I’ve read a few things here and there about social traffic and how ‘important’ it is to have. And with more and more businesses flocking to social media platforms like Instagram to promote their brand. That means more competition to get the most followers. While growing your following should not be the sole focus of your social media strategy, it still pays to have as many followers as possible on Instagram. And with companies such as Upleap that can help you get more Instagram followers, it’s now easier to boost your credibility on the site. I also have a personal blog and the social traffic is through the roof, however, the big question is, does any of the social traffic really matter?

Take StumbleUpon traffic, for example. If you’re a Stumbler, you know as much as any other Stumbler, you’re killing time and looking for things of interest. This usually doesn’t involve running around spending a dime, it’s just about finding funny pictures or things of interest without having to put much thought into it. I can honestly say I’ve never spent a single penny on a site I have stumbled on. I might have referenced something I found on my blog, but I can’t see any financial benefit that this type of traffic might bring.

Now let’s look at Digg traffic. I will admit I’m not a big Digg fan, mostly because I’ve read about how a group of power Digg users control what gets pushed up and what doesn’t so I don’t view it as as much a world view as I do a group of users view.Many users buy likes for instagram for increasing their traffic. The results are pretty much the same thing though, it’s either political, funny, shocking or just overall newsworthy, not financially beneficial to anyone. I did have one blog post that someone dugg and there was about a week of traffic that came from it, all which opens that one page, looks at the content, and then moves on.

Social media branding is about consistently using the right methods to engage with your target audience on social media platforms. The aim or purpose is to boost brand awareness. Social media branding makes it easy for you to get more relevant people into your sales funnel by giving them a reason to trust you. People use social media for various reasons. But for marketers, it is mainly to reach more consumers with their brand message. Reaching more people helps grow your brand awareness and generate leads. Magnify Signs in Denver is a company that creates custom signs for businesses. These are not your typical, simple signage, but rather they’re works of art with clever sayings and messages to make you laugh or smile. Whether it’s the sign outside of an office building welcoming people each day as they enter or one at the entranceway telling them what floor their destination can be found on, Magnify will take care of all aspects from design layout to installation!

I’ve also blogged some time ago about Facebook Ads and how poor they performed. Granted, this was millions of new users ago and they’ve probably put more work into their ad platform, but what are you looking for when you login to Facebook? Something to buy or pay for? I would say 75% of the time I login to my account, the ad I see you can see to the right. Yep, it’s a mugshot of Matt Baker, who works for us. Just seems like a big waste to show that ad over ads that might actually convert for serious advertisers. (not that I don’t enjoy seeing Baker’s peace sign) As I said before, other than branding, I still can’t see a huge benefit in running ads on the Facebook system.

I would love to see a study that compares the value of a social media site to a large company with thousands of employees, and the company spends millions of dollars in advertising with that social site. Then determine how much employee time is wasted on that social site during a typical workday. Total both sides of the study and see what the true benefit to the company really is. What if it was found that social websites are a proven way to cost companies millions of dollars in lost revenues because their employees spend more time being social than being productive?

I’m not here to say social sites are worthless, I’m just asking if they really matter when it comes to paying the bills. If you have a site that averages a thousand uniques per month without any social traffic and you convert 5% of the traffic, and then after bumping your traffic up another thousand uniques of social visits, would that translate into the same number of conversions? I’ve searched and haven’t really found much by way of real life examples or data to prove it’s worth the time, so if you are reading this and know of a good study or two, please post a link or any real life situations you might have been involved with.

I read this over at techcrunch, about the CEO of ChaCha and his home workstation.

An 8 monitor (19″) setup that is equipped with an exercise bike at the bottom which we got on sale from MyProScooter. I’ve always thought a way to help people who sit all day and all night at their computers, is to make their system powered by the electricity created from pedaling a stationary bike. Some of you may think, “but wouldn’t that kill everything if you stopped?” … yes, that’s why you don’t make it kill the computer, just the monitors. If you want to see what’s going on, pedal. It might suck at the beginning, but after a while, it becomes a habit and you’re burning calories.

The CEO of ChaCha, Scott Jones’ setup is very close to my idea, so maybe he’ll read this and take it a step further to invent it. With everyone sitting behind computers these days, why not have the option to force you to exercise a bit while on the computer? Even save a little electricity.

Do yourself a favor and watch the MTV Cribs they link to over at TechCrunch.

