Just a quickie – we’ve recently been using a fab free service called Social Mention that not only offers real time search for the places your name or brand is appearing, but also analyses those mentions for tone and meaning. Find out if the talk about you online is negative, positive or neutral!

They also offer daily Social Media Alerts, which are like Google alerts but for a variety of social media applications – again it’s free and well worth checking out if you want to see where you’re being talked about.

If you’re looking for free brand monitoring online then this in conjunction with Google Alerts is a great start.

It’s all very well frantically beavering away: Facebooking this, Tweeting that, Blogging here, Commenting there, updating your YouTube Channel and spending an age answering questions on LinkedIn – but  are you tracking and measuring the results of all this activity?

I know that if you do all of this work yourself, in theory it costs you nothing, but your time still has a value, right? Even if you don’t always charge your hourly rate, you must have one in mind, so for every hour you spend on your Social Media and Internet Marketing efforts, that’s how much it’s cost you. OK not in cold hard cash, but that’s an hour / a day / a week you haven’t billed out your time, so for the sake of this example let’s say that’s what you’re spending on your online marketing.

So, what’s your ROI? Are you measuring it? Are you tracking leads that come in because of your efforts, working out how many of them convert to sales, looking at the lifetime value of the client and working out whether your efforts are well spent?

If your time is worth £65 an hour, and you spend 10 hours a week on your online marketing efforts, then you need to be making a profit of MORE THAN £650 a week FROM YOUR EFFORTS ALONE for it to be worthwhile.

10 hours sounds a lot, doesn’t it? But it’s not really – it’s easy to spend an hour or so a day messing around on Twitter, chatting to people and answering queries. Then half an hour a day updating the Facebook fan page and replying to people on there (ooh, don’t forget to tend to your Farm and Cafe while you’re there!). Then an hour or so a week blogging, ten minutes a day replying to other people’s blogs. It all adds up.

Don’t believe me? Download and install RescueTime - it tracks the amount of time you spend on each website or activity. It’s a fab piece of software as it tracks without you having to do anything, and gives you a lovely report at the end. Find out EXACTLY how much time you spend on Facebook / Twitter et al.

Then look at the leads and clients that you can track back to your online marketing efforts – ask everyone who contacts you where they heard of you, whether they get in touch by email, phone, or call by your shop / office.

For a month, keep a log of all of this info – and at the end of it work out whether your efforts are well spent or not.

Because let’s face it, it’s easy to let Internet Marketing and Social Media descend into the realms of ego – how many times you’re retweeted, where you’re mentioned, whether someone replies to your blogs. But at the end of the day we’re all here for the same thing – we want to promote our businesses and make money. It’s great if my latest Tweet is retweeted 56 times – but if I’ve spent 15 hours promoting my company in the last week and had no sales or leads, then those retweets aren’t going to put food in the mouths of my kids.

Leave the ego behind and find the facts – are YOUR efforts online paying off?

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photo credit: Doublep1

We’ve been adding Google Analytics to clients’ Facebook fan pages over the past couple of days, and they’re loving it!

It’s not difficult to do – all you need is:

• A Google Analytics account
• A Facebook Fanpage
• The FBML application
• Some generated code
• 10 minutes spare

There’s a fantastic guide to it here: How to add Google Analytics to your Fan Page

The basic premise is:

1) Add a new profile in Google Analytics

2) Use the Analytics Tracking code here to generate some code

3) Install the FMBL application on your fan page

4) Add the code generated in step 2 to the FBML page you want to track.

5) Check stats tomorrow!

The guide in the link above is great, and walks you through the process easily.

If, however, you’re having problems and can’t get it installed, then we’re offering a basic no frills installation in return for a donation. You can purchase it below. Why a donation? Because although it takes next to no time, we can’t offer it for free or we’d be inundated and have no time for ‘real’ work. This way, if Leigh spends 6 weeks adding Analytics code to Facebook pages, at least she’ll get paid for it! You can choose the amount you pay, so just pay what you think it’s worth.

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Anyone who’s known me for any length of time knows that I’m a big ambassador for tracking everything you do. After all, if you don’t track your efforts, how do you know what’s working?

Social Media Marketing is no different, and it’s been on my mind for a while to write a blog about the easiest ways to track your social media marketing activities.

As usually happens, someone got there first, and saved me the trouble

Top 10 Free Social Media Tracking Tools

The above blog is a fab list of tools you can use to track your efforts – and they’re all free to boot!

If you’ve found any others I’d love to hear about them below!

