Let’s get started…

Transferring a File by FTP

First off you will need an FTP client (software). There are many freebies out on the web. I prefer to use CoreFTP, this is what I will use for this post. FileZilla is another popular one. Whichever you choose, the process will be roughly the same.

Visit: http://www.coreftp.com/ download and install Core FTP

Open the software and you will be given a “Site Manager” window, here we need to configure a new site.

Click “New Site” in the bottom left corner of the window. Now fill in the blanks as follows:

Site Name – Pick a name to refer to your site (this doesn’t have to be your url)

Host/IP/URL – Here you will need to enter your domain name (without the http://www) or the site IP address, if you have it. The IP address will look something like 70.32.116.20

Username – This is your FTP username

Password – This is your FTP password

All other settings can be left alone. Now click “Connect”. After connecting, you’ll be given a screen split into four areas. The top row displays the processing information and a log of all actions performed while connected to the server. The middle left column displays the files on your hard drive and the right hand column displays the files on the server. Finally the bottom row displays a log of current actions performed, i.e. CoreFTP lets you know where it is at when you start uploading files.

To upload a file to the server, you simply navigate to the correct folder/file on your hard drive (in the left column). When you have found the file click and drag it over to the relevant directory/folder in the right column (the web server). You might want to drill down to the correct folder on  the server-side first, since you cannot change the folder as you are dragging. Most files will transfer quickly, the larger the file, the longer it will take.

The process can be reversed just as easily. To copy a file from the web server back to your hard drive, click the file in the right window and drag it to the left window.

Note, this process of dragging will COPY the file from one location to another, it will not “move” it as it would if dragging files to different folders within your hard drive.

Have a favorite FTP client that you like to use? Tell me which it is and why you like it in the comments below.

I’ve written this post as a resource for clients and non clients alike, to provide the basics of navigating Google Analytics and getting the most out of the software.

This post assumes that you have the necessary analytics code installed on your site and is correctly capturing data. If you do not have the code installed, here’s the Google Analytics installation instructions. If you are unsure, here’s how to do a quick check.

1. Navigate to your website
2. Click “view” from the menu and “view source”
3. With the view source window open, press Ctrl F (windows) to open the find window
4. Type “google-analytics.com”. If you find that in your code, then its likely you have Google Analytics installed. Although this won’t check if its installed correctly

With that said, lets get on with the Guide to Google Analytics…

Accessing Your Website Analytics

Visit Google.com and sign in via the link in the top right hand corner. Enter your login information. Once logged in you will need to click the “Analytics” button to access your website account “Dashboard” and view your stats.

The Google Dashboard is essentially a summary of your web metrics. Look at it as your web metrics homepage. The following sections will explain the main features of the tabs located in the left hand column of your Dashboard page. Topics covered are: Visitors; Traffic Sources; Content and Goals.

Visitors Overview

The first tab covers statistics that relevant to your visitors. It answers questions like, how many people visited my website? etc. Take a look at the date range to the top right of the screen. This can be changed to show stats for a different date range by clicking the gray arrow to the right of the last date. The default is set for the past 30 days. Note: This date range setting is applicable to all metrics from the dashboard.

The Visitor graph display provides a visual look at your traffic trends.

The following information displays numeric figures relating to your website visitors during the time period specified above. Here’s what they mean:

Visits: Total number of all visits to the site

Absolute Visitors: Total number of “unique visitors” to the site, does not include visitors who viewed the site more than once

Pageviews: Total number of pages viewed by all visitors

Average Pageviews: Average number of pages viewed per visitor

Time on Site: Average amount of time spent on the site by all visitors

Bounce Rate: Percentage of web visitors who only viewed one page

New Visits: Percentage of visitors who were visiting the site for the first time

Each of the breakdown figures above are clickable for more detail.

The next section of the Visitors area is “Visitor Segmentation”. This is basically a browsable area of more information based on user location, operating systems, languages etc. Click the links in this section for details.

The bottom of the page features the “Technical Profiles” of the hardware used to access your site, such as browsers used and connection speeds. This particularly important when designing your website for cross browser compatibility. Again, the information is clickable for details.

Traffic Sources

In this section you can learn about where your visitors came from and how they found you.

The first part features numeric metrics and a pie chart to visually show you the sources of your traffic.

Direct Traffic: Visitors to your site who got there directly by entering your url in the browser address bar. These visitors may have got your url from printed literature of clicked a link in an email

Referring Sites: Visitors who clicked a link on another website that sent them to your website

Search Engines: Visitors who found your site after performing a search on a search engine website like Google.

The “Top Traffic Sources” section provides a breakdown of the search engines and other sites that linked visitors to your site and includes the keywords that they used to find you.

The Traffic Sources section is a great tool to use when determining the best methods to optimize your website for search engines (SEO).

Content

Here you learn about which of your web pages were looked at the most and which pages your visitors clicked to within your site after “landing” there.

