As I write this post, we are about 7 1/2 hours from the new year here in Salt Lake City.
Spencer and his family went down to St. George to escape the cold, and it turns out today is one of the warmest days in a while.
I am also less than two weeks away from attending the Marketers Cruise, an annual event that gives me the opportunity to mastermind with 350+ marketers from around the world for 8 days while cruising the Caribbean. While I spend much of my time in December reflecting on the previous year and mapping out what our plans are for the following year, the cruise is really where the plan gets it’s jumpstart.
If you have ever been on a cruise ship, you know the internet connection is horrible and expensive. It is always entertaining to watch online marketers go through withdrawal the first day or two at sea. However, this disconnection allows us to really focus on the core principles and functionality of our businesses.
The cruise is also a great opportunity to connect with marketers I speak to with Skype throughout the year, mastermind and setup joint veture partnerships.
What Does 2012 Hold For Social Traffic Lab?
Content, Conversions and Customers
This weekend, I was reading an interesting article from Inc. Magazine titled “Content Is Still King”
In that article, they included a graph of top performing content types from Focus Research, “Marketers’ Benchmarks 2011: A Survey of Marketers’ Priorities & Challenges,” June 8, 2011
As you can see in the graph, Webinars and Virtual events are #2. As you heard in several of our emails over the past month, Webinars have been the #1 income source for Social Traffic Lab.
We have recommended two products related to Webinars; Webinar Bootstrap Method and Webinar Warrior both from Stephen Renton.
From this graph, we can also see other areas where we simply have not taken the time to nurture in our content strategy.
In 2012, you will see a lot more blogging from us. You will actually see shorter emails leading the reader over to the blog to read the complete content. There are a few reasons for this.
1) It expands the reach of the content beyond our email subscribers
2) It gives the readers a better opportunity to share the content within the blog
3) It provides a better means of feedback from our readers through comments
4) It makes it easier for us to control the experience with the blog environment.
For the Industry Whitepapers, the Inc. article suggested competitive comparisons as a downloadable PDF. As we continue to develop our suite of Facebook apps in 2012, we are planning to provide a comparison report between Social Traffic Lab and other app development companies like Wildfire, Lujure, and North Social. According to Inc., while this may seem counterintuitive the comparison is an important step in the buying process for your potential customers. What better source for that information, than you.
Videos also already have an important role in our content strategy. In 2012, you will see many more tutorial videos on not only Facebook but other social media sites and strategies as well. Videos will also play an important role in our support desk within our FAQ. The FAQ will also be expanded. It has been a bit neglected, and can easily be expanded to continue to streamline our support and give a growing resource for our customers to get self service answers to their questions.
#6 on the graph is User/Peer Generated Content. One way we will be addressing this within Social Traffic Lab is user success stories. We want to hear from you and the results you are getting using our products. We are also hoping to create a larger fan base on our fan pages and create more interaction between our fans. The private Facebook group for our Silver, Gold and Platinum members has worked very well creating interaction not only between us and our members but within the member community as well.
The last item on the graph is podcasts. A podcast has been on our list for a while now. The blog is already setup to start podcasting using a plugin from Blubrry.com. Podcasting actually expands the content distribution dramatically and brings our content to television through devices like Roku and Apple TV. My Nomadic Warrior podcast was available through Blubrry on their Roku channel. One thing that became obvious through that experience was an Audio Podcast just wasn’t that interesting through a TV Screen. So, our focus will be a video podcast along with an audio podcast with audio stripped from the video. An easy way to do this on Windows is using software like Any Video Converter.
Now On To Conversion…
This month, I have spent a lot of time focused on Google Analytics. One of the best ways to make more money is to improve the conversions of what you already have. Many times, people simply pursue more traffic. However, not all traffic sources convert the same.
In January, we will be expanding our use of Google Analytics and start tracking conversions on a much more granular level. We will also be adding several traffic sources to move the brand beyond Warrior Forum.
To track conversions from Social Media, we will be tagging each of the URLs used on status updates to identify the source of each campaign. By looking at the Google Analytics data, we can then refine our Social Media strategy. Being able to know what traffic sources are converting is critical information to know in order to scale your business and eliminate traffic sources that simply don’t convert.
This year, we recommended two products to help you improve conversions; Conversion Jiu Jitsu and Response Dynamite.
Finally Comes Our Customers…
Based on feedback from our Private Facebook group, we realize many people find it difficult to focus and remain productive with all of the different opportunities they are bombarded with on a daily basis. This last week as we looked at what we did right and what we did wrong this month, we definitely saw we were pushing affiliate offers hard this month and pushed out a project several times making room for other JV partners. This was a big mistake, and we can definitely see the impact.
As for our products, in 2012 you will see some shifts in our admin interface for our apps. We are looking at including more of a drag and drop interface to add/remove content or reorder the content within the app. Both Fan Page Engine and Lujure have some really good user interefaces and we want to raise the standard of our apps in 2012 as we move into a larger market.
We will continue to use ZenDesk.com for our helpdesk.
What are your plans for 2012?
