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Table of Contents for this issue.....
1.
Authors Comments
2.
Q & A, Suggestions
and Comments
3.
Google Analytics
4.
Dreamstime – Stock
Picture Site
5.
Unsubscribe Now
6.
Google Image Search –
Revisited
11-27-07
7.
Traffic Boost – Web
2.0
8.
New Retirement
Calculator
Author's Comments
This
month has been a blur. John’s
company is in the middle of an IPO on a stock market in
London
UK
and John is having to answer most of
the questions that arise from a transaction like this.
This is on top of his normal duties.
John
is trying to finish rebuilding his hunting car so he is spending late
hours working to put the car back together.
Thanksgiving
weekend was 1,115 miles in 4 ½ days during which we were with all our
children and grand children – wonderful trip in spite of heavy traffic
and miserable weather.
On
Sunday we baptized Mark – Thomas, our new grandson.
By
the time you receive our next eZine, we will have finished Christmas and
be into the New Year. Linda
and I join to wish you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
Q
& A, Suggestions and Comments
If you have anything for this
section or you have a suggestion for a topic for an article,
please use this suggestion
form to give us your suggestions or your input.
With your help, we can improve the Boomer eZine.
This link will open a new page.
Close the page to return to Boomer eZine.
Google Analytics
It
seems that Google keeps track of everything on the Internet.
When we dig down into Google Analytics, this seems to really be
the case.
We
mentioned Google Analytics in the last issue of the eZine and promised
an article about it so here goes.
This
is how it was described in the last issue:
Google
Analytics is free web-based site metrics / analytics software hosted by
Google. After you include tracking code on all selected pages of your
site, Google collects data regarding visitor activity and then you are
able to log into an Analytics interface and view site activity and
produce reports.
The
great thing about Google Analytics – it is free!
To
use it, open an account on Google. If
you do not already have an account, go to www.google.com.
In the upper right corner, click “Sign In”.
When the sign-in page loads, look for the box in the lower right
of the screen. You will see
a box that contains
Don't
have a Google Account?
Create an account now
Click
the “Create an account now” link and follow the instructions to open
you account.
Once
you log on to your account on Google you will see:
In
the upper right corner, you will see your user name to show you are
logged in. Click “My
Account” to see what is available to you in your account.
Stop
here for a second and see the other options in your Google account
before we launch off on Analytics.
If
you want to set up pay per click marketing on Google Adwords, you can
start here my clicking the “Adwords” link.
We
have written before about the powerful webmaster tools that are
available free on Google. To
explore these tools, click the “Webmaster Tools” link.
We
have also written about Google Alerts.
You can set up and manage your alerts by clicking the
“Alerts” link.
Want
to start a blog? You can set
up a blog and be blogging in about 10 minutes by clicking on the
“Blogger” link.
Enough
off the subject rambling! Back
to Analytics. Click on the
Analytics link to go to the Analytics Home Page.
You
can see that I have set up Analytics on Boomer eZine and Retirement Jobs
Online. I also set up
sbi-guru.com and the-best-gps.com but they are off the screen.
You
add Analytics to your website by copying a small snippet of code that
Google supplies and pasting it in every page of your website.
To get the code, scroll down to the bottom of the home page and
in the bottom left corner, you will see the link “Add Website
Profile”. Click this link
and on the new page, enter the website you want to track and follow the
instructions. Google will
provide you with the lines of code that you paste in each page of your
website.
Each
time the page loads or there is activity on the page, the script sends a
message to Google Analytics and it captures the activity.
When you log on and read the reports for your website, you will
see what happened on your website.
The
reports that are available are almost overwhelming.
I am not going to go through each report, since they are so
numerous. You can do that on
your own.
However,
I am going to show you a really helpful tool to track links on a web
page on your site. I have
often questioned where my readers were going and which links they were
clicking. Google has a tool
that will tell you this. To
activate this tool, look on the left side of the page and click
Content/Overview/Site Overlay.
This
will open your website with a Google overlay that shows you the number
of times each link on a page was clicked.
Float your cursor over the link and Google will pop up a box
showing the number of clicks on that link.
I find this really helpful in following my visitors across my
pages.
I
just modified a web page where I found that a large number of visitors
were following a link that I assumed very few would follow.
This pulled them out of the conversion funnel which cost me the
sale. Without this tool, I
would never have known this.
Speaking
of conversion funnels, let’s define what one is.
This is the path that you plan for your visitor to follow from
the point where they enter your site until they perform the activity
that you want them to perform. This
might be to purchase something or to complete a subscription form.
