Search Meter Wordpress Plugin

I came across the Search Meter Wordpress plugin the other day and have been playing with it. I am not sure how I ever missed this one as it is fantastic. It is yet another free plugin that tracks what your visitors are searching for on your site. Full details of recent searches are available, as are statistics for the previous day, week or month, including whether or not users are finding what they are looking for. The thing I like in addition to the stats is how you can show show your readers what the most popular searches are. The Popular Searches widget displays a configurable list of recent popular successful search terms on your blog, with each term hyperlinked to the actual search results. Make sure you give this great plugin a workout.

Oh, The Things People Will Buy

First off all thanks for the many emails I received on the passing of my grandfather. I certainly appreciate it. Surely you all have read, "Oh! The Places You'll Go" by Dr. Seuss. If not, run to your local Books-A-Milion this weekend and grab a cup of coffee and knock it out. It will not take you long. I call this post "Oh, The Things People Will Buy" just as a play on words, but it amazes me at the things people really do buy. Not always what I am trying to sell them either. That is what is so great about this business. You set the line for a tuna and catch grouper and amberjack at the same time.

There are not enough hours in the week for me and sometimes I concern myself more with stats and earnings and not so much what I sell. I made an effort late last night to go over the huge reports of products I have sold, and uncovered 3 very untapped niches with a wealth of untapped keyword phrases and exact domain name matches unregistered as well. These sites will all get a quick install this weekend of the Keywords To Websites plugin I talked about in my top 40 Wordpress plugins post until I can get back around to giving them content and converting them into full fledged review/product niche sites. I have 100% confidence these will do splendid right out of the box and even better when I get them built to their final stage.

I highly suggest looking over your sold reports in Amazon, EPN and whatever other affiliate program you belong to that lets you see what you sold. If you are new to the business, but do not sell much currently, pick a day and just surf aimlessly through Amazon and eBay. Make notes for about 30 or so different items and then do your research. Do not pre-judge anything, let the research tell you the good or bad. Your own stats and numbers have so much information that we often ignore.

StatCounter Global Stats Report & IE6 Users Declining

Happy Friday everyone. I ran across the StatCounter Global Stats Report the other day and was floored at the amount of traffic that Facebook, StumbleUpon and Twitter send to websites that use StatCounter on their sites. I knew the three were growing, but the Facebook numbers are astounding. Hopefully you are embracing social media as it is here to stay. You can play with the sorting of statistics in 9 different categories and also by country/region and date. A good little bookmark to have as a quick glance.

Another quick fact I came across is that the usage of the web browser Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) in the US and Europe fell below the 5% mark for the first time in May. Good riddance to that piece of crap. Worst browser version ever made in my opinion.

Free StatCounter Wordpress Plugin

I have been meaning to post about this for a while, but it keeps slipping down my list. If you use an external stat counter, you likely have run across both StatCounter and Sitemeter. I have used both and like both, but StatCounter has a plugin for Wordpress that I have yet to run across for Sitemeter. The plugin page is here and the download is here if you choose not to install it through your plugin dashboard. Give it a try, today, especially if you already use StatCounter.

Clickbank Analytics Sites

Just a quick blurb on Sunday about Clickbank product promotion. On every site I build, I try to find some sort of product I can sell from Clickbank. It is not always possible to find, but I have been surprised before. Some tools to research Clickbank products that might be beneficial to you are, Clickbank monitor and Clickbank Analytics. These sites have been around for a while and provide great data on Clickbank sold items. If you are new to one or both, you read the getting started with Clickbank Analytics section as well as the information on what is offered on Clickbank monitor. If you do any type of selling of Clickbank products, these sites will be very helpful to you. I make a ton of money with Clickbank products and never need to worry about the tracking or getting paid.

Checking Your Bit.ly Link Shortener Stats

Many of you might be new to using link shorteners. I like to use bit.ly when I can as I like the stats interface it has. Especially when I use it to post links on Twitter. If you use a Twitter application like TweetDeck, it gives you the ability to automatically shorten all of your links if you choose with bit.ly. You can quickly get a look at each links stats page by merely adding a + sign to the end of the link in a browser should you choose so. Here is a link I posted a few days ago with a plus sign added. http://bit.ly/66Joyj+

Track Wordpress Outbound Links With Google Analyticator Plugin

If you are a Google Analytics conspiracy theorist, this post will not be for you. For everyone else, I wanted to post a link on How To Track Outbound Links From Your WordPress Blog. It shows how to use the Google Analyticator WordPress Plugin along with Google Analytics to track your outbound links clicks. If you already have the Google Analytics code on site in the footer or header, you will need to remove it beforehand as the plugin will automatically add the code for you. Give it a try on a site.

