Jacob S Paulsen's Blog, page 13

UTM Tracking Codes for Web Traffic Acquisition Reporting

I talk to a lot of digital marketers who drive a lot of web traffic from several different sources to their website but are currently unable to measure the value or conversion rates of these unique traffic channels. UTM codes can solve that problem.

For example, you may be buying paid search ads from Google Adwords, Bing, Yahoo, and other sources while also running large display campaigns. From each source you know your impressions and clicks but you may not know which of these traffic sources is sending the most interested and engaged customer to your website.

What Are UTM Codes?

Also know as UTM parameters and Urchin Tracking Modules, UTM codes are small snippets of text added in a specific format to the end of any web URL or link to help you isolate and track the web traffic from that link separate from the rest of your web traffic. Here is an example of a UTM code in use:

http://www.jacobspaulsen.com?utm_camp... &utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook

When you add UTM codes or snippets to your web URL it doesn’t change anything on the webpage. It only reports the source to your web traffic system. Generally, the user is none the wiser and even if they are an advanced user who understands UTM codes they would know that this doesn’t effect their web experience and the content they are seeing.

Within the code snippet added to the URL there are three different UTM parameters you can include. All 5 are optional but using all 5 when possible can be very important when you are running a lot of different online marketing campaigns and you want to be able to track and report each individually.

1: Campaign: utm_campaign=name. This tracking code is used to group various parts of a single campaign together. In Google Analytics there is a section for “Campaigns” where this would be reported and accessed.

2. Medium: utm_medium=name. This tracking code is used to report the type of online medium. Social, Email, Direct, etc.

3. Source: utm_source=name. The actual website or vendor that is sending you the traffic.

4. Content: utm_content=footerlink. Used to track the different types of content that point to the same URL from the same campaign, source, and medium codes. Often used in PPC or with two identical links on the same page.

5. Term: utm_term=keyword+keyword. Used to identify the keywords you’ve paid for in a paid search (PPC) ad.

You can combine and use any combination of these parameters that you would like. Also begin the UTM code with a question mark and separate them with an and symbol as shown in the example above.

Original article: UTM Tracking Codes for Web Traffic Acquisition Reporting.

[image error]

The Eternal Laws of Stewardship

I recently sat down with a very great group of men at my church and we spoke openly about the term Stewardship. Since stewardship is the governing principle or law between us and our divine creator (or insert here whatever eternal power term you prefer) its very important to understand how it works. The laws that dictate stewardship can be used to bless more people in a greater way if we understand them.

This is not meant to be a religious discussion exclusively but simply a look at how the laws of human behavior govern the outcome of our efforts. That said, I am pulling on religious overtones and taking some specific terms and ideas from Christian scripture. With that in mind, and with the help of my friends and my mom, I’ve come up with this short list of Laws and Principles of Stewardship.

Stewardship consists of all things with which we are given or blessed. All stewardship is a blessing and stewardship includes things, resources, time, responsibilities and assignments. This also includes our own body, talents, intuition, family, relationships, and physical and monetary blessings.
If we do not work to grow, cultivate, or take care of our stewardship we risk losing it. Certainly we all know that we must exercise our talents if we want to keep them but we must actively leverage all of our stewardship to serve and produce value for others if we are to keep and grow our stewardship.
To some is given more stewardship than others. We are not all born and raised in comparable circumstances. Thus, some are naturally blessed with a greater amount of resources (stewardship) to help them serve others. They still must choose what to do with that stewardship.
Stewardship is grown at the benefit or service of others. Since our Creator has given us stewardship in order to help others, when we are obedient to that purpose in creating value our stewardship is increased.
Some stewardship like assignments, roles, titles, and other responsibilities are temporary. We must do the best to magnify them while we have them.
To good stewards is given more stewardship. As states above, stewards who work toward serving others and creating more value for more people will be rewarded with increased stewardship.
Our greatest stewardship is the relationships we have with others including the relationship we have with deity.
Some stewardship appears to be a burden and other stewardship is more clearly a blessing to the steward. Regardless of the appearance all stewardship is given to the steward to bless them and others.
Stewardship needs to be prioritized: As one’s time is a stewardship, wise stewards work to prioritize and discern the best timing and importance of each stewardship as it competes for one’s time.
Stewards are accountable to he who gave the stewardship. Stewardship is not given lightly. We must give an accounting of what we have done with the stewardship we were given on behalf of serving others. We are judged and blessed not in comparison to others but in respect to what we did with what we were entrusted with.
A wise steward shall inherit all things. The creator wants to give us more stewardship. He wants to bless us. The ultimate reward given to the wisest stewards who magnify their stewardship, is “all things.” The great and wonderful reward.

