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Website Traffic — How Well is Your Copy Performing?

March 26, 2010 Leave a Comment

Measure your copywriting conversionsMy friend Teddy Garcia recently spoke about website testing at his Raleigh Internet Mastermind Meetup and shared some cool tools to evaluate how well your sales pages and other web pages are faring.

Google Analytics — Everyone probably knows this one but even many of the big name Internet marketers who could well afford other programs rely on Google Analytics for ongoing monitoring of their site traffic. Free

Crazy Egg – Gives you heat maps showing how much time visitors spend on each area of your web page and a “treasure map” graphic to show where they clicked. This is a great way of seeing what was read most often (i.e. most important to your visitor) and which links are getting clicked. Starts at $9 a month and up.

Clicktale – Even more Big Brotherish is Clicktale, which records visitors’ movements on your web page and provides you the videos! Now you can see what they looked at and in what order and how fast they scrolled down the page (i.e. are they reading, scanning or just looking for the price?),.

You can also see where they might have gotten hung up and where they were when they decided to buy or leave your website. Clicktale offers a free basic plan.

Woopra – This was the first I’d heard of Woopra, which lets you see in real-time what visitors are doing. You can also send a chat message directly to the person while they’re still on the page!

Granted, that might freak them out a bit. But it can also be invaluable if you notice they’re having trouble with something. This way you can save the sale and have a better idea of what needs to be changed and how. Woopra also offers a free basic plan.

One affliliate link is included above. Feel free to go directly to the site if you have a problem with that. photo courtesy of Oskay @ Flickr / CC BY 2.0

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I Miss Twitter

March 18, 2010 Leave a Comment

…

When I joined Twitter 2 years ago, it was about “meeting” others that shared your interests, your mindset, or even just your love of chocolate peanut butter ice cream.

Your fellow tweeps could be across the country, across the world or even just 5 minutes away. Finding new resources, getting help, and sometimes, sharing what you have to offer with the twitterverse.

But most of all, it used to be about having a conversation.

Connecting with people you would have never otherwise known. Swapping tweets with “gurus” you would have never gotten a chance to talk to in person. Staying in touch with people you met elsewhere.

Then a lot of people started competing to see who could get the most followers. One guy I know would literally get upset if he lost 100 followers one day simply because Twitter cleaned out a bunch of bots. Um, how exactly were those bots useful to you?!!

And a lot of the follow-hungry tweeps automatically unfollow anyone not following them back. Which is just crazy to me…Maybe you’re just not on their radar screen yet. Maybe they manually decide who to follow (like I do) and they just haven’t gone through to update that yet.

Some folks I’d follow regardless of whether they follow me back because I want to keep up with what they’re doing. Or the info in their tweets is usually quite valuable–or funny. (Laughter is always a good thing!)

But nowadays, I hardly ever see tweets from the people I used to “talk” with all the time because my Twitter stream is full of  crap–ghostwritten tweets, pre-scheduled quotes to make it look like someone has a presence on Twitter, and endless promotions…

Especially for get-followers-quick schemes and products promising to show you how to make “a boat load of money” on Twitter.

Hello–you’re MISSING THE POINT!

The most valuable part of Twitter has always been the relationships. But as more companies and spammy marketers fill the tweetstream with their junk, that’s getting harder and harder to do.

Because people start tuning out. Just like they did with TV commercials (unless they’re REALLY good) and just like they do with anything that makes them feel they’re constantly being hounded for the money in their wallet.

Unfortunately, I’ve found myself tuning out more and more these days.

Yes, you can make lists. I’ve done that. But as I move to different Twitter clients or devices it gets harder to take those lists with me. Plus they always need to be updated as you follow new people.

I know some have completely purged their accounts and started over with just the people they really want to keep in touch with. But I like the synchronicity of discovering new people to “meet” popping up in my timeline.

So what do you do to reduce the noise in your tweetstream so Twitter continues to be useful for you?

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A Round-Up of Tips about WordPress Themes

March 12, 2010 Leave a Comment

As you know, I’m not a designer but I’m a big WordPress fan so I recently attended a meetup about WordPress themes and learned a few tips I thought were worth sharing…

Whatever you need, WordPress can do it. Need a contact manager? Or to create a classified ad, job board or membership site? For virtually anything you’d want to do, there’s a theme for that.

Go ahead and take it off. According to Craig Tuller of Studio Press, it’s OK to strip off the promotional information (e.g. “Created by xxxx with a link) for the thememaker at the bottom of the webpage template. The biggest exception to this is Thesis, which requires you to pay for the theme if you want to eliminate that.

In my opinion, keeping the promo is the courteous thing to do if it’s a free theme–the backlink to their site is an always appreciated thank you. I just noticed the person who set up my free theme took it off though so I can’t throw stones at you if you do the same. But in short, it’s your call.

Only download free themes from a reputable repository (such as the WordPress theme directory). There are a lot of sketchy directories out there where the themes have hidden backlinks to spammy and other non-desirable sites–which will come back and haunt your search engine rankings.

Theme customization is easier than ever. Apparently 99% of themes for sale these days have an options tab where you can change colors, the number of columns, and other basic formatting items to personalize your site in a snap.

You’ll soon see plug-ins built directly into WordPress. They’re moving toward integrating some widely used plug-ins into the main WordPress code so you don’t have to add them later. But to keep these “core plug-ins” from bogging WordPress down, they’re working with plug-in makers to strip out any little-used functionality. (Thank you!)

Did you find a custom blog design you love? You can use a FireFox add-in called Firebug to reverse engineer the theme and recreate it for yourself.

Parent and child themes are the new trend. A parent is a theme that provides the overarching framework for a site and has a lot of built-in functionality to boot. (For example, including SEO functionality.) You can use it solo if you’d like or you can add a child theme.

The child theme provides a different look and it’s also where you do all your work and design customization. That means you don’t have to worry about losing your posts, your settings or anything else breaking when the parent theme needs updating.

Each version of a theme adds improvements. But sometimes the new versions make a big leap in functionality. With a standard theme, you’d have to move your site over to that new theme to get those extra benefits. But a parent theme should be able to make those kinds of leaps without problems. For examples, check out the Genesis theme framework from Studio Press.

Want to add a sales page to your site? Maybe you’ve had the same issue I have–where you find a sales page template for WordPress then realize you can’t simultaneously use more than one theme on the same site. Apparently, the trick is to just create (or have someone create) a new page template for your current theme and select that page when you need it.

Moving your site to a new theme? This is something I’ve long wanted to do but have been afraid to because my blog wasn’t set up properly by the person I hired to do it. So I’m afraid I’d click to publish the new theme and the site would just implode. Instead, the safer route apparently is to create what’s called a development site.

Just create a new subdomain in your site’s cpanel. Install WordPress on the subdomain (which most hosts make super simple–just click on the “Install WordPress” option they offer) and install the new theme. Export your current site to the development site and see what happens. If all goes fine, you can just move that site to the main domain.

In fact, a development site is a great way to test drive any major changes you’re planning on making to your site.

Note:  The link to the Genesis framework is an affiliate link. If that bothers you feel free to go directly to the Studio Press website.

Photo courtesy of Flickr, originally uploaded by Peregrino Will Reign

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