Online Marketing Using Social Sites

Yes, it's all the buzz - Social Bookmarking, Social Networking, Web 2.0, blah, blah, blah. But what is it?

Well, you're standing in it.

This page is on one of those "Web 2.0" sites. They are places where people get together, and the users generate the content. Usually, there is some kind of ranking system that users can apply to one another's pages. (If you scroll down to the bottom of this page, you'll see "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" buttons - that's how people vote on whether this is a good page or not. Please give me a "thumbs up" while you're there!)

Google likes Web 2.0 platforms, because the pages are filtered by human beings, which means the popular ones are more likely to contain good quality, relevant content. Google gives a lot of weight to links from pages which are popular on Web 2.0 sites.

This means that links from these sites to your site are very valuable.

Over the next few weeks, I will be updating this page with information about the various sites, how to best use them to promote your site, and any things to beware. I'm starting with Hubs (as you can see), although I have also made one Squidoo lens about kids and money. More about Squidoo when I have learned more.

This week I spent an hour on the phone with one of the top internet marketers, Jeff Dedrick, and he told me that he pretty much uses Web 2.0 strategies exclusively at the moment.

Of course, the landscape is constantly moving, and in a year, everything may be completely different.

But we are here and now, and we need to know this stuff!

What's so great about this whole Web 2.0 thing?

The Holy Grail of internet marketing is free traffic, AKA organic search traffic. People type in one of our keywords, our site comes up in the results, and they click on it.

Web 2.0 sites give us a leg-up in getting free traffic.

The reasoning goes like this:

We have a website (or several) where we sell something. We'll call this The Money Site.

Now, we have learned over time a range of things that we need to do with The Money Site, to make sure we get maximum conversions, and maximum revenue. The problem is, these things aren't always compatible with Google's idea of "quality content". In fact, since users generally don't much like being sold things, those very features (like opt-in boxes and pop-ups) are the things which will stop The Money Site from ever making it to the front page of the organic search listings.

So Round Two in the SEO war begins.

We get ourselves a blog, because Google loves blogs, and we dress it up with all the things the Google likes to see. We hope to get our blog posts to show up on the front page of the organic search results, and over time we hope that the incoming links from our blog (and other blogs who syndicate our content) will overcome the penalties that Google imposes because we are selling something on The Money Site.

In the meanwhile, at least we can get people to find our blog via the organic listings, and hopefully they will then follow one of the links from our blog to The Money Site.

We also write articles and post them on the article sites, because Google loves the big article sites. If we do it right, we can get our articles on something like ezinearticles.com to show up in the first page of search results. Just like a blog post, the articles contain links to The Money Site. Once again, we hope that the incoming links boost The Money Site up the organic search listings, and in the meanwhile we rely on people who find the articles to click on the links and come to The Money Site.

Think of Web 2.0 pages as something akin to a blog or an article directory. Sites like HubPages and Squidoo allow you to create articles with more than just words - you can also include pictures, videos, RSS feeds, news feeds, and lists of links.

These pages perform the same function as a blog or an article in an article directory - they create a page which has a link to The Money Site, and they put that page somewhere that Google thinks contains Good Things.

Right now, these Web 2.0 sites have a lot of credibility with Google. I created a HubPages hub called "Business Ideas For Kids", and the very next day it was appearing on the first page of Google search results for "business ideas for kids".

It's a couple of days later as I write this, and that hub isn't on the first page today - but my bookmark on Digg, pointing to that page, is showing up on the first page instead. So I still have the chance to grab that surfer and pull them into a web of pages, blogs and bookmarks that will eventually lead them to The Money Site.

And that's what it's all about.

The next day: Well, it's early days, but as of yesterday my Hub author status is now high enough that any of my Hubs which rate over 50 will now have their links counted by Google. We checked out The Money Site's stats this morning, and two of the inbound links from HubPages are showing up. It will take a while for the Googlebot to revisit all those pages and discover that the links don't have "no follow" on them any more.

This has been a reasonably time-consuming exercise, several hours over the past four days, but I enjoy writing, and it's nice to be able to play with pictures and inset boxes and such, so I don't really feel as though I have been "working". I imagine it could get very tedious and frustrating for someone who struggles to write things, though, or someone who is not quite as comfortable with the technology.

