"The 1990s Called - They Want Their Website Back"

So you have a website. How's that working for you? Getting a lot of traffic, sales and interest from visitors making comments? No?

Well, it's no longer enough to just have a website. I've found that a lot of websites fall into this category: "Hey the 1990s called and they want their website back."

The era of the static website is long gone. You need an interactive site if you want visitors to come to your site and stay awhile.

Why do you think big book stores have a major coffee cafe inside like Starbucks or Seattle so a potential book buyer will stay awhile, have a cup of coffee, read a book and get so immersed in the book that they end up buying it.

Websites are the same except you can't smell the coffee, but you should have something just as enticing. Flashing, moving graphics? Floating or popup windows? Narrow page design so long that your hand goes numb from scrolling? NOT!

Here are some top level items you should consider for your site:

• A website that uses blog software like Wordpress, Typepad or a custom design
• A short video that doesn't insult one's intelligence
• A slide show with good photographs and/or good content
• Mobile viewing capability, i.e. Android and iPhone apps
• Good content that actually helps people solve a problem or is of value
• Fresh content as often as possible - hourly, daily, weekly
• Social media and networking to help promote your product or service

Here's why you should consider these top level items.

The blog software allows anyone in your company to easily post content. You don't have to contact the IT department or hire a web designer.
The blog software also allows visitors to interact with any content you post. Now your customers, supporters, fans, stalkers, whoever feel they have a stake in your product or service and the power to mold it into the best thing since sliced bread.

The video sells your product or service instantly not only to PC visitors, but to visitors with mobile devices as well. This is also another reason why you should consider mobile capability. The slide presentation does the same in a different format but not as effectively as a video.

The mobile capability opens your site up to a marketing channel that is accessible everywhere, anytime. Visitors do not have to wait to be in front of a PC to view your site. It is the next big Internet wave and it's coming whether you are there or not.

Good content - this is the Holy Grail of the 21st century.

The search engine algorithms are intelligent enough to detect sentence structure as opposed to the earlier gibberish used to increase your rankings.

The content should not be how great your product or service is, but how it can help customers solve a problem or answer questions without the sales pitch. It should impart knowledge about your industry and give readers a good feeling about your product or service.

Information is your lost-leader of the 21st century.

Your content must be truthful and presented in a personal, one-on-one way. The Internet today is the age of highly-customized marketing down to the individual level.

Lastly, you really need to jump on the social networking bandwagon. It is a new and revolutionary, hard to fathom the numbers marketing channel. Social media is where you will learn the most about what your customers think of your product or service. Here, they will shape your brand into what they want it to be.

Imagine launching a product or service and getting a flurry of constructive and non-so-constructive advice not from only a few people, but from hundreds or thousands? Take what the majority says to heart and improve your offering.

When it works, it works like a firestorm and if your product/service goes viral, you'll need extra capacity to handle all the traffic to your site. Your site may even crash from too many visitors - what a terrible problem to have.

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In case you don't want to do all of these things yourself (don't do it all yourself), here are some recommended experts I've worked with who can help tremendously, myself included.

For the Wordpress site:
Michelle Gower's Gower Power - expert and creative WordPress Training, Consulting, Strategy, and Website design.

For a really unique customized website:
Outer Banks Internet - call Chris Hess or Tricia Joseph at 252 441-6698 or contact them through their website at http://obinet.com

For Social Networking:
Martin Brossman - sign up to many of his daily courses on social networking for businesses. You'll be surprised at what you didn't know. Check out Martin's Facebook page for more up to the minute information.

For Good Content:
Hire me. I created search engine optimized copy for one site that increased their visitors by 16,000% the first month it was launched. Check out my main site: Outer Banks Publishing Group.

For Mobile Apps and Video:
There are a lot of good firms out there and prices vary. Do a Google or Bing search.

Driving Traffic to Your Site(s)

By now you should start to see data from your blog or website captured by Google Analytics. If you don't, you'll have to reinstall the javascript code again. Check out Google's Installation Troubleshooting if you are having problems.

So you want to know what all this data means and what you can do with it to drive traffic to your site(s) right?

Let's take each area and look at it in depth and what the numbers mean. The first one is Visitors. (Just click Visitors in the frame on the left.)

First you will see the overview with a nice graph showing your traffic and then a summary of various types of visitors and their behavior on your site(s). If you click on any of the categories, a horizontal bar graph appears showing that metric for each day. This is good to show trends for the month. Is your traffic increasing? decreasing? variable or static? You can also click on the date section on the top right and check the "Compare to past" box to compare last month's traffic. Google also is nice enough to put percentages in green or red showing whether your site increased or decreased traffic.

