In Part One I reviewed the challenges facing affiliates and the reality that adaption is the only way to survive. So if you’re an affiliate wondering about your future options, I recommend that you become  your own network/affiliate/OPM/merchant. It’s actually easier than it sounds.

Forget promoting every merchant under the sun. I’d hesitate even promoting a general niche, like sporting goods. If you as an individual were searching for a new baseball glove, and the search results showed the normal results (e.g., the famous name sports sites and a few unknowns) do you keep searching for your own generic sports site? And just like the coupon model I mentioned last time, you’d still have to belong to every sports merchant on every network.

My advice? Pick one item, for example “pink pajamas.” (remember the pink pajamas?) and make yourself the go-to authority on it. Blog it! Tweet it! Facebook it! When people hear your name, they should think pink pajamas.

First, using “pink pajamas” as an example, get a website with those words. Next, using the Google keyword tool, find the exact words people use in searches and plan your web pages based solely on those keywords. If people are searching for “pink pajamas for people with short legs” use that as a basis for a web page. You don’t decide what a web page contains. You let the searches decide. You find out what they search for and create a page that answers their search queries.

Next you need to find pink pajama merchants. Compare at least a dozen. Decide the best for commission rates, cookie durations, terms of service, management, and get started with them.

Contact the merchant prior to applying to the program and tell them your plans. The fact that you contacted them puts you ahead of most of their affiliates. The merchant will remember you, be inclined to help you, and suggest things they know work. You now have a relationship with a merchant and that’s one of the most important things to have in affiliate marketing.

Once the merchant approves you, contact your rep at their network and tell them your plans. Since the network makes money when an affiliate generates a sale from one of their merchants, you now have another important friend in the business.

Now, stop and re-read the last two lines. I can’t stress enough how important it is to have the merchant and the network working towards your success. It changes the game exponentially in ways most affiliates never imagine!

Next, learn the basics of a website that converts. If you made a page for “pink pajamas for boys with short legs,” that’s the only content that should appear on that page. You do not want a banner for Priceline’s latest offer for Las Vegas on this page. Imagine you owned a brick-and-mortar store, and of all the pink pajama stores in the world, someone came into your store. You want to convert them into a sale, so you don’t distract them with anything other than what they came in for. They came in for short-legged pink pajamas. That’s what you tell them about.

Let them browse first. That means having some thumbnail graphics of the available choices, and then they click through to the product description page. There you tell them everything about the item you can get so they can make an informed decision now!

Even if you’re not a coupon site, give them a reason to buy now as opposed to later. Maybe your merchant has a coupon already. If not, ask for one. Look at the merchant’s page. Even if they don’t have an actual coupon, they almost definitely have a sale going on. For example, Summer Sale, Graduation Sale, or Christmas Sale are common options for most merchants. Also, look to see if they list “Suggested Price” and “Our Price.” If so, use it to your advantage on your own site.

Proven sales closers are an actual coupon (e.g.,10 percent off today), a seasonal sale (e.g., “Our annual summer savings sale is in full swing”), or comparing your “low price” to a suggested retail price. I can’t think of any merchant that doesn’t offer one or more of these options.

Lastly, check your link! Make sure it goes to the right page on the merchant’s site. Follow the merchant’s order process all the way through (e.g., until the buyer needs to supply credit card information) to make sure there are no surprises.

After all that, you still need to work on a back-up plan. Pick a second merchant on a second network and repeat the process. Now you have a merchant and a network working for you. You have a site that works. What comes next?

It’s time to tell the world. Create a pink pajama blog. Make the item sound fun, useful, and necessary. Send the blog visitor to your site. Pre-screen them, and send them off to the merchant. If your blog is fun and informative, the visitor will bookmark it and you can have repeat business just like a merchant!

Next you can create a separate pajama profile on Twitter and Facebook. This is not the normal profile for your family and friends where you tell them what you had for dinner. It’s strictly a profile for pink pajamas. Blog, tweet, and update Facebook at least once daily. Decide why you follow certain people on Twitter and emulate them. Their posts are probably upbeat and informative, making you want to click through to their website.

Search Twitter and Facebook for pajama keywords and friend those people. If you did it right, those people will tell their friends… who will tell their friends… and in no time you will be the go-to pink pajama authority.

