"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.

Web Analytics - another excuse to procrastinate

Unless it's your job or you are making money doing it, I find a lot of people with blogs and web sites don't often check their web analytics to see how their site(s) are doing.

It's like balancing your checkbook - something you should do regularly, but always put off until the last possible moment. Even the word is foreboding - Analytics.

Well, I'm here to ease your pain. Call your analytics a guest book and you always want to check the guess book to see who has visited or left a message (converted to a sale or download).

Web Analytics is like a computer program - it has all the bells and whistles, but you only need to use the bells or just the whistles. Take a standard word processing program. There are several ways to make a word bold or change a typeface, but you only use one the ways.

It's the same with analytics. You don't need all the information it tracks, only the most important pieces of data related to your site and your promotions.

Let's look at a typical scenario. You send out a monthly newsletter about new products you have just introduced. You know that most of your email list, say 80%, consists of people who live in your city. You have also placed links in your email to only the new products featured.

A few days later a few sales come in and then there is a large spike in sales. Your email marketing firm tells you that 12% of your emails converted meaning that 12% of your email recipients at least opened your email. The marketing firm also tells you a majority of your emails were forwarded to others. But, you don't know where your customers are coming from for future promotions.

You see from your sales records that the spike in sales is coming from Florida and most sales are for a new wooly scarf from a new designer you just took on in your clothing line.

Now you are scratching your head and wondering, "Who would buy a wooly scarf in Florida?"

A quick look at your web analytics and you see that many of your visitors and your conversions are concentrated in pockets in the larger metropolitan areas. And the majority of conversions (sales) were made late at night.

You are ready to call that psychic you always passed on the highway each morning to work to find out who this new customer segment is and their demographics.

But you don't have to call her, just look at your analytics again. Another piece of interesting data shown is that the majority of visitors to your site who purchased a wooly scarf did it from a mobile device. Now you know your new customer segment.

Playing a web analytics detective, you put the clues together:

• A good number of your emails were forwarded to others
• The majority of transactions occurred late at night
• Sales were concentrated around larger metropolitan areas
• Online sales were made mostly with mobile devices

Your new customer segment is mainly composed of female teenagers and young people.
How do you know? Elementary my dear Watson.

When a few teens saw your new scarf, they were excited and wanted to share with all their friends - the email forwarding then ensued.

The majority of sales occurred late at night - teens and young people are busy texting each other at night and probably texted your website address to each other. Ordering was done at night.

Sales were concentrated around metro areas - most teens live close to each other by the location of their high school so you see the higher sales in the more populated areas.

Most of the sales were made using mobile devices - younger people are more comfortable with using a mobile device and especially using it to make purchases. You can assume the majority of sales came from teens and young people.

To test your conclusions, you send another email marketing newsletter with a new scarf and other items from your new designer and track the online sales with your web analytics. Your sales take off.

So you can see it pays to check your web analytics...at least once in awhile. Don't put it off.

So You Thought Chasing Ghosts was Easy

You have proven to be a top notch Internet marketer and you are diving thousands of visitors to your site each day. No? That's not happening? Don't fret. There's more to chasing ghosts than you think.

I see driving traffic to your site similar to hand cranking a generator. As long as you keep cranking, the lights stay on and traffic flows to your site. Once you stop, the lights go out and your traffic goes away. The key is content and frequent content. So make sure you have interesting material and you update it at least once a week or more.

Just six reports will tell you all you need to know

Now that you have the basics, there are really just six reports that will tell you all you need to know. And you can create a customized dashboard on Google Analytics showing just these six key performance indicators (KPI).

Here are the coveted six KPIs:

1. Where visitors are coming from; what websites or links are bringing people to your site.

You can find this information under the Traffic Sources link on your Google dashboard.

Under Traffic Sources you will see Direct Traffic. These are visitors who know your site URL and either typed it directly into their browsers or have it as an RSS link or saved in favorites. These are loyal visitors who want to make sure they find your site again. So work on driving up your direct traffic by posting your site address, emailing it to friends, relatives, and coworkers and just shamelessly promoting it.