Doing some searching today, something caught my eye in my tabs:

Then I looked up in the Firefox address bar and noticed it there too:

Good job Google. I thought the little “G” icon was pretty boring.

Now that the holidays are behind us and things are back on track, it only makes sense to sum up 2008 and look forward to 2009. The economy was one of the biggest headlines, along with the history making presidential election, but what did all of this mean to LinkWorth?

Numbers of 2008:

• New accounts were up over 90%, marking our biggest year on record. Even after our largest increase of 554% in 2007
• Our partner inventory is up over 110%
• Published ads are up almost 400%
• After a dismal year for most companies, our sales were up 17% and marked our 4th consecutive yearly sales increase
• The year marked 5 different record monthly sales
• Money paid out to partners was up nearly 25% equaling many millions dollars paid to our partners in 4 years
• The only number that was down is how many advertisers we lost, which is down from 10% in ’07 to 7% in ’08
• Over 2 million people laid off in 2008, with over 100k in the tech industry. LinkWorth layoffs, zero

In a year of economic turmoil, LinkWorth has come through with flying colors. There is no doubt we were worried as much as the next business as we watched company after company laying off people, but we have been very lucky to not be affected.

What to expect in 2009:

• We are forecasting another record year in sales, which means even higher payouts
• At least 2 new product offerings, with the possibility of 4
• The addition of more staff to help support customers and manage accounts for advertisers
• Video tutorials and more online help to assist in common tasks
• Cutting down on steps with common tasks
• Listen to our customers on what they feel we can do to improve
• LinkWorth tour including the usual stops, SES, SMX, PubCon and SXSW, with new stops being added including Ad-Tech, DMA, trip to Europe and a few local shows

Many think the economy will continue to fall, but when we are down to idiots asking for a porn bailout, that tells me the worst is over. LinkWorth will continue to improve and find new ways for advertisers to market and partners to earn even more money, so we’re positive this will be another exciting year. Thank you to everyone that has helped us continue to grow the past 4 years and we look forward to the years to come.

As things wind down this year, I just wanted to take a minute to wish everyone in our little community a wonderful holiday and happy new year! The LinkWorth crew had a night out recently to celebrate the season and as you can see here, we had a great time! I want to thank all of our kick-ass employees for making 2008 our best year ever.

2009 is already shaping up to be even better. With new staff, a shiny new product (shh…details to come), exciting new strategic alignments, and our busiest conference-tour ever; we’re fired up for things to come. Our partners, advertisers, employees…EVERYONE…should benefit from what’s in store. So stayed-tuned, party-safe, and have a safe holiday!

From all of us, to all of you….CHEERS!!

Human beings are social creatures, and maintaining personal relationships are a very important part of our lives which often require a lot of work. Thankfully for my generation, the internet has blessed us with convenient tools that allow us to remain in close touch with a large number of our friends relatively easy. We are entering the age of the Social Network! Sites like Facebook and MySpace allow users to keep in contact with a larger number of people than would be possible in the everyday offline (AKA real) world; social networks complement our natural ability to maintain personal relationships by eliminating the barriers of distance and time.

Take for example my personal Social Network of choice, Facebook. I currently have around 800 friends on Facebook, 90% of whom are friends and acquaintances of mine that I have met over the years at high school and College, people who now live far away from me in different parts across the country. Without the internet, it would be physically impossible for me to keep in touch with each of them even if I tried, but thanks to Facebook I am able to indirectly keep up with their lives and if I needed to contact them, they are just a message away.  Facebook is not just useful for distant connections, but it also is a great tool for my closest friends and I to communicate with.

Facebook refers to the collection of user friend connections as the “Social Graph”. The company’s success can be largely attributed to its ability to leverage the Social Graph for the benefit of its users by allowing them to easily connect to one another and share information. In fact, if someone were to ask me,  “What is Facebook?”  My reply would be that, “Facebook is a tool that helps connect users with their friends, allowing them to share information very easily between one another.” It’s important to remember that Facebook does not replace other more traditional means of sharing information and communicating; it’s purpose is to enhance and expand the sharing of information by making it simpler to communicate and connect with others.