Start with this, then little by little grow your brand. Add a third merchant. Add a blue pajama website. Or do what I do. Repeat the whole process with something totally different than pajamas. Become the authority of doorknockers.

In case you missed it, you have a website for pink pajamas. Since that’s all that you promote, you will rank well on the search engines by default. You only have to deal with a handful of merchants who are rooting for your success and helping themselves by helping you. The networks are on your side. Your niche is not saturated with thousands of other competitors. You’ve become the pink pajama darling on the social networks. Even people who don’t wear pajamas are re-tweeting you!

Success breeds success! You become the merchant’s best converting pajama affiliate. You get a commission bump. Better cookies. You get to the point where you can call the OPM’s private cell phone while he’s at dinner for a special coupon code you need tonight. You are… successful!

You duplicate your pajama success with doorknockers. Your network rep calls and asks if you could do the same thing you did with pajamas for a leather belt merchant if he gives you a great private offer. And so on and so on.

That’s how an affiliate adapts. That’s how an affiliate survives in this environment.

What are you doing take control of your future?

This article is taken from ReveNews

Unfortunately for affiliates, the last few years have seen many, mostly detrimental, changes in the affiliate marketing channel.

Networks became affiliates themselves, failing to see the obvious conflict. The bad players (like cookie thieves) multiplied and got smarter. Merchants opened up other profit channels and partnerships, making what we affiliates refer to as “leaks” the norm. Then there’s state governments’ pursuit of nexus, which put many affiliates out of business as retailers pull out of states that pass the so-called “Amazon tax.”

Perhaps most frustrating is the loss of affiliate advocates as they move on to new ventures. It seems that affiliates are under attack from every direction. No one seems to grasp that without “affiliates,” there’s no “affiliate” marketing.

So what are an affiliate’s option nowadays?

1. Encourage advocates, like the Haikos, the Donuts, the Scooters, to come back and motivate the rest of the affiliates.

2. We can head over to the dark side. Raise your hand if you ever thought of buying an email list, spamming it, and not caring? After all, you know someone else who does it and cleans up!

3. We can educate the merchants, networks and affiliates. Haven’t we done that for twenty years now? These people are not stupid. They know what they’re doing. That’s why they run the network or the merchant program. They get paid to make the company money.

4. Our last option (and the only one that makes sense) is to adapt.

After 20 years in the business, here are a few suggestions you can take or leave as the mood strikes.

First and most importantly, avoid the coupon/rebate model. Unless you have a better idea than the established ones (who I won’t name), you’re wasting your time. That model was saturated years ago anyway. Plus, as a coupon/rebate site, you have to list every merchant on every network. So every time a network or merchant makes an unfriendly affiliate decision, you have to swallow your pride and accept it.

Second, pay attention and learn about the current issues. What’s your state’s position on a nexus tax? Could your favorite merchant be bought out by another merchant you dislike? Make it a point to read forums, blogs, and sites like ReveNews.

Once you’re familiar with the issues, decide where you stand on them, and how important each issue is to you. A simple example is website leaks. Ideally, if you do all the work to attract a visitor to your site and then send them off to “Merchant A,” that merchant should not have any links off their website.

Finally, think about the sites you visit “as a person,” not as an affiliate. How many sites do you visit that don’t have any external links? My guess is none. There’s a way to look at it that makes sense: If you get a visitor looking for “pink pajamas,, and you send that visitor to Walmart’s pink pajama section, and that visitor clicks out of Walmart through a 1-800-Flowers Mother’s Day ad on the Walmart site. Maybe that visitor wasn’t serious about the pink pajamas to begin with.

Think about your own habits again. How many searches do you do daily with absolutely no intention of being a buyer that day? At least a dozen? Your job is to bring them in – and set a cookie – which you did! Be proud of your accomplishment! There’s probably 500,000 search results for “Pink pajamas”, and they clicked YOU! Take a bow!

Tomorrow: In Part 2 I’ll review how to leverage your expertise!

This article is taken from ReveNews

Despite some of the most rapid growth posted in web history, Twitter has a surprisingly low revenue stream. To fix this, the company is considering multiple ad format possibilities, including using the main tweet feed for promoted ads.

