How to spy on your blogspot visitors with Google analytics – Part 1

Curious about the number of people hitting your blogger page? Want to take a look at which of your five friends is actually supportive of you and your thoughts on renewable energy/REO Speedwagon? Google has released a service called Google Analytics, which will allow you to do just that and quite a lot more besides. It’s free providing that you accrue less than 5 million hits a month. If your blog is anything like mine, that means it will be free and I can just relax and not make any contingency plans for when it won’t be.

Very detailed customizable reports can be created covering all aspects of behavior of visitors to the site in question including geographic location of sources, average time on site, pages viewed per visit and percentage of new visitors. These reports can be mailed to you periodically or can be sent to others in a variety of different formats. It’s a great tool for shining a spotlight on the weaker sections of your blog or just basically kind of spying.

Setting up Google Analytics on a Blogspot page is very simple indeed. You need to get a Google account:

https://www.google.com/account s/NewAccount

Then you need to sign up for Google Analytics:

http://www.google.com/analytic s/

Then just follow the prompts and enter your site URL and any other details that Google might want to know about. Like your mother’s maiden name or the name of your first dog or how old you were when you first did it. After a few steps they will give you a code segment, which you should copy to the clipboard. You now need to sign in to your Blogger page and click on “Template” and then “Edit HTML”. Next, scroll down to almost the bottom of the page and paste the code segment just before the tag. Click “Save Template Changes”.

You have done it, you have cut the jewel, but it’s not party time yet. The jewel must be polished, which is just my way of saying that you should check to see if everything is working. To do this, reopen the Google Analytics window and click “Continue”. If all has gone well, under the “Tracking Status Information” heading you should see ” Waiting For Data” and “Analytics has been successfully installed and data is being gathered now”. Have you ever felt such joy? Well have you ever?

Anyway, your blog just became an East German two bedroom flat and you an outwardly stern (but privately quite sensitive) Stasi operative sent to keep tabs on the mysterious and beautiful ballet dancer that lives there with her cat. You’ll probably end up falling in love with her and be forced into some cruel choice or something but, whatever, with Google Analytics now installed and operational you will need to wait a couple of days or so before you begin to see data. Then it will start to trickle in. All the secrets and all the lies. Trickle, trickle, trickle. That maddening trickle; bittersweet and beguiling all-at-once, that will keep you coming back again and again. You sicko.

The Holy Grail

Co-author Chris Wexler founded Carmichael Lynch’s online media practice, worked at MRM Worldwide and will soon join Crispin Porter+Bogusky as Associate Media Director. He can be reached at chris.wexler@gmail.com.

Measurement. ROI. Metrics. Analytics.

We’re supposed to bow down to these altars in the digital age. We’ve stood on our soapboxes for over a decade, asking others, to believe—to acknowledge the proof. The digital space is inherently measurable! All praises to the digital age!

Tell us you find it all a bit amusing. We do. Especially since Enron, it’s been tough believing in numbers, statistics and ROI. (Why yes, that’s a well-worn copy of Darrell Huff’s How To Lie With Statistics on the bookshelf.)

The digital age is certainly far more accountable than its predecessors. At least when you run Google Analytics for a site or MediaPlex for display banner CTRs, the numbers are not wholly speculative like the $60B broadcast TV market.

We certainly know more, now, too. Perhaps the real advantage of inherent measurability is knowledge, more so than proof. We’re better equipped to tell more compelling stories under more relevant circumstances to more specific people.

But now, Social Media: Conversation. Listening. Participation. New approaches that subvert traditional assumptions, and turn old school marketing on its head. And our audience, the CMOs and CEOs rightfully ask, “Where’s the proof?” If digital marketing is better in part because of accountable metrics, shouldn’t there be measurement standards for social media?

Maybe not. Maybe the holy grail of digital marketing doesn’t apply to social media. Yet.

We’re not convinced social media ROI is truly possible at this point, because as marketers, we’re not party to the vast majority of marketing conversations occurring offline (until Google perfects that cranial implant). That said, current analytics opportunities within social media can help us better sense the flow of marketing conversation than ever before.

