Tracking Your Web Site

by John Eberhard

I routinely run into people who are not tracking the statistics of their web site and have no idea how many people are coming to the site. I realize that a web site and Internet marketing are not a priority for every business. But if you are trying to generate business with a web site, it is vital that you have a mechanism in place to track how many people are coming to the site.

Minimally this will answer the question on whether you need to a) concentrate on generating traffic (if you traffic is really low) or b) work on changing the web site to get more leads from it (if your traffic is decent but you're not getting enough leads).

There are a number of web statistics software programs and services available, but several years ago Google came out with Google Analytics, a free service that is quite good. So Analytics is the service I recommend to everyone at this point.

Putting Analytics on your site involves putting some code onto every page of the site, although if you have a Wordpress site, one simply has to download a plugin that allows you to hook up Analytics, then enter your account number.

You can view these statistics for your site on a weekly or monthly basis.

Visitors: The first thing you should track with your web site is the number of visitors that come to the web site each week. I graph this weekly for my own web site, and I report the number of visitors monthly to my monthly marketing clients.

Some people say that the statistic you should pay attention to is the number of unique visitors, which is the number of people who came to the site, discounting if they came more than once. So if 100 people came to your web site, but one of them came 21 times, the unique visitors stat would be 100, but the total visits stat would be 120. I prefer the total visits statistics because I think you want people to come to your site multiple times.

Pages: You should look at what pages people came to on your site, and how many times for each page. As you make changes to your site, this will tell you how well those changes are working and how well you are directing people to go to the important areas of your site.

Referring Sites: These are sites that have a link to yours, and it shows what sites actually referred you some traffic in the week or month. This is important because it shows which search engines are sending you traffic, which social media sites you are getting traffic from (showing how well your social media marketing efforts are going), and in general it shows how well your link building efforts are going.

Keywords: Google Analytics will show you what keywords people entered in search engines, that resulted in their finding you and arriving on your site. This is important because it is an indicator of which keywords your site is ranking well for. Because people wouldn't actually be arriving on your site using that keyword if your site was ranking lower than page 2 or 3 for that keyword.

Good luck with tracking your online marketing and site activity.

Artificial Scarcity

by John Eberhard

In this article I am going to talk about a marketing strategy or copywriting strategy, and actually, a whole business model, that exists today. You may have seen this strategy used. I'm not in favor of it.

My first experience with what I will called the "artificial scarcity" model was maybe 20 years ago. I responded to some offer of a free 2 day cruise or something like that, and you had to sit through a presentation where they tried to sell you something. In this case we got on a bus and went up to the desert. They had built a recreation center and hotel in the middle of nowhere, and they were selling plots of land around this thing.

The idea was you buy a plot of land, you get access to the recreation center and hotel, like a timeshare, and eventually a town will get built there and your land will be worth a lot more. Well I didn't know if a town was ever going to get built there. Before I committed to spending $15,000 I wanted to d a bit more research. But no, the deal was only available that day.

About 5 years ago, a company called Stompernet released a course on how to market on social media. I think the course cost around $2,000. This was at the beginning of social media marketing, and these guys knew how to do it and no one else did at that time. So their course offering broke all records and they made millions within two or three days.

Since this release made such a big splash, I did some research on it at the time. There was one guy associated with the release who did the copywriting and the release strategy.

Basically it was a case of created, artificial scarcity. The course was only going to be offered to X number of people and only until X date. But why was it only for X number of people and until X date? Why couldn't it be a situation where they could sell it to an unlimited number of people, and continue indefinitely, the way most companies do business?

They purposely made it that way to create the idea of scarcity. From the marketer's point of view, this gives you a couple advantages:

1. Some people will sign up for the service who otherwise would not have, because they fear they will miss out otherwise.
2. People have no time to do any due diligence on the purchase.
3. You can probably inflate the price higher than you could otherwise charge. 

