Libardo Lambrano's Blog

Everything has to do with the period of time you are looking at, to explain the phenomenon better I have taken a real example from the data of one of my clients. On this example you can see that the number of “Absolute Unique Visitors” for the month of October 2010 is 38,472 and for the same period the number of “Unique Visitors” is 41,240; on this specific case a difference of 6,71%. Why this happen? Is not suppose to be the same number in both places? What is the difference between “Absolute Unique Visitors” and “Unique Visitors”?

Let me explain this step by step… first at all the number of “Unique Visitors” will be ALWAYS larger that the number of “Absolute Unique Visitors”, the difference could be very small or very large depending what kind of website you have. If your site has a lot of recurring customers (banks websites – where people go on a regular basis to check balances) this difference can be pretty big, 20% or more. If your site doesn’t have any kind of recurring users this difference may be very small.

This is why…

Let’s say (as this example) you consider 1 month data range for your report, if you go to visitors (Google analytics menu on the left) you will see that” Absolute Unique Visitors” is 38,472 but if you create a custom report and add “Unique Visitors” as one of the “metrics” you will see that you will get a greater number 41,240 on this case… so which number will you believe? 38,472 or 41,240 well the truth is that both of them are accurate, here the explanation:

Click To Enlarge

Click To Enlarge

“Absolute Unique Visitors” is the number of “Unique Visits” you have in that period of time, on this case Oct 2010. In other words if a user log in to your site today and then in a week and then in two weeks, that person will be counted as ONE unique visitor for the month. That’s why this number will be always the smaller one. No matter how many times a user visit your site, if they log from the same IP address they will be counted as just one visit ALWAYS.

“Unique Visitors” is the number of unique visitors cut by the day, in other words… if somebody visit your site 3 times a day for 10 days, that person will be considered ONE “Absolute Unique Visitor” for that month but 10 “Unique Visits” will be actually counted towards the “Unique Visitor” total (3 times per day = ”1 Unique Visitor a day” x 10 days). So basically what Google analytics does is that adds up Unique Visitors for the day to give you a total “Unique Visitors” for the month.

Few days ago Google finally gave Google URL Shortener its own URL: http://goo.gl. The site works similar to any of the shorteners out there, but I found a cool feature that allows users to track referrals to their sites from off line channels. It is the integration of QR codes.

The way it works is like this, let’s say you have a long URL you want to make short: http://syndikomm.com/blog/2010/10/the-3-most-important-things-i-have-learned-from-%E2%80%9Cthe-social-network%E2%80%9D-movie/ then you go to http://goo.gl and enter your url on the URL Shortener field, automatically Google gives you a shorter URL address that people can use to go to the same content: goo.gl/sfoF, people do this for many reasons but two of the most important ones are:

1. They can send long URL’s through twetter or othermini blogging sites where characters are limited to a very small number (140)
2. They can track different channels individually and identify how people is reaching their blog, article or news. These shortener services give you reports of visitors to your site from the short URL.

The cool feature now is that Google integrates also QR Codes, so you can actually print the code on any publication or advertising piece and people with smart phones and the proper app (ie: QR reader) can get the page right into their phones without typing a single character… awesome!!

Thanks Google! really like these guys…

Ideas worth nothing…

In November 2003, as a student at Harvard University, Zuckerberg was approached by three fellow students (Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra) to build Harvard Connection, a website that later became ConnectU, a new idea of a set of interlinked social networks for people at a single college. Zuckerberg did some work for them, but then launched his own website — what’s now known as Facebook. It is true (as it is shown in the movie) that Mark Zuckerberg didn’t come up with the idea, but it is also true that the Winklevoss brothers didn’t have the experience, knowledge  and capabilities of building this site on their own… well… the truth is that IDEAS WORTH NOTHING, all that matters is execution and Mark Zuckerberg was exactly capable of doing what the Winklevoss never did. I’m not talking only about the technical part, which obviously was Mark Zuckerberg strength, he was also capable of distribute and sell the idea to other colleges and universities and he also managed to reach investors and create new ideas to build something bigger and stronger that the Winklevoss ever did.

Connections is all that matters…

Never sign a document without reading it….

