The StartUp Blog at PartnerUp

Any small business owner who has a website needs to know where visitors are coming from, what they’re doing on the site and where they’re going.

Luckily there’s Google Analytics—an awesome tool from Google (obviously) that can tell you just about anything you want to know about your website visitors. The best part for small business owners…it’s totally free.

Here are some examples of what Google Analytics can tell you about visitors to your small business website.

• Google Analytics can tell you exactly where your visitors just came from when they reach your site. Did they come from a particular search engine? Were they directed to you from a social media site? Was it a marketing piece that sent them to you? Knowing where exactly your traffic is coming from will help you figure out where to focus your marketing efforts.
• Google Analytics can tell you which pages your visitors are frequenting. This can show you which kinds of content your visitors are attracted to and which kinds they aren’t. Maybe you could expand aspects of a particularly popular page into less popular pages.
• Google Analytics  can tell you how much time visitors are spending on your site, where they are spending their time, and ultimately which pages of your site they are most frequently leaving from.  This could help you troubleshoot why visitors are leaving and how you can make changes to prevent them from leaving. Perhaps it is as simple as changing some wording to make your message clearer and less confusing.
• Google Analytics can tell you where your visitors are geographically located. By looking at what is called the Geomap Overlay, you’ll be able to quickly see in a very visual way the varying locations of your visitors. You may find that the audience you’ve been targeting is not exactly the audience you’re getting. Maybe you’ve been marketing to Midwesterners but are also seeing a large following on the Eastern Seaboard. Knowing this will enable you to tweak and/or expand your marketing efforts.

Many small business owners shy away from using Google Analytics because they’re not IT experts. But you really don’t need to be. If you can follow Google’s directions (which are pretty good), you’ll be just fine. To get started just go to Google.com/Analytics.

As technology advances and consumers continue to upgrade their mobile devices and increase their usage of the mobile Web, research in this space also continues to expand. I recently found two pieces of research that I think small business owners should pay attention to.

Consumer Alerts
A recent survey from Harris Interactive measured consumer sentiment toward mobile devices as they relate to shopping, sales promotions and impulse purchases.

The research shows that consumers are interested in receiving opt-in mobile alerts from their favorite places—42 percent of 18 to 34 year olds and 33 percent of 35 to 44 year olds. The research also shows that 9 out of 10 U.S. adults make impulse purchases when they are out and about and hear of a sale or special going on near them.

Making the connection?

There is an opportunity here for small businesses to trigger these impulses through mobile alerts, so think about how your business could adapt to take advantage.

Peak Performance
Gomez Inc., a Web application experience management company, on Monday released results from a study examining the experiences and expectations of consumers when it comes to the mobile Web.

Unfortunately for many businesses, consumers seem to be pretty dissatisfied. Nearly 75 percent of respondents complained of slow load times. This is particularly scary because of additional results.

• 85 percent of consumers said they are willing to retry a mobile Web site two times or less if it does not work initially
• More than half are unlikely to return to a Web site that they had trouble accessing from their phone
• 40 percent said they’d likely visit a competitor’s mobile Web site instead

The lesson here is that businesses need to place the performance of their mobile Web site at the top of their priority lists to avoid this discontent and capitalize on the mobile opportunity.

As kids a lot of us dreamed of working for NASA. We wanted to be astronauts like Buzz Aldrin, Sally Ride or Neil Armstrong and lift off on exhilarating space missions. I’m guessing that for most of us, however, this never happened. In fact, not to crush anyone’s dreams or anything, but most likely it will never happen.

Just because you can’t work for NASA, however, doesn’t mean you can’t work with NASA. The U.S. space agency frequently works with small businesses that can provide resources and new technologies to aid their missions, programs and research.

While getting your foot in the door can be a massive hindrance when working with many government agencies, NASA is making it easier. On Nov. 16-17, NASA will hold its second annual Small Business Symposium and Awards Ceremony in Bethesda, Md.  During the two-day event, small business owners will be able to learn about some of NASA’s future missions in space and Earth Science, including associated programs, initiatives, and business and/or teaming opportunities.

