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Once you have your QR Code generated using Google URL Builder and Google URL Shortenter you are ready to begin setting up the goal tracking.

Step By Step

Determine which page you want to track as your goal and copy the url in the address bar. (Hint: This should not be the same as the QR Code landing page and should be a “Thank You” page or something similar.)

1. Go to your analytics account and click “Edit” next to the profile listing belonging to the site you are tracking.
2. In the “Goals” section click on “Add Goal.”
3. Give the goal a name.
4. Check the “Goal Type” selection “URL Destination” box.
5. Paste the url of the page you want tracked in the box.
6. Click save goal.

That is it!

You are now set to start tracking your first goal. You can define additional goals if you want. It’s important to only set “real” goals that affect revenue. Every goal should be determined by a “step” you want the user to take on their path to becoming a customer. Typically that requires multiple steps.

What should be the next goals?

Your first goal might be to view a specific page like in our demo video we specified the “application” page. The second goal could be set to a page they can only view upon completion of the form. A third goal could be a what you want them to do after completing the first actions. This could typically be an up-sell on the back end or additional purchase offers. Keep it simple and focus on revenue generating goals. Happy tracking and thanks for watching!

It’s important to know what people do after scanning your QR Codes whether they are displayed on bill boards, magazines, flyers, brochures or business cards.

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Most businesses use QR Code generators like bit.ly and others typically used for tracking Social Media efforts. This tutorial is based on making sure your brick and mortar traditional marketing is helping your website’s search engine optimization efforts. Google and Bing know what marketing you are doing and making sure they catch everything is very important. This video uses Google tools and primarily focuses on Google in general.

Step by Step Instructions

1.  Determine what page on your website you want to send traffic to and copy the url from the address bar.
2. Go to Google and search for “Google URL Builder” and click the first official Google listing.
3. Paste the url you copied into the website box and add your specifics such as “Medium” and “Campaign Name” then click “Generate URL.”
4. Copy the newly generated url and open a new tab and type in goo.gl and hit enter.
5. Paste the long url into the URL Shortener box and hit “Shorten.”
6. Click “View Details” next to the newly shortened url row line on the right side.
7. Right click the QR Code image and “Save as.”
8. Either use this image in your marketing directly or you can fix it up in Photoshop or something to make it look better with your creatives.

URGENT REMINDER:

Make sure that you attempt to scan it with Google Google’s app or something similar. Just go to your app store and search for QR Code Scanner and obtain an app with high downloads and ratings. Scan your QR Code as it would appear on your creative and see if it works. If it works you are good to go! Have fun being a QR Code Ninja from now on. This info isn’t widely known or used so feel proud!

Determine Response Rates

Keep in mind that only about 6% of the population uses QR Code Scanners. So if you distribute a flyer to lets say 10,000 residences and you see in Analytics in the “Campaigns” section of “Traffic Sources” that 100 people visited your website, you can estimate an Open Rate, sometimes called Read Rate, of around 1,750 people or 17.5% because 100 is around 6% of 1,750.

If you want to get really accurate you can also track your inbound calls and emails. If you know the normal response rates you can use these to better accurately determine the true “Response Rate” for your marketing campaign. QR Code tracking is a great skill to add to your tool box!

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Using Google to send you alert emails is just one of many ways you can tap into this new frontier of Social Media Customer Service.

Simple Steps To Get Started

We can show you or your staff simple tricks to find people who are using language on their social profiles and blogs that may indicate that they are in the market for your company’s services.

Google Alerts

Google has a free system for keeping an eye on the web. You can enter search terms and Google will let you get email alerts for what ever it was you put in the search box. This is nothing new but using it in a smart way is very uncommon. Here is an example of how a local business might use it.

Steps to set up Google Alert

• Got to http://www.google.com/alerts
• Type in the search box the following with quotes and everything exactly: “the coffee was horrible” Spokane
• Change the “Volume” drop down to “All results”
• Click the blue Preview results link

You should see something similar to the following graphic.

Feel free to change out the city name Spokane for your city. Keep in mind that the quote marks (“) are important as they keep your search more exact and that keeps out most of the irrelevant results.

