Announcing new affiliate partner, the SSL Store
This post was updated to reflect that Facebook’s deadline is October 1, not October 14.
As you may or may not know, Facebook will be requiring all custom App developers to have SSL certificates installed on their Facebook Apps in order to be published as of October 1, 2011. This is going to break a lot of apps, particularly those made by folks looking for simple things such as Like Gates and custom landing pages.
I’m pleased to offer stupidly cheap SSL certificates from Comodo, Verisign, GeoTrust, and more through a new affiliate partnership with the SSL Store. For as little as $30 per year, you can meet Facebook’s requirements for digital certificates on your Apps. My recommendation is Comodo’s Essential SSL Certificate for $30. Any Facebook Page owner should be able to spring for that.
Once you’ve purchased an SSL certificate for your Facebook App, you’ll need to install it on your web server or have your web hosting provider install it for you. A list of instructions for installing these certificates can be found here.
Note that this change doesn’t affect regular Facebook Pages themselves, only those Pages which have developed a custom App of some kind (like a Like Gate).
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Finding connections in blog comments
Borrowing an idea from Tom Webster‘s social media monitoring, let’s take a look at your blog’s comments today.
Start with WordPress (any blogging software will do, however). Open up your comments section and look at only approved comments, as I assume you de-spam your comments regularly before approving them.
Open up your text editor of choice and begin copying and pasting the last 10 pages of comments into it. If you’re feeling more sophisticated than copy/paste, open up MySQL and do an export of the post text column only to simplify the next steps.
Dedupe it if your software allows you to dedupe by line. Remove any obvious formatting or data-only lines and you should be left with a large text file of your recent blog comments.
Now fire up Wordle and feed this large chunk of text into it:
Two questions for you:
1. Do the largest words in the cloud express an intended focus of your blogging? That is, if you blog about marketing or social media, are the comments you’ve received indicative of that? If not, your content may be somewhat off target.
2. Are there words or word associations in the cloud that you didn’t expect to find in there? For example, in my cloud above, I found that people was unusually prominent and it turns out that the word people is used very heavily when referencing how to build social networks like Google+.
Got a blogger you respect? Run their comments through the same mechanism and see if you have anything in common with their audience. Here, for example, is Chris Brogan:
So, what are people saying about your blog posts?
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What’s your cloud backup plan?
The cloud sure is convenient. I can put stuff in it and never have to worry about managing or maintaining server infrastructure, system maintenance, etc. Someone else does all that, and I just show up, pay my dues, and have my stuff wherever I go. It’s perfect, right?
Except…
… when companies in the cloud get bought or go away, like CoHuman, which I had previously recommended and loved. One quick signature by its founder on a letter of intent and the service announces that it’s going away.
… when data is transient, like Twitter search. Tweets come and go, but not nearly as many are recorded permanently.
… when systems out of your control fail, like a major daily deal service experienced. Instantly their main source of income vanished.
… when, as Helena Bouchez pointed out, you run out of money yourself. Think carefully about how deeply invested you are financially in the cloud. Can you afford to pay for all those services if things get lean? How much of your business depends on cloud services that you might want to suspend until cash flow improves?
How dependent are you on the cloud? Have you investigated things like the Data Liberation Front?
Before you sign up for a cloud service, ask yourself these simple questions:
- How easily can I get my data out?
- How easily can I replicate the business processes that the cloud service provides? This is a lot harder than #1.
- How dependent is my business on the accessibility and availability of the cloud?
- What expense is there between the cloud and rolling my own, and is the trade-off worth it?
Based on your answers, you can judge whether you should be pursuing a cloud-based solution or doing something in-house. There are times when using the cloud just makes sense. Maintaining your own mailserver is a pain in the butt. I’ve done it, I don’t enjoy it, and I gladly hand that over to GMail to be their problem, with the understanding that I need to regularly back up my email on my machine.
There are other times when using the cloud is possibly the worst thing you could do because it locks you into a mission-critical solution that you lose control over, and if you can’t sustain the requirements of the cloud service, you’re up a creek without a paddle.
At the very least, before considering a cloud service, you should have in mind a completely viable alternative to it that’s local or self-hosted software. It doesn’t have to be exactly the same as the cloud, but it has to be good enough to fall back upon and still be able to manage your business. For example…
- If you’re a Salesforce.com user, you had better be aware of and able to install SugarCRM.
- If you’re an IM user, you should know what Jabber is and how to deploy it.
- If you’re a GMail user, you’d better know what Postfix is and how to get a hold of it.
