How To Get Huge Traffic From LinkedIn using company pages.

Hi All if you did not see my last blog about Linkedin then check out How To Get Huge Traffic From LinkedIn

If you have not checked out the last blog on Linkedin do that but Linkedin has i new feature were you can add your company and product as well.
Check out this video on how to do it, it saves me time in making one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OemVrpb-AM

Just like to sa a big thank you to Great job Shelley at springboardw

How To Get Huge Traffic From LinkedIn

How To Get Huge Traffic From LinkedIn

As you probably know,  LinkedIn has had a huge week. The company launched a wildly successful IPO, doubling the company’s valuation overnight. While there is a fair amount of debate as to whether or not this valuation is too high, one thing is clear – LinkedIn is doing what few other social networks can do - maintaining success in the age of Facebook.
LinkedIn can be a tremendous source of web traffic, and perhaps more importantly, it can be a tremendous source of highly targeted web traffic, given the professional nature of the network.

Do you count LinkedIn among your most valued traffic sources? Let us know in the comments.

A while back, we posted an article about how LinkedIn can be one of your most valuable traffic sources. We talked to entrepreneur Lewis Howes, who claimed LinkedIn was one of the top traffic sources to his blogs.

“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,” he said. “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). 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.”

That was over a year ago. The network has indeed grown significantly since then. It now has over 100 million members, and going public probably won’t do much to slow down growth.

Howes had written his own article on steps to take to drive traffic with LinkedIn. These were:

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.

Since that article, LinkedIn has done quite a few things, and luckily for site owners, some of them have huge implications as traffic drivers.

Earlier this month, BusinessInsider posted a pretty inspirational chart showing how traffic from LinkedIn suddenly skyrocketed:











Nicholas Carlson says LinkedIn product manager Liz Walker told the publication that the traffic was “coming from a bunch of sources – mostly new products like LinkedIn.com/Today, newsletters, and LinkedIn News.” LinkedIn’s “inShares” (see the LinkedIn share button at the top of this article) contribute to these. Obviously using these and/or other plugins from the company can help.

LinkedIn Today is a product the company launched in beta in March. It was launched with the aim of showing what users’ connections and coworkers (people you know) are sharing, what industry peers are sharing, and what stories are interesting to the broader audience. If you’re creating compelling content, just like with any other social network, you have a good chance of increasing your traffic here, provided you are able to drive influence within your industry.
Again, this brings forward the appeal of targeted traffic, as opposed to just traffic. LinkedIn Today is accessible via the “news” tab on the LinkedIn homepage.

Of course, LinkedIn has a news feed section just like Twitter/Facebook, so building your network in general is key. Obviously this key for reasons beyond traffic, but it should certainly help in this area as well. LinkedIn’s Lindsey Pollak recently provided some tips for sprucing up your presence on the network, which could help overall. She suggested kick-starting your keywords, featuring a new photo, adding some apps, and getting active in groups.

“If you’re not attracting a lot of interest to your LinkedIn profile, take a look at what words you use to describe yourself,” she says. “They might be doing more harm than good. Last month, LinkedIn released a list of the top 10 LinkedIn profile termsthat are most overused by professionals based in the United States.”

These terms are as follows:

Extensive experience
Innovative
Motivated
Results-oriented
Dynamic
Proven track record
Team player
Fast-paced
Problem solver
Entrepreneurial

Suffice it to say, you should be giving people a compelling reason to want to connect with you, and separating yourself from the crowd. Even if you are already doing this with your content, they may never see the content if their first impression of you comes from a lackluster LinkedIn profile.

In terms of apps, she says, “If you travel frequently, try TripIt, which enables you to share your travel itineraries and potentially set up appointments and build deeper relationships with LinkedIn connections in the cities you visit. If you’re a visual type, consider SlideShare or Google Presentation, which allow you to add presentations to your profile. I also love the Reading List by Amazon, which invites you to post books you’re reading and share your reviews with your LinkedIn connections. The overall goal of adding more applications is to give people as many reasons as possible to find something in common with you.”

Essentially, these are just more ways to spark engagement, which can trickle down into traffic (and engaged traffic at that). LinkedIn’s app directory can be found here. Obviously the Groups also contribute to the engagement factor.

Also keep in mind that LinkedIn regularly sends emails to users. These include emails for LinkedIn Today updates and Network Updates, which display profiles, connections, new contacts, posts, groups, photos, recommendations, and applications.
Study

A recent study from LeadFormix found:

1. 24 % of all visitors from LinkedIn to a B2B website are enterprise visitors (leads).

2. Nearly 45% of leads coming to a company website through LinkedIn are first time visitors.

3. 1 in 2 leads to a website coming from LinkedIn, come from individual profile + company profile pages.

