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What You Need to Know to Use Google Analytics Effectively

By Toby Russell on May 18, 2012

Okay now as I’ve said many times before knowledge is power and put very simply if you don’t know who’s visiting your site and from where it’s very difficult to benchmark and decide on a clear marketing strategy that will return good results, so listen up to this guide to Google Analytics.

Measuring Your Success & Failure is Vital

Google Analytics is a free tool that’s one of the best for analyzing traffic – that is, if you know how to use it right.

The trouble with Google Analytics is that it gives you too much information. It can give you something like 85 different reports covering every aspect of your site. Do you really need all of that? I’d say you probably don’t.

 Instead, you should focus on a few key areas:

Referring Sources

This analytic tells you where your site visitors are coming from. You can find out what percentage are coming from organic search or referring sites. It also tells you how many people clicked through from which specific site. (more…)

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Categories: Internet Marketing, Research, SEO, Traffic Generation

Getting to Know Your Customers Better

By Toby Russell on May 16, 2012

You could have the greatest product on earth but still not sell anything if you’re trying to sell it to the wrong market. Knowing your customers is everything, and that goes for any business online or off.

What Does She Like & What makes Her Smile?

What You Need to Know

What do you need to know about your customers exactly? Of course, you need to know what kinds of products or services they want, especially things that they can’t find currently.

You also need to take into account the kinds of products and services they’ll want in the future. This is essential for building a long-term relationship with them where they’ll come back and buy from you again and again.

What’s really important is to understand how your customers see themselves. Self-image determines the kinds of products you buy and also shopping habits. You’ve got to know if they see themselves as young and hip or mature and conservative, for example.

All of this determines how they like to interact with businesses. If you know that, you’ll know exactly how to reach them on their terms.

My Top Tip (more…)

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Categories: General Business Advice, Internet Marketing, Research

How To Determine Demand for Your Niche

By Toby Russell on May 14, 2012

Find That Niche

Everybody says that when you’re choosing your niche, you should go with your passion. That sounds great, but what if your passion is totally unprofitable?

Step one is to identify your passion. Step two is to decide whether or not there’s demand for it. If there isn’t, drop it and move on to your next passion. If there is, you’re ready to get started.

Here’s Sam’s & my take on this: we’ve managed to create an ebook on property investing which is our passion and we hope over time it will sell ok, take a look The Diaries of a Serial Property Investor

But most of the niches we are in are tight either “how To” solve a problem, get started in a hobby etc because those kind of subjects rank well and we know people are searching for solutions to them, hence our www.bestsnoringhelp.com , and ebook and audio version to help with snoring, a problem many people suffer with. So take on board these points and find profitable niches that you can satisfy. (more…)

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Categories: Internet Marketing, List Building, Research

Why Your Squeeze Page Needs a Blog

By Toby Russell on May 12, 2012

A squeeze page (or landing page) is a static page. It serves one purpose – to sell a product. The page is simple and clean, and the layout leads the visitor straight to the bottom, where they’re urged to take action and buy.

What most people don’t realize is that there are some serious benefits to adding a blog to your squeeze page. The main benefit is that it gives your site fresh content.

Fresh Content is Key

Lately, Google has been changing its algorithm in order to favour sites that offer lots of fresh content over static pages like squeeze pages. In fact, it’s no exaggeration to say that the Big G hates squeeze pages.

When you attach a blog to your squeeze page, it changes it from a static site to one that’s more helpful to your readers and that’s what the search engines like. If your squeeze page uses WordPress (as so many do), building a blog on it is easy to do.

Building Your Blog

Keep Your Blog Simple!

The key is to put your blog on the back-end. In other words, there should be no link on your squeeze page to your blog. Why is this? It’s because as I said, your squeeze page serves one purpose only (to get them to buy) and you don’t want any distractions. A link to your blog would lead them astray.

What should you write about? If you’ve got a squeeze page and product, you already have an ideal prospect in mind. What do they want to know? What would help them out? What would pre-sell your services to them?

Check out forums, social media sites and similar blogs in your niche to see what they’re writing about. Focus on identifying and focusing your prospects’ problems. Teach them how to use your products and how your products will make their lives easier. (more…)

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Categories: Internet Marketing

Finding Photos for Your Blog Posts

By Toby Russell on May 11, 2012

If you’re not putting photos on your blog posts, you need to get with the program. Take a look at the most popular blogs in your niche and you’ll see they all have photos. Once you start including photos, you’ll get way more traffic and lots of response from readers. Everybody wants something to look at aside from all that text.

The only trouble is that unless you’re an ace photographer,

Are You A Great Photographer?

it’s tough to find good photos without breaking the bank.

The Stock Photo Site Option

The common method is to use sites like iStockPhoto.com and stock.xchnge. These are sites where you pay for credits and then use those credits to buy images. Both offer lots of great images – in fact, there is stuff on there that’s absolutely amazing.

Unfortunately, the price often reflects that. You’re always scoring the perfect picture for your post and just about to download it and then your eyes fall on the price. Even the smallest, cheapest images cost a couple of dollars. It’s not cheap. (more…)

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Categories: Internet Marketing

Publishing with Smashwords

By Toby Russell on May 9, 2012

Smashwords is a platform for eBook publishing and distribution.

