J. Timothy King Software Engineering & Consulting - Custom Web Development by a Veteran Software Engineer

Here Are 4 Key Metrics Google Analytics Can Measure

TimK — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

If you measure nothing else about your website, keep an eye on these 4 metrics:

The conversion rate of your ads. That is, for each person who clicks on one of your ads, what percentage of them take action?
The cost per conversion of your ads. That is, on average, how much do you pay in ad costs for each person who takes action?
Where prospects leave your sales funnel. If you have a sequence of pages leading up to a sale, once someone begins down that path, why do they bail out?
Which ads and landing pages in a split test perform better? Try two different variants of each ad and landing page, and find out which one has a higher conversion ratio.

Google Analytics is a free service that can measure all these things for you. It’s a very powerful service. Of course, that means it’s also complex. To demystify Google Analytics, start with ROI Revolution’s free email course, 7 Days to Success with Google Analytics.

The Most Important Web Statistic You'll Need

TimK — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Web statistics can make you feel overwhelmed. All the graphs and tables, numbers and percentages. And figuring out the difference between visitors, pages, and hits.

Unfortunately, if you want to understand web stats, reading up on the subject may just make it more confusing. Even if you understand the measurements themselves, how do you interpret them? What’s more important to maximize? Visits per day? Minutes per visit? Or pages per visit? Don’t answer. It’s a trick question. Because none of these measurements help us achieve our website goals.

It’s said that if you ask the wrong questions, you’ll always get the wrong answers. But many web consultants and business owners ask just these questions. They ask these questions, because these are the only questions they know to ask. But if we take into account our website goals, we’ll ask much better questions.

The goal of a small-business website is to convert visitors into customers, and to convert customers into visitors. The key word here is convert. If we measure conversions, we’ll maximize our goals. Conversions are what matters. How easy is it to convert visitors into customers? Customers into visitors? How much does it cost to acquire a new customer? How much business on average will that customer bring us?

So here are the kinds of statistics we need to measure:

Of all the people who search Google for a given keyword and click on a given AdWords ad, what percentage of them sign up to our email list?
How much on average do we have to pay to get each of these email subscribers?
Of the subscribers on our email list, what percentage of them will respond to an offer?
Of all the subscribers who respond to an offer, what percentage of them will become premium customers?
If we try two different ads, all else being equal, which one gives us more subscribers?
If we try two different landing pages, all else being equal, which one gives us more subscribers?

As it turns out, these are statistics that direct-response marketers have been measuring for over a century, long before there was an Internet. They’re the same metrics Claude Hopkins advocated in his classic book Scientific Advertising. Back in the day, they just measured in terms of magazine ads and direct-mail pieces. Now we measure in terms of web visits. Different technology, but the same methodology.

Building Traffic: What's The One Thing You Need to Generate Repeat Visitors?

TimK — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Lester Wunderman wrote, “Manufacturers, distributors and retailers, in fact all who advertise, are beginning to recognize that they must focus increasingly on making customers rather than just making sales.”

This is the essence of building your own web traffic. It’s the same as building your business. Getting repeat web visitors is the same, in concept, as getting repeat customers.

There are several methods you can use to build repeat traffic to your website. With each of these methods, to get the most out of it, you need to provide value to your visitors. A customer who feels they got a good deal from your business is more likely to buy again. And a visitor who feels they found valuable information at your website is more likely to return. And you use web copy to convert visitors into subscribers, as you might say “Come again!” to a happy customer.

When someone visits your site, they’re looking for information. Give them exactly what they want.

All successful business owners understand this. Ironically, when it comes to the web, many become afraid to do the same thing online. When a prospect walks into their store, they’ll gladly give any advice he needs to make a purchase decision. But when a prospect comes to their website, they don’t want to tell them anything, because they fear the prospect will find out everything he needs to know and won’t take the next step towards a purchase decision.

