TJ14 – Traffic and Conversion Lessons From A $570,000, 37 Minute Launch With Brent Hodgson

Hello! Welcome back. You’re tuned in to Traffic Jam Episode#14, I am your host James Reynolds and I’ve got another fantastic show and guest lined up for you today. Let’s first of all start with show and if you are a regular listener of Traffic Jam you will be very much familiar with the format of the show. We start the first part of the show where we dive deep in to one particular area of traffic. We then follow that with this week’s news in traffic which is the big news that is affecting us online marketers that has been revealed in the past seven days, we then have the one minute traffic tip, which is short actionable advice delivered to you in under 60 seconds – sometimes a little bit longer than that, I am not always keen with keeping my time, and then we close out the show with the Traffic Jam jam,; a little musical jam picked by today’s guest.

So who is today’s guest? He is a well- accomplished online entrepreneur, his name you may not know of yet, but when you learn that he is one of the men behind the samurai suite of products: that’s market samurai, domain samurai, and article samurai, as well as zen tester conversion optimization software, you’ll quickly understand he clearly knows his stuff. He’s a keyword specialist, an expert in conversion optimization, and he can also throw his hand very well to copywriting. As well as getting him to reveal his very best traffic secrets, we cover some very important marketing fundamentals in today’s chat. And we also foray in to the critical area of conversions.

So with that little intro let’s move in to today’s feature interview, and my guest is Brent Hodgson.

James: So today I am joined by a friend of mine, one of the most rounded marketing talents I would say I know and that is Brent Hodgson. Brent, welcome to Traffic Jam!

Brent: Thanks James!

James: It’s good to have you on the show. I am really excited about this episode. I guess I should give people a little bit of a background on who you are to start with. You kind of cut your marketing teeth early on in real estate; you are a creator of, or at least a co-creator of several software products. You write copy for a number of well-known marketers, and you have a number of done for you marketing services plus between all of that, you travel the world, usually in first or business class to some amazingly exotic places, can you tell us a little bit about what you do because there seems to be so much there?

Brent: James I should get you to do my resume for me! I think you have done a better job than I could do for myself on there. Thank you! That’s really gracious of you. If I go back to where I actually started, originally I was a high school student reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad which is Robert Kiyosaki’s book and I looked ahead on the route that was ahead of me if I had kept on going down the path that was laid out and it was leading towards an economic style degree at a university which would have led to working in a suit and tie job, working in the city, perhaps somewhere in the banking industry, and I will be working 10 hour days, five days a week, maybe six days a week, getting one or two days off and then 2 weeks annual leave each year. I just did not like the idea of that. So instead of doing that, I went in to real estate investing and started working for a guy who became quite a successful author and digital product creator in that space. I was really bad in investing, but really good at the marketing side of his business so it wasn’t too long until I worked out that the money was actually being in the income generating side of the business, so I went from being in admin to marketing and kept on pushing myself to get better and better results for this guy, eventually became a consultant, started using some of the techniques I used as a consultant to systemize things, some people saw some software that I had or the company that I was working with had created, as well as some other tools and software that another colleague of mine had created, we put them all together, turned it to some software called market samurai that did quite well in the first three years having three hundred thousand users. Goodness! There’s a lot of stuff in there that you’ve covered off- that business and first class stuff, that stuff I guess I am really good at taking some huge amounts of data, analyzing them down and looking for where the best opportunities are, I guess that’s what I’d do and the keyword research stuff that I do, taking a lot of data, narrowing it down, and focusing on the big bits make a big difference.

James: Well perhaps we’ll talk about some of those things that really can make the difference in terms of traffic and perhaps also conversions as an area that I’d like to talk to you about today- the top 20% of the top 20% really get the big changes of the business but we’ll come to that a little bit later. One of the real big reasons I want to get you on the show is that you’ve real been really successful in a number of traffic sources; in fact I think you’ve developed whole businesses around at least three that I can think of anyway. With all of that experience, what would you say Brent is your favorite way to get traffic?