“Business-to-business networking with NASA, JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and prime contractors will be the objective throughout the event,” NASA said in a statement.

The registration deadline for the symposium is Nov. 9. So if you’ve ever been interested in potentially partnering your small business with NASA, visit http://acquisition.jpl.nasa.gov/boo/2009sbs/ and check it out.

For the first time ever, the Federal Trade Commission will attempt to regulate the social media industry, blogging in particular.

On Monday the FTC released updates to its guidelines for acceptable use of endorsements in ads. Like mainstream media outlets, bloggers (and Twitterers, Facebookers, etc.) will now be required to disclose any “material connections” to a brand or product they write about. To put it plainly, if anyone gives you any money or freebies to endorse or review their products or services, you MUST disclose that to your readers.

Violating these new rules, which will take effect Dec. 1, could cost up to $11,000 in fines per violation. Bloggers and advertisers could also face injunctions and be ordered to reimburse consumers for financial losses that may have stemmed from misguiding reviews.

Because of these new guidelines, many social media writers are nervous about posting even the most harmless of comments. To soothe this anxiety, the FTC states that most often (violations will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis) it will pursue the advertiser regarding the violation rather than the blogger.

While I will of course plead the fifth on giving my opinion regarding regulation of the industry, I do believe that the more transparent a company, blogger, or anyone for that matter is about the work they do, the more likely they’ll be to gain the trust of consumers.

Word of mouth is powerful stuff. When one happy customer tells three friends about your business and then they each tell three friends, you’ve got some traction.

Now imagine that customer is involved in social media and instead of telling three friends about your business, she hops on Twitter and sends out a Tweet that reaches 300 people. Then each of those 300 people (obviously also involved in social media) Retweets your message. Now you’ve got a movement!

Clearly you can see the difference here. Customers who regularly utilize social media have the ability to wield a lot more power over your business than a regular customer.

All customers are of course important, so I’m not suggesting that you favor one over the other. That would be like choosing which kid you like better (Note: Always go with the girl). But it might serve you well to go the extra mile to serve your more social media-minded customers.

The possibilities here are endless. You could offer a special discount code through Facebook. Or maybe you could look for a way to invite your Twitter-using customers to a special event of sorts. You may need to experiment a little here. The bottom line is that regardless of how wonderful your company is just going about its business, it might be worth the trouble to go further to give your customers involved in social media a little something worth spreading the word about. You never know how far it will go.

Choosing a company to host your web site for your business is an important decision and deserves some attention.  The company you choose will be responsible for keeping your website up and online so your customers and visitors can get to it.  They will also be the ones who will need to help you troubleshoot any issues you may have with your website and ensure that it is working correctly.  There are lots of options in the web hosting arena to choose from. Some are really cheap and the service they offer falls short, but there are good deals to be found and web hosting doesn’t need to cost a fortune.  Do your research beforehand and find a company that you think you can trust.

This is a guest post by Zeke Camusio, founder of The Outsourcing Company.

The Pareto principle states that for many events, roughly 80 percent of the effects come from 20 percent of the causes. This is one of the most important ideas in business because it helps you quickly assess what to do in any given situation. Always focus on the 20 percent and you’ll get the results.

Many Web designers take a very different approach to Web design. Their goal, it seems, is to pack a home page with as much information as possible. There are a lot of reasons they take this approach:

• Search engines use the home page as a launching platform for scanning the site.
• Packing as many keywords into the copy as possible.
• The home page is a launching point for all things they want to accomplish on the site
• They already created beautiful menus to organize the information

Let’s take our SEO caps off for a second and think about what the goals actually are:

1. Attracting customers
2. Getting those customers to do something specific (i.e. buy, sign up or click something specific)

Choice is a burden.
If there are too many options, potential buyers will get confused and do nothing. Smart retailers learned this concept a long time ago and stopped stocking 30 varieties of jelly and instead focused on the few that sold the best. Web designers need to think the same way. The more choices you provide, the less likely your potential customers are to choose anything at all.

