Category Archives: Marketing

Marketing, promoting and selling your books, especially on the Internet

Marketing

Blog Tours: Keeping it interesting

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This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series Marketing: Blog tours

Blog tours are great for introducing new audiences to your book. But for your existing audience, they can sometimes get a little . . . repetitive. Boring.

Most blog tour posts consist of the back cover copy and a review of the book. We definitely want the blogger’s review in the post, reading the same back cover over and over can get tedious, and even your biggest fans won’t read 25 identical posts, even for the reviews.

What’s the solution? Variety, of course!

But first, Announcements!

TODAY, July 16, is Sell Books for Steve Day! Steven Kerry Brown is the author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Private Investigating, a really useful book if your character is a PI (or if you want to be one, you know, if you want to look at the intended audience. Whatever). I’ve had a chance to “meet” Steve online and see how much he gives back to other writers, and have been the beneficiary of his expertise more than once.

Steve has leukemia, and recently had to undergo a bone marrow transplant. As a PI, he’s self-employed and doesn’t have insurance. The transplant comes with a price tag of $500,000. To help someone who has helped so many people, Jeffrey Phillips has brought together more than a dozen authors who will donate part of their proceeds from today’s sales to Steve’s treatment. You can see all the available books or donate directly on Jeff & Steve’s blog, Handcuffed to the Ocean, where Steve is also reporting on his recovery.

Next weekend, July 27-28, I’ll be presenting on HTML at the iWriteNetwork Conference. If you’ll be in the American Fork area, it’s only $50 for two days. Check out the schedule in the sidebar of the iWriteNetwork blog.

Finally, remember that every comment on this blog in July is a chance to win a free 15-page critique from me!

Now, back to blog tours.

Encouraging variety to keep your blog tours interesting

Although bloggers are endlessly creative, it’s up to the author to encourage bloggers to use that creativity. You might include a list of ideas for bloggers so they know you’re open to them thinking outside the box when it comes to their posts.

  • Author interviews—answer a few questions for the blogger, about your writing journey, the process of writing this book, your characters, or even you.
  • Character interviews—if a blogger has a favorite character, you can answer questions as that character, which is not only fun but helps to draw potential readers into a character more.. I’ve also seen fellow authors have one of their characters interview one of the characters from
  • Giveaways—these are generally sponsored by the author and often have a big, overarching prize (I’ve seen Kindles and the like). However, if the individual blogger wants to also sponsor a giveaway. The blogger might offer their [hard] copy of the book, or if the author provided them with an extra copy to giveaway. If the blogger is an author, Another option might be a book of theirs in the same genre, though that might be a little sketchy.
  • Book features—this is my favorite, because you can go so many directions with it. My friend Annette Lyon had someone on her book tour blog about the smells in her book. How cool is that?

What do you think? What are the coolest blog book tour posts you’ve done or seen? (Links welcome, but if you use more than 2 I’ll have to manually approve the comment.)

Photo by Kevin Dooley

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Marketing

Blog tours: Best practices for bloggers & authors

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This entry is part 2 of 4 in the series Marketing: Blog tours

Blog tours offer both bloggers and authors a chance to get out there, find new books to love, find a bigger audience. I’ve participated in a few blog tours for other authors. Here are a few things I’ve learned over the years.

For bloggers

Be honest! While author-bloggers want to be loyal to fellow authors, we have to remember our blog readers are our real audience. If our blog readers go out and spend their money on a book we didn’t really enjoy but made to sound good, might that reflect poorly on us?

Be kind. To offset the above, just because you didn’t like a book doesn’t mean you should publicly rip on it. If you really, really hated it, I recommend contacting the author or blog tour coordinator first to let them know you don’t feel good about posting your feelings in public. I know of authors who’ve invited bloggers to post it anyway. You might focus on areas that you feel were strong and list other areas that needed improvement.

Link, link, link! You don’t have to list all the planned stops on the tour with links, but at the bare minimum, you should provide a clickable link to somewhere your readers can buy the book. Links to the author’s website and/or blog are awesome, too.

