Optimise your Facebook Business Page Using Google Analytics

Thu, 24th February, 2011 - Posted by - (0) Comment

Google Analytics statisticsGoogle analytics provides information about visitors to your website or blog and how they navigate. Insights gathered from Google Analytics enable you to optimise your online presence. Many business owners are aware of Google Analytics and use it on website and blog but not many use it on their Facebook Business pages.

With the increase in businesses and people using Facebook for marketing it follows that using Google Analytics on your Facebook business page is a must. There is no reason to treat your website any differently to your Facebook pages. To get the most from your investment in them, you need to know what your visitors are doing so you can make appropriate changes if necessary.

Facebook provides ‘Insights’ for your business page, these are useful but limiting. Statistics provided are limited to active users, daily likes, daily post views and daily post feedback.

Google Analytics provides a far more comprehensive set of information. Statistics will show specific page views, bounce rate and time spent on your site. You will learn where your visitors are located and which browser they use to find you. With all this knowledge you can optimise your pages and use to improve your marketing strategies. With all this knowledge you can change your website and Facebook pages to increase conversions and make more money online.

Google Analytics has built in automation so you can receive reports however often you like, direct into your Inbox. Then you can see where your visitors are spending there time and whether you need to alter pages to benefit from this information.

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Category : Facebook / Google / Social media marketing

Emails: read or shred and how to make a difference to open rates – pt.2

Thu, 10th February, 2011 - Posted by - (0) Comment

You can read part 1 of this post here. Below is the continuation – part.2

  • Email personalisation when used by companies gains higher order values than generic emails.
  • Campaigns can be aimed at specific customers increasing order value. Using a customer database to determine purchase history,demographic and channel behaviour allows you to personalise your emails and target your customers.
  • Using the name of the recipient in the subject line of your email almost doubles the ‘open’ rate. Using the name of your recipient in your email marketing gets their attention and increases open rates.
  • You can take the personalisation one step further by using where your customer lives in the subject line. There are plenty of tools available to automatically merge all the personal details together into a highly personalised email.
  • Because the name and subject line may be all your prospects/customers see in their Inbox, it’s important that first impressions get across as much as possible to achieve higher ‘open’ rates.

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    Category : e-mail marketing / TJConsulting news

    Pricing – the key to sales?

    Wed, 26th January, 2011 - Posted by - (0) Comment

    Image: jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.netPrice is key in your client/customers perception of your product.

    When you are trying to decide how much your product is worth, how your client/customer perceives your product goes a long way towards whether they make the decision to invest.

    Under price and your prospective clients/ customers may think that your product is inferior in some way to it’s competitors. Overprice and you could appear to be too expensive with no extras to warrant the cost.

    Many may equate low prices with a poor and inferior item or service. A little research into your market may gain you insight into what your clients/customers are willing to pay or expect to pay for a similar product.

    Your customers will regard your product as valuable if it solves a problem for them. Rarity and scarcity of a product and 100% no quibble guarantee can improve your sales and let you price your product at a higher level.

    If your pricing is too low you will find yourself working for very little revenue with no time or money to use to improve and develop your business. Get your pricing too high and you could lose out to your competitors when your prospective customers/clients deem that your product does not contain enough value for them to invest in.

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    Category : Financial management

    SEO: Website content optimisation tips

    Thu, 13th May, 2010 - Posted by - (0) Comment

    Guest post by Nichola Stott, the media flow

    In this fourth part of a series guide to search engine optimisation, we’re going to look at SEO considerations for content. It is extremely important that you are familiar with keyword research, and I would recommend reading part 3 of this series (Keyword Research) to help provide a solid foundation.

    Once you have identified your keywords you then need to implement them in the correct manner on your site, including in the user-facing content, and also the source code, or CMS for your site, (in the meta- data, header and other appropriate tags). Today we’re going to focus on content…

    It is important to ensure that the keywords you have identified feature in your content. I mean… why wouldn’t they? Having your keywords in your content is the most natural thing to do, providing you got the keyword research stage correct. Although this will contribute towards ranking your pages for the terms you have identified; most importantly this provides a consistent user journey and helps to assure visitors that your page is indeed relevant for the query they have initiated.

    Some SEO practitioners may advise you to consider and optimise your keyword density, (which is the number of times a keyword may be used in any given piece of content, expressed as a percentage of total content). Whilst having your keywords in your content is important, I would advise against this approach. Come on now – if all we had to do was drop your keywords a magic number of times then the web would be full of dull pages of auto-written crap. It’s not the 90’s anymore!

    I strongly urge you not to obsess about an optimum density, and instead focus on writing relevant and attractive content for your users.

  • Keep content relevant and snappy as the web is not the best medium for reading long pieces of wordy content
  • Do consider your keywords and make sure your main keywords are contained a handful of times in a relevant and meaningful way
  • Do not obsess about keyword density or you risk your content reading badly to humans (who are your customers after all.)
  • More on debunking the keyword density myth (amongst others)!

    Also check out this excellent piece on “promotional vs informative” copywriting, from web copywriting expert Angie Nikoleychuk.

    About the author: Nichola Stott is a highly regarded search and social media professional with over a decade of experience in online communications. Nichola is director and co-founder of theMediaFlow, a search and social media agency; and is a regular conference speaker and contributor to online industry media including Econsultancy, SEO Chicks and State of Search. You can contact Nichola on linkedin  or twitter.

    Category : SEO

    The benefits of using a Shopping Cart on your website

    Tue, 23rd February, 2010 - Posted by - (0) Comment

    If you decided to start selling information products from your website you need to decide on how you are going to automate the delivery of purchases to your customers. Information products offer a good way of converting your knowledge and expertise into products that can be sold online and offline regardless of the amount of hours you work every day. If you are trying to implement the 4-hours-working-week concept – you know that’s something that you need to do as soon as possible. You can then use social media marketing to promote your products.

    One option would be to integrate PayPal into your HTML/CSS website. It’s easy and cheap to do. Your payments will be securely processed by PayPal so you don’t need to worry about handling someone else’s card details. However the downside is that every time someone places an order for an ebook or a mp3 recording – you have to go online and send the customer the file or a link to download it. This will take time. And by no means the income, generated from such sales, can be called “passive”.

    The other option is to use a shopping cart. Whichever system you are using at the moment to manage your website – WordPress, Joomla, HTML – there is a way to integrate a shopping cart solution. Some are free (like ZenCart), for some you need to pay a regular monthly free (like 1shoppingcart). However the system will handle the whole purchasing process on your behalf – from listing the products to sending a Thank You message.

    The main benefits of a shopping cart over basic PayPal:

    • Easier to update – you can add products & categories via an online control panel, image resizing is done for you, download links are automatically created for each product;
    • Access it from anywhere – all you need is a web browser;
    • Multiple payment methods already integrated – you may be able to use PayPal, Worldpay etc.;
    • Automatic email notifications – you get notified of all new orders, your customers receive an automatic thank you message;
    • Statistics available online, all in one place;
    • You don’t need to have any technical knowledge of how to build a website;
    • You can create discounts, multiple purchase offers, use affiliate schemes, send promotional emails to get customers to return and buy again;
    • The purchase will get delivered automatically;
    • You can create content pages to fully integrate the shopping cart into your site (or make your site as a shopping cart);
    • The system will collate customers’ emails, so you can keep in touch and follow up;
    • In most systems you can send a newsletter to your customers or integrate it with e-newsletter systems like Aweber, MailChimp or Constant Contact.

    So very quickly you will be able to set up and manage your online store. All you need now is to finish off that e-book you were working on for a while.

    Category : e-commerce