The other KPI under Direct Traffic is Referring Sites. This information will tell you which sites are driving the most traffic to your site. These are the blogs and sites where a link to your site is listed if you had done your homework and asked to exchange links or left comments on blogs. The highest traffic generator this week for this blog was Joe Wikert's Publishing 2020 blog where he was gracious enough to run my post announcing this blog. My post drove traffic to this site.

2. What search engines and keywords are driving visitors to your site?

You will see the link Search Engines also under Traffic Sources. Here is a list of the search engines used the most by your visitors. When you first start using analytics only Google will show up since it is most popular. In a few weeks, you should see others. You may want to place an ad on the search engine home page that drives the most traffic.

Keywords are probably the most valuable KPI in the mix. When you click on the Keywords link you will see the words your visitors put in the search engines to find your site. These are the words you want to make sure are always used on every page of your site or in all the posts on your blog. For this blog, I'm finding "dog chasing ghosts" are the most popular keywords and that is the title of this blog. I purposely chose that title because it intrigues most people and is easy to remember. And analytics is proving me correct.

Keywords are the words you want to make sure are always used on every page of your site or in all the posts on your blog.

Keywords are also important when you bid on adwords through Google. If "ghosts" is my most popular keyword, I could buy (bid) on its ranking for this blog. Depending how deep my pockets are would determine how high in the search list my site will appear when visitors search for "ghosts" on Google. There is a lot more information on adwords at Google so check it out if you want to know more.

3. Content. This is what it is all about.

If you don't have good content nothing you do will keep your traffic flowing. Under the Content link on your dashboard you will see which content generated the most visitors. This is a highly important indicator because it will show you what your visitors want to read, and what subject matter is most important to them.

With a website, the content metric will tell you which content is most popular. With this information you can then optimize the other pages with similar content.

With a blog, you can see which subject matter is most important to your visitors and post accordingly.

With my other blog, The Writer's Edge, the analytics tells me that the most popular posts deal with how to articles on writing and publishing. This tells me that the majority of the audience is composed of aspiring writers and just published authors.

4. Top Landing Pages


A nice metric under Content tells you which pages are most interesting to your visitors. Analytics also gives you the bounce rate for each page. Remember bounce rate are visitors who stayed less than 10 seconds. This metric will not only tell you which page is most successful, it will tell you which pages need to be changed or fixed to make them more attractive.



5. Top Exit Pages


Just the opposite of Top Landing Pages. Did the majority of your visitors exit from your home page? If so, there is nothing there to entice them to explore further on your site. Or did they exit on the last page of your navigation tree meaning that they viewed your entire site before leaving.


6. The Site Overlay


A really cool feature and its free! When you launch it, a new window with your site pops up and in a few seconds boxes appear over your links with percentages in them. When you scroll your mouse over the boxes, it tells you how many times visitors clicked on those links in a given time period. This is especially helpful on a home page because you can see if your visitors clicked on your navigation links to go to other pages. If you find that your visitors are clicking on links that take them off your site, I would eliminate those.


Another cool thing about this tool is that you can change the layout of your page to see the best place to position your navigation links or checkout cart.


Well, that's it for now. Don't tell me your brain hurts - just open your dashboard and use the information to optimize your site. Happy ghost chasing.

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.

Ok, so you think you are ready to try web analytics?

If you can copy and paste that’s all you need to know to get started. You’ll be the dog chasing ghosts instead of your favorite pet.

Ready? Go to Google Analytics and create an account. If you have a Google account for gmail or another Google feature you may be able to use that ID and password. If not just sign up.

On the next page, create an web page account.

Fill in the fields on the next page for your website or blog.

You’re almost there. After you finish with the account creation the JavaScript code is generated and you are ready to copy and paste.

Ok, now here is where you have to pay attention. Read everything on the page especially this sentence just above the JavaScript window: “Copy the following code block into every webpage you want to track immediately before the tag.”

You’re brain is hurting now, right? Take an aspirin. If you have never seen or created HTML language then might as well be hieroglyphics.

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language, the universal code read by every web browser on the planet telling it what to display on your computer screen. Since your brain is hurting I captured the link to the HTML definition on Wikipedia in case you wanted to know more.

