Category: Grow a Home Business

    The Top Web Analytics Metrics to Track Part 1

    Most web analytics programs track hundreds of variables. To come up with a predefined list of metrics that are the same for all webmasters equally would be a daunting undertaking, if not impossible. What works for your website may not work for others. You may not get a lot of traffic to your website but the people that visit tend to buy from you. But there are a few metrics that most webmasters feel the need to track. They are also the metrics that tend to be common across most web analytic software packages.

    Bounce Rate
    Bounce rate is the number of single page visits divided by the total number of entrances to that page. Typically, a high bounce rate indicates that visitors were not interested in what the page had to offer or convey. However, this is not always the case. Suppose you gave your readers exactly what they were searching for and the page answered the question they had. They no longer need an answer so they leave your page. In other words, you gave them too much information. If you instead, gave them some of the information and then you asked them to subscribe to your newsletter in order to get the rest, this will not only help your bounce rate but it will build your list as well.

    Exit Rate
    This is the last page that a user visited on your website. It’s the place where the user decided that your website is no longer relevant to what they are seeking. If you see a page with a high exit rate, you may want to try and determine what it is about the page that is making visitors leave. Perhaps there is no call to action. It could even be something as simple as grammar errors. Paragraphs that are too long and wordy can also generate high exit rates.

    Average Time Spent on Page
    If Google sees that you have pages that people are spending a lot of time on, they are going to reward you with higher rankings, all things being equal. If this number is high, you are likely doing something right with respect to the content you are presenting. Try to determine what it is about the page that is keeping people on it and do more of the same.
    As stated in the first paragraph, there are many other metrics that you can track and what I believe are the top three may be quite different than what others believe should be the top three. Over time, you will develop your own priority on which metrics to track.

    Categories: SEO Keywords Tags: Tags:

    Referrer Spam Can Skew Web Analytics Data

    You log into your web analytics dashboard. You get excited because you see a surge of traffic. It is from several different sites. Finally, all your content marketing efforts are starting to pay off. Then you discover that your bounce rate is 100% and the average time spent is 0 seconds. This doesn’t seem right. How can all of these visitors not like the content and leave before even reading it? This is a classic sign of referrer spam and it can skew your metrics in a big way.

    Referrer spam is traffic from automated bots that inflate the number of hits in your web analytics metrics. This will invoke the curiosity in unsuspecting webmasters who will go to the site that appears in the analytics report. They do this across many websites and as webmasters explore these sites, it makes it seem to Google that the sites are getting traffic from different sources, i.e., the webmasters themselves. The belief is that Google will consider this traffic legitimate and possibly increase the rank of the site.

    The increase in your hits count, is not the only metric to be affected by this practice. As mentioned before, your bounce rate will be at 100% and your average time spent will be 0 seconds. Google does not look highly on sites with high bounce rates. If your visitors are not sticking around to read what you have written this is also not a good situation. Hopefully, the Google algorithm keeps itself apprised of these spam sites and adjusts accordingly.

    There are several ways to block this referral spam. However, this means you will have an added duty of frequently checking for new spam sites. It also means for some of the solutions to tinker with a file known as the .htaccess. This is a file that contains rules that can be defined to allow or block certain web entities, including websites. Many webmasters are not familiar with this file and would not be comfortable making any changes. In such cases, it’s best to contact your web hosting company’s technical support for guidance or they can make the changes for you.

    Another option is to ignore the situation altogether. If you hold the belief that Google will be smart enough to figure out which traffic data comes from spam bots, this would clearly be the best option for you. Although, you will have to remember to back out this skewed data when you are trying to adjust your content strategy based on your web analytics data.

    Categories: SEO Keywords Tags: Tags:

    A Beginner’s Guide to Marketing Automation

    Marketing automation sounds rather complex. Basically, it is simply tools and software you use to do things for your business without having to manually do them. For example, you probably have heard of an autoresponder. That is a basic form of marketing automation and one every business should have, even if they are a standard brick and mortar business. Collecting emails and building a list the right way is crucial to any business.

    An autoresponder allows you to collect emails from people who opt in and want to be on your list. You can then separate the list based on interest, or which optin form they used. You can set up emails to drip feed automatically to the list. You can send to some or all of the list as needed. This kind of automation frees you up to work on other projects and allows your customers to get what they opted in for, or products they buy immediately without having to wait for you do to something.