Of course there is one big disadvantage, which is, if you end up having a big hit on your hands, you are limited to how many you can sell and how long. You aren't really in a business. You're just sort of doing something temporarily. And you can't later go back and say "Hey we're offering this now again, or for a longer time," because then you totally lose credibility.

I studied some material from this copywriter who did the Stompernet release, and he listed out all these other releases he had worked on (mostly courses), and they were all done this way, with the release only being offered for a short period of time and then it wasn't offered any more.

One reason offered for doing it this way was that the person giving the course and the "personal coaching" could only coach so many people at a time. But this was a made up reason, because if he's such a good coach he could train other trainers, like most businesses do.

Recently I saw a reputable company that I respect offer a course on doing copywriting this way, with headlines saying that you could "5x your conversions." I checked into it and found they were promoting this artificial scarcity strategy. I had no interest in this, and I have never tried to create a campaign this way for my company or any of my clients.

I object to this model for a number of reasons:

a. I think scarcity is not a happy thing in life or society, and to artificially create it is not a constructive business tactic.

b. I don't like the way this strategy or business model manipulates people and plays off their fears. Based on fear, some people will end up buying the product or service that would not have otherwise bought it and may not really need it. Also they will probably end up paying too much for it.

c. I think to create a viable business or service offering is not necessarily an easy task, so to assign an arbitrary cutoff date, where you won't sell the item after that date, is foolish from a business perspective.

I think the proper way to write copy and market, whether it is online marketing or offline marketing, is to have a product or service that people need and is a helpful and useful product or service, to tell people why it is good and what benefits they would get from it, let people do any research they want, and let them make up their minds. The usefulness of the product or service should be what sells them, not gimmicks or manipulation.

That is not to say that you can't occasionally have a buy now discount, that ends on a certain date. That's quite a bit different. But threatening to take away the product or service completely is too manipulative, and I advise people not to take this route.

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

Social Media Engagement

by John Eberhard

In past articles I’ve talked about the necessity of getting lots of friends, followers and connections on social media sites, if you want to use them effectively for marketing purposes.

But there is another important point that is vital in effectively using social media sites to market. That is your amount of engagement with others on social media sites. By engagement in this case I mean “interacting back and forth with people on the social media sites.”

The idea is that you are not just outflowing information or messages to your friends, followers or connections on sites like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. You should be viewing what other people are doing or saying and interacting with them about it.

I was talking to a friend about this recently and I could tell he thought it would be a daunting task, i.e. that it would take him too much time. But I think it is important if you want to get much benefit from social media sites, and I don’t think it has to take a lot of time. Here are some examples:

1. On Facebook, click on “Home.” This brings up a feed of things that your Facebook friends have posted, including short blurbs about what they are doing, comments on things, links to articles elsewhere on the web, pictures they have uploaded, or links to videos on YouTube. Quickly scroll through this feed to look for things that interest you. If someone has posted a blurb or comment that you agree with, click the “Like” button underneath that post. Or post a short comment on it yourself. Similarly if someone has posted a link to an article or video that you like or agree with, click the “Like” button or post your own comment. It is easy to spend excessive time on this but you should discipline yourself and make it take no more than 5 minutes a day. When you click the “Like” button or post a comment on someone else’s content, they receive an email. It shows them that you give a hoot about them and it’s not all about you.

2. On Facebook, in the upper right area of the page you can click to see a list of your Facebook friends for whom today is their birthday. Review this list and for anyone who is a real life friend, write a quick “Happy birthday Joe” message.

3. On Facebook there are groups or fan pages you can find about areas of interest or about your industry. Click “like” on some of these groups and follow or join in the discussions that appear on their fan pages.

4. Facebook has its own email system. Read any Facebook email you get and reply to it.

5. On Twitter, you can spend a few minutes following the posts of other people that you are following, then “re-tweet” the ones you like (that means to send that particular post again out to all of your followers). Or you can send them a direct message via Twitter.

6. Set up folders in your email program and set up mail rules that will dump all Facebook emails into a folder for Facebook and all Twitter emails into a folder for Twitter. That way they do not clutter up your main inbox and you can handle those emails when you have time.

