Long Tail Keywords

Improve Search Results with Long Tail Keywords

Long Tail Keywords - you have probably heard this term before. still, chances are you are probably asking yourself, “What are long tail keywords?” They are keywords or key phrases that are more specific (and sometimes longer) than the more commonly searched-for keywords. For example, “SEO” is a very general search that will net you all sorts of results, but “SEO company Kansas City” is very specific, and will direct you towards VMA (and our competitors)! Long tail keywords usually get less traffic, but will have a higher conversion value, since they are more specific to a particular topic.

If you really want your business to profit off of long tail keywords, you first need to have a very clear vision for your company, your product, and your website. If you can do this, then you can go ahead and start using a keyword strategy by focusing on long tail keywords. Here’s how to begin:

Know Your Product and Your Business

While you are working to set up great marketing online for your business, you really need to focus on and understand just what you are selling and to whom you are selling it. Having a clear focus for your business will make marketing it easier and get you the customer traffic you want.

If you want to target the customer that knows exactly what they are looking for (and you can offer it), using long tail keywords is a great idea. But first, you need to know exactly how to use them and make the most out of it.

Customer Buying Patterns

A seasoned online businessperson knows the value in long tail keywords and uses them to his or her advantage. You need to get to those buyers who are being specific in what they want. There is typically a six-step pattern that someone uses when they go to buy something, and it looks a little like this:

1. The customer becomes aware of the product.
2. They seek information about the product as they prepare to possibly purchase it.
3. They will evaluate the alternatives to the product.
4. They will make the purchase decision.
5. They will pull out their payment method and complete the transaction.
6. The customer will evaluate the product after buying and decide whether to keep or return it.

Looking at this buying pattern, it is safe to say that as a business, you will want to really gain this customer’s attention around step 4. Sure, it’s great to gain their attention earlier by using short, broad keywords, but you can also focus on long tail keywords to really get their attention when they’re making the actual purchase decision. As they are ready to buy a product, the customer will start using very specific search phrases as they seek out their target purchase.

The Benefit of Using Multi-Phrases

Using a very specific multi-phrase is usually easier to rank and rank well with than using keywords that simply use a generic single- or double-word phrase. Making sure you get a good specific long tail keyword can be tricky, because you will always most likely be going up against big-name companies no matter what you are selling. Alternately, you could go too specific and end up using a keyword that is simply too unique and unused. Just remember these two things as you are sitting and thinking about your business and how you want to get it out there:

1. Long tail keywords are much easier to rank for, since they are specific.
2. People who search by using these long tail keywords are more likely to become a buyer.

By using long tail keywords, it is likely that you will need to create more pages within your website, as you are trying to gain a very specific audience and buyer. That is okay, because it turns out that Google likes a website that has many pages! This takes a special balance, as you build your website and those pages without adding too much junk.

Be careful to not completely neglect more common keywords, or you may not gain enough traffic. It is a balance for your business that needs to be researched and see which long tail keywords have the highest traffic and go from there. It is best to have a few pages that send you large amounts of general traffic and then also have a large number of pages with each one sending you a small amount of highly targeted traffic.

Research is Key

With SEO, it is always best to get in some good old-fashioned research as you look into using long tail keywords. This will help you determine which keywords will bring you enough traffic to sustain your business as well as help you rank higher based on the sites you are competing against.

Once you have these keywords researched and ready to use, make sure that the long tail keywords are well used within all the content on your website and the pages. Content is a crucial part of making the long tail keywords work well for you.

Using long tail keywords that work for your business should do three things for you over time:

1. You should have better rankings.
2. You should see higher sales conversions.
3. More of your pages will be indexed in Google.

Long tail keywords may not always work, and that is okay. It is not something you want to overuse anyway. You want these longer keywords or phrases to help push your business up, not bring it down. Sprinkle them in where you need them and figure out where to use them using trial and error.

Resources for Long Tail Keywords

Here are a few websites that are useful for finding long tail keywords for specific topics:

• Long Tail Pro
• SearchVolume.io
• Keyword Tool
• Answer the Public
• AgencyAnalytics
• You can also simply use search engine results by looking at what Google or other sites try to auto fill when searching for your product or topic.

