Why You Need to Be Tracking Your Statistics with Google Analytics
Have you ever run an ad in the newspaper only to wonder how many people really took the time to read it? Have you ever paid for a billboard on a highway, only to wonder how often it is looked at?
With a website, you don’t need to wonder about any of these things, because it can be tracked easily.
Google Analytics is an incredibly powerful statistical tracking service that is provided by Google free of charge. You can sign up here: http://google.com/analytics
Once you have an account, all you need to do is forward a special bit of code to the person who manages your website. They will need to place it on each page. After a few days you will have a lot of valuable data to review.
Here are just a few of the things Google Analytics shows you:
How many visitors you get each week/day/hour/and so forth.
Where your visitors are coming from. What keywords are they typing in to find you? What sites are they finding you through?
What specific pages on your website are your visitors viewing? It even breaks down how long they stay on each page.
What specific pages are people leaving your site from?
Where are the visitors located geographically?
And lots more…
Tracking the performance and results of your website is incredibly important. If you aren’t doing it already, you are really missing out on a chance to understand how your website is performing.
A professional internet marketing specialist would be happy to explain what these statistics mean.
In an up coming video I will show you how to set up Google Analytics and a few other useful website tracing scripts.
The Internet is an amazing place that allows you to track almost everything your website visitors do. This information is very powerful and you should be taking advantage of it for your own business
No matter how compelling your website is, a large amount of your visitors are going to visit it once and never return. It is a sad fact! Some of them may even think in their minds, “I need to check this out again later”, but they forget.
What if I told you there was a way to market to these people before they are lost forever?
A tactic that smart website owners use to increase their success is to offer their visitors some sort of incentive in exchange for their email address. Restaurants can offer money-saving coupons, yoga instructors can offer a free class, and so forth. Often time’s websites offer education as well. Something like “Sign up for our free newsletter and receive helpful advice on how to help your hair stay beautiful and healthy” could be used by a salon to encourage sign-ups.
Once you have someone’s email, you will have the ability to contact them from time to time. It doesn’t need to all be about selling to them either. A good email marketing campaign educates your readers while at the same time reminds them about your services.
All of this might sound like a lot of work, but it is actually quite simple. An auto-responder is an email campaign that can be configured to automatically send emails out on a regular basis. Once you have your content written, you can load it into a program and forget about it.
An email capture system can allow your business to grab potential visitors and market to them repeatedly over time. All of this is “hands off” for you. Pretty neat stuff!
In an upcoming video I will be showing you how to set up an auto-responder and capture leads that you can continually market to.
Email marketing is a fantastic way to increase sales for your online business.
Taking Advantage of Youtube and Other Video Websites
Over half of the traffic online is viewing video right now. That is an incredible statistic! Getting your business on Youtube and the other big video networks is an absolute must, and brings many advantages including:
Credibility: Being able to say your business has “commercials” and is on YouTube helps your business appear more professional to people, and that can sell a customer right there.
Exposure: Local businesses that have videos on YouTube get traffic. It is as simple as that. Not only is YouTube immensely popular, but because of its ranking in the search engines, it isn’t uncommon to see actual YouTube videos popping up in the search results.
Ability to Share More About Your Business: A video allows you to show pictures of your delicious food, summarize the benefits of your business, and so forth. Videos are appealing, and often times can be much more exciting than something such as a newspaper advertisement.
Making the Most of Your Commercials: Many businesses have already sunk money into getting commercials produced, and if they aren’t currently being aired on television, they are not being seen by people. YouTube will get your videos exposure.
Search Engine Optimization Benefits: When the search engines see that your website is being mentioned on the various video sites, it helps with your credibility, and this in turn helps your search engine rankings.
It doesn’t have to stop with YouTube, there are dozens of popular video sites out there, such as Yahoo Video, Metacafe, DailyMotion, Vimeo, and Myspace Video. All of these sites are free to join.
Just getting your presence on YouTube is only the beginning. Your video should be correctly optimized and produced by an expert to get the best results.
How To Use The Power of Affiliates for Your Business
Marketing your own business can be so time consuming. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could have people doing it for you? Affiliates can be a fantastic way to grow your business while you sit back and let them do the work for you.
Affiliate marketing (people selling for a business in exchange for a commission) is very popular online. In most cases, you only pay affiliates a commission you decide upon whenever they make a sale for you. This means that you only pay people when they make you money. What a perfect situation.