7. On Twitter, you will receive emails that say “Direct message from Joe Jones.” Unfortunately a lot of these will be automatically generated messages that others send out whenever someone follows them, most saying “Thanks for following me. Look forward to reading your messages.” Some will include a link to something they are pitching. I think whoever invented the auto direct messages on Twitter should have a special seat reserved for them in a very hot place, next to that guy who invented that sticky tape along the top of a CD jewel case. The auto direct message is an unfortunate thing you have to put up with. But be on the lookout for any direct messages from others who are actually communicating to you. Reply to them.

8. One thing you can do on Twitter is do a search for your company name or brand, and see what people are saying about you. Then respond to them or re-tweet their stuff if it is positive. If it’s negative, it gives you a chance to monitor any problems and respond to them.

The web, and especially social media sites, are all about interaction, a conversation, back and forth. In the days before the web and social media, most companies were used to putting out communications that their public or consumers would receive. The public could write them a letter but most people never did that.

Today with social media it is much easier for people to write back to a company, or to comment about it. It’s vital, especially as your company expands, to be aware of what people are saying and to respond and be engaged in conversation.

But even beyond managing your public relations, it is best to engage with others on social media sites. By showing interest in your online friends and what they are saying and in responding to their communications, it ensures they will show more interest in you.

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

Online Email Services 2013

by John Eberhard

There are a number of online email services being offered. These allow you to do email marketing, to create databases of email addresses that are stored online (not on your computer) and then send emails to them as often as you want. Most of the services charge you according to how big your list is, though some charge you based on how many emails you send out.

These online services allow you to:

* Put up subscription forms on your site, and then if someone fills it out their name gets added to your database of email addresses
* Set up multiple databases for different purposes, i.e. for newsletter, for sales leads, etc.
* Send out different emails to the different lists you have
* Set up autoresponders. These are emails that get sent out automatically to someone once they subscribe.
* They all provide templates that you can use to create your emails

I wrote an article back in 2010 about the biggest providers, Aweber, Mailchimp, Constant Contact and iContact, and included grids showing the differences between them and their pricing.

Here is some updated information on the services:

Monthly Pricing:

Service	1-500 names	501-1000	1001-2500	2501-5000	5001-10,000	10,000-25,000
Aweber	$19	$29	$29	$49	$69	$149
Mailchimp	$10	$15	$30	$50	$75	$150
Constant Contact	$15	$30	$30	$50	$75	$150
iContact	$14	$19	$29	$47	$74	$109 (10,0001 to 15,000)

As you can see the prices are all pretty much comparable and they have hardly changed at all in three years.

Features Grid

	Aweber	Mailchimp	Constant Contact	iContact
Has HTML email templates
Can import email lists
Easy creation of signup forms to put on website
Double opt-in feature
Tracking tools
Free support
Autoresponder
Sends email to you once person signs up, with their name and other info
Requires sending out a re-opt-in message to any list you import

If you compare this to the features grid in my earlier article, you'll see that hardly anything has changed. But one major and important thing has changed, which is that three years ago Mailchimp did not require sending out a re-opt-in message to any list that you import, and now they do.

Here's what this means. Let's say that you start a new account with one of the companies above, and you already have a list of email addresses that you have compiled, either while using another email service, or by hand. You can upload that list to your new account, but there's a catch.

Each of the services above will require that an email gets sent out to that list, asking if the person still wants to be on that list. If they do not respond, they are then taken off the list.

That means that if you have a list you have compiled in some way prior to uploading it to one of these services, that due to the re-opt-in process, you will lose 80-90% of the subscribers on that list.

I was discussing this with one of my clients the other day, who has compiled a large email list by having people fill out cards at home shows and fairs where they sell their product. So through the re-opt-in process she would lose 80-90% of those subscribers, even though the people did validly opt-in to the list via filling out a physical card at a show.