Brent: This is going to sound a bit controversial given that a lot of the work that our listeners are listening right now would be doing is online traffic generation. One of my favorite ways to get traffic at the moment is actually to take it offline. I think it is an often overlooked opportunity to bring people in to your business. To go offline, particularly in business to business niches and just contact businesses directly via post, via phone, via SMS, via fax. People who have business to business lists talk about doing lead generation for their businesses. But realistically, all the lead generation that they need to do is already done for them and all they need to do is open up the Yellow Pages or go to Google and Google the names of the businesses that they want as clients and get in touch with them. That’s it! There’s a lot of opportunities out there in Facebook- Facebook works very well these days. Google Adwords pay per click is excellent. There’s a lot of stuff that you can do in banner network these days that a lot of people overlook YouTube – because there are so many opportunities out there to get traffic. But among all of them, I think the one that’s most often overlooked and is perhaps one of the easiest, is to just contact businesses directly in business to business markets.

James: Well I think it is one of those scenarios where a lot of people want to jump on the latest riding trend and the coolest and most interesting way to do traffic but sometimes just the simplest possible things, just the old school stuff like picking up the telephone or writing a real note to someone- those real high touch forms of contact are sometimes just the most effective. Because everyone is doing the new stuff the old stuff just often works so, so well.

Brent: Yeah absolutely! You raised the point of just writing a note to someone being so high touch. We start going through the numbers on traffic generation methods that we use- we look at a lead that’s costing us $60 and is generating this much value out of a lead are 5% or 10% on one particular traffic method. The 80%, 90% and sometimes a 100% conversion rates just off a handwritten note, there is a lot more effort, it’s not automated, it’s not like you could build leverage with SEO or with Google Adwords, but it’s still a very effective way to bring in leads.

James: Yeah absolutely. But having said that, I guess there are some ways that those processes can be automated partially. I mean the systems out there now that once you have captured that lead and send them off a physical card via the post. What- if any of those systems are you using or would you recommend doing that type of process?

Brent: Yeah, doing it manually gives you a lot of quality control over how you send things to people. But sometimes it’s not just feasible to do manually. So for example we are doing a mail out to people who are coming to a seminar. There are about 1200 people that we are mailing out to at the moment, and it would just not be feasible for us to write 1200 notes. That will take a long time. So for that particular marketing strategy that we’re using right now to make sure that people come to this free event, we’re using a service called send out card. Send Out Card lets you send out cards to people via the mail. It comes with a stamp that is from your country as well. So even though they print the post cards in the US, they then box them up, ship them to Australia as in our case put a post mark or a stamp on it, and it looks really professional. It looks really nice to receive, something that’s well written; and it even has your handwriting as a font if you want to set up your service to actually do that yourself. We’re also using a couple of different SMS follow up services or SMS sending services and we’ve been able to integrate them to Infusion Soft and so forth. And the issues that you have with email, you don’t have the same way with post and with SMS. So these days we’re sending an email and you sometimes can get a deliverability rate of 50%. Half of your emails go missing. So if you’re looking at the effectiveness of email, even though you can send an email for free, there’s still a value per action associated with it. If you can work out what your value per action is, sometimes it is actually more effective to go down the SMS route and still pay 9cents per SMS but then end up with a much greater response rate so I guess it comes down to having a couple of different strategies to get your message through to people.

James: Yeah, absolutely. And I think there’s always that inclination to go down the route where everything is automated and free and simple, whereas as you said the high touch stuff there, the stuff that needs more effort, sending out a handwritten note and putting the stamps upside down to make it a little bit weird and peculiar to make it worth to open- It’s hard work right? These types of things in environments where its business to business especially as you mentioned is highly effective.

Brent: Yeah. And it’s nice to look beyond the free as well. It’s nice to be able to know your numbers well enough to be able to say I can actually afford to do this thing and spend as much to contacting the client.

James: Yeah absolutely! Good. Well for someone who’s been as long in the game as you have, I’m sure that you’ve got a few more secrets up your sleeve. You’ve covered a great traffic tip there in going offline. What is your best kept traffic secret in terms of generating online traffic?