So here are two ideas around helping us all step closer to that illusive goal. We believe the faster those of us who engage in social media share common metrics and results, the faster we’ll convince the majority who have yet to jump in.

Data Aggregation: Start with Google or Yahoo! alerts, stir in Google Trends, add a pinch of BoardTracker to find posts based on keyword inputs, some Nielsen BuzzMetrics, a hint of Compete and Alexa for brand website measures, Technorati for brand keyword activity on blogs and tagged media, pour on Facebook Lexicon to see the volume of chatter on Facebook Walls, blend in Tubemogel.com and VidMeter.com to track video views and comments, and SocialMeter to scan blogs, search engines, link promotion and portals for evidence of brand URLs, then finish off with a touch of Summize, Tweet Scan or Flaptor to measure brand keyword activity on Twitter. Stir it all together in a single dashboard using tools like Yahoo! Pipes.

It’s so easy, teenagers do it. And if you’re smart, you’ll automate most of it. While we’re on the subject—hey, Effies, IAB or AAAAs—how about establishing and promoting a standard methodology here?

Brand Engagement: How does your brand define it? For Betty Crocker, it may be recipe downloads. With Volkswagen, vehicle configurations. For Zappos, DMs via Twitter. In other words, what counts? What actions truly matter, and how do you value them?

Here’s one approach for applying values to actions with an audience of almost any size. What’s yours?

 

Value
Action

.5
Searching for a brand on Google, Yahoo!, MSN

1
Visiting a brand website once

1.2
Writing an original blog post about a brand (negative)

1.5
Returning to the same website within 15 days

1.75
Becoming a brand’s “fan/friend” on Facebook/MySpace

2
Subscribing to a brand’s e-newsletter

2.1
Sign up for customer loyalty program

2.2
Calling a brand’s 800 number

2.25
Subscribing to a brand’s RSS feed

2.25
Following a brand’s spokesperson on Twitter/Pownce/Jaiku

3.5
Commenting on a brand’s blog post

3.75
Joining a brand’s custom social network

4
Engaging in a transaction on a brand’s e-commerce website

6
Writing an original blog post about a brand (positive)

etc.

Brand Engagement monthly goal = Obtain participation value of 2.00 with 5% of the brand’s total consumers and value of 3.00 with 1% of consumers. In other words, we want the hyper-connected 4-6% of the brand’s consumers to engage with the brand and help spread the word to the other 94-6%.

 

You’ve got to build your own holy grail. Then share it.

In this era of social media, it’s up to everyone to create and propagate the rules by which we’ll all measure effectiveness. This might require re-calibrating long held beliefs inside your organization about what gets consumers excited, or how and when consumers engage. It will probably require rethinking your sense of proprietary marketing data.

But the results are worth it. The greater our common understanding of what works, why and how, the better our individual efforts will be. Isn’t that a goal worth chasing?

Co-author Chris Wexler founded Carmichael Lynch’s online media practice, worked at MRM Worldwide and will soon join Crispin Porter+Bogusky as Associate Media Director. He can be reached at chris.wexler@gmail.com.

“google Tips That Every Entrepreneur Should Know”

Google is a powerful search engine and has a stronghold on the Internet market. Therefore, many Internet business entrepreneurs look to Google for help in promoting their Internet business. Google has several features that can be used to your advantage including a Google AdWords Campaign and increasing your placement in the Google search engine results.

A Google Adwords campaign is easy to setup. The key is to set up your Google AdWords account and advertisements properly in order to garner impressions and clicks on your advertisements. The advertisements you run in your Google AdWords campaign need to be tested and tweaked on a daily or weekly basis.

You should run two to three advertisements at a time and analyze the impressions and clicks each advertisement yields. In most cases, you should only change one element of your advertisement at a time and then run another test. The reason to change just one element, such as the headline, is because it will help you pinpoint which areas of your advertisement are effective or are dead weight.

While tweaking one piece at a time is the recommended course of action, there are instances when you may have to overhaul your entire advertisement. These instances are rare, but can occur. For example, let’s say that you have set up a Google AdWords advertisement that gets impressions, but zero clicks. If you do not receive any clicks then you should redo your entire advertisement. The reason you want to change your entire advertisement is that you need to at least get some clicks and the current advertisement you have did not achieve this.

