The post did well: 100+ Tweets, 50+ comments (half mine), and Michael even told me, “when I saw it, I was like, this is what I like.”

One reason that post did well was because I followed the advice in the post (with the exception of #5).

Another reason it did well is because I followed up with many of the 10 blog post marketing steps that I want to tell you about today.

1. Schedule Instead of Publish

I always schedule rather than publish because scheduling gives me one last chance to look over the post.

I also schedule my posts to be published at midnight for three reasons:

1. So the published on time is 00:00. I’m a little OCD about it.
2. So it has the maximum number of hours with the current date.
3. So it has a few “live-hours” before Feedburner/Aweber emails out between 7am-9am. This gives it a chance to have a few Tweets, Likes and comments before it gets emailed out.

2. Read it Again

Immediately after your post is published, read it again. You should’ve already looked it over for grammar. Now is the time to look for ways to improve the final post.

If you don’t enjoy spending a few minutes reading your post one last time, then you probably didn’t do a very good job of writing it.

It’s like fixing up an old car. Once it’s complete, if you don’t spend at least a few minutes admiring it, then you know you could’ve done better.

3. Tweet it Out

Simple enough, eh?

I don’t use any auto-tweeting tools because I like to adjust the tweet and I like to be able to say, “hey world… I just now finished this post. Come be one of the first to see it.”

4. Share on Facebook

Facebook, on the other hand, is a bit more strategic.

When you publish your blog posts on your personal profile, understand that those people are primarily your friends and family. They probably don’t care too much about the content of the post but they will be interested in the fact that you wrote it. So when you add the comment to the link, include something a bit more personal.

When you post your link on your Facebook page, know that these are people who have “Liked” your blog/brand/company. So here, add a comment mentioning the benefit of taking a few minutes to read the post.

It’s important to share the article on both your personal profile and Facebook page at the same time because people who follow both are more likely to see it. It’s the same reason you’re starting to see the links that multiple friends recommend.

5. Set Up Automatic Pinging

If you’re unfamiliar with pinging, there are a number of sites and platforms (including Google, Yahoo!, and Technorati) that allow you to automatically notify, or “ping,” them when your site is updated with new content.

If you’re using WordPress, it’s easy to set up.

From your WordPress dashboard, go to Settings > Writing and scroll down to Update Services.

In that box, copy and paste these URLs:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.twingly.com/

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://www.bloglines.com/ping

http://ping.feedburner.com/

http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/

http://www.octora.com/add_rss.php

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://www.wasalive.com/ping/

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://ping.myblog.jp

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://bblog.com/ping.php

I’ve gathered this collection of pinging services over the last three years. Let me know if I’m missing any.

6. Email Broadcast

Assuming you’ve started to build your email list, email out your blog post to people who have signed up for your blog updates.

You can simply write up and send out an email with a short introduction and link to the post.

Or, depending on your email marketing service, you can automate this step.

I use Aweber’s Blog Broadcast function and integrate it with Feedburner. This way, every time I update my blog, my list automatically gets an email with the blog post between the hours of 7am-9am. I chose that time so it’s sitting at the top of their inbox when they start their computer in the morning.

If you’d like to know how to set up the Aweber Blog Broadcast function, let me know in the comments.

7. Link from Old Posts

Last week I talked about interlinking by adding links to old posts before you publish a new post. You can also do the opposite.

If you’re doing a good job of optimizing and writing evergreen content, then your old posts will continue to get traffic. An easy way to get traffic to a brand new post is to dig into your archives and link from a few relevant posts to the new post with the keyword as the anchor text.

It counts as a link and a trackback. If you’re struggling to get that first comment, consider doing this because the default settings in WordPress count trackbacks as comments. I’ve found that people are more likely to comment if they see other comments.

8. Link from Other Sites

About a year ago I was considering starting a new blog by taking an existing blog and putting it on a new domain. I asked Michael for his opinion and he told me that it’s nice to have two high-traffic sites (his being IncomeDiary.com and Retireat21.com).

One reason that it’s nice to have multiple sites is that you can link between them.

Whenever I publish a post on my new blog, I search the archives of my old blog for relevant articles until I find at least one chance to link to the new blog post.

This adds a trackback, adds a link, increases traffic, and strengthens the structure of my mini network of sites.

9. Submit it to Article Directories

If you’re serious about blogging and would like to boost your SEO, consider submitting your posts to article directories.

Here’s the process:

1. Rewrite your post so it’s new content.
2. Submit it to a few article directories (EzineArticles, ArticlesBase, GoArticles, and ArticleDashboard).
3. Include a link back to the original article or one of your article directory articles.

This process takes awhile so it doesn’t make sense to do it for every post. Once a post starts getting a fair amount of search traffic, consider going through this process to boost it even higher.

10. Reply to First Comment

The first comment is the hardest to get, unless you have a site like IncomeDiary. So you want to reward that commenter by replying to their comment as soon as you can. This does two things:

1. Rewards the first commenter.
2. Shows other commenters that you listen which encourages them to leave comments as well.

For me, I choose to reply to almost every comment simply because I like answering questions and interacting with smart people. It takes a fair amount of time, but I enjoy your comments.

If this post helped you at all or taught you something new, I’d like to know. Leave a comment below and you’ll likely see my reply within a day.

Image by: Stuck in Customs

It’s a valid question, so why don’t you put more thought into it?

You hear having a Facebook Page, being on Twitter, and writing a blog are all great supplements for your business.

You’ve set each of these things up, and even craft what you think is pretty good content, but still…

No one shows.

Believe it or not, your customers aren’t just “out there” floating around in the ether of the Internet. In fact, they might be closer to you than you think. You just have to start being a little more strategic about where you find them.

1. Go Down The Rabbit Hole

Everyone including your grandmother has a Facebook.

If they’re a little more savvy, they’ll also have a Twitter, and maybe even a secret Tumblr blog.

But what are the other lower-profile sites that are hiding your customers?

I’m not talking about the really well-hidden, backchannel type places (not exactly, anyway).  Instead I’m talking about social platforms developed specifically for a smaller group of people.

I’m talking specialized forums, blogs, and ::shudder:: yes, maybe even a celebrity gossip site.

It’s not always intuitive to seek these places and join in, but that’s exactly what you need to do in order to set up camp among the folks you need to talk to and hear from.

Don’t just rely on the top three-to-five biggest social platforms to be sufficient. Seek out your customers in the other places they’re active.

If you sell lighting equipment, find photography forums.
If you sell car parts, interact with car enthusiasts on Twitter.
If you sell Facebook Pages, get active website design blogs…

See where I’m going with this?

2. Stalk People

It’s 75% research and 150% practice.

If you’re trying to catch the eye of key players in your field, you need to know who they are and where they hang.

You also need to know how they interact with each other and how they expect to be spoken to. It seems simple, but if they’re not the type to call people “dude,” and you approach them with, “duuuude!” you look like a moron.

Use Twitter to “spy” on key influencers. Watch their tweets and get a feel for their sense of humor, their workload, and most importantly places where you might be able to offer a hand.

Many influential people will vent their frustrations, or make an offhand joke about something on Twitter, so if you’re able to either A.) offer help or B.) make them laugh, that’ll go a long way in building a relationship with them.

Same goes for your customers, at any given time you should be monitoring for “Keywords” that are related to your product or service.

Lend a hand to someone in need. (without being spammy!) Use what you find in their previous tweets to get a feel for them. Do this enough and you’ll begin to identify your “ideal” customers, so you can work only with people who you will enjoy working with.

3. Be nice to the “Little Guy”

There are no “little guys,” there are just differing levels of success.

Don’t expect that you’ll only ever need to speak to the major figures in your niche: networks are full of guys like you, and guess what? They’re the ones who make you a success.

Never forget that without the support of the average joe, there would be no big names, no key players. So, don’t be a jerk just because you don’t recognize someone’s name right away.

4. Shut Up, Just Listen

Before you start pushing content in your new networks, learn to listen.

There are tools available to help you scan the “chatter” of the internet – feed readers, alerts, keyword filters, etc.

Finding and utilizing tools that aggregate fresh content for you means you’re as well-informed as possible.

You can find and absorb content from others in your field, keep an eye on key players, and locate content belonging to other contributors that you don’t mind sharing.

Listening is always more important than self promotion. You can push content on others all day long and be ignored, or you can catch the eye of the folks whose attention you want, by re-sharing their information and helping them on their way.

5. Share Others, But Be Selective

Some folks will start following you before you’ve even said anything.

Others engage with you only if you’re a team player. No one will like you if you spend all your time massaging your ego… don’t be that guy.