LinkWorth is also about connections; our products and services facilitate the connections between Advertisers and Partners for the purpose of Search Engine Marketing. Our company exists, in part, to simplify the process of connecting websites interested in text link advertising with websites looking to monetize their site by selling ads on it. In fact our three pointed logo (as legend has it) is symbolic of the three way connection between LinkWorth, our partners and advertisers. We believe that our strength lies in our ability to build and maintain relationships with our users and potential users. These relations help keep the LinkWorth team aware of our customers online marketing needs, so that we can always find ways to better satisfy those needs.

We are always searching for ways to better communicate with and serve our users. With that in mind I’d like to introduce our newest social experiment, LinkWorth on Facebook. If you are familiar with Facebook Pages, I encourage you to become a fan of our page and make use of all its social features (Wall, Discussion Board, etc). If you are not familiar with Facebook, it’s easy to sign up and learn the ropes. Think of our page as an online hangout for everything LinkWorth related; whether you want to learn more about SEO for your website or you just have a little fun getting to know the LinkWorth Team… Be sure to check out LinkWorth on Facebook!

LinkWorth loves Vegas. Maybe too much, in fact.

Some of you old-schoolers might remember the story from a couple years ago when yours truly got stamped with our logo along with a client of ours. Well, fast forward two years and voila! De ja vu!

This time, it was our own Jeffrey Marek that stepped up to the tattoo-plate. Ron planted the seed before we left and by Thursday night it was ON. SearchBash was at Rain at the Palms on Thursday night and by the end of it we were all SearchSmashed to put it mildly! (Insert a special shout-out to Dan Leon with Idea Launch. Thanks for the hook, dude!) Carey Hart has a great tattoo little shop there so we went down with a couple friends for some drunken tattooing. (Shannon & Sven…we had a blast hangin’ out with y’all!)

I don’t remember much, but apparently I was taking a bunch of pictures. Here are a couple shots of Jeff mid-ink and post-ink…

Great times. Oh, and Jeff….that most certainly is a permanent link…er…ink!

Sitting here in our booth at PubCon in Vegas. Attendence has been slow but those we speak to are great contacts.

In a booth next to us is a really cool iphone game app called inetmania. Its a game for webmasters and you have the ability to make a lot of money with it. Check it out at www.inetmania.com …

Last night Matt and I were invited to a secret “dirty link sellers dinner”. Hosted by Patrick Gavin and MediaWhiz. Lots of familiar faces and plenty of food and drinks. Conversations were great and thanks so much to those guys for the night.

Off for now. Have 2 more nights!!

TWEET TWEET!!! No, that’s not a bird you hear, those tweets are from the new LinkWorth’s Twitter Profile. While most have probably heard a lot of buzz about the up and coming micro-blogging service Twitter, there are many who still may be in the dark so let us briefly explain what Twitter is. According to Wikipedia, “Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.” Basically Twitter is a whole social network devoted short little messages, I like to think of it as the evolution of the Instant Messenger “away message” from online days of yore (back when AIM was king).

So why has LinkWorth joined Twitter? In the long term Twitter could very well become a useful way of communicating with our users, but right now the whole reason for the LinkWorth Twitter Profile is to provide real time updates on our trip to the 2008 PubCon Search Marketing Conference in Las Vegas Nevada, November 11^th – 14^th. We’ll be “tweeting” all the latest search news from PubCon, as well as documenting our teams shenanigans out on the town! What happens to us in Vegas, probably will stay in Vegas… but everything that doesn’t will end up on the LinkWorth Twitter Profile. Be sure to check it out November 11^th – 14^th.

PubCon is just over a week away from posting this. Always a fun time and great way to meet all the industry people who enjoy a great time. Let’s face it, if you are going to PubCon Vegas, it means you like to let loose and socialize. Plus, the end of the conference includes a Pub crawl!

Things we look forward to this year:

• Spreading the LinkWorth business to new business owners, their employees & agencies that haven’t heard of us yet! (the whole point of going)
• A secret little dinner with some big names, hosted by a cool guy. (all I can say) The conversation here will most definitely be top secret and classified.
• Meeting new faces and seeing familiar faces as well.
• Tattoo Me Night! This will be the night that a couple of us will be getting LinkWorth logo tattoo’s and anyone else who is interested. Always the best night!
• Pub Crawl. This will be our first time to stick around for it. Hope it’s as fun as they say it is. If it isn’t, something tells me we’ll wake things up a bit.

If you’re interested in the “Tattoo Me Night”, shoot me an email. We’ll pay for the tattoo, as long as it’s our logo, of course. It’s fun and a story you’ll have for the rest of your life!