Bill McRea

Just when you thought you’d gotten caught up with what’s new in social media, now you learn that Google+ Brand Pages have been rolled out in early November. It might seem like a chore to have to learn the ropes of yet another social media platform, but if you do take the time and create a Google+ brand page you will reap the benefits in the form of greater exposure for your brand, more traffic to your website and a nice SEO boost.

Getting Started with Google+
While Google+ launched mid-summer, their brand pages have just been made available in early November. If you are not yet on Google+’s social network, sign up there first by creating a Google profile. profiles.google.com. Next you’ll claim your business brand page at: google.com/+/business. If your business also has a physical location such as a retail shop, you can link your G+ brand page to your Google places page.

Google+ will help boost your site’s SEO
Yet another new development is the Google+ ‘Direct Connect,’ which brings searchers directly to your G+ brand page when they type in a ‘+’ sign before your page name in Google. Direct Connect is still pretty new and it works only on a limited number of pages so far, but the G+ website says that more pages are being added every day.

Having a G+ brand page is good for branding
Be sure to add a G+ badge to your website and blog to link your site to your Google Plus brand page. When visitors click on your G+ badge, they will be brought to your Google+ brand page where they can add you to their circles and begin to follow your posts.

Measure your social media influence with Ripples
A new feature recently launched on Google+ is ‘Ripples,’ which visually displays which users have shared a public post, and then who has shared it again. This handy feature shows the relative influence of each member who has interacted with that ripple.

Use Hangouts creatively to engage your market and stand out from your competition
Hangouts is the cool multi-video chat feature on G+. You could hold live how-to workshops, demonstrations, or just hangout with customers and answer questions and get feedback. You can record these sessions and make them available for viewing later.

Use Circles to grow and group your audiences
One of the distinctive features of G+ is the Circle feature. You can easily group the followers of your G+ page into smaller more specific groups to customize communications with them.

You need a Google+ page for your business so that you can be ahead of the crowd on this brand new, hot, social media platform. You’ll get lots more exposure for your brand in the G+ stream, and a nice boost to your website’s SEO. If you are looking to stay current with social media marketing and stay top-of-mind with your market, then don’t overlook the powerful potential of Google+ brand pages.

For more information about how you can use social media marketing to grow your online or offline business, visit http://mcreasite.com/blog today.

If you are using a free website analytics package such as Google Analytics and the like, you are more than likely leaving money on the table. There are some premium website analytics tools that will automate the testing and tracking of your website’s traffic, and help you gain the insight to convert more of your current traffic to sales.

Let’s take a look at some of the information that you want to be able to get quickly and easily from your website analytics software.

You want to choose website analytics tools that will show you visitor value and customer lifetime value so that you can take the steps to improve those numbers and help your business grow.

Can you tell right now how much it is costing you for each lead that your website generates? Knowing your cost per lead and what each lead is worth to you per month will help you become more efficient at generating leads. Another metric you can discover is what percentage of leads actually gets converted into customers. Raise this number and your website is making you more money on the same traffic.

You know the value of testing and tracking the various aspects of your website, so when you use web site analytics you will know what is working best so that you can optimize those pages and get a better ROI.

Other important information includes knowing how many new customers you are getting each day, being able to track both your online and offline advertising and seeing whether it is profitable for you or not. You want to know how many unique visitors are landing on your website each day and the traffic sources that are bringing them to you.

With premium website analytics software you can easily get all of this data and more automatically without the need for you to figure out how to create and run a report.

What you want your website analytics software to do is provide you with the critical information that has a direct impact on your profits, and free solutions just can’t do that for you. And as a business owner you don’t want to spend too much of your valuable time fussing over bounce rates and browser stats. The best premium website analytics software works hands free in an automated way to deliver the timely data you need to keep your business in profit.

If you’re an Internet marketer who sells information products and services your website is the life’s blood of your business. You need to keep an eye on the numbers so that you can keep improving them. If you own a retail location but you also have a website to drive customers to your store, website analytics can help your site become more efficient at generating and converting leads.

So, take another look at your free website analytics tools and see if they are providing the actionable information that you need to keep your website running at its peak of efficiency and generating the most profits possible.

Premium website analytics software like MyeMetrics, can help you improve your website’s profitability. For more information about other tools and strategies for growing your online business, visit, http://mcreasite.com/blog today.

Conversion marketing is the art and science of making the most of your website visitor’s experience on your website. When you use conversion marketing strategies you will find ways to get better results from the traffic you are already getting to your website.