Be a team player by interacting with other people’s work. Retweet it, share the link, “like” it, post it in a forum… you get the idea. Be vocal in your encouragement of other folks’ work.

Show them that you’re not just here to push your work down their throats.

When you do share, do it selectively. Three email blasts a day is too much… sometimes one a day is too much if your other conversations are lagging.

And furthermore, while you’re sharing selectively, be thorough.

If you’re going to talk about your own content, make sure you’re alerting everyone at close to the same time.

There are tools at your disposal, such as an RSS feed, that can be plugged into various profiles or networks so that your message is thoroughly saturating your networks without overdoing it.

If your RSS has posted on your behalf, don’t follow it up immediately with your own personal version.

Let your tools work for you so you can focus on building important relationships.

Bonus: Be Yourself

You have to interact.

You wouldn’t buy a cellphone from a salesman who stares at you blankly while you’re asking questions out loud in the store. So why would expect your customers to do the same?

There are literally thousands if not millions of articles on how to make money online using social media to assist in growing your business. What it really all comes down to is having a network of people who’s lives are better from knowing you. And in order to know you, you must be active.

Enrich people’s lives and help them acheive their goals, and they will remember you forever.

Try to push them into buying stuff from you, and you’re as easily forgotten as everyone else who tries to do the same.

No amount of tips, tricks or tactics can teach you how to be a good person, that you have to find within.

But the tips in this article will assist you to find the right people so you don’t end up staring at the computer screen waiting for money to appear.

What do you think? Anything I missed?

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

As people get started with blogging, they think it’s as simple as clicking, “Add New Post,” typing up a few paragraphs, and clicking, “Publish.”

Then they hopelessly wait for views, comments, and tweets. No one comes. No one comments. No one tweets.

They do this three or four times and eventually write off blogging as, “not it’s all hyped up to be.”

After writing for Michael for a few months now, I can tell you that there are dozens of small blogging nuances that we work into nearly every post.

Here are 10 of the most popular SEO blog post publishing steps that bloggers tend to forget.

1. Keyword Research

Before I write a single word, I figure out if it’s something that people are asking about. And if they are, I want to know if the internet is already saturated with that type of content.

To figure this out, I do two things:

1. Google’s Keyword Tool – I look up the words I believe people would search for to find the post I plan on writing.
2. Google – I google those keywords to see the actual competition.

By now, I can look at a series of search results and determine how well I’ll be able to rank for a keyword.

I want this post to rank for “seo blog post publishing steps” (click to see how it’s doing).

For more clarification on this tip, read this comment below.

2. Fine-Tuning the Headline

Here’s my formula for crafting headlines for list posts:

[#][keyword][ curiosity-capturing phrase]

For title tag SEO, your goal is to place the keyword as near to the front of the headline as possible:

• Top 10 Motivational YouTube Videos for Entrepreneurs
• 20 Great Google Chrome Extensions for Online Entrepreneurs
• 20 Best Designed Pricing Comparison Tables

For that last one, I switched the keyword with the curiosity phrase because “Best Designed” was another phrase that people tack on to the base keyword.

3. Post Slug

The post slug is what shows up after the domain for every post or page.

When you type a headline, WordPress generates the post slug by placing every word in the headline into the slug. This clutters it up with lots of small words.

Instead, change your post slug to your primary keyword.

Default: IncomeDiary.com/10-seo-blog-post-publishing-steps-that-most-bloggers-forget/

Ideal: IncomeDiary.com/seo-blog-post-publishing-steps/

4. Images

We all know that images grab your attention, break up the content, and supplement your ideas. But they also add great SEO benefits, as long as you follow these steps:

1. Save your images as [keyword-phrase.png] before you upload them to your site.
2. Add alt text as [keyword phrase].
3. Add title tag as [keyword phrase].

These rules apply to your featured image and the images within your posts. For the images within the content, however, use other similar and relevant keywords.

5. Relevant Videos

Google understands that adding a video to a blog post makes it a more complete resource. If they haven’t already boosting blog posts with videos, they will eventually.

If blogging is a big portion of your business, start making videos for your posts, upload them to your channel, and embed them in the actual post.

If you’re still dabbling in blogging, consider embedding other peoples’ videos in your posts.

6. Subheads

Similar to images, subheadings break up the content and make blog posts easier to read. They also have big-time SEO benefits.

When a search engine robot hits a page, it reads the headline/title tag first. Then it reads the H2, H3, and H4 tags.

When you add subheadings to your content, proper HTML is:

<h2>Subhead Level 1</h2>

<h3>Subhead Level 2</h3>

<h4>Subhead Level 3</h3>

Note: The headline/title tag should be automatically wrapped in <h1></h1>.

So… Stop simply bolding and italicizing your subheads.

7. Interlinking

Another important step that most people forget is interlinking between posts.

Before you publish a new post, read through it and try to find two-three opportunities to naturally link back to relevant posts on your blog.

This keeps both readers and search spiders on your site longer.

8. External Linking

Also, look for opportunities to link to other bloggers. The SEO benefits of external linking are unclear, but Neil Patel says:

“Did you know that an external links going out to these high authority sites can boost your SEO? When search engines crawl your site and see a link and follow it to CNN or Huffington Post, they weight it as a positive. The trick is to find organic ways to link to these sites, like I did in this post.”

Linking to other sites is also a good way to build relationships with other bloggers.

I’ve received two “thank you” emails from important people because I chose to link to their sites on IncomeDiary posts.

I linked to Pat’s site on: 10 Blog Posts that Made an Everlasting Impact on Me

I linked to Giancarlo’s site on: 10 Weird Ways Big Companies Make Money Online

Bloggers notice and appreciate backlinks.

9. Meta Data

Whether or not Google still looks at meta keywords is up for debate, but the meta description is definitely still used.

In a search result, your meta description often shows up as the little blurb beneath the blue link. In writing your meta description, you need to keep three things in mind:

1. It needs to be fewer than 155 characters so Google will display the whole description.
2. It needs to include your keywords because Google bolds them in search results.
3. It should be an actual sentence from the post because people look for that sentence once they arrive.

I always summarize the post with the keywords in the last sentence of the introduction and use that as the meta description.

10. Call to Action

The final step is the call-to-action. As with any piece of marketing material, a blog post should be designed to get someone to do something.

Here are a few popular calls to action:

1. Comment – You can encourage people to comment by ending the post with a thought-provoking question or simply asking them to let you know what they think.
2. Share – “If you liked this post, tweet it out.”
3. Implement – I believe the best result of any blog post is for a reader to take your advice and implement it.

The main reason I’ve been following IncomeDiary for so long is because I constantly find myself implementing Michael’s advice. When I see the benefits to following his advice, it makes me want to come back for more.

Now you have a choice. You can comment, share, or implement. I prefer if you implement, but I’ll appreciate all three.

Image by: Stuck in Customs

How Alerts Work

Every time Google sees something that it thinks is significant, then they create an alert, which matches up with the websites time-line of traffic. These alerts range from boost in traffic, and time on site, to location of visitors and traffic sources. If you don’t want to look through all of your Analytics everyday then I suggest that you use the intelligence to alert you to what’s going on instead. When you open up the Intelligence section, it should look something like this.

The alerts that you’re seeing on the time-line at all alerts set by Google with what they deem to be significant. These alerts can start to add up, so if you want to make sure that you only see much more relevant information, you can change the sensitivity slider down to low. This will remove the results that are not especially important, although it won’t delete them, it’ll just hide them. Unlike setting goals, or combining your Adsense earnings with Analytics, you don’t have to set anything up for this to work, nor do you have to wait to start seeing results as it will show you all of the results from the past too. When I adjust the sensitivity slider to low, this is what my results look like.

Sliding this far along the slider is quite extreme, but relevant to show you the difference – I usually have it set somewhere around the middle where the mix of results are more relevant. Below are the results that you see when you click on one of the bars containing alerts. As you can see, at this end of the scale, the results are quite extreme, and results such as source information and visitor location have been taken away. It’s all about what you’re interested in seeing, and how relevant they are to your website. I personally don’t have too much need to know any more about the location of my visitors.

So far, we’ve been viewing these results on a daily basis, but you can also view them on a weekly or monthly basis too. This doesn’t combine all of the data into a week’s worth of information, it changes how Google will look at what is significant. A large boost in traffic from Mexico one day may have been relevant on a daily basis, but when you look at one week and compare it to another, it may not longer be deemed significant. Looking at the results on a weekly or monthly basis become as relevant as daily views for you when your website gets older. I would always recommend tracking the website on a daily basis, but checking at the end of each week and month on those basis’s too is a good idea.

