Highlights of this week include my book “The Money Gym” being listed for a few days on the BBC News website as one of their Top 10 Wealth Creation books, which resulted in a surge of traffic to all of my websites. This was part of their promotion for the BBC Money programme “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” which is part 1 of a 3 part series apparently. If you missed it you can catch it on BBC iPlayer here >>>
You can find out more about my thoughts on that programme here and the debates have been raging on Facebook, along with some rather snide comments about wealth creation education people and the people on that programme. Most of the nastier comments were from people who had never been to one of these seminars so go figure!
If you are interested in money, the economy and wealth creation (as I obviously am still) you should also check out a TV series that’s on at the moment called The Ascent Of Money which I had previously missed, but which I’ll be watching now, and you can find here >>>. This series is apparently doing a great job of making sense of money as a concept and tool, how it started, what it is nowadays, what’s going on in the world around money right now.
Google Analytics Gets EVEN Sexier! See Who Is Visiting Your Site Right Now…
Another highlight of the week (and don’t you DARE call me sad!) is using the new Google Analytics interface. When you login to it, on the home page you are getting REAL TIME data, for example I can see that there is someone on my site right now, who came from an organic search for “private yoga teacher Croydon” and they are viewing the Marketing MOT I did for a yoga teaching client of mine who lives and works in Croydon!
If you click on the Standard Reporting and then Visitor Flow, you can see where your visitors are coming from geographically, which pages they are viewing first, on their first visit, second visit, third visit. You can also see how much traffic you are LOSING from the most visited pages. Now I realise that this information has probably always been there to be mined from Analytics, I just never was able to grasp it in the format it was laid out in.
Seeing that Flow Chart really brought it home to me and when I saw that I was losing 30% of my traffic from my front page, which is my most visited page for visitors from the UK, I realised I had to do something to try and improve that.
I’ve saved my old content and rewritten new content and I’m going to monitor the dropoff rate on a weekly basis, as I’ve added it to my Key Performance Indicators (KPI) sheet.
Special “Silver For Gold” Offer Extended To 14th December!
You may recall that last week that I really want to grow the internet marketing mentoring side of the business, I’m enjoying it so much, and that I wanted to target more internet marketing orientated phrases (rather than business success and business marketing which get less searches per month).
To that end I’ve extended my “Join Silver, Get Gold” mentoring offer to 14th December. Not only that, but I’ve added a 30 day trial so that you can secure your deal, yet not feel you have to start taking action till January! Can’t say fairer than that!
I’m trying to encourage you to stop thinking of spending money on other people for a second and think of investing in you and your business for the New Year. Also, you will feel better during Christmas, even if you don’t start serious work till the New Year, knowing you have taken some positive action to get your business online or start your online business.
You can save £150 a month, get a personal 1:2:1 with me every month as well as the THREE group call in sessions AND lock in that investment for as long as you stay current with your membership. That’s a stonking deal and you can secure it here >>>
Fancy Coming To A “Profit From Your Passion” Workshop In The New Year?
Talking of The Money Gym, one of the most popular Money Gym workshops was always the “Profit From Your Passion” internet marketing workshops and I’m thinking of holding some in the New Year, and they will be ear-squeezing free, I promise (you’ll understand if you watched “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”!)
If you might be interested in coming to a one-day workshop, probably in London or Brighton, where I share everything I know about setting up an online business, step by step, can you just take a minute and let me know?
What if I can make it really, really affordable? They won’t be free, because if you do that, people register but don’t turn up, but it will be as cheap as I can make it.
If you would be interested, just use the comments box below to let me know and I’ll know if it’s worth setting some up and tell you how to get on the Priority Notification List.
I’m thinking mid to late January. Look forward to hearing from you!
Get Help With Your Blogging SEO
I’ve also been trying out two SEO plugins for WordPress that work alongside All-In-One-SEO Pack.
Daniel Tan’s SEOPressor Plugin for WordPress, which enables you to write your blog posts and pages with a key phrase in mind, and the plugin monitors how you are doing on things like keyword density as you go, reminding you to put in a picture, ALT text, Sub Headings etc. featuring your key word or phrase. When using this plugin, be aware that if you are optimising for a two word phrase it will double your keyword density from say, 3% to 6% while a three word phrase will bump it up by a factor of 3. You want to aim for something around 1-3% in total so watch out.
