Powered by Blogger.
Yahoo dethroned Google as the top destination of U.S. web users in July,comScore reported. Yahoo had an estimated 197 million unique visitors in July, compared to Google's 192 million. However, mobile device visits aren't included in those figures.
While these aren't the most comprehensive traffic figures, comScore's July numbers show that Yahoo boosted its traffic by around 20 percent compared to last July. This is the first time Yahoo has taken the top spot on comScore's list since May 2011.
Also of note, Tumblr, which Yahoo recently acquired, didn't help pass Google on unique visitors. Tumblr ranked at 28th in the list, with roughly 38 million visitors during the month of July.
The usual suspects – Microsoft, Facebook and AOL – took the third, fourth and fifth spots, raking in an estimated 180 million, 142 million and 117 million unique visitors last month, respectively.





LinkedIn announced today that LinkedIn Groups is getting a big redesign with new customization features. Here’s what it looks like:
New LinkedIn Groups
“The new streamlined interface also makes it easier for members to find content and engage in a Group,” says LinkedIn’s Jennifer Bunting. “On LinkedIn, members join Groups to share knowledge and network. Brands like Citi, Staples, and Capital One use Groups to build relationships with these members, drive advocacy, and generate engagement with their content marketing efforts.”


Read more >>



When Facebook began to introduce its revamped News Feed in March, the social network emphasized its highly visual nature to brands. Three updates announced Thursday will help brands on Facebook in their quest to capture more attention: an agreement with stock photography agency and image library Shutterstock, making millions of images available for use in ads on the social network; multiple image uploads; and an update to its Pages Manager application for iOS and Android that enables page administrators to upload multiple photos for a single post.
Starting next week, millions of images from Shutterstock’s library will be available free-of-charge for use in all of Facebook’s ad formats, and those images are fully searchable, as well as accessible directly within the social network’s ad creation tool.
Facebook’s revamped image uploader will allow page admins to select from page photos, images used in previous ads, and Shutterstock images, after which they can simultaneously upload their selections, and simultaneously create multiple ads with multiple images. Page admins can also run tests to see which images boost their campaigns’ performance. This change goes into effect Thursday.
MultipleImageUploads




The advent of technological innovations has found its use in all human activities ranging from communication, learning, and production among other functions. There have been numerous ventures that have been operated on the social media which is known to greatly enable easy interaction between the stake holders. The media provides a platform upon which site are developed that serves as communication tools and centers between people at different locations
Among the sites developed are those that aide in facilitating employment for both the employers and the job seekers. These are widely known as professional websites which enables the employer to post a job vacancy where the aspiring employee can view the details and apply for it where possible. However there are sites which serve multiple functions but also promote the process of employment. These websites on social media includes:
LinkedIn: this is a social media site where people register and create a personal account by providing their personal information as per the instructions available. Upon the account creation, the new member creates a personal profile that highlights his academic and professional competence that becomes visible to other members who are connected to him. The site allows potential employers to review the profile of different people and hence link them to any arising vacancies
LinkedIn as a social media tool has enabled even corporate companies to create profiles where other people can follow. The companies posts vacancies in the site and welcomes applications, making it a useful site that can propel aspiring professionals
Google plus: this is a site on social media that has recently gained international recognition due to the volume of activities happening in it. It has been largely used by the recruitment companies to connect employees to their dream jobs. The employee creates an account where he can access to all job openings that are posted daily. Google plus serves a variety of professions and offers a convenient means of advertising vacancies and companies
OLX: is the one of the most recent sites developed to promote advertising. It provides multiple and vertical search engines which contains jobs vacancies and other products. This site is easy to use as the users must not register any accounts and hence providing unlimited view. Jobs are posted which includes; the posting and deadline dates, the employers contact details and the requirements for the job, hence one can apply for the desired job. This site provides a professional based classification of the posted jobs to promote easy search. The classification includes finance, engineering, agriculture jobs among others therefore you only search in accordance your specialization
Facebook: this is considered to be one of the largest sites of the social media attracting the greatest volume of users. It enables the recruiting agents to post their vacancies for the interested candidates to apply. Companies creates their pages where people get more information on the requirements and activities of the company
Yahoo: this is a mail service website that has greatly attracted numerous companies to post their job openings for the public. These enables the users access the application details and eventually submit the application
The world of innovation remains dynamic and more of social media advertising continues to emerge. Most of the successful professionals trace their employment to the career websites where they first got the job detail.

