) (end of first month)

Posted on August 3, 2011 by JPM

In this post I discussed how I was testing TweetAttacks on Twitter Accounts that I created to see how quickly you could build up a large relatively targeted Twitter Audience.

Each time I make a post on iphone-experience.com I re-tweet on these other accounts to increase the number of people who are aware of my articles.

I have 4 accounts currently being increased by TweetAttacks, and I currently have a combined following of 1426 twitter users, and increase of 403 over last weeks total. During this week I was without a computer for a couple of days and manually followed other users using this process.

If your Twitter Followers were a Country, which Country would they be

Posted on August 1, 2011 by JPM

Twitter is a fantastic tool for very quickly reaching out to many people and sharing a brief message, but when looking at how many Twitter followers someone has can you really put that number in to context. To most people it will just be a figure, but to try and visualise numbers of users you could compare the populations of countries.

For example every time Stephen Fry writes a Tweet it appears on the the time line of ~ 2.8 million Twitter users, which equates to the population of Mongolia. Imagine any other situation where an entire population of a country can hear something you say, and what’s more a country who has chosen to listen to you by following your Tweets.

Here are some further examples of comparing Twitter followers to the populations of countries:

Lady Gaga – 12.1 Million – Senegal
Justin Bieber – 11.4 million – Cuba
Barack Obama – 9.4 million – Sweden
Oprah Winfrey – 6.8 million – Papua New Guinea
Stephen Fry – 2.8 million – Mongolia
Arnold Schwarzenegger – 2.1 million – Lesotho
Jason Bradbury – 130k -Saint Vincent and the Grenadines & Palau combined
Edna Fry – 108k – U.S. Virgin Islands
Pat Flynn – 50k – Saint Kitts and Nevis
iPhonehints – 1.4k Niue ( or 2.8k – Falkland Islands if you include the accounts from this project)

Interesting 2 pop stars (one of which is a young lad) has significantly more followers then the official Twitter account of the President of the United States and most powerful man in the world.

With popularity and an audience comes responsibility, as a small example Stephen Fry has accidentally taken a few websites down simply by providing a link to their site and the amount of traffic has taken down the server. Imagine if Lady Gaga linked to a site, the amount of traffic could be about 4 times larger.

We have recently seen how when Twitter collectively gets behind a cause the effect can be incredible, just ask the former staff at the News of the World news paper, and with millions of followers you could start to direct Twitter causes. This could (and I ‘m sure does) causes some cause of concern.

Even my little iPhonehints twitter feed reaches the same number of people as in a country called Niue, (which is a small island country of New Zealand citizens).

Hello Niue I feel I have a connection with you now.

Quick Twitter Followers Update (22/07/11) (over 1000 followers in 3 weeks)

Posted on July 22, 2011 by JPM

In this post I discussed how I was testing TweetAttacks on Twitter Accounts that I created to see how quickly you could build up a large relatively targeted Twitter Audience.

Each time I make a post on iphone-experience.com I re-tweet on these other accounts to increase the number of people who are aware of my articles.

I have 4 accounts currently being increased by TweetAttacks, and I currently have a combined following of 1023 twitter users, and increase of 308 over last weeks total.

On average I’m picking up an additional 48 followers per day, which means that if I did this process everyday for a year I could increase my followers by 17500.

Over the next week I’m going to increase the numbers of people I follow using TweetAttacks to see if I can accelerate the process with out upsetting twitter and getting banned

Quick Twitter Followers Update (15/07/11)

Posted on July 15, 2011 by JPM

In this post I discussed how I was testing TweetAttacks on Twitter Accounts that I created to see how quickly you could build up a large relatively targeted Twitter Audience.

Each time I make a post on iphone-experience.com I re-tweet on these other accounts to increase the number of people who are aware of my articles.

I have 4 accounts currently being increased by TweetAttacks, and I currently have a combined following of 715 twitter users, and increase of 315 over last weeks total.

How to quickly increase your number of Twitter Followers

Posted on July 8, 2011 by JPM

Twitter is a popular social network which can be used to reach a large number of people very quickly.
I’ve previously discussed how to increase the number of twitter followers but it is possible to automate the process.
This process is a little blackhat and can get your twitter account banned so it might be better to create new accounts for this process.
I’ve been testing a product called TweetAttacks which allows you to automatically follow the followers of a twitter account.

