Google offers a great free tool for measuring your website traffic success – Google Analytics. Go to www.google.com/analytics, set up an account, add a special code to the web pages you want to track and start a great adventure of monitoring your website performance.

Google Analytics gives you handy reports on the following issues:

Content Analysis

Visitors Analysis

Traffic Sources

Goal Conversion

Among these tools you will find an answer to every question regarding your website performance. I would recommend that you create monthly reports in Excel spreadsheets (as described below) which will enable you to compare the results over time.

Specifically, you should keep an eye on these data:

Visits

Page Views

Pages/Visit

Average Time on Site

Bounce Rate – how many people left immediately after they came to the page

% New Visits

Google Page Rank – you can see this on you Google Toolbar

Goal Conversions Total

Keywords – what keywords were our website visitors looking for?

Traffic Sources – where did visitors came from?

However, the ultimate statistics talk about the VALUE all your website optimization efforts and online advertising have brought to your company.

An ebook, or, electronic book, as it is called, is simply a short or longer book you can view on the screen of your laptop, or even on your iPhone.

Don’t feel daunted by any technicalities – it’s a simple document, usually saved as a pdf file, which you can email your clients or prospects, or it can be available on your website for download.

Even if you are an expert on your, it sometimes might be a challenge to know where to start and how to approach writing this masterpiece. Remember, on every single page of the ebook you will put your contact details, so you better make sure it will only enhance your company image – so the quality must be excellent.

You can come up with free tips for your and give them out as a gift when somebody signs up for your newsletter or just use it as an introduction to your company. Make sure you make the use of all content you have already created – you can even put together your newsletter articles etc.

It is very important to make sure that your ebook has these items:

• Value adding content
• Contact details to your company
• Call to action – eg. “if you need more advice, call us now”

To promote your ebook, here are a few hints:

• Mention your ebook on your website and your blog
• Submit it to ebook directories
• Email your related websites about it and ask them to promote it
• Offer it as a free gift to your customers or prospects

To apply goals and tracking in online marketing, you first need to gather some data upfront, so that you will be able to estimate the value your your website is delivering every month:

• Average Sales Value – What is the value of an average sale?
• No. of Products Avg. Client Buys – How many products does an average client buy in their lifetime?
• Sales Conversion Ratio (%) – What percentage of leads will turn into sales?

When you get these data right, it is then easy, with all the online tracking tools available, to measure the real value your website is delivering every month. We recommend to measure the initial state before you start any optimisation work – since then you will be able to say how much your marketing activities have delivered.

Again, it might be worthwhile to confirm we are on the same page re these definitions:

• Absolute Unique Visitors – How many people visited your website in a particular month
• Visitors from Non-paid Search - How many people came to your website from organic non-paid search in Google
• Visitors from Google Adwords – How many people came to your website from Google Adwords
• Online Leads (Enquiries) - How many people contacted you through the website
• Estimated Lifetime Sales – How much lifetime sales did your website generate, based on your average sales value and no. of products an average customer buys in their lifetime
• Cost of Online Marketing – How much did you spend on online marketing
• Estimated Gross Profit – What remains in your pocket after you deduct Cost of Online Marketing from Estimated Lifetime Sales

Since not all leads come through the website forms, it is probably a good idea to track all incoming calls and other leads. To get the most value from your tracking, we recommend using a simple call sheet which will track all incoming calls.

After you have succeeded in bringing customers interested in your to your website, and maybe got them to read a few of your pages, in order to bring them to the next step, which could be for example contacting you about a particular product, you might need to keep in touch with them and make sure that they keep you in mind.

One of the options of involving visitors into happening on your website is to invite them to join your mailing list, so that you will be sending them a monthly online newsletter with free your tips – with links back to your website.

Writing a newsletter is an excellent way to stay in touch with your customers and to keep them updated on your special offers and news.

1. Write an article and create a special offer for the newsletter
2. Setup http://www.getresponse.com account
3. Create newsletter template and put together your first online newsletter
4. Upload your contacts, who will get a verification email with a link to confirm that they agree to be included in your list
5. Setup a sign-in form and send the code to your web designer who will put it to the website – preferably to every page to the upper half
6. Broadcast your first newsletter
7. Create a tracking sheet for the newsletter
8. Write up newsletter articles, broadcast monthly and track responses

Here all general rules for writing content apply, so don’t forget about using benefits, testimonials and irresistible calls to action as outlined earlier in this chapter.