4. Leads from LinkedIn groups and ads are most likely to fill a form (convert) on a B2B website.

5. Visitors from LinkedIn groups are also most likely to respond to webinar invites.

6. 1 in 3 visitors from a LinkedIn group, filled a form on a website (converted).

7. Based on the intent of visitors measured by LeadFormix, the most relevant traffic for a company comes from its LinkedIn employee profiles and participation in groups. These visitors are most interested in the company details, product offerings and in attending webinars which are highly correlated with a potential buyer’s intent.

8. Visitors from LinkedIn company pages are most likely to spend more than 10 minutes on a company website.
Given all of this week’s LinkedIn news, it’s clear that the network is bigger than ever, and doesn’t show any signs of dwindling down anytime soon. If you’re not capitalizing on it as a potential traffic source, you might be missing out big time – and at a time when the importance of diversifying your traffic sources has truly been driven home by Google’s Panda update. It’s also worth noting, however, that people sharing your content on LinkedIn can actually help you with Google’s social search.

LinkedIn has expanded its mobile presence recently too. This should only help general use of the network, and potentially help for increased traffic as well. Last month, the company launched the first version of its Android app. Shortly before that, they also launched a feature phone app. Remember, there are still a lot of people out there that haven’t upgraded to smartphones. This can keep them engaged with the network and show them your content while they’re on the go.

Our Five Tips Backup and Recovery in Virtual Environments

Backup and Recovery in Virtual Environments

Back to the tech stuff if you use VMware and Citrix system.


Introduction
Virtualization is being rapidly adopted, particularly in small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs) where time and money are always at a premium. It brings significant time, money and labor savings in a variety of areas, including procurement, administration, deployment, operation, reliability and recoverability. Virtualization can radically simplify management of the entire environment and enable the SMB administrator to ―do more with less.‖ Moreover, disaster recovery becomes significantly easier once a business has virtualized, provided the administrator adopts newer, more efficient technologies that are designed to work with the virtual infrastructure.
However, like any technology, virtualization brings challenges that can erode its cost benefits and leave the infrastructure less protected than before. In this paper, Quest’s data protection experts offer five tips for effective backup and recovery to help you avoid the challenges that might keep you from fully protecting your virtual assets and infrastructure. You will discover how simple and affordable effective virtual data protection can be, and maximize your investment in your virtualized infrastructure.


Tip #1: Minimize the amount of data you protect
You can reduce the amount of data you back up while ensuring 100 percent recovery by using technologies that filter out unchanged and deleted data.
While tools that utilize VMware CBT (Changed Block Tracking) eliminate the backup of some unnecessary data, CBT does not prevent the backup and restore of deleted data. The Windows operating system uses the unused free space that is allocated, but not used, for data to store deleted files. That deleted data is never removed until it is overwritten to make space for new data. VMs that host applications with frequently changing data can have gigabytes of deleted data. Unfortunately, those files are seen as changed data blocks, and backup tools using only CBT will back up that deleted data. That stretches backup times, lengthens restore times, and overloads your network.
Our tip is to select a tool that does not back up deleted data. That way, you can back up often and with greater granularity. You’ll also save substantially on storage space, backup time, bandwidth and recovery time, enabling you to have better recovery point objectives (RPOs) and shorter recovery time objectives (RTOs).

Tip #2: Maximize backup speed and throughput

Many backup administrators manage data protection for their virtual systems as if they were protecting physical systems; this can seriously reduce the efficiency of virtual asset data protection. For example, administrators often put multiple VMs on a server that would have previously hosted only one physical application. This creates increased contention for network resources—particularly when backups and restores are being performed.
Virtualized systems are different and need different techniques for optimal protection. We recommend you use a tool that allows simultaneous backup and restore to avoid bottlenecks. In addition, use a tool that provides flexible backup methods (proxy, direct-to-target, LAN-free) to fit your environment and minimize workload impact.
To further increase network and system efficiency, choose a tool that eliminates the need for a backup server by sending backup images directly to target storage. This approach reduces network load by eliminating intermediate steps.
Tip #3: Keep your recovery options flexible
 