It's a Great Publishing Platform

It’s the world’s largest indie distribution network and it offers its titles in all kinds of formats so that they can be read by any device.

In addition to publishing your work on its site and all of its micro sites, it also gets the title listed on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Apple’s iPad Store, which are the three main places people buy their eBooks.

Why Use Smashwords?

Smashwords is great because it’s the cheapest way to get your title in front of the most people. The publishing process is relatively user-friendly and their time to the market is incredibly fast. It takes minutes to publish with them.

When you become a Smashwords author, you get your own profile page and you can connect it to your site, blog and social media sites. It also shows up in web searches, so if you keyword optimize it and make the content interesting, you can get some exposure there.

One of the things that makes it unique is that you have total control over the final product. Absolutely everything is up to you. You can even go back and update your books with changes if you end up finding typos or something like that. (more…)

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Categories: Copy Writing, Internet Marketing

My “Diaries of a Serial Property Investor” Is Live on Amazon!

By Toby Russell on May 8, 2012

Hello

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I’d uploaded my new Kindle product and was just waiting for it to ‘go live’. Well it has and just to refresh your memories here’s what its all about:

The Diaries of a Serial Property Investor

Click on the Cover to take a look!

The Reality of Property Investment and

How You Might Retire a Millionaire if you’re Lucky!

This book covers our journey through property investing and the buy-to-let market in the UK. I’ll tell you why we started, how we nearly stopped, the highs, lows and absolutely terrible periods but most importantly what we’ve achieved over the last twelve years of our’ adrenaline rush’ journey.

We are not property gurus, this is not a “How To” become a property investor hyped up manual but a “warts and all” diary of our activities that might be interesting for would-be investors.

Ok so what’s all this got to do with internet marketing I hear you ask?

The downside of course is you tend when writing like that to not construct it in the best of English and sometimes it doesn’t make a load of sense. Any way here’s what I learnt from the exercise (more…)

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Categories: Internet Marketing, News, Outsourcing, Self Publishing

3 Productivity Myths Revealed and Explained

By Toby Russell on May 7, 2012

Do you want to boost your productivity? Do you find yourself not being as productive as you want to be? Well, most of what you’ve heard about productivity – all the ‘common sense’ – is utterly false. Here are 3 of the biggest myths floating around about getting more done.

Getting Stressed is NOT Productive!

Myth – Longer Hours Means Better Productivity

What do you do when you really need to get some work cranked out? You make a strong pot of coffee and burn the midnight oil. And you end up burning yourself out in the process.

Studies have shown over and over again that longer hours kill productivity. Any hours that you work over 40 a week are pretty much wasted. Staying up late after your usual working time doesn’t get the job done.

The reason is that there are only so many hours you can maintain focus. When your focus goes, it takes you much longer to get the same amount of work done. You slow down, get distracted more and make mistakes. (more…)

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Categories: General Business Advice, Internet Marketing, Mental Control & Mindset, Research

Newsflash -My 2nd. Kindle eBook Available Tomorrow!

By Toby Russell on May 5, 2012

Hi there

As I’ve been mentioning in some of my blogposts, Tweets and on Facebook I decided some months ago to combine 2 of my interests, namely publishing and property investing,  by writing and self publishing an ebook about our passion for property investing and our experiences over the last 12 years of buy to let investing here in the UK.

It’s been a bit of a rollercoaster as the book’s description indicates, but what’s been really interesting is that when I decided to write it, I started in my lunch hour in the office and you’d be surprised just how many words you can crash through once you get started.

What It’s About:

Well here’s the Title &  description:

The Diaries of a Serial Property Investor

The Reality of Property Investment

and How You Might Retire a Millionaire if you’re Lucky!

This book covers our journey through property investing and the buy-to-let market in the UK. I’ll tell you why we started, how we nearly stopped, the highs, lows and absolutely terrible periods but most importantly what we’ve achieved.

Nearly twelve years down the road, we’ve experienced an interesting time with our property investments and as you’ll discover when you read further, it’s certainly not all been a bed of roses. In fact there have been times when I’ve felt like selling up and walking away.

But even after tenants dying, houses being trashed, boilers stolen along with all the copper pipe work, agents going bust, threatening phone calls and more – I love the property business I keep coming back for more, it’s an adrenaline rush.

We are not property gurus, this is not a “How To” become a property investor hyped up manual covering strategies to follow, no money down deals and creative purchasing but a “warts and all” diary of our activities  that might be interesting for would-be investors or those amateur investors looking to grow their portfolios.

And our Top Tips located at the end of the book might offer some really useful pointers of how to be successful in property and how not to lose your shirt.

Well, that what it is all about, and if you can’t wait , click on the book cover and you can view it @ Smashwords.com another ebook publishing platform.

So there you have it, in the next day or so I’ll update you with the Amazon link and what I’ve learnt from the publishing expereince.

Until then

Toby Russell

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Categories: Internet Marketing
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