The game of the moment is how to rank first in Google and other search engines, years ago it was an easy task, in fact so easy that a decade ago just manipulating the metatags you would be able to achieve highest positions on search engines; unfortunately with the Google algorithm getting more and more savvy every day, this is not the case anymore. Anyway it doesn’t mean it can stop you from appearing first in search engines, if you are creative enough, even if your website sucks you can get high rankings on Google and other search engines (or at least high traffic from search engines to your site). Some of the techniques I describe here are based on my experience working with different clients from products to services. I hope this article gives you a better understanding of how search engines work and how you can take advantage of them even if your website sucks.

The Problem Ranking First On Search Engines

The problem to rank first on search engines is that you have to have two things that are not easy to achieve without honest hard work, the first one is link popularity and the second one is relevant content. Even though Google analyzes about 200 factors to rank your site, undoubtedly these two are the most relevant.

Honest Link Popularity is difficult to achieve because it doesn’t depend on you, it depends on the criteria of the many users who arrive to your site (and think that your information is so useful and relevant that is worth to link to). These links are difficult to get especially when the source of the information is an authority. It is not the same to have an incoming link from the New York Times than having an incoming link from a farm directory in spammyland. Google qualifies authority sites from 1 to 10, the higher the ranking the more relevant the link, and the more relevant the link, the better the influence in your search engine ranking positions. You cannot go to link farms and create 1,500 links in a day and think that will help you… it is not! and Google already knows those sites are not worth a penny, they also know that you cannot go to the New York Times and ask a journalist specialized in your topic to write an article about you, including a link, search engines are savvy, more than you can even imagine.

The second problem to rank high in search engines is to create relevant content… if you create your site 10 years ago and you have keep it that way since then, you will never achieve the same positions of sites that are updated regularly with new articles and media content every day. The more content and the better quality of it, the better for your ranking in search engines. Good content is difficult to create because it requires a good knowledge of your industry, most of the time much better knowledge than your competitors; and it also requires a lot of dedication and resources, if you are going to write the articles you need to have the time, if you don’t you have to pay qualified people to do the job, which most of the time is not cheap.

So if you don’t have good link popularity and good content what are the options of your sites to appear first on search engines? NONE!… that’s the reality, but not the end of the world, there are some legal workarounds that you can use and benefit from this traffic even if your website sucks.

You can appear first on search engines even if your website sucks; in order to do that you need to take any of these two approaches: Ranking first on search engines by using “Universal Optimization” or Ranking first by just being creative and “implementing legal workarounds”.

Ranking first on search engines by using “Universal Optimization”

In May 16 2007 Google introduced “Universal Search” that basically blends results from news, video, images, local, products, books and most recently social networks and blogs. So if your site doesn’t’ rank first from your keywords of interest why don’t you implement a “Universal Optimization” strategy and pay more attention to other media content in your site (other than text) with better possibilities.

For instance… if you search for “Learn English” in Google, you will see that the 4^th result is a video commercial from a small local English school in Netherlands called “Soesman Language Institute”, it is not their website, which is far away from appearing in search results by these terms. The video that has been seen more than 6’000.000 times since released in December 1998. It is a powerful marketing tool and has allowed them to get a great position on search results (for a better competitive keyword) just by focusing on different media rather than text.

You can do the same by focusing in news, images, products, blogs or social media, with “Universal Search” opportunities are open to implement a real strategy for “Universal Optimization” and get stronger on areas where your competition may still be weak.

Ranking first in search engines by implementing “creative workarounds”

If your website sucks and you are not definitely close to achieve top rankings in search engines you can be creative and work in different fronts, here are just some:

1. Vertical Sites.

One of my clients had a difficult time ranking for their keywords of interest: “Learn English In New York” the strategy was to find a vertical site (specialized just on this industry) with top rankings already and include a profile page of my client there. The result was fantastic I found a company specialized just in language courses abroad called abroadlanguages.com on this website we created a complete profile page under the category “Learn English in New York”  at that moment there was more information on this profile page that in the whole entire website of my client. As a result my client got immediate rankings on Google because where people was searching for “Learn English In New York” this profile page was appearing in positions 5 to 10, but always on the main page. All student request received through this page were received from my client, in average 20 serious inquires per day. The lesson here is that you can benefit from organic rankings by using vertical sites that allow you to generate profile pages from your business.