If you want more SEO advice from Virtual Market Advantage, check out our other blogs, such this one that goes over how to best write Facebook Ads for your business!

How to Make Money … by Spending Money

It seems like no matter what website you visit, there is an ad there trying to sell you something. Do you ever click on it? You might (maybe accidentally), but most of the time you’ll pass it by. So how do you take your own website and turn it into a money-maker, if most of your visitors skip clicking on the ads? There are a few steps you can take to make more money, but it will require you to invest some of your own money first.

“You have to spend money to make money” is an old saying, but it’s true for many businesses. By investing in high-quality products, whether physical items or software, you can improve your business, draw in customers, and keep your clients more satisfied with your products or services. By spending some money on better equipment and tools, you can often save money by saving yourself valuable time.

Stand Out With Design

So you’ve decided to build your website yourself. Great! This is a fantastic way to save money for your business, as long as you get it done well. You are most likely using WordPress as your design platform. This is highly recommended. WordPress has so many great templates for websites that are free, but tons of other websites have already used these. While it does save money to use the free templates and WordPress on your own, this does not compare to a custom-built website that is designed specifically around your business. This is where hiring someone to custom design your site is worth the extra money if you have it to spend.

If you just do not have the extra money to spend on hiring someone, you can always buy a premium theme on WordPress. This is a great option for a couple of reasons. When you buy a premium theme, it will most likely come with support, whereas most free themes do not. It is also more secure and less likely to have someone hack into it. Considering these things, it would be well worth the $40 it would cost to purchase a premium theme.

Invest in your Website

Okay, it may seem obvious that you need to invest in a good website, since it’s such an important part of a modern business. Seriously though, it is worth your money to hire a company that will build you a great website that is easy to use and has everything you and your clients need. This takes the stress off of you for maintaining the site and lets you run your business from the other side and focus on what you are best at within your business.

Will this cost money up front? Yep. Should you pay a monthly fee to have the company keep it fresh and current? Definitely. If you do this, your website will stay fresh and current, which is very important for modern businesses on the Internet. An updated site will keep your customers coming back as well as draw in new ones. This in turn will bring you more profit and make the money you invested in a great website worth it. By using someone to custom-build your website, it will also help you stand out in the crowd of thousands of websites for similar businesses online.

Make your Website Mobile-Friendly

Making your website mobile-friendly goes along with the previous topic, but is equally important. This is another solid reason to hire a company to build your site custom to you and your business, unless you know what you’re doing in WordPress. Any great website-development company will make your site mobile-friendly. This is critical now that most people browse the Internet and even do their shopping from their smart phone or tablet.

Spend on the Right Technology

Which company you choose to host your website is very important. The hosting provider will play a key role in ensuring site speed and good performance. This is where many businesses make the mistake of settling on the cheapest hosting option. While the cost can be just a small difference, a cheap purchase here can be a costly mistake in the long run. Slower site speeds have proven to cut down on site conversions. Basically, a good web host will be the key difference in a site that takes forever to load or an easily accessible site. You must make sure your site is up and running fast at all times in order for you to retain customers and make more money.

Investing into managed WordPress hosting will help you save time by having someone else do the troubleshooting and making sure you have the latest technologies available no matter how many plugins your site uses or how many changes are made to the site. Also, you wont have to worry about dealing with security breaches to your site, having to back it up, or doing the updates yourself.

It also a good idea to invest in good cloud storage. Free or inexpensive cloud storage is usually that price for a reason. Do not skimp here, and go for a good quality to ensure that your data is safe and secure.

Spend on Marketing

Now that you have invested in a professionally managed and custom built website, you need to draw your customers in. How do you do that when there are thousands of competitors attempting to do the same thing? You have to get out there and battle for every customer. This will include methods like utilizing search engine optimization (SEO), social media, and great content marketing.

