Welcome, I see you're new here! Before you go, don't forget to download my new free website improvement ebook - its got some great feedback and will help you improve your website for free!

Online communities are starting to take over the internet, and are now even more popular than blogs. From the giant online communities like Facebook and MySpace, to smaller niche online communities like Marketing 2.0 or my very own Classic Rockers Network. In fact now anyone can fairly easily create their own online community social network for free by using great tools like Ning.com or KickApps.com.

But even though its pretty easy to setup an online community, its entirely much harder to make a successful online community. So given my experiences, I thought I would put together some best practices for helping to optimize and improve online communities. So let’s get started… Continue Reading »

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If you know how to use Twitter well, you can have some amazing success by networking you or your business on Twitter. And you can also do some serious damage to poor customer driven companies by using it to complain about things. But most people don’t really understand the benefits of Twitter because it’s hard to track results from it. But why is it so hard to track your results and success from Twitter?

Basically, unless your web visitor is clicking your Twitter link from the Twitter.com website, it won’t show up as a direct Twitter referrer in your analytics (it will simply appear as direct/bookmark traffic). Therefore if the user is visiting from a desktop application like TweetDeck, or a mobile phone app like TwitterFon, it will come in wrongly as direct/bookmark traffic instead. And unfortunately a pretty high proportion of all Twitter traffic comes from mobile or regular Twitter apps, and not from the Twitter.com website.

Luckily there are several great ways to track your success better and address some of these tracking issues. So, lets take a look at some great ways to track and measure your success (or current failure) on Twitter… Continue Reading »

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The talk of the internet over the last few days has been over a strangely named new website called Bing.com. In case you hadn’t heard, its actually Microsoft’s brand new attempt at stealing back some of Google’s ever growing search dominance. It looks pretty, with a beautiful back drop on the homepage. And it has some great new search features. But I know Bing won’t really take off in its current form (and not just because of the odd name associations - badda bing… chandler bing etc). But why?

Here are the main reasons why I think Bing.com won’t succeed in wrestling away much of a search share back from Google, and what they need to change…

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Yes, call me crazy, but I am giving away a brand new iPod nano! And all I am looking for in return is to find out how I can help improve and optimize your website.

Most people who own or work for a website need help optimizing and improving it to get better results (after all, no website is ever perfect or complete!) - so simply let me know what you need help with via Twitter and you get a chance to win the iPod Nano!

I will do my best to answer everyone’s website help questions that I get (and may even do a complete blog post on the answer if its a good question). And you will get the chance to win my brand new iPod Nano for free!

How to Win the iPod:
1: Follow me on Twitter.
2: Retweet the following message below on Twitter, along with what you most need help for optimizing and improving your website.

‘I want to win @RichPage’s iPod Nano http://bit.ly/richipod and I need help with (insert what your website needs help with)’

Great examples of website help requests would be:
- I need help getting more people to convert for my free trial
- I need help reducing the bounce rate of my homepage
- I need help improving my shopping cart to get more sales
- I need help getting more newsletter subscribers
- I need help getting more items added to my shopping cart

Please be honest, and don’t just make something up - because if you win, I will be helping you with the website problem you mention. And please note, one of the few things I really can’t offer much help with is website design.

I will pick and announce a random Twitter reply on June 9th as the winner, and will do my best to reply to all the messages I get too.

Thanks and good luck!

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Behavioral targeting - it sounds like something you would learn (and quickly forget) in college, right? But did you know that by using behavioral targeting on your website you can actually make your website visitors happier? And we all know what happier website visitors mean - more repeat visits, more conversions (sales, signups etc), and more people spreading the word about your site. Sounds great right?