The idea is that you “funnel” them in the direction where you
want them to go.
When
you plan a website, plan the conversion funnels.
Google Analytics will let you define your conversion funnel.
It will then show you how many visitors start into the funnel and
how many complete it. It
also shows where visitors leave the funnel if they do not complete it.
I
could go on and on about Analytics since it is so all encompassing but I
will stop here.
To
learn more about Analytics, open a Google account and go to the
Analytics home page. Watch
the video by clicking the "Take a Tour" link, read the
FAQ’s, click the "Learn More" link and the "Report
Finder Tool" link. These are located for you in the red box
in the picture below
This
is a powerful tool for managing your website and it is FREE.
Dreamstime
I
use Dreamstime for many of my stock photos for the websites.
Here is a press release from Dreamstime that I found interesting.
If you are looking for photos, I recommend this site.
We
are happy to announce two major events, marking not only Dreamstime
achievements and activity but also rewarding our users. We just posted
the image that brings our total images up to 2,000,000:
http://www.dreamstime.com/thread_8702
We also announced the winner of the Dreamstime workshop, "Shoot
with Ron Chapple". Serving a worldwide customer base of over
450,000 users and 25,000 contributing photographers, we continue to
support our community with a unique policy of "giving back" to
our users.
Dreamstime has become "the place to shop" for double platinum
stock photography. We have exceeded 2,000,000 images online with
contributing photographer, Inga Ivanova's submission:
http://www.dreamstime.com/shopping-time-image3632111. Designers who
download this or other Dreamstime milestone images can earn 100 free
credits.
To celebrate the two million mark, Dreamstime offers three FREE images
to all NEW members who register today, while assuming payment for the
royalties rewarded to contributors for these free images. Hurry to
spread the word about our site to your colleagues and friends who are
not yet Dreamstime members. They can benefit from our promotional offer
while you benefit from referring new members to our site.
http://www.dreamstime.com/referral
Dreamstime sends its photographers to learn tips and tricks from the
best. Our three month workshop competition has been won by contributor
Tomasz Trojanowski:
http://www.dreamstime.com/forumm_8218_pg3
The winning photographer will participate in an exciting workshop.
Tomasz will travel to
Maui
,
Hawaii
for a three day
shoot with industry veteran Ron Chapple, one of the world's most
successful stock photographers and one of our top contributors.
We take this opportunity to congratulate and thank all users, both
buyers and photographers, for making these two achievements possible.
Our very best regards and looking forward to new Dreamstime milestones,
contests and achievements!
The Dreamstime Team
------------------------------------------
http://www.dreamstime.com
Unsubscribe Now
For
a few years, I have subscribed to the mailing lists of many of the top
Internet marketers, and I have become totally fed up with the junk that
they are peddling. They have
a “breakthrough product” about once per week.
At
one time, I aspired to become an Internet marketer, but the more I saw
them in action, the less charm that ambition held.
They
all band together to hype each others’ products and create a major
launch. However, I have not
seen any products recently that were worthy of mention.
Jason
James was my classmate at the Tim Knox – Jim Cockrum boot camp a
couple of years ago so I felt personal ties to him.
However, recently, Jason was touting the newest, greatest product
every day (or so it seemed). You
know the saying about going to the well once too often.
Well, the last promotional email Jason sent out was one too many.
I pulled the plug.
I
unsubscribed from the following lists:
Jason
James
Michael
Rasmussen
Mike
Filsame
Alok
Jain
Chris
Chandler
Gary
Harvey – eProfit news
James
Jackson
Mark
Roth
Michael
Cheney
Ron
LeGrand
Mark
Hodges
Alok
Jain
The only lists I am still on are:
Jim
Cockrum – Jim will sell something every once in a while, but he gives
you much more value than he charges you for.
Jeremy
Palmer – Jeremy charges for his PPC Classroom course, but if you want
to learn PPC, this is worth the price.
He is really sincere about teaching PPC to his students.
Since
Linda and I are working on the Net to generate a modest retirement
income, we do not need to get rich from it.
Our children are grown and gone and we only have to worry about
ourselves so we don’t have to make the big bucks like some of the
Internet marketers are trying to make.
We
are going to emulate Jim Cockrum’s style.
Be honest. Provide
value. Sell something of
true value every once in a while to make the effort worth it.
Google Image Search –
Revisited
11-27-07
Last
issue, we wrote about Google image search, and how we did not understand
why Retirement Jobs Online was getting hits for the keyword
“retirement” which we did not consider our keyword.
