Web site maintenance, website management and web consulting services

If I was asked to give you just one piece of advice to improve the way you market your business online, it would be this:

Install Google Analytics for your website, and learn how to use it.

I know it doesn’t sound like an earth-shattering revelation, but making this one small change to your site is going to provide you with more insight into the way people interact with you online than anything else you’ve tried in the past.

Get Google Analytics

Since it was released as a public service, I’ve been recommending Google Analytics as my website monitoring package of choice for a small business. Why? Well, for starters it’s free. And the amount of information you can get from just one report is simply mind-boggling.

Without even scratching the surface of what Google Analytics is capable of, you can use a typical report to determine:

• How many people visited your website last month.
• How many of them have been there before.
• What pages were the most popular, and how long people spent on each page.
• Where visitors came from.
• What terms people searched for on their favourite search engine to get to your site.

What could Google Analytics do for your business?

Armed with a fresh Analytics report, you can use the above information to make some startling revelations. For example:

1. Finding out that you are getting 1000 visitors a month to your site, but only generating one sales enquiry means that you aren’t converting prospects as well as you could be.
2. Finding out that 80% of your audience has been to your site before indicates that people are hungry for more information from you. Give it to them.
3. Discovering what people search for to find your website will give you an insight into what people actually want from a company like yours. Perhaps you can change your product offering to suit people’s requirements, or simply make some modifications to the way you present your products online.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

If you can find the discipline to spend an hour every month figuring out what people want from your company, it shouldn’t be too difficult to decide which changes need to be made to your website to improve the results you get.

Within a fairly short time, you’ll start noticing an increase in visitors and qualified sales leads. That’s not half bad for a piece of free software, is it?

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Photo by foshie

I’ve decided to change my comment links from no-follow to do-follow.

If you don’t know what this means, I can sum it up like this: Most often, when you leave a comment on a blog, that’s it. Even though your comment has a link to your website, Google won’t recognize that link, and you get no reward.

Conversely, with do-follow, you can leave a comment on my blog and I’ll reward you by sending you a tiny little bit of Google juice (that’s a good thing!). Now obviously a do-follow link is something other bloggers want, so while I’m expecting a few more people to comment, I’m also expecting a lot more spam.

Because I moderate all comments by people on my site, this means I spend time reading what you have to say. So in exchange I expect you to play by the rules. Here they are:

• Links to offensive sites. If you wouldn’t let your kids look at your site, I don’t want to know about it.
• Scraper site links. If you’ve decided that stealing content from other people just to make money, you don’t deserve my links. In fact, you deserve to be shot at dawn.
• General spam. I’m opening up my comments to do-follow in order to start a conversation. So posting a comment that reads ‘great post!’ doesn’t really do much for me. If you want to get published, write something worth reading.
• Very few parents name their kids “Make money online now!”, so don’t try keyword sniping in your comments. Unless you publish your real name, you won’t get my link.

So the question is, do you have anything to say?

2 comments. Join the club.

Imagine a world where clients tell you exactly what they’re thinking. In this world, your clients don’t hold back. They give you hell when you let them down. And they praise you (sometimes) when you do things right. If you’re at all interested in building a great company, this should sound like a great idea?

Now imagine that this supplier/client interaction takes place online, where anyone can see it. A quick search on Google will show exactly what people think of your company and your products. Not so keen any more, are you? Traditionally business people haven’t seen any point in airing dirty laundry. They try to fix problems with clients quietly, making sure nobody else hears about it. But things have changed since the birth of blogging. People who feel like ranting just rant. And if you’re not around to fix their problem as soon as they hit the ‘publish’ button, you’re probably going to take some serious flack.

If you’re a small business owner or manager, I recommend this approach. Instead of hiding from your clients online, give them an outlet. Start a company blog and ask your clients to give you feedback. You’ll need to be on your toes to keep things under control but it’s actually quite enjoyable once you get started. And your new blog will help your company in a number of ways. For example:

• As the company blogger, you can become a bit of a personality with your clients and suppliers. People like to hear a human voice.
• Sure your blog will attract some negative feedback from clients. But negative feedback can be harnessed and turned around into great PR if you deal with problems quickly.
• Publishing blog posts helps you get information out to your marketplace faster than your sales reps can.
• Building a community of clients online gives you instant permission to market to them (just don’t overdo it).
• Most blogging software has built-in systems to help you spread information, monitor feedback and gather the thoughts of your readers.

A good place to start is to research your competitors. Some of them may already be blogging. If they are, watch how they interact with their audience. You’ll soon see patterns emerging, like the number of RSS subscribers they have, the average number of comments each blog post attracts, the topics they write about and the tone of the writing.

If your competitors are blogging, join them. If they aren’t, start now before they do and get the advantage of being the first person in your industry with the guts to grow your business through public interaction.

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