I have been a consistent contributor to the site over the years, starting in earnest in mid-2007. As of this week, I am proud to say that my articles have surpassed the “1,000,000 read” mark, along with 51,000+ URL click-throughs. Woo hooo!

Of course, I submit my articles to multiple article sites – not just EZA – but EZA is always my first stop.

Over the years, I have posted over 700 articles on behalf of my clients and in support of my own affiliate marketing efforts (under my own name and the author names of my clients).

Having 1,000,000 reads under my belt is a lot of fun, and I must admit that I do feel a sense of pride at having met this mark. It hasn’t been easy: there has been a whole lot of time, thought and effort put into those articles.

My click-through rate (defined as the # of people who click on the URL link in an article divided by the # of article reads) hovers at around 5.1% over the life of my EZA account. But, I have been honing my skills over the years and these days click-throughs easily reach the 10-20% range for many of our articles. So, that 5.1% average should continue to rise over the next year or so as my skills continue to produce better click-through rates.

The coolest thing is that almost all of the articles I posted as far back as 2007 are still ranking well on search engines and getting regular reads. Now, that’s staying power (and you can’t say the same for pay-per-click advertising, can you?).

Article marketing remains a powerful force as a means to drive well-converting, quality traffic to websites. If you have not yet given article marketing a try for your business, give me a call for some pointers or to have us write some on your behalf to promote your company, product, service or website.

My next goal? 1,000 articles or 2,000,000 reads, whichever comes first!

My frequent readers already know that I am a big proponent of using Google Analytics. It is free, easy to use, and has a ton of extremely useful features.

One of the Google Analytics features that I really like is the Landing Page feature. Simply put, this metric allows you to know which pages on your site are used as “landing pages.” This simple refers to pages that serve as the first page or “point of entry” page when someone first comes to your site.

To understand why this is so important, you need to first understand how traffic gets to a website. Usually, the number one landing page for most websites is of course the home page itself. However, when a site features a lot of pages – each of which is highly-optimized for a different keyword or topic – it is often the case that these “interior pages” of the site will rank much higher on a search engine results page like Bing or Google than the home page (for a given keyword). In other words, they become the point of entry into the site for certain topics, rather than the home page. Similarly, these pages will often receive backlinks directly from other sites who want to inform their visitors about the given topic.

So, let’s say you have spent a lot of time optimizing a given interior page of your site for a particular keyword. Over time, you are going to be curious as to whether you are actually getting more visits to your site from people whose initial point of entry is that particular page. due to your excellent optimization skills. The Landing Page feature will tell you.

Once you have installed Google Analytics on your site, here’s how to access the Landing Page feature:

1. From the Google Analytics Home Page, under Dashboard (on the left), click on Content.
2. Then click on Top Landing Pages in the sub-menu under the Content section.

On the right, you will see listed in order of most-to-least visits those pages of your site are currently serving as landing pages for your visitors. Over time, if you have optimized each page properly and for the right keywords, those visits should increase.

The related concept of “visual paths” in relation to web design is also a very useful concept for designers to understand. Generally speaking, one should design the images on any given page of your site in a way that presents a useful, accessible visual pattern to the eye. What you want to avoid, in essence, is randomly-placed visual information that distracts the eye and causes it to wander or be confused about where to focus.

The archetypal visual paths are the Triangle, S or Z, the Spiral, and Converging Lines. For an excellent article on this topic with visual examples of each archetype, check out this article featured on the iStockPhoto website.

Optimizing pay-per-click campaigns is a whole art and science unto itself. There are countless tricks, techniques and strategies for getting the most out of your campaign. Sometimes, it makes sense to learn all of these tricks yourself. Other times, it is best to leave it to a professional PPC campaign manager.

Either way, you will want to make sure the campaign is being optimized properly. But, how can you measure whether this is the case? The most common answer to this question is, “The lower the cost-per-click, the better-optimized the campaign.” Bzzzzzz – sorry, wrong answer! It is not all about cost-per-click, it is all about cost-per-conversion.

As explained in more detail elsewhere in this blog, a conversion is some action taken by the website visitor that the site owner deems desirable. The action could be almost anything, but is typically defined in terms of making a purchase, filling out a web form, or placing a phone call to the number listed on the site.

Once you have defined a conversion action, you need to set up Adwords to track it automatically. Once set up properly, you can login to your account and view your “cost per conversion” data for any given campaign over any given period of time. The key to setting this up is to create a page on your site that comes up after the desired conversion action has happened. For example, if your conversion is defined as a purchase, then you could have a Thank You page pop up on the site. In that page, in the “code” running in the background, you will want to embed a bit of code from Google Adwords. How it works is: when that Thank You page is displayed, it sends a little message to your Adwords campaign, notifying it of the successful conversion and thereby allowing it to calculate how much you had to spend (on average, over a given period of time) to get each such conversion. Pretty cool, eh? Okay, here’s how to set it up:

1. Login to your Adwords account.

2. Go to the green row of tabs at the top and click Reporting, then Conversions.

3. Click “New Conversion.”

4. Give your new conversion a name and select a tracking purpose.

5. If you like, assign an expected revenue value to this conversion (could be an estimate).

6. Click “Save and get code.”

7. Place the code as instructed onto your site on the Thank You page (or whichever relavant page you like).

Now, whenever someone clicks on one of your ads AND completes the conversion action, Adwords will keep track of it.