I'm not a tech guru or anything, but I know how to search You Tube for videos, how to copy and paste links, and I've done a bit of desktop publishing in my time, so setting up the pages is no big deal for me. If I am working from an existing article, creating a brand new page with images, video, links to a whole bunch of other sites, and an RSS feed takes me less than half an hour.

The next day, and all my pages are "in the zone", high enough scores for my links to be indexed by Google, but what's this?

My author score (Hubber Score) has dropped dramatically. Now none of the links on any of my pages will count!

What happened?

I whipped across to the forum and belted out a plea for help. Fortunately, the HubPages world is very responsive, and within minutes I had some suggestions back. You can check out the thread to get the whole conversation, but basically, part of their algorithm is checking that you don't make too many pages which link only to a small number of sites.

I wish I'd known that to begin with!

I'd have amassed a much bigger collection of external links, or maybe rotated around several topics, instead of starting experimenting with "laser focus". Ah, well, we live and learn, and now we all know!

So I am working my way through the Hubs, adding and deleting links. If I can't get my Hubber score over 75, and keep it there consistently, then this whole exercise will be almost pointless.

On the other hand, since an opt-in page is frowned on by Google, I suppose the Hub pages would be like article directory pages, and possibly send some traffic my way via search results. It's a lot of work, though, because making a quality Hub takes half an hour, whereas submitting and article somewhere takes two minutes. I could get 15 article pages up in the the time it takes me to create one Hub page.

I have confidence, though. I think this is just a little glitch.

Back to the link editing ....

Well, it's about 8 hours later, and after a bit of link editing my Hubber score is back to the magic 75.

I have just published a few Hubs on an unrelated topic as well, which I am hoping will help increase the overall variety in my Hubs. I'm not sure at this point how much it will affect the overall rating to start a new group of Hubs on a different topic. Time will tell.

I am experimenting with structuring links between Hubs like an SEO silo. This link is to the Hub which acts as the index page for my new group.

An SEO silo consists of an index page, which links to all the individual pages that are optimised for particular keywords, and then an individual page for each keyword. The individual pages link back to the index page, and nowhere else.

This structure helps the spiders from the search engines to find all the pages with a minimum of going in circles.

I notice with my first group of Hubs only some of the pages have been indexed - at least only some of them have been indexed while by Hubber Score was over the magic 75. We're watching to see when the links show up on the Yahoo database.

Maybe if I structured the links between those pages better, I could get a more efficient journey through them happening.

Later. I've done way too much link editing already today!

Another 12 hours, and my Hubber Score is hovering perilously close to 75. I'd really feel a lot more comfortable if it was over 80. I just can't work out what do to get it there. Sigh.

Today I will publish a couple more Hubs, and get myself up off the bottom row of the table in terms of number of Hubs. But I saw someone yesterday who only had 7 Hubs and had a Hubber score of 90, so I am not expecting that to give me an automatic boost.

I am starting to wonder whether bringing in traffic is the only way to stay comfortably above 75.

Given that my Hubs don't actually make me money in and of themselves, that means I would be diverting traffic-generating activities from my Money Site to the Hubs, and possibly losing sales in the process. Hmmmmm ... could it be that these Hubs only work if you can push lots of traffic to them in a short period of time?

Maybe they are good for launches, but not as a long-term foundation for quality traffic.

Then again, we need to be very clear about the purpose of the Hub pages. Are we trying to get the Hubs to appear in the organic listings, give great content on them, and hope that brings "warm" traffic directly to our Money Sites?

Are we trying to get the Hubs themselves to show a profit?

Or are we happy to have the Hubs gathering dust most of the time, as long as overall they are good enough that the links to our other sites count?

Each of these three objectives would require quite a different strategy.

Yesterday I received Derek Gehl's latest Internet Marketing newsletter, which contained the following warning from Marketing Manager Dwain Jeworski:

According to all the current hype, Web 2.0 means TRAFFIC -- and lots of it.

The theory is that the more you interact on Web 2.0 sites like those mentioned above, the more you can expose potential new customers to your brand, and encourage them to visit your site.