Launching a website is a little like making homemade soup. You’ve got many ingredients coming together, and before you’re done adding them, you sample it to see that you got it just right. But this step – the testing – is often ignored before a site goes live.
Testing a new website can seem overwhelming. Teams aren’t sure where to start. But you may have more help than you know. Every team member can assist in the pre-launch process.
Most websites have writers, web developers, marketers, search engine optimizers, and network administrators coming together to create the site. These same people can help test it. Here's how.
Editor

For the Writer or Editor

Writers and editors have strong attention to detail when it comes to the written content on your site. And this attention to detail can also be used for other tasks as well. Here’s what they can do pre-launch:

1. Spelling, Grammar, Punctuation

Check for proper spelling, typos, and grammar site-wide.

2. Forms

Fill out the forms on the site and go through the following questions:
  • Can the flow be improved?
  • Do you get stuck?
  • Are the instructions accurate?
  • Does the completed form get sent to the right people or person?

3. Site speed

Check the size of your page sizes and their load time. Here’s how:
  • Download Google Chrome
  • Navigate to your page in Chrome
  • Press F12
  • View “network” tab
  • Behold!
While Step 3 may appear technical, it doesn’t require a very technical person in order to be useful. The Gantt chart on the network tab will show what a page is doing when it loads in a browser. In the top right corner, they’ll be able to see the total load time.
Gannt
In the Gantt chart, it shows how much time each element takes to load. Almost anyone can help find the culprit slow page. Just show the long, horizontal bars to your web developers or network administrators, and they can help.

4. Context

When giving a critical eye to the pages within the site, ask:
  • Why would I visit this page?
  • Is the content ready for visitor?
  • Does the page address the audience?
Web Designer

For the Web Designer

Web designers know what the original design intent is, and they have an eye for the visual details. They can usually spot when things don’t look quite right pretty quickly.

5. Compatibility

Multi-browser rendering is the bane of the Internet, but as website creators, we have to live with it. Check to make sure the pages render well in common browsers. Browser share is a moving target so to help prioritize efforts, here’s a site that continually examines it.

6. Fonts

Sometimes font codes get dropped into a page inadvertently and make a letter or a word look funny. Check to see that the formatting is consistent, and look for odd blips in the copy.

7. Images

Make sure all display text renders on the image when you hover over it (the alt attribute). Make sure the images display correctly. Are they larger than 120 kilobytes? If so, find out of there is a good reason for that. You really only need 72 dots per inch (dpi) for web images in terms of quality.
Web Developer

For the Web Developer

Web developers know the inner workings of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and how browsers handle those languages. There are some important technical items that a web developer is best suited for when it’s time to go live. Here are a few.

8. Live URLs

Often, sites are built at a URL (uniform resource locator) that isn't the website’s final destination. When a site goes live, the URLs are transferred from a staging area to production. All the URLs change at this time, and they need to be tested.
On small sites without any tools, you can navigate to each page to make sure they all work. On a site with fewer than 500 URLs, you can use Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool for free to find bad URLs. For larger sites, there is a modest annual fee.

9. Validation

W3C-valid code is the one thing you can do prior to launch to have some confidence around a search engine spider being able to crawl your site. It’s pretty simple to know if a page is valid. You just paste the URL in question here, and you’ll get a report almost instantly.
With that report, you can attack the issues and get the page into compliance. To help even more, here are 10 common fixes.

10. Minify

This is a technique that combines and compresses website code into smaller chunks to speed up your site. You can read more about it at Google. Then, look at the website pre-launch to see if the site is using minify where it can.

11. 404 pages

When a 404 (“page not found”) error occurs, make sure you have a custom page to help your visitor find something else of use, even if it wasn’t what they were looking for. Do you have an HTML sitemap there? Does the 404 page include a site search?

12. Favicon

Favicons are those little iconic images that show up in the address bar and tabs of your browser. How does it help? It’s a small branding opportunity that lends credibility to your site. It’s nice to have one when you launch.
Search Engine Optimizer

For the Search Engine Optimizer

SEO professionals bring an understanding of the web marketing focus. They can look at a number of things with perspective that can help the site right out of the gate with search engines.