I’m also trial’ing EasyWPSeo which is just about to launch and is a Warrior Forum Special Offer right now. It does the same as Daniels’ plugin but is a bit more complex and takes the above calculation into account among many other things.
If you have an issue ensuring your page or blog post content is focused enough, I highly recommend you invest in a plugin – I’ve been trying out the multi-site license for Dan’s plugin and you get a 7 day trial for just a couple of dollars so if you don’t like it you can cancel and get a refund before you pay for it. Ditto with EasyWPSeo where you buy it but get 60 days to make up your mind.
Not sure if it was the plugin and the focus on keywords, but something had the strange effect of making me feel a bit uninspired this week, or perhaps that was because my diary was quite full with calls with prospective mentoring clients, but I’ve given myself permission to write these business diaries without targeting key words or phrases and that seems to have unblocked me again.
As did a clear morning today with no appointments at all. Diary zoning really works for me!
I’ve also gone back over some of my high traffic blog posts and souped up the SEO on those, because I figure if they were doing well before, they may well do even better with some really decent SEO on them.
Meetings Schmeetings!
One of the things I’m always on the watch out for, when listening on the mentoring calls, is limiting and negative beliefs which might be tripping them up or holding them back. You can often hear some corkers and now my sister Sarah’s back for Christmas, she’s picking me up on some of my own too!
One of my self-confessed limiting behaviours is my dislike of unscheduled phone calls (although it could be argued that I’m just protecting my time and concentration) and another is my dislike of meetings. The exploratory kind that is, I don’t mind meetings with a specific purpose.
However some people – what I think of as “old school” business people – seem completely obsessed with them! Does it make people feel busy or important I wonder, or are they trying to fill up their employers time, to justify their salary, is that why they love them so much?
I totally “get” that they are better for striking up a real relationship with real people but I like to do that at workshops, seminars and conferences and THEN work with people afterwards. Much more efficient that way.
When it involves a whole day, lots of travelling and the stress associated with that, I can’t see that it’s ever worth it for an exploratory meeting, just to SEE if you want to work together. Surely a webinar or skype will work for that?
We had an interesting situation last week; my sister Heather and I were supposed to go and meet someone on Friday, who had the potential to get Heather’s heard by a wider audience, and they wanted help with launching a new service. All good, we thought, so we arranged a meeting as Heather likes the old face to face stuff too.
This initial meeting got changed at the last minute – 6.30 in the morning actually – from Friday to the Saturday. Not a problem, something had come up that was out of their control and had they let us know in plenty of time, before we got up even.
Then, the next day, we both got up and got ready to go (my sacrificing my weekly Saturday treat of watching Saturday Kitchen in bed while planning my week and listening to Rich Schefren’s weekly webinar recording) and sat waiting in our respective houses to get in the car, to drive to meet this person halfway between our respective abodes.
We knew they had been out late the night before, hosting something, and then going onto a gig, so we didn’t expect to hear about a meeting time before lunchtime. It was a bit odd we hadn’t agreed a time beforehand, looking back on it – not very organised of me, specifically.
By lunchtime though, we were getting a bit tetchy as no word had come about time. I sent an email, I sent a text, still no word. As it was an hour and a half drive there AND back and Heather had to get back for a friends gig locally at 7.30, time was running short.
Worse, because we were expecting to go out, we had not been able to settle down to doing anything – I find it really hard to concentrate when I know I have to go somewhere.
All day, no word at all, we were absolutely stumped as to what happened. This person had seemed really keen, but come to think of it, hadn’t supplied a crucial bit of information I had asked for during the week, so perhaps that was a sign that this business relationship wasn’t meant to be?
We tried to talk ourselves down, seeking first to understand (as Steven Covey would say) telling each other that we are control freaks and not everyone likes to know what’s happening every minute of every day, and that we might have misunderstood the arrangements.
We got no word till Monday actually, when we got an email to say the other person had had to go into hospital for urgent treatment for a long standing condition. So the “seek first to understand” was good advice as it would have been awful if we had assumed the worst.
The meeting has now been rearranged for this weekend and this person is coming to us. I’ll let you know what transpires!
Great news Nicola and really well-deserved, too. I still dip into the money gym, so much in there that’s valuable and even more relevant in the current economic climate.