The opposite is actually true. If you give a prospect valuable information that he can act on immediately, he can then trust you to deliver more value in the future. He’ll be more likely to come back to your website. And he’ll be more likely to buy from you. The first rule of the web is this: When someone visits your site, they’re looking for information. The best thing you can do is to give them exactly what they want… And then offer them even more. Good content brings visitors in, gets them to bring their friends, and gets them to come back.

So how do you actually implement this strategy? One method, becoming ever more popular, is to use a blog, because a blog allows visitors to subscribe to the blog’s feed. And they can even comment on your blog posts, which not only gives you valuable feedback but also encourages visitors to return to read the comments. A blog doesn’t just talk to your customers. A blog opens a dialogue with them. It builds relationships. And as a bonus, you’ll eventually get extra traffic and subscribers that you didn’t even know existed, because search engines love blogs.

But for even better results, you can use opt-in email lists. Use can use email instead of a blog, or to supplement a blog.

Never use spam lists. Always get explicit permission from people to send them email. Just as you keep a customer list of people who have bought from you, keep an email list of people who ask you to email them content. And then send them valuable content. Offer them a free report or white paper. Let them sign up for your weekly “tips” email or free e-newsletter. Or offer a course or informational series by email.

The way to send these emails is with an autoresponder. What I’m talking about is much more powerful than the simple “autoresponder” email feature you get through your hosting provider. That simple feature will allow someone to send email to, for example, info@mydomain.com, and the computer will automatically send them back an informational email. What I mean by “autoresponder” is a service that:

… allows a visitor to sign-up via a simple web form, because this makes it easy for him to sign up, hence more likely he’ll do it.
… allows him to unsubscribe just as easily, because this establishes trust. This is your money-back guarantee, as it were, that you will continue to send only valuable information.
… automatically sends him a pre-programmed series of personalized emails, spanning over days, weeks, or even months. Because permission ages poorly. You want to make him feel good immediately about his decision to give you his email address.
… tracks which visitors sign up for which email lists and from which forms, because this allows you to send different content to different people, depending on specifically what they’re interested in.
… allows you to send personalized follow-up email messages to each list, so that you can send your subscribers timely ongoing content.
… allows you to send two different emails to random samples of a list, so that you can measure which email gets better results.
… knows the CAN-SPAM Act and has features that help you comply with it.
… works with ISP’s around the Internet to make sure your legitimate emails are not being blocked as spam.

I use AWeber Communications, the leading email autoresponder service, for all my email lists, because they offer these advantages.

Borrowing Traffic: 7 Ways to Get Free Web Publicity

TimK — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 01:00:00 -0700

Borrowing traffic is one of the most effective ways to get free traffic to your website. It is part of the great power of Web 2.0. Borrowing traffic is the PR of the web. Just as PR gets you attention from people who already have attention, borrowing gets you traffic from someone else who already has traffic.

For example, you are borrowing traffic when:

… you issue a press release that causes someone else to post a news story on his site or blog.
… you write an article for someone else’s e-zine, or be a guest blogger on someone else’s blog.
… you contribute to an on-line forum, or leave a comment on a blog, with a link to a relevant resource on your website.
… you partner with another website to send traffic or exchange links.
… someone searches on Google, finds your website, and clicks through.
… you create a purple cow, and bask in the word-of-mouth.
… you give a talk on a problem you know how to solve, and someone types your website URL into a web browser.

Of these, getting recommendations from others is the most powerful. Because people will listen to an honest recommendation from a reputable third party. They are much more skeptical of an advertisement or press release.

I didn’t mention it in the above list. But if you have a blog, there’s a way of getting links on other blogs. It’s called a trackback. Not all blogs support trackbacks, but when you link to a blog that does, it’s a great way to get links. Here’s how they work. You publish a blog post that talks about a post on someone else’s blog and links to that post. Using your blog software, you “trackback” to his blog post. (WordPress even does this for you automatically.) Then on the same page as his blog post, a link appears to your blog post, usually with an excerpt of what you wrote.

