Articles and Newsletters

Google Analytics: Are You Missing Out?

Google Analytics is the most widely used website statistics programme, and can tell you about who is visiting your site and what they are looking at. You can find out how long people visit your site for, how often they return and how many times they return. You can work out which pages result in people buying and look at lessons you can learn from them and apply to other pages. And you can customise your reports so you see the stats that are most useful to you.

Analytics expert Avinash Kaushik advises, “Start focusing on where your traffic is coming from (referring urls, search engine keywords, campaigns etc etc). If you understand where your visitors are coming from then you’ll get great clues about their intent. If you know intent then there is a pot of gold waiting for you if you solve for customer intent.”

When using Google Analytics, look at the top pages that people enter your site through – not just your home page – and treat each of those as a home page. In this way you will make sure that people get sign posted to buy, when they find your site and arrive on any number of popular entry pages. Plus, when you have found the different ways people arrive on your site you can try different designs and layouts, promotions and offers on the different entry points and see which turns into most sales.

There are other useful lessons to learn if you integrate Google Analytics into your website. Bounce rate shows how many people leave your site after viewing a single page: if someone arrives and leaves very fast it is likely that they are not engaged by your content. So, you can try to change the content to become more engaging for visitors.

Google Analytics could be just what you need to maximise the way that your website works for your business. Why not try it today?

 

Linking your blog into Twitter and Facebook, plus ways to attract readers for your blog

You can read about the benefits of a blog for Search Engine Optimisation in an article from earlier this year. But did you know that once you have posts going up on your blog on a regular basis it is really easy to use some free tools to link your posts to Twitter and Facebook?

Linking your site
I like Twitterfeed to link my posts to Twitter. On Facebook search on Networked Blogs which allows you to link your blog to your personal or business page so your posts appear automatically.

There are lots of social networking sites, from Linked in to Ning.com sites where you can link into your Twitter posts, so once your blog posts are appearing on twitter they also appear automatically on your other social networking sites.

Getting readers
Promoting your posts on social networking sites is one way to get readers: here are some more.
First and foremost, make time to visit other people’s blogs and leave comments. You’ll need to go beyond comments like ’nice blog’ – aim to add something new to the post that you are commenting on.

Next, look for Blog Carnivals. These are collections of great blogs posts. You email the organiser to suggest a post that you have written and they may include it ... which gets a link back to your blog and hopefully lots more visitors.

You could also offer to guest write a blog post for someone, or invite someone in to guest write a post for you. This can attract new readers to your site too

And finally, add widgets to your blog to allow people to share the posts on your site that they like, using Digg, Stumbleupon, or simply a ‘Tweet This’ button.

 

Using Twitter for Online Marketing

Twitter is an easy way to reach new customers, but it can seem a bit daunting at first. Just how do you get people to follow you, how can you get your message across in 140 characters, and what’s the right mix of tweets? Here is some guidance to get you started.

Twitter is a great place to share. You’ll get the most out of it if you start by using it to pass on great articles and useful tips. This will help you build your reputation and get followers.

Twitter itself isn’t hard to use, but there are some handy tools to make it much easier. Try:

Tweetdeck: helps you divide the people you are following into columns much easier to see at a glance who’s saying what. You can add in search columns to make it easier to follow topics of interest to you. It also allows you to link Twitter up with Linked in and Facebook.

Hootsuite: Does all of the above and allows you to schedule tweets in advance; very helpful if you are planning marketing messages for the month ahead.

Twitterfeed: A helpful tool to automate linking up Twitter, blogs and Facebook.

Social Oomph: Allows you to vet followers, send automated replies and schedule tweets in advance.

As you’ll see there is overlap between these tools, and there are lots more available too. Try them out to see which works best for you. Finally, once you’ve experimented a little, make sure you have a strategy for using Twitter. Come up with 12 promotions and offers that you will be running this year that’s one for each month. Then, plan your month’s marketing activities around that promotion, and tie your tweets in too. Use a tool to schedule in tweets highlighting that month’s promotion.

Follow these tips and you’ll find Twitter is a useful part of your social marketing mix.

 

Blogging for Search Engine Optimisation

There are lots of good reasons to start a blog for your business. A blog attracts people to your site for great articles. You can use your blog to build a relationship with your customers and potential customers. And you can use the blog to encourage people to sign up for your newsletters too. But perhaps most importantly for a small business, a blog is a great way to help your business rise up the search engine rankings and get picked up for keywords that lead people to make purchases.

First, the most effective way to use a blog to help your business is to have the blog integrated into your website. Wordpress is the leading tool to help you do this, but there are other options – check out what comes with your site. Why is integrating the blog so important? Well, put simply, blogs rank really well in Google because of the constantly updated content. If you add new short articles to your site every day or a couple of times a week it all helps your search engine ranking.

Next, do you know what keywords you want to rank for? Look at the terms people are using to find you already. Think about the products that you have and how you might describe them. Then take some of these terms and put them into the Google keywords tool. This will show you the competition for those terms (in Adwords) and the number of people searching for them. You can search in your local area too which will help you refine your results if, say, you are aiming at UK sales. You need to find the terms that have as little competition as possible but with a reasonable number of searches. Search on and weight up variations in terms: organic baby clothes may have a lot of competition and a high number of searches. If you have a great range of boys clothes, check out the competition and searches for ‘organic baby boys clothes’. Could you break it down further and look at ‘organic baby boy’s hats’? It is worth investing time in this and looking it as an ongoing business task.

Once you have some keywords and phrases that you want to use, start using them on a weekly basis in your blog. Check the Google ‘news’ search for news on related topics and set yourself up a Google Alert so you get items of news through to your inbox to inspire you and remind you to blog.

When creating your blog post, use the keywords and phrases once or twice in the post. If you can use them naturally in the title this works well. You can also bold your key terms which can help them get picked up by search engines. Importantly, make sure that you embed a link to the right part of your site. So, if you are writing about fashion trends for baby boys and have included your term, organic baby boys hats, make sure that these words can be clicked on to take you through to the page where customers can buy the hat.

Ideally, you should post 2-3 times a week, daily if you enjoy it and can build it into your routine. If you struggle to do this, look at finding someone who can blog for you. In future articles we will look at linking your blog into Twitter and Facebook, plus ways to attract readers for your blog. Using easy online tools can help you make the most of your blog and see it really boost your business.

Newletters

May 2010
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