flyte blog: small business web marketing blog

What Is Web Marketing, Anyway?

Although businesses and organizations have different goals and purposes, most would like to achieve the following:

• increase their online visibility
• drive more qualified prospects to their site
• convert that traffic into business or membership.

These days, almost everyone will agree that a company's Web site is the hub of their marketing; TV ads, print ads, even billboards, will include a URL to drive interested parties to for more information or to order.

While different people have different opinions of what Web marketing is, I feel there are four major components:

• Attraction: How to you drive qualified prospects to visit your site
• Retention: How to keep the lines of communication open after they've left your site
• Conversion: How to get visitors to take a desired action on your site (buy now, picking up the phone, etc.)
• Measurement: How to track your success and continually improve on your site and marketing campaigns.

There are plenty of tools at our disposal as small business owners and entrepreneurs to accomplish this, including search engine optimization, email marketing, blogging and social media to name a few.

If you'd like to learn more in a classroom setting, I'll be teaching Web Marketing for Small Business at the University of Southern Maine starting this Thursday evening from 6 - 8pm, and three additional classes after that.

Just remember to bring the teacher instructor an apple.

Rich Brooks
Web Marketing for Small Business

Web Marketing Course for Small Business

It's hard to think about school starting up while classic rock stations still have Alice Cooper's anthem on heavy rotation.

Even if you're not quite ready to shop for back-to-school fashions, it's never too early to register for Web Marketing for Small Business, the four-week, eight-hour course I teach at the University of Southern Maine through their Center for Continuing Education.

If you're a small business owner, marketer, or thinking about starting your own business, you can't go wrong with this course. We'll review:

• Search engine optimization
• Email marketing
• Blogging
• Social media (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.)
• E-commerce tips
• Web site analytics and
• How to build a Web site that sells

If you're wondering why your competitors rank higher than you, or how you can leverage your Web site to grow your business, than you should register for Web Marketing for Small Business.

Just remember to bring your teacher an apple.

Rich Brooks
Checking My Seat for Tacks as We Speak

The Ultimate Google Analytics Video Guide

In the Holistic Web Marketing model, there are four components to a successful, effective Web marketing campaign:

• Attraction: how to drive qualified traffic to your site
• Retention: how to keep the lines of communication open after people have left your site
• Conversion: how to get people to move down the sales funnel at your site
• Measurement: tracking all of the above for continual improvement

It's that last piece--measurement--that's the focus of The Ultimate Google Analytics Video Guide that we just published at Squidoo.

This is a collection of the how-to videos we created for small businesses so you could put Google Analytics to use, along with some other important resources that will help you measure your growth and success online.

If you'd like more help understanding your Google Analytics, or installing a copy of the free software on your own Web site, just let us know.

Rich Brooks
Google Analytics for Small Business

How to Set Up Goals in Google Analytics - Video

Every Web site has conversion points; actions you want your visitors to take to move them down the sales funnel. It could be clicking on a "buy now" button, signing up for an email newsletter, completing a contact form, and so on.

Using Google Analytics Goals we can track this activity at our Web site. By setting up goals we can find out not just how much traffic a search engine or Web site is sending us, but what's the quality of that traffic, and even what each lead is worth.

In the video below you can see how to set up and use goals to gain new insight into the activity at your Web site, or you can watch How to Set Up Goals in Google Analytics at YouTube.

Rich Brooks
Goal Oriented

What is Holistic Web Marketing?

What is Holistic Web Marketing? At flyte we use this model to explain our integrated approach to online success. A static Web site is no longer enough; you need a coordinated Web marketing strategy to reach the widest audience possible.

Holistic Web marketing consists of four parts:

• Attraction: How to drive quality traffic to your Web site. [Tools: search engine optimization, blogging, social media]
• Retention: How to keep the conversation going after they’ve left your site. [Tools: email marketing, social media]
• Conversion: How to get people to make a buying decision at your site, whether it’s clicking on a “Buy Now” button, completing a contact form, or picking up the phone. [Tools: web site]
• Measurement: How to analyze your traffic to make ongoing improvements to both your Web site and your Internet marketing for better results. [Tools: analytics]

We believe that you need to address and integrate all four pieces of Holistic Web Marketing for long-term success.

On Thursday, May 14th at 12pm EDT, I'll be leading a one hour Webinar (plus 30 minutes of Q&A) examining how small businesses can use the holistic Web marketing model to grow their own business. We'll look at search engine optimization, email marketing, blogging, social media and your own Web site as tools to increase online visibility, drive more qualified leads to your site, and generate more online business.

The cost of the Webinar is normally $49, but if you enter coupon code "theeconomystinks" you'll save $15. That's our stimulus package to you.

Learn more and register now!

Rich Brooks
Web Marketing for Small Biz

A Shout Out from The Official Google Analytics Blog...FTW!

Flyte received a shout out from Google the other day--specifically the Google Analytics Blog. As regular readers to this blog know--hi, Mom!--I've been putting together some short instructional videos on how to make the most of Google Analytics, Google's free Web site traffic reporting system.

The Official Google Analytics Blog ran a recent post, Google Analytic Videos from "Vacationland", where they linked to several of our instructional videos that we posted on YouTube. I also noticed that we got a bunch of new YouTube subscribers shortly afterwards. (YouTube subscribers get alerted when we add new videos to our flyte new media channel.)

