Packing Heat 057: Track Your Marketing

Posted by Jordan Castillo Price at 6/7/2009 9:38 AM
Categories: Marketing,Business of Writing
Tags: analytics newsletter tactics web design how-to

Book Trailers


Do video trailers for books increase sales in any way? Heck, I don't know! I got the fire in my belly to make a trailer, so I made one in order to flush the idea out of my head and move on. It'll be interesting to see if points any traffic my way, but I remain skeptical of its effectiveness. If you decide to make your own, make it short, 40-50 seconds tops. This one was made in GarageBand/iMovie.

Analytics


Even though it can be difficult to tell where your traffic comes from, you should still have analytics on your websites — preferrably more than one type, so you can compare them. Here are two I use:
http://statcounter.com
http://analytics.google.com

Sometimes things like banner ads or participation in online communities can create traffic in a way that isn't measurable, and that's frustrating. You'll need to pay attention to overall trends and do some detective work to figure out what's going on.

I'm in a position where I can track individual customers and look at how they're using my sites. In this cast I analyze the page hits of six customers to see where they came from and what they're doing that leads them to buy. The verdict? Almost all of them got to my site by doing a search on my author name — not traceable! However, I do see a couple of things I recently did right. I simplified the home page of psycop.com and made the buy links more handy, and I created a custom 404 page with a simple sitemap. I also see my newsletter archive and LiveJournal are being read.

If you post links to Yahoo groups as part of your marketing strategy but you don't know which ones are effective, how about creating some named anchors and linking directly to them to see where you're getting the most clickthroughs? Here's a tutorial on named anchors.

Your Assignment


Install some analytics on your website, by golly! If you already have 'em, take a peek and see what you notice.

Download | Duration: 00:31:01

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  • 6/11/2009 11:24 PM Ecchi 69 Designs wrote:
    Great podcast.
    I use a bunch of those tactics.
    Hmm...you didn't mention something else that's important to boosting sales and getting hits and such.
    Meta tags and Alt text on images,little things like that really help.
    The spider bots love them, the faster Google sees and ranks your site the better IMHO.
    You can have a great site, but if it doesn't show up in a search it's not helping you.
    Reply to this
    1. 6/13/2009 5:53 AM Jordan Castillo Price wrote:
      You're so right! I think of SEO as another part of "what you can do to market." Maybe I'll do a show just on that, though I'm no expert. Or at least a couple of tips. In the last Dreamweaver class I took, the instructor said you'd be surprised how many people don't even title their pages.

      Reply to this
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