Remember your FTC disclosure: you received the book for free from the author/publisher, but that didn’t affect your opinion. In some cases, you might also need to disclose that it didn’t guarantee a review (such as newspapers, who receive free books to review all the time, but don’t guarantee a review just because you give them a free copy).

Make your blog post engaging! Just slapping the back cover copy on your blog only does so much to help to the author&madsh;or interest your blog readers! We’ll take a look at this in a little more depth in another week or two.

For authors

Be clear and communicative. Last week, Tristi Pinkston gave us some great advice on setting up a blog tour. Make sure you make your expectations clear from the get-go: tell the bloggers exactly what you’d like them to do. Offer gentle reminders about a week before a post is scheduled.

Be accommodating. Like Tristi said last week, provide an image of at least the book cover (an image of you would be helpful too!), as well as a clean, well-formatted copy of the back cover copy for them to cut and paste. If you can, offer your review copies in multiple formats: hardcover, Kindle, Nook, PDF, etc. And be sure to give them a direct link to somewhere their readers can purchase your book, to make things easy for them.

Cross promote, cross promote, cross promote! You do not want your blog devolving into a daily update of all the other places your book is being featured, but you definitely need to link to the reviews people are doing for you! If you have a Twitter account or a Facebook page, sharing those reviews there would be great. (Look for an awesome quote to go with the link to help draw people in.)

Recognize that not everyone will love your book. It’s just a mathematical impossibility. The purpose of a blog tour is getting your book out there in front of a wider audience, and not everyone will love everything they read. It’s not necessarily a reflection on you or your writing or even your book. So let’s put down the flamethrower, okay?

Consider whether you want to comment publicly on the blog posts. I have friends who don’t because they feel that their presence might stifle the conversation on the blog, emailing their thanks instead. Others pop by to say thank you publicly. Others engage in a dialogue (friendly, I hope!) in the comments.

Be gracious. The bloggers on your tour are doing you a favor, even if they post a negative review. Say thank you. Stay humble. Make friends.

A successful blog tour generates more than just sales. You’re building readership and creating relationships. Keep that in mind no matter which side of the book you fall on.

What do you think? What have you learned from doing blog tours, as a blogger or an author?

Photo credits: On the platform, reading—Mo Riza; Thank you sign—Avard Woolaver

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Marketing

Virtual Book Tours: an introduction by Tristi Pinkston

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This entry is part 1 of 4 in the series Marketing: Blog tours

by Tristi Pinkston

As you get more involved in Internet marketing, you’ll hear the term “virtual book tour.” What is that, anyway? Basically, a virtual book tour is where an author or publicist has arranged for several different blogs or sites to feature the book within a relatively short period of time. These posts should include the book’s cover, price, purchase link, and a little blurb about the book—and hopefully a review written by the blogger or a guest post by the author.

Virtual book tours are an excellent way to spread the word about your book. They can be as simple as asking five or ten of your good friends to blog about your book, or you can take it a step further and ask bloggers from all over the Internet and all walks of life to talk about it. You can determine for yourself how complicated or how easy you want the process to be, and whether you want to include any giveaways with the promotion. They can be inexpensive, or they can be a little more of an investment. It’s all up to you.

Regardless of how you set up your tour, there are a few simple steps you should take to ensure the best results.

1. Choose bloggers whose readers are likely to be interested in the topic of your book. Your favorite aunt might be really eager to blog about it, but if her readers are only knitters, and your book is about exploring coral reefs, this might not be the best fit. However, keep in mind that we can’t prejudge who will enjoy what books. For the most part, see if you can match readership with your topic.

2. Choose bloggers who have more than fifty followers. Of course, the more followers the better, but at least fifty is a good number to start with.

3. Provide the review copy to the reviewer. It’s bad form to ask them to review the book and then tell them where they can buy it … I had someone do that to me, and needless to say, I deleted the e-mail instantly.

4. Ask them to post their reviews on Amazon and GoodReads as well as on their blog. This will get you a ton more exposure, and it’s really only a few extra minutes on their end.

