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Archives for June 2009

How much traffic is Bing sending to your blog?

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I thought it would be interesting, a couple of weeks in, to see how much traffic Microsoft’s new Bing search engine was sending to a range of blogs I have stats access to.

While it’s very early days and the sample size I have access to is fairly limited compared to the web statistics collection companies, it does suggest that Microsoft has a long way to go to begin challenging Yahoo, let alone Google.

Bing’s highest share was on my personal blog, which covers a range of topics including technology and current affairs. Even there it mustered just 2.35%, putting it in second place behind Google’s massive 93% lead. It seems to have taken some market share from Yahoo and AOL.

On a site about families and relationships, Bing accrued 0.5% of the share in the past two weeks. Here it possibly took a little share from Google, though the giant still had over 90%.

On a large general consumer technology site, Bing managed 0.67%, putting it in fourth place, though it took no share from Google or Yahoo.

Bing did less well, accruing just 0.46%, on an iPhone-related blog, while on a blog about high definition TVs it scraped 0.69%.

Hardly anything to write home about.

iTWire reports that StatCounter search engine market share data also showed Bing got just a fraction of a percentage point.

It’s hard to get an idea of the keywords and phrases someone uses to find each site differs between Google and Bing because Bing’s sample size is so small. The fact is, with such a huge market share and history of crawl, the list of keywords from Google is huge and far more varied.

When it comes to how many pages have been indexed and listed (using the “site:” modifier, which isn’t perfect), Google often seems to return more results than Bing, though some larger sites have more returns from Microsoft’s engine.

It’s unfair to draw conclusions just a fortnight after Bing launched. At one level, I’d like to see Google’s dominance challenged just a bit by some other players, as it reduces our reliance on one company to send visitors to our sites. At the moment, though, Microsoft is playing catchup with everyone else.

Have you noticed any significant influx of visitors from Bing or is Google still your main search engine traffic driver?

Do You Tweet to Read or Do You Tweet to Write?

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I’ve observed several celebrity Twitter users to have a friend/follower ratio that is heavily skewed toward the follower side. This means they have a huge following, but follow only a very few people. While most do reply to tweets related to them or directly sent to them as @replies, a lot are probably just using Twitter to post updates about themselves (which is understandable, especially for folks with a very public life). Some others are most likely marketers. They don’t engage in conversation much, but they do post a lot of quotes, retweets and links.

On the other hand, some Twitter users I know are more of readers rather than writers. They seem to have a lot of followed folks, but only a few followers. And they mostly engage in conversation when the topic interests them.

I’m part of the second group. I must admit I’m not too fond of tweeting out of the blue, about what I ate for breakfast, musing about the weather, or complaining about the chores I’m currently doing. I mostly scan and read updates from my Twitter friends–mostly on my mobile phone using Gravity–and reply to or retweet interesting messages. I also try to get ideas for blog posts or articles from my friends’ feed or from searches relevant to my interests. For me, Twitter is not a platform for simply shouting out my ideas, but rather a community with a rich cloud of information ready to be harvested and processed.

What about you? Do you tweet to read? Or do tweet to write?

How Long Should a Twitter @reply Take?

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If you were to reply to an email message, it’s generally acceptable practice to respond at your convenience, as you are able, or at the very least during the same business day. Email is not instant messaging after all. It’s like an exchange of letters. You send a message and you expect your correspondent to write you an answer in a similar fashion. Maybe the recipient needs to better digest the contents of your email. Maybe he’s researching and studying how to best respond.

Instant messaging, on the other hand, is different. It’s like a phone call–you expect the person you’re chatting with to answer as soon as you hit the “send” button. If we further compare to other modes of online communication, blogs handle it differently, because you write a message meant to be read, but you don’t exactly expect the reader to respond.

In a way, Twitter features these different characteristics from email, IM and blogging–of course, in 140 characters or less. You can write a tweet meant for consumption by the general public. You can write a direct message or a @reply directed at someone. And you can even have these exchanges of @replies on an instant basis, like being in a public chatroom where people can listen in.

Just this evening, after reviewing the day’s tweets by my contacts, I sent replies to a few. When I looked at the timestamps of the original messages, most were posted about 30 minutes to about an hour prior. But one of the tweets I replied to was already six hours old. In that case, was my @reply already too late? Was the original tweet stale already? What was the point of replying to an old tweet when twitter posts were supposed to be about “what [you are] doing right now?”

It’s like your neighbor asking you about the weather in the morning, and you get back to him later that evening that it’s a lovely moonlit evening, without a cloud in the sky. Where’d the rest of the day go?