While agent-based systems have their benefits, they aren’t always most efficient or cost effective for small organizations. When you back up virtual systems with agent-based systems, you typically have to pre-stage your VMs to restore an entire VM. This means you have to spawn a new VM via clone or template, size the memory and disks correctly, name it correctly, and create the appropriate number of virtual disks. Once this is up and running, you must then install an agent, connect to the target, and restore the VM. One alternative to an agent-based system is bare-metal restore routines. However, these are challenging to implement at best, and you may have to maintain duplicate hardware with this option as well.
Fortunately, virtualization brings many simpler and more powerful recovery options. Use a tool that allows you to simply click on a VM to restore it, with no need for pre-staging. Find one that allows you to easily restore files at the file level and to restore application objects. Set up your disaster recovery scheme so you can fail over to a VM on a remote server (either on campus or offsite) with a single click of a button, and ensure the replication is automatically reversed so that once the source site comes back up, you can simply synchronize the changes and failback to source.
What about physical boxes? Almost every virtual environment has some servers that just can’t be virtualized yet. Consider companion tools that work with your virtual data protection tool to offer continuous protection for physical servers. Using continuous protection, you can image physical systems into VMs, which can be then restored to a VMor a physical server. This approach gives you the flexibility to get your systems restored and your business back on line fast.
What about long term tape-based retention? Most organizations already have investments in agent-based software and tape systems. All you need is a single agent with visibility to an archive repository to sweep the archives off to tape. Consider a tool that offers sweep-to-tape integration that can be used with a traditional backup tool. Then if you ever need to recover an old archive, you can simply restore it to the repository, import the manifest, and start restoring files or VMs as you please.

Tip #4: Minimize performance drains
As mentioned earlier, many backup administrators manage data protection for virtual machines as if they were managing separate individual physical systems. Another example of this is deploying backup agents on each VM and running backup jobs in defined backup windows in order to avoid hurting the performance of business operations on the system. Often backups are run during off-peak hours, usually at night.
Unfortunately, this approach has a significant impact on the virtual machine host and VMs. The host system must take on the extra processing load and absorb latency increases due to I/O contention during the entire backup window, slowing all VMs on the host until all scheduled backups are complete. Adding to this impact is increased network traffic and latency due to the increased volume of data traveling to the backup server.
Our tip is to use dynamic resource management to free unneeded resources; when resources are taken only when needed, limited or scarce resources can be shared among processes. You can also reduce performance impact by simplifying your backup infrastructure with a flexible tool that can adapt to your network layout (LAN, WAN, or storage network), shifting the load of data protection operations away from the networks critical to business performance. For even greater benefits, choose a tool that provides flexible backup methods (proxy, direct-to-target, LAN-free).
Reducing the impact of backups on your network, servers and applications will enable you to save on hardware and infrastructure costs. It will also help your current infrastructure perform better so you have room for growth without spending more money. In other words, with the right tools, you can do even more with less.
Tip #5: Protect to fit your needs and SLAs
You have different SLAs and infrastructure for different applications and data. Your data protection solution needs to adapt to fit your needs—not the other way around. Your data protection tool shouldn’t force you to conduct your data protection operations in a way that interferes with your production systems and networks. You should back up only as often as you need to meet your SLAs, in order to minimize effort and load on your production systems and networks.
Therefore, choose a flexible tool that offers a choice of networks and a method to be used for data protection: LAN, WAN, server-less. We recommend an image-based data protection tool because images are very portable, allowing you to recover when, where and how you need to for the greatest efficiency. We also advise choosing a tool with flexible licensing to provide the best fit for your environment while costing as little as possible.
Most of all, choose an architecture that fits the SLAs for your organization. The correct architecture for your business depends on the hardware and setup you have today; there is no one-size-fits-all. Understanding the options here is arguably the most important part of the equation when designing a virtualized disaster recovery system. Regardless of which image-based tool you are using, you need to configure it correctly, which includes, among other things, choosing the correct source method and understanding data flow and proper positioning of targets.
Finally, choose a tool that offers a variety of architectural options for deployment: network-based, direct-to-target, iSCSI, fiber and both ESX and ESXi backups. This will ensure you can set up your backup regime in a way that makes sense for your environment.

If You’re Not Local, How Can You Compete in an Increasingly Local Google?

If You’re Not Local, How Can You Compete in an Increasingly Local Google?

Original Article: There’s no question that Google has been putting a lot of focus on local results lately – from the release of products like Google Places and Hotpot (the company’s personalized and social recommendation engine) to an increasing amount of queries simply retrieving local results – often above other organic listings.

We had an extensive conversation about this with industry veteran Bruce Clay at PubCon a couple months ago, and webmasters and SEOs have been stressing about it all over the web. In fact, just today, one consulting firm ran a press release talking about the competitive advantages local business owners have as a result of recent changes with Google.

Do local businesses have the upper hand in Google? Tell us what you think.

Consultant (and founder of the firm, LocalMarketingProfitFaucet says there’s a new type of Google Gold Rush. He’s referring to getting the prime listings from Google Places, which Google will often place at the top of the SERPs.