Pageviews: Total number of pages viewed on your site by all visitors

Unique Views: Total number of pages viewed by unique visitors, i.e., this would not include visitors who have been to your site before and clicked the same pages

Bounce Rate: Percentage of web visitors who only viewed one page

The following sections are clickable and provide details on navigation, optimization and click patterns as follows:

Navigation Summary: How visitors found your content

Entrance Paths: How visitors navigated through your site to get to your content

Entrance Sources: Top sources of traffic for each page

Entrance Keywords: Top keywords used to find each page

Site Overlay: A transparent overlay view of your website that visually shows you which buttons or links were clicked most.

At the bottom of the “Content” page you will find a breakdown of the number of visitors to each page of your site. The most popular being first and working down to the least popular. The top five pages are displayed here but you can click for the complete list.

Use this section to determine where to place or direct visitors to the content that you want them to see. You can also use this area to help determine why these pages are popular and replicate the format or structure for the pages that are most important.

Goals

The last section covered in this reference guide is for “Goals”. The area allows you to set up and record “goals”. Goals are records of conversions from your website. In most cases a goal could be to get your visitor to fill out a contact form, or buy a product. These goals (or conversions) can be recorded automatically by Google Analytics. You can then monitor these goals and tweak, update and restructure your website to “funnel” more conversions.

To set up a goal, follow the instructions on the “Goal Overview” page.

Conclusion

This concludes my “Google Analytics Quick Reference Guide” although, I realize that I have only scratched the surface in this guide on all you can do with Google Analytics.

Do you already use Google Analytics? What do you or don’t you like about it? Tell me about it in the comments below.

• SEO – How to choose and use your keywords
• Blogging – What is the advantage of blogging?
• Social Media – Using FaceBook, Twitter and LinkedIn and how are they different
• Selling your book – Lulu, Amazon and ebay
• Strategy – Tying it all together

The following media clip is a direct recording from the show. Hit Play, then scan across to about the ninth minute, where the Internet Marketing content begins.

Have you written a book, and have further questions? Post them in the comments below. Thanks!

How Do I Obtain an SSL Certificate?

GoDaddy is a great and cost effective source for an SSL Certificate. Be warned of the various levels of certificates though. The basic level starts out at about $30/year, more “advanced” levels increase by $ as you go up the ranks. Take note of exactly what you are getting for the additional $’s. In my experience, particularly with GoDaddy.com, you are only paying for a color change in the address bar, ie, not actually more security, but instead more security perception. For example, the basic package will secure your site, if you buy the next package, say for an additional $30/year, your site will be secure plus the address bar will turn GREEN clearly indicating to your customers that the site you are on is secure. The actual level of security though remains the same as the basic package. You’ll have to determine if the green bar is worth double the cost of the base package. For me/my clients, basic is good enough. It all depends on your circumstances.

A favicon is a quick addition to your website that will do wonders for improving your brand image online. Learn more about what they are and how to implement one on your site, in this clip.

Follow me on Twitter @beamondcreative or contact us about your next Internet marketing project.

Unfortunately most email applications, either web-based or locally installed, will not allow you to take the video’s code and embed your video right into your email message. Instead you could opt for a screenshot or frame capture of part of your movie and embed the static image into your email message. This is better than no image at all but wouldn’t it be better if you could simulate the video and engage the reader with a better chance of them clicking through to your video?

Yes, But How Do I Simulate a Video Embedded in My Email?

While flv or other web-based video file formats cannot be embedded in emails, more standardized imagery can, such as gifs and jpgs. The wonderful element of gif images is that they can be saved as animated gifs. There are many pieces of software that will allow you to create an animated gif file some paid and some for free. A simple Google search will yield many results. I’ll leave it to you to sift through and find a solution that is right for you needs. With your new animated gif capable software installed, you will need to play your video and take a screen shot/frame capture at various intervals throughout your video playback. I would suggest no more than 10. Now take your frame captures, crop them to size and add them to a time line in your gif software. (Note, for added effect, I suggest leaving the video player frame around your screen shots/frame captures so that the email reader can see that the animation is indeed a video and not some random image sequence thrown in there. Playback of your animated gif will show a somewhat jumpy sequence of your video clip, that tells the story of your video while capturing the attention of the viewer.

Now that you video is in an abbreviated format and exported as an animated gif, you can freely place the file into your email newsletter just like you would a static image. Now once in place you can set your image to link to the live version of your video on youtube or wherever you placed it, when the user clicks the image (animated gif).

Drop me a note if you have any questions or comments!

Why Can’t Search Engines See My Photo-Filled Site?

The main factors search engines use for determining search rankings, is to read site text and coding to learn what the site is about. Since the search engine spiders/crawlers (or whatever you want to call them) aren’t human, they cant see a picture of a house, for example, and record that the site is about houses. It will see the picture and likely move on.

If you have text converted to images so you can use a special font or another reason, this is a big SEO no no. You should make the change right away to use a more generic font, and replace the image text with real text. The sacrifice of the fancy font will be more than outweighed by the increased SEO visibility. Think of it this way, what is the point in using a stylish font style on your site if nobody can find it?

I Still Want Images on My Site, What Are My Options?

