Alright, we mentioned this one before too, Google FeedBurner. Google FeedBurner is the ability for people to follow any new posting content you post in your blog, and we talked about it when we talked about the plug-ins for WordPress. There was the Google FeedBurner plug-in, which you could use in order to automate the process and connect those two.
But Google FeedBurner is the website you’d go to in order to have – you’d be able to see the number of people that are following you on your website, the number of people that are receiving updates from your website. You can also see one of the interesting things I personally use it for. You can discover which articles people are clicking on. So which ones are most excited about – which articles are most exciting to people on your list. And then you can use this data, if you find out that certain article topics are more popular, you can use this data to decide to write more of those articles, or if you’re noticing certain articles are getting very few page views, or very few views on Google FeedBurner, you could stop writing about that topic because it may not be an appropriate thing for you to write about. You may get more leverage, again Pareto’s principle, if you focus on things that have a much bigger impact. You can write the articles that people are already interested in and more likely to click on, or you can write the ones that you’re not getting much activity from. So you want to focus on the ones that give you good activity, good feedback. And then you can also use the data from which articles are being clicked on most to determine new marketing widgets that you may want to create in the future.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
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The following is an excerpt from “How To Market Your Handyman Business” (a 1 hour and 41 minute free training course download available to our visitors).
James: Is that kind of what you’re looking for?
Jassen: Yeah, and what you just said, keeping in touch with people that really is the key to the whole thing is keeping in touch, keeping top of mind awareness so that when they think about a project that they need a handyman for you’re the person that they are going to call so – man we are really running on the time clock here do you mind if I run through the Google tools real quick?
James: I’d love you to.
Jassen: OK, I’ve done a couple webinars myself over the past year or so about how to set up you know a home based internet businesses using nothing but Google tools and there’s some Google tools you use that I’m just now starting to use that you’re obviously more of an expert on then I am but you can literally set up all these tech-y things that we’ve been talking about using nothing but free tools that are provided by Google.
The one that’s not free you have already briefly mentioned as a lead generation method is Google AdWords, If you’ve ever done a Google search and you see the ads that show up at the top or on the right hand side those are Google AdWords, people put together an ad and they say I will pay so much per click for my ads to appear and based on how much you bid is where or what position your ad appears in and people can see your ad as you click on that and you know you’ll get traffic to your website and help build your list that way.
You also talked about getting paid to do your lead generation by having ads from Google on your own web page so that you can get paid for people clicking on those ads when they come to your website and that again is called Google AdSense.
Another really important tool and personally I think that this is – out of all the Google tools I think that this is personally the most important but that’s Google Analytics, you talked earlier about tracking and measuring your marketing well, Google Analytics allows you to track and measure who’s coming to your website, how long they are sticking around, where they’re coming from and the where they’re coming from I think is the most important aspect there and so it really allows you to target and prove your marketing efforts that you’re doing online.
The next thing is Google Feedburner, you just mentioned the RSS feed thing and that is what Feedburner does it is an RSS aggregator tool and it allows people to subscribe to your website content and get notified of updates it is also a tool to use as your electronic list so you can actually use Feedburner as your email list it’s not ideal for that solution but it is a free and effective method for building an email list if that’s part of your marketing plan.
James: Yeah, I don’t recommend using it for that but it can be used.
Jassen: It can be done for that. Google Groups is a tool on Google that I think has two uses one – and you and I have both done this actually is you can use this as your email list central place, you can do that you can also find other Google Groups that are where people get together and talk about different topics so maybe you find a Google Group about people that are finishing their basement or people that have older homes of a certain style and they’re looking for tips and hardware and whatnot for maintain their home you can become an expert in those groups and people will get to know you as an expert by you participating and you can build business that way.
Google Website Optimizer, this is a tool for tracking – not tracking but for testing conversion items you talked earlier about pressing your headline, Google Website Optimizer will do what are called split tests for you so you can for example pit two headlines head to head on an opt in page for people to sign up to your list and you can track whether you know headline A or headline B perform better or which special report is going to get you more subscribers you can do that kind of stuff with Google Website Optimizer.