Brent: Good question! I guess that my best kept traffic secret is not such a best kept traffic secret these days but it’s all about finding the right keywords to target online. It’s something that not enough people do. I think people for the most part when they’re doing search engine optimization; they never look in to the keywords before they jump in and as a result they don’t have much they’re likely to spend doing search engine optimization for how long it’s going to take a result. Or when they do get a result, what result is going to look like? How many visitors they’re likely to attract from that particular keyword? What ranking they’re likely to receive and what each visitor is likely to be worth to their business? I think these are the things that you can get from doing a little bit of keyword research brought from the outset. You can actually reverse engineer the results that you are going to get from search engine optimization and from your website rankings. And that lets you make a lot of decisions about whether or not a keyword is worth targeting or whether it’s better to target it’s lower value cousin that might not generate as much traffic to your website but might be easier to achieve those rankings because they’re just not as competitive. So keyword research is I think part of the secret source of doing any of the online lead generation, and also making sure that any content that you produce, any websites that you put up, anything that you publish, is going to have some sort of return of investment. Because 87% of all sales online start with a search engine search or something ridiculous like that. So unless you are actually take that content and publishing the specific keyword, the chances of actually getting a return on the content is much lower. Or the return that you will get is much you will get is much lower than if you were to actively target your content out to specific keywords out there.

James: Got it! Well it’s about relevancy isn’t it? I work with a lot of businesses as you know and there is always that tendency for them to want to kind of shape everything in their own voice and manner that they totally forget what the actually customer is saying and how they’re searching online and just the vocabulary  that they use. They alienate themselves in many instances from the market that they are trying to attract. That’s bonkers! So that research you said really laid out the ground work for what follows.

Brent: Yeah, it’s okay to have your own voice; it’s okay to say what you want to say. It’s just worth to see whether the client or the customer want to hear it. And if they do want to hear it, what phrases they’re typing to the search engines to look for that information. So then you still have your voice but it actually gets heard.

James: Absolutely! Good! Well I want to talk about some of the results that you have achieved for yourself and for others in the past and I see over in one of your websites, you state that you developed a three week online marketing that was responsible for generating over $960,000 in three weeks. Tell me a bit about that and some of the lessons that came from it.

