70 percent of respondents to a Pew Research Center study said they check Facebook at least once per day. If you’re using social media to connect with consumers, the more followers you have, the better. One way to get more followers for your business is to run and promote a giveaway. By providing a free product or service to people who follows your blog, social media profiles, or newsletter, you’ll attract customers who haven’t yet signed up to learn more what you’re promoting. The most important part of giveaways is making sure they’re attractive to the right set of people and that they get in front of the people who you want to sign up. [Read more…] about How To Use Giveaways to Boost Your Followers & Grow Your Social Audience
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Getting Ahead of SEO Algorithm Tweaks By Offering a Better User Experience
Instead of waiting for a new SEO change to take effect, get ahead of the curve by offering a better user experience now. A focus on improving certain aspects of your site will ensure that you don’t drop down in the search results when new changes are rolled out, which means that you’ll still be visible to the people you want to reach. Waiting until changes are implemented will put you behind—and improving your Web presence now has the added benefit of creating a more relevant, attractive and secure website. [Read more…] about Getting Ahead of SEO Algorithm Tweaks By Offering a Better User Experience
How To Track The ‘Real’ Bounce Rate On Your Website
Bounce rate is a very important metric that we like to keep an eye on to see if our content is what the visitor is looking for and if it’s keeping them engaged or not.
But did you know that the bounce rate score you see in Google Analytics can often be horribly skewed and misleading?
What is a bounce?
Google’s definition of a bounce goes as follows:
“A bounce is a single-page session on your site. In Analytics, a bounce is calculated specifically as a session that triggers only a single request to the Analytics server, such as when a user opens a single page on your site and then exits without triggering any other requests to the Analytics server during that session.”
Seems straight forward enough right? Now imagine this scenario, a visitor comes to your site and leaves 5 seconds later without clicking anything else after not finding what they were looking for. A second visitor then comes to the same page, loves the content there and spends the next 10 minutes reading and afterwards also leaves the site. Obviously these two visitors did not have the same interaction with your site and yet they are both counted as a bounce!
The problem with Google Analytics is that unless there is some other form of interaction by the user on your site (such as clicking an internal link to another page) then with it’s default setup it’s very difficult for the tracking code to tell the difference (in terms of bounce rate anyway) between the above two cases. There are some other engagement metrics that Google uses to try and estimate the time spent on the page as explained very well by Justin Cutroni here but there are ways of filtering this yourself too.
How to change Google Analytics tracking for bounce rate
Let’s say you have a blog or content site, you may have calls to action for selling products or downloading pdfs and so on and all these can be counted and tracked as engagements. However, even a visitor staying on your site for a reasonable length of time and reading your content should be counted as an engagement and that needs to be tracked.
A good way of getting a rough idea of what a reasonable engagement time is by going into your Google Analytics dashboard and then going to Audience > Behaviour > Engagement and then looking at the session duration vs sessions and page-views, if a large number of your sessions and page-views are for say the 61-180 seconds session duration then this a firm indicator of a reasonable amount of time for a visitor who is engaged with your content.
You can now use this number to make a change to your tracking code as follows:
<script>
(function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){
(i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),
m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)
})(window,document,'script','https://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga');
ga('create', 'UA-XXXXXXX', 'auto');
ga('send', 'pageview');
setTimeout(“ga(‘send’,’event’,’Engaged User’,’time on page more than X minutes‘)”,XXXXX);
</script>
Your tracking code will most likely look the above, you add the last line just before the </script> code, the text in bold is for the following:
UA-XXXXXXX – this is your Google Analytics tracking code, it should already be present so you don’t need to change that.
Engaged User – here we are creating an event for Google Analytics to track
X minutes – is the number of minutes we want to track, so for this example it might be 3 minutes
XXXXX – this is the same number as above but in milliseconds, so for 3 minutes that is 180 seconds so 1800 milliseconds.
Once you have that setup Google Analytics will now count users that have been on any page for more than 3 minutes as an ‘Engaged user’ and the more of these events are triggered
the less number of visitors will be counted as a bounce even if they only visit a single page and your overall bounce rate should drop.
Do note that it will most likely take at least 48 hrs before you see any changes to your bounce rate.
