SimilarWeb for Helpful Site Stats

There are numerous and plentiful stat sites for your own affiliate sites or if you’re interested in seeing where your competitors are gaining or sending traffic.

However, a site we’ve been really enjoying lately called SimilarWeb has been insanely helpful for all things stat-related:

SimilarWeb – About Us: “The source of our data is the accurate collection of clickstream data from internet users all over the world. Unlike some providers who focus on a specific region or user type, our collection is done on a global scale, with a statistically representative cross-section of all types of consumers. This allows us to reach unbiased, all-round understanding of a website’s traffic.”

For instance, here’s ReveNews’ entry on SimilarWeb.

Or here is CouponCabin.

You get the point.

This is fun and very helpful. Go and enjoy this awesome free tool.

Plunk for Mobile Site Testing

Plunk is a nifty and easy-to-use utility that allows you to upload a mobile screen image of a site you might be testing or designing, share it with others and get a report 48 hours later of where people touched their screen.

It’s totally for mobile sites and I think it’s an ingenious idea given the analytics you get:

Plunk – An easy way to test clicks on a mobile phone…

“Here are 5 ways Plunk will help:
1. User intuition. See where touch screen testers want to click on your page.
2. Improve functionality. Visually review where users are expecting to find that new button.
3. Retain interaction and engagement. Test where mobile users are getting lost due to either navigation or design and keep their attention locked.
4. Mobile conversion. Feedback for creating a great design will encourage more mobile activity.
5. Bob for those apples. Stuck deciding between new mobile designs? Send them out and dive into your results to find the best one!time and money. Plunk lets you test your mobile users’ clicks to figure out what works and what doesn’t.”

You can share the image to get results to your own social networking followers or to an email beta list etc.

Very cool and handy, especially for performance marketers using mobile (as you should be).

Twitter’s Essential Value to Marketers

It’s amazing to me that Twitter has grown from a (perceived) questionable platform of democratized reporting of breakfasts and cat activity around the world to a full blown news stream.

Well, not amazing… we saw it coming and we knew that Twitter or something like it, would eventually fill the place that RSS started carving out in the early 2000’s.

This is pretty solid testimony for what Twitter means to the news business:

How Twitter won the social media battle for journalism | The Wall Blog: “More telling is the comment from Joanna Carr, editor of BBC Radio 4′s news programme ‘PM’, who said she ‘wouldn’t hire anybody who doesn’t know how to use Twitter’.

From that you get all you need to know. Twitter has quickly made itself an essential modern journalism tool for news journalists.”

(Via Matthew Ingram on Twitter)

So what does this mean for marketers?

The same thing Twitter meant for marketers in 2007 when I wrote this on CostPerNews:

It really is amazing to see how these conversations have started to sprout up as more and more people in our sphere get involved with these micro-platforms. I took a great deal of heat for being a Twitter fan boy late last year, but those same people who gave the heat are now (for the most part) realizing the potential that these programs have for their marketing efforts.

After all, marketing is just the spread of information about an idea, service, program, theology, ideology, offer or emotion… what better way to do spread that information in an attention deficit world than through micro-chunks?

I still stand by that.

Just as it is no longer an option or convenience for press professionals to not use Twitter, it is not an option for performance marketers to continue to either ignore or just use Twitter as a broadcasting medium in 2013 (or 2007).

Importance of Marketing Plans

Whether you’re doing search marketing, affiliate marketing, SEO, social media, PPC or some combination of those it’s always important to at least have a framework plan set out.

Here’s a quick and easy post that helps spur some thoughts about marketing plans and what you could be doing to improve your campaigns…

Writing Marketing Plans – SEO Book: “Writing forces an analytic approach. The act of writing something down often brings about new ideas because it gets us out of the routine of ‘just doing’. Secondly, writing plans helps us write better proposals. A marketing plan is about both an analysis and a form of communication. It’s a means to get across your ideas to clients and other partners and convince them of the merits of what we’re doing.”

Importance of Social Media Curation in Marketing

Great questions and answers here:

Social Media Curation Guide | SEOmoz: “Last year on SEOmoz, I published The Content Curation Guide for SEO, which – even though it is still valid – I thought it needed a fresh addition. Not only does this post update some of the information shared, but it also digs deeper into an aspect of content curation that is actually the most used and, possibly, useful to SEOs and Content Marketers who must deal with more duties than just curation: social media curation.”

The web is social in 2013 regardless if you’re participating in Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ etc with your affiliate site or branding site or company. Finding the proper balance between your own voice while putting together interesting links for your intended and/or potential audience (or group of customers) is so incredibly important.

If you’re not thinking of social media curation as a part of your performance marketing effort, you’re not thinking of the whole picture.

Tumblr’s Untraditional and Provocative Mobile Advertising Approach

It’s interesting to note that Tumblr is taking a different approach to monetizing its rabid and highly-participatory audience… rather than selling IAB-style display ads or keyword based text ads, Tumblr is encouraging brands to put their own content out there as ads and use more organic means such as the built in views or hearts paradigms as measures of engagement.