Get out a sheet of paper and make a list of each cloud service and its non-cloud alternative. If you find a service that has no non-cloud alternative, and it’s mission critical to your company, be prepared to pay for it indefinitely or don’t use it.
Having those backup options will provide your business with the insurance it needs in case something goes horribly wrong with the cloud.
What’s your cloud backup strategy? Do you have one?
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Getting your audio podcast into Facebook and Google+
Over the weekend at PodCamp NH, I gave a presentation about marketing your podcast. One of the little tidbits in there was how to load your podcast to Facebook and Google+. The trick with both of these services is that they have in-content video players, but no audio players. There are obviously apps in Facebook’s case, but those aren’t helpful to you for people who don’t have those apps installed or aren’t browsing your page.
So how do you load up a podcast episode? Very straightforward: turn it into a video. Start with a still image that accurately reflects the podcast. In the example below, I used a photo of John Wall and me at the doughnut shop where we record Marketing Over Coffee.
If you were really clever, you’d put some text on the photo such as calls to action or letting people know that it’s a video still and won’t be moving.
Drag and drop that photo into iMovie or the video editor of your choice. Adjust its duration to the maximum length allowed; for iMovie, that’s 10 minutes. Copy and paste as many times as you need until you’ve got enough “video” for the duration of your audio clip, then drop in your audio clip.
Once you’ve got everything lined up, render the project to a completed video file and upload to the respective services.
After the content is loaded, you’ll be able to have social conversations in-network about the audio, which is handy, especially if your own site doesn’t garner much in the way of comments or discussions.
Obviously, if you have actual video content, load that instead, but this is a fast and very simple way of getting your audio content into social networks using their default players.
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Set up your own link shortening service
One of the obvious yet overlooked little things I do is have a simple link shortening service of my own, cspenn.com. I find having my own link shortener to be invaluable for four major reasons:
1. Easy to remember permanent shortlinks. Every day I start off with a welcome message. Instead of having to remember other services’ links, I just have to remember my domain and the URL for the welcome page: cspenn.com/w. Nothing easier to remember. I’ve got Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ wired up the same way, with easy to remember URLs like cspenn.com/f, cspenn.com/t, and cspenn.com/g.
This is even more important in a word of mouth culture: if anyone asks me for one of these URLs, it’s easy for them to remember, too. Make your links easy to remember and people will share them more easily.
One cautionary note: services like Google and Bit.ly tend to frown on redirects of redirects, so if you’re being social with clients like Tweetdeck, etc., you’ll want to make sure your shortened links don’t get re-shortened if possible.
2. Easy redirects of affiliate links. Most affiliate links are horrendously long affairs that are highly subject to error, even when copy-pasting. What’s worse is that depending on where you make the error, an affiliate link that’s mistyped may still function, getting a visitor to the correct destination, but will fail to give you credit (and therefore commission). Solve this with your custom link shortener so that you only have to set up an affiliate link once, then use your link shortener the rest of the time on your site ads.
For example, if I had to remember this every time I wanted to plug TweetAdder:
http://www.tweetadder.com/idevaffiliate/idevaffiliate.php?id=10695_0_1_3
I’d probably go nuts. But cspenn.com/ta is much easier to remember and far less prone to errors and copy pasting problems.
Here’s another angle a lot of affiliate marketers forget: sometimes, affiliates go bad. They stop paying, or they flat out shut down. If you’re posting content out there (which is in turn getting scraped, linked, excerpted, reposted, etc.) with clear affiliate links, then if you have an affiliate that goes bad, you can’t do anything to change those links that are out of your control. If you use your own link shortener, you can simply change where the redirected link goes to and move that traffic to a different affiliate.
3. Easy implementation of Google Analytics tracking codes. If you’ve been at any of my talks, read my blog posts, etc., you know how much I harp on using Google Analytics tracking codes in your links and campaigns. Be honest: you probably don’t most of the time because it’s not a whole lot of fun to set those up over and over again. If you have a certain number of URLs you’re sharing over and over again (like links to downloads, content, landing pages, etc.) then take the time to set up the Google Analytics link tracking codes for those regular URLs once and stick them in your link shortener. Then you won’t have to remember to tag them with tracking codes and your traffic will get correctly attributed time and time again.
4. Shortened links under your control. As much as I love services like Argyle Social, bit.ly, etc., they are not under my control. At any point, they could be shut down, especially anything with a .ly domain (which is owned by the country of Libya and has caused problems in the past). For your average socially shared links, this may not be a big deal, but for your top links, your most important links? Don’t leave those in the hands of a service that isn’t yours.