4 Of The Best Free Website Builders (You Might Not Have Heard Of)
Creating your own website or blog is very easy these days, WordPress is one of the most popular platforms for building one and very easy to install and setup on your own domain. There are also hundreds of fantastic themes available for as little as $30 and even many free ones that can give your website a slick and professional look with just a few files being uploaded. [Read more…] about 4 Of The Best Free Website Builders (You Might Not Have Heard Of)
Planning Your Blogging Year Ahead
This time of year is perfect for looking back and looking forwards. Most blogs have a bit of a lull around about now due to your audience being overstuffed with rich stodgy foods and over indulging in festive spirit. Take advantage and get ahead.
Blogs and seasonality
Blogs are strange beasts. On the one hand they seem to not follow the same time line as the rest of your life, being the 24-7 type affairs that they are often trumpeted to be. On the other hand the people who post and visit are after all human and therefore are subject to things that affect people such as the calendar and seasons. So with this in mind first of all do not be dismayed if right now you are not making enough money from your blog to buy a postage stamp. On the other hand I imagine other blogs will have done great business and you will be hoping it will never end.
How seasonal is your blog? I know in the tech industry there seems to be two lulls, one around now where the only big announcements will be early January at the very earliest (tech companies tend to have great end of year parties too), and another quiet period in summer when the decision makers are sunning their pale hides on beaches. Gadget blogs though tend to do well on the lead up to Christmas due to the increase in interest in the niche. Lots of mums, dads, aunts and uncles all trying to find that perfect gift for little Johnny or Jilly.
What should you do about it?
If you can predict ahead when your busy time or quiet time will be this coming year then you will be better prepared.
Every blogger needs some time off otherwise you might well burn out. It is tough on the little grey cells to be constantly inventing and creating, it’s good to give it a rest for a bit to recharge your batteries and get reacquainted with your family.
Quiet periods are also perfect for implementing design changes, tweaking and housekeeping, changing hosting, all those things you don’t want to do in case there is downtime or your blog looks messy to new visitors.
Busy periods need to be planned for if at all possible so you can maximise your returns. For example if your blog is about selling old tat and unwanted gifts on auction sites right now you need to be prominent on all major search engines for relevant search phrases. This is not the sort of thing you can do on the spur of the moment. Same with gadgets and gifts leading up to Christmas, Valentines, Easter.
You can usually work out when the “money time” is for many industries by watching the television advertising. Around about now the vacation adverts will appear showing sunny scenes in direct contrast to what many of us are experiencing outside our windows. Also the debt consolidation and loans people will be going into high gear thanks to the hyper spending of months previous.
Niche calendar
The other aspect of calendar effects on blogs is there are certain events you need to plan for that are well known in your niche.
For bloggers and webmasters there are of course big conferences and events that all the blogs talk about. There are the search engine events, like SES, the big webmastering get togethers like webmasterworld then the blogger events such as Northernvoice.
It is no use deciding to just turn up to these things even if they are local to you (which for me they never are). For example Northernvoice is in February but if you want to speak and haven’t already got your slot then you are out of luck. Even if you want to attend just to listen you need to get organised with tickets, travel and accommodation plans.
If you want to be seen as an authority in your niche then you need to be covering the main events. Make sure you know what the big events are and ensure you are there and blogging them. It’s quite easy for your audience to get their daily fix elsewhere. I am sure there were quite a few blogs got a leg up with the Ipod and Xbox 360 announcements of last year.
Planning the year ahead
So, sitting as we are at the cusp of a new year, we are perfectly positioned to look forward and plan.
If you already have an established blog then you will have some advance warning of some of the things we have discussed in this post. Take a look at your years worth of logs and stats and work out where your peaks and troughs were. What posts worked best and when. Try and work out when you missed the mark or scored bullseyes.
Are you using this time to plan a new blog or take your fledgling blog to the next level? In that case you need to do some brainstorming. Get a calendar (electronic or physical) and mark in when your niche events happen and the big news times. Set yourself goals and try to put a milestone in every month.
- Traffic – when will you go from zero visitors to 100 a day, then 1000 a day, then 5000 a day?
- Content – try to plan at least one killer post a month, aim for more. If you start brainstorming now it will be so much easier when the time comes. Use the month and season as inspiration.
- Income – when will you be able to approach advertisers and sponsors? When will you write and release your ebook or blogcommerce? What is your starting income? When will you increase this figure by 50%, when will it increase by the same amount? When will you be able to quit your job and do this full time?
If you fancy being a blog overlord you might also want to phase your launches of new blogs. In which case you will also need to plan finding bloggers, setting up hosting and implementing designs, well before your planned blog launches.
What are you going to do?
