LinkedIn is often discussed as a powerful social networking tool, particularly for business professionals, employers, and jobseekers. What is not discussed as frequently is the site’s ability to simply drive traffic to your site. We talked to entrepreneur Lewis Howes (who claims that LinkedIn is one of the top traffic sources to his blogs) about how powerful LinkedIn can be for driving traffic.
We asked Howes why he thinks people don’t generally associate LinkedIn with driving traffic like they would with other social networks like Facebook or Twitter. “Their perception of LinkedIn is of a resume, or a way to get a job, but they don’t see all of the powerful tools within LinkedIn that allow you to drive traffic back to your site,” he tells WebProNews.

LinkedIn has announced that it is now being integrated into Microsoft Outlook, in one of the numerous convergences of social media and email that are increasingly taking place.

“Anytime you can increase the size of your network on LinkedIn, it will give you the opportunity to distribute your content to more people, therefore driving more traffic back to your site,” says Howes. “The Outlook integration is a way to connect more with your current LinkedIn contacts, and also help you grow you network as well.”

In some ways, LinkedIn traffic may even be more valuable than traffic from other social networks and sites. This is simply due to the generally professional nature of LinkedIn itself.

“You need to take into consideration that LinkedIn has the highest average household income per user over any other social networking site (even NYTimes.com and BusinessWeek.com readers),” Howes tells us. “That being said, these are business decision makers you are targeting with your traffic from LinkedIn. The network is for real, and it will only continue to grow in time as there are currently 60 million professionals.”

Now consider that LinkedIn could be one of your top traffic sources if you put enough effort into cultivating it as such. On a scale of 1-10, Howes says he’d rank it as a 7 or 8 on importance level for using it. “For me it is always one of the top 5 referring sites that drives traffic to my blogs,” he says.

Howes went through ten steps in a post at ProBlogger.net. While the post is geared at driving traffic to your blog, you may find the advice helpful for other types of sites. In summary (he goes into much more detail about each of these in the post), the ten steps are:

1. Complete your profile.
2. Increase you connections.
3. Customize your website links.
4. Answer questions.
5. Update your status.
6. Join niche groups.
7. Post comments in groups.
8. Add RSS feeds to groups.
9. Create a group.
10. Add the blog application to your profile.

Now that LinkedIn can be integrated into Microsoft Outlook, I would suggest looking at getting that set up as well (steps here), if you want to get serious about including LinkedIn in your traffic strategy.

Of course there are plenty of other ways to use LinkedIn as a tool to increase the success of your business. As Howes lists, you can sell products, find new clients/employees, generate leads, receive funding, obtain sponsorships, sell tickets to events, as get press coverage to name a few.

We all make New Year’s resolutions – some are personal, some are business or professional in nature. Even if we don’t actually make New Year’s resolutions, we engage in formal and informal “planning” as we look ahead to the new year.

If you operate a website, you’re probably aware that your website operations are now highly regulated. And the pace of legal regulations continues to accelerate.

Which means that you face an increasing risk of legal liability.

So, it’s a good idea to give your website a legal check-up and to update your site before it’s too late.

General Issue Checklist

The general checklist below covers issues that are not new issues which arose in 2009. These issues have been around for a while, but some may be new to you, particularly if your website or marketing activities changed recently.

• Copyright Notice. These are the basic elements of a copyright notice: the word “copyright” or copyright symbol (c in a circle) followed by the year of first publication followed by the name of the copyright owner followed by “All rights reserved worldwide.” Here’s an example taken from my digicontracts.com website: Copyright 1996-2010 Digital Contracts, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide.

• Blogs. If you’ve recently added a blog to your site, or if your site is a blog site, it’s possible that a visitor could post infringing materials (e.g. text, video links, images). Under the strict principles of copyright law, you’d be a copyright infringer even if you were unaware of the posting. Your liability could be significant. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) provides a “safe harbor” from liability provided you publish a DMCA notice and register with the Copyright Office.

• Collection, Use and Sharing of Personal Information. Your marketing activities determine the categories of personal information you collect, how you use it, and how you share it. As you evolve your marketing practices over time, it’s easy to forget that your Privacy Policy should reflect your actual practices regarding personal information. This is one area in which most online marketers are the most vulnerable to legal liability. So, review carefully your present and anticipated future marketing activities that include personal information and update your Privacy Policy accordingly.

• Data Security. Technology and security practices are in a continual state of evolution. You’re required to implement and maintain “reasonable and appropriate” data security measures, according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). If your site does not actually implement up-to-date measures, you should update them immediately.

