Author Archives: Amrit Hallan

About Amrit Hallan

Amrit Hallan is a professional content writer who helps businesses improve their conversion rate through credible and compelling content writing. His main strength lies in writing search engine optimized content without compromizing quality and meaningfulness.

Using Google analytics to know how effective is your content

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Often when you want to know how effective your content is you gauge its popularity by the number of people retweeting the link or the number of people coming to your blog and leaving comments.

Although it feels good to know how popular your particular page or blog post is growing, the real effectiveness of your content can only be gauged by what people do after coming to that page. If people are visiting your link in hordes and then leaving for other external links immediately after reading that page you aren’t achieving much (actually you are in terms of brand building and recognition but that’s different subject).

Google analytics can give you an in-depth analysis of user behaviour when they access your content. It is a free tool and you can easily put the tracking code in one of your common files so that all your pages and blog posts are tracked.

So assuming that you are tracking your websites with Google analytics, after logging in select the website or the blog profile you would like to see an on the left-hand sidebar you get the “Content” tab. When you click it there is a further drop down menu and you will see links like “Pages”, “Landing Pages” and so on. In these two sections you will see:

The number of unique visitors to individual pages
The time they spend on these pages and blog posts
The bounce rate
The exit rate

Content effectiveness with Google analytics

If the number of unique visitors is increasing to a particular page it means the page is getting more exposure on search engine and other websites.

It matters how much time people spend on that page. The more compelling and relevant content you have on that page or blog post, the more time people are going to spend on it.

The bounce rate is when people come to your landing page and then immediately leave your website without exploring other parts of your website. If they don’t find your content valuable then obviously they are going to assume that it represents the overall quality of content on your website and then they leave your website straightaway.

So even if traffic to a particular page is increasing but then it also has a higher bounce rate it is not doing you much good. You have to analyse its content quality and see why people are leaving your website without exploring other pages or blog posts.

This is where you can gauge the effectiveness of your content. If more people are coming to that particular page or blog post and the bounce rate is lower it means the content on that page is effective.

Then there is the exit rate. How many people who come to your website leave your website completely from a particular web page or blog post. Although this is a subjective matter you should carefully examine the content of a particular page or the blog post if more people are exiting your website from that link.

You cannot gauge the overall effectiveness of your content by its search engine and social media popularity. Effective content engages your visitors and gives them a reason to stay on your website for a longer time. The longer they stay the better are your chances of converting them into your paying customers and clients.

The Content Grid: At which stage of buying people prefer what type of content

Why you need a Facebook page and how to increase your fans with quality content

Getting more Facebook fans with quality content

Eventually it all boils down to what sort of content you post on your Facebook page. Remember that you have to engage your audience. Your content must be inspiring, informative, provocative and thought-provoking. Since they have liked your page they expect you to say something authoritative, knowledgeable and useful. You are like a thought leader. They look up to you.

Publishing content on your Facebook page differs from field to field. It depends on your audience. A Paris Hilton audience would be totally different from, let us say, a Salman Rushdie audience (yup, I’m stereotyping here but that’s the reality). So you have to understand the dynamics of your audience and post your content accordingly.

A professional content writer can help you study your audience and then create your Facebook page content accordingly.

Three things get you a greater number of fans on Facebook:

Regular posting
Sticking to the interest of your fans
Interacting with your fans however much possible

Regular posting

Regular posting gives you constant visibility. Timelines on Facebook move very fast. No matter how popular you are if you don’t post for a couple of weeks nobody really misses you unless your presence is indispensable. So you have to appear in the timelines of your fans as much as possible. There are different frequencies for different types of audience, 4-5 postings everyday is the least amount of content you should create and post.

Regarding creating quality content, it doesn’t always have to come from you. If you come across an interesting link that you think your fans will find useful, post that link. If you find something controversial, post that and invite your fans to give their comments. You can also share stuff from people you are friends with on Facebook and other social networking websites. Use different sources to keep your Facebook page timeline buzzing.