And the more links you get pointing to your site from popular, high-PageRank sites such as these, the higher your site will appear in the search engine standings.

... Which means even MORE traffic to your site!

In practice, this is mostly true. Kind of.

Yes, you can drive a lot more traffic to your site from social media and bookmarking sites.

But -- and here's something the majority of Web 2.0 fanatics neglect to point out -- it takes a LOT of TIME and EFFORT to get that traffic.

And on top of that, a question that must be asked is: "What KIND of traffic do you get???"

We know that Web 2.0 traffic converts poorly. This means that Web 2.0 is not a great place to go to generate leads, and you really shouldn't expect to earn anything like a full-time income from Hubs and Squidoo pages.

The jury is still out on how much SEO value there is in having links from Hubs to your Money Site.

It is very time-consuming, getting this going, but at least it's fun!

If you can get links from someone else who has already done the work to get their Hubber Score up, so it doesn't cost you any time, then it's a lower risk strategy, and probably worth doing - they will be better value links than links from some related site that's on Page 27 of the organic search listings.

And my Hubber Score is still wobbling around the magic 75.

I asked again on the forum, and it doesn't seem I am doing anything particularly wrong. It may just be a matter of time. I have noticed that Hub score floats generally upward over the first few days after a new Hub is created, although the traffic levels mine are getting are low enough that the Hub Score for each page can vary by 5 points or more within a period of a few hours.

I am off to post a few comments on other people's pages.

This is where the whole thing gets time-consuming. On the other hand, some of these people might get to like my Hubs and actually post links to them on their Hubs. One day.

If I can't stabilise my Hubber score in the next week, I will have to write off HubPages as a viable platform for gaining backlinks, even when giving good content for free.

Having a Hub at #11 on Google, though, is not a bad thing. As long as the traffic from those organic searchers converts ...

Or so I am told.

Apparently I am worrying too much for someone so new, and these scores will settle down over time. Or at least, that's what an more experienced Hubber suggests.

As long as my Hubber score settles in the "green zone", over 80 ...

Apparently traffic builds over time, too. I wish I could see other people's traffic stats, not just my own. The best I can do is guess, based on the page score. Apparently the higher page scores only come from high traffic.

I am not aiming to have massively trafficked pages; as long as they are good quality they will rate over 50, and I'm not in this as a popularity contest!

Well, my Hubber Score (author score) has gone back over 80 today.

I don't have any unpublished Hubs waiting right now - those tend to have lower scores, because they aren't getting traffic, and the average Hub score affects my overall Hubber Score. I have been told that unpublished Hubs don't affect the Hubber Score, but other Hub authors have told me that their score seems to drop when they have unpublished Hubs "on the spike".

I had to wait for a while to publish the Hub on body jewellery, because we needed permission to use the copyright images. (If you're raising your eyebrows about the topic, I'll just point out that one of my girls has a business in that niche!)

Hopefully, this puts an end to the wobbles, at least to the wobbles below 75. It's just really frustrating looking at a score of less than 75 and knowing that if Googlebot wanders by while that's going on I'll lose all my link credits for some indefinite period.

Another day, and my author score has been over 80 all day. Hopefully Googlebot and the Yahoo! spider are happily snagging links from my Hubs and carrying them back to their respective Search Engine mother ships. To mix a metaphor.

So far, over 7 days, I have had 11 visitors who clicked a HubPages link and came to our landing page, 10 unique (so one was a repeat visitor). Two of those visitors opted in, and they looked at over 5 pages each on the site - so that's landing page, free content page, sign up page, and possibly the aMember data entry page, or our press clippings gallery, or maybe the Fundraising (affiliates) page.

Neither of them joined immediately, but at least if we're getting people through we can start split testing and improving the page content to increase conversion rates.

I suppose I can also start tweaking Hubs to see if I can improve the cllick-through rate from there, but as I said earlier we can't expect traffic from Web 2.0 sites to be particularly targeted, necessarily. It's not about getting floods of visitors clicking on Hub links and heading over to The Money Site. At least, at this point it doesn't look to me as though that's a viable reason to be doing this.

Now that I have solved the problem of keeping the links live, it's time to look at the performance of various forms of promotion.