Another Google feature is placement in their search engine listings. One way to improve your placement on the Google search engine results is to link with webpages that have a high Google page rank. A webpage with a high Google page rank will have several back links.

Strive to find a website that has a high number of back links, but not just any back links. The back links should be to websites that are indexed in Google. If the back link is not indexed in Google then you will not receive credit for the link. Google won’t recognize the link as being valuable. Remember, Google looks for valuable back links and the more you have, the higher your placement in the Google search engine results.

Google also has a great program that can help you track your websites. The program is called “Google Analytics” at http://www.google.com/analytics. Google Analytics is powerful, free, and provides a wealth of information and parameters. An added bonus is that is easy to set up.

3 Internet Advertising Tips

How Many visitors are you getting to your website on a daily basis? If you do not understand the importance of analyzing your traffic, you may want to check out Google analytics. This is a great way to see where your traffic is coming from. In this article we are going to take a look at the three Internet advertising tips that will help you get more traffic to your website.

1. Is there such a thing as free Internet advertising? The answer to that question from a monetary aspect is yes. There are many different things you can do that do not cost you any money.

For example, you can write an article, include a resource box that has your website address in it, submit your article to a top directory such as Ezinearticles.com, and get traffic from it. All of these things are free to do up to a point.

The thing that you must understand however, is you are investing your time. As you begin to make more money on the Internet your time becomes more valuable. If it takes you one hour to write and submit one article, and your time is worth $20 an hour, then in reality you just spent $20 on article marketing.

2. Therefore it is import and that you spend your time as effectively as possible. Whether you are investing time or money you want to get the greatest return you can on the investment that you’re making. This is where Google Analytics can he come helpful.

When you set up tracking campaign with them, you will learn a lot about the type of traffic you are getting. This will allow you to focus more on the traffic that is the most effective from a time and money standpoint.

3. The last Internet advertising tip we want to give you is that you focus on one form of advertising initially. Learn to master one form of advertising regardless of what it is.

For example, there are people who do extremely well with traffic exchanges. These people know what they are doing because they have taken the time to learn how to properly utilize traffic exchanges to promote their business. The successful Internet marketer masters one form of advertising before taking on another.

This is three Internet advertising tips that can have an impact on your business. The key is to understand what is working when it comes to advertising and promotion, and then to do more of it.

Search Engine Optimization Tips – Google Webmaster Tools & Sitemaps

In today’s age, users do not have the time or the patience to go through thousands of search results. More than 90% of Internet users do not browse beyond the top 15 sites. In such a scenario, visibility and search engine optimization are crucial if you want to pull in maximum visitor traffic to your site. In such a case, Google’s Webmaster tools help you do just that and much more!

Google provides one of the best Webmaster tools available online. These tools offer a free and an easy way to make your site more Google-friendly and search engine optimized. “Google Webmaster tools” have great scope to help you in efficiently handling all aspects of website management and making your site search engine friendly. To take an example, keyword suggestion tool helps you in identifying keywords relevant to your business. Another tool like site analytics software helps you track online visitors to your site. This tool can provide information about the channel through which these visitors find you, if they are turning into customers and also give data on prospective leads on your site.

Broadly, these tools provide updated information about any problems on your web pages; the number of pages contained in your index and a detailed compilation of every page on the Internet that links to your pages. Using this tool, you can identify the reason why your pages rank high or low for search words and phrases. Optimal use of Webmaster tools is the only way you can achieve

search engine optimization

and a sure shot technique to stay way ahead of competition.

Another valuable tool is Sitemaps. A Sitemap is a list of pages on your website. By creating and submitting a Sitemap, you provide Google information about your site, including URLs which Google’s normal crawling process may not be able to discover. The Sitemap tells Google about the important pages of your website and how often you change them. This tool helps Google crawl your pages smarter and enables you to see what is going on the minds of Google searchers. To take an example, you can see what queries and keywords people use when they find your site. You will know whether people find you for the keywords you have been targeting or not. This way you can optimize your content.