This trackback link does several cool things for your website. It establishes a relationship with the other blogger, because it helps build up his website. This reflects well on you. It’s also better than leaving a comment on his blog, because readers tend to respect trackbacks more than comments. Linking to someone else’s blog also increases both blogs’ search-engine ranking, making it more likely that new people will find your blog posts.

Another way to borrow traffic is to show everyone you’re an expert in your niche. Since you ran your AdWords campaign well, you know what your customers care about, what they worry about, what keeps them up nights. So you can write articles about these subjects, and use these articles to generate traffic. I can’t go into this subject in depth here, because it’s too deep. But Turn Words Into Traffic, by Jim Edwards and Dallas Edwards, is a step-by-step guide that covers how to write high-impact articles that get attention, and how to get your articles published in e-zines, on websites, in article indexes, and more. Also check out the Turn Words Into Traffic electronic version, which you can download immediately, and which comes with several bonuses and a 60-day money-back guarantee.

Buying Web Traffic with Targeted Advertising

TimK — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 01:00:00 -0700

The quickest way to get visitors to come to your site is with advertising. And the quickest way to get started in on-line advertising is to use Google AdWords. Unfortunately, if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s also the quickest way to give Google a lot of money.

Using Google AdWords is usually the first thing you want to use to drive traffic to your website. Because with AdWords, you can find people who are interested in exactly what you have to offer. [block:block=4] You do this by bidding on the words that your customers are typing into Google Search. You’ll also want to choose “negative” keywords that exclude users who are not interested in your offering.

Then you test your ads and keywords to find out which ones are working and which ones aren’t. If you set it up right, AdWords will tell you exactly how much each new customer costs, and exactly which ads and keywords are the most cost-effective.

But that’s not the best part about AdWords. The best part is that you can get this data almost in real time. Therefore, you can adjust your keywords and ads quickly. And by so doing, you can learn what words and ideas your customers respond to, before your competitors discover this. This is valuable knowledge you can use in other marketing channels. AdWords lets you do this faster and more inexpensively than any other system available today. Used well, AdWords is the fastest, most effective way to get high-quality leads and information, wicked cheap. The power of AdWords is that with 5 dollars and 10 minutes, you can have your own ad being shown to millions of people.

And the danger of AdWords is that with 5 dollars and 10 minutes, you can have your own ad being shown to millions of people. Used poorly, AdWords is the fastest, most effective way to give lots of money to Google. Please don’t do that. There are enough horror stories of someone opening an AdWords account, naively setting up an ad campaign, forgetting about it, and ending up with a $5000 charge at the end of the month and not one sale. Instead of doing that:

Use the Google AdWords Standard Edition. Avoid the Starter Edition, because it doesn’t provide the features you need to run an effective campaign.
Determine to become acquainted with the features of the Standard Edition.
Start with a limited budget. Don’t just accept Google’s recommendation for how much to spend. Invest a little, and learn a lot.
Start with a small set of closely-related keywords, monitor your ad campaign daily, and improve it over a number of weeks.
Get Perry Marshall’s free email course, “5 Days to Success with Google AdWords.” This will give you a taste of what’s in the Definitive Guide to Google AdWords and Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords.

Getting People to Visit Your Website

TimK — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 01:00:00 -0700

If a site goes up on the web, but there’s no one there to see it, does it make any money?

Just because you have a stop on the information superhighway, that doesn’t mean the right people will visit it. Just because you build it, that doesn’t mean they’ll come. You need to get traffic to your website. And not just any traffic, but the right traffic.

There are myriad people who will try to sell you the latest fool-proof traffic technique, because traffic is a key element of a website strategy. Unfortunately, most of these traffic techniques don’t work. Or at least they aren’t magic bullets. There are no magic bullets. If you buy into Dr. Terminus’s cool new website traffic program, it won’t magically send you all the right customers and turn you into a millionaire overnight. Yes, I’m sure Dr. Terminus is making a bundle. As Perry Marshall recently warned, “In the ‘make money on the Internet’ category… a sucker is born every six seconds.” But you don’t have to be one of them.