Since I started creating Hub pages, there have been 13 visitors from Hub pages, 12 of them unique.

Over the same period, we have been running a Yahoo! pay per click campaign as an experiment.

That campaign has produced 11 unique visitors.

On the plus side for Hubpages, we don't have to keep paying each week to get that traffic, whereas we would have to keep paying to keep getting that traffic from PPC. On the minus side for HubPages, it took a lot longer to set them all up than it takes to set up a PPC ad campaign.

Both groups bounce at over 80% - that is, less than 1 in 5 opt-in and actually read the free content on the site.

As a comparison, the press release we sent out a couple of weeks ago is still attracting traffic, and they are clicking through to our landing page. Over this same period of time, 5 people have arrived via PRWeb, and those people are almost all opting in - only one bounced - and reading four or five pages of content each for an average of more than 11 minutes per visit.

Now THAT is quality traffic!

We get quite a lot of traffic from people just typing in the URL, too - some of that will be from print articles based on that press release. The people who just type in the URL opt in about half the time.

So far, it appears that the information was correct - traffic from Web 2.0 sites is not well-targeted and doesn't convert well. It seems, so far, to be about the equivalent of a cold PPC lead. That's a bit worse than I expected from Hubs, because a Hub contains an article, which should warm people up and qualify them a bit.

When I break it down further, 6 of the 13 HubPages visitors came from one Hub - my first Hub, Business Ideas For Kids. What's more, they were the only HubPages visitors who opted in.

It looks as though that particular Hub might be doing a good job of warming and filtering, even if the others aren't so good. That's the Hub that is almost on the first page of Google search results - and was on the first page for a day or so. It's probably worth putting some effort into trying to get that Hub back on the first page, given the quality of the visitors it is providing.

Another couple of days have gone by, and my Hubber author score hasn't dipped below 80.

I'm not sure which of the things I did made the key difference, or whether it was just passage of time, but now it's clear that I will no longer have to worry about whether or not my links are counting.

It takes a bit of ongoing effort to maintain an active presence in the HubPages community, and there is definitely a penalty if you fly in, drop a couple of Hubs down, and disappear. I will need to invest a few minutes a day reading the forums and other peoples' Hubs.

I have seen some of the earnings statistcs for people who have lots of Hubs and good Hubber scores, and I can safely say that nobody is going to get wealthy by Hubbing! About $1 per 1000 page views is a reasonable expectation. HubPages frowns on having affiliate links on Hubs (they don't get a cut of that revenue, whereas they do get a cut of the Adsense, Amazon and eBay earnings), so there is not really a viable business model for increasing the earnings per page view via adding affiliate sales.

Once again, we have confirmation that the reason to do this is primarily to get backlinks to one's Money Site landing page, and as a side benefit, some of the Hubs may actually serve to capture prospects, warm them up, and send them to the Money Site.

We're not doing this primarily for traffic, but some traffic may result. We have added an average of about 5 new visitors a day since I put up the Kids Money Hubs.

So far, Yahoo is recognising two of the inbound links from HubPages to our landing page. We can't find out as easily what Google has on record, unfortunately, but we can see from our log that a Googlebot wanders around our site very few days, so we can assume that Google also has at least a couple of the links on record now.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes for all the HubPages links to appear on Yahoo's list.

Check back in a day or two for further updates ...

Well, I'm not sure what it means, but over the past 24 hours I have had more traffic to my Hubs from search engines than from inside the HubPages site.

In the beginning, most of my traffic was from inside HubPages, or from social bookmarking sites like Digg and StumbleUpon.

Now, nearly 2 weeks in, I am getting 20 hits a day on my Hubs from organic search results. This must be a good thing, right?

I'm just not sure how to translate that through to a business result - but I'm sure it will come.

I noticed a bump in traffic to one of my Hubs yesterday, "How To Get What you Want In Life" (http://hubpages.com/hub/How-To-Get-What-You-Want-In-Life), and when I looked at the stats there was a bunch of traffic from places like mail.yahoo.com. It looks like someone (or maybe more than one person) has emailed a link to my Hub out to a list. Those who read the email in a web browser and click the link show up as traffic from mail.wherever.com, and there is also a bunch of traffic from "places unknown", which is likely to be all the people who click the link from inside their email client on their computer.