Google Sitemaps is a simple way in which you can enhance your coverage in the Google index. It’s a collaborative crawling system that allows you to communicate directly with Google. The Sitemaps protocol allows a web master to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling. By submitting sitemaps to a search engine, a web master is assisting that engine’s crawlers to crawl more intelligently and do a better job. Having a Google Sitemap would let the biggest search engines have latest and up-to-date information. To build your sitemap online in four easy steps, check the link http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/.

Google Webmaster Tools and Sitemaps are an excellent way to take better control of your website management. You would no longer be passively submitting your site; but would also monitor and edit it. As explained earlier, with the help of these advanced tools, you can improve online traffic to your site, enhance your site’s functionality and grow your business opportunities.

Social Marketing Tips

Social marketing is something many internet marketing gurus are taking full advantage of. IM newbies want to know where to start and what to focus their time on. By using the social marketing tools on the internet you can reach a wide audience anxious to buy what you are selling. There are so many social platforms out there, how do you know what to take advantage of? Continue reading for some useful tips.

Many people are looking to get in on the ground floor of something new in order to maximize their ROI but in order to do that your ear has to be close to the ground and you have to have some savvy. Sometimes it’s about timing which can be as easy as being in the right online place at the right time. Many new social bookmarking and networking websites start out each day and due to the law of averages, while the vast majority don’t do amount to very much, you don’t want to miss any boats either. So, how can you as a new internet marketing dabbler decide where to spend your time and energy?

First, find great sources of information. Find some IM niche mentors that you can follow around cyberspace and take advantage of the info they share. Use their industry knowledge to help you gather intelligence. Internet marketing information is readily available through blogs as well as through community forums like Sitepoint and the Warrior Forum, through online articles, through program review sites and for those interested in unique services you can purchase a program or subscription in a service such as StomperNet or SpaceBankers where you can gain insider information for a fee.

After you pay a great deal of attention to what the experts are saying, it’s time to dabble a little. Consider joining five different recommended tools and see what they do for you. It can be time well invested and if nothing else, will teach you a lot about social marketing and networking. Many social sites will give you statistics that can help you gage their success. Digg will show you digs to your articles, you can see feed statistics when you use RSS on blogs and other pages, you can see what type of search engine results your efforts bring you plus you can check Google Adsense reports on channel data to see where your earnings are coming from. Plus, you can follow your site stats through free tools like AWStats or Google Analytics to see what social efforts are paying off.

Programs exist that can help you learn the basics as well as internet marketing secrets to social marketing as well. Programs like Space Bankers can help you get the inside scoop without as much fumbling, trial and error. This type of program along with some homework and following around some great marketing mentors can help you take the guesswork out and start making headway with your plans to make money online through internet marketing.

6 Small Business Tips To Use Today

As a small business owner, any ideas that you have can be put to work right away. That means they can often have a bigger impact on your business than they ever could on a larger company. In this article we cover six quick tips that you can put to work for your business today.

Outsource

Rather than having to worry about taking on more staff, or managing staffing levels to fit with demand, why not consider outsourcing instead? You might find that you end up paying a little extra per hour, compared to in-house staff, but that you can grow far more comfortably into the future.

DonÂ’t Always Compete On Price

Many people are brought up to believe that the lowest price always wins. Most small businesses can compete on other things on than price. Imagine if your business was ten times bigger than it was now? Would it be profitable at your current pricing levels? If not, then consider what you could do to beef-up your margins.

Develop Partnerships

Many small business owners fail to consider just how good it could be for their business if they developed partnerships. To give an example, if you provide plumbing services in your local area, then why not consider entering into a partnership with an electrician or a joiner? Maybe it would be possible for both parties to refer work to each other.

Delegate

It is rare to find a small business owner thatÂ’s good at delegating. Some of the time, though, small business owners donÂ’t have someone in place that they can delegate to. Consider more and more ways that you can delegate the jobs you do, and as your business grows you will have more time to concentrate on strategy.

Search Marketing

Search engine marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways that you can grow your business – if you know what you’re doing. If you set up an account with Google Analytics, you can track exactly what visitors buy from you when they type in certain keywords. You can then buy the keywords that are likely to convert into sales. When you are able to be smart about your marketing, it stops becoming an expense and starts becoming a cost of sale.