• Service Providers. Do your outsourced service providers – hosting, SEO, website development, etc. – have access to the internals of your website server and your databases that archive personal information? If so, according to the FTC, you need to enter into simple confidentiality agreements with these service providers.

• Human Intervention in Online Contracting. Two 2008 cases highlighted the fact that human intervention in online contracting may be a recipe for creating unenforceable agreements. The recipe for enforceable online agreements is well settled, but if you add intervention by your employees into the acceptance process, your online agreement may end up becoming unenforceable.

Emerging Issue Checklist

The emerging issue checklist below covers issues that were new in 2009 or experienced relatively significant new developments in 2009.

• Keyword-Triggered Ads. The issue is familiar: Whether pay-per-click advertisers should be permitted to use keywords that are also competitor’s trademarks for purposes of triggering the advertisers’ ads on a search results page. This issue continued to be hotly litigated in 2009 without ultimate resolution due to a split among various Circuit Courts of Appeals. However, a 2nd Circuit ruling in 2009 narrowed the split in favor of trademark owners. Congress may resolve the split with specific legislation in 2010.

• Behavioral Ads. Behavioral ads are highly relevant to consumers because they are based on consumers’ online behavior, including data tracked regarding sites visited, length of visits, content read, and searches made. In February 2009, the FTC issued a staff report entitled “Self-Regulatory Principles For Online Behavioral Advertising”. This report set out certain principles for purposes of protecting consumer privacy. Later, Google issued a notice that “interest-based” advertising utilized in its AdSense program required a modification to the Privacy Policies of all participants in the AdSense program. Look for congressional action on behavioral advertising in 2010.

• Red Flag Identity Theft Policy. 2009 saw deadlines for establishing a Red Flag Identity Theft Policy come and go. Extensions of the deadline were ordered by the FTC due to confusion over the scope of the regulations and who is covered. The current deadline is June 1, 2010. In simple terms, if your registered users make periodic payments payable as monthly or quarterly installments, or if you extend credít so that payment is made after receipt of the product or service, you’re covered by the regulations, and you should implement a policy.

• False Advertising. In July 2009, the Attorney General for New York reached a settlement with a cosmetic surgery company over the company’s fake positive consumer reviews on the Web. The company ordered its employees to pose as customers and to write flattering reviews. The Company agreed to pay $300,000 in penalties.

• FTC Guides. Concerned over false advertising on the Web (including the type of behavior discussed in the False Advertising point above), the FTC issued new Guides explaining how they will interpret existing law regarding endorsements and testimonials used in online advertising. If you recruit affiliates, resellers, or bloggers to promote your offering, you’d be classified as an “Advertiser” under the Guides, and if you’re recruited as an affiliate, reseller, or blogger to pitch the products of others, you’d be classified as an “Endorser” under the Guides. In simple terms, Advertisers are required to provide guidance and training to their Endorsers regarding the Guides or face liability. Endorsers are required to disclose material connections with their sponsoring Advertisers including receipt of compensation of any kind. Drafting and posting a Disclosure Policy is the key to compliance for Endorsers in order to avoid a fine of up to $11,000.

What to do if You’re Developing a New Website

If you’re developing a new website (or heaven forbid, if you have an existing website that has yet to incorporate website compliance documents), your website should incorporate some combination of the following documents:

• FTC Guides Disclosure Policy,
• Legal Page,
• Terms of Use,
• DMCA Registration Form,
• Privacy Policy,
• Service Provider Privacy-Security Agreement,
• Customer Agreement (click-wrapped SaaS, Membership, Subscription, Account Agreement), and
• Red Flag Identity Theft Policy.

Conclusion

The checklists in this article are not exhaustive; however, they should be a good start to a comprehensive legal check-up for your website as you move into 2010.

It’s not the “wild, wild west” atmosphere on the Web anymore. Legal compliance is essential if you want to avoid liability in a highly regulated environment.

This article is provided for educational and informative purposes only. This information does not constitute legal advice, and should not be construed as such.

Companies that have consistently updated blog content with back links to their main company site and it’s interior web pages will always perform much better in the search engines.

So, why don’t most companies have a blog?

The answer lies in one simple word:

CONSISTENCY

That’s right. You need to regularly and constantly post to the blog — and how many business owners have the time for that?

That’s the beauty of our Blog Marketing service.

We not only setup and design TWO blogs, but our professional writers also consistently write and post new content to those blogs on your behalf. Every time we post, we also promote the new blog entries in social bookmarking sites like Digg and others.

So you’re getting all the benefits of a frequently updated and promoted blog — from one of the top and most professional marketing companies on the web — and without having to worry about doing any of the work!

