Many of the website analytics we use tell us quantitative things – how many people are visiting our blogs, what they read, how much the read, and on and on. However that’s only 50% of what we need to know to make our blogs more effective business tools. The other 50%? Qualitative data.
Qualitative data tells us the why, which isn’t always easy to figure out. One step in the right direction is using Google Site Search inside of Google Analytics.
Google Site Search tracks what people are searching for on our sites. And not only that, it can tell us if they didn’t find what they were looking for with their first query! That’s rock your socks off kind of stuff.
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Blogs are built for conversation. It’s why all major blogging platforms have a comment feature. And now even Google is reported to be getting into the comment game, though that could have something to do with mass amounts of people leaving Blogger, or because it sucks.
There are many blog metrics you can and should be measuring, including but definitely not limited to:
- Audience growth
- Author contribution
- Number of inbound links
- Number of social shares on a per-post basis
- RSS subscriber growth
- Email list subscriber growth
But there’s one that you may have overlooked – conversation rate.
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Many small business owners believe that because of their size and referral business they have no competition. They’re only partially right.
There’s one competitor we all face that is stronger than any other competition we may come up against.
This foe has no shape, it transcends demographics, and it can strike when you least expect. It is completely without conscience.
The competitor of which I speak, is nothing, or more specifically, doing nothing.
I was watching an excellent presentation that Avinash Kaushik gave at O’Reilly Strata 2012 – What Marketers Can Learn From Analysts. Something Avinash said really struck me – that today the path someone takes to purchase is so convoluted it’s impossible to point to one factor and say definitively that it was the source of the purchase.
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I’m currently reading two books: Screw Business As Usual by my unofficial mentor Richard Branson, and War Made New: Weapons, Warriors, and the Making of the Modern World by Max Boot. Both of these books are highly applicable for all entrepreneurs, and on my “must read” list. Here’s why.
Screw Business As Usual is a book about creating a profitable business by doing good, specifically helping to solve major world issues such as poverty and global warming. Now I’m not a climate scientist and can’t look at data to say if global warming is for sure. However I believe it is. During the 7 years my family and I lived in Florida it got hotter and hotter each year. In addition, this year in Thailand the storms have been worse, and they began earlier than years past. This past Winter Minnesota experienced 60-degree days. When I was growing up and visited my Grandmother for Christmas it never get above freezing, for months.
These are not isolated incidents. Globally the weather is getting more extreme. You don’t need to be a climate scientist to see that. It’s right outside your window.
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Today I finished reading The Start-up of You by Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn) and Ben Casnocha. It’s a great book for every entrepreneur and anyone looking to add entrepreneurism to their career (which should be everyone with a job). Highly recommended.
As with all books on my Kindle I’ve been taking notes and determining how I can apply the knowledge to better help my clients. At the end of this book though I had a huge realization – I’ve been approaching this the wrong way.
Over the past months I’ve been approaching my product and service offerings at Dempsey Marketing from the standpoint of “what else can I offer my clients that will help their businesses?” It’s that thinking that gave birth to our premium WordPress hosting solution. Today though I realized that I’ve been asking myself the wrong question.
Rather than ask, “what else can I offer my clients” instead ask “what do I need to know and be able to do in order to better help my clients?”
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I’ve heard it said that if you aren’t the customer you are the product. This is in reference to social networks, especially the biggies: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and now Google+. So let me ask you a question, would you pay to use a social network?
I’m reading enough by Patrick Rhone – highly recommended. It makes me wish I spoke with Patrick more when I was in Minnesota before. I’ll have to change that…
“Their customer is the advertiser… Their customer is their investors…
Like Neo in the classic science fiction movie, The Matrix, we need to wake up and realize we are nothing but batteries powering otherwise powerless systems.”
- Patrick Rhone, enough
Patrick has one essay titled, “You Are Not The Customer, You Are The Product” in which he reminds us that our use of free social networks does not make us the customer, rather we are the product. They gather our information, package it up and sell it to advertisers. We accept this trade in order for the opportunity to connect with people we may haven’t otherwise become connected to.