In a way, Tweets are like blog posts, as they have time stamps and permalinks. And they’re sticky. Once you post a tweet, it’s public record and is searchable (unless you delete it), and so users looking for relevant material on the search engines or even Twitter’s own #search feature can chance upon your tweet, no matter how old it is. And whenever someone posts a reply, Twitter does have a record of which particular post that @reply was directed towards, and even links to the original tweet in the “this post was in reply to …”

Still, not all Twitter clients cite the tweet being referenced. And so sometimes the context is lost.

How long after a tweet should you reply? In the Twitterverse, what is considered fresh? How old is considered old?

I think for me, it’s reasonable to publicly reply to a tweet that’s at most one hour old. Otherwise, I insert a few keywords from the original tweet just to make sure the recipient and everyone else listening in would not be lost.

The Winning Way: an eBook Review

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If you operate a website or a blog, I’m pretty sure that you are obsessed with driving more traffic to your site. Readers and visitors are the lifeblood of a website or blog and attracting them is a big part of operating a web site.

Marketing a web site has become both a science and art form and has spawned a multi-million dollar industry. Internet marketing professionals can be found all over the web hawking their services to anyone who would care to listen. Search Engine Optimization has also become a buzzword for web site and blog owners because posting a decent showing in search engine results pages can guarantee an increase in readership or website hits. As owners of web sites and blogs you’ll need all the help you can get to increase the visibility of your web site or blog. Even though there are professional SEO and internet marketing companies out there, most people still prefer to do the internet marketing themselves especially if the site is still a starting out. The best way to learn is, of course, do research online. But this is where the dilemma comes in. The Internet’s biggest come-on – wealth of information – can be a bane if you are bombarded with so many different kinds of information that you just don’t know where to start and which advice to take. Wouldn’t it be great if we can find a distillation of all the great internet marketing strategies conveniently compiled in one handy reference. And wouldn’t it be wonderful if that handy reference would be offered for free?

That’s what Gyutae Park has done exactly. Park — an SEO specialist, internet marketer, blogger and entrepreneur — has been a nine year veteran of internet marketing, having worked for various companies and consulted with a number of corporations on their own SEO needs.

Park has compiled a wonderful new resource “The Winning Way – Ultimate Checklist of 500+ Proven Marketing Strategies” that will surely help the web site or blog owner that wants to improve their sites’ visibility on the net.

The Winning Way is a 118 page long e-book that compiles all of the useful advice and strategies culled from various blog posts, e-books, membership sites, internet marketing products and actual trial and error experience.

The information that you will get from The Winning Way is so invaluable and vital to any web site or blog endeavor that you will immediately think that this resource is going to be expensive. But in one of those nice surprises you can only find online, Park’s The Winning Way is actually available for free! That’s a $97 value! Park even goes a step further by giving a $50 guarantee. If you don’t find at least three new internet marketing ideas then he will send you $50 through Paypal. Another addition to the offer is that by downloading The Winning Way you also get an internet marketing newsletter (which you can unsubscribe to anytime).

You can download The Winning Way over the weekend for a good read.

The New Landing Pages

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With social media talk fluttering about, your product’s website doesn’t necessarily need to be discovered via search engine results or billboard ads (for more info, go to www.yourwebsiteyay.com). The past 3 years has brought forth a new set of “landing pages” for your brand. Here are some of them:

a. Social Networks: Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, Yahoo! 360 (eep, they’ve closed!)… the list goes on. But which one should you join? Which platform should you grow your community? Should you pick at random? Should you do all? The key is to experiment, yes but according to Gladwell’s principles in Blink!, you may already know the answer — go for gut feel. If you still need social proof, take a look at your referral traffic in your stats page. In my case, I run a blog for a local men’s lifestyle magazine and we figured that Facebook and Plurk (not Twitter), give us the biggest referral traffic next to Multiply.com. It’s gut feel, solidified with stats.

b. Apps: Brands are slowly realizing this, by taking their brand name into sponsoring or co-developing applications mostly for your mobile phone. The iTunes store, open social app development for social networks, the Nokia Ovi store, the Android store — a plethora of opportunities lies in ubiquity. So let’s think for a bit: do we put that flash game in our website or do we bring the game to our users onto their Facebook profiles and iPhone apps? I say the latter!

c. Brand Ambassadors: There’s nothing like good ‘ol word of mouth. Genuine word of mouth. Not those conceived “viral” messages that get passed on artificially. I personally think PR practitioners should be more attentive to what goes on in the circle of their “stakeholders” on the web. There are tools for this — Twitter hashtags are great ways for finding people who have good things to say about your product. Why not encourage them to love you more by giving them a little push (like a review unit of your upcoming phone). It isn’t about losing credibility. It’s about selection and being a smart marketer.

