Remember when people cared about Digg? I know, it’s been a while, but back when Digg was at its height, there was a phenomenon known as the Digg Effect. The Digg Effect occurred whenever a site would hit the front page of Digg, sending tons of traffic to the site and causing the servers to crash. Simply put, most websites just weren’t able to handle the traffic that came with hitting the front page of Digg, and as a result, marketers and site owners would end up missing out on opportunities to cash in on their content going viral.
While Digg might not get much love anymore, the Digg Effect is still very much a real thing. These days, content goes viral through Twitter ReTweets and Facebook shares or on sites like ReddIt. And just like back in Digg’s glory days, many websites still struggle to stay up when they have content that goes viral.
With all this in mind, it’s important to take a look at your own website. If you’re trying to drive traffic to your website, it’s important to make sure your website can actually handle that traffic if your marketing efforts are successful. If your website can’t handle a spike in traffic, you will:
Disappoint visitors
Lose visitors as many won’t come back if your website is down
Fail to enjoy the benefits that can come with viral marketing success
Joining their series allows you to ask questions and offer a thumbs up or down vote on other questions already asked. The questions with the most thumbs up votes gets bumped to the top of the list. Each week, Avinash and Nick address and answer the most popular questions. While they haven’t been exactly addressing these questions once a week, they have at least been addressing them.
That said, if you’re really looking to buckle down and learn the In’s and Out’s of Google Analytics, I totally suggest tuning in to this video Q’s and A’s offered by Avinash and Nick. Here is a recap of the items that have been addressed to date.
Web Analytics Q & A With Avinash Kaushik & Nick Mihailovski: Part One
Strategies for non-bounced non-converted visitors (Macro vs. Micro conversion)
Ways to report total number of keywords over time
Benefits to tracking transactions as conversion goals
Tracking unique visitors to specific web pages
Path analysis for keyword reports — why it’s bad and what to do instead
How Google Analytics can be used on affiliate sites
How site owners can exclude themselves from being tracked by Google Analytics
How to properly track sites that reside on different domains but use a shopping cart on a different, common, site (cross domain tracking)
You’re going to want to view the blog post that correlates with the video because they include links to the resources discussed in the video tutorial.
Once again, if you’re looking to finally gain a better understanding of Google Analytics and how the program can help you, I suggest tuning in and listening to what Avinash and Nick say in these videos. While they said they’re going to be posting new videos weekly, it hasn’t been consistent. But that’s ok! I am pleased that they are doing them. That said, to assure that you don’t miss any of their new videos, I recommend subscribing to the Google Analytics YouTube Channel. Doing so, will get you a lot of great information in addition to the videos Avinash and Nick are providing.
Increasing traffic to your blog is something that can be a challenge for lot of people. So how do you get traffic to your blog? Well, there are many ways. For one, you can pay for traffic. I’ve never done that, but many people do. But what about free traffic to your blog? You might feel like you have great content, and a nice looking blog, but you don’t have traffic. That is where the buzz factor kicks in.
There are many ways to generate traffic with creating buzz. Some people offer contests, some people create blog memes and others write posts on controversial topics. Along with the various buzz building tactics comes a reaction. A reaction is the result of blog buzz. The reactions are either negative or positive.
Depending on what kind of buzz tactic you use will warrant which kind of reaction you get. So the key to getting traffic is by creating a buzz. But, within that, it’s your goal to create a buzz that scores a positive reaction. Anything less, then you’ll create what I call, one hit wonder traffic, which are people who visit your blog and don’t like what they see and never will return again.
How Do You Create A Positive Buzz?
Here’s something that I say to myself when I’m writing content for my blog. Following this for the last few years helped me create some of my best articles. I call this SEMI.
Stimulate. People want to stimulate their brains. Our brains are filled with thousands of pulsing receptors that need to be stimulated at all times.
Entertain. People want to be entertained. Why else do we have The Comedy Channel and a million and one Blond Jokes?
Motivate. People want to feel good. They want to be encouraged and supported. People want to be motivated and pushed towards achieving things.
Inform. People want to be aware. We want to know whats going on, how did it happen, who was the cause of it, when did this happen and where do I go?
Now, in the process of creating a positive buzz, you should remember SEMI and ask yourself this, “Is my post going to stimulate, entertain, motivate or inform people?” If you can get a yes for all four questions, you then have yourself an excellent post.
The great thing is that it doesn’t matter what topic you have chosen for your blog, you do have an audience. The best way to reach out to your audience is to give them SEMI! Take what you have learned in this post and write one today that follows the basic rules of SEMI!
Google Analytics is a free traffic analysis program offered by Google which is capable of generating detailed statistics about the people who visit your website. Google Analytics (abbreviated GA) can track visitors from most all referring sources including search engines, display advertising, pay-per-click campaigns, email newsletters, and clicks from links within PDF files.
While GA is packed full of features and functionality, initially the program can seem intimidating and daunting to use. I’d like to share a few resources with you that may help lessen the overwhelming feeling of not knowing exactly how to use the program, and what its capable of doing.