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Let me be blunt: as an entrepreneur you cannot accept the way things are. If we did that there would be no innovation, no America, and we’d be living in huts. Not accepting what is created Apple, Amazon.com, Virgin, and thousands of companies, products and services throughout history.
Here’s the context for this…
I’m currently reading “Return on Influence” by Mark Schaefer, and something he wrote is very upsetting to me. Before I get to that there’s some backstory I need to explain first.
I was introduced to Mark via Dino Dogan when Dino launched Triberr. Later on Mark invited me to write for his blog. For a while I wrote guest posts (for a small payment) until he and I had a large difference of opinion on a post where I discussed results from testing the removal of the sidebar from this blog. After that I stopped writing for him and we haven’t spoken.
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When do you use a search engine? How do you use a search engine? How do you decide if you need to use a search engine in the first place? Are there alternatives that provide “better” answers faster?
These are some of the questions we were discussing at a recent Ruby on Rails meetup. Let no one say we geeks don’t ask the hard questions!
As the builder of a business that helps entrepreneurs attract and convert their customers online it’s my job to consider the future and how best to postion them for it.
In November 2010 online marketing was pretty straight forward. With ideal customer profile in hand it was a matter of:
- Creating content that attracts your ideal customers
- Optimize the content for both search (being found) and social (being shared)
- Convert visitors to leads using a variety of methods
- Stay in touch with those leads until they become customers
And while the devil is in the details that was pretty much it.
Time have changed, and they are changing faster than every before.
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Something I haven’t told people for a very long time is why I got into IT more than 12 years ago. The reasoning has served me well and as I build Dempsey Marketing to a much larger business, it will continue to serve me.
My business consultant Lauri Flaquer (also a client of mine) has a fantastic saying. Lauri says:
I help you get clients for life! That’s what you want. That’s what I do.
The way Lauri does that is by helping you form the foundation of your business. And she’s awesome at it. Just listen to a few of the testimonials her clients provided and you’ll see why. But I digress…
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SEO has changed, and there is no going back. Want to ensure your site doesn’t disappear from Google and that you’re “future proofed” for the next round of vicious Panda updates? Read on.
Recently Search Engine Land reported that Google is de-indexing link networks like it’s going out of style. That means that all the links they (the link networks) had in Google are now gone. In Google, they no longer exist.
This is just the latest round of updates Google has pushed out. And they’re just getting warmed up.
Matt Cutts – Google’s head of web spam - recently gave a sneak preview into Google’s next update. Their target? Overly SEO’d websites. Here’s a tasty quote from the article:
We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.
- Matt Cutts
Too much SEO? You’re next in line for the Google smackdown.
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How do you ensure that no matter what device your customers view your website on – their computer, iPad, iPhone, Android phone, or whatever’s next – they’ll be able to see your site in it’s full glory? Two words: responsive design.
All geekery aside, responsive design is a web design technique where you code a website in such a way that when the size of the screen changes the content will automatically adjust to fit it.
Rather than just talk about it let’s look at an example.
When we updated the Dempsey Marketing site the theme we customized was a responsive theme. So if you’re on a regular computer or laptop you’ll see something like this (click any image to see it full size):
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I’m looking for an accountant, and here’s what I need. Is this you?
We’ll start our relationship with me describing my business and where I’m going with all this. From that you’ll create a proper chart of accounts that makes the most sense. As you’re the pro I’ll leave that to you.
As we spend money I’ll email you my receipts. As we make money I’ll send you that information too. You keep track of all that goodness and email me, on a weekly basis, financial statements – P&L, balance sheet – the usual stuff. On a monthly basis we’ll hop on a call and talk financial strategerie. At the end of the year if you can do my taxes that would also rock.
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Thanks to Steve Jobs, my entire outlook on building a business has changed. Here are the lessons that helped to change it.
Lesson 1: Products Before Profits
My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Sure, it was great to make a profit, because that was what allowed you to make great products. But the products, not the profit, were the motivation.