Do you think I missed any?

If we can accept these laws of the universe and work toward obeying them our stewardship will increase and we will be able to help and serve more people in a bigger way.

>>Download Printable Laws of Stewardship Handout<<

Original article: The Eternal Laws of Stewardship.

Five More Ways To Get Me To Stop Following You On Twitter

Me being very annoyed at people on Twitter

I follow a lot of people on Twitter. Currently over 4000… this number fluctuates between 2 and 6 thousand depending on the season. I enjoy checking the news feed and retweeting and favoriting the best stuff. I don’t have any bandwidth for junk. Several years ago I originally published an article called “10 Ways to Guarantee I Stop Following You On Twitter” and today I want to add to that list with 5 more things I find annoying enough to warrant the “Unfollow.”

Nothing but quotes and retweets. I like a good quote and who doesn’t like some RT lovein but the people I follow have to provide original content and ideas as well.
Promoting Real Estate: Real estate agents, insurance agents, and other direct marketing folk have a tough job in social promotion. If you feel so inclined as to tell me about your latest listings, products, etc I will probably hit the big red “Unfollow.” It just doesn’t create any value for me in the moment.
Twitter as an alternative publishing platform. If you think Twitter isn’t good enough to warrant your time to publish to it directly than we can’t be virtual friends. This is evident by the fact that all your tweets have fb…. and instagram hyperlinks that show you only publish on Facebook and Instagram and have those networks setup to push to your Twitter account. I love Facebook and Instagram too but if that is where you are all the time I don’t see any value in following you on Twitter.
Unresponsive. I hate it when I call someone out (individual or brand) and they don’t respond. For a brand its shameful. For an individual it means you don’t invest into the platform and so I’m not going to invest into you where you aren’t proactive.
Hashtag Vomiting. Yeah… we’re all over it. Keep it to a max of 3… if you put in 5 hashtags we are finished.

Original article: Five More Ways To Get Me To Stop Following You On Twitter.

This RSS Trick Supports SEO Strategy and Sharing

Online marketers are taking and re-purposing your content. Did you know that? Have you see the tweets that say “The ____ daily is out” and tag you or a small number of other users? These daily sites are just aggregate sites that pull together blog posts from many other users that share a common interest or topic or event. If you feel a sense of pride that your content was worthy to be included you need to stop and rethink that.

Google and other search engines don’t like duplicate content. The idea that your entire blog post has been republished is not necessarily to your own benefit. It could be hurting you.

There are other ways and methods that are being used to re-purpose content and all of them leverage your site’s RSS feed to read and re-publish your content. The best thing you can do to ensure that this is not only to your determent but also becomes and advantage in your marketing strategy is to include a link at the bottom of every RSS feed item that links back to the original post.

If you include a link at the bottom of each RSS feed item you will also make it easier for your RSS subscribers to come back to your site and explore more content. You also will get more backlinks back to your site whenever your feed is picked up by an aggregate site. Lastly that link will tell Google and other search engines that you are the original author of the content.

If you use WordPress the easiest way to accomplish this is to install a plugin that automatically inserts the link for you into the RSS feed. My favorite plugin is “Copyright Footer RSS.”

Install and activate it and you are good to go. You will start seeing something like this at the end of your RSS feed:

Original article: This RSS Trick Supports SEO Strategy and Sharing.

How Do You Get A Klout Score of 60 and Why Do You Care?

Short Answer: Stop worrying about your Klout score and start creating value for people online.