Strangely, no word from KamaSutraForNoobs.com on my other set of instructional videos.

Rich Brooks
FTW = For the Win

Track Visitor Behavior Using Google Analytics

In this ongoing video series on Google Analytics we've come to the content section; specifically, looking at what people are doing at your site.

To continually improve your Web site's effectiveness you need to have a better understanding of which pages people are landing on, which pages they're viewing, and ultimately where they're abandoning your site.

Google Analytics provides insights into all these questions, and gives you a cool site overlay that breaks down which links people are clicking on for every page on your site.

You can watch the video below or check out Google Analytics: How Are People Behaving On Your Site? at YouTube.

Want more Google Analytics goodness? Check out these other videos and don't forget to subscribe to our blog!

• Track Visitor Behavior Using Google Analytics
• Use Google Analytics to Better Understand Your Site Traffic
• Get Better Traffic Reports with Google Analytic Filters
• Google Analytics Dashboard: The How-to Video

Rich Brooks
Tracking Your Behavior Right Now

Use Google Analytics to Better Understand Your Site Traffic

One of the big reasons you want a traffic reporting system like Google Analytics is to better understand where your Web site traffic is coming from.

Google Analytics breaks down your traffic into 3 categories:

• Direct Traffic: these are the people who typed in your URL into the address bar, bookmarked your site earlier, or followed a link from an email.
• Referral Traffic: this traffic arrives when someone is at another Web site and clicks on a link to your site.
• Search Engine Traffic: these people found you via a search at Google, Yahoo or another search engine.

In addition, you can also see which search terms people used to find your site under the Keywords tab.

It all makes more sense with visuals, so I've created the video below and posted it to YouTube under the title: Google Analytics: Where Does Your Traffic Come From?

Want more Google Analytics goodness? Check out these other videos and don't forget to subscribe to our blog!

• Track Visitor Behavior Using Google Analytics
• Use Google Analytics to Better Understand Your Site Traffic
• Get Better Traffic Reports with Google Analytic Filters
• Google Analytics Dashboard: The How-to Video

Rich Brooks
I'm Just Like Cross Town Traffic

Get Better Traffic Reports with Google Analytic Filters

Traffic reports are an essential tool if you have a Web site or if you're running an online marketing campaign. Tools like Google Analytics give great insight into how people found your site and their behavior once they get there.

However, if you spend time on your own site you may be skewing the reports which reduces their effectiveness. Luckily, Google Analytics gives us filters so that we can, well, filter out internal traffic. In the Google Analytics Filter video below I walk you through how to create filters that will block your own activity at your site.

To find your own IP address check out the aptly-named WhatIsMyIPAddress.com.

If you want to filter your own traffic and you have a range of static IP addresses, or you have a dynamic IP address you have a little more work ahead of you. Google Analytic's help section has loads of information on that, but here's the quick start guide:

For Ranges:

Range: 176.168.1.1-25 and 10.0.0.1-14
IP address value : ^176\.168\.1\.([1-9]|1[0-9]|2[0-5])$|^10\.0\.0\.([1-9]|1[0-4])$

For help finding the correct expression for your range of IP addresses, use our tool:
http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55572

For Dynamic IPs:

How to exclude traffic by cookie:

1. Create a new page on your domain, containing the following code:

  <body onLoad="javascript:pageTracker._setVar('test_value');">

(Please note that this code is in addition to the Google Analytics tracking code that you have on every page of your website.)

2. In order to set the cookie, visit your newly created page from all computers that you would like to exclude from your reports.

3. Create an Exclude filter to remove data from visitors with this cookie. Follow these instructions http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55494
to create a filter with the following settings:

Filter Type: Custom filter > Exclude
Filter Field: User Defined
Filter Pattern: test_value
Case Sensitive: No

Want more Google Analytics goodness? Check out these other videos and don't forget to subscribe to our blog!

• Track Visitor Behavior Using Google Analytics
• Use Google Analytics to Better Understand Your Site Traffic
• Get Better Traffic Reports with Google Analytic Filters
• Google Analytics Dashboard: The How-to Video

Rich Brooks
Your Web Site Analyst

Google Analytics Dashboard: The How-to Video

Google Analytics is a powerful tool for analyzing how visitors find your site and their behavior once they get there. Based on that information you can continue to improve your Web site and your marketing campaigns.

Once you login you are greeted with the dashboard: a quick overview of some of the more important reports Google Analytics provides. Although the default report shows you a month's activity, you can change the length of time or even measure your previous month's activity against the same time the previous year.

You can also move the dashboard reports around to suit your needs, add new reports, and remove ones that aren't of importance to your business.

In this video on the Google Analytics dashboard I'll show you how to make those changes to get the most out of your analytics report.

Want more Google Analytics goodness? Check out these other videos and don't forget to subscribe to our blog!

• Track Visitor Behavior Using Google Analytics
• Use Google Analytics to Better Understand Your Site Traffic
• Get Better Traffic Reports with Google Analytic Filters
• Google Analytics Dashboard: The How-to Video

Related resources on Google Analytics:

• How to Set Up Google Analytics
• How to Share Your Google Analytics (Without Sharing Your Google Account)
• Google Analytics for Beginners
• Google Analytics Benchmarking
• How Google Analytics Can Make You the Life of the Party

Rich Brooks
Analyze This