The tag tells the browser that it’s the end of the body of your web page. The Google JavaScript code goes right in front of the tag and there is a good reason for this location.

Quickly, I’ll tell you because I know your brain is overloading – when you request a web page, the browser begins reading the HTML code and loading the elements of the page including cool pieces of information called meta data which is like the inside scoop on the web page and browser. Other pieces of information from the browser are also there like where the person was before they entered the site, the name of the ISP (Internet Service Provider) and other bits of juicy data. No personal or identifying information, mind you.

While the page loads, the Google JavaScript records all this juicy information and sends it to a server somewhere in Google land with your account numbers and stores it there for about a year or so. When you access your Google Analytics account, it pulls all the data and compiles into nice graphs and charts on the analytics web site.

There are a lot of other things going on, but I wanted to give you the simple version of how web analytics works. You’re probably passed out by now. Let’s take a rest and continue another day. Next will be how to put the code on your web site and how to make sure it works.

So what is Web Analytics and what has it got to do with writing a book?

A lot, especially, if you plan to sell your work at the biggest market place on the planet – the Internet.

Web Analytics is simply that – the analysis of the web in such a way that it enables you to discover your market, tantalize them with your work, and convince them to buy whatever it is that you are selling.

You can find additional definitions at these and other web analytics blogs if you like:

Google Analytics Blog at http://analytics.blogspot.com

Occam’s Razor at http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/

Web Analytics Demystified at http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com/weblog

There’s more, but we would need a lot more space and you would be bored scrolling forever to the bottom of the page. Just search for “Web Analytics” and be done with it.

Ok. You are still asking the same question: what has this got to do with writing a book?

With the explosion of electronic books all over the Internet, with the dire state of the economy and with the launch of Amazon’s Kindle 2 electronic book reader, the Stanza book reading application for the iPhone and others like it, more and more people are buying their entertainment from the Internet and this includes books. E-books are cheaper than printed ones, they can be read almost anywhere if you have a reading device, and people save gas and have more time for finding a job if they are out of work.

That means if there are a million books for sale on the Internet today, there may be two million by the end of the year. So the question is how are you going to make your work stand out against those numbers?

If you are lucky and have the marketing muscle of a major New York publisher or the brand awareness of a James Patterson, you don’t have much to do. But if you are like ninety nine point nine percent of the unknown aspiring and published authors you need an edge that only web analytics can provide for you.

You first need to use a web analytics tool and it is a good idea to start with ones that are free like Google Analytics. There are others like Yahoo Analytics, Microsoft Analytics and Omniture, but some cost money and some are not easy to use unless you are a web analytics guru.

The Google Analytics will help you, “measure, collect, analyze and report Internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web site usage,” according to Wikipedia.

In essence, Google Analytics and other tools are like my dog, Nickie – when a visitor comes to your site, the tool senses them and tracks their activities. No, the tools don’t bark – my dog does that, but analytics will tell you things like where your visitors came from, what links they clicked on, how long they stayed, and where and when they left.

I know, you’re probably saying so what. What does all this information mean?

A lot. If you knew the search phrase a visitor used or the website or search engine that referred them to your site, you can understand their intentions. For example, if a lot of your visitors used the keyword phrase, “free novels” and one or both of those words were on your site, you can assume these visitors are looking for free novels. If there are a significant number of these visitors coming to your site, you may want to consider offering one of your novels as a free download for a limited time to keep visitors on your site. Most likely once the visitor realized there were no free novels, they would instantly leave.

With the time spent on site or TSOS metric, you could see if visitors were staying. This would indicate that you have something that interests them and maybe they may decide to register or buy something. Another analytics metric, Page Depth or clicks per page would indicate if your visitors liked your home page enough to explore other pages on your site.

And if your visitors registered or bought one of your products, you would have a conversion rate metric because you converted your visitors to do what you intended them to do – register or buy your product.

It’s like buying a house. Your real estate agent may show you one that you are not thrilled about because of its design, but after you go inside, see the bonus room, the sauna in the backyard you fall in love with the house and make an offer. Your website is similar.

Ok, I think that’s enough for now. Your brain is probably hurting right now.