Put yourself in an unhappy customers position

What would a dissatisfied customer type on a review site or on their social profile? This could be “the coffee was horrible” or “the coffee was terrible” or maybe even “the coffee was disgusting.” I think you get the point. Experiment with different things your customer base may be talking about on the web.

Tap into your competition’s negative complaints

One great way to build loyalty through social media customer service is to help people who are complaining about your competitors as well as your own products or services. Set up a Google alert for complaining language and your competitors name. It might be something like (“I hate starbucks” spokane) or something similar. Experiment with different variations. If you are not sure who your competitors are just Google them and look up your type of business in a phone book or something.

Why this works and how it gives you an advantage

The simple fact is there is a big circle of crowd based communications going on on the internet that small businesses have no clue about when it comes to listening in on or taping into it to join the conversation. As long as your Google alerts are set up smartly and you are not getting irrelevant results leading you to ignore them, it is an indispensable tool to small businesses.

How to improve your alerts over time

Sometimes you might get an alert that is not what you are looking for. When that happens knowing some of Google’s more advanced search operators can help greatly. Lets say you were a local coffee shop looking to capitalize on Starbucks mistakes. You might set up an alert like: “terrible coffee” starbucks. It could look like this:

The problem is these results are not going to be much help. They are showing one writer’s opinion of Starbucks coffee that they posted in an article on the mobile payment processing which they syndicated to tons of blog sites. Let’s refine this in order to come up with some better results.

Change the query to: bad “starbucks coffee” site:facebook.com

This will look for places where someone typed “starbucks coffee” exactly and also the word (bad), in close proximity to it, on the site facebook.com somewhere. Notice how you can see results that are more actionable? You could right click these results, open them in a new tab, and begin a conversation with the people involved. You can interachange site:facebook.com for any site you want. You might want to try site:twitter.com or site:foursquare.com, etc. Go ahead and experiment with it and see what you can come up with that is relevant to your business.

Advanced search operators for Google Alerts

Even with these refinements you still may not be seeing what you want. Here are a few other tricks. Type in this query exactly: bad “starbucks coffee” near:spokane -site:starbucks.com. This query will allow you to find more results, order them by distance from Spokane and exclude results from Starbucks themselves.

Try this really advanced query:

“starbucks” reviews “bad service” OR “terrible service” OR “horrible service” OR “poor service” OR “bad taste” OR “tasted gross” OR “tasted nasty” OR “tasted disgusting” OR “terrible coffee” OR “horrible coffee” OR “coffee was nasty” -inurl:news -inurl:category -inurl:wiki -inurl:definition -site:starbucks.com

Advanced Search Operators Explained:

Operator: ” “

You can search for words like bad service but you will get results that have those words appearing in any order on the page. If you surround phrases by the quotes it will limit results to sites with what you put in-be-tween quotes exactly.

Operator: OR

You can pick from many different variations of potential queries. If you don’t use OR and just use a space it is assumed you mean AND which is not what you want.

Operator: -

With the minus sine (-) you can exclude results. You can use it in front of most words and operators to reverse their purpose.

Operator: inurl:

You can specify a word that is required to appear in the actual URL Address of the site listing. This works great for using the negative operator minus sine to get rid of results you see as irrelevant. In our example we excluded sites with news, category, wiki and definition in the url, as they may be more news related or not conversational.

Operator: site:

You can specify results from a specific site or exclude results from a specific site like in the example: -site:starbucks.com

Thoughts on advanced search operators

You can see what we mean when we say that Google Alerts have been around for a long time but hardly anyone knows how to use them effectively. The search operators can get pretty technical. If you want to do something really cool,  practice your search queries in Google itself first. This will allow you to narrow down your results to things that you know you want which may not appear when you try the query in Google Alerts itself. Actually join the conversations and interact with people while you are refining your queries. Once you are done then paste your query in Google Alerts and create the alert even if there are no results. It will alert you when there is similar results and it may also notify you when someone responds in most cases. It works really well.

Proactive Social Media Customer Service

If you want to get “Real Time” results you won’t be able to do that easily with Google Alerts but you can do it at Google.com. This will allow you to interact in conversions that are happening in the last few minutes or hours. This would be a really smart use of your or your staff’s time during times in the day where business is slow. Check out the links in the sidebar Google provides that help you narrow your search. This example is the advanced query above but with the “Real Time” tab in the sidebar selected.

