"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 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.