The New Twitter Ad Frontier

According to the Financial Times, Twitter is considering “introducing advertisements among the short messages that users see in the most active part of the social networking service.” In brief, that would mean that promoted tweets – currently located in unobtrusive portions of the site and sometimes even missing from third-party services, like TweetDeck or HootSuite – would be integrated with the standard messages.

That means much higher visibility, especially if the promoted ads are “glued” to specific positions (e.g., there will always be an ad in the third position down). Considering the demonstrable habits of Twitter users when it comes to clicking on links, this model may work beautifully – if it doesn’t cause a riot from users.

Other ad formats being considered include ads at the top of the tweet stream, and limited-time offers from companies who want to advertise (similar, if not quite parallel, to the Groupon concept). None of the ad models introduced thus far has had much success, and Twitter has been slow to implement self-serve systems.

The Future of the Tweet

Webmasters need to pay attention to Twitter’s movements here, partially because the company’s ad trajectory is unclear. Twitter has yet to commit to any course of action, despite repeatedly indicating that they plan to be “bold in the product decisions we make” and that the company is “always talking with marketers about ways they could potentially get more out of Twitter.”

But what should Twitter actually do? The idea of avoiding anything that causes a user backlash is cowardly, and Twitter’s claim that they will avoid anything that doesn’t “improve the user experience or serve our mission” needs to be carefully evaluated. There’s a long history of social media users whining about any change in their interface, even when the majority of users favored the new features.

It’s already status-quo to have a clearly labeled advertisement section in the front and center of where users interact. Social media isn’t just about being unobtrusive and allowing an open space, as beautifully idealistic as that is.

It’s about establishing a revenue stream that lets Twitter pursue greater enhancements and spread in the future, while allowing advertisers to take more direct advantage of a powerful medium. While $100 million in revenue is great,  Twitter can – and must – do better if it wants to stick around for the long haul.

This article is taken from Search Engine Watch

Misdirection is something that stage magicians do to get you to look away while they slip your watch from under the handkerchief before hitting it with a hammer.  It’s also something that you may be doing by accident with your site and, in the process, hurting your business.

How does misdirection apply in SEO? This isn’t an article about doorway pages or cloaking; rather, it’s about problems with the canonical form of the URL for your pages. 

You may think that you don’t have an issue, because you’re using the canonical tag, or you’ve got redirects set up on your pages to ensure that anyone who comes to your site (including the search engine spiders) ends up on the URL you want them to, with the content that you want them to see. 

Here are five different issues that may be causing you problems.

Incorrect Use of the Canonical Tag

If you’ve implemented the rel=canonical tag to specify to the search engines which version of the URL you want them to use, regardless of the one that they actually reached the content using, then you’re most likely ahead of at least some of your competition. You’ve reduced the potential for duplicate content issues, and can feel free to use tracking parameters to your heart’s content. 

Assuming the right URL is actually in the canonical tag.

Last year I recommended to a site that they use canonical tags. They asked for an example of a site that had implemented them well. I passed that site on to them, and their developers spoke to the developers of the other site. 

They decided that the easiest thing to do was to cut and paste the code that generated the canonical tags. Unfortunately, this also meant that they copied and pasted the hard coded string that set the domain in the canonical tag. So all their canonical tags pointed the search engines to the other site, which 404’d and got indexed by Google (this happened about a year ago, and I’ve not seen canonical tags that 404 get in the index since, so Google may have fixed this shooting-yourself-in-the-foot-with-canonical-tags issue by simply ignoring them in cases such as this).

Do your pages have a trailing slash (i.e., do they look like www.example.com or www.example.com/)?  If one redirects to the other, you need to make sure that your canonical tag contains the one that it’ll resolve to (if the non-trailing slash version redirects to the trailing slash version, then your canonical tag needs to have the trailing slash).

Infinite Redirects

This should be a fairly easy one to spot, as none of your users will be able to get to the page as the page redirects to itself, or in some cases redirects to another page, which then redirects back to the original page, and so on. The browser will whir for a couple of moments, then inform them of the error.  But if you have a large site, this may not be as obvious. 