Sure you can do your research on using SEO, and you can post your content to social media all day. But these things can end up feeling like an extra full-time job. Many people find that providing content, blogging, keeping current with SEO, and posting daily to social media is impossible to do while still running their business. Another option is investing in pay per click (PPC) ads, but this again will require the time to research and make sure your money invested actually brings you customers and a return on investment.

Content management and SEO are things your website and business will need to thrive online, but it comes at the cost of time to you, and I am betting this is time you don’t have. Here again is where it would be smart to hire an online marketing firm that will handle all of this for you. Luckily, Virtual Market Advantage can do this for you, with as much or as little input from you as you like. It may take some money to properly set up your website, but it is sure to being you plenty of money back to more than cover the costs.

All of these online factors will help your business grow and give you peace of mind. Using these digital marketing tools will give you an edge over your competitors. From social media management to email marketing, there are many avenues you can take to stay competitive and grow your online presence. Know how to make money by spending it wisely where it will make the most impact.

Improve your Copy with these Copywriting Exercises

Our previous VMA blog defined copywriting and discussed what makes good copy. As a refresher, good copy will engage your audience and provide something valuable to make people want to buy your product or use your services. In addition to starting a conversation with your customers, good copy also needs to take web design and SEO into account in order to thrive in modern-age business.

The next question is:

How do I get better at writing copy?

Let’s go over some useful copywriting exercises to help you improve your copy and make you more comfortable with writing and creating as a whole. Practice makes perfect, so let’s go over some things you can do to develop your copywriting skills.

Re-Write Ads

Advertisements are everywhere. We’re bombarded with them constantly. As you interact with the world every day, pay close attention to the ads around you and try to re-write them. Can you figure out a way to make people crave that restaurant’s food even more with a better billboard slogan? Is there any way to improve that Google AdWord advertisement that came up on your last search?

Don’t worry about the quality of your fake re-written ads. The important thing is to constantly practice using different styles and methods to promote an idea or product.

Make a Swipe File

If you have a job that requires you to constantly produce new content, keeping a swipe file is a must. A swipe file is a collection of advertisements and copy that left a mark on you in some way. Even if it has nothing to do with your field, you can put content in your swipe file for any reason: great visual design, a clever turn of phrase, or even a cool font that you want to use later. Make sure to save anything that makes you click on a link, laugh, or even just pause for a closer look.

A swipe file can be either a physical file or digital file. You can even have one on your phone, which is a great way to keep up with mobile-responsive innovations. Screenshots are a great tool for easily saving digital copies. If you have a Mac, you can press command-shift-4, then drag a box around the desired image. By default, this saves the screenshot to your desktop, where you can drag it into your swipe file.

If you have a Windows PC, it gets a bit more complicated. Here’s an overview of several different ways to take screenshots in Windows. If you have Windows 10, by default one of the easier ways to take a screenshot is to press Windows-PrintScreen (usually abbreviated to something like PrntScrn or PrtScn and located near F12). This will save an image of your entire screen to Screenshots under the default Pictures folder.

So what do you do with your expanding swipe file? Use it for inspiration! If you need to make something, browse your swipe file for ideas related to that project. Need a clean-but-interesting web layout? Want to find phrasing ideas for blog titles? Check your swipe file and see if anything that popped out at you in the past can help with your current problem.

Copy Copy

A simple exercise for improving your content is to copy other people’s copy. While you’re filling your swipe file with fun ideas, physically write down advertisements, slogans, and other forms of copy that you think are brilliant. Copy them word-for-word, so you can get a better feel for how the sentence is structured and what makes it sound and look good.

Highlight the Benefits

When you describe the features of your product or business, don’t simply list them. You also need to let your customers know the results of these features and how they will benefit them.

For example, a feature of WordPress is the ability to publish content such as pages and posts without using code. This is a great feature, but on the WordPress website, the copywriter further explains that anyone who has created a document on their computer is already prepared to write a post, format it, insert media, and publish “with the click of a button.” Not only does the paragraph describe the feature of WordPress, but it also explains in simple terms how this feature benefits the potential user.