Tweetattacks works by simulating human interaction, and it allows you to set variables like the amount of time between follows so that it looks like a real human to twitter. I suggest that you set a max number of 200 follows per day and a time of between 10 and 20 seconds between follows.

The free version of Tweetattacks allows you to configure 5 Twitter accounts, and here’s why this is useful.
It’s very time consuming to get a single Twitter Account to 5000 followers but with Tweet Attacks you can easily get 5 account to 1000 users, so if all 5 accounts re-tweet a tweet from your main account it still gets seen by 5000 users. It is key that your new accounts have a similar theme to your main account, and there is content on those accounts, even if only re-tweets to make them worth following.

I’m current 1 week into this process, and I’ve picked up a total of 400 new followers I’ll feed back here on future progress.

Turn Your Social Media into a Magazine with Flipboard on the iPad

Posted on March 24, 2011 by JPM

Unlike traditional Laptops and Desktops computers, the iPad has a size and form factor which makes it ideal for Magazine style content, the touch driven interface is ideal for flicking between articles and pages.

Flipboard is a fantastic application for the iPad which in addition to providing a number of quality news streams, can turn your Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader feeds into a virtual Magazine. The end results are fantastic, well presented articles with associated media that is 100% relivent to you as it uses your own Social Media Feeds to produce the articles.

This also opens up another avenue of providing content to your readers. If you readers follow you on RSS then you articles will appear in their Flipboard articles, also if you Tweet the links to your posts then any Flipboard users who follow you on Twitter will also see your articles. This is definitly a facility that you can promote to your readers, most Flipboard users will check their articles regularly, so this is a great way to reach them.

Charlie Sheen Sacked TV Star to Internet Phenomenon

Posted on March 9, 2011 by JPM

It’s been an Interesting week in the life of Charlie Sheen, the Movie and TV actor who has recently been most famous for starring in Two and a Half men has formally been sacked by his bosses at Warner Bros following Sheen’s high profile criticism of the shows writer.

Sheen’s behaviour has apparently started to become increasingly erratic and a series of high profile, and somewhat strange TV interviews have generated an incredible amount of Internet Interest, as viewers have been curious as to what his next step will be.

Over the last week Sheen’s Social Relevance as soared.

Recent Video Interviews with Sheen on YouTube are getting millions of views, the number of people who follow him on Twitter has sored to 2.5 million and as this graph shows the google searches related to him has recently rocketed.

Charlie Sheen may have lost his job but with his sudden increase in popularity and demand for TV interviews it will be a while until he’s got time on his hands again.

A Cost Free Strategy for Increasing Traffic to your Blog – Part 5 Social Bookmarking

Posted on February 24, 2011 by JPM

Part 1 Using Twitter can be found here.

Part 2 Using Discussion forums can be found here.

Part 3 Face Book can be found here.

Part 4 Article Directories can be found here.

Part 5 Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking Sites offer the facility for users to share web based articles that interest them with other users of the Social Bookmarking sites.

If they see an article on a web site that they like, then they post the URL of the site onto the Social Bookmarking site for all to see, many Social Bookmarking sites then allow site users to rate the article that’s been linked too.

Many of these sites get large amounts of traffic and therefore any links to your site on there are shared with many potential readers.

Popular Social Bookmarking Sites include:

There is nothing to stop you posting your own links on Social Bookmarking Sites, but you should make it as easy as possible for visitors to your blog to share links to your articles. Many Social Bookmarking Sites provide their own widgets or tools to put on your site, put there are also several very good WordPress Plugins which you can place on your blog post to make too easy for your articles to be shared, like the tool under this post.

There are many good tools for social bookmarking

As well as providing visibility of your site to thousands of potential readers, the top Social Bookmarking Sites also carry high Google Page Rank scores, so putting links to your blog on these sites may help you index higher in Google.

