The Smart Passive Income Blog » analytics

Cool Things We Can Learn About Internet Business From Analytics

Pat — Thu, 14 May 2009 07:47:09 +0000

Ever since I began my online adventures, I’ve always kept close track of certain statistics. As you already know, I’m very into the earnings of my different passive income streams, but I’m equally interested in the website traffic statistics too. When I started, I was fortunate enough to sign up for Google Analytics, Google’s free website traffic analyzer, and even though I haven’t taken advantage of everything it can do, I still find it very interesting, informational and inspirational.

I say inspirational because just from looking at the graphs and charts, I can track my progress and learn from it. Here are some real life examples and screenshots from my own website at intheleed.com, and what YOU can learn from them.

Things Don’t Happen Overnight, But They Do Happen

Here’s a chart of my overall pageviews per month from January 2008 thru March 2009:

The lesson here is that things might take a while to get going.It takes a while for your website to get noticed by Google, as well as the word-of-mouth virus to spread.

The same goes with my income. I had my website up for about 4 months before I ever saw a penny from it. Then, as I started earning cash, it was a few cents here and there, which turned into a few dollars, which later turned into tens of thousands of dollars a month (which was over a year later). So – if you’ve tried and didn’t succeed yet, did you give yourself enough time, or did you just expect it all to happen overnight?

Know Your Numbers, and Show Them Off!

Everyone loves to hear details, especially your readers and/or customers (or even potential advertisers). If you’re at 10,000 pageviews, announce that and thank everyone for helping you get to that milestone. If you’re close to 1,000,000, hold a contest for the spectacular occasion.

Did you hear about the 1,000,000,000th (one-billion) iPhone application download? Apple was promoting the crap out of it, and it helped them get to that number even faster. They held a contest for the billionth download, and everyone was talking about it left and right on twitter. Great marketing (Apple’s marketing is top-notch, so I didn’t expect anything less), but as you can see…people like numbers. Show off your success!

For example, when I reached 1,000,000 pageviews, I actually held a contest and was giving away some iPod Nanos to a few lucky eBook customers, just because. I think it helped my sales (I didn’t keep track like I should have), but it was fun and I know people were telling their friends.

Right now, I’m at…

Reach The World

I think one of the coolest parts about working online is the fact that you can reach people from all around the world. This is something we all too often forget.

I LOVE to look at where my visitors are from. I’ve actually made an effort to learn how the LEED exam is taken in those countries, where the tet facilities are, etc. When people from those regions have questions, I’m more than likely ready to answer those region specific questions. This has helped my sales, and helped those people spread the word in those countries. If I wanted to get really fancy, I could put a translator on my website so it could be read in any of those languages that most visit my site.

Here’s a picture of my visitor numbers and where some are coming from:

So, if you have a product, or a blog about a certain subject, are you catering to your non-local readers? Do you even know where your readers are coming from? Good stuff.

Today’s Conclusion

So, the lesson here for today consists of three parts:

1. It’s going to take time to get the traffic you’re looking for. You can, however, help it along by link sharing, posting on blogs and forums, and even paid advertising. Don’t give up on your projects that you really care about just because you’re not getting traffic yet. Give it time, but also give it the best chance to succeed as well.

2. Keep track of your numbers, and use them to your advantage. It’s an easy way to stay inspired, and inspire your readers and customers as well. Besides visitors, you can showcase any type of statistic worth mentioning. For example, I often tell my “I’m not so sure I should buy your product” customers that over 3500 people were satisfied with their purchase. They usually are convinced after that.

3. Don’t be so local! Your website and product(s) are definitely open to the world. Check out who is visiting your website and where they are coming from. You may be able to use that to your advantage.

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Cool Things We Can Learn About Internet Business From Analytics

How to Run Free Split Tests Using Google Optimizer for Better Results

Pat — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 18:03:54 +0000

Do you want a poor website? Of course not. We all want to make our websites the best websites they can be. We all want them to grab more attention, catch more subscribers, and increase our sales and popularity.

In a previous post, I talked about how I spent just 5 minutes to change my “buy it now” button, which this increased my book sales by almost 25%. The new button I used was proven to work because it was “split tested” with a multitude of other buttons with different sizes, shapes and color combos.

