We are pleased to announce that one of the amazing social media monitoring dashboard tools has decided to offer its services as white-label! Trackur has always been a trusted monitoring tool, and now having one with your branding can be more affordable than ever. Not only will everything be custom to your company, but you won’t have to spend time in development attempting to make a tool of your own.

The Trackur dashboard, which can be found in its new location- track.trackur.com-  is generally the same- you’ll find subtle improvements in usability and slight enhancements. Along with this, you’ll be able to offer your own:

• Logo- Upload your own logo so that when you and your clients log in, it will be branded with your own personal assets.
• Domain Name-  You can pick your own domain name to point both you and your clients to the social media monitoring dashboard. No more sending your clients directly to Trackur.
• Colors- Have particular business colors in mind? Go ahead and theme the dashboard with the Ultimate package.

Trackur has done all of this because they realize that many companies want to give their clients (and themselves) a personalized experience, and sometimes using a platform branded by someone else just doesn’t do it for them.

The new features aren’t the only big announcement that they have rolled out. The Trackur Ultimate package is available for $377/month- which is a highly competitive price. If you sign up before June 30th, you’ll be able to catch the deal of $297 a month- which you can keep as long as you renew monthly. Aren’t you excited?!

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Trackur Update- The White-Labeled Social Media Monitoring Dashboard

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In my agency experience, what seemed to work best was breaking down the report into sections. In each section of your report, I recommend structuring the report as follows:

Executive Summary

The Executive Summary belongs at the beginning of your report and summarizes all of the KPI’s of your social media marketing campaign. The idea behind this section is that someone can quickly glance at it and know where you stand at meeting your goals. If they have the time or the desire to dive into the details they’ll be able to later in the report. But the goal is to give them the information they care about the most upfront.

I typically give a 1-2 sentence description as to where we are at for the time period and then have a chart that lists all of the KPI’s, where we are at now and where we were at at a comparative date.

Campaign Insights

Now that you have your executive summary setup, it’s time to go social platform by platform and explain what’s been going on. For each platform I cover the following information:

1. KPI metrics, trends and analysis
2. Special event analysis (e.g. product launch)
3. Month over month growth
4. Correlations (store traffic, mentions, etc.)

What Clients/Management Want to See

It’s great that you have all of this data, but what does it actually mean? Keep in mind that the goal of these reports is to determine the value of the work you’re doing. Is all of the time and money your client/company investing into each social platform actually paying off. Does it show promise that it will pay off in the future? Try and provide the following information for the campaign insights you listed earlier.

1. How can you prove correlations in data?
2. Which efforts are having the greatest impact?
3. What actions were taken by customers/visitors as a result of your social efforts?
4. Persona growth metrics
5. Customer quotes
6. Competitor insights

Taking it One Step Further

If you want to add even more value to your social media marketing report, I highly recommend answering the following questions (and think of other similar questions as well):

1. How are we changing our social strategy based on these metrics?
2. Should we be adjusting our strategy to conform to the platform’s gender balance?
3. What new strategies can we implement based on the data we have?
4. Are we engaging at the right level?
5. What is the appropriate effort level to maximize results?

Be sure to organize your data in an easy to read format. By that I mean that someone can quickly glance through the report (because you know that’s what they’re going to do) and pickup the highlights. I find tables and bullet points to be the easiest way to achieve those goals. I also recommend any types of charts and graphs you can add. As businessmen and women we are visual learners. Plotting trends on a graph can go a long way to showing your clients just how big of an impact you’re having on their business.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Creating A Social Media Marketing Action Plan – Part 3: Reporting

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Link building is a much easier task to outsource than many other aspects of SEO. If I were a French site owner wanting to market my French site, I’d be fine with a native English speaker who could write just well enough in French in order to send out emailed link requests and read the responses, for example. I would not at all be happy with the idea of a non-proficient French speaker writing my content.