The Tweetvine is abuzz today with the story of Michael Werch and his experience of ‘twitter-squatting’. Michael took on the persona of Heinz, and tweeted as them for a short while, to see how many followers he could build up, and what the consequences could be.

As it happens, he only managed to build up 300 or so followers (rising now!) and a couple of weeks before Heinz jumped on him and complained to Twitter, who changed his profile to make it clear that he wasn’t an official representative.

The interesting part, to me, is this quote:

The experiment also yielded some important findings that should be recognized by all major brands with little social-media presence. For two weeks I spoke unrestricted as the company. This in its own right is a potential PR nightmare. It should also be noted that Twitter is a low-cost marketing and communication mechanism for large brands; no more than the salary of someone currently working for them or someone they hire to tweet.

For two weeks, Michael tweeted as if he were Heinz. The people following him thought he was Heinz. It took Heinz that long to do anything about it.

Now let’s not forget that Michael wasn’t out to do harm. He tweeted only positive things, was a good ambassador for the brand, and probably did them no harm.

But let’s imagine for a moment that he hadn’t set out with quite so altruistic intentions. Two weeks is a long time to have someone you don’t know and have no control over representing your brand on any Social Media platform.

This ‘experiment’, to my mind’ brings to the fore a whole lot of questions:

• Why did Heinz not have the twitter name registered anyway?
• Why did it take them solong to realise he was doing this?
• Why didn’t they get in touch with him direct?
• Why are they not embracing what he’s done and using him as an advocate?
• Why have they STILL not done anything with the profile they had taken away from him?

Right now, you may not think Twitter is important to you or for your brand online. And that’s fine – I’m not here to argue that point.

But how important would Twitter become to you if someone with negative intentions towards you decided to ‘hijack’ your name and tweet as if they were you? How important will it be when you decide to give it a go and can’t get your brand as your Twitter name? How important is it going to become when an account purporting to be you builds up thousands of followers that you have no control over?

Now extrapolate that out to Facebook, You Tube, Google Buzz, and any one of many other Social Media platforms. How much damage could be done to your brand before you even noticed?

Seriously people, even if you have no interest in these platforms right now, you should be monitoring and checking to make sure they’re not being used against you.

Are you monitoring?

I’m always telling clients to track their marketing, and obviously it’s easy to do that online with the help of google Analytics or a real time webstats tool such as Clicky Analytics – knowing where your traffic is coming from, what it’s doing once it gets to your site and whether or not your efforts are working is a huge step in the right direction towards NOT wasting your efforts online.

But what about offline? Do you ask someone where they heard about you when they call? Are you tracking which efforts are producing calls and sales? If your website is focused on ‘getting the call’ and you’re not asking the people who call you where they found you, how do you know whether it’s an offline promotion or an online one?

Remember that not everyone will drop you an email / buy online straight away – some people will go away and think about it, maybe make a note of your number. others will just call because for them it’s easier.

Every time someone new contacts you on the telephone, or walks through your doors, you should be asking them how they found you, where they heard of you, what made them choose you – only then will you ahve a full and rounded picture of what you are doing, what works and what doesn’t.

Are YOU asking the right questions?

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photo credit: aussiegall

I’ve been talking about this for a while, but this is the first chance I’ve had to put thoughts into words properly, so hopefully it will ring a few bells with some of you!

We’re all pretty much aware by now that one of the first things a potential client does when considering working with you is to ‘Google’ you – they’ll head off to google and type in your company name, maybe your director / owner’s name, and probably look through a few listings to see what others are saying about you.

The results that are shown here form the basis of what I call your ‘Circle of Credibility‘. Your Circle of Credibility is the extent to which you appear to be credible online. When someone searches for you, what’s the impression you get?

Without a doubt your company website should be appearing on the front page of those results, whether the search is for your company name or your boss’s name, but what else can appear in that search result to help compound the good feeling the potential client is going to get? And just as importantly, what can appear that can make you look bad?

The Good

- Your company website. Ideally your website will be in the number one position, and if you’re lucky, you’ll have prominent links showing to the main areas of your website, including testimonials.

Your website is probably the first thing someone will be looking for, so make sure it contains some great testimonials / reviews, and shows you at your best. Case studies, examples of work and quotes from happy clients are great for showing you in a good light.

- Your blog. Whether your blog is attached to your website, or a separate entity, it gives any potential client a flavour of your thoughts, opinions and expertise. A quick read through a corporate blog can often tell you much more than a company website, as a blog tends to be more informal and have more of a ‘personality’ – make sure yours is visible and showing the side of you that you want people to see.

