Posts Tagged ‘website planning’

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.

Technorati Tags: efficient business, website planning

Soooo… Sunday I had a big scare from one of my Google Alerts.  The one that got me was one for my own name.

Yes,  I have an alert setup for me and my name as well as my business name.  I’m not egotistical or anything, I actually recommend everyone have these types of alerts setup in order to keep tabs on when and where your name comes up in the online world. An alert, for those new to this term, is an email update of the latest Google results (web, news, etc.) based upon the search parameter you setup. It’s an effective way to keep on top of mentions out on the Web of you, or even your company or clients.

Anyhow, Sunday I open the Alert for “Kathy Colaiacovo” and come to find it is a link to a website under construction.  I click on it and the fear sets in! Why?  The website was www.kathycolaiacovo.com !!  It was me!  And I didn’t own it! Crap!  That’s all I could think was “Crap!”, and how dumb I had been because I had not bothered to take the time and $10 to book the darn domain name – my name.

I was so mad!  And there I was looking at the screen and reading the message that said how this website was the home of a future website. I was fuming at my desk and my stupidity – sorry no better word could describe what I was calling myself at that moment!

I decided I had to see who owned the domain name, I knew there could be another Kathy Colaiacovo out there but, OH!  I was so mad at myself.  I head over to the Whois registry website to lookup the owner of this fine domain name – only so I could yell at them in my mind.  They had every right to buy it, since I dropped the ball.  Read the rest of this entry »

Technorati Tags: promote business, virtual assistant, website planning

All right… this is more of a vent, but hopefully it can change the way at least even one person sets up their forum or membership system.

Trying to keep on top of all things Virtual, I have a Google Alert set up for the term “Virtual Assistant” (as well as a few other terms, including my own name)…anyhow – today it popped up a discussion post regarding Virtual Assistants and some online support forums available to help VAs run their businesses.  It was a great post and I wanted to make a comment and add another choice to the options listed (my always favourite one, VANetworking) … and here is where the problem started.

I consider myself fairly net-savvy, especially with regards to joining online groups and asking or posting questions and answering them as well.  Sometimes you can just post a comment and sometimes you have to join the group.

Read the rest of this entry »

Technorati Tags: on line forums, virtual assistant, virtual assistant organizations, website planning