From Black Friday Until Christmas

I am in the midst of an utterly fantastic month thus far in November. It is shaping up to be record month for me. Some of the success is attributed to some sites that were rebuilt that are starting to reap the changes. The other success I think is to the fact that the holidays are approaching and everyone is jumping into the holiday spirit a bit early. As the calender turned to November 1st, I had sharp spikes in traffic on many sites.

I am not one that checks stats every day as most of you know. I get to looking at stats and I can't put them down. It eats away productive time. I like to check stats once a week and archive twice a month. However, from Black Friday until Christmas, I will check traffic stats everyday and examine very very closely the keywords associated from the SERPS traffic. I look for anything I can attack and attack quickly. Usually I do it in a blog post and a single item. I had a ton of success doing this last year and expect this year to be no different. I also will watch Google trends to see if I can spot anything in my niches as well. You never know when something might get hot and that way I can attack it as soon as possible. Remember, Black Friday is only a week away now, get ready.

Traffic & Earnings Are The Truest Measuring Sticks

I see a ton of people that get hung up on chasing what the little green Google bar has to say about their site and where they rank for certain keyword phrases. It is easy to use these and other factors as measuring sticks of a site. It is indeed easy to do as we all fall into the trap sooner or later. I judge my own sites by traffic and earnings. It is all that matters in the big picture. My traffic tells me what is working, where the surfer is coming from and where they are going. It tells me what they were looking for and if I had it. Traffic however is worthless if you are not earning from it though. I have sites that do well traffic wise, but the keyword focus and product selection was off. Thus the earnings are flat. I learn from this and re-vamp the sites to better earn from my traffic.

Is page rank important? Not as important as you think. A PR 0 site that is focused properly and full of good chewy content can produce organically on it's own. I have had PR 3 sites that earn less than some PR 1 sites. Now these PR 3 sites are from much earlier days, but once again the traffic was not earning as it could, thus these were re-vamped and are now pulling much better profits.

So do not get caught up in PR and other minor measuring sticks, measure by what matters. The bottom line.

Gold In The Long Tail

I was always horrible in math, but always loved stats. Growing up I could figure a baseball players batting average in a heart beat and recite statistics from my favorite teams players at a drop of the hat. This has led to my love affair with web stats and Google analytics. Once you learn the ends and outs of it, it will tell you more than you can imagine about your site. I watch for where surfers come from and what links they exit on in particular and then match up items purchased on eBay that match terms of the exit link from the site. On my best well structured and content laden sites, the long tail search terms convert the best from the search engines. These surfers general use 4-7 keywords in their search from the engine, land on my site and exit through an eBay product link on the page. The longer the keyword the surfer uses, the higher the ratio of out-clicks to an eBay product.

Focusing on longer tail keywords is simple to implement into a relative content page. Just drill down in MNF, Google Keyword tool or whatever tool you are using and these will pop right out at you. Do not get caught up in the low search for count as you can integrate a lot of long tail phrases into one parent page of a shorter keyword focused targeted page. These low searched for terms add up the more you integrate them into your site and have a ton less competition as well. People tend to get too hung up on search numbers of primary keywords, that they neglect to pay any attention to adding longer tail phrases. The article will usually be only driven around a 2-3 word keyword phrase, thus leaving the big money surfer on the table. If you buy content from Need An Article or Text Broker, you may want to instruct the writer to integrate in a couple of the longer tail phrases you research out into the article. Remember while most of these writers are great writers, they are not SEO or keyword specialist. The article you might purchase might be great on the surface and actually solve a problem or need, but can truly gather more money from the table with longer tail phrases added.

If you have already purchased and posted your article, you can easily go in and weave in some long tail phrases into it without any problems. There is no penalty for improving your content on the page. You will be at the mercy of waiting for the search engines to re-index, but this normally only takes a few weeks at most.

If you are not using some sort of analytics program, I suggest you start. There are several out there besides Google as many have been lead to believe that the less you give Google the better. I am not one who wears a tin foil hat, but if you are, just use a different analytics. You will see that the big money is indeed in the long tail and will better learn how to attack it.

Ezine Articles Now Providing Keyword Data

If you are a Platinum or Premium Ezinearticle member, you are now getting a monthly email with some critical data on your live articles. The data included in the email is as follows:

1. Total Monthly Article Views
2. New Live Articles Submitted In The Previous Month
3. Total Number Of Live Articles
4. Total Lifetime Article Views
5. Top 3 Performing Articles with top 5 keyword phrases used to find them

These are great stats to have, especially the keyword phrases. Ezinearticles is also requesting feedback on these new features in this blog post and I highly suggest you chime in with any improvements.