    There are other tools for marketing automation as well. For example, there are several tools that allow you to set up posts for social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, reddit, and others, to post for you at specific times. Use these sparingly and wisely because people do not appreciate not hearing directly from you. Especially in Facebook groups, you may find yourself banned if you keep posting only automated posts to the group. Remember that a big part of social media is about being social and communicating directly. However, if you use automated posts correctly, they can help you brand yourself and have more of a voice on the sites.

    Another type of marketing automation is used with blogs. Word Press has this built in, plus there are many free and low cost plug-ins for Word Press that can add more features to the marketing automation for your blog. The basic one that Word Press has built in, is the ability to drip feed your blog posts. For example if you know that next week you will not have time to post on your blog, you can spend the weekend writing the posts ahead of time and set it up to drip feed the content on your regular posting schedule. A lot of marketers do this on a regular basis.

    These are just a few of the examples of marketing automation out there that can help your business. Whatever methods you end up using, be sure to remember that automation is just a tool, and not a magic pill, to running your business.

    Categories: Marketing Tags: Tags:

    Log File Analysis vs. Web Analytics

    Before web analytics came to the scene, webmasters relied on log files. These files are stored on your web hosting account. Log files still have some usefulness, although there are shortfalls when using them. Web analytics use a concept known as page tagging. This requires a snippet of JavaScript to be placed on your website somewhere. It analyzes the HTML markup and records such items as what pages users have visited, when they visited, and where they come from, among many other metrics. A cookie is also tracked to determine if the user has been to your website before. Page tagging has its shortfalls as well, some of which will be explored here.

    Log file analysis doesn’t require JavaScript to be placed on your website so it is available as soon as you create your website. When visitors or search engine bots visit your website, this gets recorded in the log file. Although log files are not as widely used today, they can be used as a way to check the validity of page tagging or web analytics data. One major limitation is that your hosting provider may periodically flush the log file. If this happens, you won’t be able to maintain a historical perspective for your website. If the hosting company does not empty the file, it can get quite big over time. If you have too many files and the sizes of those files get large, your hosting company may cry foul that you are violating fair use.

    You may be thinking that you need to decipher this log file yourself. The good news is that most of the major hosting companies provide tools right within your account to interpret these log files. Usually, you can run them directly from your dashboard. You should see an icon called Webalizer or Awstats. If these don’t exist, contact your hosting company to find out if there any alternative programs.

    Page tagging via web analytics stores the data at the provider’s website. The advantage here is that you won’t be using up resources on your website. You will need to include a piece of code that the provider gives you. As mentioned before, this is usually JavaScript code. Page tagging provides much more data and that data is more comprehensive than what is provided by log files. The biggest limitation with page tagging is if the user has disabled JavaScript on their browser or has an add in that does so, you will not get any data for that user. This is why using both page tagging and log file analysis can be a good check.

    Categories: SEO Keywords Tags: Tags:

    You Need to Know your Brand Voice

    Social media was all a buzz about the faux pas that was the newly released Pepsi commercial that was quickly removed after the backlash.

    What were they thinking?

    “Pepsi was trying to project a global message of unity, peace and understanding. Clearly we missed the mark, and we apologize,” the brand said in a statement. “We did not intend to make light of any serious issue. We are removing the content and halting any further rollout. We also apologize for putting Kendall Jenner in this position.” by Pepsi Is Pulling Its Widely Mocked Kendall Jenner Ad

    Why did the commercial fail?

    According to Julian Gamboa an instructor at Digital Marketing Today and founder of Digiviewpoint, a millenial publishing account

    A prime example of brands using celebrities is Nike’s #Equality campaign. The celebrities do not serve as the spotlight, but instead help deliver the message. .

    Another fine example would be Twitter’s collaboration with various celebrities to tweet out Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech.

    by Pepsi’s failed commercial: why your marketing team should be listening

    Your Voice is Your Brand

    When brand voice is consistent across all communications, it creates a kind of personality for your organization. As a result, your audience knows what to expect and learns to trust you. It is an essential feature of branding which allows you to successfully position yourself in the market.

    With the advent of social media and Facebook LIve, Instagram and Periscope, there are people with thousands of followers who are seen as influencers. Even Amazon is understanding the power of the social media influencer as they are pushing for “non-celebrities” to sell their stuff if they have influence.

    Similar to the Amazon Affiliate program, the new program will offer influencers commission on products sold, but is not open to the public by Amazon quietly launches its own social media influencer program into beta

    Your Business Needs to be a Storyteller

    People love hearing stories and they help people create an emotional bond with the brands they like. If you can tell stories and engage your audience, you will get them to know you on a personal level.