2. Retail Stores & Shopping Engines

One of my clients produces and sells convertible strollers for babies, and they were having a really hard time ranking for their keywords of interest “bicycle baby carrier” after doing the analysis of the competition and analyzing the sites that were getting good rankings for these keywords we concluded that 5 of the 10 first results were resellers other than manufacturers. These resellers were on the following positions: Amazon:1,2; Walmart: 4; Sports Authority: 8; Models: 9; Tiptoeturtle:10; and 2 more sites were from shopping engines: Nexttag: 5 and Epinions: 6

That left MyZigo (my client) with just three positions available in an environment dominated for big players. Based on this analysis I recommended them to place their products on retail stores and shopping engines instead trying to rank on the top ten results for these keywords; the result couldn’t be better, if today you search for these keywords in Google, the stroller of MyZigo appear first, even with a thumbnail picture on the left side, the site is not theirs but they are definitely benefiting from these sales, the site at the top is a retailer store called www.jazzygearsports.com who is now carrying MyZigo products. By using this strategy myzigo was able to reach top positions and sale more products even tough their site has undertaken minor changes over the past year.

3. Marketplaces

Let’s say you are talent voice producer and you have your personal site, no matter how nice is your site most likely will take you months if not years of work to rank organic in search engines, one way you can do it faster and get exposure in search engines is using market places. Marketplaces are niche market sites specialized in just one product, for instance it will make more sense to you to register to voice123.com, or voices.com to get found that try to rank your personal site over theirs; by doing this you can benefit from organic traffic to your business and believe me, even if it cost you some it would be much less that you would have to spent if you want to rank first on Google for this category.

4. Lead Generation Sites

I have few clients in the finance and insurance business, the problem they have, specially in these challenging environment is that getting new clients and their sites at the top in search engines is very tough. Finance and Insurance are some of the most competitive industries in search engines and where I’ve seen more expensive click prices in online marketing campaigns. So if you want to benefit from organic search engine traffic sometimes is easier to partner with these kind of companies; if you enter the term “car insurance quotes” in Google, the site at the top result will be http://www.carinsurancequotes.com/. Even tough is not your site if you are on their database on the same local area where the consumer is looking to buy a car insurance you will get this lead. Off course is not free but it is cheaper that try to get to the same position for the same keywords on your own. The good thing is a that a lead is much better qualified prospect than just a click, but be careful, the business practices from some of these sites are not the greatest, some of them sell the lead to a lot of people (more than 10) or sometimes the sell the same lead but a year after. If you have the fortune to find a good lead generation site for your local area stick with it and benefit from organic traffic and great businesses opportunities.

5. Affiliate Marketing

If your site really sucks and you are not willing to pay the price to achieve top ranking positions, then join the companies that can do the dirty job for you…  this is know as “Affiliate Marketing”. Let’s say you have a small hotel or local break & breakfast in your area; but you don’t have muscle power and expertise to get exposure in search engines… what you can do is to join firms that can do this part not just for you but also for other small lodgings in your area. On this way, one single company will concentrate on the ranking and promotion and you will concentrate on your business and forget your crappy website. One great sample of these kind of sites is www.letmego.com, the have a large database of affiliated places in several cities and they promote the industry as a whole, then if somebody request a stay in your area, you will get the request and bid on it. You will pay only if the user book the stay with you, and the payment is just an small commission over the final sales price. By doing this you have thousands if not millions more of possibilities that somebody can find you by using these terms on Google, than promoting the site yourself.

So even though your website sucks don’t give up, you can still have some exposure in search engines if you do it right, just be creative, use all available resources and sites out there and get results. Happy Traffic!

I didn’t know about Patrick Jean or One More Production until today. I got an email early in the morning from Stumbleupon where they were recommending this video called “pixels” directed by Patrick Jean and executed by One More Production. I went to see the video and I have to day is one of the best short films I have ever seen, very creative and very well executed; I love it even more because it was shoot in New York, the city that I love and where I live since 1999. This video is a great example of how a successful campaign can not just drive traffic to a site but get you real businesses. In less than 24 hours of being release the video got 1 million viewers, so far, just days after the video has been published on Daily Motion (04-07-2010) seen more than 2 million times, it has been featured in many sites such as motionographer.com and many more. As I mentioned in one of my previous posts the power on viral campaigns is incredible, as David Skok has demonstrated a successful viral campaign with a short cycle time (like this video) can reach 30.000.000 in 20 days. I’m sure this video will become one of those phenomenons, and will represent Patrick Jean and his company years of new business, investment in creativity pays off. See the video below and judge for yourself.

