Who’s Talking About Me?

In my last post, I talked about actively reacting to what other people are saying about our businesses and websites. Actively Reacting As A Marketing Strategy can be a time consuming task but there is one great way to make the task much easier.

In order to actively react to blog entries, forum posts and other conversations that relate to your website or business you first have to find those conversations. For small websites and businesses, it might be as easy as conducting a few Google searches for their company name. But, there’s an even better way to find out who’s talking about your site(s) and go directly to the page where the conversation is taking place.

Most every webhost provides some level of reporting on where traffic originates. In this case, we’re interested in the “referrer logs”. The referrer logs identify those websites that have a link to your site that brought someone to visit your site. By reviewing the referrer logs you can quickly see the number of visitors the site has brought you as well as which page or pages they are linking to.

Unfortunately, there is a bit of a catch here. Like so much about the web that’s good, the spammers have found a way to even corrupt referrer logs – its called referrer spam. These folks have a way of spamming your referrer logs to make it look like there’s a link on their site to yours. The reality is that there is no link to your site on theirs and the site appearing in your log more than likely is a site that should come with parental warnings. Thankfully the domain names alone often provide a clue to the nature of the sites.

The intent of these spammers is to get site owners who find those entries to visit the spammer’s site.

When I review my own referral logs, I look for sites that I am familiar with and ones where the domain name sounds like something related to my site. Anything that has body parts or sexual innuendos, I skip. What remains is gold when it comes to actively reacting to what people are saying about your website and business.

So, go log into your hosting accounts and start reviewing who has sent visitors to your website(s) and consider joining in the conversation to promote yourself. Most bloggers and forum owners will appreciate your participation and you’ll see even more visitors to your site!

A few suggestions for further reading...