What the Alerts Track

To look closer at the results that Google provide me with, I’m looking at the day with with most amount of alerts, with a total of 14. There was a small spike in traffic on this day, but it was mostly from the aftermath of a much larger spike in traffic. This did provide me with a couple traffic alerts telling me that my percentage of new visits was up by over 40% and because of the increase in traffic who were being linked to a single page, my bounce rate also went up by 15%, providing me with a second alert.

All this new traffic produced further results such as a decreased time on site and boosts in traffic from certain locations. Google does exactly what we’ve come to expect and breaks this down into easy to read information, referencing the result it was expecting for the day. Not only was I provided with relevant information on what was going on with my visitors, but it was further broken down by location. I had two alerts for United States and they were grouped together with an increase in visitors, but a decrease in time on site.

The final bit of information that I was provided with was the Traffic and Content alerts, which told me where my traffic was coming from, along with how long they were staying on the page. I can see from my alerts that both Reddit and StumbleUpon picked up on my link and I received an increase of traffic and time on site respectively. This is all very nicely laid out for me in this easy to read intelligence section, without having to do any confusing looking around. The Content information even went so deep as to not only tell me which page was the most popular, but which landing and exit pages had an increase in time on site.

How to use this New Information

If you’ve read my recent article on Custom Reporting and Advanced Segments, then you’ll understand the extra control and knowledge they can provide if used properly. Google understands the uses better than any of us, and that’s why they’ve added the ‘Create segment’ link at the end of most of the alerts that you see above. We can use this new information that we’ve found through our alerts to study the traffic in more detail and provide us with better results and knowledge.

Say for example, I notice one day in my alerts that my Facebook time on site has gone up, I may want to track this further and more often in the future. I click on the Create Segment at the bottom and I’ll be taken to an Advanced Segment page, where all I have to do is add any other metrics I may be interested in, name it and save it. Even though the alert was referring to the increased time on site, the segment is still only going to show a single parameter referring to the source. This is because we can examine all the future information by saving the segment and using it in the dashboard as our only traffic source under the segment section in the top right-hand corner.

How to use Custom Alerts

When you’re in the Intelligence section, click on ‘+ Create A Custom Alert’ on the right hand side to take you to the right page. You create these alerts similarly to how you would an Advanced Segment. You first select whether you would like the traffic to apply to the Day, Week or Month, and then whether you’d like to be alerted by email for these. I select yes, as I like to know straight away when something is happening on my website so that I can act accordingly. Next, you select conditions from the drop down menus for whatever you would like to test. I’ve gone for the source of Facebook.com and asked it to alert me when the % of traffic from them is more than 50% greater than the day before. It’s up to you to experiment with this and find one that suits your traffic, I may find in a few days that 50% is too low.

When you take the added functionality of the intelligence reports, and combine that with advanced segments and custom alerts, you can produce a lot of very useful information from this feature. This is a quite advanced feature for Google Analytics and if you’re having trouble then I suggest you go back and read my post on Google Analytics and my post on Custom Reports and Advanced Segments to get a better idea of how this all works.

In fact, a 2010 report from Cisco stated that 30% of Internet traffic is video – and that number is only getting bigger and bigger. They project that video will account for a ridiculous 90% of Internet traffic by 2013.

So how can your blog get a slice of that big video pie?

How to Use Video to Increase Blog Traffic

Blogs thrive on quality content – and since video is so dynamic and engaging, adding it to your posts can help make your content more exciting and shareable.

Since video search ranking is less competitive than traditional search, posting a how-to video can bring in more visitors from search engines as well.

But if you’re posting videos that are too long, too dull, or that don’t offer anything more than a written post, you’re actually doing your blog and your readers a disservice.

Three Types of Effective Video Blog Posts

Tutorials

When you’re explaining something that visual or auditory, words alone can be clumsy and confusing. Anyone who has tried to follow an instruction manual knows this all too well.

But with a video tutorial, you can show people exactly how something is done – whether that means recording video of you building a table or capturing video of your computer screen to demonstrate how to create a website.

Not only are video tutorials more valuable to your readers, they can also be easier to make than a lengthy written tutorial.

Example:

Interviews

Interviewing people who’ve found success in your blog’s niche is a tried and true tactic. Not only do interviews offer fresh perspective and valuable advice, they give you an excuse to meet interesting people.

While posting text or audio from the interview is great, recording and posting video (whether in person or over Skype) is almost as good as being right there in the same room as the interviewee.

Example:

Entertainment

If you’ve got a creative streak in you, video is a great way to let it show.

You don’t have to be an expert video editor. Some simple ways to make a fun video are using stop-motion or time-elapse footage.

Strike the right chord and your video could go viral.

Example:

Note:

All the views in the world don’t mean much if nobody’s actually visiting your site. If you’re planning on people watching your video on YouTube or Facebook, it’s essential that your video ends with a call to action and incentive for the viewer to visit your blog.

Don’t make the video content the end of the story. If people find your video elsewhere like on YouTube or embedded on another site, you must provide them with a means and incentive to reach your blog.

Write some related content that you can dangle before viewers at the end of the video, so that they’ll have an incentive to go visit your site. In the above example, the video directs to a post called, 21 Life Lessons from Steve Jobs.

Video Advantage #1 – Shareable

Video posts are more socially viral than their written counterparts.

When you share a standard blog post on Facebook, what you’re really sharing is a picture, a title, and a link.

When you share a video post on Facebook, you’re sharing much more: with one click, people can begin watching and benefitting from your content. This makes a video post a very potent tool on the world’s most popular social network, because people who otherwise wouldn’t bother to follow the link may well click play.

How to Use Video to Increase Product Sales

If you’ve been to many sales pages lately, you know that the best ones feature a video front and center.

Video simply increases conversion: an April 2010 report from Internet Retailer stated that consumers who watch a product video are 85% more likely to buy.

A video is a 24-hour salesperson:  all a shopper has to do is press play and they’re immediately hearing and seeing about everything that makes your product great.

Selling Your Product through Video

While the videos on your posts can be a bit amateur, a sales page video must reflect the professionalism and quality that you want people to associate with your product.

That doesn’t mean that the video has to be flashy. Many videos on sales pages are nothing more than a human voice and some simple background text – a little dull even by the standards of a PowerPoint presentation.

The point isn’t to entertain the viewer or to wow them with special effects. Instead, the goal of your video should simply be to enumerate the features, advantages, and benefits of your product in a straightforward and honest way.

Video Advantage #2 – Easy

To read a web page, one must be active – reading paragraph after paragraph while scrolling downward.

But once they’re watching a video they must actually be active to stop watching.

This is a huge advantage on your sales page because half of the battle is just communicating your full message before the potential customer decides to bail.

Video Advantage #3 – Persuasive

When somebody is watching a video, they’re using a different part of their brain than when they’re reading – and while that part of the brain is very spatially intelligent, it’s not quite as good at coming up with rational arguments.

This is why television commercials feature so many supermodels. Though our rational minds would never think, “If I drink more Coca-Cola, I’m going to be more attractive, like those people,” our visual minds make an association between healthy, beautiful people and the bottle of Coke.

People are easier to persuade when they’re watching a video than they are when they’re reading text.

Example: Pop Up Domination

To see a simple but effective sales video in action, check out this page for Income Diary’s very own PopUp Domination.

How to Use Video to Build a Stronger Brand

The world’s biggest brands have been promoting themselves with video since the first television commercial aired in 1941.

Ever since, video has been the primary platform for the development of major brands. Just think of all of the striking logos, talking animals, memorable taglines, and catchy jingles you’ve seen.

Video and Your About Page

The about page is every blogger’s best opportunity to establish their all-important personal brand.

People read your blog posts because they want to be instructed, engaged, or entertained – but they visit your about page because they want to know more about you.

So even if you don’t want to post video regularly, you should consider creating or commissioning a video for your about page. It will give visitors the impression that your website is a professional place, dedicated to providing quality content – and it can help forge a personal connection with your audience.

Advice for Branding through Video

Instead of reciting goals and data, try telling people your company’s story.

It’s a good idea to put your logo at the beginning and end of each of your video, to keep your brand at the forefront of the viewer’s mind.

Ideally, you’ll create an audio signature to go with your logo. It can be simple as a short melody or sound effect – anything that can get stuck in your head.

Video Advantage #4 – Personal

When we meet a person for the first time, the actual words that they say take a backseat to everything that they’re “saying” with their tone of voice, facial expression, and body language.