The Internet is the way everyone is marketing now. If you can utilize the Internet to spread the word about your book (or other product), you’ll be better able to keep in step with the future of marketing.

About the Author
Tristi Pinkston is the author of thirteen published books and works as a freelance editor. If you’d like to learn more about her new book Virtual Book Tours: Harness the Power of the Internet, click here.

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Marketing

SEO: Tracking your results

This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Marketing: SEO

In marketing, we have to focus on delivering results. It can be very difficult to prove your return on your marketing time investment with SEO, especially for books, when you probably can’t point to the data to say “This person searched for [jelly beans], found our landing page and bought $67,028.26 of jelly beans.”

Google Analytics, which we covered a little while ago, does offer a little of that kind of information (though if you have a store on your site, be sure to read up on using Google Analytics for tracking). As you can see at right (click to expand), it does tell you what search queries people are using to find your site*.

But there’s something this report can’t tell you: how well you rank for those words. It can’t tell you if you got only 5 hits for “i lurve orange soda sumpin fierce” because only 5 people searched for it, or if it’s because your link is buried on the 57th page of results.

Google has another free product that can help you find out. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Jordan, can’t I just Google my own keywords and see how I’m doing?” Yes. And no. Mostly no.

Google instituted personalized search five years ago. If you’re signed into your Google account, Google keeps track of a lot of things, possibly including what sites are yours (especially if you’ve ever claimed them), what sites you click on in search results, what subjects you search for, even who your friends are and what they like and recommend. It factors that information to the best of its ability in delivering your results. So your results and my results could be very different—including your ranking, or even appearing on the page at all. (Additionally, some more random variation occurs due to geography, what data centers you’re hitting, etc.)

However, being Google, they do keep track of your average ranking position on search pages, and they’ll share that with you through Google Webmaster Tools. If you’re on Blogger, you’re already signed up! If not, the sign up process is fairly easy. Visit the Google Webmaster Tools site (and create or sign into your Google account, if necessary), and click on the red “Add A Site” Button.

Enter the URL.

And use one of their verification methods.

Voila! It will take some time for them to build up a good set of data (a month, for the standard view), but they’ll start collecting data on what queries people are using to find your site. Here’s what you see when you sign in:

Note that it also gives you a list of URLs that aren’t working in the first column. These might be missing posts on your blog that you pulled down, or mistyped links from other blogs. (If it’s the latter, go to Blogger’s Settings > Custom Redirects. Click Edit and add a permanent redirect from the mistyped link to the correct one.)

For our purposes today, we’re going to focus on the queries report. Click on Queries and you’ll see something like this:

Or for a closeup:

This report (sorted by clicks) shows us impressions, clicks, CTR and Avg. position.

Impressions tells us how many times your link appeared on an actual search results page for that query. Clicks tells us . . . how many times someone clicked on your link. Duh. Clearly, the numbers for Impressions and Clicks are rounded, and numbers below 10 are not displayed. CTR stands for Clickthrough Rate (or Choose the Right, but come on, one of those makes more sense than the other here). This is basically clicks/impressions, telling us what percent of people who saw your link actually clicked on it. Finally, Avg. position tells you your average ranking.

In general, a higher clickthrough rate is better. Years ago, the industry standard for the paid ad links on the top and sides of a search engine results page (SERP) hovered around 2%. Organic results like these generally have better click through rates, but once you get out of the prime positioning on the first screen of results (“above the fold”), those CTRs tend to fall off.

If your CTR is lower than you’d like, take a look at what “snippet” Google displays for those keywords. Can you try to work in some sentences using those keywords that would be more enticing to your potential readers? Maybe make your title more engaging (while still using the keyword)?

In general, CTR is correlated with your ranking—sort by CTR and you’ll probably see this as a general trend—so improving your ranking can also help your CTR. Probably the easiest (ha) way to work on your rankings are to get more links. You might need to go link hunting! (As always, guest posts are my favorite way to come get links, sometimes with an anchor text that you specify.)

