A No-Brainer Offer and a Lesson Learned
I just checkout out James Brausch’s blog and it looks like he’s rolling out another newsletter. If you read any of the stuff on his blog, you’ll see that he’s a big advocate of testing and tracking different aspects of your site in order to boost conversions (among other topics). I guess he feels testing is so important that he’s devoting an entire newsletter JUST about testing. You can find out more about it via that link.
Of course, I’m posting this so I can get my free "premiere" issue…James, looking forward to reading the first issue. Thanks for the offer.
Now that that’s out of the way and since I’m here, maybe I can make this a value-added post for you too.
Here’s my big takeaway from what James has done with his testing newsletter and something for you to think about:
Are there any subtopics in YOUR market that you know enough about (or could learn about) that could justify creating your own newsletter?
If you’re in the online business market, do you know a good deal of info about affiliate marketing, creating information products, article marketing or any of the other subtopics that make up this little corner of the Internet? Why not a focused newsletter on only that topic?
If you’re in a different market, what subtopics are hot within that market?
Maybe you’re into real estate investing and could have a focused newsletter just covering investing in duplexes (I’d probably want to know about that if anyone does it). Or investing in land…I have a coaching student who could run with that idea. 
Or maybe your prospects are really into car audio systems, so you could do a newsletter just about designing your own speaker enclosures.
The list goes on and on, but if you know your market, it shouldn’t be too tough to come up with a couple of ideas. Then maybe focus your blog posts on just that topic for awhile, see how people respond, and if it looks like the idea has legs, transition over to a paid newsletter format instead.
Just a thought.
By the way, that offer for the complimentary first copy of the Testing Newsletter ends pretty soon. If you want a copy, all you have to do is post to your blog just like I did, with a link back to the same post that I linked to above (see James’ site for full details).
If you don’t have a blog, you may be out of luck on this one. This is just another reason to have a blog – here’s my course that shows you exactly how to set one up (another no-brainer offer).
Just amazing…and another reason to have a blog
Just some quick results from one of my latests posts (though I really shouldn’t be surprised).
1. I added a new post to my blog…brand new category. The timestamp on it is 12:20pm.
2. According to Hittail (www.hittail.com), I started getting traffic for that post at 2:27pm.
3. And I’m #12 for "define Google Analytics bounce rate" (as of 5:30pm, same day).
Yeah yeah, not the MOST searched-for term, but to get on the cusp of page 1 for something in just a hair over 2 hours has to count for something. And we’ve already seen that someone was actually searching for that term.
Finally, keep in mind that this is with a blog that hasn’t had much activity on it until recently. Powerful stuff.
If you don’t have a blog you’re nuts!
Google Analytics Goodness…Can You Believe This is Free?
I just watched a free replay of a conversion strategies webinar put on by "The Conversion Doctor", Eric Graham. Fair warning…it was pretty long, so take a look when you have some time on your hands, but definitely be sure to check it out. It was jam packed with some great info you can take action on right now to help boost your conversions. He even reveals his "secret tool" for conducting split tests (you’ll have to watch the video to find out what it is though).
One of the things he kept pointing out time and time again was the importance of tracking your test results. This sort of ties in with one of the things I mentioned in last week’s "Weekly Roundup" post. There I mentioned the fact that you really have to know where your traffic is coming from and that not all traffic is equal. This was right in line with some of the things Eric mentioned during his webinar and he suggests using Google Analytics to track your results.
If you’re not already using Google Analytics, then hopefully this will help you see how valuable this free tool is for tracking your site’s performance, be it a blog, sales letter site, online store or anything else for that matter. Analytics can easily tell you the number of visitors, unique visitors and other basic info. But below are a few of the more useful types of data you can easily analyze once you have Analytics installed.
1. How do visitors behave once they visit your site?
- Avg pages per visit – How many pages, on average are people viewing?
- Bounce rate – What percentage of visitors are leaving your site without viewing at least one more page other than the one they land on?
- Average time on site – self explanatory…how long are they sticking around?
- Why do these matter?: These stats give you insight into how long people are sticking around once they get to your site. If you have a ton of traffic but also have a 100% bounce rate and people only stick around for 10 seconds, there’s obviously some work to be done. Getting MORE TRAFFIC isn’t going to solve that problem.
2. How many times are people coming back?
- New vs. Returning visitors – self explanatory
- Visitor loyalty – similar to above, but indicates the number of visits rather than just new vs. returning visitors
- Why do these matter?: If you’re continuing to promote your site via article marketing and other means of generating traffic, it’s nice to know if you’re continuing to get new visitors. It’s also important to know if the visitors you’ve already gotten to your site are ever coming back. For instance, if they’re not, it might be a good case for setting up a name capture/follow-up system. Visitor loyalty shows you the same type of info but with more fidelity, so you see whether people are coming back once, twice, 10 times, etc.
3. How do they like your content? Which content do they like?
- Top content – shows you the number of views for each page on your site, in order of page views.
- Content drilldown – shows you a breakdown of all the URLs that were visited on your site.
- Why do these matter?: This could give you a better understanding of the types of products people view the most (for instance, for an online store) or the types of content your visitors like the most (in the case of a content site or blog). In fact, do you have a blog where you promote products? Want to know how many people are clicking on the links to your product pages (or other external links)? Content drilldown can help there, with a few tweaks to your blog. Now admittedly, some of this is not so useful for a single page sales letter site, but could also be valuable there if the site has an article/link directory as part of it. Is anyone going to the directory pages? What are they looking at?
4. Conversion rates GALORE!
- Goal conversions – this is how you setup conversion rate tracking in Analytics (for just about anything).
- Why does this matter?: This is probably the easiest way to track the results of your testing efforts. If you can define the path on your site that people follow in order to purchase, then you can setup a goal to track those results. Typically it’s something like Sales Letter Page –> Upsell Page –> Order Page –> Thank You Page. So what if no one’s even clicking on the order button? Or what if a large number of people make it to the upsell page and then back out? Or back out at the order page? You can track all of that with Analytics and see where in the process people are abandoning the purchase. Otherwise, you might just assume you need more traffic…again, that’s not going to solve the problem.
5. The killer way to look at all the above
One of the best features about Analytics is that you can analyze nearly everything above based on individual traffic source. Why would you want to do that? Maybe you have traffic coming from another site that converts like crazy. Perhaps you could offer an original article or strike up some other kind of offer with that webmaster to draw in more of that traffic. Maybe you’re getting a ton of traffic from that WSO ebook you just purchased…you know, the one titled "How to Get a Flood of Visitors from Social Networks and Earn a Gazillion Dollars a Day". But you find out that they stay on your site for all of about 15 seconds. Is that the best use of your time?
Amazing what a few lines of code can tell you about your site.
You can find out more about Google Analytics here:
http://www.google.com/analytics/