It’s all of these hard-to-describe visual and auditory cues that make up our first impression and allow us to begin connecting with somebody at a personal level.

So when you put a video on your about page, you’re inviting your readership to understand a little bit more about what it would be like to know you in real life. When people start seeing you as an actual person, they’re more likely to start seeing you as a friend – and that’s when loyalty and community can really blossom.

Ready to Feature Video on Your Blog?

I hope that this article has you motivated to utilize video to help your website reach its full potential.

If you have any questions about web video, don’t hesitate to ask below and I’ll do my best to respond.

Sharebar – Social Media Slider

This plugin is actually the inspiration for this blog post, as we’ve been getting a lot of people asking us about it, and how we set it up. The one that I use on ExpertPhotography is called Sharebar, but there other version such as Digg Digg, which is used on this site. They all do roughly the same thing though. They allow your readers to select the social media that they would like to share your content though, which makes it much easier for them, and encourages them to do so. I’m sure you’ve probably noticed that it slides up and down the page as you’re browsing, so it stands out, and you know where to find it if you want to share anything.

Since starting my Twitter marketing, I’m always annoyed when a photography website doesn’t have this plugin, because it means that I have to go looking for a share button, which you shouldn’t have to do when you’re effectively doing them a favour. Having this plugin, as apposed to no plugin at all, makes a huge difference, which I notice immediately. You can add your @profile to the end of the tweets, so that TweetDeck will alert you when someone tweets your content, and as soon as my plugin was installed, I started receiving a lot more alerts. This means that more people are seeing my website, as well as my Twitter account, where if they follow me, there’s a very good chance they’ll see my site again.

Tweet Old Post

I installed this plugin on a whim, thinking that it wouldn’t really do much, but it couldn’t hurt. I had all my latest content set up to tweet through TweetAdder, but nothing set up to encourage people to view my older pages, most of which I consider to be lost in the archive. You can change the settings to include links, add additional text, how many it posts a day, and much more, you can even select the URL shortener.

So, from 5 minutes of work, you can have all of your older posts contribute to your twitter marketing, and start sending you considerable traffic if you have a strong following. My following has grown to over 3500 in just a few months, and it’s continuing to grow, as well as sending people to my Facebook. Facebook insights showed me exactly how successful my linking to the Facebook was when I looked at my Insights, it said that within 1 month, 635 people had come to my page, just from my regularly tweeting about it.

Facebook Social Plugin

This is a plugin that almost every decent blog has, or at least a variation of it. The official Facebook version is probably a bit better than the one than most, but less in keeping with my theme. The official version is a large square box to attract the readers attention, with details on how many people like the Facebook page, as well as some of the names and faces of those who like it. There’s also an option to click ‘Like’ right there on the page, without having to go through to Facebook, which I think is a real advantage to the alternatives as readers are more likely to click on it if they don’t have to leave the page. I switched to this plugin just recently, and I’m already noticing a big difference in the amount of likes that I’m receiving. 

PopUp Domination

I can’t really talk about ways to get more traffic to your site, without talking about PopUp Domination. As many of you well know, PopUp Domination has been proven to increase your subscribers by 429%, by using a simple, but good looking light-box solution that pops up when a new visitor arrives on your site. It’s intrusive enough to get their attention, but designed well enough so that it’s clearly part of the website and not an unrelated advert. This is the only plugin on the list that you actually have to pay for, but over 8000 people already have, and that’s a lot of happy customers. The product is only $47 dollars, and if you’re not happy with it, you can have your money back within 60 days. Building a list is a very important step to making money online, because you can start to contact people directly who are interested in what you have to sell.

Show Top Commentators

This plugin in a great way to encourage people to comment more often, because it starts to rank those who comment the most. It could be easily compared to becoming the major or somewhere in Foursquare, or karma on Reddit; it doesn’t mean anything, and you can’t do anything with it, but people want it anyway. You link the names, and website if they input it, along with the number of comments in your sidebar. This is a good way to grow your reader interaction, and make people want to come back to your site more than once. This isn’t a plugin that I currently use, because I think it would work better with a website with a stronger following, but I can see myself using this in a couple months.

Post to Twitter

Post to Twitter is a plugin that takes any content that you post on WordPress and then posts it to Twitter, which immediately notifies all of your followers. This sort of automation is accepted on Twitter, but not Facebook, because the number of updates per day is a lot higher than Facebook. Posting to Facebook is something that needs to be done manually because Facebook can detect what program is used to post, and that distances the fan from the post when they know that a machine wrote it. I’ve recently started to post less of other peoples material on my Twitter, and more about myself so that I can use it for traffic now, rather than growth of the Twitter page.

Facebook Comments for WordPress

This is a plugin that I’ve been meaning to get installed because of the way it works with Facebook, as well as WordPress. Besides the fact that it makes it way easier for people to comment on a post, it also means that they can share what they’ve commented to their Facebook page with the ‘post to Facebook’ function. By clicking on this function, it enables the readers to share their opinions in their Facebook feed, which is also sharing your website with all of their friends. By making it easier for them to comment, you’re actually helping people to find your website where they wouldn’t have before. The image below is from the black theme, but it’s also available in white. 

All in One SEO Pack

This is one among the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress. It’s incredibly easy to use and works with most WordPress plugins by automatically generating META tags and optimizing your titles for search engines. It’s been downloaded more than 9 million times, making it one of the most popular WordPress plugins for SEO. It takes a lot of the hard work out of the equation, and doesn’t rely on you knowing the sort of knowledge that professional SEO guys know, to start getting good results. This is the sort of plugin that everyone should put on their blog if they’re trying to get a better response with Google, because Google is hard to understand, so it’s easier to leave it up to someone else who understands better than you.

WordPress SEO by Yoast

This has got to be one of my favourite SEO plugins because it allows you to check how search engine friendly your content is, before you actually post it. You’re provided with a preview of what your post will look like in Google, and then you can input focus keyword(s) to see how many times they throughout the post, title, URL, etc. You can then change how the title appears in Google, as well as the description too, meaning that you can takes steps to make your content more SEO friendly, and make people want to click on them. All of this is edited from the post editor page, and it just becomes a part of how you finish up your posts, along with tags, excerpt, category and featured image.

upPrev Previous Post Animated Notification

This plugin was designed to emulate the “Next Post” buttons you see once you scroll to the bottom of New York Times web articles, and it’s the exception in this post. This isn’t about getting more traffic to your post, it’s a way of making someone stay on your site for longer, by clicking on more pages. I included this because I started to use it, and found that I was getting really good results and wanted to share with others. When a visitor reaches the bottom of the page, the preview will pop up for the next post in that particular category, and if you have your categories laid out well, you can greatly increase the amount of time that a visitor will spend on your site. The preview looks very professional, and the popup action attracts the readers attention without being too intrusive. It’s proven to produce more pageviews as it’s more effective than most related articles.

If you’ve been blogging for long, then you’ll no doubt be aware of the power that Facebook has on your traffic as you can work on building repeat customers, although convincing people to like your page has never been the easiest thing to do. Welcome pages are used to entice the visitor into the page, and encouraging them to like it, but it only really works if you’ve got a good looking page. This is where the 5 Minute Fan Page Generator comes in, they make designing an awesome page quick and simple, and which increases your conversion rate of visitors into fans.

Plenty of Designs to Choose From

The reason that it’s possible for you to create a fan page with this generator in only 5 minutes, is because a lot of the hard work with design has been done for you. When I created my own welcome page before, I made it in Photoshop, and had to come up with my own ideas, which took me a few hours. With the generator though, you have plenty of designs to choose from, ranging in styles from entire themes, to simple coupon or contact sections. When I first opened up the program, I was honestly surprised by the amount of effort and time that had gone into these very enticing designs, which rival big name fan pages that you’d expect from people such as Coca-Cola (click on that link to see their cool fan page).

Wide Variety of Page Styles

The creators of the fan page generator clearly understand the different marketing techniques that people like to employ to boost their numbers, because they’ve designed pages to help you. You have the basic options such as a single image, or making it look like your website with blog posts, to more advanced marketing, such as coupons, contact forms and video pages. A great way to get people to sign up to your list, or like your page, is to offer them an incentive, such as a free ebook, and this can be done using the coupon page. If say, for example, you’re a builder and you use your page to find new clients, then you may want to include a contact for so that you can start generating new leads. When people make fan pages for themselves and the business they’re in, such as public speaking or internet marketing, you’ll often find that they use video pages to create a more memorable introduction, and all of this can be done using the fan page generator.