Another important aspect of the Queries page is the Top Pages tab at the top. It sorts all the same information as the Top Queries tab, but this time the info is grouped by the landing page on your site instead of the keyword people type in. (People can find the same page using different keywords, and if you’ve got multiple search engine results, they might look at the different pages for the same keyword.) (To get to the similar report in Google Analytics, go to Traffic Sources > Search > Organic. Just below the graph and big data chart, you’ll see a line that says Primary Dimension. Select Landing Page.)

If you want to get a little more advanced in your tracking, you can also go back to Google Analytics for Goal Tracking. My goals include having someone download one of my PDF guides or subscribe to my blog, so I’ve added special Google Analytics Event Tracking code into my links for those actions. I put an arbitrary monetary value on those goals (like $10 or something, but if it makes you feel good, say $1,000,000 or something 😉 ), and occasionally take a peek at my goals to see how I’m doing.

It’s also good to look at your “funnels” or paths in Google Analytics to see how people find your site and if they’re following the route you’d like them to.

Not comfortable sharing all this information with Google? I understand. I really do.

What do you think? How would you use all this cool information?

*Except when the searcher is signed in to Google, when Google Analytics reports the keyword as (not provided). Up to 40% of my search queries are (not provided) in GA. This is not my happy face. As you were.

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Marketing

SEO: Keywords, Research and Links, oh my!

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This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series Marketing: SEO

Last week, we looked at whether SEO is right for authors and book marketing. My background in Internet marketing focuses on SEO, but I’m largely NOT convinced that aggressively targeting search engine rankings is right for authors and book marketing beyond a very basic level. I tend to agree with author Roberta Trahan:

One last caveat—and this is a pet peeve of mine: NO AUTHOR NEEDS SEO services (aka Search Engine Optimization). It is an absolute waste of your money. Readers simply DO NOT do a search for “book,” or “spy novel” or “memoir” or “historical fiction,” and then shop the first 10 titles that show up. Don’t let anyone tell you they do—it’s an out and out lie. [Or an author doing market research. *sheepishly raising a hand.*] Readers shop for books in BOOKSTORES — whether they be brick-and-mortar shops or online retailers like Amazon. The one and only possible exception to this would be some non-fiction books, largely business or self-help titles.

search enginesBut, as I sang in the fourth-grade school play, “I give myself very good advice, and I very seldom follow it.” My blog already ranks well for my name and even my book’s title—but I’m still pursuing a little SEO (weeeell, okay, not so much pursuing as tracking, but that’s next week), and it’s not to sell books. (I don’t have any out yet, so it really doesn’t help.)

There are basically three good reasons to do SEO for an author or book:

  • You do not rank for your name or your book title
  • Your book title or your name is already searched for quite a bit, and there’s some competition for good rankings. (Depending on the term, it might be easier to change your title or get a pen name.)
  • You’re stubborn not (just) trying to sell books, but attract a blog audience.

So if you’re as bullheaded like me—and if you PROMISE to take shelve any schemes to sell tons of books with SEO—read on to learn a little more about how to do SEO.

But first, time for our weekly announcements!

Enjoy my free writing guides? I’m giving away a full set of writing guides—plus some never-before-released, extra special and/or expanded guides—this week on Julie Coulter Bellon’s blog. Go set a goal and get to work for your chance to win!

Looking for a writers conference in Utah? iWriteNetwork and the Alpine School District are putting on an inexpensive writers’ conference July 27-28 in American Fork, and I’m teaching a class on HTML! Learn more on the iWriteNetwork blog (in the sidebar).

Wait, what? It’s Tuesday? Gasp! Marketing Mondays are all mixed up! Sorry, folks—I had a sick weekend that spilled over into my family and my week. We’re moving on!

The Nuts and Bolts of SEO

Once you’ve gotten through the most basic levels of SEO—understanding your website visitors, etc.—you can start looking at attracting more visitors with awesome search engine rankings.