Here are a few things to keep in mind when building an affiliate program:
Be sure to offer a fair and competitive commission. If your program isn’t as enticing as others out there, people won’t bother selling for you. Even though it may mean having to take a bigger cut out of your profits, you can make this back by the increased volume of your sales.
Pay your affiliates in a timely manner. It is very important that you establish good relationships with your affiliates, and treat them well. Timely payments will help reinforce to them that doing business with you is a good thing. Often time’s affiliates will expand their efforts once they receive payment from you.
Help your affiliates. Remember, the better your affiliates do, the better you do! Take the time to make sure your affiliates understand your products or services, and how to best sell them. Provide them with sales material, banners, and so forth.
If it suits your business, having affiliates working for you can help tremendously. An internet marketing professional can help you get this setup as soon as possible.
Later I will show you how to set up your own affiliate tracking and where to go to find the “supper affiliate” that can promote your business for maximum profits.
The Power of Article Marketing – article marketing for your online business
Article marketing is a very powerful form of web promotion, and it can easily be applied to local businesses as well. Article marketing is a type of advertising in which businesses write short articles related to their respective industry, and they are then released for free distribution to the many article directories that appear on the internet. It is not uncommon for a well-written article to appear numerous places on the net. This brings you a great deal of exposure.
Article marketing is essentially a way to obtain free press space. It is important to understand that when an article is well-written and published on the right article directories, people will see your article. Article marketing is a great way to get the word out about your business. It’s also a great way to build links or backlinks to your website.
Here are a few reasons why you should be doing article marketing to gain exposure for your business:
Article marketing allows you to get the word out about your business.
You Control the Content: Since you are the one writing the article, you don’t have to worry about someone putting a negative spin on things. You control what appears which is very nice.
Article Marketing Helps with the Search Engine Rankings: Having articles about your business online will help the search engines see that your business is being talked about online, and this will help it rise in those all-important search engine rankings.
Simply put, article marketing will help your customers find your business online. After all, what is the point of having a website if your potential customers won’t be able to find it!
There are ways to automate your article marketing and I will be discussing some of these in a future post but for now what you need to know is that article marketing does work to drive targeted visitors to your online business.
What is Pay Per Click(PPC)and is it right for your business?
Many businesses spend a ton of money on pay per click (PPC) advertising. Let’s take Google for example, if you head to Google.com and perform a search, ads appear at the top and sides of the search results. These ads are known as “PPC”.
Don’t get me wrong, paying for advertising can be a great way to get immediate traffic to your website and business. There are a few problems with PPC though, and why it usually isn’t a recommendation I give to businesses interested in a long-term search engine placement:
Short-term Results: If you want to get your website on the first page of Google, you have to pay for it. This means that the second you stop running PPC ads, your results will stop as well.
PPC Can Be Very Expensive: Often times you will have to pay a relatively high price for every “click” you get. It can be upwards of a few dollars for each visitor you get, depending on the competitiveness of your market and area.
PPC can be Confusing: If you don’t know what you are doing when you start advertising on PPC, you can end up paying for ads that are irrelevant, costly, and ineffective. That’s bad news!
People are Putting More Trust into the Natural Results: The experienced internet user is well aware that the results at the top of the search page are in fact ads, and will avoid these like the plague, focusing on the natural results below.
When I work with businesses, I strongly suggest taking a long-term approach and focusing on getting the website in the natural search engine results. PPC is great if it is getting results for you, but I’ve found that getting results from the natural search results is far more beneficial, for many reasons.
PPC is not for every business. It can be VERY expensive especially if your bidding on key words that are very competitive like “New Laser Hair Removal” or “Cosmetic Facial Surgery” or even “Tax Debt Relief”.
For very competitive key words the cost can be incredibly high. For the key words mentioned above the costs are “new laser hair removal” = $7.46, “cosmetic facial surgery” = $10.98, “Tax Debt Relief” = $31.49. Those dollar amounts are for each click!
PPC can produce fast results and it can be profitable but you need to use caution when running a PPC campaign and you need to constantly test your results to make sure your earning a profitable return on your advertising dollars.