PIXELS by PATRICK JEAN.
Uploaded by onemoreprod. – Independent web videos.

This article has been written by Libardo Lambrano, founder of Syndikomm; an online marketing firm based in New York city and specialized in multicultural markets. Libardo Lambrano, a digital citizen of the world can be reached@llambrano

The Venator Partners Newsletter is one of the best free information available on fundings, IPO’s, merger and acquisitions and executive moves on the fields of software, internet, digital media, government, clean tech and telecom.

I found out about this newsletter when I read the book “Inbound Marketing” by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah; on the book they referred to this newsletter  as one of the best nurturing emails you can ever get. I have to say they were completely right. I subscribed to this newsletter and every week I get the latest updates of what is happening on the Internet and tech industry.

On the newsletter they provide a brief description of the companies involved on the transactions, along with a direct link to their websites, some of the fundings and acquisitions included really interesting companies with great ideas that inspire me every Monday when I get the newsletter.

Before getting this newsletter I never imagined the kind of activity of this industry, the newsletter has also allowed me to discover great investors and VC’s that focused on particular vertical industries. I think the Venator Partners newsletter is a must subscription for all entrepreneurs and executives on this field.

This article has been written by Libardo Lambrano, founder of Syndikomm; an online marketing firm based in New York city and specialized in multicultural markets. Libardo Lambrano, a digital citizen of the world can be reached@llambrano

I recently listened a webcast on PPC Rockstars (a webmaster radio program hosted by David Szetela, founder of Clix Marketing) where David was interviewing Brad Geddes, a guru in Post-Click conversion optimization who was talking about the importance of a PPC management. It was really interesting for me because a lot of companies undervalue the professional help of a PPC or SEM professionals. Brad explained on a very simple way, how a PPC campaign can immensely benefit from basic management and good practices.

On the webcast Brad demonstrates how improving the quality score on your keywords, improving conversion rates, profits per sale (through cross sales) and adding negative keywords can increase the profitability of any campaign on more that 50%. The interesting thing about the presentation is that the data presented by Brad is based on reasonable achievable improvements but virtually any good PPC management firm.

In order to simplified the conclusions of this webcast and summarize the 12 slides presented by Brad, I created these spreadsheet based on the same data presented on this example.

Let’s say you run a “non managed” PPC campaign spending $1,000 per day and making $50,700 in profits. If the campaign is properly managed for an online advertising professional you could end it up making $134.672 in profits without increasing your monthly budget.

On this graph I presented 3 different case scenarios:

1. Change: Increasing Quality Score (from 6.5 to 8 ) – Result: Increased of $11,700 in revenues
2. Change: Increasing Conversion Rate (from 2% to 3%) – Result: Increased of $25,350 in revenues
3. Change: Increasing profits per sales (cross selling) (25%) – Result: Increased of $12,675 in revenues
4. Change: Adding Negative Keywords (0.5 improvement in Quality Score and 0.25% improvement in conversions) – Result: Increased of $10,725 in revenues

By applying all these changes you can see how the numbers at the end of the month have also increased, the largest increased though takes place where you increase your conversion rate, even by just 1%; that’s why the landing pages in PPC campaigns are critically important.

The problem today is that a lot of businesses don’t realize these new challenges on PPC management and they never focused on these critical factors; any good PPC management firm will be able to handle all these issues properly, and put your ROI back on track. As Brad has illustrated a good PPC management is always a good investment.

This article has been written by Libardo Lambrano, founder of Syndikomm; an online marketing firm based in New York city and specialized in multicultural markets. Libardo Lambrano, a digital citizen of the world can be reached@llambrano

There has been a lot of polemic around the disapproval from Apple of the Google Voice App for the iPhone, but I have to clarify several things, first at all on an answer from Apple to the FCC on July 31 2009 they clearly said that is not true that the Google Voice App has been disapproved, they said that they continue to study (which is supposedly should be different). But no matter if the application still under review I believe it will never going to make it to the iPhone, the reason is very simple, it will allow you to call for free and it will allow Google to take control of the voicemail among other intrinsic features of the iphone.