A Cost Free Strategy for Increasing Traffic to your Blog – Part 4 Article Directories

Posted on February 14, 2011 by JPM

A Cost Free Strategy for Increasing Traffic to your Blog – Part 4 Article Directories

Part 1 Using Twitter can be found here.

Part 2 Using Discussion forums can be found here.

Part 3 Face Book can be found here.

Part 4 Article Directories.

Article Directories are websites that catalogue and host large numbers of articles on various topics. A good source of information for readers search on specific topics, the main Article Directories try and guarantee good quality in documents by setting various rules on submission and checking each article manually.

The top Article Directories are very popular and receive thousands of hits per day, and because Article Authors tend to link back to the directories they have a high Google Page Rank.

There are 2 potential ways to use Article Directories to increase the amount of traffic to your site, but both require you to write a high quality article on the same\similar topic to your site.

I can recommend these articles Directory Sites:

After you identify which sites you are going to submit articles too, check out the sites rules and policies carefully to make sure that your document stays within their guidelines, and write a unique article for each site, making sure to check your spelling and the sites minimum number of words per article.

The first way to increase traffic to your site is to put a link to your site in the articles, each site will have different rules about placing links but most will allow a link in an information box at the end of the article.

In the information box place a sentence about where to find more information about the subject and a link to your site. Readers will find your article within the directory and then follow the link back to your site.

The second way to increase traffic to your site is through improved Google Authority, if you link back to your site within the article using key words that you want to rank highly for, then you have a better chance of ranking higher for those key words in Google. For example if you ran a website on Dog Coats and you wanted to rank highly for the search term “Dog Coats” then use that term as a hyperlink to your site.

Make sure you submit a different article to each site and submit several articles to each site for your keywords and you should notice that you start ranking higher in Google.

A Cost Free Strategy for Increasing Traffic to your Blog – Part 3 Using FaceBook

Posted on February 1, 2011 by JPM

This is the second part of my series of guides to help you increase traffic to your Blog.

Part 1 Using Twitter can be found here.

Part 2 Using Discussion forums can be found here.

Part 3 Face Book

FaceBook has rapidly become a World Wide phenomenon on the Internet with Many Millions of users frequently logging onto the Social Networking Site to communicate with their family, friends & colleagues, and to take part with discussions with other Facebook users with shared interests. It’s certainly a very powerful and user friendly facility and well deserving of its position as most popular Social Networking Site.

FaceBook offers a number of ways for you to promote your Blog or Website.

1) Status Updates.
Simply tell your FaceBook Friends about your Blog updates. If you post a URL in your status update, Facebook will publish a hyperlink and a brief preview, including a thumbnail image, of the webpage in your Status. This is a quick and easy way to share your updates with a group of people who might be interested in the topic.

Click to Enlarge

2) Groups.
FaceBook lets you create Discussion Groups based on the topic of your choice, so you could create a group to match the subject of your Blog, and allow other Facebook users join in the discussion. Groups allow you to build keen discussion forums, increase your authority on a subject and also to network with other interested in your subject matter, and by posting links in your groups you can drive readers to your Blog.

Other users will be able to find your Group by using the FaceBook search tool, and you can link to your group Status updates and posts on other groups.

Before you start your own Group, it’s worthwhile checking to see if any existing groups covering your subject matter already exists. If an active and vibrate Group already exists you might be better contributing to and posting in that group rather than trying to build your own group from start.

3) Pages.
Facebook provides pages for you to provide information of your interest, Website or business. Working very much in the same to personal profiles, pages allow you to post updates, including URL’s to your Blog or Posts in a dedicated area that is visible to all Facebook users.
Users can opt to like your page and each time you post on your Page everyone who likes your Page will see the updates, allowing you to potentially reach many users and driving traffic to your site.

A Cost Free Strategy for Increasing Traffic to your Blog – Part 2 Discussion Forums

Posted on January 25, 2011 by JPM

This is the second part of my series of guides to help you increase traffic to your Blog.

Part 1 Using Twitter can be found here.

Part 2 Using Discussion forums

Discussion Forums have been around on the Internet for a long time now, and provide users with a dedicated space on the Internet to discuss specific topics. There are many Forums on the Internet so finding\joining one which covers the same topic as your site shouldn’t be a problem. Try and join one with lots of active users and lots of new posts, as an active Forum will be more interesting for you to be a member of.