Loads of Customizations

If you have a look at our fan page, you’ll see that even though we’ve used a theme, we’ve managed to make a load of our own customizations. We changed the color of the text in the header, the font, the images, the italics, the links, and all the links. The means that when we send someone to our Facebook through a direct message on Twitter, they get a taste of the content that we have to offer, which would encourage them to click ‘like’, and they may even click on a link and visit our site.

There are even options to customize the coloring of your welcome page so that it suits your website better. When you’re choosing the theme that you want to use, then as you hover over the link, the color selection pops up, so you can see whether it will be ideal for you or not, before you move forward. The combination of lots of themes, and the ability to customize them, means that you’re not going to have a problem of finding someone else with the same page design as you.

You Can Make People Like It

You’ve probably all been onto a fan page before where they make you like it before you can actually use it, and that option is now available for you too. Or at least that’s how it seems. With the added functionality of the ‘like gate’, you can now include a small personal message and ask people to like your page before they can see it, but as I said it only seems that way. In reality, if you click on ‘wall’ in the sidebar, anyone can see the page, but it helps to encourage people to like the page anyway as most people don’t realize this. Whether you want to use this or not is really dependent on what you’re offering. I personally don’t use on for my personal fan page because my site is still in the early stages, so I want people to be able to see all the details that I’ve laid out for them on the welcome page, so that they’ll either like the page or click on some links. If you’re doing a promotional offer for people who like the page, then you will of course want to include this.

You can Add more than 1 Tab

If you really want to maximize the uses of the page generator, then there’s no reason why you wouldn’t want to include multiple pages, such as an extra contact form or video page. All these extra pages no only make your Facebook more useful, but it looks much more professional and high end, as you can use all the same theme options for the same page. Your page will end up looking like it’s a big budget project, when really it was made in less than half an hour at the most, and that will make people think that you’re more valuable.

You can Use it with Google Analytics

When you’ve completed the page and gone back to the dashboard, you’ll see a section that says ‘analytics’ and this is where you can input your GA code, so that you can track the effectiveness of your page. Facebook Insights has improved recently, but Google Analytics is always going to be on top, because of the sheer volume of information that it can provide for you, so I would recommend using this function. Again, this is incredibly easy to do, with the generator doing most of the work for you, and when it’s set up, all you have to do is go into GA and use it how you typically would for any other website.

There’s No Installation

When I made my first welcome page, I made it all on Photoshop and had to use an HTML page maker, which meant that I had to go through and work out how to code it properly so that the links would work and it was all laid out properly. I managed to get by with the information that I’d learned from editing the HTML in the post editor on my website, but for the less technically minded, this is a massive hurdle to overcome. To get this program to work, it’s just like any ordinary Facebook app where you accept the terms and conditions and allow the app to access your page; that’s all the hard work gone. You even have the option to change the icon that appears in the tab, and the name of the page. Mine says ‘welcome’ because it’s a welcome page, but you may want to change it to promote your offers, or encourage people to contact you.

It Only Takes 5 Minutes

It really depends on how much customization you want to do, and which theme you choose, but it really can be done in just 5 minutes. I was surprised at how easy it was to do, as you just click on the certain parts you want to edit and then work away. The more you customize, the longer it’s going to take, but even if you spent an hour on this, it’s still much faster than the alternatives. Mine took a little bit longer than most because I spent time finding posts that I knew would do well if I included them on the welcome page, because it’s all about getting people interested in what you have to offer. The page only went up recently, but I can tell already that this little add-on has already improved the conversions that we’re getting.

Visit 5 Minute Fan Page Now!

How to Make a Custom Report

When you open the custom reporting section, it can look quite confusing at first glance, but it’s not that hard when you start to understand what everything does. There are two main elements to custom reporting; metrics and dimensions. Metrics are the main statistics which you would typically study, such as site usage and content, and dimensions are the different values for each metric such as time on site and bounce rate. It’s really simple when you get started with making your own.

Firstly, you need to choose a metric that you want to work on and drag that into the metrics bar in the custom report. You can study up to 10 different metrics in one tab of a report at the same time, but if you run out of room, you can always add another tab. The metrics that you can chose from are Site Usage, which contains all the information about your visitors, Content, Goals, E-Commerce and Advertising. The last three metrics are more advanced and niched, so we won’t be going into too much detail about them. You use the drop down menus to choose which metric you want to use and drag it into the metric bar as shown below.

I’m going to make this report really simple to help you to understand it, so for now, I’m only going to use one metric – we’ll be looking at multiples further down this post. The next thing you’ll want to do is add dimensions to your report and that’s done much the same way as metrics, you simple drag them over from the left hand side of the page. When you choose a metric, it limits the amount of dimensions that you’re allowed to examine, so for example, when I chose visitors, I could only then look at Day, Week and Month.

Adding a dimension effectively cross references the metric to produce results. By adding Day to the metric of Visitors, I find out which days were the most popular and which days were the least popular, and I can then use this information to my advantage in the future. It basically lets you customize your Google Analytics results to provide you with information that you either wouldn’t have had before, or would have been hard to find.

If you want to expand on this you can add further dimensions, just make sure that you add them in a sensible order. For example, I may have wanted to originally look at Day, but if I add Week below, it’s only going to show me the week that my selected day was in. So if you’re adding additional dimensions, make sure you add them in order. If you’re only looking to see which Day is the most popular then stick to the single metric, don’t try to make it more complicated because the most popular days may get lost in the Month and Week dimensions.

When you’ve put all of this together and click on either preview or create report then you’re taken to a more recognizable side of GA, where your results will appear. When you click on the results to investigate further, you’re provided with the next dimension, so for example, I clicked on the month of July below which was the most popular month. I’m then shown the graph for this time as well as a run down of the most popular weeks in this time. If I were to then click on these weeks, I would be taken to a very similar page, only this time it would have a run down of the days.

When you’ve finished with a report that you’re happy with, just make sure that you title it with a relevant name and click ‘Save Report’ at the bottom of the page. Now that we know how to put one together, lets have a look at some useful custom reports that you may want to consider making yourself.

Useful Custom Reports

The first report that I recommend that you use studies the traffic on your site in a much more detailed way, by day. To do this, I examine the number of unique visitors, visits, pages per visit, average time on site, percentage of new visits and bounce rate all as metrics, and have the dimension set to Day. The time period you select is entirely up to you; if you want to know for the current day, then the choice is obvious, but if you’re looking to see how popular your site has been over the past week then you can select longer time periods. Here’s what my report looks like, followed by the overview.

To make things really easy for you, I’m sharing all of the custom reports that I’ve made in this post, so here’s the link for the report above. One of my favorite things to look at each week is which day was the most popular day because it helps me to understand when I should post my content. Taking this a step further, I like to examine what the most popular time of day by using this custom report which examines the amount of visits broken down by the hour and arranged by their popularity. If you go one step further, you’ll be taken to the source dimension which tells you exactly where all these visitors are coming from during a certain hour.

From these two reports, I can work out which is the best day of the week to post and what time during that day that I should be posting to get the best results. I didn’t include the Hour dimension in the original report because the result would have been dependent on how popular the day was. These reports are particularly useful if you’re planning on posting a top-list that you hope will do well.

Something that GA is definitely lacking is a customizable section to look at the amount of unique visitors your website is receiving. By creating a custom report we’re able to see these results in a graph as well as look at some of the finer details about how the visitors have found your site. For my report, I’ve selected to view unique visitors and visits (for comparison) as the metrics and the dimensions as Page, Source and Keyword. Page is an obvious choice because it will tell you exactly which ones are the most popular posts, and Keyword is there to help you understand how people are finding your content. When you click on a page, it’ll take you through to the Source section, and if you click on Google, then you’ll be shown the top keywords which have taken the visitors to your site. This is always good to know as it gives you a good insight into what people are searching for and how relevant the results are. Here is my custom report – Unique Visitors by Page.

The bigger your website is, the more use you will have for some of these custom features such as revenue, and various goals that you set yourself. There’s loads of different variables you can try, so I suggest you go in and explore what works for you. Chances are you’ve been in GA before and not been able to find a statistic that you’re looking for, and quit in frustration. Custom reports put a stop to this as they open up many more answers to you.

Advanced Segments

Advanced Segmentation is a tool you can use to slice and dice your Analytics data with great precision. Advanced segments allow you to choose what types of visitors you want to be considered when generating the data for a report. If you find that you have a large amount of data but you’re having a hard time filtering the information into a report, then you can easily create your own segments and apply them to any report instead of creating different filters for each profile.