Click Image To Open Link To Google

You can create email alerts from Google results directly sometimes. If you see something similar to the following at the bottom of the search page you should be able to create one. Don’t forget to change the drop down to “All results.”

“Stay up to date on these results:

Conclusion about social media customer service for local businesses

Our goal is to set up training courses for small businesses in the Spokane area to train their staff in internet marketing and online customer service techniques. We want to create something where we can get to the point of holding local classes or seminars. We want to do it all for free because if businesses see the skills we give away for free, make them money, then they may hire us for more advanced services and buy our software packages, etc.

If you would like to have you or your staff trained in basics of Social Media Customer Service please click the contact button at the top of the site and let us know what your needs entail. Thanks for reading and have a great day. We hope this tip gives you an advantage in business you did not have previously.

Once you get visitors to your site you have to find ways to monetize that traffic. In other words you want to make money off of the visitors to your site.

Give them value for free, then offer something for sale, then re-offer other similar products as an up-sale.

All website are conversion tools to get users to become customers

There are many sites that are more of a conversion or sales tool than a traffic magnet. Some types of business, usually local service businesses, don’t have a chance to get much traffic organically. There are just not many customers or buyers searching locally for their service online.

Whether your business is a great traffic magnet or you have to send your potential customers to your site manually through cold calling, brochures or some other form of traditional marketing, once they are there it is important to convert them to to a real customer.

Stop yourself from treating your site as just a hobby

Websites are just tools for getting business or making money. Many websites are treated as nothing more than a hobby or a status symbol. No matter what your passion is there are ways to make money off of your website. Be passionate and write your heart out but make sure there is something on your site that users can buy to support your effort.

How to sell an e-book on your website

Many websites have really annoying advertisements on their sites that just make their visitors crazy. The more effective ad, is something that makes sense with the article the user just read. Example:

“If this article interests you than you may want to consider reading the e-book on “Advanced On Page Optimization” published by Optimization Tutor. Click Here to View the E-Book.”

After plugging your e-book convert the reader to a buyer

When they click to view the e-book you should send them to a conversion page which is a page designed to convince the visitor that they should buy the e-book. Usually these type of pages are the highest converting when they have very attractive graphics, are extremely simple, and have a photo of some face with the eyes invitingly looking at the user. They already trust you if they read the whole article. If they are serious about conversion rates there is a decent chance they will buy.

Stay clear of affiliate programs unless you are an expert

Affiliate programs allow you to advertise other company’s products or services on your site in exchange for you getting a percentage of the sale. Our experience with affiliate programs have shown us that they are all pretty much a total waste of time.

There are so many technicalities that can disqualify your commission that you can end up making them a bunch of money and get non yourself. They don’t tell you what you are doing wrong very often. They will continue to let you send them customers without letting you know why you are not getting a piece of the pie. Our recommendation is that you find or create unique content such as e-books that you get almost all of the sales price yourself.

Keep your conversion process on your site

Keep the user on your site through the conversion process. If you just send all your users to other sites where they buy the products then you lose much of the control that is needed to make a decent amount or money on the internet. There are very easy ways to collect the money yourself using Google Checkout of Paypal payment systems. You can send bills via email and allow users to purchase your products and when they are done buying they are redirected back to your site. Ideally you have what are called up-sells ready for them.

How to make additional offers after a sale

An “up-sale” is an offer designed to compliment their recent purchase. You see it all the time with big sites like Ebay, Amazon, etc. “If you are interested in this, maybe you will be interested in that.” It is a way to add purchases to each buyer and many times users will actually be upset that you don’t sell something if they consider it as vitally related to what they already purchased.

Use email marketing for effective customer retention

An effective way to resell a customer who you already went to the expense of attracting to your site is email marketing. This is only effective if the email recipient trusts you and has bought from you already. Once they buy something offer them an option to be added to an email list for further offers or product updates. This allows you to send them thank you notes and additional offers that compliment what they already purchased. Many websites lose massive amounts of money by neglecting the power of customer retention.

Example of a hobby site that is losing thousands per month

An example of this is http://nintendoplayers.com. They provide great Nintendo video game reviews and information but there is no “Buy Now” button anywhere to be found. So, if a user wants to buy the game that they became convinced was great they then have the added frustration of having to go off page to buy it. This is a common problem with all the sites where the owners of the site just think of it as a hobby. Make sure that you don’t make this mistake.