Images aren’t completely invisible to search engines, there are certain “tags” that can be coded and associated with your images so that you can tell search engines what the images are. The Google Images search feature uses these for example. Although, this alone is not enough in itself to maximize your visibility.

Follow these steps to bring your image loaded site into SEO compliance:

1. Remove any text imagery and replace it with properly coded html text
2. Reduce the amount of images on your site or at least reduce their size
3. Add html text to page in the areas where the images have been reduced or removed that talk about the image or content relevant to your site
4. Use appropriate tags (see below) to code your image placement so that search engines can read them. Remember to use descriptive keywords and phrases relative to your company

Which Image Tags Are Important For SEO?

Alt tag: This tag appears when your mouse rolls over an image. It also replaces the image area if the link to the image file becomes broken

Title tag: This tag text replaces the image area if the link to the image file becomes broken. Although similar in nature to the “Alt tag” both of these tags should be used. When this is the case, the Title tag will override the Alt tag for a broken image. The good thing is that search engines pay attention to both the Title and Alt tags.

File name: Avoid using a generic file name like image1.jpg, instead, for SEO advantages, name your file with a keyword or phrase related to your field.

Now you know what to do to have a “pretty” site while keeping it relatively optimized for search engine visibility. Go for it and start making some changes. Let me know if I can help in any way!

Google provides a service where you can create a custom trackable URL using its “URL Builder“. The builder allows you to enter your destination URL as well as campaign information for your link. Once all the information is added, you can click “Generate URL” and you will be provided with a trackable URL. Use this URL for your banner ad or email link. Change the information in the url builder each time, to create a separate URL for each link location. Now every time that URL is clicked you will know exactly where it came from.

The following fields may be defined when composing your URL, not all are necessary (* are required fields):

Campaign Source: *     (the website or newsletter where your ad will be placed )
Campaign Medium: *     (what type of ad will you be placing? banner ad, text link, etc)
Campaign Term:     (identify any paid keywords that will cause the ad to display)
Campaign Content:     (use to differentiate ads, e.g. “free shipping” or “buy one get one free”)
Campaign Name*:     (product, promo code, or slogan)

Unless you want to be very granular in your tracking abilities, only the * fields need to be used. Note that the more information you provide here (fields you complete), the longer the generated URL will be.

I Want to Use This in Twitter, But the Long URL Wont Fit in My 140 Character Limit Twitter Post. Can I Still Use UTMs?

As well as Twitter, there are other times when the long URL cannot be used, all is not lost! UTMs can be entered into a URL shortener like bit.ly to have the URL size reduced. The UTM will still record the clicks and traffic from the URL since the shortener service is redirecting the URL to the trackable URL NOT directly to your site. Now you can use Google’s UTM feature for tracking specific Twitter posts. In the past you would only have been able to record the number of clicks for Twitter in general. Now you can see which links were clicked the most, and more importantly , which clicks generated the most conversions.

What Does UTM Mean?

The term UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module and is the format/coding that Google uses to track your unique urls.

Useful Links

How do I tag my links?

Understanding campaign variables

The UTM URL builder

What is Contextual Targeting Then?

Contextual Targeting works in a similar way except there is not ramp up time needed to gather user data, instead contextual targeting displays ads to users based on the context of the page that they are reading. For example say you wanted to market to ATV consumers online. You will generally gather a lot of user information and can market quite successfully on ATV focused websites. Instead of targeting those sites though, what if you could position your ad in front of a web user reading an ATV-related article on a news website, or a generalized outdoors website that you normally wouldn’t advertise on since its not focused on your industry?

Combine Them

Regular online targeted marketing and contextual targeting can generally be used independently. However by combining standard web targeting with contextual targeting you would have the ultimate targeted marketing solution. Not only would you benefit from web user gathered information, but you would also have the opportunity of reaching the “new” users in your segment. Those users that haven’t been surfing, subscribing and purchasing products online in your industry for very long. Since these users are just learning the industry, they generally will need to spend money on getting into a new hobby or sport, thereby increasing the value of your ad spend further. Yes, you will get some overlap in the audience that you reach, for example, obviously users whom you have data on already, will be highly likely to read an article or access content online related to your industry but on non industry sites, like a news page. In those circumstances you are strengthening your brand to them by repeatedly display ads to these people. They are more likely to remember you or even be reminded that they need to make a purchase from a company like yours.

Have a question about contextual marketing? Send me a note… or leave a response below.

While there are many web developers, bloggers, email marketers, SEO, social media professionals etc. out there, these practices in themselves are not the solution to marketing a company, product or service on the web. Members of this group understand that a successful online strategy encompasses all aspects of these online channels to achieve the marketing objective. Different levels of each aspect are required depending on industry and audience. Named “Internet Marketing Source”, the group aims to bring professionals together in these marketing fields, to learn from each other, exchange ideas and share real life success stories from the field. Join today to broaden your knowledge of internet marketing, and contribute your expertise.

Follow this link to join the “Internet Marketing Source”! http://www.linkedin.com/groupRegistration?gid=2475645

Contact us to learn more about how Internet Marketing techniques that will grow your business.