Keep in mind that you are most likely much more informed on your business’ field than your customers. They want to know how they can use your features to benefit themselves and why they should use your company over another. Most of them won't be drawn to a jargon-heavy list of features.

Be Concise

There’s a reason why social media sites such as Twitter and Instagram are so huge. People love taglines. A short, concise phrase such as “just do it” or “I’m lovin’ it” sticks in your head much easier than a longer sentence would.

When creating your copy, try to trim down the content and get your point across with as few words as possible. By sending out information more efficiently, you will get your message across better. Whether it’s text, video, or audio, spread information with fewer words.

This doesn’t mean that all of your copy should be cut short. Long copy can spread a lot of information, draw people in, and sell well. Longwinded copy, on the other hand, drives people away before they finish listening.

Read Out Loud

One of the best things you can do to improve your copy right away is read it out loud. Not only does this help you weed out typos and grammatical errors, but it also helps you make your content sound more conversational. It’s much easier to make a sentence sound natural if you hear it as you read it. It will also help you avoid being as longwinded!

Read aloud to yourself, record your voice and listen to it, or even force someone else to listen to you. You’ll see instant results.

Learn More

Many jobs require you to keep up-to-date on the latest news, techniques, or trends. Working as a copywriter is no different, especially if your focus is online. A copywriter who is good at many things is always going to have an edge over one who is only good at one thing.

Get experience wherever you can. If you want to work as a freelancer, it’s best to start out in an established company for a few years. That way, you can learn how many aspects of the business works, and it’s not as easy to get stuck in a rut of your own repeating ideas.

Constantly search for more ways to learn something new or improve an old skill. Take classes, join a discussion, read a book…the possibilities for new information are endless, especially online!

Hopefully these tips help you develop your copywriting skills a bit more in the future. If you want more information on SEO, web development, design, and many other topics, check out Virtual Market Advantage’s other blogs here!

What is Good Copywriting?

We’ve all seen spammy, boring advertisements that make us just want to hit “next” and get on with what we're doing. But there are also advertisements out there that will draw you in and make you interested in learning more about the product. What’s the difference? Often, it comes down to the Copy!

What is Copy?

Copywriting is when someone comes up with text content for the purposes of advertisement and marketing. Copy is the content that the copywriter creates. Glance at a billboard next time you go down a highway, or flip through a magazine at your next doctor’s appointment. All of those words were written by a copywriter. Open up any website page and the text you see is also copy.

Good Copywriting

So what distinguishes good copywriting from bad? The majority of advertisements fly past us, day after day, without making us stop to think about them. Good copywriting stops people from passing by, draws them in, and makes them care about the product or service being sold.

As a copywriter, you don’t have to come up with constant brilliant advertising, like the “Budweiser Frogs” or Apple’s “1984.” You just need to learn how to engage with your targeted audience. Here are three major tenets of good copywriting:

1. Get your audience to want to engage with you. Don’t spam your viewers.
2. Offer something valuable to your audience. Don’t just ask for their money.
3. Make your customers want to buy from you because they like your content.

Unfortunately there’s no one single trick to achieving these objectives. Everything depends on your business, your product, your target audience, and the goals you are trying to attain.

Pay close attention to number 2 on the list. It’s easier to draw people in if you have something to offer to them. This doesn’t just mean using coupons, though that’s a place to start. If you want more ideas about how to use pricing strategies to draw in more customers, check out VMA’s blog on the subject here. It goes over more details on ways to draw in new customers and bring back old ones with offers from your company.

Modern Age Copywriting

One result of the Internet is that there are new kinds of copywriting specifically geared towards that medium. What works in a magazine, newspaper, or billboard won’t necessarily work for a website. How you set up the back end of your website is crucial to ensure that your pages are seen in the first place.

SEO Copywriting

SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization.” You use SEO to make it so that when people search for topics related to your business on a search engine such as Google, your pages are included in the top results. There are 3 major parts to setting up SEO copywriting:

1. Finding the right keywords. The ones that other people are using the most to search for your product.
2. Writing articles on subjects that people want to learn more about to draw them in.
3. Use the important keywords and the content you create around them to try to rank in the top results for those keywords.

