According to Google Analytics, at least 25% of the traffic here is coming from Twitter and Facebook.  Which is great, but the problem is that a lot of these visitors are here for the 1st time, and often they will only be here long enough to read the latest post, maybe leave a comment, and then they are gone.  And they likely won’t be back unless someone in their network links to another of my posts.  We are beginning to use our networks as our newstand, we quickly check out shared links, but bounce to the next one just as quickly.

So I started thinking, if there was a way to convert just 10% of those new visitors that were coming from Twitter and Facebook every day, that could make a HUGE impact on this blog’s readership!  To help me do this, I’ve added two plugins that I wanted to share with you, to see if you can benefit from them as well.

1 – Comment Redirect.  I can tell that this plugin has been a BIG hit with yall, as I get a few emails every week on how much readers love this.  What comment redirect does is redirect FIRST time commenters to a page of your choice, after they leave their comment.  On that page you can put whatever information you want.  Since I am hoping to get first time commenters to become regular readers, my page thanks them for commenting, and then gives them a way to subscribe to this blog’s feed, and follow me on Twitter.  Also, I have an area where they can learn about my services.  Here’s where you can learn more about this plugin, or from your WordPress dashboard, go to plugins, and then search for it.  Thanks to Amy for introducing this one to me.  If you’ve never commented here before, you can leave one to see what my page looks like 😉

2 – WP Greet Box – I discovered this one on C.C.’s blog.  What WP Greet Box does is target new visitors based on where they came from, and offers you the ability to give them a custom welcome message!  For example, if you come here for the 1st time from Twitter, the plugin should notice that and offer a small message box above the post and welcome you.  For Twitter, you are giving a window box that gives you the options to tweet the post to Twitter, and follow me on Twitter.  You can learn more about the plugin here.  Below is a snapshot of what the box would look like for a new visitor from Twitter to my last post on introverts and social media.

To be honest, I’ve just started using this plugin and I’m not 100% sold on it.  It’s a good idea, but it’s also slightly intrusive at the top of the post.  I think a similar message at the end of the post might be a better idea.  I will track my number of readers/followers for a couple of weeks and see if there are noticeable changes.

But notice that for both these plugins, the idea is to focus on the type of behavior that I want to encourage.  I want more comments, so the Comment Redirect plugin is there to make sure that first time commenters know that I appreciate them and how they are helping to make the content here more interesting.  With the WP Greet Box, I want first time visitors to stay in touch with me, so I give them custom ways to do this, based on the site they came from.

What about you?  What plugins are you using to help convert first time visitors into readers?  What other options are there, or do you know of something similar to WP Greet Box?  I would like to see what else is available.  But I think the point is that it just makes sense to make it as easy as possible for new visitors to subscribe to your content, and to keep up with the new content you are creating.

 

Yesterday’s post on Social Media Crisis Management was a bit of experiment to see how highly I could rank for the term “Social Media Crisis Management”.  I also wanted to share my results with you, so you can hopefully learn a bit more about the importance of SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

First, I picked a fairly specific term, in “Social Media Crisis Management”.  I checked prior to publishing yesterday’s post, and there were just a shade under 29,000 Google results for that term.  This is important because you need to pick the most specific term as possible, because this will result in less competition, and (if you’ve picked the right term for you) it means you will be more likely to get the ‘right’ kind of traffic.

Second, I made sure the term was in the title and mentioned a couple of times in the post.  I also made the term “Social Media Crisis Management” at the front of the post title, I originally had the title as “A No-Nonsense Guide to Social Media Crisis Management” but Amy wisely suggested that I flip it so the term I was targeting was at the front of the title.

Now, a note about keywords and phrases: You do need to pick and target specific keywords and phrases, but you also need to incorporate them into the post in a way that makes sense to the reader.  I only used that term in the post twice, because that’s all I felt it needed.  It might have helped the results to get it in there once or twice more, but I felt I would have had to compromise the flow of the post’s structure to do it, so I didn’t.  You always have to remember that you are writing for people, if the post doesn’t make sense to them, then it really doesn’t matter if it does well in search results.

So, when I published the post yesterday at 12:20pm, there were 28,900 Google results for the term “Social Media Crisis Management”.  I tweeted a link to it at that time.  Fifty minutes later at 1:10pm, the post was already showing up on the 3rd page for a Google search of #Social Media Crisis Management”:

I tweeted out another link to the post around 2pm, and then at 2:30pm, it moved a bit further up the results on the 3rd page:

Then 15 minutes later at 2:45pm I checked again, and 2 hours and 25 minutes after being published, the post is now on the 1st page of results for the term “Social Media Crisis Management”:

As you can see, the post was now at #7 on the internet for that term.  I searched one more time at 3:40pm, and the term had risen up to #6 on Google, and above the fold (barely):

As of this writing it has settled back to #7.  But the interesting part is that all of the above screenshots were taken by me searching with Google with results for EVERYTHING, and when I was NOT signed into Google.

So at 3:20pm, I decided to check the Latest results for “Social Media Crisis Management”, and this is what I saw:

THIS is huge.  The Latest results factors in real-time linking behavior, so it is picking up all the tweets where my post was being RTed, and as a result, the top half of the Latest results for the term “Social Media Crisis Management” were completely devoted to MY post.

And this is what the same search showed me this morning at 9:20am:

I couldn’t get all of the results in one screenshot but EVERY result from the above was about my post.  Every result in the latest column on the left, the Top Link on the Right, and the Top Updates under it.  My post owned the 1st page of Latest search results for the term “Social Media Crisis Management”.

That’s a perfect example of how Twitter and Facebook sharing is now impacting Google results.  And it’s also a wonderful illustration of the value of being active on Twitter.  I tweeted a link to that post several times yesterday and this morning, which was a big reason why it moved up the Google results so quickly, and a big reason why it dominated the Latest results for that term.

So those of you that are trying to sell your boss on why they should use Twitter, you just got another argument in your favor 😉

But there are two things I want you to take away from this:

1 – This was very basic SEO stuff that any of you can do.  It was simply a case of targeting a specific phrase, and inserting it in the post.  Now as far as my having a large and engaged Twitter network and readership here (thanks guys!), that definitely played a big factor in the post moving up the results so quickly.  But at a basic level, everything I did from a SEO perspective is what you can do with every post.  And you should.

2 – You can best learn by breaking stuff.  There are a gazillion ‘How to’ and ’10 Steps to…’ articles about using social media, and I have certainly written my fair share of these.  But the best way *I* learn is if you can show me the first 1 or 2 steps, then leave me alone and let me figure out the remaining 8 or 9 steps for myself.  Don’t just blindly follow my social media advice or anyone else’s.  Use the advice as a guide for how you can get started.  But there is no one RIGHT way to use social media.  Never forget that.  I can tell you what works for me and my clients, but you still need to tweak any advice so that it is perfect for you.  SEO geeks will no doubt see a ton of things that I could have done or altered in this experiment to get even better results.  And moving forward, I am going to continue to tweak and ‘break stuff’ in order to better figure out how all the moving parts work together.

So go forth, be social, and keep breaking stuff 😉