Clutter distracts from your goal.
The more stuff on your page, the harder it is for me to find exactly what I need. It’s great that you have a full menu of options, RSS feeds and links to every possible option, but if I can’t figure out where to click, I’m going to leave your site.

Take a good hard look at your home page.

• What is the most important 20 percent? What generates 80 percent of my results? This isn’t something that you have to guess at. Google Analytics can easily tell you what most of your customers click on.
• How can I use graphic design to accentuate this 20 percent? You can use graphic boxes, colors, backgrounds, larger fonts, etc. to make sure your reader can’t miss the most important stuff.
• What can I cut from my home page? A great place to start is to cut text-heavy paragraphs. You’ll be amazed by how much you can say in just a few carefully chosen words. The next place to move is unused links. Is it really useful to have a recipe section on your site? Do you really need that news feed? Can you shrink your menu to a few common choices that can expand?
• Do I have the essentials? Clients need to know 1) who you are, 2) what you do, and 3) how to get a hold of you. Make sure this information is very easy to find.

How does all of this work with SEO?
An important part of SEO is the ratio of text to keywords, so cutting superfluous text will help your search engine rankings. Also, you may be optimizing for things that aren’t bringing you clients, so cutting some topics may help clarify what you’re doing for the search engines. Finally, the goal of SEO is to reach customers, not just unqualified traffic. Working on your homepage clarity will dramatically help with this goal of SEO.

Zeke is a serial entrepreneur, Internet Marketing expert and founder of The Outsourcing Company, an Internet marketing agency with offices in Aspen, Colo. and New York. Let’s Do It!, Zeke’s Internet marketing blog, has thousands of followers from all over the world.

This is a guest post by Zeke Camusio, founder of The Outsourcing Company.

There are many issues when it comes to online advertising. You used to have to blast out millions of ads online so people will read all about your products or services, click on your ad, go to your site and make a purchase. Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple anymore. People have been so bombarded with irrelevant ads that they just don’t pay attention the way they used to.

Does this mean that online advertising is on its way out? Absolutely not. But it has drastically changed.

Online Advertising Solutions

One of the best ways to get a return on your investment is through SEO, PPC and social media marketing.

SEO and PPC are effective advertising tools because they enable users to find you more easily at the exact time they are looking for products and services like yours.  Without SEO and PPC expect to be lost in cyberspace and not be found by the right potential customers.

• SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – Unlike ads, SEO uses optimized techniques/keywords to drive quality traffic to your site through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, etc. 
• PPC (Pay Per Click) – Online advertisers pay their hosts only when their ad is clicked (e.g. Google AdWords). When writing PPC ads keep the following in mind: it’s all about the headlines and benefits. Keep it simple, use strong headlines and a call to action. Your goal is to get that ad clicked!

Social media marketing allows you to really hone in to your target market. You have control over the information you share with people on your networks.

• Connects you with large active audiences across the globe. You can interact and connect with people immediately.
• Creates a dynamic, long-lasting online presence. As a result people grow to desire your products or services, which over time results in sales!
• Positions you and your company as experts in your field.

Targeted Advertising

Even though the above marketing techniques are highly recommended, banner ads can work to your advantage if targeted correctly. Make sure that ads are displayed to audiences in your specific niche. Steer clear of broad-based advertising.

• Targeted Ads – For example, if you sell organic dog food, place banner ads in a site specifically geared toward health/nutrition for dogs. It will be cheaper and your ads will convert better. 
• Broad Ads – Google also displays ads that contain certain keywords. It’s not as good as targeted advertising but it still works. Remember not to place ads on sites with a “broad appeal” – don’t place the same organic dog food banner ad on a general pets site – think NICHE!

Zeke is a serial entrepreneur, Internet Marketing expert and founder of The Outsourcing Company, an Internet marketing agency with offices in Aspen, Colo. and New York. Let’s Do It!, Zeke’s Internet marketing blog, has thousands of followers from all over the world.