There are two very simple pieces that make up a whole lot of the SEO puzzle: keywords and links. Keywords are the terms people type into search engines, and if you’re targeting certain terms, you’ll want to use them on your site. Links are important for regular users, because, hey, people can click them and get to your site, but they’re also nice because search engines view them like a vote for your site’s content.

Keyword Research

Just like you need to understand what people are doing on your site, you need to understand how people interact with search engines. We don’t go to Google (or even Ask Jeeves *ha*) and type in, “Excuse me, but could you please direct me to the best websites about writing,and also, do you have any Grey Poupon?” No, we’re more likely to type in “best writing websites” or “best websites about writing” or “writing resource websites.”

Unfortunately, what occurs to first us isn’t necessarily the most popular phrasing of the keyword. You don’t have to repeat the keyword exactly verbatim on your website/blog, but if you don’t use the word “resources” and most people search for “resources,” they’re probably going to end up at sites that do use the word “resources.”

(Believe it or not, I’m not actively trying to target “resources,” but we’ll see what happens with the post, LOL.)

Search engines provide tools to help us figure out what terms people really use. Granted, they’re really targeted at people trying to place search engine ads (the results along the sidebar and sometimes listed in a shaded box first—the people who buy those ads pay per click or 1000 views), but they’ve very useful for “organic” SEO (the “natural” results).

The tool I usually turn to first is Google AdWords’ External Keyword Tool. You can type in several keywords (or enter your website address to see what keywords Google sees there), and it gives you back a list of the real terms people type into search engines related to that term, along with their relative popularity and competition.

And then you get:

The competition column tells us how hard it is to get a well-placed ad. (If you’re wondering, to get a well-placed ad for a highly competitive term, you’ll need some combination of a high quality ad, a good site and a good price per click.) The competition level might not be identical in the organic results, but typically they’re strongly correlated.

If you really want to dig into SEO and keyword research, check out this article on keyword research by SEOmoz, and Neil Patel’s 3-Step Process to Creating an Effective and Profitable Keyword Plan for more tools and ways to expand your keyword research reach!

Using keywords on your site

keyword stuffing. This is not the way you do it.Don’t kill yourself to cram as many uses of the keyword into as many pages of your site as you can! This is called “keyword stuffing” and it’s not good for your visitors, of the human or search engine spider variety.

While we can’t really tell exactly how search engines operate, search engine gurus these days tell us there is no “ideal keyword density.” (When I started working in the industry we sought to use keywords at least 5 times in 300-word articles. Load. Of. Crap.)

Of course, using the keyword on the page does help the search engine know that the page is about that subject, but too much just looks unnatural. So, how should you use the keyword on the page?

  • In the name of your page or blog post: if the post is really about this subject, it belongs here! This typically displays it in a “header” tag, indicating to search engines that it’s an important topic on the page
  • In the URL: most blog platforms automatically generate this from the post name, so you’re set if you’ve done it above
  • In the text: some tests have shown that using a keyword more than 2-3 times in the text of an article really does nothing to improve your rankings. You can certainly use it more if it’s more natural, but don’t worry about it if it’s not.
  • Internal links: when it makes sense, you link to the page from other pages of your site, using that keyword at the “anchor text” of the link.
  • In the ALT tag of images: look at the HTML code for one of your images. Do you see an alt=””? Use the keyword there to help your image rank in image searches.

If the keyword is a major focus of your blog, you might put it in your tagline, and maybe in the META description element for your blog. (Self-hosted WordPress allows you to set these on a by-page basis, but most platforms only customize the main description tag)—this doesn’t change your rankings, but it might be displayed as the “snippet” below your site name in the search results (which can be more appealing to potential visitors than the random snippet of text they usually use).

Of course, using it even this minimum means that you usually only focus on one, maybe two, keywords per page. It’s honestly difficult to do well with more than that because the page itself can be less focused, and thus less appealing to search engines and visitors.

This is called “on-page SEO,” because it’s (mostly) things you do on the page itself to try to help it rank well. But the page itself isn’t the only way to influence search engines.

Links!

Links are really important in search engine optimization. In fact, they’re important in almost all aspects of the web. Links are often likened to Internet currency. You link, for the most part, to sites you like and links!trust and want to refer people to.

Search engines know this, and take advantage of this fact. They view links as a ‘vote’ for the content of that site. The actual linked text, the “anchor text” of the link, is another indicator of the page’s content, and helps the page to rank for that term.

So, if you really like a page’s content, try to think about how you write your links. “Click here” as the anchor text doesn’t tell a search engine what kind of vote you’re casting with that link. The “best writing guides” does, and will help out that page a lot more than a generic link.

You can also use this to your advantage when you have an opportunity to get your own links. Whether a friend has offered you a link, or you’re writing a guest post and get to write your own biography, when you get the chance to write your own link anchor text, make sure it counts!

Join in the conversation!

That’s a quick guide to SEO! What do you think? What terms make sense for you to target for SEO?

Want to learn more about SEO? An excellent, comprehensive beginner’s guide to SEO is available (totally free, totally online—you don’t even have to give up your email address) from the good folks at SEOmoz. (Sorry, no magic beans to make it so you can sell books with it.)

Photo credits: search engines—Danard Vincente;
keyword stuffing—Muhammad Rafizeldi; links—Will Lion

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Marketing

SEO: Yes or no?

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This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Marketing: SEO

Is search engine optimization right for your blog or writer’s website?

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the (totally legit, Google-approved) way to make sure your site ranks well in search engines when people look for terms that are relevant to your site. I cut my Internet marketing seo signteeth in the world of SEO, writing copy designed to draw in those rankings—but is it the best fit for a writer’s blog or website?

Let’s dig in—but first, some announcements:

Hey! May is over—tomorrow I’ll announce the winner of a 15-page edit from me. Missed out on commenting last month? No worries—I’ll give away another 15-page edit to one lucky commentator this month! Winner will be drawn at random; each comment from June 1 to June 30 counts as one entry; winner to be announced on the blog in July. So come join in the conversation!

We’re done discussing tracking your blog—but if you have any questions about getting more from Google Analytics, feel free to pop in and ask!

Have you joined Julie Coulter Bellon’s Jump Start WriMo yet? I’ve got a quick pep talk post on her blog today, o if you need a pick me up, read & join in!

What is SEO? (And what isn’t?)

Good “white hat” SEO is NOT using tricks, hidden text, redirects or cloaking to show search engines one thing and your website visitors another. Search engines like Google don’t like to be manipulated that way, and when they catch you, they’ll dock your rankings.

Good “white hat” SEO IS about making sure your site is designed to attract both search engines and, even more importantly, visitors. It’s also designing your site so as to not impede search engine “crawlers” that read it. Above all, it’s understanding what your visitors want and how they’re trying to find it, and making sure your site is there when they look for it.

Oh man, I love this stuff.

I like that idea. So how do I do SEO?

Ooh. This answer’s going to be a little circular, but the basic way to do what I just said is to understand what your visitors want and how they’re trying to find it, and then making it easier for them.

Helpful, I know. Let’s break it down.

Understanding what your visitors want & how they’re trying to find it

A very, very basic way to understand what your visitors are looking for is to flat-out ask them. You might or might not get a good response from a poll (and often, if open-ended questions aren’t an option with your software, you might be giving people the wrong options), but it could be worth a shot.

Short of asking your visitors what they want, you can look at how people are interacting with your site to try to understand what they’re looking for, and if they’re finding it. One of my favorite ways to look at this is to look at the analytics data, especially focusing on what search terms (“keywords”) people are using to find your site, and what pages or posts are the most popular.

However, this is only reflective of what your website is currently performing well (or maybe not so much) with. If we’re looking to expand on that, we’ll need to do a little research and a little legwork. But that’s for next week. First, we’re going to talk about whether all this work is worth it.

Yes, is all this SEO work worth it for a writer’s website or blog?

Good question; I’m so glad you asked.