The simplest way to see what people are searching for when it comes to your product is to see what Google automatically fills in when you perform a search yourself. Although this can give you a basic idea of keyword searches, it’s much better to use another resource. Programs such as Google Analytics allow you to look in-depth at your audience and what they are searching for. This is an incredibly useful tool to have on your belt for keeping track of how your website is performing. It can also help with determining what to do to make it better.

When Internet search engines first began, getting your site to the top of the search was a simpler process. You could get away with spamming the audience and throwing a ton of junk articles on the page. These days, search engines are getting incredibly smart. They do their best to weed out spammy, junk sites for ones that people want to see.

When you write an article now, it’s important to make it as interesting as possible to draw in more people and keep them on your site for longer. How many people can find your site through searches, how many different people click on your site, how long viewers stay on your pages, and many other factors determine how well your website is performing. Again, tools such as Google Analytics can help you keep track of this kind of information. You can then use that to see which articles are working and which are not, to help improve your future copy.

Also keep in mind that search engine optimization is changing all the time. Google and other companies are constantly working to improve their algorithms. Sometimes they make small tweaks and other times they completely overhaul the system. Staying up-to-date is crucial.

In the end, making good copywriting comes down to the same things that almost any skill requires. Practice and a willingness to constantly learn new techniques will get you far. Being able to keep up with the newest trends is what the Internet is all about. If you get out there and engage with your customers, you will quickly learn what they are interested in and what kind of information will appeal to them. Use their questions as article topics, and start a discussion. One of the best (and sometimes worst!) aspects of modern marketing is the ability to get instant feedback and conversations with your viewers.

If you want more information about SEO, marketing, and other topics, check out Virtual Market Advantage’s other blogs!

Online Business Pricing Strategies

For most businesses that sell a product, a significant portion of sales come from repeat customers. After you put in the effort to get customers to visit your website and make an online purchase, it’s time to start working towards bringing them back. One major way you can accomplish this is by using smart online business pricing strategies for your products.

The Benefits of Repeat Customers

In 2015, RJMetrics posted a study on eCommerce buying behavior. They found that 32% of customers who make an online purchase are likely to come back and make another purchase within a year. Although this doesn’t seem like much, repeat customers tend to also come back again. If someone makes a second purchase, they jump to a 50% chance of making a third purchase. This continues incrementally, leading to a statistic that shows that return customers can be very loyal. If you make an effort to develop customer loyalty, you can increase your sales greatly and make everyone happy!

Use Smart Online Business Pricing Strategies

Smart online business pricing strategies can be a powerful tool in helping you bring back repeat customers. These methods reward customers for choosing your store again and again. There’s more to it than simply passing out coupons. Here are some simple pricing strategies to try for your online business:

Delayed Rewards

People love rewards and will go out of their way to obtain them. Although you may draw in many first customers by simply distributing coupons and offering a reduced price on a first purchase, this method doesn’t necessarily bring people back for a second buy. In fact, the customer might feel upset when they realize that they now have to pay more for the same thing they purchased before.

Instead, give a reward for a purchase by offering a discount on the next purchase. Rather than handing out $5 coupons for a first purchase, offer a $10 discount on a second purchase. This has two major benefits. First, it brings more people back for a second purchase, which can snowball into customer loyalty. Second, the offer doesn’t have to be limited to first-time customers only. This makes your business look really good to repeat customers, and may even bring back buyers who weren’t originally planning to make another purchase.

Instant gratification is great, but delaying the reward can be even better for your business by drawing in repeat customers.

Reward Certain Actions

You can make customers feel more involved and recognized by giving out rewards for doing certain things that benefit your business. You can reward many types of actions, such as:

• Coming back to make a set number of different purchases.
• Purchasing the same product repeatedly.
• Purchasing several different items at once.
• Spending specific amounts of money.
• Joining a monthly subscription.