Get Discounts

Contact all of your suppliers and ask them if you are entitled to receive your services or products for any cheaper than you are getting them for currently. ThereÂ’s a polite and an impolite way to do this. Just tell your suppliers that you are looking for ways to improve your margins so that you can compete better on price, and that youÂ’d appreciate if they would consider offering you a better deal. If they say no, then you might wish to explain that youÂ’ll pay their competitors a visit!

One of the best ways to enter a negotiation is when you already know what a fair price is. Just tell them what you are prepared to pay, and give them an opportunity to take it or leave it. This is what bigger businesses do already, and there is no reason why your small business canÂ’t do it too.

At one point, you will probably want to take your work from home business out of the bedroom. To do that you should ensure that you conduct your business more like a serious company, and less like a work from home endeavour. Have a business plan, set strong foundations, and think big!

Visit CityLocalÂ’s small business directory to find out about our lucrative franchise opportunity. http://www.citylocal.co.uk & http://www.citylocal.ie

Tips for improving your blog design

When you first began your blog, you chose a design template that best fit your idea of how you wanted it to look. That was fine for a while, but now you want to build a brand for yourself and to express your personality.

Using a stock template on your blog makes it difficult to stand out from the crowd. Try these suggestions for ways to customize your blog design without rebuilding your template from scratch. Find good HTML and CSS tutorials and remember to save the changes work every step of the way.

Start a test blog and copy your current template to that blog. That way, you can fiddle to your heart’s content without frustrating your readers. When you’ve decided on your template changes, save the template and upload it over your old one. Ask your visitors for feedback or suggestions.

Create a custom header for your blog. Find a picture or create a logo that really suits your content and your personality. You can choose an ornate first letter for your blog’s name, a photo related to your topic, or even a picture of yourself or your cat. Use a place like flickr or photobucket to host your images.

Personalize whatever image you choose so that no one can download and use an identical item from somewhere else. Change the colors or crop an image to change its focus. Add your blog name and description in a font compatible with those used for your posts and sidebar. Presto! You have a custom-made image. Use the image or a small section of it as your avatar for social media sites on-line. Soon your readers will recognize you anywhere.

Speaking of fonts, take a look at yours. Specifically, consider the contrast between the font colors and your background and the size of the letters. Are they easy to read? Is the background so busy that the letters blend in? Do you need to lean in to or squint at the screen to make them out? Do the serifs on your letters blend into each other? Experiment with typeface and size to find a font that you can read easily without it overwhelming the screen.

If the background of your blog interferes with your font (or is so busy that it distracts from your blog’s content entirely), ditch it. Don’t hesitate to toy with colors and subdued images. Your blog design should have a set width for your main content and a separate background the shows around the edges if the reader has their browser window wider than that. You can be wild with the static background, but provide a solid field or an opaque overlay on which to display your text.

The key to improving your blog’s design lies in customizing for yourself while remembering your readers. Not all of them will see as well or use the same display settings as you do. Use a service like Google Analytics or BlogFlux that will tell you the browsers and display settings that your readers use. Design the column width and font size for the majority.

Blend any ads into your blog’s color scheme as much as possible. They will be less obtrusive to new readers and will show everyone that you have put time and effort into creating a custom blog design. Google AdSense and many other ad sources offer ways to customize how ads display so that you can monetize your blog without being alienating readers.

Look at successful blogs and read about blog design on other blogs and on discussion boards. Experiment until you find a balance between creative elements and expected blog design techniques that make your blog feel like home, without alienating readers.

SEO Tips

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) can often be an expensive exercise in terms of both time and money.

Here is a list of 10 of the worst mistakes you could make, that at worst could get your website banned, and if you are lucky, their implementation would just impede your success in achieving higher organic search engine positions.

SEO Tips – 10 Don’ts Of SEO

1. Keyword stuffing. Needlessly stuffing your keywords on your web pages will sound nonsense not only to your human visitors but also the search engines. This tactic could actually harm your rankings.