The best way to identify infinite redirects is to look in the crawl errors section of Google Webmaster Tools where they’ll tell you all of the issues they’ve encountered while attempting to crawl your site.

Multiple Redirects

Your page was originally at URL A, then moved to URL B, so you put a redirect in place to send any traffic and link juice that was going to URL A to URL B.  Then somewhere down the road the decision is made to move to URL C.  So you put a redirect in place to send any traffic and link juice that was going to URL B to URL C.

That’s all you need to do right? No. You now need to go back and change the original redirects from URL A to URL B to instead point directly to URL C. 

If it’s been a year or so, and you’ve managed to go back and change all of the old links from URL A to go directly to URL B, then it’s less of an issue, but it’s still a good practice to make sure that there’s only a single redirect where you can. One site I worked with changed domains twice in the space of four weeks, getting these redirects right was absolutely something that we had to do to ensure that we preserved as much of our traffic as possible.

Using 302 Redirects Rather Than 301 Redirects

A 302 redirect is a temporary redirect, and should be used when you anticipate the URL you’re redirecting from coming back at some point (i.e., for a seasonal service that’s only active for part of the year). A 302 redirect sends users and search engines to the new URL, but don’t pass the link juice or page equity to the new URL.

A 301 redirect sends everyone to the new URL and passes some of the link equity to the new URL. If you’re using 302’s from a page that’s never coming back, you’re not taking full advantage of what you’ve already built up for that page.

Linking to a Non-canonical Form of a URL

If the canonical form of your page is with a trailing slash, you 301 redirect the non-trailing slash version to the trailing slash version, and you have the trailing slash version in your canonical tag.  Make sure that your navigation links all point to the canonical version. 

Many sites don’t have the correct form of the URL in their navigation, footer links, and article links – all they’re doing is wasting some of that link juice.  Make sure that your links on your own site use the canonical form of the pages they’re linking to.

Misdirection Correction Tools

Here are a couple of tools that can help you diagnose these issues. 

• Microsoft IIS SEO Toolkit – This is my initial go-to tool for any new site that I look at. It crawls as many pages of your site that you’d like (up to 999,999) and reports on errors such as those listed above. The major issue with this tool is that you need to have Windows Vista or Windows 7 for it to work. It also obeys robots.txt, so won’t crawls a staging server that’s blocked to crawlers.
• Bruce Clay’s Server Response Checker – There are other server header response tools out there, but this one gives the results in a nice screen grab format. Simply put your URL in the tool, and you’ll see what redirections are in place for that page.

This article is taken from Search Engine Watch

The Internet is crammed with useful resources for online marketers, but it can be hard to know what you need and what’s most important.

New marketers often ask me which pages and tools are most useful. So I’ve compiled this list of 21 tools and resources it’s a good idea to have handy. Feel free to enhance this directory by adding your own suggestions in the comments.

1. Google AdWords

No matter what size your budget, a new marketer can score some easy wins advertising around Google’s search results and across relevant websites. It’s simple to use, there’s a lot of guidance provided, and there’s a phone number if you need some human help.

2. Google AdWords’ keyword research tool

Google’s keyword research tool is great if you’re using AdWords but it’s also really useful if you’re not sure which terms to optimize your website for. Play around with this tool and see what effective long-tail phrases you can find.

3. Business Link’s Ecommerce guide

Before you get busy marketing online, do you know your legal responsibilities? Business Link’s guide to ecommerce best practise tells you precisely what you need to do to remain compliant, so it’s a must-read for a new marketer.

4. Twitter

Your company cannot afford to ignore the micro-blogging platform Twitter. Even if you don’t use it yourself, it’s vital to monitor for mentions of your organization so that you can respond to any negative comments.

If you have time to really engage with it, you’ll be able to engage conversationally with your customers and build great loyalty.

5. Rank Tracker

This free tool is offered by SEOmoz and lets you retrieve, store, and monitor websites’ rankings for certain keywords. It’s a real timesaver and allows you to monitor results over time, showing you how effective your SEO is.

6. Google Analytics

Google makes it astoundingly easy to assess the success of your advertising and optimisation. You can see and analyse traffic to your site, helping you hone your marketing efforts and increase your visitor numbers.

There are also tools available for Yahoo and Bing.