Take a look for yourself:

… get a blog for your company and make the search engines fall in love with YOUR site.

If your business website doesn’t have a blog, get one. A blog, if done right, can act as a direct and indirect mechanism that brings large amounts of qualified visitors to your site, many of whom may become customers.

This is mostly related to the way blogs interact with search engines and the traffic I am speaking of will come from search engines, mostly Google.

Before I explain how you can do this to help your website, let me first give some background on how search engines work, Google in particular.

When it comes to optimizing your website (or blog for that matter) for search engines you must always keep in mind two things: on-page optimization and off-page optimization.

On-page optimization is the elements of a Web page that better optimize it to be found and ranked well in the search engines. These elements can include on-page content such as the actual sentences and paragraphs on the page, the headlines (or headers or Hx tags), the links, the links’ text, the title tag and much more.

Off-page optimization means the things that are done on sites besides your site, namely link-building. Off-page optimization is the process of creating links (or causing others to create links) on other websites that point to your site. Inbound links as these are often called have a major impact on how well you rank in search engines. Generally speaking, the more inbound links, the better. But the quality of the sites with these inbound links, or the way the search engines perceive the sites, is even more important.

To rank on the first couple of pages on the search engines requires work on both on-page and off-page optimization.

Two additional and important pieces of information that you’ll need to understand are related to site content and internal links.

Search engines also very much love new, original and quality content, and they like to see your website regularly adding this kind of new content. You don’t need to add pages every day, just add pages at the same rate over time. So if you add a page a week to your site, keep it at around that same pace, or increase or decrease gradually.

A website can be considered a living entity in a sense. It certainly shouldn’t be static. It should grow over time. And the fantastic thing about content is that the more of it there is on your site, the more chances you have of getting found in the search engines.

The idea that inbound links help your search engine rankings that I explained above can be extended to your internal pages as well. In other words, the more links to a particular page coming from other pages within the same site will boost that page’s rank as well.

Think of it this way. If you had a ten page site, including a product page and every page on the site contained a link to your product page and, if all other things were equal, your product page would rank higher than the rest of your site’s pages (besides the home page which is given a little extra weíght).

Now let’s consider what would happen if there were only you and your competitor in your industry (if only that could be true!) and your site still had those ten pages while your competitor’s site contained one hundred pages. Furthermore, your competitor set it up the same way as you where he added a link to every page on his site that pointed to his product page. If all other things were equal, his product page would outrank your product page every time. Why? Because he had 100 internal links pointing to his product page and you only had 10.

If you put all these pieces together now, on-page optimization, off-page optimization or link building, content creation and internal linking, can you begin to see why a blog may be a good thing? A blog helps with all of these.

A blog that is regularly updated is providing a mechanism for adding fresh content on a regular basis. Plus, it’s so easy to use a blog that anyone can use them, so even if you or your employees don’t know a thing about Web pages and HTML, you’ll still be able to add new content to your site.

Consider this. If you add fresh, quality content to your blog on a regular basis by writing posts, something the search engines love, and within each post you link to an important page within your site, let’s say your product page for instance, you’re now building links to help your rankings using your blog. With this additional link your product page gets that much more boost in the search engines.

Remember how I explained that links from within your site help your rankings? Adding links within your blog posts pointing back to your other important pages that you want to rank well is a great way to help your rankings.

And every time you publish a new post, you’re giving the search engines one more entry point into your site. Your site will quickly get bigger, and with each new page your site gets more visible.

Keep in mind that the links you make within your blog posts should be relevant. Only link to your product page from a post that has to do with your products. And also, blog posts ought to be useful to your site visitors. The less you talk about your products and instead offer useful, free information that people can use, the more traffíc and repeat visitors you’ll get.

Remember that people really don’t care about you, your website or your products, they only care about how you can help them. If you sell furniture, a blog post about how to find the best deals on furniture would be far better than a post about how your chairs are the best in the world.

One important thing to remember is that if you plan on creating a new blog for your business as a way to augment your website be sure you put the blog on your actual domain. This means that you would not use a remote service like Blogger.com. Instead, you must have the blog on your business website’s address (or domain). For example, if your website address is http://www.yoursite.com/ then your blog should be located at http://www.yoursite.com/blog or http://blog.yoursite.com/

By adding a blog to your business website you are creating a way to get additional traffic. You’ll get direct traffic from your posts, which get indexed by the search engines and drive traffic to your site from searches. And, you’ll get indirect traffic from your other site’s pages ranking well in the search engines because they have links pointing to them from your blog posts.