    Your Brand is your Story, your Words and your Images

    While we’re primarily focusing on words and phrases when talking about brand voice, you don’t only communicate your brand voice through text or the spoken word. Everything your brand does uses its voice, and this includes visuals. Your content should have strong visuals and graphics that consistently convey your brand voice.

    Learn more
    Get 5 Steps to a Brand Voice!

    Categories: Brand Tags: Tags: , , ,

    Awesome Software for Memberships

    One of the things you’ll need to figure out when you decide to start a membership site is how you’ll run the technology. Thankfully, today there are many options available at your fingertips for running your membership website.

    Before you even look at membership software, though, write down the features you want it to have and the budget you’ve set for the software. In addition, consider your technological background and how much it will cost you to get professional assistance if you need it for any of the software mentioned.

    * JigsawBox.com – This software is mostly directed towards coaches, offering a lot of features that will benefit coaches like drip content, eCourses, integration with autoresponders and so forth. This is a cloud-based service so you don’t have to worry about the technology; you just have to set it up and start collecting revenue.

    * aMember.com – This is a plugin for WordPress that works very well and is very popular with online marketing experts who have membership websites. The software turns your WordPress site into a membership site and an affiliate program. You would need to purchase separate forum software if you wanted a forum.

    * Wishlist Member Plugins (http://wishlistmemberplugins.net) – Another plugin for WordPress, this turns your site into a membership website and it integrates with PayPal, JVZoo, ClickBank and other payment processors. It also integrates with ONTRAPORT and Maropost and other autoresponders. With this membership software you can do everything that you need to run a great membership site.

    * iGrOOps.com – Another cloud-based solution that has an enormous amount of features, from message boards, to drip content, to meetings and more. It’s exhaustive but can also be confusing and look oddly old-fashioned compared to a WordPress-driven membership site.

    * Rainmaker Platform (http://rainmakerplatform.com/) – Built by the people at Copyblogger, this is an expensive option. However, it does a lot and comes with Copyblogger Authority membership. Run from a WordPress platform, they handle hosting, all the technology and more for you.

    * SocialGO.com – A cloud-based solution that seeks to help you build a social based website, this can work as a membership site if you pick the classic version. However, it might not be responsive and has some limitations over some of the others. It also has some pluses which is that it’s simple to use and implement and get started.

    * EasyMemberPro.com – Affiliate program, forums and more are all yours with this software. It really is as easy as they say to set it up. Plus you can integrate it with WordPress and more. If you’re more advanced technologically, you can get a lot out of using this software.

    * MemberPress.com – Integrates with WordPress as a plugin to build WordPress-based membership websites. You’ll gain control over who sees your content. It enables sales of digital products securely and accepts payments right on your website.

    * MemberGate.com – This full-featured software is amazing and has so many features – from an affiliate program, to a shopping cart, to podcasting, to forums and more. There really isn’t anything this software cannot do and the support is incredible. Once again the website templates look a little outdated, but they all work well.

    Memberships are lucrative, but you need to choose the right software for your needs. Consider your budget, how many members you want to attract, how much you plan to charge members, what you want to include in the membership website and more, as you pick and choose which software is right for your membership.

    Categories: Membership Tags: Tags:

    Expanding the Lifetime Value of Your Customer

    You probably know that each customer has a lifetime value in business. This is called the CLV, customer lifetime value. It translates into the amount that you can earn on any one customer as they enter your product funnel. Understanding your CLV can help you determine how much you should spend on marketing, and also help you determine ways to expand your CLV.

    * Become More Customer Centric – Customer service is one of the most important parts of any business. Even if you have the best products or services in the world, if your customer service is lacking you won’t last long. If you want repeat buyers, treat your customers with the importance they deserve.

    * Build Targeted Upsells – With technology like LeadPages.net you can easily create an automated system to build upselling into the buying process. For example, you can do it in the shopping cart, or you can do it through follow-up emails.

    * Create Logical Cross-Sells – A cross-sell is a just selling a different product to a current customer. It should relate to your audience, but it doesn’t have to relate to the first product that you sold them the same way an upsell does.

    * Be Responsive – It’s imperative that you set up a system that makes you seem super responsive to your customers. Whether that is a ticketing system, a 48-hour answering policy, or open office hours doesn’t matter. But, you need to be perceived as very responsive to keep your customers happy.

    * Over Deliver – Every product or service that you deliver should be better than the customer expects. The fact is, you won’t please everyone all the time, but you can shoot to over deliver. If a customer is unhappy, you can over deliver with your solution to fix their problem.

    * Create a Referral Program – Let your customers earn money or points by recommending you to other people. Often, when people can earn enough money to support their buying habits, they’ll be more likely to spend money with you. It’s a win-win all the way around.