Brent: Alright, this one is surprisingly simple. We actually did this campaign twice. It was done in two slightly different ways. The first time we released it, it did $570,000 of sales in 37 minutes. And it crashed our servers and we stopped being able to take sales so we flipped over to an “email us if you want to make a purchase and we’ll give you a quick call back to take your credit card details.” And that’s how we were able to take all the sales in 30 minutes – we jumped on the phone instead of taking online sales after our site crashed. But the principles behind this strategy were really, really simple things. This marketing comes down to common sense. We had a list of people who are interested in a particular topic and we kept on noticing that in support and when we ran events and when we chatted with these people on the phone, they kept on asking the same sorts of questions over and over again. And they wanted those questions to be answered in the specific style of product. So what we did was we created a survey and set that survey out to all the people in the customer list and got them to tell us what questions they had specifically, what format they want those questions answered in, how much they would be willing to spend to get those questions answered on the information product that we would create and also some of the inclusions whether or not they wanted regular mentoring meetings, DVDs and CDs that they could play in their car, whether or not they wanted access to a coach that they could telephone their questions. And we went through and we calculated how much each one of those little inclusions would cost; how much would it cost to produce a DVD every month, or a CD every month? How much would it cost for us to have a dedicated mentor that people would be able to call up day or night and ask their questions. And using what people told us they would be willing to spend on this particular product, and what it would cost to do each of those little inclusions, we worked out an optimal profitability curve. So we were able to see what level of demand for the product if it included certain items and not other items and if it was a certain price or a lower price or a higher price. So we were able to work out what the most profitable ones by producing this product was, what it would sell for, and what it should include. And then it was really simple, we went out to the list and we gave it to the list. And this is really, really simple. People often overlook to ask customers what they want to buy. So after going out to the customers and asking them what they want to buy, we created the product, and the product turned in to an annual mentoring program, it was 12 months’ worth of mentoring. It was a couple of thousand dollars to be a part of this mentoring program. For that couple of thousand you will get a folder, I think it was a folder every month at that time. You would get a lot of training that would go in to it, a couple of CDs; you would have a quarterly get together or a quarterly meeting. In addition to that, you’d be able to come to various seminars that we’re running. So we started to run an anticipation campaign, and we knew things are going to take off when we chewed through our whole service bandwidth in the first couple of days. People kept going to our website and watching our little countdown timer and each time the countdown timer was ticking along, it was spending a couple of bytes worth of bandwidth. We eventually chewed through our whole monthly bandwidth bill. Anyway, the day of the launch comes around, and we are watching the server and there are thousands of people who were sitting on the website waiting for this counter to tick down to 0. So they’re just sitting there hitting refresh, and refresh, and refresh. So it wasn’t long after we flicked the switch and made the sales cart available that the cart actually crashed. And this is before the days of internet marketers deliberately crashing carts to create a reason to go back to the list and say you should buy this again because the cart crashed because it was so popular. So it was before any of those strategies so before you start criticizing me for this one here, no it was not deliberate. This thing actually happened because, I will be frank, we were running a poorly written website actually on an AHP/Access database so this is going back a few years. Anyway, the site crashed, we had a Plan B in place, we flicked over to an email address, people sent over their phone numbers and we just jumped on the phone and started collecting these orders and we had hundreds by the time it ended. We did not get all of the thousands of people who were on the website on the first instance but we still made $570,000 in 37 minutes. When it came time to do it again, rather than crashing the website, we decided to do a staged release. So it was the same process over again. We made a couple of tweaks to the way that the product was actually structured, made it available again, did the whole bit anticipation campaign and over the next three weeks we went painfully shy of the 1 million mark. We did $960,000 in those three weeks. So this was a particularly big year for the company that we are in at the time and it was because we asked customers what they wanted to buy. We created a nice anticipation campaign around it, and we gave them what they wanted at the cost that they wanted to spend. So as a result of that, we were able to make a lot of sales.

James: Simple. Love it! Just to clarify then Brent, in terms of the traffic source for that particular offer, was that all preexisting customer or leads that you’d acquired. What was the makeup of that database that you accessed?

Brent: The database was accessed through a book. Most of the people that are coming to that particular database had been readers of the book that was published. So in terms of a different traffic source, this is another one of those offline traffic sources. We knew that there were people in this particular market who were going to bookstores and reading about this particular topic so we published a book around the topic and we were able to get up to 50,000 or so people who signed up for the list over the months after the book was released. The database was originally started out of forums and out of word of mouth and out of search engine optimization, and then it started to grow as a result of this book so we went on to achieve about 70,000 people on the database from search engine optimization for marketing essentially. Those 7,000 people that were chosen from the list formed the basis of the book. So it does not actually take a huge amount of people buying your book to actually become a best seller. You’d be surprised how few people you need to become a number one best seller. As a result of getting that best seller kudos, suddenly all of these magazines started featuring our book, there was a TV segment about the book, we started to be put in to the newspapers- the corporate columns right where people was and we started picking up leads from that as well. As a result, the book went from best seller to mega best seller and we were able to get a lot of leads out of that.

James: Fantastic! So this was a sort of proven buyers list. I think it probably is a nice Segway at this point of the interview to actually talk about the process of converting a lead or traffic in to a sale because this is an area of expertise for you, something that so far we have not really touched upon in Traffic Jam. So you are a big believer in conversion rate optimization as it is called and fact I think you now offer this as a service. To people in the outside, this whole conversion thing can look a bit of complex and sort of tech worthy and scientific, can anyone do it? I guess it’s probably one question I’d have for you and also what is the process behind optimizing a website to make the most of your traffic sources for conversions?

