Marketing
Analytics are your Friend
I am back from a lovely vacation in sunny Florida – my family and I had a blast. The kids loved Disney World and with all the walking we did I even shed a few pounds. Now it’s back to work and checking on how things went while I was away.
One of the big things I check monthly are my analytics – setup with Google’s Free Analytics tools – on my websites. A big part of any online marketing and business should be ensuring this is set in place so you can check that your efforts at online marketing are working. You can learn a lot from finding out what words used in online searches bring people to your site – what page they view the most – what page they linger on the most and also whether you have any issues with your website.
As I was reading through my emails and blog updates, I saw that the Social Media Examiner published a blog post while I was away that explained how you can add Google Analytics to your facebook fanpage! If you are at all serious about checking your traffic, stats and getting this information I suggest you take a read and follow their steps to add this feature to your fanpage. The instructions are very detailed and helpful.
Don’t forget that you can always look at the Insights on your facebook fanpage account as well. They keep stats and graphs on the traffic to your fanpage as well. Very easy to read info and helpful in knowing what kind of visitors are coming to and joining your fanpage.
Analytics don’t have to be scary – if you are intimidated then take them slowly and just check the basics. But at least do that much; the info you gather can be very helpful in modifying your online marketing of your business.
A Simple Marketing Strategy for every Business
When I was doing my yearly planning for 2010, I listed the five marketing strategies that I intended to carry out. Number one on that list…Article marketing. I set a goal to write and submit an article at least once every two weeks (I am short by one, so not too bad)
In case you’re not familiar with article marketing yet, it involves writing informative and useful articles and distributing them to article directories – giving permission to anyone to republish your article as long as your author resource box is left intact.
Two of the main results you can experience from article marketing are:
- Traffic to your website
- Increased rankings in Google and other search engines.
High authority article directories, like Ezine Articles, enjoy a lot of traffic (we’re talking millions of visitors every month). Many of those who read articles invariably click on the links in the author resource box and end up going to the author’s website. This is free traffic that otherwise would not have been able to learn about my site!
Search engine optimization (SEO) experts say that one of the most important ways to get high Google rankings for your target keywords is to have lots of links from other sites pointing to yours. The trick is the anchor text of those links should be the keywords you’d like to rank high for.
This strategy works so well that a Internet marketing guru once succeeded in having his website rank number one in Google for the keywords “coolest guy on earth” (or something like that!) – just by having all his buddies link to his site with that anchor text. That’s how powerful linking is.
These are the same links you get from the usually high-authority article directories all linking back to your website through the author resource box.
I realize many of you will immediately think – No way – no more writing! I have no time for that. You have to think about it as marketing not writing. Write what you say to clients when you are telling them about your business and how it helps clients. Tape it if need be and just write down what you say – or hire a Virtual Assistant to take your words and turn them into articles. Be targeted and use key words – words that people will use when searching for solutions on the internet.
A simple marketing strategy every business can use. Are you?
Cleaning up your email list … and what to do with Mickey Mouse!
We are in the process at Time on Task of switching to 1 Shopping Cart for our newsletter and auto responder system. That has meant checking into our list of subscribers and cleaning up the names and information to import to the new system.
I had been thinking that this is a task to do regularly with an email list – check your reports – especially after talking to a new client and discovering she had been using an automated newsletter system for a few years now and never once checked her bounce/delivered reports. One quick call determined she had many errors, current clients on the bounce list and many old and out of date ones as well. She also had no idea how many were getting opened every month and if anyone was clicking on the links in her articles. Keeping this list up to date is important for a few main reasons:
- When you are paying a different fee with different subscriber levels -you will want to ensure that invalid emails are not going out every month – causing your numbers and thus your fees to be higher.
- Knowing if there are entry errors on your list and that people who should be getting your emails are not.
- You are investing time and money into creating your newsletter – what if not one soul was reading it? Would you change things around with your content, try something new or maybe even stop altogether and use your time/money elsewhere?
You would not know the answers to these questions if you are not checking your reports.
It is important to take a few minutes and review your bounce list each month and see if anything is out of place. Bring it up to date, fix the errors and get rid of the invalid emails. Sometimes you will come across emails you are uncertain what to do with.
Mickey.... one of my email Subscribers
Which brings me to the point of my post today… Mickey Mouse is on my Newsletter list. Yep – Mickey Mouse. The big-eared one himself… and I am sure it is him because of the email address – mmouse at a Disney domain name (I can’t publish full email addresses you know). An interesting dilemma…
I was going to delete him, but then realized his email was being delivered and opened – I checked my reports, again the importance of checking these reports comes out.
Curiouser and Curiouser… I think for now I will leave Mickey alone and be happy I have such a celebrity on my list.
What would you do? and more importantly, do you regularly check your reports/list?
The other social media channel – Your Blog
Social Media
Well, today was quite a day… as a social media virtual assistant, I had a very hairy day as Twitter and Facebook both succumbed to Denial of Service Attacks, which appeared to be coordinated attacks too. Their systems in effect were shut down and people could not sign in nor post any updates.
It meant that several items of work done for clients and also to do for clients could not happen. It also was a wakeup call to me, and hopefully many others, that you should not keep all your social networking eggs in one basket. Read the rest of this entry »
With a little help from my Friends
Paul McCartney is playing in Halifax this Saturday, his only show in Canada too! He’ll be playing on the Halifax Common – a green space meant to be open to share for use by all residents and I believe they are expecting 60,000 people.
Anyhow, in my attempt to win tickets for my brother-in-law, I have been listening to News95.7 and the Beatles & Paul McCartney have been playing over and over in my head. I won’t describe to you the horror I put so many people through today as I sang my song (made up by me) to the listeners of the show - you had to go on air and sing to be in the draw to win.
That’s my segue to, the title of my blog post today! I chose this song to showcase my social media experience this past week to my readers. Social media is more than a marketing channel/tool, it is also about networking and connecting with others.
Last Friday I had a client run into some issues with her Facebook fanpage. I was asked to figure out why it wasn’t working properly. After much searching, I found myself stumped. So… I started putting out my ‘feelers’ to see if anyone else could help figure it out. I used Twitter, facebook and some blogs all weekend and through until yesterday.
Finally this morning, 5 days later, I found the answer with a little help from a friend of sorts; but many ‘friends’ were trying to help me figure it out. These were not people I have ever met, yet they were attempting to help me just the same.
What was in it for them, you might ask? Nothing. So why would they bother? Simple, to help out a ‘friend’ who happens to be someone they have never met and probably never will. Being helpful is the only reason why any of these people made contact with me. Connecting and networking… that’s all it was about and I am so grateful they took the time to help me, and ultimately my client.
The next time you are talking about social media and Twitter and Facebook and don’t seem to get it all… try thinking of it as the water cooler or staffroom in your office. When you are sitting at your office stumped on a problem, where do you turn? To your co-workers in the office… well, social media works in the same way sometimes; the only difference being that the ‘office’ of each party involved most likely spans a great distance and they may never meet face to face.
The ‘bug’ was noticed by Salman Ansari, with Involver . Salman, I really appreciate your help. It was a simple solution, but one that took an extra set of eyes! Involver is a company that has some great Facebook Applications for Pages – definitely check them out! I use them with many of my clients. Salman, you also helped out someone else having the same problem, she contacted me after seeing the posts, and once I found the fix, I passed on the info to ehr as well!
Thanks to everyone else (I hope I do not forget anyone) who helped by retweeting my posts or commenting back on a blog or sending me a message on Facebook or Twitter. I am grateful for the time you gave to me and my problem.
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