Tumblr to Introduce Mobile Advertising to Help Achieve Profit – Bloomberg: “Tumblr, a startup founded by Karp, now gets more than 16 billion monthly page views worldwide, according to Quantcast Corp. To reach those eyeballs, companies won’t be able to buy display space or keywords in the ways they are accustomed — Tumblr is ‘not going to get into the regular ad network,’ Gottfrid said.

Instead, they have to pay to get their own Tumblr blogs seen by more people. They can measure impact by how many viewers republished the post on their own blogs or ‘hearted’ it.”

Twitter’s card-based display advertising and promoted tweets platform has been an up-and-down adventure for many advertisers and marketers because Twitter is asking companies to place a style of advertising on top of community that doesn’t operate in such a fashion.

Tumblr’s approach is definitely refreshing in that they are welcoming advertisers and marketers but asking them to not just bring traditional Madison Ave constructs to the service but to actually participate using methods that the users use and are familiar with themselves.

I can’t wait to see how the numbers go for this.

Tara Hunt Explains the Secret to Great Social Content

Tara lays it out with a nice analogy and rock solid advice at the end:

The Secret to Great Social Content – Tara Hunt on LinkedIn: “Quite often, people seek out things like formulas and best practices and all sorts of ways to ensure the best outcomes. Books and posts and articles and infographics are gobbled up whole in order to satisfy an eager marketers desire to implement a ‘highly impactful’ content strategy. These types are Hedgehogs. They will see a popular 700×700 inspirational quote being passed around Facebook like wildfire and think, “A-ha! That’s the key! We need to create more square inspirational quotes!'”

Head over and read the post, it’s worth your time to reflect on how you’re making content for social media tied to your marketing campaigns and efforts and how effective you’re really being with your words and images.

Marketing in 2013 requires heart to be successful and marketers all-too-often forget that.

Twitter Killing TweetDeck on Desktop and Mobile

I run TweetDeck on my beloved ChromeBook because of the rather impressive Chrome app that Twitter has created for the interface. To be honest, this isn’t really that surprising given that TweetDeck has been moving towards the web and away from its roots in Adobe Air:

An update on TweetDeck – The TweetDeck Blog: “TweetDeck is the most powerful Twitter tool for tracking real-time conversations. Its flexibility and customizable layout let you keep up with what’s happening on Twitter, across multiple topics and accounts, in real time. To continue to offer a great product that addresses your unique needs, we’re going to focus our development efforts on our modern, web-based versions of TweetDeck. To that end, we are discontinuing support for our older apps: TweetDeck AIR, TweetDeck for Android and TweetDeck for iPhone. They will be removed from their respective app stores in early May and will stop functioning shortly thereafter. We’ll also discontinue support for our Facebook integration.”

I’m actually excited about this and hope that Twitter continues to put dev resources towards the product that I’ve been using for many many years now as my go-to “Twitter power user” app.

Facebook Responds to Pay-to-Play Allegations

Facebook says we’re wrong about its pay-to-play scheme for surfacing content in users’ news feeds:

Fact Check – Facebook Newsroom: “There have been recent claims suggesting that our News Feed algorithm suppresses organic distribution of posts in favor of paid posts in order to increase our revenue. This is not true. We want to clear up any misconceptions by explaining how the News Feed algorithm works.”

It’s interesting to see Facebook take to their blog to defend their algorithms the day after the original post in the NY Times.

Instagram and Affiliate Marketing

Instagram continues to be a hotbed of brand engagement with users despite concerns about its new privacy policy and its souring relationship with Twitter:

Despite a Rocky Road, 59% of Top Brands Are Now Active on Instagram [STUDY] – SimplyMeasured: “With 90 million monthly active users, 40 million photos per day, and 8,500 likes per second, Instagram has now managed to attract 59% of the world’s top brands. The past three months have seen a number of new feature and policy changes on the network, creating both incentives for brands to adopt, but also a backlash among users.”

However, how well does Instagram work with performance marketers? Brand marketers seem to be having a field day with the service, but is there any translation to the affiliate or action-oriented segment of marketers?

Aside from approaches that use bots and questionable tactics, it is quite possible to do well with affiliate marketing using Instagram.

For starters, Instagram’s visual nature makes it a no-brainer for connecting with product driven affiliate offers. If you’re marketing something that is service related, show results of your service or how it helps people get something done or done better.

Instagram’s ability to help people make connections by performing as a visual aid is a natural fit for affiliate marketers as well. As with all marketing, you want to “show not just tell” and Instagram is great for showing stories or snippets relevant to your campaign.

Instagram’s connections with Facebook shouldn’t be taken for granted either, since the service can quickly send visual images into the Great Walled Garden.

As with the early days of Twitter and its growth of a community ethos, it’s important to keep in mind that people value the visual function and fun of Instagram but won’t react in a positive way to pure spam. So keep community rules in your mind if you’re going to use Instagram in your affiliate campaign.

Most importantly, use your head and keep your stats.