As has been said on the media Google Voice will allow you to call for free but it is not because the Google Voice uses the data plan and the call is VoIP, this is absolutely not true, what the application does is that it routes your call through a Google number before dial to your final destination, so you are actually making a call using the minutes in your phone. So the question is…

How can I call for free with the Google Voice on the IPhone?

Here it is how:

1. First at all you need to get your Google voice number from Google on this website www.google.com/voice
2. Once you have your number assigned you can access the Google voice website directly from your phone by pointing to this url in your browser www.m.google.com/voice
3. Once on this page you can login to your Google Voice account and start to dial any number as you would normally do directly with the dial pad on your iphone.
4. After dial any number, Google Voice will connect to a Google Voice number, which is different from the Google Voice number Google originally assigned to you. For instance in my case my Google Voice number is 516-690-68XX but when Google Voice is making an outgoing call from my iPhone connects the call using another number that is 518-314-94XX. In other words the number Google Voice uses for outgoing calls is different to the Google Voice number assigned (for incoming calls only).
5. The number Google Voice uses to make the out-coming call is the important number in this case, because this number is the one that will allow you to call for free; this is how: When Google Voice is connecting you through this number is actually making a real call that will be deducted from the minutes in your plan, to avoid this the only thing you need to do is to add this number to you A-List at AT&T, this is a feature that not too many people is aware of, but it is basically a list of 10 different telephone numbers that you can call for free and don’t count within the minutes on your plan. In other words if you just use Google Voice for your outgoing calls and the Google Voice connection number is on you’re a-List at AT&T all your calls will be free, you will then be able to minimize the minutes on your plan, saving several bucks a month.

The problem I have right now is that I equally love and enjoy Google and Apple products, unfortunately this time I need to side with one of them and it is Google, these are my reasons:

On January 26 Google Voice released the HTML5 version for the iPhone making most of the functionalities originally planed available to the public and under passing the questionable approval process from iPhone. I started to use the application and for its convenience and savings opportunity I just want to use it from now on (instead my AT&T number), the problem is that because of Apple’s rejection one of the most critical features originally planned is not available on Google Voice and is the integration of the application with my contacts list; Any time I want to dial somebody I need to see his/her number somewhere else and then dial it manually, off course this can be solved by exporting the contacts from my iPhone and importing them to Google Voice, the problem is they will never be up to date and there is not possibility of keeping them in sync.

What all this is causing is that for the first time I started to feel some kind of tyranny from Apple which having the ability to make my life much life has insisted in blocking the Google Voice application while approving others with the same or better functionalities such as Line2 the first dual mode cell/VoIP app for the iPhone.

Most of the reasons they expressed to delay the approval of the Google Voice app are actually present on the Line2 app by Toktumi. On response from Apple to the FCC they said that no application routing calls through the AT&T’s 3G network has been approved on the Apple Store; this is not true anymore Line2 actually can place free calls using the 3G data network of AT&T. Why if they approve this application they still denied Google Voice? On the same reply to the FCC Apple said that they have not approved Google Voice because “it appears to alter the iPhone’s distinctive user experience by replacing the iPhone’s core mobile telephone functionality and Apple user interface with its own user interface for telephone calls, text messaging and voicemail“; this is exactly what the Line2 app does… so please Apple explain me what is the criteria behind this. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple buys out Toktumi and its Line2 App and definitely blocks the possibility of Google Voice to be completely integrated with the iPhone.

I would like to see the Google Voice App approved and I know so many people is expecting the same, this double criteria, lack of transparency and confusion is just hurting Apple’s brand and will force so many users to migrate to Nexus one. If the Google Voice App gets approved I would be happy to continue using my iPhone, but blocking the app is just making the iPhone more difficult to use and less convenient. Please Apple don’t make this mistake, I used to love Palm too but where other phones are easier and more convenient to use consumers don’t think twice… please approve the Google Voice once for all, we need it, we want it.

This article has been written by Libardo Lambrano, founder of Syndikomm; an online marketing firm based in New York city and specialized in multicultural markets. Libardo Lambrano, a digital citizen of the world can be reached@llambrano