Most people will visit your website only once, and most will not make a purchase on their first visit. If you can find a way to encourage more of your visitors to stay on your page longer, and interact with your content, your chances are better that they will return and eventually make a purchase.

In order to improve your website’s conversion rate you’ve got to know what it is today. There are a few ways to measure your website’s conversion rate. You can multiply the number of sales by the number of visitors and then multiply that by 100 and you’ll get your base conversion rate. There are some changes that you can make to your site that will result in a significant improvement to your conversion rate.

Let’s look at five tips that you can implement to make your website more effective:

1. Keep Testing

Use a website analytics tool such as Google Analytics to test your website’s efficiency. Which pages have the highest bounce rate? Are visitors abandoning your forms? Is your website working properly in all of the various browsers?

Then you can test other things such as landing page copy, buttons, images, etc. Virtually every element that the user interacts with on your site will have an impact on conversions.

2. Optimize your copy

Content is King. If your visitors are not responding as well to your copy as they could be, then you are losing money. Test your copy and make changes accordingly.

3.  Niche it down

Personalize your website content to appeal to your audience. Every market segment has different preferences. Show that you know what makes your prospective and current customers tick, by offering content that speaks their unique language.

4. Keep it clean, easy to find & error free

Make it a regular practice to clean up broken links on your site, provide site maps and intuitive navigation schemes, and search capabilities to make it easy on your visitors to find exactly what they need in as few clicks as possible.

5. Deliver content in flexible formats

Given the multi-media capabilities of the web you have the option of presenting your content in ways that your audience wants to consume it. Do they prefer video? Maybe they would rather listen to an audio than pore over an eBook. You might look into whether or not a mobile app would be helpful to your market.

As I said in the beginning of this article, never stop testing every possible element of your website. If you can find better ways to reach the visitors you already have and convert them at an even higher rate, your profits will increase without spending an additional dime on advertising.

For more information about conversion marketing and how to make the most of your website’s traffic, visit, http://mcreasite.com/blog to discover how to grow your online business today.

In a business like Internet marketing where stories of overnight success are legendary, even more are the stories of those who have failed miserably having spent thousands of dollars on courses, hiring the wrong coaches, and chasing every hot trend that comes along. There are a few commonalities among the mistakes that new online marketers make. In this article we will explore just eight of them and how to avoid them.

1. Your website looks unprofessional

With competition as steep as it is online your website must look professional and you must appear trustworthy or else visitors will click away. No one will take you seriously if your website looks sloppy and unprofessional. This is not an area to cut corners if you want to make money online. Spend the money and hire a designer.

2. Starting out with ideas that are too complex

Keep it simple when you are first starting out and then build on your small successes. Don’t aim to create a site to compete with Amazon as your first project.

3. Failure to focus

Because the Internet moves so fast and there is so much going on people can easily get distracted and want to drop what they are doing and jump in on the next, “Big Thing.” You will never find success if you do not focus on one project at a time until you achieve the goals you have set.

4. Failing to keep your website updated with fresh content

You can’t just build a site and then sit back and wait for sales to roll in. In order to attract traffic from the search engines, and attention from your human visitors, you need a steady flow of fresh, relevant content on your site several times a week.

5. Neglecting SEO

SEO, or search engine optimization is critical if you are going to rely upon organic search engine traffic to your site. One of the biggest determining factors to search engine ranking is how many back links your site has.  Either spend the time building backlinks or hire someone to do it for you or your site will flounder and never reach page one in Google.

6. Attempting to go it alone

Internet marketing can be a challenging thing to try do all on your own. Having joint venture partners, and networking with other marketers is a great way to gain support and encouragement, get exposure to other audiences and learn new strategies.

7. Neglecting to build an email subscriber list

This is a huge one, and it should be closer to the top of the list. Ask any successful marketer and they will tell you that they would be dead in the water without their email subscriber list. This is one of those rare cases where size does not matter. What matters is the kind of relationship you have with your list. If you maintain a trusting, mutually beneficial relationship with your subscribers, your email list can be a lucrative resource.

8. Giving up too soon

Here’s another big mistake that would-be marketers make and that is to give up before they give their project a chance to reach success. So many new marketers jump from project to project without seeing success simply because they did not invest enough time or have enough patience to see it through.

If you want to avoid common mistakes and learn some powerful Internet marketing strategies, visit, http://mcreasite.com/blog, where you will discover how you can build and grow a successful business online today.