One of my favorite things to do is to track the quality of visitor that I’m receiving and there’s no better way to do this than to create and advanced segment which will filter out all of the information that I don’t want. A quality visitor for me is someone who spends over 20 seconds on the site, and views at least 2 pages. These are people who haven’t just come to visit a top list or a popular post that’s been shared on the Internet somewhere. The time factor is still relatively short, but the majority of visitors stay for under 10 seconds, so 20 seconds is still quite generous. When you look at all the factors together and press test, it’ll look something like the the image below.

When you save your segment, you can save it and view it like any other Google Analytic result. To view it, go back into your advanced segment section and click on it, or use the drop down menu in the top right hand corner of your dashboard. It will update your dashboard with only information that fits within these parameters, and then you can carry on researching your website analytics with more accurate results. Here’s a link to the Advanced Segment.

I do a lot of marketing through social media, which I suspect a lot of you do too, so it’s important for me to track my progress through these means. This is really simple, all you do is open up another advanced segment and add a list of sources with ‘or’ between them, so that the segment considers all of the results. Then make sure all of the condition parameters say ‘contain’ and then list the website name in the value box, like I’ve done in the image below. List as many sources as you wish to examine at a single time, and then save it down. Here’s the one that I use.

You can include more advanced segments such as the ones above, or keep it much simpler and only have a single parameter. I have a segment set up for Google traffic so that I can easily view my traffic from my dashboard and delve deeper into the statistics than Google previously allowed me. I have all of the information that I would typically look at, only now it’s specific to traffic that’s come from Google. This is really easy to put together, and here’s now you do it.

Combining Custom Reports & Advanced Segments

The excellent thing about Advanced Segments is that I can then use these new parameters to look more accurately at my custom reports. By using the segment on quality visitors, I now only examine the information that matters to the growth of my blog, which is the quality traffic. It will also help me to see which is the most popular content with people who are already following the website, so I can get a better idea about what they’re interested in learning.

All of this makes for a free program, that you probably didn’t realize could get even better. I use Google Analytics almost everyday and having this added functionality has really improved the quality of my results.

I take steps everyday to make sure that my quality of reader is improving, whether it means installing a new plugin to help direct traffic to certain places, or posting photos or polls on Facebook, encouraging visitors to get more involved. Through the past few month, I’ve started to see my different techniques take effect as my quality of visitor has gone up.

How to Track the Quality of Reader

I like to look at my website in periods of a month and see how my progress has improved, and there’s four different factors that I look at – Pages/Visit, Time on Site, Bounce Rate and Percentage of Returning Visitors. Looking at the amount of pageviews, unique visits, and visits per day is nice, but they don’t tell you much about the type of person viewing your blog. There are days when I reach a huge spike in traffic and make noticeably more money, but I always prefer quality over quantity as that’s my target market.

How Has The Quality Improved

Pages Per Visit

The first factor we’re going to look at is the amount of pages per visit that the average reader looks at. This is one of the best indications of the quality of visitor you have because the more a person views, the better they are. My website officially launched at the end of April, but I’m starting with the month of May just to make it tidier. You’ll see in the graph below that I track the progress for 5 months, all the way up until the end of September.

This graph above is a good indication of what my visitors are doing and it’s good to see that for the most part, the pages per visit has improved. With any luck, I should be right on target to get two page views for every visitor each month, or so it may seem at least. The truth of the matter is that there’s going to be a lot of people who only view one page when they visit, and then there’s also a strong group of visitors who look at over ten. One of the many great things about Google Analytics is that they tell you exactly how many pages were visited by each visitor, in the visitor loyalty section.

I’ve had to separate my results below into two different graphs because the amount of people that only visited one page in their visit is actually six times as many people as visited twice. You’ll notice that all of these months have the majority of the visits only viewing one page, which is usually the page that they’re linked to.

The details are above are nice to know because they provide me with information that counts towards my views and tells me the amount of poor quality visitors, but I’m really only interested in the high quality visitors and for this, I need to see who’s clicking on more than one page. Below is a graph of all the people that view more than one page in a visit, spread across the five months I’m comparing here. All of the months are pretty similar at first glance and the results are pretty much how you would expect, that is, until you look at the last category of 20 or more visits.

The spike in the 20+pageviews section can easily be considered to be my regular following so it gives you a good idea of how well you’re doing. It’s best to look at this online and simply change the month that you want to compare as it’s easier to read, but I can tell you that June, which had basically the same number of views as September had a third less people over viewing over 20 pages each month, which shows me that my following is growing and the quality of visitor is going up.

Average Time on Site

When you look at your dashboard, you’re told the average time spent on site for each time period that you have selected, and for the past five months, mine looks like this. This is a good indication of how well your site is doing, but if you want to know the finer details, you have to look further by looking at the length of visit section under visitor loyalty in Google Analytics.

When you have a look at the average length of visit on the site, you’ll see that not only do most people only view one page, the majority of them only stay for 10 seconds or less. This isn’t what you want, but it’s ultimately hard to avoid, although there are steps that you can take to reduce this percentage, but we’ll get to that further down this post. Lets have a look at how long my visitors stay for, divided up into groups of time as percentages for each month. You’ll notice that the majoirty of visitors only stay for 10 seconds or less, but that’s not really a problem.

From looking at the graph, you’ll see that when you compare September to May, you’ll see that there is a lot more more people who are staying for 61 seconds and longer and less people staying for a minute or less. The aim is to get the all the time under a minute, specifically less than 10 seconds, to be as small as possible. The progress I’m making so far is pretty strong, but the main difference between September and July is the lack of spikes in traffic produced by top lists. Not having these spikes in traffic haven’t been entirely bad because I can see clearly that the quality of visitor that’s now following me has improved greatly.

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who view one page and then leave straight after without browsing the site anymore, so you want this to be as low as possible. As you can see, this is a little bit harder to control and large spikes in traffic, or traffic from certain sources causes this rate to go up quite substantially. If you compare May when my website was first starting out, with September where I’ve built a strong following (now 1100 fans on Facebook), you’ll see that people take my site more seriously because of the amount of content that they can find on there and because of certain visual improvements I’ve made.

Returning Visitors

The improvement in bounce rate has a lot to do with whether the visitor has been on your site before, because if they have then they’re more likely to stay for longer as they’re familiar with what you have to offer. To do this, you need to look at the percentage of new visitors page in GA. It’s common to think that if the percentage is low then you’re not reaching a new, wider audience, which is true to some extent, but that’s not what is important to start with. You’re better off writing great content while you find your way through Google and then as your website grows you’ll become more popular. It takes a while to build a good website, so give it time.

My favorite stat to look at when trying to gauge the quality of visitor that my site is receiving, is the visitor loyalty stat. It will tell not only how many people have visited before, but how many people have visited your site in a certain time period, from one single view to over 200 views. When you take some time and put these into a graph like I have, then it becomes really easy to compare. Have a look at my graph below.

This shows the amount of people each month who are visiting my website multiple times and if you compare May on the right with September on the left, you’ll see that the amount of people who only visit my site once in a month has gone down from around 82% to 58%. This is one of the best improvements to track as it tracks visits and not pages per visits, so it’s easy to see if your following is improving. You’ll notice that the biggest improvements are in the 9+ visits a month section, where I’m starting to see a steady following.

How to Improve Your Visitor Quality

This is actually easier than you may think, and if you’ve managed to read through the material above, then you’ve probably got a few ideas of your own by now. We’re going to look at each factor in order and see what steps you can take to improving it.

Firstly, we can try and improve pageviews, and this is surprisingly easy to improve, it just takes a little time before it starts to take effect. I’ve managed to improve mine quite substantially by the installation of a single plugin which does most of the work for me – SEO Smart Links. I’ve mentioned it multiple times on this site before, but it’s always worth mentioning again because it’s a really powerful tool. It will take all of the keywords that you input and assign them to links that you also input so that every time one of these keyword terms pops up in the text, it becomes a link and starts to send people to different pages on your site. I have my plugin set up so that it will link a maximum of three times for each keyword so by the end of the post, with about 80 keywords listed, I can have a huge amount of links sharing other pages on my site with people. This has proven to work as the more links I input, the higher my pages per visit seems to become.

Time on site is slightly more difficult as there’s a lot more factors to it, but of course the SEO plugin does help. One of the biggest changes that I’ve made which I think has improved time on site, is my writing. As I’ve written more, my style has improved, along with my grammar and structuring. I looked back recently on a post that didn’t make it to publish, although I was considering using it, and in my opinion it was unusable. I was clearly struggling with what to write and the content and length was suffering. It was a typical ‘Top 10 Reasons…” style post (which are usually a little shorter), but had just 566 words, and when you compare that to one I wrote the other day at 1634 words, there’s a big difference. I don’t do anything to bulk out the text at all anymore like I may have done in school tests when you didn’t know the answer – I just included everything that it required. The more recent posts can be done a lot quicker now as I know a lot more about what I’m writing about.

