Why is all the fuss all of a sudden about mobile and mobile traffic you probably ask yourself? The answer is pretty straight forward, do you remember back in 1997 when the web started expanding slowly and you wished you had bought a good domain name or programmed a search engine making you a billionaire right now, well, now is your chance. Mobile is still new and there is a lot of business you can make via mobile if you are fast enough to make the switch (or adjustments).

The big companies already understand the potential of mobile traffic and have made the adjustments either by creating mobile apps which can be downloaded from a relevant app store for free just so the mobile users can use their websites, there’s space for many players here, you can either adjust your website and make it mobile and more accessible for mobile users or create an application which you will need to market to your traffic so it will be downloaded by as many users as possible.

Mobile Traffic Stats (courtesy of Pingdom and Statcounter)

This trend of growth in mobile traffic is set to continue as mobile devices evolve and become available to the mass. It’s now easier to use the internet from most mobile phone devices and applications make it even easier for both developers and web users to experience the web – better.

There are many services or plugins that will help you turn your website mobile, you can also use outsource services to create a mobile app but the bottom line is that you must go mobile if you want to survive – don’t get left behind.

The question is whether the Facebook advertising is actually a targeted traffic source or is it just a way to get fans to “Like” your brand?

Before we get to dealing with this issue, Facebook is gradually unavailing its new advertising system which is improved and more sophisticated in a way that it directs you to the result you as an advertiser are interested in = Likes or Sales.

This system also integrated the use of in depth data taken from the Open Graph which Facebook introduced a while back and is being used by app developers as well as webmasters to integrate data with Facebook. The bottom line of the Open Graph is that Facebook now knows a lot more about its users and you don’t need that a user publicly declared of having an interest in something, now that user is “marked” as having an interest in something in case he or she were watching a certain video clip, read an article about a certain topic or even have friends that are interested in something and they have participated in a conversation about it.

Back to the new Facebook ads system which enables better segmentation as well as use of mobile data that was not available in the previous system (users that use the Facebook app with Iphone, Blackberry and so on).

One thing is for sure, when it comes to targeted traffic, Facebook will never be Google. That is unless they will roll out an in app search engine that if users will actually use it will be the beginning of the end for Google. We will not compare user searching for keywords having ads displayed based on their exact keyword string, but instead ads are displayed based on the interest of the user. This means that if the user is engaged there’s a chance he will be interested in a wedding ring, then again, there’s a chance the wedding ring has already been bought and then the ad is not targeted.

While it’s not targeted it’s a cheap way of branding, there’s no argue that big brands are using Facebook and friends of friends to expose their brand to as many potential customers as possible. This means that as long as there’s a need for branding, Facebook ad system will always be relevant.

As Facebook constantly evolve we will probably see advertisements based on keywords in user’s posts. For example: A user will post that he has an exploding head ache and will be displayed an ad for Advil. This is truly targeted and the future of advertising on Facebook but there’s still a long way to go.

Botton line: If you are looking for targeted traffic, unlike free traffic, stick with the old school keyword based or media buy as the results will be much better.

DNS changer is a malware or a virus that allows the creator of it to direct the infected user to where ever it desires, and specifically to websites that makes the creator of the virus money from advertisements.

These Estonians were arrested but the bigger problem is that this malware still exists on more than 300,000 computers world wide. Controlled computer can be used for many causes including DDos attacks and unauthorized use of websites, hacking and more. And even though the cause is this virus is behind bars, now these computers must be cleaned so that no one will make use of this malware and do more harm.

The solution was that the FBI set up a server which is used to clean this virus and invites anyone with a computer to visit a website and find out with a click of a button whether they are infected. You can scan your computer by clicking here (takes you to the cleaning server).

This server will be active until July 9th 2012 and any infected computer that will not be cleaned by then will lose access to the internet completely.

This story raises the question of unethical marketing methods that gives an advantage to hackers over white hat marketers who use legal methods to promote products and earn a living online. We all seen the “This site may harm your computer” link on some websites that were hacked by these type of unethical marketers as well as pop ups and teasing advertisements on social networks that entice users to click on a link or view a movie that was forbidden to be seen.

Who do you think should be in charge of protecting the users, the websites? or maybe the user is the one in charge of their own security?

Even here on the Buy Traffic Guide some of the traffic services offer additional services of social media fans, likes, youtube views and so on and that’s perfectly fine as this is a neat shortcut that will save a lot of time and money and give some volume to your Facebook brand.

There’s a slight problem with the statistics that is available for everyone to see, while you usually expect a fans of a product or page to originate from various global geographic locations, when buying facebook fans you often fall for traps that may cause other users to stay away from your product. For example: Imagine your product or page is targeted for Italian facebook users and most of your facebook fans (at least the ones you paid for) are India based?

This is something you should definitely consider before buying facebook fans, make sure and double check that these fans will be globally spread and not originate from a single country or geo location.

Another thing you should keep in mind is the engagement of these users. Facebook can measure the engagement of your users and if you have a big list of fans that is not taking any action at all towards your page, you might get “punished” in a way that your posts on your page, status updates and notifications will not be visible to all the members of your page/group/application. This will harm your marketing strategy in Facebook.

To sum it all up, Facebook claims that only around 50 million of its users are fake could be more, Facebook is a great marketing channel and if used properly it can show great results, just make sure your Facebook fans are the ones you actually interested in.

