Treat Your Blog Like A Business – Slides From San Diego WordCamp

Treat Your Blog LIke A Business - Monetization Strategies

Below are the slides from my San Diego WordCamp talk on “Treat Your Blog Like A Business”. I discussed a few common monetization strategies, and the ins n’s outs of each. My overall premise is that in most cases, monetization doesn’t just happen to you, you have to be prepared and have a strategy that will help you take advantage of opportunities that may arise. The more value you build with your blog, even before thinking of monetization, the better prepared you will be. Don’t wait until you actually want to make money before building an email list or developing your social networking efforts.

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How To Tell Google That You’re A Great Content Author

Google Authorship MarkupIn its continuing effort to keep low quality content out of its search results, Google announced this week that it would be supporting  “authorship markup”. Authorship markup is essentially a couple of specific pieces of code you can add to links that would designate you as the author of that content.

Google describes it as:

a way to connect authors with their content on the web. We are experimenting with using this data to help people find content from great authors in our search results.

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Get More Clients & Sell More Products with Effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

It’s true that there can be many confusing intricacies to the science of Search Engine Optimization, but what’s also true is that most people get tripped up on the basics, before they even get to the complex stuff! In working with many entrepreneurial and small business clients, I’ve come to see a few common trends in the way that people look at SEO and why they are often not getting the results they want. Improvement typically begins with some fundamental shifts in the way you think about the process.

1)   Forget Sex, Specificity Sells!
Lack of clarity about your business offerings and target market will lead to lack of clarity in your search marketing efforts and you will either attract clients that aren’t a good fit, or you will have trouble converting your web traffic. Your search engine strategy should be based on a clear picture of who your ideal client is and exactly what you can do for them. Then make sure that you are effectively communicating that on your website.

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Improve Your Site’s Effectiveness With Google Analytics Event Tracking

This post is a taste of  what’s to come in my forthcoming Google Analytics Ebook. Sign up to be notified of its launch and for a special promotional price.

Internal Link Tracking Using Google Analytics

On your blog or website you may have multiple links –such as icons or calls to action in different locations – leading to the same page, product or piece of content – but do you know which link placement and type is most effective?

Heatmap software and services such as CrazyEgg will give you this type of information in great detail and in a visual format. But there’s usually a cost involved and for a lot of cases it might be overkill if you just need simple comparisons. So while not as elegant, you can use Google Analytics to do some simple testing and comparison.

Warning – Don’t Use Link Tagging!

Google Analytics offers a link tagging feature  which allows you to label links with a referral source, and other tracking info. On first glance you might think you could simply use this to tag your internal links in a similar way. However link tagging is designed to track promotional campaigns with traffic coming from external sources. If you use it for internal links, you will screw up your data. If someone arrives at your site via a link from another site, this would be tracked in GA as a referring site. However if that visitor then clicks an internal link that you’ve tagged, it erases that referral source and replaces it with whatever you’ve used in your link tagging.

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Social Media and Online Marketing News Roundup – Week of 8/23

Perhaps the biggest news this week in the online world is that Seth Godin announced he is giving up on traditional book publishing and is going all-digital. Seth has the following and the leverage to make this an exciting development for digital publishing. This could be a big step in mainstreaming electronic publishing and changing the consumption of “books.” He has published 12 bestsellers in the traditional manner, so it’s possible he will be the reason some consumers start buying digital products.

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