    * Stay Connected – Find ways to stay connected with your audience, such as social media, email, teleseminars, and webinars. The more ways they can connect with you, the happier they’re going to be and the more your CLV will expand.

    * Develop an Inner Circle – One way to expand your CLV is to provide a fee-based inner circle that certain customers can join. It can be on a private forum or even be run by Facebook. You can use a private Facebook group or create your own forum with native software.

    Nothing is more important in your business than your customers. The more you can study what they need and find a way to deliver it to them, the longer they’ll stick with you. But, you have to keep creating products to keep those who’ve bought from you interested and wanting more. You also have to deliver exceptional service and quality so they get past the first product in your funnel.

    Categories: Customer Engagement, Grow a Home Business Tags: Tags:

    Networking with Members

    When you join a membership group, the whole point is to network with members, and the whole point of doing that is to build relationships. People like to buy from people that they trust, and the way to build trust is to network with people enough that they can get a good idea of what type of person you are. Even if you’re an introvert, you can network with members successfully.

    * It’s All about Them – Just like your “about me” page is really written with your audience in mind, and all about them, so is networking with members. It’s about them, not you. This can actually take a lot of pressure off your nerves when attending membership meetings.

    * Don’t Sell Anything – Networking meetings are about building relationships, not about selling. Yes, your ultimate goal is to get more clients and referrals. But to do that, focus on just making connections and getting to know people.

    * Make a Good Impression – Don’t show up at meetings in your jammies even if you work from home in them. Instead, dress in a professional way depending on the type of membership you joined. If the typical dress at the meeting is a business suit then you need to wear one. If it’s more dressed down, that’s great; but always present a clean, professional appearance that will please your ideal customer.

    * Have Business Cards Ready – It might seem old-fashioned, but the business card is still available and a popular way to share information when networking. You need to have cards with you at all times because you never know when you’ll meet someone who needs the information you have. Don’t fling your card at people, but when an opening comes up – such as they ask, or you ask for theirs – then you can trade cards.

    * Practice Your Elevator Speech – Some people claim the elevator speech is too old-fashioned and “canned.” However, if you don’t practice talking about what it is that you do, framed in the language of benefit to your audience, you will be lost and so will your audience.

    * Be Ready to Answer Questions – Not only should you know your niche well, but you should know how your audience likes to hear about your niche. In this way, when they ask questions you can always frame the answers in terms of benefits for them. Remember, you don’t “do data entry” – you save time for your customer by doing those tasks that they don’t want to do.

    * Make Out of Meeting Dates – This means that you want to continue building the relationship outside of the meetings. This is a great way to take the networking to the next level. Arrange luncheons to learn more about the person and their business, and move forward. You are going to want to refer others too, so getting to know them is imperative.

    * Go to Meetings Regularly – Once you join, it’s important to be an active member. Joining and getting on a list isn’t going to help. Participating, showing up, and being an active member will do wonders for you.

    It’s important to remember that networking with members is all about building relationships. It’s not just about going to a meeting, sitting there while everyone else talks, and “doing your time” then going home. You need to get out of your comfort zone and truly network. But, simply by making it more about them than you, you’ll be able to do it well.

    Categories: Grow a Home Business, Networking Tags: Tags:

    How to Optimize a Squeeze Page for Search Engine Traffic

    When building a squeeze page it’s important that you understand who your audience is and what the purpose of the page is before getting started. Then, to optimize the squeeze page appropriately consider the following.

    1. Keep It Simple – Don’t go nuts with putting every last thing in every last squeeze page you make. You don’t want pop-ups and pop-unders on the same page. You don’t want too many keywords to gunk up how readers view your page either. You want the page to read well for real-life visitors, while at the same time attracting the search engines to rank you higher.

    2. Know Your Keywords – Study the keywords that your audience uses to find you. It doesn’t matter what other people think about your keywords, it only matters what your audience is using to find you. Look for high value, low competition keywords to use to attract your audience.

    3. Keywords in Titles – Not only should the titles on your page be keywords, they should also be in the proper heading style. If the search engine recognizes it as a header, it will place more importance on the words than if it’s body text.

    4. Optimize Title Tags – If you look at the top of any webpage, there is a title for the page. Take advantage of this area to define what the search engine sees about your page. If you don’t control this area, every page of your website will have the same title tag. Differentiate each page in order to get more hits from search engine.

    5. Use META Descriptions – Every page has a META description that will define how the search engine displays your search results to the reader. Make the most of this feature. If you use WordPress to build your sales pages, you can use a SEO plugin like YOAST, which allows you to control the META description and even see a preview of what it will look like before publishing the page.

