Archive for November, 2007

Website Marketing Analysis with StatCounter.com

Tuesday, November 20th, 2007
I will spend money if I feel it is going to a worthwhile cause, but I hate wasting money on worthless marketing, or anything else for that matter.
Internet marketing is a tricky thing. Getting a lot of hits to your site does not necessarily equate to getting quality hits on your website. You’ve got Google Adwords, reciprocal links, directory listings, even links from your MySpace page, so how do you figure out what works and what doesn’t?
Have a look at www.StatCounter.com. They offer a free service for tracking stats on your website. Not only can you track unique, return, and total visits to your website on a daily basis, but StatCounter gives you a wealth of information that can be used to track the quality of your marketing, such as:
  • IP tracking – find out where your visitors are coming from. If you are a small local retail store in Dayton, Ohio and most of your hits are coming from China… there’s a problem.
  • Referral link – StatCounter tells you where on the web your visitors came from. This allows you to determine whether directory links, google adwords, or other incoming links are working best for you. You can even see which search engine terms are directing people to your website.
  • Exit Page & Visit Length – If everyone is leaving your site 3 seconds after they hit your homepage, something is turning them off. You may consider upgrading your website design, or re-organizing a few things.
There are a bunch of other stats, pie charts, graphs, and all kinds of analytical info that StatCounter provides too. So any mathematicians out there, this might be a good passtime for you… although that seems a little sad.

Setup is easy as pie for anyone who knows how to copy and paste code into an HTML document and upload via FTP. As of right now, StatCounter doesn’t require a link back, obnoxious advertisements, or anything of the sort. So when I say free, I mean it.

So anyone struggling to get their website up and going, get yourself a StatCounter and know without a doubt how effective your website and your internet marketing are for your business.

WARNING: Checking StatCounter stats can become addictive. Please use with caution. If you have an obsessive compulsive personality and become addicted to StatCounter, the writer of this article takes no responsibility for your mental shortcomings or rehab bills.

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Using Paypal? Here’s A Few Suggestions

Monday, November 12th, 2007

Despite all of the negative hype, Paypal is a really great resource. It has given countless individuals and companies the ability to EASILY set up an ecommerce solution on their website without spending a lot of cash.

Unfortunately, a regular “free” Paypal account has its drawbacks, the most notable being that it looks somewhat unprofessional to have all of your payments processed through Paypal’s website.

Why you ask? Well, people that frequent the internet have come to realize that while paypal is a fairly safe and secure method for making payments and purchasing goods, it is a “free” solution. It screams “I’m a start-up, I don’t have the financial backing to buy an SSL Certificate and pay to have someone set up a real shopping cart, and I don’t want to pay the $30 a month fee to process cards directly on my site”.

That being said, Paypal realizes this and offers many different ways to improve consumer confidence for those of us who sell with Paypal.

For starters, you can customize the shopping cart page. When people go to the view cart page, instead of seeing the typical seller email address or company name in black text, you can set a header image for this page, customize the background and text styles, and essentially make the paypal payment page look a whole lot more customized than the standard style accomplishes.

How To Do This:

  • Log into your paypal account
  • Click on the profile tab under your account
  • Under the “Selling Preferences” column, select custom payment pages
  • Follow the instructions

You can customize more than one style incase you have more than one store. Great tool!

Drawbacks? Well, if the image you use as your header isn’t stored on a secure server, your customers will get a little message when they view the payment page that “not all items on this page are secure, would you like to view unsecured items?”.

This message isn’t the best for buyer confidence…

Solution:

Visit this website https://www.eliteweaver.co.uk/imgpal.php . It provides a great service that will route your image through a secure server, give you a secure URL to use on your payments page, and voila, no more error message.

Some Other Tips:

A few other suggestions for all of the Paypal users out there…

  • Make sure your account is upgraded to a merchant account. A merchant account is still free, however it provides more options to you and your buyers i.e. they don’t need a paypal account to pay you.
  • Set a return URL page. Send your users back to your website after payment has been made. Makes for a much smoother process. (You will find this under Profile > Selling Preferences > Website Payment Preferences)
  • Try to set up your paypal buttons to give people as many options as possible. Paypal allows you to set options when creating a button, so USE THIS FEATURE!
  • Always use the full shopping cart instead of just a buy button. Once again helps with buyer confidence.

If all of this just isn’t cutting it for you, don’t be afraid to upgrade to a Paypal Pro account and set up payments directly on your website with a shopping cart solution. Its probably the cheapest merchant account/payment gateway service out there. The sign up process is very easy compared to other services. Plus, if it just doesn’t work out for you, you can downgrade again. Simple as that.

Moral of the story, if you’re gonna go with a free payment processing solution make it look like you paid for it!

Need help integrating Paypal or sprucing up your payment page? Contact me Here.

Posted in Web | No Comments »