Klout Overview:

If you aren’t familiar with Klout, this website set out to measure the online influence of people. They give every online user a score between 1 and 100 and connect marketers and brands with users that are influential in the topics most important to the brand. Since their launch there have been some competitors that have come into the space as well. You can setup your account at Klout.com and connect your profiles from your various social networks.

According to Klout the average score is about 20. A score of 50 would put you in the top 5% of users and a score of 63 would put you in the top 1%. Klout also identifies and allows users to identify for themselves topics around which they are or mean to be influential.

How Does the Klout Score Work?

Naturally Klout isn’t going to share their full algorithm for how they calculate scores. There are some things that we know both because Klout has shared the information and through testing.

Connecting different social networks will only help you. Engagement from different social networks adds to your Klout score incrementally. If you have low influence on one network adding it will still only help your overall score.

Things you would assume effect engagement do effect the Klout score. Comments, like, favorites, shares, and retweets for example all increase and drive your Klout score.

Why Might You Care?

Your Klout score can certainly help stroke your ego I suppose. Some people also setup their account so that they can receive Klout perks. Perks are the “gifts” given to users from brands based on their influence in a specific topic.

I think most importantly you should think of Klout as a way of measuring if you are doing it right. Are you, or is your team, really engaging your network and audience correctly. Do people care about your brand and open themselves to engage with it? Klout is a way of measuring that. It isn’t perfect but I think its the best tool we have.

Example: I have a friend who has less than 1000 Twitter follower and he has a Klout score of 63. I have over 20,000 followers and my Klout score is 60. So which is more valuable, engagement or size of audience? ENGAGEMENT is more valuable and that is why the Klout score removes the smoke screens and allows us to see what really matters.

So Your Focus Should Be On:

Identify what you want to be known for.

Create and push out value for people around those topics.

Focus on people. Engage them and care about their content as well.

 

Original article: How Do You Get A Klout Score of 60 and Why Do You Care?.

The Marketer’s Ultimate Guide to RSS

In the next 5 minutes it will take you to read this post you will become an expert in all things related to RSS and how it can be used and leveraged for online marketing. Hold on to your seats.

What is RSS?

RSS originally referred to Rich Site Summary and more recently is dubbed Real Simple Syndication. Whatever it stands for it refers to the format in which content is published on a website (generally a blog or news site) that allows that content to be FED to outside sources or subscribers.

To technical? Essentially RSS is the technology or format in which EVERY news site and EVERY blog publishes their content. You’ve see the cool orange icon that looks like a wifi symbol on it’s side all over the internet and now you know what it is for.

If you are using WordPress you can find your RSS feed by typing in www.yoursite.com/feed/. If you are the site of someone else you can generally find the orange icon somewhere to guide you to their feed. Some of the larger news publishers may give you multiple options to subscribe to the RSS feed of a specific content category (DenverPost Example).

Where Is It Used?

It is used everywhere online. Site publishers have a great need to be able to somehow automatically publish their newly published blog posts or news stories out via email, to social networks, or direct to RSS subscribers. The uses are endless and it is the standard format for the entire web. Different browsers read RSS feeds differently so depending on what type of browser you use you may have had different experiences with RSS to date. When you click on a link or icon to a RSS feed some browsers open up a page that looks like a bunch of mumbo jumbo. Other browsers may prompt you to add the feed to your reader or subscribe to the feed.

What Are The Practical Applications?

The primary purpose of an RSS feed is to… well… FEED content from the published site to somewhere else. Some examples would include:

Direct to Subscribers Via RSS Readers

Many of the more techy folk online use RSS Readers to subscribe to the RSS feeds of all their favorite sites. A RSS Reader is a great way to stay up to date with lots of different blogs and/or news sources without flooding your email inbox constantly with new updates. Feedly is a good example of a popular RSS Reader. Offering, and making easy to find, a RSS feed for your site is going to make it easier for that type of user to subscribe to your content.