The answer for what we’ve discussed so far is a resounding YES. How often do you go on a website looking for something specific and can’t find it? How often do you turn to Google for an answer instead? How often do you use Google? I’m guessing the answer is lots.

We want to minimize the frustration of not being able to find something on our site. We want to keep our visitors from wandering away empty-handed, sad and dejected. We want to be there (if we have the answer!) when someone turns to Google.

SEO is all about making it easier on your visitors

We want to make our visitors happy. And that should be the #1 rule of optimizing any website: Fulfill your visitors’ needs. SEO is really about making it easier for your potential visitors to find you, and for them to find what they’re looking for on your site.

In this market, SEO is probably NOT about driving direct sales. If someone is Googling the name of your book—or even your name—then they’re probably already in the mode to buy, and yes, you’ll want to capture and help those visitors (or hope they go right to Amazon or B&N or what have you). But frankly, you should be ranking well for those terms already.

SEO stands to help you improve your ranking for other terms, especially more generic ones—but when’s the last time you typed in “good sweet romance novel” at Google? Perhaps never? Do other people search for those terms, and if they do, are they likely to buy your book? Although it definitely can and does happen from time to time, odds aren’t great—but SEO can help to expose your name, your books and your writing to a greater audience.

Next week, we’ll dig into the hows of doing SEO, including “how can I make this work for me?”, especially in light of the last paragraph.

What do you think? Do you search for books? What are the top searches that find your site? What does that tell you?

Photo credits: Seo sign—Superboreen; SEO shirt & LOLkitteh—H Vasco

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Marketing

Tracking your blog: using the data

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This entry is part 7 of 8 in the series Marketing: blogging

Oh my goodness, I almost forgot! Throughout May, you can win a 15-page critique from me just by commenting! Winner will be drawn at random; each comment from April 30 to May 31 counts as one entry; winner to be announced on the blog June 1. So come join in the conversation!

Whether you use Blogger’s stats or Google Analytics, you’re collecting information about your blog visitors, and that information can be put to good use for you. If you understand how and why people are using your site, you can try to target and appeal to your visitors better.

The first step is always to dig into the data (hooray!). First we’ll take a look at how people are finding your site, then at your most popular content.

Note: At the top of the page in both these programs, you can adjust your time frame. I like to use a month for my data, which is the default in Google Analytics (Blogger’s default is one week).

How people are finding your site

In Blogger, you’ll want to go to Stats > Traffic Sources. In Google Analytics, it’s Traffic Sources > Overview. The Blogger version lists only the URLs and sites sending traffic to yours, followed by the search engine keywords. Google Analytics sorts the incoming visit sources. If you click on Traffic Sources > Sources, you’ll see some of these categories: “direct” visits, i.e. when someone types in your URL; referral visits, when someone clicks on a link to visit your site; and search engine visits.

Dig into your referring sites. Are your guest posts generating traffic for you? Critique partners’ sites? Random people? One thing I like to do is to visit the referring sites, especially if they’re blog posts. I love finding people who’ve linked to my site and thanking them!

What do I do with this information? I really like Google Analytics’ information here: it shows the proportion of your visits from the various source categories. If you’re getting more referrals than search visits, you can decide whether you want to try to attract more search traffic, or pursue referral traffic even harder with guest posts, hunting for links, etc.

Searching the search engines

I hope some part of your traffic is coming from search engines! But more than just knowing that they’re coming from a search engine, you want to know why—you need to know what they were searching for. And that might be more complex than it sounds—we can’t always tell what someone who typed in “oneida” is looking for. (Google it; there are lots of options.)

Take a look at the Keywords report. In Blogger, it’s at the bottom of the Traffic Sources page. In Google Analytics, go to Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Organic. [You might think it’s under Search Engine Optimization, but that’s for the integration with Webmaster Tools. We’ll come back to that—if I ever run out of other things to blog about!]

There you’ll find a list of the keywords people type into search engines and end up on your site. Note that just because people come to your site from that keyword, it does NOT mean you necessarily rank well (though one would hope there’d be a correlation between a lot of visits from a keyword and a high ranking).