Brent: To answer the first part first quickly, yes anyone can do it. In fact the skill level needed to do conversion optimization these days with tools like Visual Optimizer is a lot lower than what it used to be. You used to have to have a level of coding skill to be able to set up a conversion optimization test, or split test, or multi variant test. And you’d also need a level of mathematical knowledge to work out what the statistics are actually telling you. But these days you can pretty much open your website in one of these visual editors and click on a button on your website and immediately swap it for another button as if you were editing a word document. The barrier to entry to doing all these optimizations is a lot lower these days than what it used to be. When you’re looking at conversion, if you are looking for things to improve on your website, there’s a lot of things that you can do to tweak your marketing. I’ve got a little bit of a different philosophy on conversion optimization from a lot of other people; I think that it’s a nice way to avoid actually making a decision about what the best way to sell a particular product is. So if you have not done any conversion optimization yet, or if you are thinking of putting together a new product, or you’re doing a new sales page, then conversion optimization is actually a good strategy to apply right from the very beginning. The reason why you want to apply from the beginning is because those crazy ideas that you have – maybe I should do this as a video, maybe I should do this as a long form sales letter, or maybe I should ask people to opt in or ask them to give me a call in this particular phone number; there’s no reason why you could not try all of those things all at once and test which ones of those things is responsible for the most conversions, the most sales or the most sign ups. So if you are able to start at the very, very beginning and start with conversion optimization at the very start, you are right at the very beginning are creating a snowball effect, and I’ll have a talk about some of the specific things that you should test in just a moment and just as an example of the snowball effect, back when we were doing market samurai, Market Samurai was released and we didn’t do a lot of conversion optimization right at the very beginning point. But a couple of weeks in to the process, we started to do some conversion optimization for a particular affiliate who signed up, he was an affiliate by the name of Mike Filsaime, who’s a really nice guy in real life although he gets a bit of a bad rep because of his hard marketing style. Anyway, Mike was our first big affiliate beyond people that we already knew. We wanted to get him a really nice result and give him a big commission cheque. So then if he approached people to sell our stuff, most people are more than likely sell our product Market Samurai. We did some split tests and found one particular split test variation that was responsible for doubling our sales and that meant that the cheque that we gave to Mike was twice as big as what we would have normally given an affiliate or what we would have given an affiliate if we did no conversion optimization. So this nice big – seriously big five figure cheque, Mike was super happy about receiving that cheque and what happened after that was Mike told his buddies and his buddies told their buddies and suddenly we had all these big names in the internet marketing industry selling our product. And not just that, people who learned about our product from those affiliates, they started telling people about the product via word of mouth at meet ups, via forums, via blogs, and as a result, we were getting not just sales from that. We were also getting links; links from social media, links from forum discussions, link from blog reviews of our products. So our search engine rankings went up. And that meant we started to get more traffic, we started to get more leads coming in, we started getting even more sales and it started to give us the ability to do even more split testing. And then when it came time to release our affiliate program to the people who have purchased our product in the past, we had an even greater number of people who had purchased our product and we were able to tap in to that list of leads to make even more sales, to get their leads, to give them commissions on any word of mouth referrals that they were able to send in. so conversion optimization is also a nice traffic generation strategy. it also makes paid advertising a lot more profitable and a lot more effective by increasing the results that you are actually getting from your website. So it might be costing you a dollar per click or a dollar per lead to actually get someone in to your website, to sign up or to make a purchase. If you can double your sales and double your sign ups, then suddenly it is fifty cents per lead or sale. So your profit significantly increases as well. In terms of the actual things that you should be testing, there’s about 10 things that I look at when I’m looking at a website and doing a bit of a review and actually testing about whether or not I can increase conversions and most of the time it’s actually fairly fast and easy to increase conversions. Should I go through some of these things?

James: I think that would be awesome! If we could get maybe sort of three to five actionable things that our listener out there can go and check on their website to see if the box is tick that would be fantastic so the floor is yours. Let’s hit a list of three to five, whatever you think is the top few percentile that makes the biggest difference.