    6. Keywords in Subheadings – Creating subheadings with keywords and header tags will help not only lead your user’s eye down to what you want them to read and describe the actions you want them to take, but it will also draw attention to the search engines.

    7. Keywords in Links – Make links within the squeeze page with words that are keywords and specific about the link. Don’t use words like “click here” – use words that describe what they’re clicking such as “100 Stroganoff Recipes” instead. Most people understand that underlined words are clickable now.

    8. Keywords in URL – If you can include a keyword in the URL of your squeeze page, that is a very good use of a keyword or keyword phrase. Don’t go too crazy with the keywords, though; you want the page URL to also look nice.

    9. Use Descriptive Keywords in Alt Tags – Search bots cannot read images, so it’s up to you to provide descriptions to the images that you have in your sales page. Use more than “pretty blue flower” to describe the image. Instead use words that are particular to your offer.

    10. Craft Awesome Headlines – Headlines in squeeze pages are important because people do not read horizontally online; they read vertically. Bolding a headline using headers and making sure it’s an important keyword, will not only lead the search engines to rank you higher, but it will also help your audience read your page better.

    11. Create Actionable Copy – Your squeeze page copy should include keywords that make sense. Don’t overdo it because using more than two percent keyword density in your pages will send alarms to the search engine that your site might be spam. Instead, create copy that leads your viewer to perform some sort of action.

    12. Consider Adding Video – Video is often shared, which adds an additional dimension to the sales page, but while a search engine bot can’t really watch the video, it can read the tags and notice that there is a video. And since users like video a lot, the search engine is more likely to put that page toward the top of the results.

    13. Responsive Design – People don’t exclusively use their PCs when looking at sales pages. In fact, a lot of people use their mobile devices while they’re waiting in the doctor’s office or visiting a coffee shop. The more responsive your design is, the more the search engines will like your page.

    Using these tips to create a fully optimized squeeze page to get more search engine traffic will work. Try making one or two changes at a time to make the effect even more useful for getting more search engine traffic. Search engines also like websites that are updated often – and since sales pages and squeeze pages don’t typically change much, improving your page over time is another way to garner more search engine traffic.

    Categories: website Tags: Tags:

    The Importance of Being Mobile-Friendly

    The Google mobile-friendly update may have you scratching your head and wondering about the value of making the investment to the changes. Your business can be a brick and mortar store and still find benefits in being online and mobile-friendly.

    Any advantage you can build in your industry can help you grow your company. Choosing to create a mobile-friendly website will not only help your company in the Google search engine, but will also draw attention to your site from users on the internet.

    Some Facts to Help Understand the Value of Mobile-Friendly

    – Most consumers need to see a product or activity seven times before following through on a specific call to action. Creating a mobile-friendly website will help your business get in front of the eyes of your potential customers.

    – Most consumers are making use of mobile devices for searches and even for purchases. Experts had been predicting that mobile use would overcome desktop and laptop use by 2016, but the threshold was crossed at the beginning of 2014. That means that your potential customers are using mobile devices to find and interact with you. Make it easy for that to happen.

    – The more time that individuals engage with your website (and therefore encounter your products or your services) the sooner they are likely to follow through on your call to action. Mobile visitors will engage more if the website has been optimized as mobile-friendly.

    – Visitors will not wait for loading. Mobile-friendly websites are optimized to load faster to offer quick solutions to mobile users. Studies have shown that most users give up on a website that takes more than 10 seconds to load – although most website design experts say that the time threshold is likely much lower.

    – A strong, mobile-friendly website will provide an advantage in a busy market place. Your company competes against all the other companies in the industry for the attention of consumers. It also competes against every other company. Visitors have more to see and less time to see it all because of the busy lives that spin around them. Creating a friendly and easy to use website can make your company one of those investments.

    – Mobile-friendly websites invite more engagement. More engagement means that a visitor invests more time in your website and on your website. This can translate into visitors becoming clients and clients becoming brand advocates.

    – Users are on the go and they are getting their information on the go. An interactive website – optimized for the mobile user – helps guide your users and offers them click and engage opportunities.

    There will never be a one-size fits all answer to the internet. Even if that one answer did exist, the habits of users and the challenges search engines face to keep up with the users would cause that one answer to change and shift as well.

    Building a successful business in today’s society is benefited with an online presence. Creating an optimized and mobile-friendly experience will further increase the focus that your company can receive from internet traffic.

    Categories: Mobile Tags: Tags: