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Starting to go social – its becoming far more measurable

During the past few weeks, thanks to the persistence of our colleague Andres Mejia, we have started engaging with our Facebook audience far more than we had before. The result has been a significant increase across all our metrics.

We have only been playing around for now but we anticipate this trend to persist as we launch Diamonds in Africa at the beginning of August and roll out our social media campaign next week (Diamonds in Africa offers ethically sourced diamonds at trade prices).

Very excited to start tracking what the $ value is of our network and if it leads to sales or at least recommendations which lead to sales.

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Google Slap = “what we need to do more of” strategy

We recently got our first ever Google “slap” a few weeks ago when Google  launched the Penguin update to their search algorithm.

So many people posted solutions and possible interpretations of the algorithm changes and we tried everything they recommended. For the most part, we have now recovered.

Now, looking forward I have pointed a few things (having read this article) that we NEED TO DO, moving forward – things that will not only ensure we avoid future slaps, but also things that may help us win the SEO battles ahead:

  1. Publish content that gets natural links because it just is INTERESTING – ensuring people we don’t even know are doing the SEO work for us.
  2. Build links slowly and consistently – not too fast and not in short bursts. A link a day keeps the Google slap away
  3. Build deep links – not just to the homepage as this looks suspicious
  4. Vary anchor text – avoid using only your url.
  5. Focus on more than PageRank for links – look at age & content quality (sites whose PR will likely go up too)
  6. Conduct competitive anaylsis for link sources – who our competitors are using
For Diamonds in Africa we are completely reviewing our link building strategy and for Rare Pink we are likely to start off with this new strategy very soon.

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Top tools of the month – Zapier and KickOffLabs

This month I came across two really, REALLY cool online services that made it just that much easier doing business online (and a lot more enjoyable).

The first of these was Zapier. Credit to Google who somehow knew that I was looking for a service just like the one Zapier was providing – to link two otherwise unlinked online services through their API, without being a developer. Zapier lets you link several dozen services by creating a “zap” between them.

In my case I wanted to make sure that every time a customer fills out one of our Wufoo forms, our Desk account automatically not only received the e-mail, but also used the information from the form to create a new customer profile (complete with name, e-mail and phone number). This makes contacting each customer just that little bit  faster and easier; over time leading to an increase in our efficiency.

Then thanks to Zapier, I found out about Kick Off Labs. I had been trying getting our graphic designer, Martin, to design us a landing page for Diamonds in Africa and while we had the design ready I was still dependent on the developers who needed to actually turn that design into a working page. When it comes to landing pages I can safely say I may never need a developer ever again; and here are two example why:

These two landing pages took less than an hour to create. What is equally impressive is that you can use Zapier to then link these landing pages to a range of other services we use such as MailChimp to manage the database of e-mails we collect for future marketing purposes.

Finally KickOffLabs also has a really cool feature. Even though it only asks the visitors to your landing page for an e-mail address, it then looks through the various social media sites to identify the name, age, location and other social networks linked to this e-mail address. You only ask for their e-mail, KickOffLabs gives you their identity. What more can I say?! 

P.S. The 5 Diamond Secrets You Need to Know landing page leads those who sign up to this Diamonds in Africa report (just in case you were interested).