Are you using this time to party or are you planning your year? Personally, I aim to do a bit of both. Tell us about your 2006!
Monetization Makeover: Tom Keating’s VoIP Blog
Welcome to the second edition of Monetization Makeover. In this series, I review the monetization of different blogs, in terms of both strategy and ad placement, and make suggestions for improving profits.
Today’s lucky blog: Tom Keating’s VoIP and Gadget Blog. Optimized correctly, a blog like this can make bank.
In Monetization Makeover Part 1 I critiqued PSPFanboy’s ad implementation, copiously citing the Adsense heat map as justification for my recommendations. If you haven’t seen the Adsense heat map, I suggest you take a good look (and even if you have, I’d suggest reviewing it early and often). And now, to this week’s blog.
Tom Keating’s VoIP and Gadget Blog
Tom Keating’s VoIP and Gadget Blog is a very well read site in its area. The niche he’s in is one that pays very well with contextual advertising, since CPC bid prices for VoIP-related keywords are very high (trust me, I know). With this in mind, let’s analyze a “permalink†page. As a long-established blog with gobs of content, Tom Keating’s blog receives tons of traffic from search engines like Google. The traffic from search engines mostly flows to these permalink pages (blog software packages like WordPress and Movable Type handle these permalinks very well for search engine ranking purposes).
Transparent Visitors Pay Your Bills
Now, a bit of an aside on search engine visitors: they tend to be transparent, meaning they find your site in a search engine, click over to your site, either find what they’re looking for, or not– but either way, they usually exit by clicking on an outbound link on your site, or by clicking the back button on their browser.
This is a very important point in terms of its implications for monetization. Visitors from search engines are not going to subscribe to your XML feed at the rate visitors from links do. They’re going to come over for 40 seconds or so and leave, so you need to make the most of them in that quick timeframe.
Now, if you’ve read any of my posts before, you know how my mind works, and you already have figured out the conclusion: these transparent visitors are ripe for monetization. If they’re going to click off, I might as well get them to click off on an ad that pays me for each click. Further, you should note that the CTR on ads from transparent visitors tend to be higher than that of repeat visitors, as repeat visitors have seen your design before and often become “banner blind†to your ad placements.
To sum it up, I think a very good strategy is to maximize the CTR of your ads from transparent visitors without going too far and annoying your regular visitors.
Back to the example at hand. Tom has obviously tried to maximize the monetization of his site (there sure are a lot of ads on the page!)
I’m seeing 6 ads, actually count em. Great monetization, right? Not necessarily.
This is one example where less is more. The ad units that can make him the most money (namely, Adsense) are not featured prominently, nor are they optimized. Further, the page is cluttered with ads that probably pay a lot less than Adsense (Chitika, and, I’m guessing, the graphical units). Using those units has the effect of lowering the CTR (and eCPM) of the Adsense units, while probably not making up that lost revenue. And at the end of the day, it’s all about eCPM of the entire page.
Sometimes Less Is More
With that in mind, I’d probably do something like this:
- Make the skyscraper part of a left column – Skyscrapers nearly always perform significantly better on the left.
- Change the sky to 160 width (it was 120 before) – 160 sky’s perform a lot better than 120 sky’s. The human eye can read the wider text much more easily (and thus click more often).
- Blend the skyscraper – The default Adsense color pattern (white background, blue border) performs terribly. Blending = good.
- Put the graphical skyscraper below the Adsense skyscraper – This one comes with a caveat as I’m not sure what kind of deal, CPC or CPM they get from these. But chances are, they pay a lot less than Adsense for a topic like VoIP. So feature the Adsense.
- Drop Chitika – For a theme like VoIP, Adsense is going to wildly outperform a program like Chitika (again, I know from experience).
- *Not pictured* Change Adsense title text to a more clickable color – To get that ridiculously high CTR on Adsense units, all you have to do sometimes is use red, orange or a shade of blue as the title text. Experiment a bit, as this will vary from blog to blog, but it can make a pretty big difference. (I didn’t picture this one however since I thought it might detract from the design–everything is a tradeoff.)
That wraps up the second edition of Monetization Makeover. Remember, when in doubt, just ask yourself What Would Andy Hagans Do?
I welcome your thoughts.
Research Resources and Tips for Truly Unique Articles
If you want to create original content, you are going to have to do some old fashioned original research. It is a time consuming work, but if you want to write a great article, it must be done. It also helps to prepare for writing lengthy articles—you don’t want to continually break away from the creative process.