Use A Formula

We have a general formula for non-English language sites that are hosted outside of the US. Let’s use Sweden as an example since it’s been my most recent conversation:

• Links on Swedish-hosted sites in Swedish language 75%
• Links on non-Swedish-hosted sites in Swedish language 10%
• Links on Swedish-hosted sites in non-Swedish languages 10%
• Links on non-Swedish-hosted sites in non-Swedish languages 5%

Note that I am making no distinction on how you build links with these percentages, as the point is simply that you should make an effort to add some variety to your portfolio. I am also not proposing to have any concrete data on how geo-location plays into this; again, I am only pointing out that if you work on foreign sites, it’s good to approach your link building efforts with an idea of how to vary the links to make a nice profile.

The Link Conversation

Lots of people all over the world speak English but there’s a benefit to conducting an exchange in the speaker’s native tongue. Our link builders have more success when writing in German when approaching a German site than they do when they’re writing in English, for example. However, for some other languages where we have link builders who are semi-proficient in the language, we usually do it in English and, while the conversions we get may be slightly less, they’re still quite good. We also have the luxury of dealing with non-native English speakers who view us as a chance to practice their own English skills, so sometimes that can definitely work in our favor. Just figure out which language the website owner would prefer to use, and if you can handle it, use that.

Learn What Is Legal

This sounds kind of silly to say out loud…but certain industries pose a challenge when marketing at times. Online gambling, for example, is illegal in many countries. However, as most people know, that means very little. I would definitely advise you to learn the ins and outs of what is legal and what is illegal when you’re dealing with certain sensitive niches in different countries.

Familiarize Yourself With the Locals
 

I don’t mean to get all anthropological on you, but it’s a good idea to at least know a little bit about the culture of the people that you’re approaching so that you don’t inadvertently offend anyone. Many times, simply emailing and asking for a link is enough to make someone’s head spin around, so why bother adding to that by accidentally insulting the webmaster? I think we’ve all seen those funny signs in languages that, when translated into English, mean something totally absurd. What may be a peace sign in the US might be a very insulting gesture in another country…apply that to how you approach people online. No matter what your industry or location, it’s important that you approach link building by giving consideration to the fact that the world is a much smaller place than many people might think. My favorite fashion blogs tend to be Scandinavian. Most of the music sites that I like are in the UK. A great deal of the traffic that comes to my link agency site is from England, as are many of my proposal requests. Why not mimic this pattern in your link building?

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Link Campaigns for Foreign Sites

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Today I am sharing another alternative tool you may want to try.

Diphur is a new fun service that lets you bookmark and page to track its changes. It has a few really unique features outlined below.

The first thing to do is to register an account which took me a few seconds.

The new-bookmark screen allows you to set the following options and parameters:

• The URL of the page;
• The page title (to easily identify it in the list of your bookmarklets);
• Private/Public settings (if you want your bookmark to be publicly visible or not);
• The checking and update frequency (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly);
• The change percentage – gotta love it! – to be able to be notified of all or only substantial changes;
• The keywords to track;
• The exact-match keywords;
• The update notification delivery time:

Track Recent SERPs Changes with Diphur

One of the first things I did when trying the tool was obviously using it for 24-hour-old Google search results – this is like Google Alerts that work! While I am already using a few other tools for that, this one seems a better fit because it allows to set how substantial the change should be to be included in the update – this makes it easier to track ONLY real changes (when it comes to tracking SERPs, this turns priceless).

So I have set up a bookmarklet for the following page (tracking only 10%-change):

Here’s how the daily update looks like (It really contains new results!):

2. Track Any On-Page Keyword

My further test was rather out of curiosity. Unlike the above one, I haven’t really started using the tool for keyword tracking – I just noticed the option and decided to give it a try.

Honestly enough, I haven’t thought hard of the example. I just set up a bookmark to track Sphinn home page for the term “SEO”.