Google Webmaster Tools this is actually something that you have definitely played with a lot more than I have, it’s only something that I’ve been looking at literally over the past few weeks but it’s got some cool stuff it can help you generate a site map for your website which Google can use to kind of track where everything is on your website it can help improve your search engine optimization. I think the coolest thing in there is something that you actually showed me that I didn’t even know existed until like I said a couple weeks ago but you can actually see what keywords Google is ranking you for and you can see some numerical statistics on how you’re performing with those keywords, that’s really, really cool from kind of an internet geek perspective like I am so.
Google Trends this is – can kind of be looked at as a research tool and I think where this can be most important for our handyman audience tonight is they can go to you know trends.google.com and they can type in a comma separated list of things to see what people are looking for so if they’re trying to decide whether they should niche into you know basement remodeling or kitchen remodeling or electrical work you know some of these sub-niches that we’ve talked about tonight they can go to Google Trends and type those things in and they can see what people are searching for more of so maybe basement remodeling is being searched for you know ten times as often as exterior painting and so that gives you a clue of kind of what you need to focus on it’s a really, really neat tool.
Lastly Google Alerts I use this extensively it is a spy tool, I use it alert me I get an email, several emails a day I do – I’ve got it set up for my own name, my business name, I actually have it set up for your name James and also some things that are important to me for example I’m big into figure skating and so I’ve got several Google Alerts set up about particular figure skaters and also since I’m a judge things related to the International judging system within your handyman business you can use it to look for what people are writing about you online for your own name, your business name, your competitors names I think it’s also a cool little tool to use to find you know news groups and discussion boards and things like that and so you can be notified if anybody you know asks a question on a blog for example and they say “Hey, I live in Miami and I’m thinking about getting my house resided you know anybody got any tips on that?” and so if you have a Google Alert set up for Miami, home residing and you get a Google Alert telling you that somebody asked that question then bam you can go to that blog or that forum and engage in that conversation and perhaps get a prospect or multiple out of that so that was my not quite so short rundown of Google Tools.
James: I was just thinking to myself you did such an awesome job that next time I think I’m just going to stick around for the introduction and I’m going to say Jassen why don’t you handle the first couple ones and I’m going to go away and take a break I’m just going to let you finish the whole thing because you did an awesome job, you went through them really well so yeah, that’s great.
Jassen: It still took two minutes longer than I wanted it to but-
James: That’s alright we’ll get through the rest of this information so-
Jassen: OK.
James: We’ve only got about four more to go.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want access to our full 7 hour training course? Upgrade to “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” today to get instant access and take your handyman business to the next level.
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Jassen: Okay, great. Now, one of the things that I know about how you run your business is that you are a huge fan of all the Google tools that are available to you.
James: Absolutely.
Jassen: I know we don’t have the time to go really in depth on each tool but could you give a quick rundown of the free marketing tools that Google makes available for promoting your business?
James: Sure thing… so here’s the quick list of nine – and you’re right, we really don’t have time to go into detail but I will mention each one and you could do your own research on it. I’ll tell you what it was generally used for.
The first one is Google AdWords. Google AdWords is Google’s advertising program. You can buy advertisements on the Google network. You can also do keyword research. So if you want to find out how many times people are searching for Denver CPA you can go on to Google AdWords and do a search and find out how many people are searching for that, whether that trend is up or down, how much people are paying for that keyword. You can do all that research on Google AdWords plus buy advertising from Google on there for specific keywords. That’s number one.
Number two, we mentioned before is Google AdSense. Google AdSense is the program where you put ads on your website and when people click on those ads you get paid part of what the advertisers are paying google. So that’s one of the ways to make money when you’re doing lead generation. That’s another great resource from Google. It’s called Google AdSense.
Number three is Google Analytics. This is the little tracking code you put at the bottom of your website and allows you to track, measure and therefore focus on and improve your marketing efforts. You can find out where your traffic’s coming from or putting articles out on somebody’s article directory type sites – is that really helping you? You can measure that with Analytics. You can use that as a measuring tool for improving your website.
Google FeedBurner is that RSS e-mail subscription type of interface where people want to receive updates whenever you publish new contents to your blog, they can receive that via RSS with Google FeedBurner. The other thing I like about FeedBurner is that it allows you to see what articles people are clicking on so that you can go and write more articles about that particular topic. Maybe you find out that certain types of topics you’re writing about are more popular than others. Well, focus on more of those. It’ll get people what they want. So you can go ahead and use that too.