2. Don’t move or remove a popular page. By keeping a regular eye on your website statistics you should be aware of your current popular pages. If you need to reorganise your site structure then remember to 301 redirect via .htaccess from the old location to the new one.

3. Do not use images in navigation. For the moment at least images mean nothing to search engines. It is therefore preferable to use text links in your navigation and use CSS for styling. When you are forced to use an image the always use the ALT attribute and of course remember to include your keywords.

4. Do not use an incorrect robot.txt file. An incorrect robot.txt file can totally stop search engine traffic. A single incorrect command in this file can block an entire folder. If you need to use a robot.txt file then make sure you know what you are doing.

5. Do not procrastinate. SEO begins at the initial website structure planning stage and never ends. There may be lots of work involved but the sooner you start the sooner you will reap the rewards.

6. Do not exchange links with everyone. Always keep in mind that outgoing links to disreputable or unrelated websites can adversely affect your search engine rankings.

7. It can be easy to foret the human visitors, make sure you do not. Do not neglect your human visitors, remember that eventually it’s the human visitors who are going to do business with you, so keep them first. Reputed SEO consultants believe that websites that are human-friendly are search-engine-friendly automatically.

8. Using analytical tools will help. Analytics tools like Google Analytics and others help you know how much traffic you are getting from various sources including search engines. They also tell you which are your popular pages and for what keywords you attract maximum number of visitors.

9. Do not focus on too few keywords. My last point discussed longtail keywords. Your main keywords may get you lots of traffic from few sources, but your long tail keywords can get you small chunks of traffic from many sources

10. Do not be impatient. It can take a while to see good results, so be patient. For instance it may take more than 5 months for your website to even start appearing in the search results. That’s why it is a good idea to start sooner rather than later.

Tips To Get More From Adsense

All webmasters and site owners who have been trying to earn from their sites must be aware of a monster called Adsense.

Adsense has presented a new and easy opportunity to earn money from your site. Adsense virtually allows any person who has built a content site or a blog to earn money, just by placing some code on their web pages. Adsense has given the ability to the web masters to concentrate on their sites rather than wasting time on trying to figure out what advertisements to put on their sites.

There are many web masters who make living on Adsense, but there are also many web masters who spend lot of time on figuring out the magic trick to earn from Adsense. Making a good living from Adsense might seem difficult but it is definitely not impossible.

Just placing Adsense code on your site is not enough if you are looking at Adsense as your only source of income. You need to experiment a lot with Adsense formats, placement and choice of keywords.

Whatever topic your site deals with, you should take care to build page around a specific topic. This ensures that the Adsense ads placed on the page, are relevant and useful to the visitors wanting to know more on the topic, and these visitors will eventually end up clicking the Adsense ad.

You should take care when placing your Adsense ads. If you read through Google help on Adsense, you will find the heat maps suggesting the best locations for your adverts. It is a proven fact that, one place the visitors look first on the site is the top left position. Since this is the place that will have the visitor’s attention, it definitely helps to place your Adsense ads there.

You should also consider placing the Adsense ads on high traffic pages. You will be able to identify the most visited pages on your site by looking at the logs or even your Google Analytics account, which provides you page by page details of visitors.

Though the banner and skyscrapers adverts look pretty good on your site, you should try to avoid using those on your site. Such banners are usually ignored by the visitors. Do you recollect clicking on any banner on a site you visited recently?

You should also use the Adsense formats to make sure your Adsense ads blend with your web pages. Google provides you different palettes to try font colors, backgrounds and borders. There is no point in placing an ad on the page which does not blend with your site and will effectively not be clicked by any visitor.

Another important factor ignored by most of the webmasters is the Adsense preview tool. Google provides with an excellent tool to help you preview the ads that appear on your page. This tool allows you to see the sample ads and formats, preview colors on your page, check the destination of the ads and geo targeted locations to see what visitors in other countries will see.

Besides the above mentioned factors, it is also important to have a definite focus on what you want to achieve. No matter how busy you are, you should always spare some time to experiment with the Adsense ads to improve the CTR. Whatever experts say, just following the basics, is really the magic of making more from Adsense.

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