7. Google Trends

How popular is a search term you’re considering optimizing your site for? How are some searches measuring up against each other? How have searches for a particular term changed over a fixed period?

Google Trends allows you to assess and compare search terms, helping inform your keyword decisions and track popularity over time. This is particularly great for assessing the value and scope of seasonal keywords.

8. Copyscape Plagiarism Checker

Unique, keyword-rich content that invites inbound links is a major part of any SEO campaign. But the web is full of plagiarized content – and you want to ensure you don’t publish any.

So, if you’re using a copywriter and want to check the content is unique, or if you want to see where your website’s copy is being used, this checker is a great tool.

9. Google Webmaster tools

Google provides so many fantastic, free tools that there’s really no excuse for not knowing how well your website is performing.

Its webmaster tools service gives you detailed reports about how visible your pages are within Google search results. You can see information on internal and external links affecting your website and discover how visitors arrived at your pages.

10. Google Mobile Ads Blog

Google has many useful blogs but this is a particularly useful one. Mobile advertising is increasing in importance but is still a developing platform. Stay ahead of the curve by subscribing to this informative blog.

11. Spyfu

When planning your paid search campaign, it’s useful to know what your competitors are doing.

Spyfu lets you search by domain and see what a website is advertising on through Google AdWords, as well as which phrases it ranks for organically. That can give you some real insights for optimizing your own paid search campaigns.

12. SurveyMonkey

What do your customers think of your website, your products, or even your promotional campaigns? You can survey them for free using Surveymonkey, helping inform your future campaigns and strategies.

13. LinkedIn

A new marketer must not forget to promote him or herself too if they want to achieve career success. LinkedIn is an essential tool these days, allowing you to chronicle your career development, publish personal recommendations, and network within your industry.

14. HootSuite

There are so many social platforms for marketers to monitor that it can be difficult to remain on top of them all. That’s why a tool like HootSuite is so useful. It allows you to post, monitor and analyze interactions across multiple social networks.

15. Hitwise

This company compiles some of the most useful reports into consumer’s online behavior, across more than 165 industries. While you have to pay for industry-specific insights and research, Hitwise regularly releases relevant research into general online behavior, such as search engine use.

Any marketer worth their salt will stay abreast of this kind of research – it can be really effective when you’re making the case for further online investment.

16. comScore

Marketers should also keep an eye on research from comScore, another digital marketing intelligence agency.

Again, your budget may not stretch to customized research but the research that’s released for free can be exceptionally insightful, particularly if you’re marketing internationally.

17. Nielsen

The third research company you should keep an eye on is Nielsen, which measures and analyses consumer behavior across 52 different countries. It regularly publishes insights that can really inform your marketing, including major research projects (for example, it recently revealed the UK’s most-liked TV ads of 2010).

18. SEOmoz GeoTarget tool

This free tool is another useful gadget from SEOmoz. Targeting location-specific search terms can be a great way of driving highly relevant traffic to your pages.

Use this website to measure how well your site is optimised for a specific region.

19. Pingdom

As a marketer, you work hard to drive visitors to your website. But your hard work is wasted if the website doesn’t function smoothly once they land – you risk them simply bouncing away.

That’s why it’s important to keep an eye on the customer journey once they land. Pingdom allows you to test your pages and find bottlenecks that are affecting your website’s usefulness.

20. UK Internet Advertising Bureau

There’s actually a trade association for online advertising – the Internet Advertising Bureau. Even if you aren’t a member, the site is a trove of valuable insights, research, and best practice guides (although non-members don’t have access to everything).

21. Search Engine Watch

It’s essential to stay abreast of developments and best practice in the industry and websites like this one will help you. Regularly reading features, news stories and research ensures you remain up to date and don’t become complacent.

Make time to read articles and perhaps even debate and discuss them in the comments. Make it part of your daily routine.

This article is taken from Search Engine Watch

This month Google rolled out the latest features in the evolution of the product. These four features increase the transparency in display buying, and provide advertisers improved ways to optimize their programs. Let’s look at what’s new.

1. Relative CTR

This metric compares your CTR with other ads running on the same placements across the network. You can add this metric by selecting “relative CTR” in the campaigns and ad groups tabs (same steps for impression share, which I’ll talk about next). This is especially helpful because CTRs for display aren’t the same as search, and with many of these campaigns being run out of the same account it can provide context.