The cold, hard truth is that building traffic is hard. And it can be expensive. Don’t let anyone fool you! Getting traffic to your website takes time, it takes money, it takes effort, and it takes smarts. But it’s a necessary part of any business website. Because without traffic, no one will discover what you have to offer, and so no one will buy your product or service.

So how do you build traffic to your website? I agree with Jim Edwards, co-author of Turn Words Into Traffic and Niche Advertising Secrets, and one of the good guys. There are basically 3 ways to get the right traffic to your website.

You can Buy traffic, through targeted, paid advertising.
You can Borrow traffic, via recommendations and links from others.
You can Build traffic, by turning one-time visitors into repeat visitors.

CMS's: Flying with Jet Fuel

TimK — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 01:00:00 -0700

For the most elaborate websites, you should consider a content-management system, or CMS. That’s a mouthful, but it only means software that lets you manage your website content. A good content-management system will let you do everything WordPress can do, and more. A CMS is more general than a blog. The main purpose of a blog is to let you post content day by day, as in a news feed. A CMS can do this, but it can also handle other content, displaying it in a number of ways.

There are a number of alternatives. One popular CMS is Joomla, and DreamHost has a one-click install for it. I prefer Drupal for my websites (also supported by Dreamhost). For example, this website runs on Drupal, as does my main site. Both Joomla and Drupal are free software.

Another example is Gilmore-ism.com, my fan site for the TV show Gilmore Girls. Some of the features on this site are custom-programmed, such as the quotes database. The theme is also highly customized. But most of the features on the site use built-in Drupal features or off-the-shelf Drupal modules.

Consider all the ways Drupal helped me put together this site:

The front-page dashboard is all based on standard features and off-the-shelf modules. The various lists are either standard blocks available from different modules, or they are custom views of the content on the site.
The “Random Quote” feature is also a custom view of the content, like the lists on the front page. It’s a view of a single, random quote.
The “RSS” feature is a feed of front-page content. Like a blog feed, this is a Web 2.0 feature that allows users to get an automatic list of the new content on the site.
The “Content from Other Sites” feature is Web 2.0 at its finest. It automatically republishes a list of links to select sites that themselves have RSS feeds.
The “Search” feature is built-into Drupal. It automatically searches all the content on the site. There’s also an off-the-shelf alternative that uses Google search.
Users can register for a free account on the site and submit comments and certain content. This is a built-in feature, and all I needed to do was to enable it.
Users can rate articles on the site and get recommended content based on their ratings and the ratings of other users. These features were all in off-the-shelf modules. All I needed to do was to install them.

There are plenty of do-it-yourselfers who install and maintain CMS-based websites, using Drupal, Joomla, and other software. You’ll also find consultants and developers who can provide the features that meet your specialized requirements.

Blogs: The Keys to Your New Car

TimK — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 01:00:00 -0700

One way to let the computer manage content is using blog software. This software lets you publish articles, day by day as in a news feed. Users can then subscribe to your site’s feed, and as you write new articles, your website automatically notifies each subscriber. Additionally, any articles you’ve already written remain on the site for as long as you want, organized by whatever categories you specify.

The most popular blog software is WordPress. And you can do a lot with it, because WordPress has some pretty powerful features. You can select from a wide variety of themes. You can use the standard blog-style front page, or you can customize your website’s front page. You can use it to put up simple, static pages as well as timely, dynamic content. Users can post comments on blog posts, if you allow it. And WordPress supports other Web 2.0 features, too, like feeds, pings, and trackbacks, making WordPress an excellent Web 2.0 marketing tool. And there are many WordPress plug-ins, opening up even more features. Some people have put together whole websites just using WordPress. And WordPress is 100% free software.

Most of these bloggers are not professional web developers, or even technical people. It’s easy to set up and use WordPress. Any competent web developer can install WordPress and show you how to use it. Many high-school and college students can as well.

My preferred hosting company, DreamHost, has a one-click WordPress install feature. (So does midPhase, and many others—Just ask your host whether they support WordPress.) Or you can download WordPress from WordPress.org.