The hits were coming from Google Image search on the picture of
the “Retirement Lane” sign that I purchased from Dreamstime for the
home page of the website. That
image was number 5 for “retirement” at that time.
I
just checked the image search for retirement and retirement jobs (on
11/27) and we have some great positions with some of our pictures.
The
Retirement Lane sign picture is number 1 for keyword “retirement”
and number 5 for “retirement jobs”.
Number
1 for “Retirement” and Number 5 for “Retirement Jobs”
For
keyword “retirement jobs”
Number
6
Number
10
Number
11
Don’t
forget to put ALT tags on all your pictures and use your keywords in the
tag name.
Traffic
Boost – Web 2.0
One
of our readers from
Canada
sent me an email on 11/4.
Here is an excerpt from it:
I have been researching some SEO information and
some web 2.0 info as well. That really is why I have contacted you
again, I noticed in your last news letter, (which I have kept up to date
with all your news and find it very helpful) that you regularly check
your stats, on your retirement-jobs-online site, well hopefully I have
some good news for you. As a little experiment I will apply some of what
I have learned (web 2.0) to your site, please let me know if you see a
uplift in your number of unique visitors in the next week as I will
apply today Sunday and see. I do this in a way of saying thanks for your
help before, and hopefully if this works I may be able to ask you some
more of my daft questions :-).
I
checked the stats the next day and here is what I found:
The
bump in traffic on 11/4 came from Stumbleupon.com which my friend used
to drive traffic to Retirement Jobs Online (RJO).
The interesting thing was that it was a one shot bump and dropped
back to the normal traffic after that.
I
then looked at the SBI stats for RJO to see the sources of the traffic.
The
traffic from Stumbleupon.com was 81 on that day (11/4).
On 11/26 as I finish this article, the traffic from
Stumbleupon.com has increased by 8 hits to 89 so this is a one shot
technique.
Another
interesting thing that I want to point out is it appears most people use
their work computer for their web surfing or they leave their personal
computer alone on weekends. The
traffic to RJO consistently drops off on weekends.
I have noted the weekends in the red boxes on the traffic stats
where the traffic dropped off.
The exception is the Sunday where Stumbleupon.com bumped the
traffic up to 262 hits.
We
will write an article about Stumbleupon.com in the next issue of the
eZine.
New
Retirement Calculator
You
meet some of the nicest and most brilliant people on the Internet.
One
such person is Daniel Ashley, a university professor who decided that
the retirement calculator that I originally wrote needed to be improved.
Dan
sent me his first communication on the contact form for Retirement Jobs
Online:
John,
I found a few errors in the spreadsheet.
I will correct them and send them to you, but I don’t have time
today. I have classes to
teach at the university today (my retirement job!)
Here are the errors: Withdrawal
amount cannot go negative. Gain
on investment, assuming that the money from savings is withdrawn on an
even basis throughout the year, should be beginning amount less ½ of
the withdrawal amount times the interest rate.
Social security may not start immediately.
Someone could retire at age 55 and not get social security until
age 62, or later. Annual
retirement income may not be achieved by many retirees.
So, I recommend changing the name of this column to Target
Retirement Income.
I will endeavor to fix these and return the spreadsheet to you
via e-mail. The
starting age for retirement could be tough for me to figure out how to
do. but I must have
your e-mail address to do that. The
e-mail on your calculator does not work
Dr. Daniel C. Ashley, Ph.D.
I
am never one to turn down professional help.
Boy, I did not realize how smart Dan was.
I thought I was pretty good at Excel and writing macros.
I am an amateur compared to Dan.
Dan
finished the first round of improvements and sent the calculator to me
to test.
Over
a month, Dan and I swapped emails. I
would test the calculator and find a bug.
I would send the info to Dan.
He would fix it and send it back.
I learned a lot from him.
The
final improvement was to add a graph to the spreadsheet that shows the
retirement savings balance versus age.
This is a dynamic graph that changes as you change the variables
for your retirement.
Dan
did all this for the fun of it. I
really appreciate the great work that he did on the project.
If you would like to try out the new, improved calculator, you can
download it at
http://www.boomer-ezine.com/Downloads/RJO_Retirement_Calculator.xls
Dan,
many thanks for your help!
That
wraps up this issue. Until
next month, stay tuned.
John
and
Linda Howe
www.boomer-ezine.com
http://www.entrepreneur-ezine.com
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