There has been a lot of talk about Facebook in the media recently. Facebook is a global social networking website and is one of the most popular places on the net, with over 300 million users. Many people use Facebook as a way to connect with old friends but it has also become a major part of many businesses as they use it to promote and share information.
The way Facebook works (if you don’t already know) is that a person joins, and then creates his or her own page which often includes basic information as well as a picture or two. The person then becomes friends with others that he or she knows, and can then communicate by leaving comments on each others pages (that everyone that is a friend can see).
Businesses have been using Facebook with much success. People spend a ton of time on this social network, and it can be a great way to get the word out about your business.
Let’s look at an example:
Sally loves getting her hair done at the local salon. Let’s say that the salon has their own Facebook page, and Sally is a member of it. The salon posts a comment on Sally’s page, and all of Sally’s friends can see it. The salon just exposed itself to ALL of Sally’s friends! Jessica, one of Sally’s friends sees the information on the salon, and gives the salon a call because she likes Sally’s hair.
Facebook can also help to add “social proof” to your business. Once you begin building a list of friends for your business, you can share this directly on your business website. This will help potential customers see that your business is thriving, and established.
Facebook works particularly well in niches such as restaurants and salons, but can be applied to just about any business.
Twitter is the new buzzword. It seems one cannot turn on the news without it being mentioned. Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service which allows its users to communicate with each other through short messages known as “tweets”. Though Twitter is not as popular as Facebook, it continues to grow very rapidly.
Twitter is quite a bit different than a place like Facebook or Myspace, as it is completely focused on the tweets that are sent out. It also features a very devoted fan-base.
Most people on Twitter are there to network, and it can be a very powerful way to share information about your business. Here are a few reasons why you should be using Twitter:
Everyone Else is doing it: There are so many businesses using Twitter successfully. Don’t get left behind!
Twitter is “Social Media”: Your business needs to be participating in social media, and this is a fantastic way to do it.
Twitter Users are Very Devoted: When you send a tweet out to your list, you better believe people are going to see it.
You can communicate with your “Followers” for Free: Whenever you want to get information out to your customers, typically you would need to spend money on sending a mailing through the post office. It doesn’t cost anything to send tweets out, and people receive them instantly!
Twitter Allows You to Communicate Individually with your Customers: Twitter allows you to message all of your followers, but also gives you the ability to communicate directly with individual customers. This can give you valuable feedback as well as allows you to build relationships with them.
Others Have Already Paved this Road: Chances are many other businesses like yours are already using Twitter successfully. You don’t need to stumble in the dark as you will have proven business models to follow.
There is no doubt about it; Twitter can help your business today!
I’m sure you’ve heard of press releases, and perhaps even have some experience with sending them out for your local business. Did you know that there are also press releases that can be distributed online?
Traditionally, sending out a press release meant that there would be a great amount of work involved. You would need to print several copies, and spend several hours mailing and faxing the information out to the various press release centers (if you even knew what they were!). Fortunately, online press releases have simplified this quite a bit:
When a press release is submitted online, there is no need to mail or fax anything, you can submit it electronically. This saves a great deal of time, money, and energy!
Online press releases can be distributed quickly, as delivery is instant.
Many online press releases are published online, which means that this will help with your search engine rankings because it will result in new links to your website.
Many press release sites “borrow” from one another, meaning that sending it one place can result in the distribution of many websites.
As you can see, there are many reasons why you should be submitting press releases online. You can write a press release on just about anything. Does your business provide a new service? Experiencing an anniversary? Recently recognized somewhere? Through creativity, you can find all kinds of reasons to be writing about your business.
Since creating and distributing press releases can be a bit daunting, I would suggest hiring a professional to do it for you. The benefit will far outweigh the cost!
Later on I will show you where to find the best places to help you with your press release and show you how you can write your own professional press release.
Other Important Local Business Directories You Should Have Your Business Listed In
There are several additional business directories you need to be listed in besides Google
Recently I talked about the importance of being listed in the Google Local Business Directory. I’d like to share a few additional directories with you that I think are also very important for your business to be listed in. Please note, you don’t need to be in every single directory that exists, but there are a few that carry quite a bit of weight. When you have the time (I’d suggest making the time soon!), Watch the Video then check the links to these directories posted below the video. They are all free to join and will help your business gain credibility on the internet.
Think of these directories as Phone Books online.
Just click the link to get signed up at each of the business directories. They may or may not all be available.