Some of the online email services will consider not having you do the re-opt-in process, if you have built up an opt-in list with an account on one of the other major online email services.

What to Do?

The question comes up as to what to do if you have built up a large email list, but not via one of the major online email services?

The first thing to do, if you have not done so, is to set up an account now with one of the online email services, so that anyone on your website filling out a subscription form from now on will be considered an opt-in subscription. In other words, it handles any new subscriptions so that are considered opt-in and they won't get lost.

If you have been in the habit of collecting email addresses by having people fill out a card, like at a show or in a store, it would be better from now on to have a computer there and have the person fill out a form online, that will dump their email address into a database with one of the online email services. That way, they will consider it an opt-in email whereas with a card they won't.

Next, if you have a large list and don't want to lose 80-90% of it through the re-opt-in process, you will have to set up a software program to send emails to it on your desktop or laptop computer. In other words, you won't be able to send to it via one of the online email services. I recommend a program called Send Blaster 2, which I use and have had a good experience with.

Next you have to figure out what type of email account you will use to send the emails. You use what is called an SMTP server and it gets a bit technical. Most ISPs have limits on how many emails you can send per hour, and with most it is really low, like 100 per hour or 100 per day. So you can see that if you have a list of 10,000 it is going to take forever to get out your emails that way.

I have an account with www.web.com and they allow you to send 1,000 per hour, max 5,000 per day. You have to cut up your lists into chunks of 1,000 each, but it is a lot better than 100. If your list is opt-in and you don't expect any complaints, you can get an account with a company called Turbo SMTP, and they have no hourly or daily limits, just a monthly limit. And you pay more if you want a higher monthly limit.

Which Email Service?

Although it is the most well known, I consider Constant Contact the worst of all the email services, just because they don't give you as many options on how to do things.

I consider Aweber and Mailchimp to be the best services for online email marketing and use Aweber for my own business and for most of my clients.

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

Navigation on a Website

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by John Eberhard

 

A well thought out navigational structure for a website design makes it easy for visitors to find all the content. A poorly thought out navigational structure makes it hard for the visitor to find content and prevents the site from being user friendly.

 

Too many sites today use a navigational structure that was popular 5-8 years ago, where you have certain navigational buttons on the home page, and you go to one of the sub-pages, and on that page you have more navigational buttons that you didn't have on the home page. Often these buttons are arranged in an additional navbar structure in the sidebar. Sometimes each of the main sub-pages will have its own additional navbar structure.

 

I have seen some sites where there are buttons on the home page, but you then can't reach or find any of those buttons on any of the sub-pages. So to find any of that content you have to go back to the home page.

 

The problem with these navigational structures is that you have to remember which pages have those other navigational menus, and you may have to click around for a bit to find what you're looking for. This makes it harder to find content and it takes more time.

 

Now think about the process you go through when you are looking for something online. Think about your patience level and how much time you have to be searching for things. If you are like most people, you want to find things fast and you don't have much patience with a confusing or time consuming navigational system that makes you hunt around for things.

 

I favor and recommend a navigational structure whereby you can reach any page from any other page on the site. This strategy involves a set of navigational buttons that usually make up the general categories, with dropdown menu items below some of the main buttons.

 

This is a more compact system too. The main buttons, usually along the top, usually number between 6 and 12 buttons. But each one can have up to say 10 dropdown menu items below it. And each of those dropdown buttons can have further dropdown buttons below it. So you can fit quite a few buttons into this arrangement.

 

And it makes it easy to find things. The main thing in planning this out is to make sure you pick general categories for your top level buttons, and select buttons under each that fall into that general category.This makes for a more user friendly web design.

 

This strategy with a set of buttons with dropdown menu items below them has become the common strategy today and has more or less replaced the idea that you click to go to one page and that page has more menu items on it that you can’t reach unless you are on that page.

 

A note on WordPress. For some reason WordPress and many purchased themes make it difficult to have a menu along the side. You can do it but it is much harder. If you’re going with WordPress it is better to plan to have your navigation buttons along the top.