Bounce rate is pretty hard to control because the majority of the percentage comes from those who are only on the site for 10 seconds or less, and there’s not much you can do for them. When you do get to people who get to the end of a post but don’t browse any other pages, you need to add a reason for them to want more. At the end of every post I’ve included a related post section to give a more visual example of what else I have to offer. This encourages them to explore more site for longer and click on more than one page.

I’ve also made my site a lot more personal in the past few months, by including more anecdotes, not just on my website, but on my Facebook too. Most tutorial sites contain a lot of different writers, but on my site, it’s basically me and I think that people can start to relate to that a lot better. I used to copy and paste the same 4 lines to the bottom of every post asking people to come and visit Facebook, Twitter and to subscribe to the RSS feed, but it didn’t really feel very personal. I’ve recently stopped doing this and now I include a short sentence or two related to what I’ve been writing about and I have an image which encourages people to come to my Facebook. I’m still trialling this, but I can tell already that it’s having a very positive effect. To encourage new visitors to come to my site, I use my Twitter marketing to meet new people in my niche and then when they follow me back, I send them a message encouraging them to come to my fan page on Facebook. This can be a slightly slow process because you can’t really guarantee that they’ll follow back, but when they do, I find that about 25% of them will click on the link to my Facebook. To make sure that they want to click ‘like’, they’re taken to my welcome page where they’re greeted with this image.

I don’t know about you, but when I see this, I like to see the wall’s activity before I like a page so this is only half of the job. I interact daily with my fan page, whether I’m posting new photos, making polls, or posting quotes and tutorials and all of this makes my Facebook page look more interesting than anyone else’s. Because of this, my fan page has grown as a very good pace, and it grows faster, the longer it’s been around. Social media is a big part of my marketing as it shares my page with people who may never have heard of it before, while making them feel as if they’ve stumbled upon it themselves.

From my experience, people are more interested in talking to a person than to a website and that’s why at the end of every post, I have an about the author section, similar to the one on this page. It’s like shopping with an independent store rather than a big corporation – you know who you’re talking to, and you can come back and talk to them again. When you’re a massive website, you may not want personal interaction, and that’s fine, because you’ve already made it, but while you’re still growing, try your best to add a personal touch. When people comment on my posts on this site, they usually call me Josh (sometimes Mike), and that’s good because it helps to build a personal relationship with your following.

Hopefully you’ve learned something about how to make improve your quality of visitor and build a website that people want to follow. If you have any more questions about what we’ve covered here today, or need help with Google Analytics, please feel free to ask.

Visitors Overview

The number of visits is the amount of times that your absolute unique visitors have collectively visited the site, and the pageviews is the amount of pages that they’ve collectively visited in the times that they  have come. Average pageviews is the amount of pageviews divided by the number of visits, giving you an indication of how many pages the average reader is viewing, which is good to keep track of as there are certain things you can do to improve this. Time on site is for the the combined total amount of time for the dates listed in your graph above, divided by the amount of visits. The best way to track the improvements of this is to look at it in smaller sections and not as part of the whole life of your site. Bounce rate is the amount of people who left your site after only visiting a single page, so you want this to be as low as possible. Finally, % of new visitsis the percentage of people who have come to your site, for the first time. My percentage is 67.64, which means that 32.36% of the visitors have been on my site before.

Map Overlay

The page tells you all about where your visitors are coming from, which may not sound that important, but I assure you it is – I use this information for all sorts of different things. I’ve found that two thirds of all my traffic comes from America which tells me that if I want to make money from Amazon Associates, I have to use American links as only about 10% of my traffic comes from Britain. It also tells what time of day that I should be posting content. I find that anytime after 5 o’clock is best as it means that the majority of America is going to be awake as 5pm over here is 9am in California. When I’m sharing content on Facebook, I want as many people to see it as possible so the time that I post it is very important. I posted a photo last night at about 1:30am and it got a really good response by the time I got up this morning because there were a lot more people viewing it.

On a much less obvious note, knowing that my main traffic comes from America, shapes the way in which I write. There are certain spellings that are different which I try to change so that it doesn’t stand out, such as; color instead of colour, or specialised instead of specialized, which might not sound like much, but I don’t want anything other then the quality of my content to stand out. There’s also slang over here that we might use that American’s won’t understand.

Browser

This isn’t particularly useful to me as I run a photography blog using wordpress, but if you’re a website designer, it’s important to view which browser your visitors are using and that’s just one more thing that Google Analytics can do. Browsers act slightly differently to each other so you want to check how your website acts in the most popular browsers. Currently about 40% of my viewers use Chrome, 25% use Firefox and 19% use Safari.

Visitor Loyalty

This is a particularly useful tool which I’ve only discovered recently which tells you the amount of times that everyone has visited your site. Over the last month, roughly 57% of my visitors have only visited my site once, but that’s to be expected as many readers may not be interested in what I have to say. When you compare that to July when I had a lot of visitors come to see top lists, that percentage goes up to around 67%. The people who only visit my site once don’t bother me, it’s the people that come again that I care about, as they’re my real audience.

In the last month, the second most visited amount of times was twice, which is to be expected, but what really surprised me was that the next two highest percentages are 15-25 times and 26-50 times and they represent about 4.5% each and count for 2100 visitors, which is huge for me. It shows me that I’m really starting to build a following so you can begin to see how useful this tool is. Back in July I was experiencing more visitors but these two brackets only represented 1.88% and 2.06%. If you’re looking for quality followers who are interested in what you have to say and potentially sell, then this is a great tool to get to grips with.

Length of Visit

Time on site can be a little bit misleading at times because you’re seeing an overall average time for the thousands of visitors that you’re receiving. That’s why I like to use the length of visit tool underneath the visitor loyalty section as it breaks down each visitor into different sections, for how long each of them spends on the site. I’ve just done a comparison of my site in the last month to the month of July and again, it shows that my quality of visitor has gone up with more people staying for longer and a lot less people staying for less than 10 seconds, which is useless to me unless they’re clicking on an ad and leaving. Here’s a comparison for the two months, which I’ve put into pie charts for easy comparison.

Traffic Sources

When you select traffic sources, you’re taken to their dashboard where you’ll be able to select the period of time which you want to study as well as glance over all the relevant data from this time. This includes comparing your traffic sources and search engine traffic, as well as being able to see the most popular keywords. The dashboard is particularly helpful for helping you find your way around the sections that you need, and it acts as a general overview of all the information that you’ll regularly need to see without delving too much deeper.

Direct Vs. Referencing

Direct traffic is pretty simple, it’s the amount of visitors who have come to your site through no other means, or at least that’s what it looks like. It’s actually doesn’t tell you a whole lot about your reader because there are ways for traffic to appear as if it’s come direct, when really it’s come through a program that manages a website such as Twitter. It’s believed that about half of the traffic that comes from twitter is viewed through a piece of software such as TweetDeck, which makes it appear as if it’s direct. I don’t really pay too much attention to direct traffic as I know that my readership is growing and more people are coming direct to my site, which is demonstrated through other statistics on my site such as Visitor Loyalty.

Sources

This is probably one of my most frequented statistics because my website relies heavily on referenced traffic, and that’s what the traffic source section is all about. People are surprised a lot of these features are even possible, let alone all in one place, but that’s what I love about Google Analytics; they make it so easy for us. When you can study where your traffic has come from, as well as how long they stay on the site, which page they’re viewing when they leave, how many pages they visit, and how often they’re visiting; you’re given a distinct advantage in knowing how to make content which will suit your readers.

From looking at the sources section, I know that I get a lot of readers from StumbleUpon, and on top of that, I know which pages they like to look at. If I want a lot of traffic, all I have to do is look at which pages they’re looking at and write more content like that. Looking at sources is also a great way of tracking how well my social marketing is going, and I can see from my second most popular being Facebook that it’s going very well this month. You can then click on the source to find out more detailed information about how many people came each day. In the past month, my clicks through Facebook range between 53 and 191 a day.

All of this useful information is listed in columns on this page showing the visits, pages per visit, time on site, % of new visits and bounce rate for each source.