So I thought I would write a beginners guide all about behavioral targeting, and hopefully help you understand the importance of it. So, lets get started…

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Last week I finally got to attend the eMetrics Summit in San Jose, and attended some great sessions (and got to moderate some too - thanks to Jim Sterne!) In particular, I learnt about some great new free tools to help optimize websites and online marketing efforts. So I figured I would share the wealth and let you all know about these tools too! So let’s get started…

Twitalyzer- this is a great new Twitter usage analysis tool from the web guru that is Eric Peterson. It allows you to determine your very own Twitter usage rating, and it allows you to analyze other Twitters influence  too(people, companies, you name it). It breaks your usage down by things like influcene and genorisity. According to my ratings results, I guess i’m pretty worth following on Twitter, because I have an 86% noise to signal ratio - in other words, I only put out good stuff (follow me and find out for yourself!) For those of you who are avid Twitter user, I suggest you go use this great free tool right now…

BTbuckets- imagine being able to segment your website visitors into different ‘buckets’, and then be able to target and automatically show them content based on what bucket they are in?  Well with BTbuckets, you can now do this and make your site an even better user experience! For example, if a user visits an electronics section of a site often, they would automatically be shown a section devoted just to electronics when they come back to the homepage. Cool eh? I definitely recommend you go play around with it - one of the easiest things you can do is just simply show different messaging depending whether the visitor is new or returning (much like you see at the top of each blog post on my site).

WASP - This is a great new tool for web analysts, created by a web analytics expert, Stephane Hamel. It allows web analysts to easily check out their web analytics tool setup, and do quality assurance on it. It works on hundreds of different web analytics tools (tracking tools, testing tools etc), and can be a real godsend when trying to trouble shoot tracking issues.

Abandonment Tracker - This is a pretty innovative new tool - it allows you to track and recapture the users that abandon your website (and yes, every website has plenty of users that abandon early that need rescuing). They have a free basic version, and also a full paid version, loaded with advanced options that actually allow you to automatically email users who abandon your website. In particular, its great for trying to recapture visitors who left during registration or a shopping cart. Definitely worth checking out!

So there we have it. Some great new tools that any web marketer or web analyst should be checking out and putting to good use!

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I am proud to announce that I am going to be attending and moderating sessions at the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit this week in San Jose! Thanks to the organizer and chief-in-charge, Jim Sterne for giving me this great opportunity!

It is the first time that I have actually got to attend this leading web analytics conference, and am excited to meet some amazing analytics and optimization experts like Avinash Kaushik, Eric Peterson, Anil Batra and of course Jim Sterne.

If anyone that reads my blog is also going, I would love to meet up with you all. Just shoot me an email or a twitter message, and we can try and meet up.

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A website homepage is like a cover of a book - many people will judge the contents of the site by looking at the homepage, often in a matter of seconds. And if it doesn’t instantly convey what they are looking for, and isn’t well optimized for a good visitor experience, chances are they will leave your site and go to a competitor instead.

Therefore, its very important to make your homepage be as good as possible for first time visitors. But before I discuss ways to help improve your homepage, it’s important to know what metrics to look at for understanding how successful your homepage is, and how much potential you have… Continue Reading »

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Coffee shops. Dentists. Plumbers. Caterers. Restaurants. Pet sitters. Golf courses. Auto repair shops. Dry cleaners. Beauty salons. Bars. Wedding planners. Electricians.

What do businesses like these all have in common in a bad way? Well, surprisingly few of these types of business  take full advantage of what the web can do for growing their business. And I don’t mean just having some bare bones website which are more often that not just glorified online brochures for these kind of businesses.

So in order to help out the many hundreds of thousands of businesses who are still failing to take full advantage of what the internet can do to help their business grow and make more money, i’ve put together 10 ways to help turn offline businesses into thriving online businesses -  lets get started. Continue Reading »

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So, you may have just got a sale or a lead from your website. Great job. So you simply move on to getting the next new set of visitors to your website in order to convert these too, right? Well, actually, there is a better thing to focus on to optimize your website further -  one of the easiest ways to generate more sales or leads is to actually build up a relationship with the last person you just converted. The best way to builld this relationship is by maximizing the usage of the emails you are already sending out to your new customers. And surprisingly few web companies do a good job email follow-up - leaving you with lots of potential to beat your competitors!

So for this next in my series of ‘Win at Website Optimization’, I have created a  list of great email tips that you should follow in order to increase the chances of someone ordering from or visiting your site again: Continue Reading »

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