13. 301 Redirects

Sometimes content is repurposed or gets moved to fit the new navigation structure of a site. If you have an existing site and you are changing the URL structure with your new site, you’ll want to make sure you’ve mapped the old URLs to the new ones.
The Screaming Frog spider mentioned earlier can be run on both the old site and the new. An Excel spreadsheet is a great way to document this effort. Column A has the old URL, and you place the new URL in Column B. Each row represents a redirect from old to new. On launch day, it’s time to execute.

14. Title Tags/Meta Data

This may sound like old news to some, but this easy-to-fix mistake happens every day. Make sure every page has a title tag, and make sure they are unique.
Also make sure each has a meta description. This is still a common source for search engine spiders to draw from to understand what the page is about and provide visitors with a sneak peak into the page contents from the results.

15. XML Sitemaps/HTML Sitemap

Make sure your new website has an accurate site map in both XML and HTML format. Both users and search engines care about this important element as it helps them find the pages they are looking for when other methods fail.

16. Tools

Make sure Google Analytics or the analytics package you’re using, and Google and Bing Webmaster Tools are set up and ready to go.

17. Social Media Integration

Do the social media icons on the site go to the correct pages? Do you have the right buttons and social plugins installed for what you are trying to accomplish and what you want the user to be able to do? (For example, share a page versus “Like” you on Facebook.)

18. SERP Display

Are the search engines displaying your pages correctly in the search engine results pages? Did you write proper meta descriptions, but they aren’t being used? Are the images you placed on your Places page being displayed in the SERP?

19. Search Engine Submission

It used to be that all new sites needed to submit to be crawled and indexed. Today, the search engines are more sophisticated, and will likely find and crawl the new site anyway, but it is helpful to include this in your launch checklist.

20. PPC Setup

Make sure if you are running any PPC campaigns that it’s set up and ready to go with the site launch. To avoid a lapse in service, if you have a Google PPC rep, you can set and pause all your campaigns to the new URLs prior to launch, and instead of the ads getting disapproved, your rep can approve them manually.
Network Administrator

For the Network Administrator

These folks manage your web servers, the software that runs on them, and all the traffic components that keep your web traffic coming in. Their technical expertise on some of these tasks is like gold.

21. Monitoring

A site monitor checks pages regularly to make sure it is available for visitors. Basic monitors check if the page is working.
Important pages within the site should have enhanced monitors that test if a completed form behaves the way it should. Enhanced monitors are more expensive to setup and keep running so the page in question needs to justify the additional expense.

22. Backup System

Have you thought about what happens if the server goes down? Make sure the backup system is configured properly, and the recovery process has been tested so you know it works.

23. Traffic Loads

Think about what might happen to your site if it gets an influx of heavy traffic. There are load test software tools that allow you to simulate heavy loads. If you are expecting big crowds, this is a must.

24. Protected Pages

Does your site have pages that require user credentials to view? If so, do the credentials work? From the opposite angle, also check to see that the pages can’t be viewed without proper credentials. Make several attempts to get to those URLs without proper credentials to make sure the security is working as expected.

25. Secure Certificate (if Required)

If your site is ecommerce, or you’re using encrypted pages to protect visitor privacy on a form or elsewhere, you’ll want to check your certificate on launch day.
To do this, go to the encrypted section of your site. When the lock appears in the address bar, right click on it and read the message your visitors will read. It should have your name on it and state that it’s valid. If the lock doesn’t appear or the name isn’t right, let your provider know.
Running a blog is so much more rewarding when you know people are reading, enjoying and sharing your work. If you’re managing a blog as part of your business, you probably want people to find and buy your products through your blog, as well. So increasing subscribers is an important task for bloggers.
These are some fairly simple hacks that you can implement without too much fuss, which should boost your subscriber numbers.