Direct to Email Subscribes Via a RSS Email Tool

Because a large number of internet users don’t know a lot about RSS Feeds and Readers, a lot of site owners and publishers allow their visitors to subscribe to the blog or content via email. Email may be the primary way the content is delivered to the subscriber in these cases however the email is still fed from the site RSS Feed. Very few of the primary players in the email marketing space have a half decent RSS delivery tool (exception is MyEmailProgram.com) so most site publishers use Feedburner or Feedblitz. Feedburner (owned by Google) is a free tool that allows publishing RSS via email but there are rumors or concerns that Google may eliminate the product sooner than later. Feedblitz is a comparable paid service.

Direct to Social Media Via a RSS Syndication/Publishing Tool

Since the introduction and popularization of Social Media networks like Facebook and Twitter, many different products have hit the market to make it easy to automatically publish RSS feeds to social media. This saves some time when you publish a new blog post as a tool or app can automatically push out the new post to your social profiles. There are many native Facebook apps like RSS Grafiti and an even larger number of Twitter publishing tools like Twitterfeed.com. A lot of your social media clients like Hootsuite also have built in RSS publishing tools.

To an Aggregate Site

There is also a lot of growing popularity around building out aggregate content sites that pull in and publish content from other popular sites or blogs into a single site. These “dailies” or “paper” sites focus on a specific topic or event and serve the consumer as a place to find a lot of content around the desired topic without having to subscribe to multiple sources. These sites live on the RSS technology to help them pull in blog posts and other RSS feed items from other sites.

How Do Marketers Use RSS?
Syndication

Marketers primarily use RSS technology as a method by which to distribute content to the internet. Great syndication content strategies help traffic directly by exposing a greater number of people to the content. It helps indirectly by supporting SEO elements. It helps engagement by encouraging social sharing. Above is a great overview of the various ways to syndicate content.

ECommerce & Affiliate Sales

If you run an online store RSS technology can make it easier for your affiliates to drive more sales to your store. Affiliates love programs  that offer some sort of RSS feed for deals or specials because they can be setup to automatically feed to Twitter or to a website sidebar widget.

Original article: The Marketer’s Ultimate Guide to RSS.

The Myths of Creativity by David Burkus

I just got off of a live Q&A call with David Burkus talking about his book, “The Myths of Creativity.” The call was very inspiring and David is a very sincere and great person. I’ve been reading his book throughout this month and finished it earlier this week. “The Myths of Creativity” addresses the various things that we believe to be true about creative ideas and creative people that are in fact myths. In addressing the myths David also references the science and then explains the truth as it relates to each of these questions.

One of my favorite chapters was the Eureka Myth. This chapter helps explain the core processes that we go through when developing ideas. Of particular note is the incubation phase in which we are not directly focused the project or problem. It is because of this process that we feel like our best ideas come to us in the shower or when we aren’t thinking about it directly.

I also really appreciated the originality myth. We tend to believe that when we have a good idea we alone are responsible for it and that the idea is new and unique. In this chapter we learn that all ideas are built upon other ideas. They are the natural evolution or combination of existing thoughts and ideas.

The third chapter I will mention here is the expert myth. We tend to believe that the more expert someone is in any given area the more likely they are to be able to generate unique ideas in that field. This is far from the truth. The science suggests that while we need a basic understanding of the field, an expert is generally to bias to the existing ideas and science to truly think outside of the box.

Each chapter of this book discusses a myth, the science behind that myth, and the reality of how creativity really works. While this book plays well toward professionals who work in a “creative” environment I think anyone could benefit and enjoy reading this book.

Original article: The Myths of Creativity by David Burkus.

They Myths of Creativity by David Burkus

I just got off of a live Q&A call with David Burkus talking about his book, “The Myths of Creativity.” The call was very inspiring and David is a very sincere and great person. I’ve been reading his book throughout this month and finished it earlier this week. “The Myths of Creativity” addresses the various things that we believe to be true about creative ideas and creative people that are in fact myths. In addressing the myths David also references the science and then explains the truth as it relates to each of these questions.

One of my favorite chapters was the Eureka Myth. This chapter helps explain the core processes that we go through when developing ideas. Of particular note is the incubation phase in which we are not directly focused the project or problem. It is because of this process that we feel like our best ideas come to us in the shower or when we aren’t thinking about it directly.

