This is a continuation from yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget on the topic of how to better monetize the website traffic you have now in the wake of Google's Penguin filter.
There are different sources where your website visitors will come from: Organic, Direct, Referrals, and Paid. I covered Organic and Direct traffic yesterday so today I'm picking up today with Referral traffic.
The websites that the Penguin filtered out are only those involved with detectable link building schemes. Google did their best not to filter out websites that were just doing their normal business and not intentionally abusing the system.
There are still a few blogging websites that are referring traffic to a few jewelers. These are off-site blogs that the jewelers themselves are maintaining, or perhaps they are paying a 3rd party to do the writing.
The blogging sites mostly include entries on product reviews, new items, and entertainment news. Each entry links back to the jewelry site, which is quite normal as an off-site blogging strategy.
What I see now is that those off site blogs are sending the most visitor traffic on Wednesday's and Sundays. Since Wednesday also has consistent organic traffic, I'm going to correlate that organic searches lead to the blogs and the blogs lead to the store's site.
To capture potential sales from this Wednesday traffic, you could upload new ads to your blog on Tuesday evenings. The ads could include a deal of some type or just a more aesthetically attractive reason to click the ad and visit your site.
On your website, it would be best to capture the blog referral page. Knowing where they came from will help you coordinate ads on your own site. It might seem odd that I'm talking about ads on your own website, but I'm not talking about you selling ad space to other people. I'm talking about you having your own ad system with ads that link to other areas of your website.
To put it differently, think about Facebook's ad system. Many of the ads you see in the right margin will link to other Facebook Pages, not to websites. Those Facebook ads are targeted, and bring people to pages they otherwise would not have found. You should be doing the same. This is actually a tough request, so ask your web programmer how to do it.
As I said, other than Wednesday, Sunday is also another good day for off-site blogs to refer visitors to your website. But this Sunday is a different story.
The blog visitors on a Wednesday are more likely to browse your product catalog, but the visitors on a Sunday are more likely to read more editorial content on your website than browse your catalog. The Sunday visitor doesn't want to be sold to directly; they are on a discovery mission.
If you set up Sunday ads, you might want to consider phrases like "Did you know what the birthstone for this month is? Click to find out." and have that lead to a landing page about pearls with a small display of pearl jewelry from your catalog.
The Wednesday ad approach would be different with phrases like "Save 10% off all June Birthstone Jewelry. Click here to shop for Pearl Jewelry Now." That ad would take the user to the same landing page.
Both ad suggestions bring the visitor to the same place, if you don't have the ability to target ads only to people who came from your off-site blog, then these could just be site-wide ads for those days.
I have a little more information about referral traffic from jewelry vendors and from Yelp, but I'm going to save that for tomorrow as a Part 3