1. Lower your bounce rate – here is how

Cameron Chapman explained in a post on the Kissmetrics blog how he kept the bounce rate under 2% on his blog. His first tip is simple navigation:
The big thing here is that there’s no fancy, complicated navigation. No assisted search. No mega drop-down menus. It’s no more complicated than it absolutely has to be.
What I found most interesting was how much Cameron stressed the overall design. Both consistency and a focus on simplicity are more important than trying to pack as much as possible onto first. Another thing that stood out was the focus on navigation bars, the more easy they are to see, the more likely a visitor is to feel they are seeing something they’re already familiar with.
Another tip Cameron had is to only publish excerpts from your blog posts on your home page, which is something a lot of blogs do extremely well. Some great ones to see do this are Copyblogger, the KISSmetrics blog homepage or 99U.  This means that if your visitors want to keep reading a post, they’ll need to click through to the post’s own page. Cameron said the trick to this was in the content your readers see before clicking through:
Make the first couple of paragraphs of your posts interesting and engaging. Avoid copy that tries too hard or goes for the hard sell. The goal is to get your visitors to click through to more of your content.
99u 730x675 7 simple and proven tips to increase your blog subscribers
I’m a big fan of showing each blog post’s category, since I like to find more like it if I enjoyed the post. Cameron explained how he does this on his blog posts, and why it’s important for keeping his bounce rate low:
Since I don’t have a sidebar on the individual post pages, there’s a section at the bottom that lists the categories and keywords that the post is tagged with. (The category is also listed at the top of each post.) This makes it simple for visitors to find related posts.
Keeping the links at the end like this makes sense on a blog, where a lot of readers will be scrolling down to see comments on the post. Internal links also mean that there’s more opportunity for visitors to click through to other pages, rather than clicking their back button.
So if you want to implement some of Cameron’s advice immediately to start decreasing your bounce rate, here’s what you could do:
  1. Ensure your site has simple, consistent navigation on every page
  2. Only publish excerpts of your blog posts on your home page
  3. Add tag and category links to each post
Our friends over at analytics tool KISSmetrics also have an amazing infographic explaining how to best improve your bounce rate:
Screen Shot 2013 08 07 at 10.35.04 AM 7 simple and proven tips to increase your blog subscribers

2. Use a pop-up to catch email addresses (it won’t hurt!)

Social media scientist Dan Zarrella did some data exploration on his own site, to see how well his email capture pop-up worked, and how it affected his bounce rate.
Here’s what the pop-up looks like when you visit Dan’s site now:
Screen Shot 2013 08 07 at 10.37.07 AM 730x234 7 simple and proven tips to increase your blog subscribers
Sometimes these are called lightbox pop-ups, because they often grey-out the content underneath.
The data Dan found is really interesting, because his bounce rate was barely affected when he had the pop-up enabled. In fact, it only rose by 0.5% when the pop-up was turned on for new visitors. The email subscriber rate, however, dropped dramatically when Dan turned off the pop-up:
Screen Shot 2013 08 07 at 10.38.02 AM 7 simple and proven tips to increase your blog subscribers
I found that during that period my signup rate dropped dramatically. I was collecting far fewer emails from visitors. Also during that time, there was no noticeable change in bounce rates. Viewers didn’t seem to mind the popup at all.
Here’s how Dan summed it up:
To me this is a no-brainer. It’s not even a trade off between any kind of measurable visitor dissatisfaction and more emails. It’s just more emails.
And Dan’s not the only one. Nikki McGonigal from Nikki, In Stitches found a big difference between her sidebar subscription form and her pop-up in the number of email subscriptions they received:
Screen Shot 2013 08 07 at 10.39.59 AM 7 simple and proven tips to increase your blog subscribers
Adding a pop-up to capture email addresses is fairly easy, as most blogging platforms and email newsletter services offer widgets or built-in options for setting one up. You can easily google “email lightbox” + the name of your email newsletter service or blog host, but I collected links to a few popular ones to start you off:

3. Optimize your loading time – 1 sec loading means 7% drop-off

We know that users don’t like to wait, it’s especially something we’ve tested before extensively, since we’re all used to technology being so fast these days, and blog readers aren’t much different. Slow loading times can be an easy way to lose visitors to your blog before they get to read your content, let alone sign up for more in their inboxes!
Sean Work from Kissmetrics collected some interesting stats about loading times. One fact that surprised me the most was this: A one-second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.
I don’t know about you, but 7% less conversions based on a one-second delay seems like a lot to me. That’s not something I’d want to risk if I had the choice.
Sean’s infographic also tells us that 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. And that 73% of mobile internet users say they’ve encountered a website that was too slow to load.
So it seems like loading time is a pretty big factor in reader satisfaction.
In fact, slow loading times can even lead to your site being penalized in search rankings by Google, so it’s definitely something to pay attention to.
Here are some suggestions from Moz on how to improve your website’s loading time:
The back-end performance of a website directly impacts search engine ranking. The back end includes the web servers, their network connections, the use of CDNs, and the back-end application and database servers. Website owners should explore ways to improve their TTFB (time to first byte). This includes using CDNs (content distribution networks), optimizing your application code, optimizing database queries, and ensuring you have fast and responsive web servers.