I looked at a few of our clients relative CTR metrics, and found that across all of these sample clients our total relative CTR was exactly the same. Could this be a coincidence, or just the newness of the metric? Hard to say, but I’ll be watching this closely over the new few weeks.

2. Impression Share

This has been in play for a few years in search, and is now available for display campaigns. This metric is used to better understand how frequently your ad is showing vs. available impressions, and what factors are limiting the ad from showing more frequently (rank or budget).

The impression share metric is a good directional tool. It helps you better understand how deep the market goes, and quantify the “how high is up” opportunity.

However, this is never a metric to be optimized against, similar to average position.
Optimization decisions should be based on conversion events, and not SOV metrics. One surprising thing about this metric is how much impression share can be lost due to rank even when the rank is in the top 3 (between 30 and 70 percent). Always remember how average position can be deceiving.

3. Content Ads Diagnostic Tool

Just like search, you have the ability to understand if your ads are running, and if not, why. This really helps in the display network where you can’t always find your ad out in the wild that easily. A simply click will allow you to see this data. Note: This won’t be available to all advertisers until July.

4. Unseen Impression Filter

If your ad is shown below the fold Google is predicting if someone will scroll down the page. If Google predicts that your ad won’t actually appear on the screen, then it will filter that out from the impression count.

This has been a pain point for media buyers, and while “predicting” when someone will scroll down isn’t the same as only having above the fold placements, it’s a start. This feature is automatically enabled, and requires no action to set-up.

Summary

For Google, these changes are great steps toward the evolution and transparency of display media. The digital media world continues to move toward a “paid media” world where the lines and metrics around both search and display get gray. This evolution will allow marketers to make better targeting decisions to consumer throughout the funnel, and create a better experience for consumers.

Search Engine Watch

I’ve previously written about how to keep up to date in search and offered tips for paid search newbies. This time I’m focusing on resources from the search engines that will help anybody working in PPC – newbie or seasoned hand – continue learning or refresh their knowledge.

Official Google PPC Resources

Google has a plethora of blogs, YouTube channels, Twitter accounts, and Facebook pages publishing information and offering tips and advice every day – alongside their static support pages and Google Groups.

Fortunately somebody at Google has noticed and there’s a directory of the official Twitter, Facebook, blog and YouTube presences of the search giant in their press section.

PPC Blogs

The blogs to note are: the overall search blog Inside Search, which features updates to search result layout and other interface changes, Inside AdWords, the Agency Blog, the Merchant Blog (if you’re using Product Extensions), and the Google Analytics blog. Most of these have accompanying Twitter and Facebook presences if you prefer to receive updates that way or interact.

PPC Videos

Google also have a number of YouTube channels introducing how to achieve specific tasks in AdWords and Analytics – again there’s a whole section in the directory via the above link. The notable ones are the Business Channel, which covers Analytics, AdWords and related topics; the Google Analytics channel; and Think with Google, which features videos from Google events and talks about business verticals or topics.

PPC Webinars and Seminars

Google also offers online webinars about AdWords topics in an online classroom, which can be viewed live or afterwards, and well as physical training sessions, (which have a small cost, unless you’re invited by a Google rep).

PPC Resource Collections

Google also maintain a number of sites that collate resources around topics / types of advertiser – including the Agency Support Area, Small Business Center, and Google for Advertisers, which spans all of their advertising products.

PPC Support and FAQ Pages

Alongside all of these resources, there are also the standard FAQs and support pages – AdWords Help including a beginner’s guide, a list of current known issues with AdWords, help pages for Merchant Center, and for Promoted Videos on YouTube.

PPC Google Certification

Google’s exams across AdWords and Analytics are a topic for a post in themselves. Even if you’re not taking the exams, the Learning Center is a good reference work for AdWords in particular.

Bing and Yahoo PPC Resources

Microsoft have a well established resource center for adCenter and their other ad products with the adCenter blog and forums, as well as beginner’s guide and help pages. There’s also a Bing Search blog.

Yahoo’s help offering is comparatively limited – and only now relevant outside the U.S., given the Search Alliance.