- Steve Jobs from Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
Apple is truly a product company. The amount of thought they put into everything product they design and engineer is astounding. And it shows. Apple products are not only truly function, extremely easy to use, but they are also beautiful.
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They say the easiest person to sell to is someone that’s just made a purchase. This is why there are upsells and cross-sells, and why referrals work so well. So the question is how can you spot current buyers?
In retail it’s easy. If I made a purchase I’m walking around with a bag in hand. Yet still I have yet to notice a clerk spend more time with me or because of this.
With e-commerce sites buyers are also easy to spot – they just made a purchase. Amazon is the king when it comes to upselling. Because they know who purchased what items with what items they can make very good recommendations. They also provide personalized recommendations on their front page, which I see and peruse each time I return, which is often.
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So many blogs to read, so little time. So how do you decide which ones to read?
In two words: blog summaries.
Here’s the problem. If you’re anything like me you may have a ton of RSS feeds in your RSS reader. Perhaps you have the posts of a few choice blogs going straight to your inbox. Either way, over time the RSS feeds start to stack up and you quickly become inundated with unread items. As I write this Reeder tells me I have 718 unread items.
That’s just a few 
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Shock! Gasp! The horror! What did I just say?
That’s right my friend – blogging might not be your best option. In fact for some businesses, it may be a complete waste of time.
How do you know if blogging is for you, and what are the alternatives? Let’s take a look.
When Blogging Is Bad
Personally I’m a huge fan of blogging. It has been proven as one of the best ways to attract your ideal customers to your website. However having a blog that’s never updated, frankly, looks horrible. It’s like those dead corporate Facebook pages I read about.
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I’ve been self-employed since 2000 with a few full-time jobs here and there. I’ve owned two companies (currently on my third), sold two online applications, built hundreds more, had many clients including a division of Chrysler, and helped hundreds of business owners get more business. Along the way I got married, obtained my computer science degree and an MBA.
In that 12 years I’ve dealt with a lot of crap, some of my own doing:
- I stupidly signed a contract for a credit card machine that, in an ironic twist of fate, ruined my credit score for a few years.
- I had a subcontractor go behind my back to a client and almost ruin that relationship (it did ruin my relationship with the subcontractor)
- I had to fire one client for being a complete jerk to myself and my team, and then had to hire a lawyer to get the money we were owed
- I made one poor hiring decision that ate up all my profits for a year
Ah the joys of being an entrepreneur!
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SEO is a continuously evolving challenge for every business looking to attract and convert their customers online, which describes many businesses today. One of the latest updates to hit the radar is Google’s support of something called microformats. In this post I want to give you the skinny on microformats and let you know how to use them to future-proof your WordPress website for the future of SEO.
Micro…what?!
In short, microformats are markup on web pages that provide a much greater amount of information about what’s on that page. The best way to understand them is to look at an example. I’ll use the movie schema from Schema.org.
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I was speaking with a developer friend of mine here in Chiang Mai (Thailand) today and realized that I may have not been explaining very well what I am trying to do in terms of solving the “problem” of gaining value from an ever increasing Twitter community. Let me attempt to remedy that today.
At the end of the day we are all human.
When you sell a service, you are selling to a human. When you get a girlfriend or boyfriend you are forming a relationship with a human. When you write a highly SEO-optimized blog post, sure Google will read it, but a human will read it too.
When you tweet, a human will be reading that.
What I am trying to do by mining the tweets of my Twitter community has very little to do with stemming the flood of information. It’s much more basic than that.
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A huge thanks to everyone who shared their favorite Twitter tools on my last post about my mistake in unfollowing a ton of people on Twitter. You all provided a lot of great recommendations and it’s appreciated.
I checked out every tool I could access and found all of them lacking the deep insight I’m looking for.
So let me clarify in this post just what kind of information I’m looking for and how I’m starting to get it. I’ll keep the geekery to a minimum for the technophobes reading this.
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