"This change is having an immediate and positive impact on the local businesses shown in these Page 1 listings," says Adams. "The Internet-savvy business owners who understand how to take advantage of this are generating new customers for next-to-nothing. Meanwhile, a surprising number are still oblivious to the significance of this change. In fact, Google has revealed that only a tiny percentage of local businesses have even claimed their Google Places listing, let alone optimize it."

"From our experience," Adams continues, "Google has always given preferential treatment to unique, multimedia content that is kept fresh and up to date. And of course, stay away from any black hat tactics that try to game the system. Google always catches up to these shenanigans. When they do, your listing could be banned with no warning and no second chances."

If local businesses have the competitive advantage now, then some non-local businesses are wondering how they’re supposed to compete with that. After all, the far reach of the web has historically been an attractive reason to start a business in the first place.

In a new video uploaded to Google’s Webmaster YouTube channel, Matt Cutts (head of the company’s webspam team) addressed a user-submitted question: "In a search environment where local is becoming increasingly important (and more full on the SERP), how can an out of town company compete with the local based (and locally housed) competition without lying to show up in these results?"

What the vidieo.

How can an out-of-town company compete with local competition?

Cutts responded by saying, "The entire page of web rankings is there that out of town people can compete on, so the idea of the local universal results is to show local businesses, so in some sense, there’s not really a way where if you’re out of town, you can sort of show up (within our guidelines), and show up as a local business."

"Now, if you are a mobile business – so for example, maybe you’re a plumber, and you get into your pickup truck, and you drive around in a particular area – so if you’re a mobile business, then in Google Places you can specify a service area, which is roughly 50 miles around where you’re based, but that’s only if you actually have some base of operations there," he continues. "You can’t be based in Topeka and claim that you have a service area in Wyoming if you have no physical presence there."

"I think that that’s a good idea. You do want to have local businesses show up, and I know that the team has really been paying a lot of attention to try and improve Maps quality, make it more robust, check on the authenticity of businesses, and that will only continue," adds Cutts. 

In other words, if you’re not a local business, there’s nothing much you can do about getting the kind of visibility the local businesses are getting, should Google deem the user’s query worthy of the local results. I might suggest finding queries related to your business that aren’t returning local results and giving these some more attention, and of course there’s always AdWords.

If there’s a particular geographic market that you’re after, but you’re not based there, you may want to consider setting up shop. In the end, Google is just going to do what it thinks will help users. Whether or not you buy that is up to you, but they’re not going to deviate from that stance, and if it encourages more people to buy AdWords ads, then so be it.  

You can expect there to be a great amount of focus continued to be placed on local. The company even moved former VP of Search products, Marissa Mayer, to this area of focus, and with mobile becoming such a big part of the way people search, local is by default going to be a bigger part of what people are actually looking for.

The One Mistake You MUST Avoid

Do Not Let The Publisher Write Your Ad! Every time I ask a frustrated, overworked business owner, who wrote this ad? I can almost guess the response… “Oh the advertising rep from the paper wrote it and laid it out for me” Now that’s the recipe for wasting all your advertising money! It drives me insane…let me explain
Firstly, If you believe that they care for a minute about your ad generating sales, unfortunately you are mistaken! What they care about is selling advertising space, because that is what they are paid for. Next thing they will do is appeal to your EGO: they will ask you to provide a big photo of your business or product. Then they will slap a massive big logo in there to ensure your brand will get the right exposure:Sounds familiar? They will lay it out and if you are lucky they will throw in a few bullet points about what you do and how good you are. Now this is a good ad right? WRONG!
So why do they do this? Why should they not care about the sales turnover your ad generates? Simply because they won’t have to think about your ad and your message, and it’s the fastest way to process you. Plus it makes their publication look bright and colorful. Now open the paper and look at the ads, and ask yourself how many people will stop to read them…The truth is publisher executives only get paid for selling advertising space, and chances are that if they were paid a commission on sales generated (money in your bank) they would probably go out of business, or else they would start putting more effort into your message to your target clientele.
Don’t fall into this trap! If you hear a publisher say “You must run the ad for long enough before you can expect to get results” you should see the red flags waving in front of your eyes! Think of Einstein’s definition for insanity, and more importantly think of your dollars pouring down the drain…
So, what should you do? WRITE THE AD YOURSELF! Or get someone who cares about your business and knows about effective ad copy writing. Always be aware that the purpose of your ad is to bring more enquiries that will ultimately bring more sales and profits to your business. If your ad doesn’t bring back 400% of its value in gross profit, you should seriously consider other marketing strategies, and there is no shortage of them!
Find out the other classic mistakes to avoid by downloading my FREE report ” The 21 breakthroughs of successful advertising” on http://www.breakthroughbusiness.co.nz
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/5701929