thinkdave.com website maintenance services

When Robert Burns said ‘The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry’, he must have been thinking about me. I had planned to write 5 new posts on thinkdave.com last week. Instead, life intervened and I didn’t write a thing - but you probably already noticed that.

To make amends for my poor service, I’ll be writing lots of interesting articles in the next few days. For starters, I’ve planned a nice little list of 5 Internet marketing tools that actually work for Monday’s reading pleasure.

Because getting a website to and from the Web is so important, I’ll be writing 2 beginner articles (on Tuesday and Thursday) to help you understand the process. And I’ll be introducing you to a great free tool to help you upload and download your website.

Speaking of free, I’ve been kicking around yet another idea about Google and how it can help micro businesses grow online. This article, planned for Wednesday, will save you time and money, so don’t miss it.

And finally, I’ll be wrapping up the week with another 10 free inbound links to help you raise your search engine ranking.

All in all it sounds like a good week on thinkdave.com. Personally I’m looking forward to it. So let the games begin! I just had to get an Olympics reference in there somewhere.

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?

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?