Whoo Hoo - I Made It

I made it into the latest Carnival of Business and Entrepreneurship this week!  And as an Editor's Pick no less.  (Thanks Amy)

You should definitely head over and check out some of the other articles.  Lots of good stuff posted, including articles from some folks you've probably heard of.

Here's the link:

http://www.businesscreditcards.com/bootstrapper/carnival-of-business-and-entrepreneurship-2/

Popularity: 76% [?]

End of Week Roundup (12-7-07)

Just a couple of quick posts to point out before shutting down for the weekend…

• Terry Dean's end-of-week post is just chock full of great info, no matter what business you're in.  This one is not to be missed!  He makes some excellent points about how some businesses/services are becoming commoditized or are heading that way.  Who wants to be in a business where price is the only factor used to choose one source from the other?  YIKES!  He goes on to present some great ways to keep this from happening in your business (even if you happen to be in one where everyone else is selling by lowest price, trying to Wal-Martify your industry to death so NO ONE can make a decent living).  By the way, just because it works for Wal-Mart doesn't make it a good idea…more to that model than meets the eye.  Speaking of which, there was a great quote (from Dan Kennedy I believe) that was something like "There's no power in being 2nd cheapest".  Think about that and then read what Terry has to say about offering "dirt cheap" products/services as a way to win the sale.  I could go on and on about this one…

• If you don't know of James Brausch, now is a great time to get acquainted.  He's literally bearing his soul in a series of posts roughly based on his escape from a horrible situation in his past (I'll let him reveal what the scenario was).  But instead of just revealing the actual path he took from there to achieve the success he has now, he's showing readers the steps he would have taken had he known then what he knows now.  This is like being able to ask someone who's already achieved success, "What would you do if you had to do it all over again".  You should definitely check it out but you'll have to subscribe to his blog announcement list since the posts are password protected.  Don't worry, your email is safe in his hands and you don't have to worry about being bombarded with one affiliate offer after another, like some lists.

Speaking of which, the start of the new year is a great time to purge your inbox of those kind of lists. Why not get started a few weeks early. You know who they are.

Popularity: 73% [?]

Just amazing…and another reason to have a blog

Just some quick results from one of my latests posts (though I really shouldn't be surprised).

1. I added a new post to my blog…brand new category.  The timestamp on it is 12:20pm.

 

2. According to Hittail (www.hittail.com), I started getting traffic for that post at 2:27pm.

 

3. And I'm #12 for "define Google Analytics bounce rate" (as of 5:30pm, same day). 

Yeah yeah, not the MOST searched-for term, but to get on the cusp of page 1 for something in just a hair over 2 hours has to count for something.  And we've already seen that someone was actually searching for that term.

Finally, keep in mind that this is with a blog that hasn't had much activity on it until recently.  Powerful stuff.

If you don't have a blog you're nuts!

Popularity: 88% [?]

Google Analytics Goodness…Can You Believe This is Free?

I just watched a free replay of a conversion strategies webinar  put on by "The Conversion Doctor", Eric Graham.  Fair warning…it was pretty long, so take a look when you have some time on your hands, but definitely be sure to check it out.  It was jam packed with some great info you can take action on right now to help boost your conversions.  He even reveals his "secret tool" for conducting split tests (you'll have to watch the video to find out what it is though).

One of the things he kept pointing out time and time again was the importance of tracking your test results.  This sort of ties in with one of the things I mentioned in last week's "Weekly Roundup" post.  There I mentioned the fact that you really have to know where your traffic is coming from and that not all traffic is equal.  This was right in line with some of the things Eric mentioned during his webinar and he suggests using Google Analytics to track your results.

If you're not already using Google Analytics, then hopefully this will help you see how valuable this free tool is for tracking your site's performance, be it a blog, sales letter site, online store or anything else for that matter.  Analytics can easily tell you the number of visitors, unique visitors and other basic info.  But below are a few of the more useful types of data you can easily analyze once you have Analytics installed.

1. How do visitors behave once they visit your site?

• Avg pages per visit - How many pages, on average are people viewing?
• Bounce rate - What percentage of visitors are leaving your site without viewing at least one more page other than the one they land on?
• Average time on site - self explanatory…how long are they sticking around?
• Why do these matter?: These stats give you insight into how long people are sticking around once they get to your site.  If you have a ton of traffic but also have a 100% bounce rate and people only stick around for 10 seconds, there's obviously some work to be done.  Getting MORE TRAFFIC isn't going to solve that problem.

2. How many times are people coming back?

• New vs. Returning visitors - self explanatory
• Visitor loyalty - similar to above, but indicates the number of visits rather than just new vs. returning visitors
• Why do these matter?: If you're continuing to promote your site via article marketing and other means of generating traffic, it's nice to know if you're continuing to get new visitors.  It's also important to know if the visitors you've already gotten to your site are ever coming back.  For instance, if they're not, it might be a good case for setting up a name capture/follow-up system.  Visitor loyalty shows you the same type of info but with more fidelity, so you see whether people are coming back once, twice, 10 times, etc.

3. How do they like your content?  Which content do they like?

• Top content - shows you the number of views for each page on your site, in order of page views.
• Content drilldown - shows you a breakdown of all the URLs that were visited on your site.
• Why do these matter?: This could give you a better understanding of the types of products people view the most (for instance, for an online store) or the types of content your visitors like the most (in the case of a content site or blog).  In fact, do you have a blog where you promote products?  Want to know how many people are clicking on the links to your product pages (or other external links)?  Content drilldown can help there, with a few tweaks to your blog.  Now admittedly, some of this is not so useful for a single page sales letter site, but could also be valuable there if the site has an article/link directory as part of it.  Is anyone going to the directory pages?  What are they looking at? 

4. Conversion rates GALORE!

• Goal conversions - this is how you setup conversion rate tracking in Analytics (for just about anything).
• Why does this matter?: This is probably the easiest way to track the results of your testing efforts.  If you can define the path on your site that people follow in order to purchase, then you can setup a goal to track those results.  Typically it's something like Sales Letter Page –> Upsell Page –> Order Page –> Thank You Page.  So what if no one's even clicking on the order button?  Or what if a large number of people make it to the upsell page and then back out?  Or back out at the order page?  You can track all of that with Analytics and see where in the process people are abandoning the purchase.  Otherwise, you might just assume you need more traffic…again, that's not going to solve the problem.

5. The killer way to look at all the above

One of the best features about Analytics is that you can analyze nearly everything above based on individual traffic source.  Why would you want to do that?  Maybe you have traffic coming from another site that converts like crazy.  Perhaps you could offer an original article or strike up some other kind of offer with that webmaster to draw in more of that traffic.  Maybe you're getting a ton of traffic from that WSO ebook you just purchased…you know, the one titled "How to Get a Flood of Visitors from Social Networks and Earn a Gazillion Dollars a Day".  But you find out that they stay on your site for all of about 15 seconds.  Is that the best use of your time?

Amazing what a few lines of code can tell you about your site.

You can find out more about Google Analytics here:
http://www.google.com/analytics/

 

Popularity: 52% [?]

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