Sticking to the interests of your fans

Your fans follow you for a reason. If you are a writer, they expect literary content from you or something related to your writing pursuits, or whatever is happening in the field of literature, writing and publishing. Of course you can also express your views on whatever is happening in the world at a particular time, but you should maintain a ratio of 80:20 – 80% your subject and 20% general interest.

Interacting with your fans however much possible

Social networking is after all 1-1 interactions. If you just post and never respond to your fans’ comments people gradually begin to lose interest, especially when they are addressing to you and they don’t get a reply. It gives them an ego boost when you personally reply to their quarries especially if you are a budding celebrity. If you are a business then people will most probably comment about how fantastic or how lousy your product or service is. Try to respond to positive and negative feedbacks as early as possible because timeliness makes your conversations more effective and relevant.

So keep on posting relevant, quality content on your Facebook page and see your fans growing with great speed in a matter of a few months.

As a business person or as an artist it is not feasible to focus on your core area and also focus on your Facebook page. Sooner or later you will need professional help, especially when it comes to regularly posting quality content on your Facebook page.

4 billion videos are watched on YouTube everyday

Don’t put all your search traffic eggs in one Google basket

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This is what says Duane Forrester, Senior Product Manager at Microsoft Bing in a post titled Bing Penguins & Pandas Poetry

Whether you like Microsoft or not, what he rightfully says is don’t just depend on Google for all your traffic – invest in other sources (websites, blogs, other search engines and social networking websites).

In the afternoon while having lunch with my wife I was explaining to her what it means to solely depend on Google for your business: it’s like farmers depending solely on the monsoons (or other rainy climates) for their crops. When you just depend on rains then your crops fail when the rainfall is below normal or if one year there is no rain. You have to create other sources of water. You need to learn to preserve water. You need to learn about crops that can be grown even if there is less water. I mean, don’t just depend on the rainy season for your harvest.

In the same manner, if you solely depend on Google, what happens if all of a sudden, like just happened with the Penguin update, your links vanish from search results and your traffic drops drastically? Most of your business will be gone.

Here are a few things you can do to create other qualified traffic sources:

Publish your content on other websites and blogs: This not only improves your search engine rankings it also gets you targeted traffic from niche sources.
Publish a regular newsletter: This is something I haven’t been doing I must confess. I have set up a newsletter at MailChimp, people have been signing up gradually, but I haven’t been regular. I must. In the coming weeks, I will. By publishing a regular newsletter you can keep in touch with your older, existing clients and you can also bring back those visitors to your website who might have visited once, dropped their e-mail ID and then forgotten about your website even when they could have used your service.
Submit your blog and the RSS feeds link to related directories: Again, this will get you more traffic from more sources.
Make ample use of social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter: Right now I’m not sure how a B2B business (which mine is) can engage people on social media for the purpose of getting you work, but many content based companies have significantly improved their traffic bypassing Google altogether.
Create a strong brand for yourself: People should know what you do and they should seek you whenever they need what you can provide. For example, people should know that I’m a professional, experienced content writer and when they need credible, reliable and well written content, they should approach me.
Submit content to social media websites: Create small videos related to your business and put them on YouTube. You can create slides and put them at SlideShare.
Create a community: Creating a community doesn’t necessarily mean that you will be getting customers and clients out of it (you do, in fact) but they will be your advocates whenever they come across people who may require your services.

Duane further says:

Algorithms change. Rankings change. Competition happens. The fact is, you need to be prepared. So, when your single biggest source of traffic sudden loses steam, what do you do? If your plan was to make sure your content ranked well across all the major engines, then your plan of action would already be in effect, protecting you from the loss in one area. True, its not an offset that matches what could potentially be lost at the same level, but the option is losing everything and having nothing suddenly.

This is actually very true. So use your content to create multiple traffic sources.