What do I do with this information? Look for trends! On my website, I’ll tell you, nearly all of my top 10 keywords have to do with plotting methods. (It’s almost as if I did a month-long series on the subject or something!) What do you think I should write about? (Yeah, we’ll see.)

Of course, with Blogger, it can sometimes be a little tricky. I have a whole series on plotting, but how can I tell which post on the subject of the Snowflake Method my people are landing on? Google Analytics makes it easier—you can figure out what pages on your site people are landing on based on keyword. In the Organic report, find the line that says “Primary Dimension.” Keyword should be selected. Below that, there’s a pull down menu for a Secondary dimension. Under Traffic Sources, click on Landing Page.

(If you want to see it the other way around, you can make Landing Page the primary dimension and keyword the secondary, too.)

What people are doing on your site

This might be the most important part. No matter how they find your site, no matter what they typed into a search engine, once they’re on your site, you want to know where they go and how long they spend there.

The average time on site is on the Audience overview page in Google Analytics (Sorry, Blogger). It gives you a simple stat, in hours, minutes and seconds, to let you know how long people are spending on your site.

Also important is the New vs. Returning user report, under Audience > Behavior. (Again, sorry Blogger peeps.)

Finally (something we can all get on board with), you want to know what people are looking at. In Blogger, this is under Stats > Posts. In Google Analytics, the full report is under Content > Site Content > Pages.

Here you’ll find a list of the most visited posts or pages on your blog.

(Google Analytics has lots of other cool things, like letting you know how many pages on average your visitors visited—broken down by what page they first landed on when they came to your site—comparison to the average time on site, etc. etc.) (It’s really cool.)

What do I do with this information? Again, look for trends. What makes these posts your most popular? The subject? The tone? The search engine presence? Was it informative? Social? Fun? Funny? Personal? Then do that again!

If you have the additional data you find in Google Analytics, take a look at how many of your visitors are “hit-and-runs,” or never return. Granted, a good proportion of your visitors might not need your content, or might get all they need by simply reading a single page and then navigate away. There will never be a 0% bounce rate or a 100% return rate.

But if you see that certain posts turn away visitors significantly more than average, take a look at those posts. You don’t necessarily have to change them, but you might think twice about using such a negative tone or writing about that subject again.

We’ve barely scratched the surface of what Google Analytics can do, but there’s something useful here for everyone!

What do you think? How do you use your site analytics?

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Marketing

Tracking your blog: Using Google Analytics

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This entry is part 6 of 8 in the series Marketing: blogging

If you’re serious about blogging, it’s important to focus on your visitors. How much do you really know about your visitors? Do you know where they come from? Why they came to your site? How long they stayed? How many pages they looked at? How many came and immediately left?

Last week we looked at a very basic solution for finding this web analytic information: Blogger or WordPress.com’s built-in stats packages. There are many free web analytics packages out there. In my opinion, Google Analytics offers the most comprehensive solution. It may be a little overwhelming for someone just starting out, but it’s really not hard to find the most important numbers you need to be keeping track of. Click on the picture at right to enlarge it to see a sample of some of the important, but easy to read, reports that Google Analytics generates.

Before you say, “Oh, numbers; I can’t deal with numbers!” or “Oh, coding; I can’t deal with coding!”, let me tell you that these numbers are good to know—and very useful in growing your blog readership. And let me tell you that these numbers are easy to find, use and understand with a free web analytics package (software installed on your site that tracks what visitors do on your site)—no coding, just cut and paste.

Here’s some of the information you can see in a single report, from one of my actual sites (not this one, though):

This report is the dashboard, a customizable overview of several reports. There are dozens of more in-depth reports available in Google Analytics, and even I only scratch the surface of this awesome web analytics program. I have a basic overview of how to install Google Analytics in my free PDF The Quick Guide to Google Analytics for Bloggers. I originally wrote it in 2007, but updated it with newer, easier installation procedures today. Check it out!

Next week, we’ll take a look at some of my favorite reports, and how to put all this data to use.

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