Google Groups – great tool for going and finding and networking with certain niches. So if you want to focus on the electrician niche you, you can go and actually find an electrician group on Google Groups. Start hanging out there, find out what their problems are, what their challenges are and then become a part of that community and market yourself there as well.
Google Website Optimizer is number six. That is used for improving your website conversion. Remember before, Jassen we’re talking about testing headlines to see which one works best?
Jassen: Yes.
James: Well, Google Website Optimizer is the tool you would use to do that. They take care of all the crazy math about how many people you need to actually visit it before it becomes significant. So they’ll tell you clearly which one is going to be the winner if you have two different headlines. They’ll swap them out and alternate between two different headlines if you’ve got visitors coming to your site and they will then show you which one is the best one for getting conversions. So that’s called Google Website Optimizer.
Jassen: Nice.
James: Google Webmaster Tools – a great resource for people that own websites you could put your site map which is basically just a list of all the different pages on your website. You could feed that in the Google Webmaster tools and then Google will know to go to all those pages to see if they can index them in search engines. The other thing that’s nice about Google Webmaster tools is that it allows you to see all the different keywords that you are ranking for. So if someone types in “Denver CPA service,” are you even coming up? Is your website showing up at all for that search? Instead of having to go and look through Google and see if you appear on page seven, Google will actually tell you what keywords you’re ranking for, where you’re ranking and that could change overtime so it keeps tracking that for you. You can look back and see if you’re improving, things of that nature. So it’s very helpful.
Google Trends is number eight. That allows you to do keyword and market research. Do you want to see if certain types of words in your industry are increasing in popularity overtime or decreasing? What is the new home buyer tax credit – is that what they’re calling that thing?
Jassen: Yes, the new home line of credit right now – the $8,000 for first time home buyers.
James: Yes. So if you want to see if that thing is decreasing in popularity or if it’s increasing in popularity you could go to Google Trends, type in that keyword and it’ll show you a graph over time of the number of people searching for that. So you can use that as a way to figure out topics that are coming in to vogue or leaving the public’s mind and you can focus on those words when you’re writing content or articles.
The last one here is Google Alerts. Google Alerts is great because it allows you to spy on your competition or you want to see every time another competing CPA firm in your town is doing any marketing on the Internet. You could put in their name in Google Alerts and Google will e-mail you once a day or once week or whatever frequency you set whenever that name shows up in any new web searches. You can also do it to put your own name of your business in there and see when people are talking about you. Whether it’s good or bad or whatever you can go and see if someone says negative about you, you can go and defend yourself. Whatever you need to do, make comments or contact the owner. Whatever you need to do in order to stay on top of people doing that and you do use Google alerts for that. So those are the Google tools.
Jassen: Google Alerts is a great service. I have bunch of alerts set up and I love seeing what people are saying about either myself, you, my business, our industry, niches that I’m tracking things. It a very powerful tool, I love Google alerts.
James: Yes. It’s free. By the way all these tools are pretty much free. The only one I think you need to pay money for is AdWords and that’s when you’re buying advertising.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want the real killer stuff? Check out The World’s Greatest CPA Marketing Book.
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Earlier today I talked with another business owner that I know about using twitter and specifically about the more that we post the more my twitter followers seem to be growing. I speculated that since my tweets are posted on the twitter count for each person who is following me that as the number of people that are following me grows, the faster the number of people that are following me will grow.
This works similarly to how compound interest works… you get growth on your initial principal amount as well as interest on the interest. With twitter, you get growth on the baseline of people that you have following you as well as the people that are following them.
From time to time (and I suspect not very often), I will post about the number of twitter followers that I have following me and perhaps even link to what I personally use to track my twitter account growth: twittercounter.com/learntoberich
As you can see from the chart I’ve included on this post (or if you want to check out the latest stats for my twitter account), I started this twitter account in December, 2009 and focused not on following others to get them to follow me. In fact, I am not following ANYONE and I have no intention of following anyone. However, I will let others follow me and actually encourage them to follow me by posting a link to my twitter account on this blog both in posts like I just did as well as in the upper right hand corner of my current theme (subject to change at a later date if I decide to do that).
Right now, I have been seeing a growth rate of about 1 new person following me for every new post that I put up on this blog. And by the way, each time I post a new blog post it is automatically tweeted via Feedburner.
So, enjoy the stats. See how you might apply it directly to your own social media marketing mix to add your own followers.
Until my next post,
James
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