Search Engines
Use of Web Analytics in Marketing
Every website owner absolutely needs to be routinely collecting web analytics and using them to perfect the site and engage in marketing campaigns. Almost all web servers provide a raw log file, usually generated nightly. You can use a web log analyzer to analyze those logs and provide you reports. Some web hosts provide web-based reports on traffic. Still other services provide web-based analytics and they collect their data from a small segment of javascript code which you embed into all of your pages. Google Analytics is my current favorite such service.
These services provide a LOT of information and much of it you might not know how you can use. Most people who are not into internet marketing usually browse these reports for the pertinent data: page views, visits, referrers, and leave much of the rest of it alone because you don’t really know what use it could be. But, in general, let’s look at how you can use these traffic reports to your benefit. Click Here To Continue Reading »
Time to Launch
There are two very distinct phases to a website: (1) Design and (2) Marketing. In my opinion, far too many people spend way too much time on #1 and not enough time on #2. That is easy to do. All of us want to have a website which looks great and functions the way we need it. Those of us who do it ourselves can go around in circles trying to make it absolutely perfect before launch. Those of you who do not know how to design and program a website will hire developers to do it for you. However, many web designers and developers know not the first thing about marketing the website. They simply design the site, hand it over to the client, and leave with check in hand. Simply put, no website, no matter how well programmed and designed, is going to matter if people are not visiting it. And simply launching a website by uploading it is not going to attract anybody. So, the question is: how do you launch a website and actually get people to come to it? Click Here To Continue Reading »
The Use of Landing Pages
Landing pages are a great way to not only get the most bang for your advertising buck, but also more accurately track the effectiveness of ads or ad copy. Landing pages are essentially a web page to which people click from an outside link. It is the page they land on when they arrive on your site. Obviously, your site homepage is probably your most popular landing page. However, you can create customized landing pages and then point external links to different landings in order to more accurately track where your visitors are coming from. By tracking page views on your different landing pages, you can tell where your traffic is coming from. So, let’s say you have active advertising on Google Adwords, Yahoo, and maybe you’re running a campaign with Tribal Fusion. You want to know which option is working the best and use that information to better balance your advertising dollars to get the most bang. You also want to know which specific keywords and banners with Google Adwords are producing the most results. Set up each banner to link to a different landing page. Click Here To Continue Reading »
What Did Google Do Right?
When I was in Russia recently, I didn’t have much to do over there. I spent some time in Korkino, a very small village in central Russia. For a guy who is used to a lot of activity and the hi-tech life (I guess I can call it that), I found myself more than a little bored sometimes. One of the several books I read there was “The Google Story”, by David A. Vise. Its a great book for those interested in the formation of Google. It takes you from the initial days of Google (starting as the college project of a couple of guys), to the formation of the company, the eventual IPO, and to the present. As a guy running my own business online, it is interesting to see what went in to creating a company with the size, success and repute of Google.
Obviously, all of the decisions made in the history of Google is enough to fill, well, a book. However, one of the key things stood out to me and it was a founding state of mind put forth by the two founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. What did they do right? They kept their eye keen on their valuable final product and on what the entire business was all about – search. No matter what came up, it was all looked at through the lens of whether it would make the search engine better or not. Click Here To Continue Reading »
I'm David Risley. I've been making my living as a blogger for over a decade. Blogging is my business and how I support my family. With this blog, I'm just gettin' REAL and telling you how this business works. 