Do Not Ignore Your Stats

Stats can really tell you a ton about your site. They let you know where the surfer is coming from, what keywords they used to find you in the search engines, what part of the world they live in, how long they stayed on your site and where the exited your site from. Google analytics is over most newbies head, but in the mean time, you can use either statscounter or sitemeter to get a better hold of your traffic. Both of these stats trackers are free and easy to implement into your site. Google analytics is a little more challenging, but can offer up a ton of information about your surfer and I highly suggest you get a grip on it as soon as possible.

I really tend to focus on where the surfer came from and where they exited the site. This lets me better tailor pages for what a surfer is looking for. There are plenty of free videos on Youtube for all of these stats programs if you need to study up more on them. Stats are an integral part of your business and should not be treated lightly.

Also Work To Disprove The Pareto Principle

The Pareto Principle also known as the 80/20 rule is one of my favorite business principles. In a nutshell and how I apply to BANS is simple. I do not want 20% of my sites producing 80% of my income. I am always striving to get 50% of my sites producing 50% of my income. That of course would mean the other 50% is producing the other 50% of my income. As of the end of January, 35% of my sites produce around 65% of my income. This is about as low as I try to be. When one sector starts dropping, I always try to dedicate more time to get it back where it belongs. I consider myself the guy in the circus that tries to keep the ten plates all spinning on the sticks at one time. I try to rush over to keep spinning the plate that most looks like it is about to fall off the stick. The further away you can keep from the Pareto Principle, the more security you will have in case a catastrophe were to happen. At all times, you should know where these figures are and work in the sectors that need the most help. Now by no means am I advocating 100 sites, but if 100% of your income comes from just one site, you might want to investigate a few more niches. Whatever you can handle and manage correctly.

Avinash Kaushik Explains Bounce Rate

Avinash Kaushik, Google Analytics guru has a great older post on bounce rate and explanations on what it is and how to deal with it. Basically your bounce rate measures the percentage of surfers who visit your website and leave instantly. Of course there is a ton of speculation on whether it does or doesn't factor into ranking. Whether it does or doesn't really isn't the concern as much as it is important to keep your surfers engaged and not giving them what they are looking for. If they are bouncing back to Google from a search term, then perhaps you would likely look at that page to see why they are not finding what they are looking for and better construct the page for future visitors. Get in tune with your sites bounce rate, to better understand your traffic.

Don't Ignore Your Stats

It is very easy to get caught up in the day to day operations of building niche sites, such as content creation, search engine optimization and traffic generation that the results of your work get ignored. Your stats for your sites can really give you a ton of info on what is pulling and from where. Often times I found myself uncovering more fruitful keyword phrase targets just by analyzing how surfers are entering various pages of my sites. Pages with unique content and articles are the big winners organic wise and just because a certain page might not have been targeted for a certain phrase or keyword it can be better sculpted by seeing how that user found that page. There are gems that can be found and often with little or no competition.

Stats can also let you know if you might have missed giving a changed content page URL a 301 redirect or if you are getting any other variety of errors. Just last week I encountered a problem that ended up being a host problem and caught it within a day. Just because your site may appear to be working fine on the outside does not mean that something unseen can be throwing errors.

Sure it does boil down to consuming time, especially for those that are time crunched as it is, but you need to schedule yourself some time at the very least once a week to examine your stats. It is crucial to your learning and good webmastering to boot.

Instant Niche Business Profitability Research

Often times new instant niche business BANS users jump right into building a niche store without knowing if it is even profitable or enough of the items are being sold. I highly suggest you research your niche products using Terapeek and get get an idea of the average selling price and monthly sales volume for each item you will be focusing on. After finding the eBay average selling price you can visit the eBay calculator site and insert the average selling price in the opening and closing price boxes and then uncheck the include PayPal fee checkbox and click on calculate fees button. Take the end calculated number and times it by 55% and this is what you stand to earn on average per sale. I usually shoot for items that will average more than $25.00 per sale on eBay. Also you you want to take notice of how many items are selling during a 7 day period. Hopefully the number you are looking at is over the 50% rate with at least 200 listings per week.

Watching your Niche Store Stats

I logged into one of my Build A Niche Store stats area on Thursday to find that one IP was eating 12 GB of bandwidth. After tracking down the IP and offending site, I merely blocked that IP (for now anyway). You should constantly be checking your stats on a regular basis to find out where you traffic is coming from, what search phrases were used to find your niche store and also to be on a lookout for bandwidth theifs. You really can learn about your site performance from the inside out. I prefer viewing using the awstats version in the cPanel with Hostgator.