 

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

Has the Internet Changed the Basic Nature of Marketing?

by John Eberhard

The idea occasionally pops up that the Internet has changed the basic nature of how we do marketing. The idea is that through Internet 2.0, with social media and blogging and all that, that marketing has changed from a top-down conversation to a back and forth conversation. It empowers the consumer to be able to talk back to the company and so on. In other words, it's no longer one person speaking to thousands, it's now a one-on-one conversation.

There are various outgrowths of this idea.

1. One outgrowth is the idea that one has to have permission before he communicates

2. Another outgrowth is the concept of duplicate content being bad on the Internet.

3. Another outgrowth of this idea is the concept that the traditional method of marketing, where ads are inserted amongst content the consumer wants, like in a magazine or newspaper or on TV, now called "interruption marketing" by some, is now outdated and doesn't work anymore. Instead, we have search engines and people come there specifically looking for something.

Well I guess it is partly my job here on planet Earth to be an iconoclast (One who attacks and seeks to overthrow traditional or popular ideas or institutions - American Heritage Dictionary Online).

First of all I will say that I have been involved full time in marketing, for a wide variety of industries, for 24 years, since 1989. That was well before there was an Internet, so I think I am well qualified to answer the question in the headline above.

The basic nature of marketing is that there has to be communications going out from one source to thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or more, people. That's the initial marketing push, and that has to be where you spend the majority of your attention and budget.

The only thing that the Internet has changed is that through social media and blogging it is now easier for the consumer to talk back, give his opinions, communicate about problems and so on. And the wise company will pay attention to what consumers are saying.

But the idea that the Internet has changed the basic nature of marketing is complete and utter nonsense. Any company that buys this idea and decides to stop sending out communications to wide audiences in order to interest those audiences in their products or services, will drown. If you think you can market your products or services just one on one, you will starve. That's the sales model, and sales and marketing are very different animals.

You still need to send out marketing messages to the multitudes, in order to make them aware of your offerings, and to generate responses. And you need to handle those responses with sales people, and pay attention to the consumer feedback that the Internet has facilitated and made easier.

Now let's address some of the ideas that have grown out of the concept that the Internet has changed everything.

1. Permission marketing: This idea largely came from a guy named Seth Godin, and it grew out of the large amount of spam email that was occurring in the early to mid 2000s. But if you examine the idea, it falls apart. How can you get someone's permission to send them a communication if they do not initially see a communication from you? I mean, I get the whole thing that people don't want to be inundated with unwanted email, and perhaps Godin's concept applies mainly to email. But we do have the CAN-SPAM Act, a federal law that requires companies to remove someone who requests off a list.

So if companies follow that law, why do we need every email company on the planet requiring that all email sent be opt-in? Why do we need vigilante companies compiling lists of "spammers" that ISPs subscribe to, in order to block those people? Permission marketing in terms of email is now virtually enforced.

2. Duplicate Content is Bad: According to SEOMoz, " Duplicate content is content that appears on the Internet in more than one place (URL). This is a problem because when there are more than one piece of identical content on the Internet, it is difficult for search engines to decide which version is more relevant to a given search query. To provide the best search experience, search engines will rarely show multiple, duplicate pieces of content and thus, are forced to choose which version is most likely to be the original (or best)."

So we see that this is really a search engine problem. But this idea that duplicate content is bad has been so thoroughly disseminated that you probably have the idea that there is something inherently wrong (bad, evil) with having two or more web pages with the same content.

As an example of this, sites like Squidoo.com and HubPages.com will no longer even accept an article that exists elsewhere on the web. They will only accept totally unique content.

According to this idea, if you have an article that you want to syndicate in multiple places across the Internet, you can't. You have to write a separate and unique version of that article for every place on the Internet that you want it to appear.