The email update highlights the word you are tracking – which seems really useful (and I am going to add this option to my SERPs tracker to see my business name always highlighted):

Via the tool settings you can also:

• Set the vacation mode (to stop notifications while still tracking);
• Change the subject line of your email notification;
• Change your time zone:

All in all, I found it a very useful tool and I am going to stick to it. Let me know what you think!

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Track Any Page Changes with Diphur

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Links from authoritative sites, such as these, are still one of the biggest factors for ranking high in the SERP’s. A link will not only help your link profile, it will also benefit your company’s brand, helping to associate it with good causes. Volunteering also has indirect benefits. It can be used as a newsworthy story for a press release, which can lead to even more links for your website.

This blog post will outline a strategy on how to get links from a charity’s website while improving your karma at the same time!

Finding a Charity

One of my goals at the start of the year was to volunteer for a charity. I wanted to use my knowledge to help a non-profit with their SEO strategy and also become more experienced in a field that interests me greatly.

After working for two separate charities I soon learned, they were both generous in linking out to websites who volunteered or partnered with their organization. Being an SEO, it quickly dawned on me that this was a great way for a business to build links and also help a charity at the same time.

www.volunteermatch.org is a website which acts like a dating service for charities and volunteers, matching the skills of the volunteer with the needs of the charity. You can use their website to find charities that are looking for SEO, or any kind of help.

You can narrow your search to your local area, but it’s worth being broad in your criteria as many jobs can be performed remotely. There is even a check box to search for ‘virtual opportunities’. The above search gave 15 results:

Now, depending on your motivation, you can either volunteer for a charity whose goals you feel most passionately about or, you can choose one which has a website with the greatest authority and is most likely to link to you. I’m not going to judge your choice, as long as you actively volunteer, and don’t simply get a link and run!

Assessing the Potential

If you click on the first listing in the screenshot above, you will find the charities URL: raceforpeace.org. Doing a quick analysis, using Open Site Explorer we can see the URL has only one domain linking to it and a Page Authority/Rank of just 1. Despite this low assessment, one thing to note is the charity is generous in linking to its ‘trusted partners’ from the homepage. Maybe after you have helped with their online marketing they will have more links pointing to their site and their authority will increase.

Compare the authority of raceforpeace.org to the second listing healthychild.org which has 10,640 links from 1,336 domains, a page authority of 56 and a PR 6 homepage. A quick browse on their site finds a ‘collaborators page’ which lists a number of other charities and businesses including Wells Fargo – if they can get a link, after volunteering your services, I am sure you can.

Contacting the Charity

Once you have found a charity you would be interested in helping, register with volunteermatch.org and press on the ‘I want to help’ link to express an interest in the volunteer opportunity. Provide a brief summary on why you would be best suited for the role. When I volunteered I thought it would be similar to applying for a regular job where it can take weeks before receiving a response. I was actually inundated with replies within hours and had to turn down a number of volunteering opportunities, so bear this in mind.

Getting the Link

Dr. Robert Cialdini was a professor of psychology and is the author of ‘Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion’. In his most recent work he defines six ‘weapons of influence’ with the first being ‘Reciprocity’.

Ciladini writes that ‘people tend to return a favour’. This is especially true if the favour does not require much effort on the part of the person who received the original good deed. If you help a charity, there is a good chance that in return they will respond positively to a request for a link, with the anchor text of your choosing.

Wait until you have actually done some meaningful work before requesting the link. The best time to ask is once you have achieved a goal or reached a milestone.

If you have access to edit the webpage you only need to ask permission. If not, call the person who has the authority to give you the link and then follow up to ensure your link is added.

As this technique shows, getting links is often about forming relationships and providing incentives. Remember, you don’t have to offer SEO services – if you have a book keeping or web design company and are less busy at certain times of the year, why not use your excess capacity to help a charity? Alternatively if you are out of work and have some spare time, why not volunteer? The experience will look great on your resume and you will likely find it to be rewarding as well.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Link Building With Charities

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