You’ll be regularly adding fresh content to your site, which search engines love, thereby creating more ways to be found in the search engines at the same time. And each post provides a new chance to create a link or two to other pages and blog posts on your site, thereby boosting those pages’ rankings.

Like I suggested at the beginning, if your business website doesn’t have a blog, go get one.

One of the biggest measurements of a website’s success is the stickiness of its visitor base. Generally web masters would rather have 1,000 visitors who return regularly (they are “stuck to the site”) as opposed to 3,000 visitors who only visit once or twice. These days the web is massive, carving out a niche for your site and gaining a following within that niche is the key to success.

There are many reasons why you should try to make your website as sticky as possible. Visitors who return regularly are more likely to purchase some of your products or content. If you have a membership site, then retaining your member base is critical for growing your íncome and long term success. Also, a faithful following will encourage viral promotíon of your site.

Search engine optimization can be a costly and time consuming task and your site’s listing can be hammered down by the powers that be (Google) in the blink of an eye. If you gain a faithful user base though, they will tell their friends and family about your site and encourage them to use it as well. Viral marketing is the cheapest and most effective type of marketing there is and making your site and content desirable is the only way to achieve this phenomenon. There are “five C’s” of stickiness to remember, and they are:

Content

Regardless of the site’s design, without good content, the visitor will not come back or stay at the site for more than a few minutes. “Content is King” is a cliché, but true. High quality content is far and away the most important factor in attracting people back to a Web site consistently, and keeping them there for more than a few minutes when they do visit. It is said, in fact, that content is what drives 75 percent of consumers to return to their favorite sites.

In addition to your site being content rich, try to also keep it fresh. At least part of your site will be regularly updated, preferably at least once a month. This is why web sites which resemble online brochures fail. Delivering the same content in a blog, posted in installments, can be much more effective. This will encourage users to come back regularly, as they check in to see what new content you’ve added lately. This is stickiness in a nutshell.

Community

When a site attracts enough visitors with similar interests it has the potential to develop into a “community.” That can be very powerful for the site owner. Providing message forums, chat rooms, podcasts, user profiles, blogs, etc. are all tools to allow your visitors to interact with both you and each other. This also makes your site VERY sticky if you are able to develop a thriving community.

Rather than visiting your site once a month people may begin to visit it multiple times a week. Having a thriving community can be viewed as developing a site which is constantly developing its own content. Rather than requiring you to spend hours developing content, you can instead monitor the postings on your site to ensure they retain the kind of atmosphere you want for your site. As time goes by you may also be able to appoint some of your more responsible members to monitoring positions to do this job for you as well.

Communication

Communication is equally important as content and community. Communication includes building and maintaining your list, reaching out to people on it and interacting with visitors to your site. Try to respond to any question, comments, or feedback you receive promptly. This builds relationships with your visitors and will keep them coming back.

One of the best ways to reach out to customers is to provide quality, free information. This is basically a sample of what your site has to present, and should always help address the questions your visitors came to your site for answers for. The very nature of the web stresses that you consider offering more free content to your customers than most other mediums do. You have too much competition to be stingy. One of the most effective means of providing content to customers and developing a slate of potential customers at the same time is to give a free guide to visitors who provide you with a name and email address.

For example, if you run a site teaching real estate tips and tricks, after your visitors have seen your “foot in the door” content located on your “splash page,” provide them the first lesson of your course on real estate for free in exchange for their name and email address. You benefit from this by having names to attach to the IP addresses of your visitors. This provides you with more information about who is being drawn into your site. It is also important you use a quality auto-responder for this step, as communication is a critical part of your site and must be handled professionally.

One last note on communication: Be sure to provide your name and contact information clearly throughout your site. It will frustrate and turn away visitors if they have a question or comment and cannot figure out how to reach you. By providing a name and place to reach you it also helps contribute to the last two “C’s…”

Commerce and Consumer Confidence

These are perhaps the two most important things that get overlooked in websites. First, effectively promote your site by using professional marketing and search engine optimization for the niche your site seeks to fill. Provide reliable, safe, and secure means for your customers to purchase your for-pay content. If your ordering method does not look safe, all your efforts working to sell your content to your visitors will be lost if they get to the order page and you look like an unprofessional, fly-by-night operator. Always use a secure ordering form. Offering a monëy back guarantee can be extremely helpful to reassure customers.

Lastly, respect your customer’s privacy. Make it clear you will not sell their names, personal information, or email addresses. People hate spam and will be hesitant to identify themselves to you out of fear of having their information sold if you do not provide some kind of assurance against this. A clear and easy to locate privacy policy is necessary.