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Making Money With pMetrics

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Over the next few weeks I’m going to be highlighting simple ways to make money with pMetrics.

Today I want to focus on what I see as the killer pMetrics feature: Spy – a live view of visitors interacting with your web site. For a live demo of Spy, click here.

Basically, Spy is a real-time ticker that displays live traffic at your website. The most recent traffic actions are listed at the top. The Spy function gives you a picture of overall traffic density along with your most popular pages and referrals.

So how can you use Spy to make money? It’s easy.

Spy Monetization #1

Track your popular content and reinforce it with supporting articles on similar but slight variations on the theme. This gives you a birds-eye view on exactly what your visitors’ are looking for.

Spy Monetization #2

Track your Digg and Reddit campaigns, learn what works, and duplicate it. The key to any Digg or Reddit campaign is coming up with a good, provocative headline. Learn which headlines work and which don’t by tracking them in Spy. Today more than ever, a successful website launch depends on good digg and reddit campaigns.

Spy Monetization #3

Track your visitors’ navigation after they land on your site. Let’s assume that the majority of people come to your site from Google. Ok. Once they land on your popular content, where do they go? Spy let’s you monitor the natural route that visitor’s take, and gives you the information you need to re-engineer your site’s navigational structure to make your site more sticky and funnel visitors exactly where you want them to go. As you make subtle changes, you can see whether they have the intended effect…in real-time.

Spy Monetization #4

Capture search trends in real-time and jump all over them. Is there a search that suddenly becomes popular? Spy will reveal this as it happens, and allow you to get a head start on your competition as you build out variations on the search phrase. This will help you grab the long-tail on popular content more quickly and efficiently than tracking your raw-logs in AWStats or Webalyzer. Reverse engineering search has always been important, but Spy makes let’s you stay ahead of the curve.

Ok. So what do these 4 techniques have to do with monetization? Well, they give you the competitive edge you need to build out a great site, draw in traffic, engineer navigation to maximize traffic and ultimately funnel more visitors towards your “money” pages.

So what are you waiting for? For an investment as low as $2.99 per month, you could see a return of hundreds of dollars per month just by using pMetrics to methodically beat out the competition.

Choosing The Target Keyphrase for pMetrics

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Performancing has this killer site statistics app called pMetrics. You might have some killer app, or some killer service too. But you might also think that not enough people know about your killer product. So it’s time for some good old fashioned, hard-core SEO.

One of the most difficult tasks in all of SEO is finding and choosing the best keyphrase to target.

Take a look at the Performancing sidebar. We link to pMetrics with “Site Analytics” – a poor choice in my view (and a poor choice that I made several months ago).

There are much better options. For example:

  1. Blog Stats
  2. Blog Statistics
  3. Site Stats
  4. Site Statistics
  5. Web Stats
  6. Web Statistics
  7. Website Stats
  8. Website Statistics

In other words, I think people are much more likely to do searches on things like “stats for my blog” then “analytics for my blog”

Now some of you might say to me, just target all of those phrases. And it’s true. We could try that. But what I like to do as an SEO is “divide and conquer” – I like to focus in on one killer keyphrase at a time. A target keyphrase. Once I’ve conquered that keyphrase (by conquer I mean nothing less than top 3), I move on to the next one.

But the problem I always have is choosing which phrase to target. Sure, you can point me to this or that tool. But I know about your tools. I just don’t always know how to use them to choose the best among good options.

So let me ask you this: as I put in place a major SEO campaign for pMetrics, what should I target? Is there any under-developed niche (blog stats)? Is one word (stats) better than another (statistics)? If so, why? If not, why not?

When Will Internet Traffic Stop Tracking American Holidays?

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It’s July 4th here in the USA. One of our most celebrated holidays, and one that almost everyone, including Ryan Caldwell, takes off from the Internets.

So my question to you is this: since the United States of America only makes up something like 1/18th of the world’s population, and since many large regions like India, China, The Middle East, Europe, Korea and Japan have pervasive internet access – when will we stop noticing American holidays on our site statistics’ graphs?