I also really appreciated the originality myth. We tend to believe that when we have a good idea we alone are responsible for it and that the idea is new and unique. In this chapter we learn that all ideas are built upon other ideas. They are the natural evolution or combination of existing thoughts and ideas.

The third chapter I will mention here is the expert myth. We tend to believe that the more expert someone is in any given area the more likely they are to be able to generate unique ideas in that field. This is far from the truth. The science suggests that while we need a basic understanding of the field, an expert is generally to bias to the existing ideas and science to truly think outside of the box.

Each chapter of this book discusses a myth, the science behind that myth, and the reality of how creativity really works. While this book plays well toward professionals who work in a “creative” environment I think anyone could benefit and enjoy reading this book.

Original article: They Myths of Creativity by David Burkus.

Marketing: What Job Is Your Product Being Hired To Do

I recently read a book that posed this paradigm of marketing. When working on product development, and then when marketing a product, ask yourself, “What job will my customer hire my product to do?” In addition to looking at this from the marketing and business angle I also want to address how this applies to relationships and personal development.

Products and services are sold when they create specific value in the life of the customer. When your customers shop they have a need in mind for which they are trying to find a solution. What is the need or what are the various needs for which your product is suited?

If you can uncover what job the product is being hired to do then you can greatly improve the product and the marketing efforts. I recently met with a car dealership client of mine. I would have assumed that they product was a car and that people buy a car to be able to have transportation from point A to B. Under that assumption I would have launched a very awful ad campaign to help drive them more business… with the wrong message to the wrong people. This particular car dealer told me that isn’t the case with their customers. Their customers buy a car from that dealership because they have no money to put down and/or because they have bad credit and they want to repair it. Knowing that, one can advertise to the right people at the right time with the right message.

Another car dealer client of mine tells me the job their customer is “hiring” the car to do is to make them look good. That particular car dealership specializes in luxury imports. If the customer wants a good deal on a reliable car they will go elsewhere.

Consider in your own marketing efforts, how well do you really understand what job your customers expect your product/service to perform. What need do they have that you are fulfilling? Use surveys and post sale calls to really identify these key insights to improve your ongoing product development and  marketing efforts.

Perhaps you also need to consider for a moment your own relationships with your spouse, family members, coworkers, and others. Ask yourself, “what job am I hired to do?” For example, do I really understand what my wife expects from me. Do I know and understand what needs she has that she expects me to meet and solve? Relationships grow when we have a clear understanding of what the other person needs from us and we work to be that person for them.

If you are wondering how you can best discover what the expectations and needs are of the other person in the relationship I suspect the best method is just to ask. Ask with a sincere intent to listen and understand and you may discover the most critical things that will help you grow a deeper and more valuable relationship with all those around you.

Original article: Marketing: What Job Is Your Product Being Hired To Do.

Getting Out of Your Comfort Zone is For Sissies

Everyone is always telling you to get out of your comfort zone. If you get a little out of your comfort zone you will always have a little success. If you want to have a significant break through you have to break through. It time to completely crush the comfort zone. Make the comfort zone look outright silly.

Somebody may beat me, but they are going to have to bleed to do it. – Steve Prefontaine

Great success comes in life when we decide to do something completely crazy. When we scare ourselves with the risk we are taking. Fear is the first killer of success. Fear breeds failure. What are you afraid of?

Well, well . . . I’m impressed. That suggests what you fear most of all is — fear. Very wise, Harry.” -Professor Lupin

My wife runs 3 miles every time she goes running. One day she decided to keep going. When she got to 4 miles she decided to keep going. Now she runs 5 miles every time she goes running. Life is a series of short sprints that catapult us to the next level of performance where we maintain our position and prepare for the next hyper growth.

How Business Growth Works – The Plateau Principle

Jim Collins recorded in his book “Good to Great” that one of the core principles of great companies is the BHAG. Big Hairy Audacious Goals are consistently a part of the strategy of all great organizations. Consider something that you want to do and recruit supporters. Run as fast as you can toward it.

Goals are won in the 2nd and 3rd lap of the Race