Brent: Okay, having done a lot of split test and having done a lot of testing service as software, I have been able to see what’s worth particularly well for a lot of clients and a lot of people doing split testing. The thing that works most effectively is to minimize distractions. And there’s two sides of this. Firstly, on every page, there should be one clear call to action. So if you’ve got a webpage that is a homepage for a shopping cart site for example, these are notorious for having a lot of little things that you can click on and find out more about, but there should be one predominant call to action on that website. The more calls to action on a website the less effective any one of them is going to be. In fact, the less effective they’re all going to be as a result of getting distracted. Everyone gets distracted on should I click on there or there. Anyway, as a result, people with too many options don’t make a decision. So by getting rid of distractions or getting rid of options, you are actually able to make significant conversion gains very, very quickly. And one of those things that you can do, and this is quite controversial, is to remove navigation from the webpage. Sometimes it is not feasible to do this, but for example, for a client that I had recently, we removed the navigation that said here are the products in this particular category that was down the left hand side of the website and just removing that product navigation in the shopping cart, that was able to result in a 419% conversion increase with 99% confidence that I offer you that statistics. 417% uplift and that took us 48 hours to run the test.

James: Wow! From something so simple as just removing a bit of navigation, that’s amazing!

Brent: Another thing that you should also have a look at particularly if you are running a shopping cart style website, if you are selling a visual product or if there is something visual that you can represent when it comes to the product that you are selling, showing it in a good light, almost literally here, will significantly increase conversion. So another test that we did recently was to just change the product image that we had for a particular product that we had on this client’s website. And we were able to run testing for a couple of days and we were able to get a 95% confidence in the sample so this is fairly certain that this is actually accurate, a 173% increase in conversion. So that’s another couple of days of testing and all we did was change the product image. So if you don’t have a product image on your digital product or if you’re selling a product on a shopping cart website that might not be the most attractive picture of that product then just testing the image can significantly increase sales that you make online.

James: Okay so that’s two that we’ve got there, remove distractions and look at your images, what’s number three on your list Brent?

Brent: Goodness! Which one would we use if we had to give one more? If I had a gun to my head and someone said Brent you have to make a sale in 30 minutes on this website otherwise I am going to pull the trigger, what I would do is I would increase the scarcity. And scarcity is all about telling people that the offer is going to end or that if they don’t act now, they are going to miss out. It’s creating pain for inaction rather than the pain of actually pulling your credit card out and taking action right now. So when it comes to creating scarcity, a couple of different techniques that you can use here: you can have a time limited offer, you can have a countdown timer, you can have a discount coupon special. The one that I really like is scarcity samurai. All business partners at market samurai have been using this one recently, I actually packaged it up as a product, it’s a countdown timer with a user limited offer. And this is something that takes a little bit of tech skill to test, but if you can create that scarcity and that urgency to buy right now before the offer expires in the next couple of minutes, then you’re typically receive a massive conversion rate. When I am talking massive conversion rate, back in the market samurai days I think we had something pushing up to 60% conversion rate. I think it was from sign up to actual sale. So these scarcities, these countdown timers, these user targeted offers, if you can create that scarcity, suddenly your conversion to sale will skyrocket.

James: Yeah, it pushes that person to that point of decision whereas if you just leave a buy button hanging there, two weeks down the line they might make it but if they have to make that decision now, it pushes them to either to take it or not, one of those two. It’s the only way they can go right?

Brent: Yeah absolutely! I’ve got a product that I got on a trial recently because I was not able to purchase it right then and there, and 28 days later, my trial is just about to expire, and I still have not gone back to purchase. I will after the trial expires because that’s when the scarcity actually kicks in for me.

James: Yeah absolutely! That’s powerful stuff Brent; I think we should probably draw it to a close. We’ve gone for about 35 minutes and we’ve covered a lot of good areas with plenty of actionable stuff to take away. What if anything would be your final words of wisdom to our listener out there right now listening in to your advice?

Brent: I think that the best thing that you can do with any marketing is try things quickly, and fail them even faster. So try a lot of different things, see what works, see if you can just dip your toes in to a lot of marketing strategies and sometimes they won’t work, but sometimes you’ll find something that is incredible. And we found that recently with SMS, we found it recently with mail, and we found it by testing some crazy ideas when it comes to conversion optimization so test as much as you can.