To recap, a split test is a test that involves showing different variations of something to equal amounts of different and random people. The test will determine which variation does better than the others.

Like I said before, companies will spend millions of dollars to do these types of tests using a number of focus groups and analysts – it’s ridiculous. Thanks to Google and the power of the internet, we can do this with ease for free.

Things You Can Run Split Tests With

Before I go over how to run split tests yourself, you may want to give some thought into what you may want to test. Here is a list of different things you can create variations of for split testing:

Colors: including background color, font color, and button and graphic colors.
Sizes: including font sizes, graphic sizes, button sizes, page sizes
Location of Objects: for instance, placing an action button above the fold vs. below the fold of your web page. An action button is something like a link, email submit, or buy button.
Order of Objects: such as testimonials, features, price, advertisements, examples, descriptions, etc.
Graphics: including jpegs, headers, buttons, etc.
Content: meaning the text that is on your page. This includes the headings, the intro, the body, the conclusion, testimonials, bonuses, advertisements, etc.
Prices, offers and guarantees

There are thousands of things to test, but it’s up to you to find out which things work best for you and your website.

Things You Can Test For

Using different variations of the things in the list above, you can look to improve your conversion rates on the following things:

Sales: The number of products you have sold with each variation
Subscribers: both for Email and RSS feeds
Email Submits: for your newsletters or tips using an email service such as Aweber
Clicks: especially for those affiliate links that earn you cash

How to Run Free Split Tests

First, you’ll need to set up Google Website Optimizer. Don’t worry – it’s totally free. If you have a user name for Google already, like for GMail, you’re good to go.

You can visit the Google Website Optimizer tool here.

After a brief setup, you’ll end up on your experiment list page, which is basically your admin panel for your tests. This is what it looks like (click to enlarge):

In order to begin, you’ll need to click on create a new experiment. Then, click on A/B Experiment (there is another form of testing called multivariate testing, which I will go into at a later date).

There are three things you need in order to run your experiments:

An original page that you are running the test on. You’ll need the url of this, for example: http://www.yourwebsite.com/index.html
A variation page that is just like your original, which has the one difference you’re trying to test. This should be a totally separate web page on your server. You can just create a new page, copy paste the code from your original, and insert your variation. Your url may end up looking like this: http://www.yourwebsite.com/index2.html
A conversion page, which is where your users will end up after doing an action on your page. For example, a thank you page: http://www.yourwebsite.com/thankyou.html

You can create more than one variation, but you will need separate urls for each.

Google will generate scripts that you must insert into each of the aforementioned web pages. This is so that Google will be able to distribute your readers evenly to each variation, so you can get accurate test results. This can be a pain, but luckily for those of us using WordPress, there’s a plugin.

The plugin is called the Easy Google Optimizer plugin from Impression Engineers, and is free to download from their website. Load it as you would any other WordPress plugin, follow the instructions, and you’ll have your test up and running in no time. Many thanks to Impression Engineers for this awesome tool.

Note that new visitors to your will be shown only one variation of the experiment, even if they were to come back and visit later. This holds true until you stop your experiment, which can be done at any time.

Give the test some time, and after a good amount of visitors, you’ll be able to see the results. Your reports will show you the % chance to beat the original, the observed improvement, as well as the number of visits and conversions for each variation.

After you know exactly which variation work best, stop the experiment and make sure that version is the one all of your visitors will see from now on. Then, rinse and repeat with another experiment. It will take some time, but after a few experiments, you’ll have a website that is optimized to convert as much as possible.

My Own Split Tests

Since this post is already lengthly, I’ll go over a split test I did myself and my exact results in the next post.

I hope this information has helped you and you begin to think about split testing on your own websites.

Thanks again for your support and your comments!

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As always, I just wanted to thank you for subscribing. This blog is a success because of you and your support. Here's to your online success!

Become a Fan of the Smart Passive Income Blog on Facebook and join the conversation!

Thank you so much!

How to Run Free Split Tests Using Google Optimizer for Better Results

Passive Income Tools of the Trade

Pat — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 10:59:59 +0000

I thought it would be helpful to create a resource page that you can always come to for all of your passive income needs. I’ll add to it as I learn more, but you’ll notice that in the future I will reference this page quite often. I recommend bookmarking it for your reference and convenience. Enjoy!

Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links to products that will earn me a commission. These are all things that I have experience with that I am recommending because they are helpful and are companies that I trust, not because of the commissions that I may earn from you using these products.

Blogging

WordPress: The #1 Blog Publishing Platform. Free and easily customizable with wonderful support. All of my blogs use WordPress.
WordPress Plugins: Download any plugins, widgets, or customizable elements for your WordPress blog.
Woo Themes: The ultimate resource for premium looking WordPress themes.
Revolution 2: Another resource for premium WordPress themes.

Hosting

Bluehost: All of my websites are hosted using Bluehost. Easy to use, 1-click automatic WordPress installation, and good customer service.
PowWeb: Another fantastic and easy to use hosting service. Also includes 1-click WordPress installation.
Amazon S3: The Amazon Simple Storage Service. Reliable internet storage, which is great for putting large files like podcasts and videos, so you don’t create bandwidth problems on your own website.

Product Distribution & Shopping Carts

E-Junkie: The shopping cart I use to sell my eBook. It’s compatible with Paypal Standard, Paypal Pro, Google Checkout, Authorize.net, TrialPay, Clickbank & 2CheckOut. Works like a charm, very low price to use. Comes with a decent affiliate program for your products.
Clickbank: Another digital products retailer. Probably the most popular. Decently priced, but comes with an amazing affiliate program for your products.
Paypal.com: Paypal is just ok for selling your own products through them, but you’ll need an account anyways to configure with and accept payments from the above shopping carts.

Keyword Research

WordTracker Free Keywords Tool: Spits out a number for the popularity of a keyword of your choice. Search volume numbers can be compared to find the perfect niche, or to choose keywords for your blog posts.
Google Adwords Tool: A tool to help you decide what keywords to use for your Adwords campaigns. You can also check to see the popularity of certain keywords and the competition for ads for those keywords as well.
Seo Book Keyword Suggestion Tool: Another fantastic keyword research tool, with even more information and numbers to compare and select the perfect keywords.

Advertising Stuff

Google Adsense: Make money by placing relevant ads on your website that are generated from advertisers using Google Adwords. This is free to use, but you have to register for an account.
Google Adwords: If you want to begin advertising on Google, you can select keywords and locations and you pay each time someone clicks on your advertisement.

Email Subscriptions & Marketing

Aweber: The internet’s most powerful email opt-in service and email marketing/broadcasting tool.

Testing Results

Google Analytics: Google’s free website tracking and analytical tool. A must have for anyone with any type of website.
Clicktale: You can use clicktale to watch actual recordings of how people use your website. It is actually like watching their own computer screen, so you can then optimize your website if you don’t like what you see. You can view a small sample of website viewers for free. It will cost more for a larger sample.
Google Optimizer: This is another free tool from google where you can test different webpages of the same content, only changing one or two things, so you can see which one works/converts best. It’s basically a website optimizer testing tool.

Outsourcing Work

Elance: Hired service for just about anything you can think of.
Odesk: Another outsource website for freelancers, IT companies, programmers and web designers from abroad.
99Designs: This is a unique website that you can use if you need a logo design. It’s in a contest format. You submit the description of what you want, and designers will compete against each other to win money.

Health Insurance

eHealthInsurance: Here, you enter your information, and it generates a number of different health care plans for your particular situation with a variety of different prices and specifications.
The National Association for the Self-Employed: NASE has a variety of different benefits to it’s members, including a unique, customizable health insurance plan for the self-employed.

Legal Stuff

LegalZoom: Easy online incorporation or LLC creation.

Books

The 4-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss, Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich: Pretty much the most awesome book in the entire world. I reference this quite a bit in my posts.
ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income by Darren Rowse: The best book about blogging from the number one online blogger, Darren Rowse.
Moonlighting on the Internet by Yanik Silver: I also own this book and it’s really what insipired me to go full time working online. I finished it in 1 day because it’s so good.

For eHow Users

If you can think of any more great tools and resources, please feel free to leave a comment below. I will review it and add it to the list.