There’s good documentation at the WordPress.org Codex. And some good WordPress tips and tricks on the DreamHost support wiki.

Mini-sites: As Easy as Riding a Bike

TimK — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 01:00:00 -0700

The simplest kind of site is a mini-site, a small, laser-focused site, usually with only a few pages. These are a great way to advertise a niche product or service. Or to promote a special offer or event. You can manage a mini-site manually, using HTML templates. That’s because a well-designed mini-site usually has only one main page, perhaps with a few variations. Everything on the site has only one purpose, to ask the visitor to make a decision whether to take the next step in a relationship with your company. Note that this is not how most companies organize their websites.

Most companies—and most web designers—do it wrong. Because they organize the website to highlight your company, rather than organizing it around the customer. The truth is: No one cares about you. They only care about what you can do for them. And they want to know this now! That’s why the landing page is the most important page, and the customer is the most important person in an effective website design.

Remember the goal a website is supposed to accomplish? It converts visitors into customers, and customers into visitors. In order to accomplish this, a mini-site must look and feel very different than what you are used to.

Jim Edwards is the mini-site expert. And he has a free audio and e-book about mini-sites. Compare Jim Edwards’s mini-site designs to how most small business websites are designed. The difference is that his actually make money. His free audio and e-book explains the 3 purposes of any mini-site, the 4 types of mini-sites, the biggest mistake people make with mini-sites, and more. Listen to it or read it, because this information is key to making a small website work.

Anything more elaborate than a mini-site, though, and you’ll proably want more than raw HTML. You’ll want the computer to manage your content. Because what’s difficult with manual web pages is not HTML itself. The hard part is combining content with presentation and managing links between pages.

In fact, even with some mini-sites, if they’re more than a few pages, you’ll want to use an automated system. For example, let’s say you have a few dozen articles, free reports, and white papers on your product or service. This can be consistent with the purpose of a mini-site. To publish all these documents on your website, you’ll want to list them in categories, maybe even in several different indexes, on several different web pages. You’ll also want to add new articles and case studies from time to time. Managing all this data becomes so much easier when you can leverage the power of the computer to do all the grunt work.

3 Ways to Manage Your Website Content

TimK — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 01:00:00 -0700

There are 3 common kinds of systems website owners use to manage the content on their sites. Some are more powerful and more flexible, but also require more effort to setup and maintain. Which system is right for you depends on what kind of web site you need.

Manually upload HTML files. This is the simplest, and the most limited way to manage your website content.
Use blog software. This lets you publish large amounts of up-to-date content, and it provides some powerful ways to organize your content and market your website to users.
Use a content-management system. With a CMS, your website can blow you away. Add in some custom programming, and you can do almost anything you can imagine.

There is a disadvantage to all this power, however. It’s like the difference between riding a bicycle, driving a car, and flying an airplane. A plane will get you a lot farther, a lot faster, but there’s a lot more that can go wrong. If you want cheap and reliable, and if a bike will get you where you want to go, then that’s the way to go. There’s also some overlap between the three. If I needed to get from New York to Tampa Bay, I could fly or I could drive. Flying will get me there much faster, but it’ll be more expensive, and you’ll have to deal with the TSA to boot. Which means of transportation you choose depends on the particular trip you want to take.

It’s the same way with these three ways of managing your web content. Each level overlaps into the others:

Some businesses have extensive on-line article archives, which they publish using hand-coded HTML. Usually, you’d use a CMS to manage a collection of documents this large.
I’ve even seen people provide Web 2.0 features like RSS feeds using hand-coded RSS! I’m just glad I don’t have to do that.
And some users use their blog software as a CMS. They install plug-ins up the wazoo, even tweak the software with custom programming.
Still others install a CMS just to put up a simple, 5-page website. They could have used manual HTML. But they chose the automated software, because they want the flexibility to rearrange it, extend it, or change the look and feel of it easily.

So there are no hard and fast rules. You have to use your own judgement to determine where you want to go and how fast you want to get there.