A good example of this method is Target’s Cartwheel app. When you are checking out at Target, you can use the app on your phone to scan the items you’re buying to earn extra savings. It also includes a badge system, letting the customer feel like they are progressing towards extra rewards on top of saving money.

This kind of reward system makes the customer feel good while shopping at your store. The rewards don’t even have to always give discounted prices. Many people will return to a store that makes them feel good and have fun while shopping.

Membership Pricing

Other common and beneficial pricing strategies include memberships. Having a key ring full of membership cards is a hassle, but these days you can easily handle memberships online. Grocery stores often use memberships to bring in repeat customers, and the system works well. If a person can buy a product in one place cheaper than another with a simple membership, they are much more likely to return there.

Keep your members feeling special by setting up great exclusive rewards. If you regularly change which items are discounted to members, they will keep coming back to see if the items they want are currently on sale. This will also entice new customers into membership if they see something they want at a cheaper price. You can also set up different membership tiers that offer greater discounts at higher levels. Another great option that combines the previous two methods is to have members unlock higher tiers of savings by making repeat purchases.

Not all of these methods will work for every business. Consider which pricing strategies would work best for your online business before setting up a lot of discounts. If in doubt, you can try several methods over a period of time and see which work best for you. If you want to learn more about improving your online business, check out VMA’s other blogs such as this one that goes over different ways to use content marketing to boost online sales.

9 Ways to Use Content Marketing to Boost Online Sales

Content marketing has become a very important method for businesses to reach out to their target audiences. It involves providing content online that your customers might find interesting and/or helpful. Valuable content will help you engage potential customers and bring in new business. Here are 10 types of content marketing you can use to boost online sales. Whether your business already has a content marketing plan or you’re just starting out, hopefully you’ll find something useful in this list for your online business.

Blog Posts

Blogging is one of the most potent content marketing tools at your disposal. Blogs allow you to provide as much useful and interesting content as you can and easily spread the information to lots of people. If you’re not sure where to start with your blog, try to provide general information about your product or think of questions that customers have asked in the past and give the answers. You can also look and see what other similar businesses are talking about on their websites for inspiration.

Guest Blog Posts

Once you get comfortable writing your own blogs, you can expand your reach by writing guest blog posts. These are blog posts that you write for other websites that are relevant to your business to try to expand your reach to new people. You need to build a relationship with the owner of the site to get permission. You might offer a trade of guest posts so both of your websites receive more traffic.

Email Lists

Having a list of emails for current and potential clients is an amazing resource for spreading content. Posts to social media sites such as Facebook may only reach a small amount of your followers. Emails are guaranteed to at least go through to everyone on the list (though whether or not they read it is up to them!) Start your email list ASAP by adding an email subscription form to your website. Then you can send content as a regular newsletter containing whatever information you want. If you add incentives, such as a chance to win free products, you’ll get even more people interested.

Videos

Videos are a great way to provide content, and people love watching them. Since they are more visual than regular text, you can express yourself in many ways that don’t work as well in a blog. You can supplement your blog with similar information or provide completely different content. Set up a YouTube channel for your business, create videos, and link them to your website.

Images and Infographics

Images are a powerful tool and can relay a large amount of information to your audience. Use photographs, illustrations, or other types of images to spice up your content. Link them to your website, blogs, and social media posts. Infographics can be even more useful since they can combine the visuals of pictures with informative text. However, when choosing pictures to use for your content marketing, make sure that they are ones you made yourself or that you have permission to use. Otherwise you can get in some legal trouble.

Podcasts

The popularity of podcasts has exploded in recent years. People listen to them in the car, at work, while doing chores, or while hanging out pretty much anywhere thanks to smart phones and laptops. Record interviews, stories, or other information about your business and post them as podcasts for your customers to download.

Ebooks

Anyone can make an ebook to either sell or give away online. You just need to combine enough information about your business into one package for distribution. After you’re done writing and putting together the information, provide a download of it on your website.

Surveys and Interviews

Your content doesn’t always have to come from your own mouth: ask around for information from your audience or other people in your profession or niche. Surveys and interviews are both great ways to get information to your customers in a smooth and easy-to-understand way. Use them to bring more interest to the topics related to your business.

