Letting people know what’s the latest and greatest on your site
The best way to do this with people who have already discovered your site is by using RSS feeds. If people have an RSS aware browser (or have a toolbar like Google’s installed) they can easily subscribe to your sites feed so that they are told when there are any new articles or pages. It’s much better than sending out emails or waiting for people to remember to visit your site, and more and more people are using them now. They’ll be able to see your latest content through their browsers bookmarks (Firefox call this Live Bookmarks), their web-based feed reader (Bloglines, Newsgator) or a personalised homepage (Google, My Yahoo, Netvibes, etc.)
So if you want to get this set up on your site and it’s built on a CMS you may be in luck. The chances are that it has the ability to author rss feeds built in, so you could be only a couple of clicks from getting it set up.
However, I recommend signing up for the free Feedburner account. If you use their feed from the word go and put all your RSS “traffic” through them you can get some interesting insights as to how many people are subscribing and what stories they are clicking on. With the pro account you get more detailed statistics on reuse, but I won’t go into those here.
So that’s your feed sorted out. Now what about those people who don’t know you yet? For this we have pinging. This is basically your CMS sending out an announcement to a specialist site that lets people find new content super fast – who wants to wait for slow old Google to index a site these days!? Chances are that you can just flick a switch and turn that on if it is not already. Feedburner also has a function for pinging certain websites. Ping o matic, technorati, etc.
Networking with a difference – getting yourself seen
One of the best ways to get your site into Google (that’s the search engine you care about most right?) is to get some honest to goodness quality links to your site (they list this as the most important thing to do to get your site into their search engine). Now this can take some time, and link exchange websites have had their day. One of the best ways, in my opinion, is to network. Network online that is.
One of the easiest ways to get links to your site is by joining a forum at a website for your industry and setting up your signature so that it has a link to your site. These may not get ‘counted’ by search engines depending on how the forum has been set up, but many forums allow this as long as you are not too over the top with the sales speak. Now I’m not saying that you should go and spam forums (please, please don’t do that, ok?). But if you are an expert in your field then contribute to the community when it’s relevant. The benefits? Well there’s these for starters:
- you’ll get some links on a relevant forum that Google may pick up on
- you may develop a name for yourself and get some good contacts
- other people may even learn something from you or repost your comments on their blog or website
Speaking of blogs. The same rules can be applied. Read relevant blogs, comment when you’ve got something worthwhile to say and put a link to your site in the space provided. (Go on, try it on this post. I’ll leave it on there unless it’s blatent spam…) Going one step further, you could set up your own blog, but that’s an article in itself.
Analytics – going all big brother
The next thing to get set up is analytics. There are many different ways of doing this. Log file analysers, hosted solutions, cookie this and javascript that. But the best way that I have found to keep an eye on what’s working on a site and what’s not is to install both Google analytics and Mint.
Google Analytics is free and exposes a lot of information. And I mean a lot. I haven’t found anything really revolutionary yet, but it is free and you can spend hours looking at data if you really want. Things of note: check on your adwords referrals and where the user went then. How long people stayed on, how many pages before the hot footed it out of there, etc. Major gripes with Google Analytics: you can’t create and save reports. It would be fantastic if you could pick the information that you care about and just get the system to run it off every month and send the report by email.
A great option for a quick overview of how your site is developing is Mint. It costs $30 per site that you want to track and shows you less information than Google. “What’s that? Less information… and it costs money?! Have you gone mad? First things first, lets get the money out of the way. It’s $30 per site…. forever. There’s no hosted solution going on here, you have to host the app and database on your own server so the software is offered with a licence similar to a desktop app. That is: you buy it, get small updates, but may have to pay for larger updates. Added to this, Mint is the baby of one Shaun Inman – his blood sweat and, I’m pretty sure, tears have gone into creating it so why not give a little back? It’s about to make your life a lot easier after all.
OK. Secondly, Mint does provide you with less information than Google, but that’s the beauty of it. It clears out the cr*p and leaves you with a clear view of how many people visited when, what they looked at, what keywords they used to find you in a search engine. Using an add-on that has been developed by xxx you can also check your Feedburner stats so you don’t have to jump over there all the time. Speaking of add-ons; they’re called pepper in Mint. There are a bunch of peppers available written by both Shaun and other developers so you can make Mint just how you like it.
Sit back and watch the masses descend
OK. This is not necessarily going to happen straight away. No matter what tools you have installed, you still have to have decent content, and enough people who agree with you who want to link to your site. But this should be a good start to at least give you a helping hand to promote your site and track the visitors you get.