Well used and supported Discussion Forums give a sense of community well beyond that provided by Facebook, but this means that there is a high sense of pride from its other users. A golden rule for Forums is that you need to contribute positively to the discussions, don’t sign up and post links to your site and never go back as this won’t work, and you are likely to get your posts deleted.

If the forum covers a topic you are interested in then you will enjoy contributing to discussions, this will also increase the sense of authority that other Forum users will have for you, making them more likely to check out any other posts you have made as well as your Blog.

There are 3 main ways that Internet Discussion Forums might be used to increase the traffic to your Blog:

1) Make sure your profile information on your Forum account contains a link to your site.

This is a quick win, and although it won’t generate high levels of traffic it’s a must do. If you contribute well to forums then other forum users may look at your account profile and click on the link to your blog.

2) Put a link to your Blog in your Signature.

Most forums provide the ability to add a signature to your profile, and your signature is displayed underneath every post you make. You can use your signature to provide information about yourself including a link to your site, you will need to check with the forum rules about the use of signatures, as some forums won’t allow links to be placed in a signature, either at all or until you have made a certain number of posts.

The use of links within Signatures is very powerful because your direct link appears under every post you make, making it more likely that other forum users will click on the link and visit your site.

3) Posting links to Blog articles within Posts.

If someone starts a Topic on a Forum or asks a question and you have already covered that topic in a blog post then post a link to the article in a reply to the post. Make sure you explain why you are providing a link and explain that the article you are linking to covers the same topic.

This shouldn’t be abused but will attract visitors with a genuine interest in your Blogs subject matter to your site.

A Cost Free Strategy for Increasing Traffic to your Blog – Part 1 Using Twitter

Posted on January 24, 2011 by JPM

There are many strategies out there on the web which try and guide you to increase traffic to your Blog, but many of them involve purchasing tool or services to help you.

I thought I would publish a series of cost free options which could form a strategy for bringing in extra traffic.

Part 1 Using Twitter

Twitter is a fantastic free Social Networking Tool for reaching new people, and can be used in a number of ways the reach new readers, and allows you to announce new blog posts to your followers.

Get into the habit of tweeting with a link everytime you write an article on your blog to let your followers know that the article is online. The more followers you have the more chance you have of increased traffic reaching your Blog.

Firstly (and perhaps most importantly) Twitter can be used to form genuine relationships with other Twitter users, as the relationships\friendships are formed you will find yourself retweeting and being retweeted and therefore reaching new readers. Your number of followers may grow slowly, but each one will be a genuine contact and much more likely to visit any links you post.

Secondly you can ask a Tweeter with a large amount of followers to re-tweet one of your Tweets, and if they find your tweet interesting, its relevant to them or the article is about them then they might retweet. They don’t have to, they are doing you a favour, but if they do Retweet then you might see a huge spike in Traffic. I noticed this recently when I launched iphone-experience.com and a couple of TV presenters re-tweeted the link.

You will notice that the traffic will quickly fade away again, and most of these visitors will never visit your site again but some will start following your tweets, or bookmark your site. Others will also retweet your message and your followers might start growing organically.

Finally you can try and grow the number of followers you have as quickly as possible and there is a strategy for this. Try and find a user of Twitter who has a large number of followers and tweets about similar topics as your site. Then start following their followers.

Their followers will see that you tweet and post about a topic that interests them and might start following you, a word of warning though, don’t try this from your personal Twitter account otherwise your twitter time line will become too busy and unmanageable, instead set up a twitter account just for announcements about your site. More information about the Follow Followers Stragety can be found here.

Kenneth Tong comes clean

Posted on January 11, 2011 by JPM

In this Post I discussed how Kenneth Tong had been using Twitter to promote managed anorexia.

It turns out that Kenneth had been hoaxing us all, he has been running a social network experiment to see if by promoting an idea that is genuinely despised by everyone he can become a media celebrity, which to be fair he has done. I just hope that no one took his tweets seriously, as the message he gave was very dangerous even if he didn’t really believe it.

Kenneth’s message can be seen in full here.

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