4. Offer exclusive content for your subscribers – the 10x increase example

Giving away a free gift or exclusive content to subscribers can be the extra little push your readers need to sign up. Plus, if your email newsletter often includes exclusive content or freebies, it makes sense to start out by offering something similar when readers first subscribe. Especially testing different copywriting tips on the headlines can be a big driver for extra signups here.
Chris Spooner did this on one of his design blogs in a really clever way:
My Blog.SpoonGraphics site has been around since 2007 and during that time I’ve posted numerous freebies such as Photoshop brushes, textures and vectors. It would take a visitor ages to dig through the archives and download all this stuff, so I used this as an opportunity and created a bundle of my design resources as my free gift.
This is the graph of Chris’ spike in new subscribers after offering exclusive content, going from 10 to 100 subscribers a day:
increase 7 simple and proven tips to increase your blog subscribers
flyte new media president Rich Brooks also found this to be incredibly helpful in boosting subscriber numbers:
By providing an incentive for site visitors to sign up for flyte log–our email newsletter on Web marketing–we now average over 120 signups per month…approximately a 5,000% increase from our “Join Our Mailing List” days.
As Rich explains, most email newsletter services will let you set up a customized first email that includes a download button so your readers can grab their freebies straight away.

5. Add sign up forms – the more the better

If you only have one place on your site where readers can subscribe to your blog, you might lose lots of reader who never see that form. This is something else that Chris Spooner tried. He found that his subscribers increased when he added more places for people to sign up. In addition to his existing header link to a sign up page, Chris added sign up forms to his side bar, his About page and at the bottom of each blog post:
One of the forms that has proved really effective on my sites is the placement at the end of every post. New visitors who have stumbled across your content and made it all the way to the end of the article have a high potential of wanting to stick around for more, so it makes sense to prompt them with the option of subscribing with a conveniently placed signup form.
I love what Chris has to say about adding a sign up option to his About page, since I would never have thought of that:
A strategically placed signup form slap bang in the middle of your bio is really effective to recruit those interested to receive more of your content. Despite having much lower display rates, my about page signup forms have amazing conversion figures (30x higher than the other forms!).

6. Change your wording choice

Something else that worked for Chris was testing different wording choice on his subscribe buttons. Because he was giving away a free downloadable gift to every new subscriber, Chris tested a “Download Now” button as well as his standard “Get Email Updates” button. The results helped him choose which one to keep:
The split test was run for around 40,000 impressions and during that time the “Download now!” button achieved 3 times more signups than the words “Get email updates”.
download now 7 simple and proven tips to increase your blog subscribers
Willy Franzen wrote about a similar experiment on Copyblogger, where he changed the wording on his subscribe button from “Subscribe by E-mail” to “Get Jobs by E-mail,” with some pretty stellar results:
change 7 simple and proven tips to increase your blog subscribers
My subscription rate has increased 254% since I made the change, and 66% of the new subscribers are e-mail subscribers.
With just a quick change of some text, Willy saw a huge increase in his subscriber rate.

7. Use a feature box

If you’re not a fan of the lightbox pop-up, you could try the feature box instead, which also seems to convert well. Francisco Rosales of SocialMouths used a feature box because he wanted a less intrusive, more customizable option than a lightbox pop-up.
While this was one of many tweaks Francisco made to his blog in the same week, it contributed to an overall jump of 500% in email subscribers.
change 7 simple and proven tips to increase your blog subscribers
Derek Halpern explains at DIYthemes how adding a feature box alone boosted subscriber rates by 51.7% overnight:
Literally overnight, our daily new subscribers to the Thesis blog shot up by 51.7%, and has stayed that way ever since.
Derek’s feature box did offer a free eBook for new subscribers (see #4) but he also found the feature box alone did the trick on his other blog, Social Triggers:
On Social Triggers, I don’t have a bribe in place, and it converts extremely well.
The last I checked, around 10% of the people who visit the home page turn into an email subscriber.
If you’re running WordPress, you can get the feature box built-in with Derek’s Thesis theme, which will save you from coding your own feature box from scratch.