Testimonials

Similar to surveys and interviews, testimonials also allow you to get content about your business from the points of view of other people. Testimonials are endorsements from customers that provide proof of the value of your business. New customers tend to feel more comfortable with a business if they can see that other people have already tried the product and support it. Urge your customers to provide feedback about their experiences and put them on your website or social media.

Content marketing is a great way to boost sales for your online business. Use these methods as a starting point and get the content flowing on your website! You can also check out more ways to spice up your website and boost online sales with VMA's blog here.

Social Media and the Unfiltered Internet

Do you remember The Dress? The one that no one could decide whether it was gold and white or blue and black. The one that was being talked about all over the place in 2015. Did you know that the original post for the dress was a Facebook post that got fewer than 20 likes? It was only later, when it was posted to Tumblr and Twitter, that the dress picture because the phenomenon of The Dress.

Filtered Internet Content

The Internet is a huge place that’s expanding every day. In fact, we can only see a tiny portion of it. And that portion is further shrunken by the social media platforms that we use to browse for entertainment or work. The general population adds to these sites constantly, providing an ever-expanding source of content. The question arises though: is there too much content?

Even if you browse social media sites all day every day, you won’t be able to see even a small fraction of their content. This poses a problem for the companies running these sites. They want people to stick around and continue to browse the site, because the more viewers they have, the more money they get from advertising. If a viewer’s feed is too bogged down by uninteresting or irrelevant content, they are more likely to stop going to that site altogether.

This problem has caused most social media sites to start filtering content in one way or another. For example, Facebook decides what to show on your feed based on many underlying factors, such as your sex, age, marital status, and the types of websites and links you tend to visit. In general this is a good thing, since it makes our feeds more interesting and pertinent to us. However, it also causes a sizable underlying layer of social media that gets lost and unseen in the shuffle.

Hidden Content

This hidden content is public and recognized by search engines, but it only reaches a tiny audience and is difficult to find if you’re looking for it. To give you an idea of how much content is hidden, here’s a study from 2009 that showed that 53% of YouTube videos had under 500 views!

Hidden content (besides the spam) often feels more honest, since it doesn’t contain the repetitive formulas of mainstream traffic that keeps those posts more visible to search engines. It also tends to be more amateurish, of low quality, be too short or too long, and have titles that are difficult to find in a search. In general, the hidden content feels more candid, intimate, and human.

If you’re interested in sifting through this forgotten content, several resources have popped up to help you. These include Oviews for unwatched YouTube videos, SadTweets for unseen Twitter tweets, and Forgotify for unheard songs on Spotify.

Using the Unfiltered Internet

As with every resource, some people have actually found a way to get money from the underbelly content of the unfiltered Internet. Some companies search through public photos that people post online looking for recognizable brands. They then sell the photos to the brand’s company for demographic information or advertisement.

Some of the unpopular content is eventually discovered and becomes extremely popular for a time. When content goes viral like this, the original poster very rarely profits from their fame, and sometimes it can even cause them harm. Imagine having a video you posted go viral to the point where you get hundreds of notifications per hour. It would get old quickly and make it impossible to actually find the notifications that you want to see. This is what happened to the girl who originally posted about The Dress. Her phone kept crashing from the influx of notifications. In the aftermath, BuzzFeed posted about a party they were throwing to celebrate The Dress as their largest post ever. It’s impossible to know exactly how much money BuzzFeed made off of that post, but it is known that the original poster didn’t really benefit.

What is interesting (and disconcerting) is that the biggest post on one of the most popular social media sites was taken from another site, which was also taken from another site, without the permission or knowledge of the act from the original poster. No one was compensated for this string of events, and the post was eventually taken down due to copyright infringement.

The Internet is becoming more and more centralized and controlled by corporations trying to subsist on other people’s content. Some of these companies last a long time, while others disappear and are quickly replaced by something else. The future of these companies and social media in general is unclear. It’s similarly hard to tell what will happen to the enormous amount of unseen content that makes up the majority of the unfiltered Internet as it continues to expand every second.

