Why You Should Be Using Google Analytics Right Now!

Have you ever called a business to inquire about their services and heard the person on the other end ask you, “Where did you hear about our business?” Sure you have, this is a pretty common thing and while it may seem like a small, almost meaningless question to the customer, the business takes this question VERY seriously. This is how they determine how effective their specific marketing and advertising campaigns are.

If a business is using, let’s say the yellow pages, fliers, and postcards to advertise their business, it is VERY helpful for them to know how many customers they are getting from each source. Once they tally how much they are spending on each particular campaign versus how many customers they acquire, they can decide which methods to continue with or which to possibly discontinue. This is EXACTLY the data that you need to be collecting for your website. Without it, you are just marketing in the dark.

The good news is, this data is EXACTLY what you can get by using Google Analytics, and actually much more than that. Google Analytics is a free program that Google allows ANYONE to use who has a website. You simply place a piece of java code on each page of your website and the program does the rest. This data is simply invaluable.

How so?

Well, when promoting your website, it is likely that you are hitting several avenues at once in order to get visitors. You may be using Google Adwords, Facebook, Press Releases, etc. Now I ask you, how do you know which of your marketing efforts is bearing the most fruit if you have no way to track where your traffic is coming from or which traffic source is producing more leads or sales?

Before programs like Google Analytics, collecting this data was not so easy or cheap. Most website owners spent all their time promoting their site never really knowing which methods were producing and which were not.

Now, it is incredibly easy to see exactly where your traffic is coming from and which campaigns are effective. Once you find out what areas are not as effective, you have the choice of either stopping those methods altogether and focusing more time and energy on the ones that are, or try to tweak the less productive ones to increase the traffic rate.

Google Analytics is helpful not only in showing you traffic data, but in showing conversion data as well. So at a glance you’ll know the percentage of visitors that have taken action by signing up to your email list or by purchasing one of your products. You’ll also know which traffic source brings in visitors that take action the most.

As you can see, Google Analytics can be a website owner’s #1 tool when it comes to producing a powerful and profitable website. So stop “driving” your business “blindfolded” and install Google Analytics already!

A Look At RSS Graffiti

I’ve been looking into RSS Graffiti to automate yet another mundane task. RSS Graffiti is a free Facebook application that pulls content from whatever RSS feeds you input and it then automatically posts to your Facebook page. Of course, this doesn’t mean you should never log in to your Facebook page again.

It’s still good to make updates on your Facebook page communicating directly with your fans instead of always just posting links. It’s something I need to work on myself, but I know it will only benefit me in the long run as it will help my “fans” and visitors to get to know which really brings us to what we’re all trying to do here… and that is to build relationships. Business and personal.

RSSGraffiti.com explains:

“RSS Graffiti periodically checks the RSS/Atom feeds that you specify and posts any new entries it finds to the Facebook Walls that you specify. You can get any feed written on any wall (Facebook Profiles, Fan Pages, Groups, Events and Application Profile Pages). In fact, multiple feeds to multiple walls. You choose the combination.”

Continue to RSS Graffiti!

Music “Piracy” Is Nothing New And It’s Not Evil

That’s right, I placed piracy in quotations. Why? Because downloading mp3′s is no different than dubbing a tape for your friend back in the day or burning a copy of a record to CD, and that is not stealing, it is called “sharing”. It is our nature as humans to share things we like with others. This is nothing new. What is new is the technology we are using to share music now. It’s sharing on steroids! That is the only thing that is different.

Here’s what the music industry giants don’t realize though. I guess they don’t read news headlines that often.

Gizmodo reports:

“A study from the BI Norwegian School of Management has found that those who download free music from services like BitTorrent are also the biggest legitimate consumers of downloadable music.

In fact, among all 1,901 (global?) study participants (all of whom were over the age of 15), it was found that those who downloaded “free” music were 10x more likely to download pay music. In other words, music pirates are the music industry’s largest online consumers.

Note: “Free” music obviously implies pirated music, but it also encompasses legitimate free music download services.

The findings also included that, in the 15-20 age range, 50% of participants had bought a CD in the last six months. So that trusty format isn’t dead quite yet.

Since we relied on Google’s translation from the original Norwegian, anyone who speaks the language is encouraged to glean for more specifics and post them in the comments.”

Record labels that “get it” can be found freely giving away mp3′s of their music for their fans to sample. Great examples of this are Rumbletowne Records and Quote Unquote Records.

I know it seems counterintuitive to give away mp3s of your music if your goal is to recoup some of the money you put into recording and releasing your music as a CD or vinyl record, but it isn’t. You see, making money was never the issue when it comes to music, exposure was. As long as your band has raving fans, you will not starve… far from it actually.