- Your Twitter profile. Of course, this is only a good thing if you WANT people to find it, and if you’ve thought about your company image and brand while posting tweets If your Twitter profile is full of ‘Got a hangover and don’t know the name of the man I woke up with this morning’ then it’s probably best if you give it a different name

However, if you use your Twitter profile as part of your company brand then having it show up as one of the results for your company name is a good thing.

- Your LinkedIn and online networking profiles. Along with places such as UK Business forums, UK Business Labs, Xing, WeCanDo.biz, BT Tradespace and more, your LinkedIn profile shows that you appear in various places online that are related to business. These profiles, especially if very active and up to date, show that you’re not just a fly by night, and that you can be tracked down in the event of any problems. This is especially important if you’re a ‘virtual’ company, in my opinion.

- Articles you’ve written. Whether they are articles on your own site, or articles on somewhere authoritative such as Ezine Articles, having your content easily findable shows you spend time promoting yourself, and those articles could be the difference between you showing your expertise or becoming just another ‘also ran’ in the competition for someone’s business.

- Interviews. If you’ve been asked to do interviews and the transcripts or audio files are online, then they’re a great way for a potential customer to learn more about you – if you’ve not been asked to do interviews, start making it known that you’re available!

- Videos. Whether it’s your very own YouTube channel, or videos on your site, having videos show up in the search results for your company name is a good thing. Not everyone likes reading reams of text about how great you are

- Your Facebook profile and / or  Fan Page. This is only a good thing if you’re aware that your Facebook profile could be seen as part of a ‘fact finding’ mission by potential customers. If your profile is available to all (and Fan Pages are by default) then make sure it shows your best side, not just your wild and possibly drunken side

Basically, you want the search results for your company or your name to show a well rounded promotion of your company and services. When people see your website, your blog, your Twitter profile and Facebook Fan Page, numerous articles written by you, interviews, videos etc, they see that you’ve been around a while, that you’re not going anywhere and that you’re probably the person that they want to deal with.

That’s why we always recommend to our clients that they have up to date profiles in as many places as possible, that they blog and write articles regularly, and that they bear in mind their Circle of Credibility, no matter what they’re doing online.

Tomorrow we’ll look at some of the things you DON’T want showing up when people search for you online, and how to avoid it happening.

For a long time I used Google Analytics to provide webstats for me and for my clients – and it worked. Great stats, pretty graphs, nice figures – everything I needed.The problem I had was that I couldn’t get real time stats – I had to wait until the next day, by which time in some cases it was too late to react to surges in traffic.

I needed something that showed me what my visitors were doing and where they were coming from NOW, not yesterday!

And then I found GetClicky.

As they say about themselves:

Clicky is a web analyzer that works great with any web site, even Ajax and Flash sites. It was originally targeted towards smaller web sites and blogs because it tracks a high level of detail on every visitor, and these types of sites find this information very interesting.

It’s the high level of detail, combined with the fact that I can see what visitors are doing RIGHT NOW that makes GetClicky the perfect stats tool for me.

So what do you get?

The Dashboard:

The dashboard is an overview of the traffic to your site – telling you how mny visitors you’ve had (and showing you trends in a nifty little graph), how many actions those vistors have taken (eg where have they gone in your site), where your visitors have come from, what search phrases they have used and which pages they have visited.As an overview of your traffic, it’s very useful, but it’s in the nitty gritty that getClicky excels, and that’s what’s more exciting to me.

Visitors

The Visitors tab gies you a list of all your recent visitors, and tells you where they came to your site from.You’ll know what time they visited, what their IP address is, how many actions they took on your site, and if the referrer was a search engine, what search phrases they used.

This can be filtered in a number of ways and is very useful information.

Actions

I love the Actions tab as it shows me what each and every visitor has doen on my sites. I can see that one visitor has come to the site from an article that was Stumbled on Stumbleupon, and has not only read that article, but has clicked on the links in it to go to external sites, returned to my site and read some more articles, and even whether they have clicked on an email link to email me. By the time I receive the email I probably already know who they are and what they’ve been looking at and can tailor my reply accordingly – how cool is THAT?

Content

The content tab shows me which pages of my site are being visited, which are the entrance pages, exit pages, which of my files are being downloaded (in my main site, www.nikkipilkington.com, I have PDF versions of my internet marketing articles – this view tells me how many downloads they get every day) and more.

Links

Like most other traffic stats, this tells me where my visitors are coming from. But unlike most other traffic stats, it also shows me which links a visitor is clicking on to LEAVE my site.