Maybe it’s just that I’m an American. Or maybe it’s because I’m largely unaware of other holidays. But I still get a strong impression that Internet traffic mirrors American culture and American holidays. Shouldn’t this be changing? Or has it already, and I’m just witnessing an illusion?

Thoughts?

50% Affiliate Rate for pMetrics

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We thought we’d spice-up our pMetrics affiliate offering and give a full 50% on all referrals. That’s 50% for the life of the sign-up.

Now you can make up to $25 per sign-up. Sign-up 10 people per month and you could be looking at a steady $250/month. Not bad!

To celebrate the new affiliate offering, we’ve created a new affiliate image that we think will help you promote pMetrics more effectively:

Just make sure to replace the “6” with your own affiliate code.

An Update on The Performancing Experiment

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Thought I’d forgotten about it, eh? Well, here are some specific updates.

  1. The site currently ranks at about position 14 in the Google SERPS for the book’s title, showing up on the second page
  2. In retrospect, it might have been better to target “harry potter book 7” over “harry potter and the deathly hallows” – but you live and learn!
  3. I’m currently doing an interview with Olubayi Olubayi of the Global Literacy Project both on the charity’s main mission and also on how he envisions the charity using technology and blogs to further its mission
  4. I’ve started sending out what I hope turns into a viral email message. Keep your fingers crossed!

Crafting A Viral Email Message

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I’ve put together a viral email message for the Harry Potter Charity Program that’s part of our Performancing experiment.

I’d really appreciate any constructive criticism so that we can hold this up as a successful model for creating legit viral email campaigns and also make our charity effort successful. Once I’ve gotten everyone’s feedback, I plan to get this ball rolling and I’ll ask all Performancing members to help out too.

Subject Line:

One Million Harry Potter Books For Charity

Message:

Hi! I’m helping raise money for charity and want your help. All you have to do is buy a Harry Potter book.

Pretty simple, huh? The only requirement is that you’ve got to buy the book by through the following website:

http://harrypotterthedeathlyhallows.net/

When you go to that site, you’ll actually be buying the book through Amazon. However, it is extremely important that you first go to the website listed so that your book purchase is counted.

With your help, we can raise over $1,000,000 for charity. For every Harry Potter book, movie or video game that is purchased through this site, they are donating $1 to charity.

If you could forward this email to at least three friends, then together we can help raise over a million dollars for charity.

$100 To The First Five Accepted pMetrics Widgets

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$500 to the first “killer” widget/plugin (as determined by Ryan) developed for pMetrics

Last night, Sean announced the launch of the pMetrics API.

The API opens up whole new possibilities for interpreting and displaying blog statistics. In the spirit of moving the pMetrics community forward, we are sponsoring five $100 prizes for the first five “fun and useful” widgets to be developed.

Here are the guidelines:

  1. Widgets that overlap in fundamental functionality will be competing on a first come, first serve basis
  2. A “fun” widget is one that people will want to put on their blog
  3. A “useful” widget is one that displays interesting information
  4. Widget submissions should come with links to live demos
  5. Widgets must meet our technical guidelines
  6. In submitting your widget, you are giving us permission to host and distribute your widget if we choose to.

Of course, “fun” and “useful” are subjective criteria, but we think you get the point. No widget nonsense, please;-)

You should submit your widgets in the pMetrics Widget Forum. The order in which you submit your widgets is the order in which they will be evaluated.

So let the fun begin!

5 Surefire Steps To Increase Readership 300% (or more)

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As they say in dieting, these should be lifestyle changes; not just short-term quick-fixes.

If you’re like the average blogger then you live in a bubble. You are content to just write posts on a consistent basis and you feel as if the world is watching your every move. Think again. Chances are that you’re being ignored. So how can you change this state of affairs?

Below I list five surefire steps that will get you noticed, get you traffic, and ultimately make you some money. These aren’t easy to implement, and if you’re lazy like me, they probably seem daunting. But just like there’s no easy way to lose weight, there’s just no easy way to get and keep readers for your blog. Make a lifestyle change now, and the benefits will start compounding like a snowball rolling down a hill.
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