James: Awesome. Well I guess in theme with the interview we should offer our listener now a call to action which they should go and do as a result of listening in today. Brent, what would that be? Where could people go and find out more about you?

Brent: Well, normally, the way that I work is I work through different marketing agencies so one of the best things that I think people can do is actually get in touch with you and if they want my services is actually to get in touch with you James and say hey I’d like some keyword research done or some website optimization done on my website.

James: You got it. Perfect response Brent, as if we practiced it. Awesome! Well thank you so much for your time and your words of wisdom today. It’s been a thoroughly enjoyable 35 or so minutes chatting with you as it always is Brent so thanks again for your time and we should do this all again soon!

Brent: Thanks for having me James.

This week’s news in traffic: The first news is from Twitter and they are now letting all US advertisers to target people who just saw their TV ads. So this type of advertising is probably out of reach to the average Traffic Jam listener, however this new development is worth mentioning. How does it work. Let’s say Adidas added a new commercial for their new sneaker across several shows on different networks. Twitter is then able to analyze exactly when those ads were shown and on what programs. It then looks at people tweeting about those particular shows or programs by naming them in their tweets or by using relevant hash tags. Twitter is then able to show advertising to these people in their twitter streams using promoted tweets. so have you got a few hundred grand worth of advertising dollars to spend on TV ads and Twitter advertising? Well if you have, you may want to give this a go.

Next we go to Linkedin and in a fantastic development; they’ve introduced sponsored updates, which pretty much seems to be their version of Facebook’s sponsored stories. With sponsored updates company owners and organizations and even institutions will be able to reach people beyond their own following. Using demographic data and profile information across 225 million profiles from LinkedIn, it seems that we can get pretty precise with that targeting.

And finally in this week’s news, a month after Facebook introduced photo comments for Facebook users, the site is implementing this technology now for pages as well. Now people can leave photo comments on page posts and page admins can also respond to comments with a photo. This is rolling out gradually and globally starting this week.

Thank you to Patty from the United Kingdom for another five star iTunes review which I got this week and he said the quality of the podcast is very high in terms of production, but also the content is equally polished. Informative and entertaining interviews, this podcast is packed with tips and insights to boost traffic from a number of different tools and platforms. A must have. Well thank you Patty. As always I’d love to get your feedback and comments relating to the show, and there are a few places which you can do that. There is of course iTunes itself, log in via the iTunes account and find the Traffic Jam podcast and leave your review and rating there. You can also post in the site in the comments for each show and you can also do it via speakpipe, which is a voice message service which you’ll find linked at the base of the site. So I would love to get your feedback and comments however you would like to submit them and any great comments, well in fact, any comments really, I will read out on next week’s show.

The one minute traffic tip; I know how popular it is when I share cool little tools and resources for you so I want to tell you this week of our little wordpress plug in which we’ve added to trafficjamcast.com in the past few days that will get your content some additional social media exposure. This little plug in is called Click to Tweet and it’s super simple. Using the plug in, you can create a pre populated tweet with the message you want people to share and with one click your site visitors can click that message from their own Twitter account and share your message with their audience. There are many applications of course for this plug in but we’re using it to share cool little quotes from the Traffic Jam interviews and because of course my guests share some pretty cool stuffy tweets, retweeting these quotes is proving to be pretty popular indeed. To see the functionality I am talking about, head on over to TrafficJamCast.com. locate the episode page where this episode sits and you should find a very cool quote from Brent, I don’t know what it is yet because I am recording this before that post is written but you will be able to click on that button and share that quote of Brent’s with your followers so go give it a try.

Okay that rounds out another episode of Traffic Jam. I’ll of course be doing it all again next week and to give you a little heads up as to what’s in store on next week’s show, we’re going to be diving in deep on the topic of retargeting, so look out for that episode. If you’ve enjoyed the content here on Traffic Jam, you may also want to check out Veravo.com. that’s my main website and I publish videos almost daily with top traffic tips and and training there too, so go check that out. To play out today’s episode is a song picked by my guest today, Brent Hodgson and the track is a good kind of dance along tune; it’s by Avicii and the track name is called Good Feeling.