I have been doing link building for clients using articles and press releases for over 7 years, putting the articles on dozens of sites, and putting the releases on dozens of sites, and have carefully tracked the results, and have seen absolutely NO negative impact for the clients. Using this program I have been able to build 500-1,000 links per month for clients, and I am not aware of another program that can create that kind of volume of links.

Yet most other SEO consultants are in such a state of propitiation to Google that just the fact that Google says it is bad is enough for them to accept it verbatim.

My thought is that when you write an article, you want it to go out widely so that thousands, tens of thousands, or hundred of thousands of people see it. That's marketing. And I will continue to resist people who tell me I can't do it.

3. Search Engines, No More "Interruption Marketing": Search engines are a new innovation and have added a new dimension to marketing, a line for marketers to place themselves in front of people who are actively searching for something.

That's great. But it still doesn't change the fact that initial marketing and branding of a product needs to be done widely to the masses. And I will say again that if you drop your communications going from one source out to thousands, in favor of only being in front of people who search for something, you will starve. And I think that people who advocate that no one do any more "interruption marketing" are hopelessly naive and short sighted and will steer people wrong.

For one thing, how did that person who went on the search engine first learn about the product or service to know enough to search for it? Huh? Gotcha thinking, didn't I?

Summary

I know I am taking a position here that is out of agreement with a large group of people, and may even offend some or piss people off.

But I feel strongly that these ideas I have mentioned above are wrong and are stopping people from marketing today. And I think it is my job to say so.

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

To CMS or Not to CMS

by John Eberhard

CMS stands for "content management system." It is a system used for putting together a web site, where the site owner can log into an interface and make simple changes to the content themselves without the web designer. Changes like the text or pictures on a page.

There are a number of content management systems available today. Some of the most commonly used ones are Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal. There are other less known ones, and some companies develop their own.

The advantages of having a CMS are many, including:

* The site owner can make changes to the site anytime they want, not having to wait for a trained web developer to do it.
* Most content management systems have what are called "plugins," that can be installed and give various added functionality, such as search engine optimization features, installing Google Analytics, easy hookup with social media sites, Flash animation, slide shows, photo galleries, and site backup.
* From the designer side, a CMS makes it easy to make certain changes that then affect the whole site, without having to go manually to each page to make the change. Wordpress also has other advantages that make things easier for a designer to add certain features.
* Easy integration with a blog.

Our company decided to go with Wordpress as a CMS and have been using it for over two years now. Wordpress was originally designed as a blogging platform, but has gained a lot of popularity as a CMS over the last couple years because it is so easy to use. It also has a plethora ($5 word) of free plugins available. We can also work with Joomla and Drupal sites.

Going with a CMS or Converting to a CMS

Going with a CMS or not is a decision you will need to make at the beginning of a web design project.

I think there are lot of pluses and I can't think of a whole lot of negatives, but there are a couple so let's be honest about them too:

* Wordpress and other CMSes pull data from a database to compile the page, and this can sometimes slow down the page loading.
* Some people think they will be able to make any change to their site with a CMS, but that is not the case. To make changes to the background, the header, the footer, and for the most part to the sidebar, you will have to have advanced web design knowledge.
* If anything goes wrong with the site you will definitely need to bring in an experienced designer, but that would be true in any case.

But by and large I think going with a CMS is a good idea, and over the last two years I have designed most of my client web sites using Wordpress.

So if you are having a new site designed or having a current site re-designed, now is a good time to make that site in a CMS. So you need to use a designer that is familiar with the CMS you want to use.

Responsive

I use a customizable Wordpress theme called Catalyst, which then allows me to implement whatever custom web design I come up with. It also has a feature that converts the site into what is called "responsive."

Wikipedia defines responsive web design as:

"Responsive web design (often abbreviated to RWD) is an approach to web design in which a site is crafted to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones)."

So responsive means your site will work well on mobile phones and pads. That is becoming more and more important, especially for certain industries. Adding this responsive feature is a good reason all by itself to convert your site to a CMS. For the most part it should be possible to convert your current site to a CMS and have it look almost identical, if desired.

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