Managing to conversion is the ONLY way to fly when running an Adwords campaign. Be sure to give it try.

Optimization, in very broad terms, is simply getting the most bang for your buck. Usually, in the world of online marketing, it refers to decreasing your cost per conversion (i.e., cost per sale, download, inquiry sent, etc.).

Now, there are a ton of ways to optimize any given campaign, depending of course upon the nature of the campaign, the techniques you are using, etc.. The specific ways to optimize for a given campaign is for another post. But, in very general terms, the optimization process goes like this:

a. set up your campaign
b. define some metrics (something you can measure who measurements represent success or failure)
c. establish some baseline metrics (i.e., take initial measurement)
d. make a small change
e. wait a while (to give things time to collect data)
f. measure again
g. compare new measurement to previous set of measurements
h. go back do “d” and repeat

Here’s the biggest pitfall that so many of my clients fall into: they try to test more than one variable at a time. In the world of optimization, here is the golden rule:

Test only ONE variable at a time!

Here’s why: if you test more than one variable at a time, whether the results (see “f” above) are good, bad, or mediocre, it won’t matter, for you will have learned NOTHING about what really worked, what didn’t. In other words: you won’t be able to tell for sure what made the difference! You may as well have not done anything at all.

This is one of those pieces of advice I’ve repeated to customers, colleagues, and random people on the street countless times. Sometimes it sinks in right away, sometimes it takes a while. But, if you think about it, it’s the only way to do optimization that makes sense. So: follow it, use it, live it! (And, happy testing, by the way.)

Market segmentation has gotten a lot more sophisticated in recent years, due to:

1. the advent of proprietary psycho-behavioral segmentation systems like Prizm, Mosaic, and Personicx
2. the increased sophistication of quantitative analytics techniques
3. the sharp increase in the sheer amount and detail of information that market research firms keep about each adult in the United States

Request: If you own, run or manage a business-to-consumer (B2C) business, I am interested in your thoughts on market segmentation. Here is a one-question poll I would like you to answer: http://polls.linkedin.com/p/70962/qhfcj. Thank you for your input!

http://tinyurl.com/ydg4u8k

It’s a $69 investment (last time I checked), but that’s a drop in the bucket relative to the value of time you will save yourself. There is no easier way to get Twitter followers fast. I get 100-150 new followers each day I use it, with minimal effort.

Once you install the software, here’s what to do (be sure to set up a Twitter account first at http://www.twitter.com):

1. Launch it. Then, login to Twitter through the software itself (rather than through your browser).

2. Now, to start building your massive follower base: click on “Tools” then “Find Targeted Followers.” Type in a keyword that matches your business or interest area (e.g., accounting). For the first person that comes up on the results list, click on their Twitter page (the link). Then, click on their Followers list. They will have 2,000 to 20,000 or more followers. Now, click on “Follow All” button at the bottom, right of your screen. The software now goes to work, automatically following other people. Go about your daily activities and give the software some time to do its thing.

Now, once you are following about 2,000 people, the software will cut you off from following more until you get around 2,000 followers yourself. This will not all happen in one shot. You will notice that not everyone will follow you back, however. So, every once in a while (every 2-3 days), you will want to “Unfollow” those people who didn’t follow you back. Just go to your own “Following” page and click on “Unfollow All” button on bottom, right. (It will only unfollow those who haven’t yet followed you).

Also, every day or so, be sure to go to your own Followers page and “Follow All.”

My answer? Well, since I clearly blog myself, you can probably guess that I think blogging can be a good idea under some circumstances. But, in what situations should you spend your time blogging, and how can it help? Here are my thoughts on the matter:

Blogging can help you:

1. Build more relevant content for your website (search engines love content!).
2. Remain focused on your core competencies and keep your skills sharp by writing about what you already know and love to do.
3. Keep your customers, colleagues and prospects informed about what you are doing, thinking and feeling about your area of specialization.
4. Send more (but not necessarily tons more – see below) traffic to your website.

However, blogging is not likely to help you:

1. Get famous. (In fact, it won’t even help you get “Internet famous.”)
2. Instantly get thousands of visitors to your site.
3. Stir deep public debate.*

* Yes, there are people out there doing all of these latter 3 things via blogging, but they have been blogging practically since the Internet was the ARPANET and Seinfeld was barely into its 3rd season. Nowadays, there are tens of millions of blogs out there – the compeition is stiff, to say the least.

So, set the right expectatations and get blogging!

Two tools I recommend to help you out:

1. Brush up on your Microsoft Excel skills.  This is a fine piece of software that 98% of computer users have free and ready access to (yes, even you Mac users!). Learn it, master it, use it.

2. Access a good PPC calculator.  You need to be able to calculate such vital numbers as:

a. The maximum amount you are willing to spend per conversion

b. The total net profit per conversion

c. Your monthly PPC ad budget

Get your SEO math right and you will be able to sleep well at night knowing your SEO and SEM strategies rest on a solid foundation, not just guesses and good faith.