Alongside the official resources, there are of course multiple blogs and sites with more advice, news, and videos – many of which are included in my earlier article about staying up to date in search.

This article is taken from Search Engine Watch

It’s time to educate yourself about such obstacles, so your next app proposal … Read the full article at MarketingProfs

We all know Facebook commands the attention and inspiration behind most social network headlines. Twitter may merit more attention from time to time, but we can only focus on so much – and we accept the light blue as quietly lingering in the dark blue’s shadow.

Add LinkedIn, YouTube, and search to the discussion and we start running into the modern marketer’s problem: how to keep up with it all. Despite discussions that compare the effectiveness of social networks for marketing – or, on the flip side, speak to how they are leveraged holistically – it’s beneficial to take the time to focus on a single network… to catch up, if you will.

Given the growth and recent activity, there are good reasons today’s topic is Twitter. I like to ask myself the following kinds of questions when narrowing focus on any social network:

1. What does the growth of this network look like relative to the last several months and/or year?
2. How is the network being used from a user engagement perspective? How is it providing value?
3. How is it evolving or demonstrating it will continue to be relevant?
4. Am I confident I know what I should know about this network to use it in the most effective way I can?
5. What can I do today that will help make a positive difference? 

Twitter Engagement

The power of Twitter from an engagement and measurement perspective is all about the links that get clicked within tweets.

For example, Ryan Sarver (Twitter’s head of platform) recently cited a Quora stat stating “every tweet going out from their service results in an average of 30 clicks back to Quora.” Twitter’s President of Global Revenue, Adam Bain, says 80 percent of Twitter user engagement is clicking on a link inside the tweet.

The Quick Facts

Aside from the pure click value, or the stats provided below that prove the network is still significantly growing, we should also be looking at the big picture in terms of where the Internet is going: mobile.

• Pew Internet’s May 2011 survey shows 13 percent of online adults are now on Twitter, and 54 percent of users with a cell phone access Twitter via mobile. Usage of 30-49 year olds has doubled since November 2010.
• At the end of Q1 2011, Twitter reported a 182 percent increase in the number of mobile users over the past year, and an average number of 460,000 new accounts created per day over the prior month.
• The average number of total tweets sent per day (February-March 2011) was 140 million, compared to 50 million per day one year ago. Note: There are approximately 200 million Twitter accounts, total.

Twitter’s Push in The Mobile Evolution

Earlier this week, mobile data from Flurry demonstrated that consumers spent an average of 9 percent more time on mobile apps than the web (a 91 percent annual increase of time spent on mobile).

Categorically, this translates to 32 percent of mobile app consumption on social networking and 47 percent on games. While Facebook is ramping up its Project Spartan to potentially compete with Apple by distributing its own mobile applications through the browsers loaded on iPhones and Androids (via HTML5) – Twitter has instead partnered directly with Apple, effectively enabling a “Twitter Connect” into Apple’s new operating system (iOS 5).

You can get the details and a better understanding of this new development via this post on how Apple has handed Twitter the keys to the iOS kingdom, but the bottom line is Twitter is now well positioned to continue growing (while being extremely relevant) through the immediate future of the Internet.

Next Steps: Start Growing Your Twitter Presence for the Future

Now that we’ve acknowledged some key elements to Twitter’s growth, engagement habits and future in mobile, it’s time to get motivated.

There’s certainly no shortage of tips, tactics, and tools to leverage Twitter strategies. Brandon Whalen’s post on Twitter growth strategies is the most recent and comprehensive I’ve seen, with the 20-page Slideshare presentation encompassing most of the content.

Here’s a summary of the areas you’ll want to address, along with the content this presentation covers below:

• Steps on building trust: Listen, actively respond, and be interesting.
• Twitter dos and don’ts: Guidelines and references on rules.
• Twitter SEO: Make your account easy to find.
• Audience targeting: Find influencers and understand your audience.
• Management methodology and monitoring tools: Tasks, messaging, and tools.
• Twitter gaming applications: Game types, benefits, and platforms.
• Promotion and content strategies: Cross promotion and brand touch points.
• Paid advertising options: Promoted tweets and third-party ad products.

This article is taken from Search Engine Watch