LotusJump Blog

Some LotusJump users have asked questions such as “Are certain task types are more important than others?” or “Should I focus my efforts on any single task?”. While such a questions are hard to answer with precision,  generally it’s best to mix things up and do a little bit of everything, that way you can monitor your incoming traffic (with Google Analytics) and see which techniques are bringing in greater amounts of traffic. [However, as a side note, this does not mean that because a certain link on a page is not bringing in traffic that it does not serve a purpose. Some links do not directly bring in traffic, but they can still help boost website visitors indirectly by helping to improve your keyword rankings in search engines]. So, with that being said, here are some reasons as to why you should balance your SEO tasks and put in time for each of the following tasks:

1) Content/Article Tasks - As the popular search marketing saying goes - “Content is king!” - so it’s extremely important that you dedicate time to creating new content that appeals to readers. The article/content generation tasks generally provide greater benefit (than other task types) to your search engine rankings, assuming that you can write a quality article that is unique and grammatically correct. Search engines love fresh content and since most article submission sites give writers the ability to choose customized anchor text (with a link back to your website), it makes this a win/win situation. Yes, articles can be painful to write and do take some time, but the value they provide for your website and search engine rankings is far too great to pass over.

2) Buzz Tasks - Buzz tasks are great tasks to work on because they direct you to blogs that are talking about your products/services in real time (almost). Aside from leaving a relevant comment with a link to your site on these blogs, you also have the opportunity to interact with the blog owner and potentially develop a relationship that could lead to bigger and better things, such as a guest post or even sidebar link. You’d be surprised as to how many bloggers out there that are willing to help people out, granted you show them some respect/praise and add value to their site.

3) Q&A Tasks - The Q&A tasks are probably one of the best tasks that can lead to conversions. People have questions about certain products & services and if you can point them in the right direction and offer them some useful advice, they are usually more inclined to make a purchase or, at the very least, investigate what your company has to offer. Since most Q&A tasks are time-sensitive, be sure to stay on top of these and answer them as soon as you can, especially if it’s to prevent other competitors from stealing potential clients.

4) Social Profile Tasks - Social media tasks are very important in these latter time since this is the new direction taken by modern day communication. More and more people are getting involved on sites like Facebook, Linked-In, etc. and there are just too many eyeballs to pass up by not creating things such as a company Facebook page. Social profile tasks may not provide the best SEO juice, but they do help promote branding and can even go viral, particularly with comical material or generous giveaways.

5) Directories - Directory tasks are nice because they hardly take any time to complete and some of the more prominent directories (such as Yahoo’s & BotW) can help boost search engine rankings. Even though there aren’t a lot of people who use directories nowadays, they are still worth spending a few minutes to knock them out and help increase your online visibility.

We’re on a roll over here at LotusJump. Last week our developers published reporting features, and this week I get to announce that we’ll be releasing new LotusJump task types!

That’s right…we’ll be adding to our current arsenal of Buzz, Content, Directory, Q&A and Competitive tasks. All this development work is just part of our commitment to provide the best DIY internet marketing tool on the planet. Please feel free to let us know how we’re doing via comment, or by sending an email to support [at] lotusjump [dot] com!

You LotusJumpers have  spoken and we’ve listened…time for some reporting features!

We’re excited to announce that our development team has begun developing a few simple reporting tools to help you track your LotusJump progress. Stay tuned for updates!

A few members of the LotusJump team got to go to Vegas for the Affiliate Summit West, which turned out to be a pretty awesome event. IMHO, one of the cooler stories to come out of it was a charity auction held by Jeremy Schoemaker (aka “Shoemoney”).

Leading up to the summit, Shoemoney offered to wear the t-shirt of the highest-bidding company, and donate the proceeds to charity. Since he’s “kind of a big deal” in the online community, he netted $5,200.00 for the winning bid. On his blog, Jeremy relates:

“The winning bidder, Train Signal, emailed me and said they had allocated $10,000.00 for this and would like to donate the full amount.

So at Affiliate Summit west I will present a check to the Affiliate Marketers Give Back, who’s chosen charity is Fighting Breast Cancer, on behalf of Train Signal for the amount of 10,000.00!!!!”

Well, during the “meet market” portion of the summit,  I got to meet Jeremy and snap a pic with the man and 10k t-shirt. Without further ado:

Pretty cool gesture on both Shoemoney and Train Signal’s part…it’s nice to see the big guys giving back!

We at LotusJump are pleased to announce that Google has finally updated its PageRank toolbar to register LotusJump.com at a PageRank of 4 (up from it’s “new website” status of zero!). The LotusJump blog has also improved to a PageRank of 3.

In case you’re wondering, PageRank is what Google uses to determine the importance of a web page. It’s one of the many factors used to decide which pages appear in search results and where.

Want to see the PageRank of your website? Try downloading and enabling PageRank with the Google Toolbar. To improve your PageRank, we’d suggest two general approaches:

1. Create content on your site that’s so good/informative that people will want to link to it naturally
2. Use LotusJump to find and build relevant backlinks to your website

These steps will help you improve your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and help you establish a successful online presence!

While we’re adding new SEO resources to LotusJump on a regular basis, we thought it would be cool to let the collective wisdom of our users improve the value of this tool. As such, we added a way for LotusJumpers to suggest SEO resources via a simple form within the application. Current users will notice the “Suggest A Resource” text link inside their accounts. We’ve already received some great stuff…keep it coming!

We’re excited to announce that we’ve added an awesome new feature to LotusJump for all it’s registered users…the Q&A task! Here’s a  little info taken from the How It Works page:

Q&A Tasks tasks - New!
Yahoo! Answers is a free service where people can ask and answer questions on virtually any subject. When someone on Yahoo! Answers asks a question that’s relevant to one of your targeted keywords, LotusJump will automatically create a task in your account to visit that page and share your knowledge. This gives you the opportunity to 1) establish yourself an an authority on a given subject and 2) direct people to other helpful resources, like your website (if applicable).

We’re pretty stoked about this feature…feel free to send us feedback via comment, email or Twitter!

Technorati Profile

If you haven’t noticed, you can now update the keywords you’re targeting directly from your LotusJump account! To find it in your account, click the “settings” link.

Keep in mind that SEO is a long term project. If you change your focus too often, you won’t get anywhere. However, there are some cases where you should consider changing them, like:

1. You’re ranking well on them already
2. The traffic they drive doesn’t convert well
3. They’re too broad or too darn competitive

Some really exciting LotusJump features are in development, we’ll let you in on some of them next Monday!