This is great – I know whether links in my articles are being visited, recommendations are being followed, links to other sites I own are being clicked – even down to whether someoneclicks on an email link. I can also track visitors that leave to read something I have recommended and then come back! This to me is vital information and one of my favourite GetClicky features.

Searches

The searches tab shows me the latest search phrases I am being fond for on search engines – it’s always interesting to see the searches that bring people to my various sites – intended and unintentional

Spy

This is my favourite GetClicky tab of all.

I can see, in REAL TIME, visitors on my site. I can see which pages they are clicking on, which files they are downloading, external links they are following, and more.

It allows me to react to visitors almost instantly – if I can see that lots of people are on Using Twitter for Business part one on my Business on twitter site, I can quickly amend the page to add a link to other more recent articles I may have written, in order to drive traffic there. If I see that lots of people are clicking on an external link to someone else’s blog, I can make sure I let the blog writer know, and investigate any synergy we may have to exploit the large amounts of traffic.

The spy tab has a multitude of uses – but I wanr you, it’s very addictive

All in all I think GetClicky is as close to perfect as a web stats tool can get.

Pricing?

There is a free service, which doesn’t include the Spy tab, and if you sign up now you’ll get a free 21 day trial of the Premium service, which is what I use. It’s only $60 for the year and you can pay monthly – it’s well worth the investment to have your traffic stats NOW instead of tomorrow.

So, why not given it a go? Sign up now at Get Clicky and let me know how you get on!

A quick insight into the sites I visit on a daily basis:

1) Search Engine Watch – the first site dedicated to search engines, and still the best. Originally started by Danny Sullivan in 1996 (he resigned in 2006), this is a great site to find out the latest search engine stats, search engine news and more.

2) Plurk - a Twitter like site that I’m testing for business use at the moment. It’s a lot easier to follow than twitter (although if you use a twitter app or plugin such as Twhirl or twitterfox then twitter isn’t that hard) and has a funky graphical interface. the downside is that it seems to be the new toy of choice for schoolkids bored in their lessons, so be careful who you approve as a friend! The link is to my personal profile.

3) Ezine Articles – in my opinion this is the best place out there to submit your articles to. It is well respected by Google, and the moderators work hard to keep the rubbish out. It’s easy to submit to, and if your articles happen to be rejected, they’ll always tell you why. If you’re on Twitter, you can follow Ezine Articles Guy here.

4) Ecademy -Please see my updated thoughts on ecademy here

5) SEO Book – with a ton of SEO tools, this site is a must visit for anyone interested in Internet Marketing and SEO. There’s also an e-book written by the founder, and the blog is a must read.

6) Google Analytics Blog – although my website statistics software of choice now tends to be Get Clicky, a lot of my clients (and indeed me) still ahve Analytics in place, so I check in briefly every day to see if there’s anything new on the blog.

7) Matt Cutt’s blog – Google employee Matt Cutts has ong been known as the public face of google for Webmasters and SEO companies alike. He regularly gives out google news, and occasionally hints at things he’s not allowed to (or doesn’t want to!) tell. Well worth checking every day to keep up to speed.

299 Steps To Website Heaven – yes, i know it’s my own site, but I visit it every day, whether to post, to approve comments, or to dig into the archives to find a tip that could help someone.

9) Google Webmaster Tools – whether to check up on clients recent search statistics or to open a new account for a client, Webmaster Tools is an important part of the optimisation process. It gives out a myriad of info about a site, as well as alerting a website owner to errors such as bad links, missing pages and more.

10) Get Clicky – I’m a great fan of Google Analytics, but it has to be said that it is annoying having to wait until the following day to see stats. Get Clicky gives you stats in real time – so you can post a thread somewhere like Ecademy, and within seconds be tracking visitors from that article, to your site, see which pages they look at and where they click to leave.

Nikki Pilkington

Looking at your analytics or web stats, there will always be pages that are both entry and exit points – meaning that they are the single only page viewed in a session by your visitor.

Look at these pages closely – what is it about them that means that people are coming to them and then leaving almost immediately?

Is there something you could do to try and get people to click somewhere else rather than just leave?

A lead in to another page, a call to action, asking them to sign up for your newsletter…

Is it obvious what they should do next? Is the home page clearly marked? Is your navigation intuitive enough?

If a visitor can’t work out what to do next then they will leave and you’ve lost your chance – don’t let that happen.

Stats packages such as Get Clicky http://getclicky.com/36192 can show you which links visitors clicked on to leave your site, and whether they came back or not.