Search Engines

To me, this is the traffic that I strive to reach the most as I’ve written 85 posts over the past 5 months and I’d like people to be able to find them. If I’m in Google more then I’m going to be reaching more people who are looking for exactly what I’m trying to teach them, and these people always work out to be better viewers. By this, I meant that they spend more time on the site, look at more pages, and invariably, click on more ads, which earns me money.

When you enter the Search Engine page, you’re given another timeline overview of all the hits that you’ve received from the different search engines. Again, they list all the details that you could possible want in an easy to read chart, and then when you click on a particular search engine, they tell you what were the most popular keyword results which took people to your website. I say a particular search engine, but we all know that there’s only one that really matters and that’s Google. Here’s a pie chart of my search engine referrers – it’s easy to see who’s on top.

Keywords

If you want to know more about how to rank well in Google (and you do), then it helps to know which are the most popular keyword search terms. When you see what’s popular with Google in comparison to sites like StumbleUpon then you can start to target what you’re writing to rank higher, which will also make the rest of your content rank higher. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still an element of a waiting game, but there are steps that you can take to help you make your way to the top.

One thing I’ve noticed, purely through studying my keyword data is that whenever there’s a spike in my traffic from a popular post, Google recognizes this and ranks me higher. But unlike my day to day traffic which goes back down, I stay at this higher ranking until my next spike which will take me higher again. I wouldn’t have known this without actually delving deeper into the stats and finding it for myself, in fact, it was only about three months ago that I realized this.

My most popular keywords are to do with my most popular top lists and my website name as well as less popular photography specific search terms. You’re given information on how long a visitor has spent on your site after searching particular search terms, as well as how many pages they visit, average time, bounce rate and interestingly enough, the percentage of them that are new visitors. That’s helpful for me because the name Expert Photography could be someone looking for my website after having been on there before, or someone looking to learn expert photography. Turns out that a lot of the visitors over the last month were not aware of my site before searching that particular term, which tells me a lot about my choice in name.

Content Overview

When you’re under this new heading, you’re greeted with another dashboard which again holds a timeline and details on the amount of pageviews and how many of those are unique. Also, you’ve given a small preview to the top content section where you can learn which are your most popular posts.

Top Content

When I’m tracking how many visits I’ve had to my site, I like to see a complete timeline from when I very first began writing, all the way up to present day, and I can do this because my site isn’t very old yet. When I’m tracking content though, and other then the odd time where I wanted to see my post popular posts of all time, I like to look at my overview for the past month. This allows me to see what’s the most popular at the present time and then I can track where these views are coming from and act accordingly.

I’m usually surprised by my findings as it’s very hard to predict which posts are going to be the most popular; for example, this last month, only three of the top ten post popular pages were written recently, the others are much older. This page breaks down all the information that I need into a handy list with all of the information that I have come to expect such as pageviews, unique pageviews, time on site, bounce rate and exit rate for each source.

I can look at it in much more detail than this, I can break it down into sources as well. For example, I’m looking at my most popular tutorial this month and it’s one of my earliest which is unusual, so I delve a little bit deeper. I see from the overview that my exit rate (the amount of people who leave after seeing this page) is 72.45%, but when I click through and divide up the page by entrance sources, I see my top referrer has an exit rate of only 47.26%. Top content is really only an overview page – there’s a lot more that can be explored by clicking through the links.

When you first click through, you’re given all the basic run down information that was listed above, along with a timeline of the traffic to that particular content. It’s good to see which days are popular if there’s sudden spikes in traffic, but for this particular post it’s pretty consistant so doesn’t really matter too much. What is always useful though are the options listed on the right hand side of this page. 

Navigation Summary

When you go through the navigation summary, you’re taken to a very useful page which shows you where people have come from and where they go next. As this is a very popular post which people have been directly linked to, the majority of people have come straight to this page – 89.06% in fact. To see this more effectively, I’m going to use a different tutorial for an example and come back to my most popular post for this month.

The tutorial below is on natural light photography which didn’t get as much traffic as I had hoped at the time, but is providing a fairly steady source now. Around 50% of the visitors to the page have come from another page on the site, and the other 50% have been linked to the tutorial directly. When they’re done reading, around half of the readers exit the site and the other half carry on reading other articles on my website. Not only are we provided with this useful information, but we’re also told which page they came from and which page they visited next with the help of a very useful list.

If you’re linking through your pages properly with the use of a side bar, related posts, and plugins such as SEO Smart Links, then you should start to see results such as this. The longer a person stays on your site, the better chance that they have of clicking on your links and becoming a more regular follower so these are the sorts of results that you want to be aiming for. This particular breakdown is useful because it tells me exactly where the majority of people go after reading an article and I can then use that information to see what I’ve been doing right with that link – check if it’s mentioned a lot, or in a particular section. It tells me a lot about my writing and which posts relate to each other well.

Entrance Sources

I’m going back to the most popular post of the month now because I want to see what’s made it so popular, and who’s been sending me the traffic. When you click on the entrance sources page, you’ll notice that the page has suddenly got a lot more pageviews, but don’t worry, it’s supposed to be like this. This page lists counts all of the pages that have been viewed after people have finished on this page as well. For example, my top referrer is Uglyhedgehog.com, so everyone who comes through them is listed as a view and then every page they click on afterwards are also listed as their views, which is why you’re able to produce such high numbers.

This page will also break down the all the details listed in the overview into their separate sources which is particularly useful if you want to know more about who you should be appealing to. At first glance it appeared as if the exit rate on this page wasn’t very good because it was listed at 72.46%, but when I look though it in detail by referrer, I can see that my most popular referrer provides me with a much better exit rate of 47.27%. All this information can sound confusing, but so long as you know what you’re looking for, it’s really easy to understand.

Landing Pages

Landing pages look at the traffic period that you’ve selected and then tell you which page those visitors came to first, as well as how many people bounced after visiting that page. This information differs to what you can find in the top content because if a post is particularly good at directing people to other pages then it may be high up on the list of top content, but not on the list of landing pages at all. I use this page quite often because it only supplies the information that I’m looking for, not information such as time on site which can be distracting.

Top Exit Pages

Exit pages are the pages that people leave your site from, and they’re listed in order depending on how many people have left the site on a particular page. As expected, my most popular tutorial in the last month had the largest amount of people leave that particular page, so listing them in this order isn’t the most useful way of using this section of Analytics. I like to change the order of the list from the number of people who have left from a particular page, to the percentage, because then you’re not mislead by large numbers. To do this, click on the ‘% Exit’ column and order it in whichever way suits you.

I firstly order the pages by the highest exit rate, which is usually, a list of random search results and pages I don’t recognize, but expand your list to 100 and scroll down and you’ll start to see useful information. Here is where you’ll find the pages that are the worst at referring the visitors around the website, either because they weren’t designed to, or I’ve not done it properly. Below is my top 10 most popular pages for people to leave my site from. With this information, I can go back and study the content of the posts to see where I can improve, and maybe add some more details which will make people want to stay on the site for longer. The more you know, the easier it is.

When I’m done with this information, I like to reverse the list and see which of my posts are the most popular in terms of keeping people on my site because that way, I can see where I’m going right. These are my top ten most popular tutorials in terms of exit % in the last month. All of these tutorials are very easy to read, with 4 of them being top 10 list tutorials, which tells me a lot about what my reader likes to be linked to when they’re on the site. There may be more popular tutorials, but if I can find a way of working these sorts of links into my posts then I’m almost guaranteed that they’ll spend longer on the site. 

Dashboard

Now that you know what everything means, it’s time to go back to the Dashboard which is the first page that you’ll see when you enter the Google Analytics for your site. As I mentioned before, I like to see the whole timeline of my site on this page as I can quickly hover over the day and find out the number of visitors I’ve had, as well as easily comparing this with the past. You can add and remove different parts of the dashboard, but I always choose to include this.

The next section which I like to see an overview of is the Usage section as it give me a clear overview of all my key facts, as well as small graphs that I can look over to track the progress. Even with them this small, I can still see that my average time on site has gone up, as well as pages per visit, while the percentage of new visitors has gone down. You can also click on any of these links to take you to the right part of the Analytics program.

Then we have the traffic sources and map overlay section. Both of these are better seen in smaller time periods because then you can track more recent progress of how your links are being shared around the world. These don’t really tell you a lot of information so it’s best to click on them and see them full sized.

You can mix and match what you’d like to include from here, but I personally only use the ones listed above because I like to give them a quick glance when I’m visiting my dashboard.

Hopefully you’ve learned something from this tutorial and if you weren’t using Google Analytics, then you should be now. It’s by far the most powerful tool at your disposal for studying the progress of your website and seeing where you can improve.