There are three phases to how I do research. Each phase has a different purpose, and I do it this way because it is very effective. This is not rocket science, but it helps to develop a rhythm for your work process.
Gathering
The gathering phase, for lack of a better name, is the time spent gathering content. The sources I use will heavily affect the contents of my article. Here are a few places to begin your search for your next great article:
Search engines:
Books:
- Amazon
- Barnes & Noble
- Borders
Videos:
Newspapers:
News Agencies:
Encyclopedias:
- Wikipedia
- Encyclopedia Britannica
- Encarta
Along with those, you could also use a blog as a source—shocking, right?
Regardless, your sources should be legitimate. This is also true if you are making bold claims against a person or company. You want to get praise—not lawsuits—for your hard work. Bloggers are not immune to the judicial system.
Evaluation
After I have gathered my content, it is time to evaluate it. I will quickly evaluate content to see if it is of any use to me. I’m a fast reader, and I can tell if an article is going to be any good pretty fast. I will discard any content that isn’t useful, and, if needed, I’ll go back to find additional content.
In-Depth Research
With all the preparation (which, as always, is very important) out of the way, it is time to study everything I have gathered. Thus begins the most time consuming process of writing a truly unique and original article. Using an application that allows me to keep notes (or even a simple notepad) is always ideal (this topic is for another article entirely), but every person is unique.
Regardless, this article is aimed at those who really put in a lot of effort into their research. These types of articles are the ones that receive notice and respect.
Admittedly, it is hard work—it certainly isn’t the most exciting thing someone could be doing. You will only feel great to have put all that time and effort when your content is found and appreciated by readers. But that is a decision you have to make. If you are going to be the best, you better put in the hard work—otherwise you could just be like every other blogger within the blogosphere.
WordPress and Drupal Compared—The Pro’s and Cons of Each CMS
Should you use WordPress or Drupal for your next project—this is a common and fair question to ask. I have been using both content management systems, and both have their pro’s and cons. Planning for your project’s needs is critical in determining which CMS be sufficient.
Both content management systems are a pleasure to work with, but each one is better suited for certain demands. Overall, both WordPress and Drupal offer an amazing experience, but which one is right for you?
WordPress
WordPress is one of the most sought after publishing platform by new bloggers, and is unquestionably one of the most popular.
Pro’s
- Easy process for migrating to Drupal
- Simple install
- Many themes available
- Easily customizable
- Very stable
- Quickly ready for production
- Built-in image and media handling
- Popularity ensures third-party support will not be a problem
Cons
- Look elsewhere for community-based sites
- Extendable, but there are limitations
- Questionable security (but reasonable turnaround time on fixes)
- User roles are fairly restricted
Drupal
Drupal is an excellent choice for people that wish to create expandable and community focused sites.
Pro’s
- If you can think it, you can create it
- Amazing centralized community on the Drupal site
- Powerful, extendable modules
- Relatively easy to develop modules
- Easy API reference
- Fast growing
- User roles completely customizable
- New data types (nodes) are easily created and extended
Cons
- Difficult and time consuming task for migrating to WordPress
- The available themes leave much to be desired
- Management of the site can become a full-time job
- Lack of a built-in rich text editor (can be added with a module)
- Lackluster image handling
The Outcome
The simplicity and efficiency of WordPress is amazing. I enjoy knowing that I can install WordPress and be blogging within minutes. It is familiar to me, and it works.
WordPress has also come a long way to maturing as a proper CMS, and more websites are finding it to be a great way to handle complex sites. (Revision 3‘s latest site was built using WordPress.) With time, I slowly see the WordPress development community making changes to the back-end to allow more expandability—similar to Drupal, but it will never be able to outperform Drupal in this manner alone, that is, unless there is a complete re-write (which is highly unlikely any time soon).
The amount of effort it requires to manage a Drupal site might not be worth it. This is also true if you are juggling multiple blogs. It can be a handful, and this is not the ideal situation for plenty of people.
I would reserve use of Drupal to sites that will be more than just a typical blog. If you want to create a community around a blog, then Drupal is perfectly fine. If your site will be handling many types of media, and needs to be extendable for the future, then Drupal, again, is an excellent choice.
To sum it all up, if you want a system that will work without the need to extend your blog into something more in the future, use WordPress, but if you want a CMS that can act as a blog and so much more, consider using Drupal. Something to keep in mind is the fact that WordPress’s export functions would easily allow you to move to Drupal, if required.