Sitepoint Marketplace becomes Flippa

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Most of you have probably heard of Sitepoint, either from its books, tutorials, or their well established marketplace, but over the last few years, they have been finding the marketplace becoming a community of its own. At first, they split off the design work to a new site, 99designs.com and now it seems the buying and selling of websites will be moved to a new domain called Flippa.

Currently in Beta, Flippa looks like a whole break with the current Marketplace, where 99designs looked fairly similar in nature to the older design market. The good thing is that they’ve moved over the user accounts so anyone that has or had an account on the old Marketplace, can use Flippa.

Why change the Marketplace on Sitepoint? Details are already on Flippa:

Why Flippa.com? If it ain’t broke don’t fix it!

In a nut shell, the SitePoint Marketplace has outgrown its tab on sitepoint.com. For this marketplace to remain the #1 location for buying and selling web sites, and for us to properly service the needs of our buyer and seller community, it simply had to have its own identity – it had to be set free from sitepoint.com. Once you’ve had a chance to look around the site we’re confident that you’ll agree it was the right move.

So far, there doesn’t seem to be much real content on the new site, as people test out the new site. How will we be able to tell the real sales from the fake as they run this Beta? Not really sure, but one thing is for certain, Flippa is something we will all have to get used to, and hopefully it won’t kill the community that has grown on Sitepoint.

Who Makes Twitter Great for You?

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With everyone talking about how few people actually Twitter, I wanted to take a second to reflect on those that make Twitter great for me. See, even though the following facts are true, I still enjoy Twitter:

A typical Twitter user contributes very rarely. Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. This translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days.

At the same time there is a small contingent of users who are very active. Specifically, the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production.

-source: Harvard Business Publishing

Everyone on Twitter has a few core people that they couldn’t bring themselves to unfollow. Be it because they are friends, family or because they say such amazing things that you couldn’t see yourself removing their nuggets of information from your daily stream.

Mine include the following:
@WTL – he is a good friend of mine in Ottawa that keeps my spirits up and Tweets about things I am interested in.

@markfox – my cousin, a fellow geek, and online gaming squad member.

@JimKukral – Inspiration to me in many different ways. Stays positive, works hard, and has interesting ideas that he follows through on.

@chrisbrogan – Another amazing inspiration to me. He is also a crazy Twitter conversationalist. Very friendly, helpful, and interesting to read, even just in 140 characters.

@jamescogan – Tweets some interesting business and new media stuff, as well as a few Canada specific things. Runs a media network with dozens of websites, on some pretty amazing Canadian domains.

@joetek – Brilliant guy, lots of fun, and posts great stuff on Twitter. He is one of the few people that ReTweet things I am interested in, acting almost like a Twitter filter for me.

@collis – The guy just exudes success. It will either make you very excited about working on the web, or very jealous. Depending on the day, I go one way or another.

@mike9r – I’ve been a fan of his design, his blog posts, and just the way he looks at the world. He’s been able to keep up that certain vibe on Twitter, and is fun to follow. He gives previews of his work, and some interesting opinions on various things.

Of course, I can’t list everyone I follow, nor all of the people that are great on Twitter, but those are my “key” people on Twitter that tweet at a decent pace, and that Twitter wouldn’t be the same for me if any of them left.

Who are the people on your Twitter list that you just couldn’t unfollow?

From Performancing Hive: May Edition

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For those of you that haven’t signed up to Performancing Hive, you’ll probably be surprised to see the type of content being published there, and so I wanted to give you a taste of what’s being said, and what topics are on-going.

Windows 7: Good or Bad and how will it effect workflow?
In this thread, I talk about my own early experiences with Windows 7, and we are also talking about how other operating systems compare. I also touch on the worry about Microsoft’s built-in nag software that will reset the computer every two hours once a certain date is past.

Presenting different ads based on nationality
We are talking about geo-targetting ads, and how easy/effective it is for various systems, scripts and tools.

Growth: What’s a Good Amount?
This is a very active thread with a variety of different views regarding the growth of a business, website, blog, revenue and more. A good amount of growth seems to be a heated topic.

These are just some of the topics continuing to be discussed by many blog experts with business details that could make or break your blog, especially if you are looking to turn it into a business or revenue building.

Hive is a great community, and while it has slowed in the last few months, the activity is still going strong and the topics are still more valuable than the membership cost. One of the little used advantages of Hive that I’d love to see people take advantage of is the fact that Hive is a think tank. With experts in nearly every field from design to business, Hive can connect you with the answers, ideas, or people to get your site to that next level.

If you are interested, head on over to Hive.Performancing.com and sign up today.