With article marketing being one of the crucial parts of off-site search engine optimisation, here are a few tips you should follow when writing articles:

• Use a strong headline and include your keywords
• Use the specified keywords at least two times in the article body
• Use each of the key phrases in sub-headings within the article
• The article must be written to add informational value to customers and must be written from their viewpoint
• Use conversational tone for the articles – use the word “you”
• Use bullet points where appropriate
• Don’t mention the name of the company, nor your website or sell anything in the article
• The word count must be 500 words minimum

Here are a few ideas on article headlines ideas you could use:

To save you a lot of time again, since you should be writing and submitting articles on a monthly basis, you can outsource this job for a relatively small fee via http://www.odesk.com – where you can post a job and people from around the world will contact you ready to do it for you. They really don’t charge much, so you should consider this option if you are going to take article submitting seriously.

Unless you are an online marketing consultant or at least have some experience with online marketing, you might realise one day that there are abbreviations that marketing people use every day but nobody ever explains them clearly.

This is what we think are the vital “must-knows” of online marketing:

• SEO = Search Engine Optimisation
  Any aspect of online marketing that is aimed at improving your ranking in search engines, such as Google or Yahoo.

• PPC = Pay per Click
  An online advertising campaign run by search engines like Google or Yahoo, where you pay only when somebody clicks on your ad and gets to your website; ad impressions are free unless anybody clicks on them. Google Adwords are an example.

• CPC = Cost per Click
  How much you pay for one click on your ad in a PPC campaign.

1. For each of your main pages, go to the External Google Adwords Keyword Tool, pick your country target (just above where you are going to write the keywords) and paste the relevant keywords from your brainstorming and reviewing competitors’ websites.
2. Hit “Get keyword ideas” and sort the results by “Local Search Volume” by clicking on that heading in the table
3. Pick up to 7 best keywords – based on the average local search volume and relevancy.
4. In theory, those keywords with the highest search volume should be your target keywords. However, you might find that you need to go for a lower volume keyword that might provide better (and achievable) PPC marketing results.

Although marketing consultants should do their best to use a simple “non-marketing” language when talking to clients, sometimes you simply cannot avoid marketing jargon.

Therefore we thought it would be useful to come up with a handy list of marketing terms, so that every word used by marketing consultants is clear and concise. Most of the terms below refer to online marketing, though.

• Sales Lead
  Anybody potentially interested in buying your product. This could be a customer who contacts you by phone with an enquiry.

• Prospect
  A sales lead that you evaluate as a more likely to become a paying customer of yours.

• Keyword
  To find the type of thing your website provides, people will type a “search term” into Google or Yahoo. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) will help to point these people straight to your website.
• Landing Page
  A page where people “land” after they click on your link at a search engine’s search results page. If this page is optimised properly with the right content, visitors will turn into clients easily.
• Website Traffic
  Number of people who visit your website in a given period of time.
• Meta Tags
  For SEO purposes, a part of a website’s code which states the title and description of the website, as well as what keywords express best the content of the website
• Call to Action
  A brief and clear message for your prospective customers to take action you want them to take – eg. Buy Now, Read More, Sign Up Now etc.

Another very useful option you have is to submit your original articles to free article directories. Again, you will find hundreds of them on the Internet. However, the two most important and most effective article portals are:

• www.ezinearticles.com
• www.isnare.com – here you can get your article distributed to thousands of other article portals just for $2 per article – we strongly recommend.

What is important to note is that in the author bio, you should include a link to your website, so you can use your HTML link code again, but this time embedded in a bit of description about yourself.

This article was written by [Your Name] of [YourCompany] offering <a href=”http://www.YourWebsite.com” title=”Keyword1,Keyword2, Keyword3”>Keyword1</a> in [YourTown].

Which will appear as:

This article was written by [YourName] of [YourCompany] offering [Keyword1] in [YourTown].

And this is the link you are getting, since most article marketing portals will not allow you to use your link in the body of the article, nor to promote your company in any way.

The first step of your SEO (after you have optimised your website for customers) is to make the best keyword list possible. A keyword is a word or a phrase people who are looking for products type in Google. For example, one of your keywords may be “your”.

However, it is better to focus on specific key phrases that will get more highly targeted people to your site. That means, do not use just “your”, as there are many people searching for this word, but many of them might be actually looking for a job in your, for example. Also, the competition is usually much stronger with these words, so it will take more time to get ranked on the first page.

Instead, go for longer keyword phrases and combinations such as “your [YourTown]”, “your company” etc.

Moreover, I would advise you to apply the following methodology to choose the right key words:

1. Organize a brainstorming with your co-workers, business partners, friends, relatives or even customers to find keywords relevant to your your business. Focus on the needs of customers, what they would type in when looking for products.
2. Check out your competitors’ websites for ideas. View the source HTML code and take a look at keywords in their meta tags (you will learn below how to do this). They could be a good tip for yours!
3. Try to make a list of 100 keywords minimum. It’s recommended to use a search term suggestion tool (such as Google Adwords Keyword Tool). It will give you an idea what your phrases have been searched for recently. Just make sure that you pick the appropriate location.