It's nice to know this happens!

I'll just file that in the "interesting - what do I do with this information?" folder for now ...

Well, I noticed a bit of an uptick in traffic to a couple of my Hubs, so I checked, and as of right now my Hubs are coming up on Page 1 of Google for "Business Ideas For Kids" and Page 1 of both Google and Yahoo for "How To Start A Business For Kids".

Yahoo is now recognising thirteen inbound links from Hubpages to our landing page, up from two last time we looked.

And my author score hasn't dipped below 75 in a week.

The question is - how much are those inbound links worth in getting our landing page up the search results? And how effective will the Hubs be at sending that search engine traffic across to the landing page?

Are Hubs going to be more effective than articles? Hubpages really, really wants the content on Hubs to be unique - not available anywhere else on the internet - which makes it fairly time-consuming to set them up. At least with articles you have the possibility that people will syndicate your articles to other websites, spreading more and more links around the net, whereas a Hub just kinda sits there ...

But that policy also means that the search engines like Hubs - I've never seen one of my articles hit the front page of the search results, even though some articles on ezinearticles do come up there, but my Hubs are doing it easily.

Again, I think it's very labor-intensive to set up your own Hub id and maintain the level of activity you need to keep your score above 75. But if you can find someone who already has that established, there's no time overhead, and your one or two Hubs can sit in their "stable" of Hubs and benefit from their activity, giving you inbound links and a bit of traffic.

Well, another week has passed, and my author score remains in the "green" zone.

I have noticed that my Hubs seem to rise and fall quite a bit - my list is by default sorted on Hub score, and the variable is usually traffic. A page will start to rise when it hits the front page on Google or Yahoo, then sink again a day or two later, when it has dropped to position 11-20 on the organic search listings.

Nobody knows why these things happen, maybe it's whether or not there's a hot news story on the topic.

But over time, I think the quality of the Hubs is making an impact on the search engines. They track pretty carefully how long people stay on a page they have clicked from the organic search results, and whether they then click other links and go deeper into the site. A good Hub will encourage both these things, and over time the search engines do seem to be picking up on it.

This is a pretty obscure keyword, right? How many people are going to type in "how to start a business for kids" in a search engine?

And the traffic volumes are small - less than a dozen visits a day, usually.

But look at the trend line, and notice what is happening with the search engine traffic.

The green area represents Yahoo search traffic, and pink represents Google search traffic. Over time, the search engine visits are increasing, indicating that this Hub is being shown on the first page of search results more and more often - especially at Yahoo at the moment.

Now, you will only get this effect if the content on your Hub is good quality. Throw up some PLR articles in broken English and a bunch of affiliate links to Clickbank, and you won't get this kind of love from the search engines. You have to write stuff that people want to read, find valuable, and then follow through to other pages.

Using groups, and displaying the navigation bar at the bottom of the page to other Hubs in your group, is a good way to encourage people to look past the Hub they land on.

You can also add links to your other, related Hubs, explaining how they fit in with the subject of this Hub, to encourage futher browsing.

I love pretty graphs!

Now, this Hub has failed to excite Yahoo. There is hardly any search traffic from there - and what there is is so small in number that it is lumped in with "other" sources.

Google, on the other hand, likes this page so much that we get a color for Google.com, and a separate color for Google.com.au.

Who can say why these two Hubs, on fairly similar keywords, should have such different results - one the darling of Yahoo, the other dancing about on and off the front page of Google?

This is why it's good to have several different Hubs based on related keywords, to give the search engines a nice smorgasbord of choices.

I created a new Hub to communicate what I believe to be the important dynamics of these Web2.0 sites - Web 2.0 Marketing - Fact Or Fiction? - and I have been overwhelmed by the response!

It seems that there is widespread disquiet in various Web 2.0 communities about people who appear, spam like crazy, and then disappear again, leaving a trail of spurious links in their wake.

If you're looking at using Web 2.0 sites in your marketing, make sure you read that page (and the very thoughtful and detailed comments that some people have left) before you plan your campaign.

Go to Web 2.0 Marketing - Fact or Fiction