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Spam Bot Traffic: What Is It and What Can I Do About It?

If you have a website and social media campaign for your business, chances are high that you’ve encountered spam bot traffic. Spam bots are programs that have been created to follow, befriend, comment on, or otherwise contact as many people or websites as possible as quickly as possible. Usually they are used in an attempt to bring more traffic back to their own site. Fake followers from spam bots are not actively looking at your site. They are not customers, and they can even be detrimental to your business.

Why is Spam Bot Traffic a Problem?

You might wonder how exactly spam bots affect your website and your business. The major problems have to do with reduced communication, security, server load, and faulty analytics data.

One of the most obvious problems is the flood of bogus comments onto your website or social media page. Comments sections are supposed to be a place where viewers can contact a business directly and set up a flow of conversation. A good comments section can genuinely benefit a website. However, if a comments section is overflowing with spam that advertises different sites, it cripples the ability to keep conversations going and takes attention away from the original site.

Spam bot traffic has gotten to be such a huge problem that many websites are opting to turn off their comments sections and user registrations entirely. Some are also forced to spend valuable time and even pay money to try to protect their websites from such attacks. Even large blogging sites such as CopyBlogger.com have opted to remove their comments sections, stating that only about 4% of the comments they were receiving were not spam.

If the spam bots get bad enough, your website can be greatly harmed. Too much spam can slow down your website, which affects how many people are willing to peruse it. Depending on what kind of outbound links the spam bots add to your site, it can even get flagged and ignored by Google, making it difficult for real viewers to find you. You might also lose your website to hackers who take it over themselves.

Spam bots also inflate your website’s statistics, making it difficult to use tools such as Google Analytics. If spam bot traffic is flooding your site, you can’t use statistical information to accurately give you useful information, such as who your viewers are, so you can focus more on those demographics.

How to Identify Spam Bot Traffic

There are two major types of spam bots that can affect your website. One kind is more visible, posting comments, advertising themselves, and directing traffic to their own sites. The other kind is harder to see and is designed to give a website more views or fake followers without adding any benefit to the original site.

A surge in traffic on your website might indicate spam bots. It might also just be legitimate, beneficial traffic. If you see a surge in traffic, consider whether or not you’ve done something recently that warrants an increase in viewership. If not, you probably have a spam bot problem. You can use Google Analytics to help identify malicious traffic by looking at the sources of the traffic before and after the surge. If the traffic is coming from a major website or social network, it’s probably legitimate. If it’s direct traffic, it’s probably from spam bots.

There are some warnings that can help identify spam bots individually. They spew out an excessive amount of comments on lots of websites. They also try to push their own links on viewers, even if they have nothing in common with the website they are posted on. However, being able to identify individual spam bots is not particularly useful, since hundreds or even thousands of them might affect your site at a time.

How to Reduce Spam Bot Traffic

There are several ways you can attempt to reduce or eliminate spam bot traffic on your website and social media pages. The most effective methods are to shut down communications, like CopyBlogger.com did when they shut down their comments section. Most websites allow you to shut off comments and turn off user registrations altogether. However, this is an extreme response, and many people want to keep communication with their viewers open.

Website can also offer options that allow for more restriction for commenting and registration. For example, WordPress has .htaccess files that restrict bots and several plugins that add CAPTCHAs, limit login attempts, and blacklist spam IP addresses. Also, Google Analytics allows you to filter the data, which can remove some of the effects of spam bots. For example, if a lot of spam is coming from a particular country, you can have the analytics ignore that area. Some websites, such as Facebook, are somewhat better than others at removing and restricting spam accounts without hassle to you.

Spam bot traffic is a huge problem online and will continue to be an issue for the foreseeable future. Not only do they slow down websites, but they can reduce beneficial communication and even be a security risk. If your websites or social media pages are plagued by spam bots, make sure you check for resources specific to those sites that might help reduce the problem. Don’t let spam bots ruin your site!