We know by now why Google actually needed Google plus and that’s the improved advertising display based on all the data we input to our Google plus account, but now the question asked is do you need it?

To answer this question we will consider the personal Google plus account and the business one.

Google plus is basically a one stop shop that gathers all of Google’s services into one place and allows you to communicate with friends along the way. On the personal note it gives almost no added value as Facebook is more popular has more feature and a much better user interface.

On the business aspect Google plus has 2 main advantages:

1. SEO – If you are optimizing your website for Google – this is a must. Not only for backlinks but also because Google can’t fully index Facebook so it is dependent on information it has access to – and it has access to Google plus. If you have an account with Google plus for your business or website you have one thing that you competitors don’t have (yet).

2. Branding and Integration – As a brand you must have an online presence outside your website. Google plus as well as other social networks are part of it.

We must not forget that even though it’s smaller and less attractive than its competitor, it still has 100 million active users and that’s a lot. This number will eventually grow and that’s a good enough reason to be there.

What do you think, do you need a Google plus account or not?

The upcoming change which will probably be called Panda (again) Google is going to “punish” websites for over optimizing their websites. This basically means giving less emphasize on the true value for the visitor and more emphasize on the required steps to rank high in search engines which includes: excessive use of keywords on the website, excessive use of backlinks that are no natural of course (link buying) and higher weight to the visitor’s activity on the website.

This means that even if your website is not as popular (backlink wise) as a large budget media website but the content and value you provide for the visitor is better, you can outrank your competitor.

The true value the visitor gets will probably be measured by factors such as bounce rate (the lower the better) , page views (the more the merrier) and time and site (the longer the better).

These news which were announced by Google’s Matt Cutts will be a game changer for sure as now webmasters will focus on how to please visitors instead of pleasing the Google bots crawling their websites.

The bottom line is that you have nothing to worry about if you provide a real value to your visitors and you have all the reasons to worry about if your website is nothing but an SEO oriented website intended to generate as much organic traffic as possible but provide that traffic with nothing but nothing.

How to avoid a penalty?

The answer is simple – have a look at your website and imagine you were a visitor to your website, are you enjoying your visit? Did you find what you were looking for? Does anyone else provide a better solution than you? If so, how can you provide a better solution?

If you answered these questions and made the improvements to your websites you are less likely to take a hit.

The most worrying part of this study is that this traffic is not even tracked by the analytics software which means that you will have to digg in to your website’s logs to find out who or what is trying to harm your website.

As webmasters we usually focus on generating as much traffic as we can to our websites, whether we build it slowly by optimizing our website to search engines or buy it from other sources, never having to stop and think of the actual traffic we get in to our website.

In terms of security you must keep your website safe, know that in case your website gets hacked, your visitors will suffer and eventually you will suffer as search engines will report you as suspected malware and your website will be blocked. This will harm your business.

Some important tips that will help you keep safe:

1. Change your password from time to time.
2. Don’t use weak passwords (such as qwerty, 123456 and so on)
3. Upgrade your software – Make sure your CMS and server software are up to date with the latest security pathes.
4. Run a periodical virus scan on your computer (that’s where it all start from).

All these and more can help you protect yourself and your site from being hacked by the unwanted traffic to your site.

SMS marketing is relatively new. 3 billion mobile devices out of 4 billion have SMS capability (as of 2011).  SMS is limited in characters so you can’t deliver the entire message to the customer, this is why you will need to be short and exact and refer the customer directly to where you want them to go, whether it’s an informative page online or simply push them a coupon code along with a special offer.

Unlike Email marketing, SMS marketing is harder to measure in terms of effect. When sending out an Email campaign you can track the open rate, the click through rate, bounces and so on – you have full access to statistics and you can measure the effect starting from the click right through to the final action of the customer. In an SMS campaign you have to try harder.

SMS campaigns must contain specific tracking methods such as using a coupon codes that are unique to that campaign, or using a special landing pages (in case you are referring the customer to a specific landing page online). You need to take into consideration the hours in which it’s best to send the campaigns (unlike Email Marketing in which the reader can go back to the email you sent, SMS will most likely to be read only once – again, there are exceptions).

The cost of sending out an SMS campaign is around the same as an Email marketing campaign.

Take into consideration that the CAN-SPAM act works on SMS marketing (or mobile marketing) the same way as it does on Email marketing – make sure not to spam your customers and send only to those who are interested in receiving information from you.

While it may just be that your website is not as relevant as you need it to be for Pinterest which deals mainly with images, you do need to have a presence there as you can enjoy targeted traffic and effective backlinks to your website.

Don’t get me wrong, you don’t have to have a “Pin it” badge on your site and send your visitors over to Pinterest, but you will need to create your own profile (sign up for the beta and you will get an invitation shortly) and post some relevant images and URLs in a relevant category – if you will be interesting enough – you might get some followers, in anyway it’s a good time to do so as this network is growing fast and catching good niches there is a must.

How is it targeted traffic you may be asking? The answer is simple, correct tagging and categorizing your Pins will make it targeted, and the visitors should follow.

Backlinks? Yep! While the effect of such a backlink is still unknown in terms of SEO progress, the link is definitely a “Do Follow” link which sends some love to your website. You will be able to enjoy that link in a few days, depending on the popularity of your Pinterest profile.

The bottom line here is that since Pinterest is new and gaining new users at an impressive rate, it’s the best time to join and follow the herd – you can only benefit from it.