Here’s another example. Imagine if I had set up cspenn.com/my years ago for MySpace. Any links I published promoting my MySpace profile years ago I could simply redirect now to Facebook or Google+ and have people going to the correct places now.
So how do you get started with your own link shortener? It’s fairly straightforward but not terribly user friendly. There certainly are plenty of other services and software that can do this sort of thing for you, but I tend to prefer simplicity where and when I can get it. Start by purchasing a domain name that’s relatively short and somehow relevant to you. I bought cspenn.com because it’s what I use in many places for my username. Get that domain set up with a cheapie Apache-based hosting account – no need to go pro for simple traffic redirection – and then start working on your redirection file.
For most Apache-based hosting services, there will be a file you can create called an .htaccess file. This is the file which specifies where you want to send traffic. For example, here’s a few lines from mine:
The format of the redirects is fairly clear. I specify that I want to redirect (redirect 302 or redirect 301) the visitor from the shortened link (/l, /f, /t, etc.) to another destination. Choosing 301 or 302 depends on whether I’m linking to my own site or someone else’s site – 302 for everyone else, 301 for me. Why? Especially with affiliate programs, things can change, and the 302 redirect is better for that. But even for non-affiliate programs, it’s not a bad idea.
You can see that for shortened links to my site, I’ve got all of my Google Analytics tracking codes implemented so I don’t have to remember them.
Is running your own link shortener a good idea? I think so, and it’s dirt cheap to do. It gives you far more control over your most important links, makes things easier to remember, and protects your most important links from unexpected changes down the road. If the technical implementation is a bit harder than you’re comfortable with, hire a local nerd to help you out and get set up. It’ll be worth it, especially in a few years when you find you need to redirect all those worthless social network profile links to the network of the future.
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4 Google Analytics Power Tips For Tracking Behavior
Are you wondering how your prospective customers are behaving? Stop guessing, stop wondering, and start tracking! Google Analytics can provide some very interesting behavioral clues to prospect behaviors on your site if you’re willing to do a bit of coding to make it do more than just out of the box analytics. Here are four power tips you can use to develop new insights about your future customers.
Caveat: be sure you’ve set a goal and goal value in your analytics first, otherwise tracking behaviors is largely meaningless. People have to accomplish some sort of business objective in order for the following tips to be of true use. Also, be sure you understand the basics of event tracking with this guide from Google.
Is your site too fat? In the Javascript event handlers, there’s a Window.resize event. You can tie Google Analytics events into this with a simple script that tells Google Analytics someone had to change the size of their browser window manually to see all of your site. If this is any significant percentage of your traffic, you may need to rethink your site’s design. Here’s an example of the code.
window.onresize = function() {
_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'behavior', 'resize']);
}
What ads are working best? Set up a simple onClick event that carefully denotes what ads you have on page and where, so that you can dig in and figure out which variations are working best. For example, if you have a sliding main panel in your WordPress theme with images, make sure each image that’s clickable is tracked, then look in your analytics data for which image is getting the most clicks, and which image is driving the most conversions to your goals.
onClick=”_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'slider', 'click', 'panel5']);”
Example of a report:
Learn where your forms die. Tie your form fields to your analytics with the onFocus event, and you’ll track how many people click on each field. If you notice that there’s a significant difference in the number of clicks into each field, you’ll know which form fields (such as date of birth or social security number) are causing people to abandon your form. You can then decide whether or not you really need that data – if the business cost of losing the data outweighs the business cost of losing the form completion.
onFocus=”_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'form', 'fieldfocus', 'ssn']);”
The Cold Feet Indicator. How many people bail out before hitting submit? Tie an onMouseover event for your submit button to Google Analytics event tracking and you’ll know how many people hovered over the button and then how many people finished the form. If you have a multipage form, you’ll know exactly when people are abandoning; for a single-page form, you’ll know how many people are getting cold feet and putting their mouse on the submit button but not actually hitting it.
onMouseover=”_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'form', 'submitbutton', 'submitmouseover']);”
For the more technical, any Javascript event handler can be tied to a Google Analytics event call, so you can develop ridiculously advanced forms of tracking that can give you insights into the behaviors you care about on site, from measuring how far into a video someone watches to seeing how long they hover the mouse near the top 10 pixels of the page. You’re limited to 500 event tracking calls per session, so don’t go too overboard, but definitely look at stepping up what you keep track of.
What power tips do you have to share?
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