The first thing you should do before anything else is subscribe to the RSS feed of the Google Analytics blog. If you’re using Twitter, you should follow them as well. The Google Analytics team seem to have put more effort into their branding compared to other official Google blogs.
You may notice that their top horizontal navigation is seamless between their blog and their education, home, product, and support pages. A matching custom orange background and their recognizable avatar have been added to their Twitter page, giving it a nice and professional appearance. Clearly a lot of energy, time, and work have gone into the Google Analytics blog, website, and corresponding social network pages.
The second thing you should do is subscribe to the Google Analytics YouTube Channel and immediately start watching the videos. At the moment, they have a total of 36. If you feel like it will take a long time to watch them, consider how long it took to create them, and also consider what the purpose is behind making them. I also recommend subscribing to their YouTube Channel RSS feed so that when you do catch up watching the videos, you’ll be able to watch the current ones quickly as they become available.
The last thing I recommend doing if you want to learn more about using Google Analytics is to join their Google Moderator series called Web Analytics Question “Hour” With Avinash & Nick. If you don’t know what Google Moderator is, no problem, I wrote a post explaining about it, and how you can use it yourself to improve your own blog or website. Joining their series allows you to ask questions and offer a thumbs up or down vote on other questions already asked. The questions with the most thumbs up votes gets bumped to the top of the list. Each week, Avinash and Nick address and answer the most popular questions.
As you can see, Google Analytics is important. It can be beneficial for you, and Google feels it’s even more essential that you learn how to use it properly. That’s why they have gone to such extents to help you learn. That said, what other advice, tips, or tricks do you know about? Also, what are some other resources that you know about that can help people learn even more about Google Analytics? Share them with everyone else in the comments below.
As a blogger, there’s many times when I need to create online video tutorials to share with my readers. Adding videos to your blog posts can help capture people’s attention, add different incoming traffic ports, increase the number of people who read and subscribe to your blog, and boost your organic ranking in search engines. The question is, where is the best place to upload videos to?
I can say that determining the best place to upload your videos to is up to you. The reason is because there are advantages and disadvantages with using different services. Below, I have included a copy of the same video that I uploaded into multiple online video sharing sites and also included are my opinions about each. You can review each video and read my opinions about each and determine which online video sharing site is best for you.
YouTube.com
YouTube.com is the most popular online video sharing site online. I would recommend using YouTube because of the added SEO value and traffic you can pipe back into your web site and pages. The disadvantages of using YouTube is that your videos will degrade in quality, and they can NOT exceed ten minutes in length. Because of the time limit, I was not able to upload my video to YouTube.com. Another thing that bothers me is that YouTube.com doesn’t inform me that the video isn’t going to process.
Yahoo! Video
I was actually quite impressed with Yahoo! Video. It has similiar qualities to YouTube.com, but doesn’t have the time restriction. The quality seems to be the same as YouTube.com. The disadvantages, in my opinion, is the lack of traffic, and SEO value. Uploading and processing the video didn’t take long at all, about 15 minutes.
MotionBox Formally AOL Video
AOL Video has been discontinued and traffic is being redirected to a service called MotionBox.com. I decided to give MotionBox.com a try and I am pleased with their service. The process of uploading a video was very clunky and not very systematic. The end result was a video higher in quality compared to YouTube.com and Yahoo! Video. The audio didn’t render quite as well. The disadvantages of using MotionBox.com is the clunky interface, lack of traffic, and I am sure lack of SEO value.
Vimeo Video
I enjoy using Vimeo a lot. It’s one of my favorite places to upload videos to. The interface is very user friendly and the uploading process is conducive to productivity. The problem I have with Vimeo is that it can take up to 30 minutes to batch videos if you have a free account. While this is annoying, I do understand and appreciate their business model. A premium account can be had for under $60 / year, which is very fair. The video and audio quality is amazing. The sharing features are brilliant. One of the things I enjoy most about the sharing features is that Vimeo will do the math for you when you’re customizing proper sizing.
Viddler Video
Viddler reminds me a lot of Vimeo but slightly lesser in quality, but much better than MotionBox, YouTube, and Yahoo. Viddler doesn’t quite match the quality that Vimeo can produce, nor do they offer the robust sharing features. A neat feature about Viddler is the fact that you can record videos on the fly, meaning you don’t have to use desktop software, such as Camtasia, to create the video. With Viddler, you can use record directly on their site.
Where Is The Best Video Sharing Site?
My vote goes to Vimeo. I would recommend upgrading to a premium account simply because it’s affordable, gives you a ton of more features, and it supports their efforts and helps keep them online. In my opinion, even the free account is superior to the other services.
After publishing this article, my strategy will be to use YouTube.com for it’s natural resource of traffic and SEO value. From there I’ll use Vimeo to actually display the videos direct on my pages so that readers can experience the best quality and ease of sharing with others.