Ok. I'm going to stop here for now and give your brain a rest. You will also notice under Visitors there are additional metrics and some have a list of subcategories. We will get into those in subsequent articles.

More importantly is whether YOU are generating traffic to your site(s). Just because you have a website or blog doesn't mean the world will flock to your URL. The old adage, "Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat down your door" does not necessarily apply here because there are too many mousetraps and people are already caught in lots of others. The adage does work IF you tell enough people about your site(s) and you have content that will interest, inspire, entertain, inform, evoke emotion or make people laugh. I know your brain is not hurting so pay attention.

Here are some ways to get traffic to your site that I have used successfully.

Search Technorati or Google Blog Search for blogs similar to your website or blog. Read them and leave comments. Don't leave short comments like, "I liked your article" or "Cool, man!" You have to leave a comment with substance that will interest readers. And make sure you leave the link to your blog or website in your comment. Then you can check your analytics dashboard in a day or two and see if your traffic increased. You can even see which blog generated the most visits by clicking on the Traffic Sources section on the left and then on Referring Sites. When you see which sites generate the most traffic check them often and leave additional comments.

Other traffic generating methods include creating a Facebook or MySpace site, joining Twitter and Linkedin and other social networking sites. Most have applications that link your site to theirs so that when you add content to your site it shows up on the other sites. But we can get into that another time.

For now put your feet up, relax, and start searching for sites similar to yours. Happy searching.

The Acid Test

Ok. Here's the acid test. You managed to create a Google Analytics account, generate the javascript code for your site, and place the code at the bottom of your site. So what's next?

Sign into your account and go to your dashboard which will look like this. I'm tracking several sites so yours may have only one listing.


If you look under the status column you should have a green check mark - that means you successfully installed the Google code and Google is receiving data.

IF you have a yellow triangle you're in trouble, but don't panic. Give the site a few hours and come back later to check it. Sometimes it takes awhile for Google to retrieve the data, figure out it's yours, and place it on your dashboard.

IF you still have the triangle after a few hours, you will have to go back and install the code again. Maybe, you placed it in the wrong area. In any event, Google has a lot of help information so take a look if you get stuck.

Ok, so let's assume you have a nice fat green check mark. Now comes the fun part. Really, I mean that.

Click on the "View Report" link and almost like magic, Google has created an analytics dashboard for you complete with a month's worth of data from the day you open the report. Of course, if you placed your code a few days ago you will see very little data. You can change the date range or make it just one day by clicking on the date.



There's a lot you can do here and you'll have to play with it. I'm just going to highlight what you first see for now because I know your brain is starting to hurt again.

The first element is a nice line graph showing the number of visits by day. This shows you which days visitors decided to come to your site and how many.

The next section is Site Usage. This shows visits, pageviews, pages per visit, bounce rate, average time on site, and the percentage of new visits or visitors. Most of this is self explanatory except maybe bounce rate. This shows the percentage of visitors who stayed less than 10 seconds. That means they found your site, glanced through it and left - they were not interested. A higher bounce rate will tell you something on the site is driving your visitors away. Ideally, you want a low bounce rate.

The average time on site tells you just that - how long the average visitor stayed. If the average is over a minute or so you can assume they liked what they saw and read something there.

The last metric tells you the percentage of new or first time visitors. Obviously, you want this to be high because it will indicate that whatever you are doing on other sites, it is driving traffic to your site. But, a high visits number and a low percentage of first time visitors will show the majority of your visitors are loyal and make repeat visits.

Image via CrunchBase

Ok, are you passed out yet? Just a few more metrics to cover and you're off the hook.

Visitors Overview on the left is just that, but the Map Overlay is really cool. Click on any country in dark green and it will show where your visitors are from by country and by state or region. I find most of my visitors are from my home state and that makes perfect sense since most of my friends and relatives are here.

The last two sections are highly valuable in determining what's working and what is not on your site. The Traffic Sources Overview will show you cool metrics like the percentage of direct traffic (visitors type in your site address), the referring sites (where you have links on other sites to your site), the search engines used to find your site and the keywords visitors used in those search engines. All valuable information that will tell you how effective you are in driving traffic to your site.

The Content Overview tells you which content on your site is getting the most visits or interest. This is great for blogs because it will tell you which post is getting read the most and you can determine what subject matter the majority of your visitors like best. It is also valuable for multiple pages on a web site to determine the most interesting pages.

You can also customize the dashboard to show different reports if you don't like the default offering, and you can easily export any report to a PDF, CSV, XML or TSV file in addition to emailing them.

I think that's enough for now. Go pass out.