There are two types of traffic you want to attract. You want traffic that increases your optimization with the search engines and you also want traffic that converts into real customers.

Click here for more on On Page Marketing if you haven’t read about marketing to users who already made it to your site.

The mental trap of conversion obsession

Which type of traffic should go first? Many people believe it is foolish to not try to convert every visitor to a customer. They feel they are failing immediately when they see visitors coming to their site and not buying.

If your off page marketing strategy completely focuses on getting a 100% conversion rate, likely your decisions are going to be guided by a short term impatience that will work against you in the long run. This has destroyed many great business plans. Having patience does not mean moving slow or delaying important decisions.

What is the best source for traffic that really converts well?

Optimization brings real customers who are already prepared, with their credit card out, to buy what you have. That is called “commercial intent.” According to Microsoft’s Commercial Intent Tool, users who type in a Google or Yahoo “search engine optimization companies” have a commercial intent rating of 72.346% and are far more likely to be looking to hire someone than a person who types in “website optimization” which has a lower rating of 47.087% . The intent behind a keyword makes all the difference between a buyer and someone just researching something.

How do I position my site to get high commercial intent users?

Ask yourself, can I get my website in a position to attract visitors who type in high commercial intent type of keywords if all I focus on is conversions? What does it take to get my site on the first page of Google, Yahoo and MSN search results for keywords with high commercial intent?

The cost of trying to target high commercial intent keywords through Pay Per Click, Pay Per View, or other advertising methods is extremely expensive because those who bring you those types of users know their value.

Overlooking optimization as form of marketing is costly

Do you want reoccurring advertising costs where your customer flow ends immediately when you quit paying top dollar? That is what being short sited will bring you, never ending high conversion advertising costs. Many make millions of dollars doing that but likely if you are reading this then that is not where you are at in life.

If you are reading this you probably have a business or want to start a business and want to avoid paying 3-5 thousand per month for optimization. You know the value of dominating your money keywords and are looking to reign in the costs by doing yourself or training your staff to do it.

More to optimization marketing than special programming code

Not that we have established that optimizing for high commercial intent keywords is key to long term conversion rates, we can move on to discussing the types of off page marketing you can do to make that happen. There is more to internet marketing than pure code optimization. You have to have the right kind of marketing that many call “off page optimization.”

Off page marketing requires staff in USA or overseas

Off Page Marketing is Optimization

Off page optimization is just internet marketing. There is not secret tricks that work long term. It just takes hard repetitive work to get where you need to be. We recommend hiring overseas people who know computers and the internet anywhere but India. The costs are just too high there. You don’t need programmers or graphic designers for marketing. Just regular computer savvy people will work.

Great sources of overseas marketing employees

South East Asia, lower Russia and South America are full of people willing to work full time for $300 per month. It creates a job for them and allows you a chance to build your business without drowning in payroll. You or your US staff will have to of course train, monitor, and direct them but it is well worth it.

Set up video conferencing and live chat to keep track of marketers

Set up live video chat or at least regular chat with your employees, you and any overseas staff you may have. Set up training videos or power point presentations that explain to them what they will be doing. Make work flow charts for them that outline step by step what they are expected to do and in what exact order they will do it. Give them examples of problems they will run into and simple solutions to get around them.

Offer potential partners traffic to get the communication going

Once that is accomplished you can begin your marketing. The best source of real customer traffic, that doesn’t come from search engines, is usually going to come from trade partnerships. Find a website that you can put an ad on their site or they can include your offer in an up sale to their users for a commission.

If your product or service naturally compliments their own they are likely to think it will bring value to their customer experience. Start your offers by offering to put their ads on your site and their ads in your up sale process. Offering to send them traffic or customers will open the door to communication.

Affiliate networks send pay per acquisition traffic

Pay per acquisition means you only pay when you get a buying customer. Set your site up in affiliate networks like Commission Junction, Hyrdra, Link Share, Click Bank, Click Booth and others. There are set up fees but it is worth it. Affiliate networks allow marketers to sell your products or services for a commission.

There are some technical aspects to installing the tracking code but remember their is a step by step tutorial on anything somewhere on the web. Affiliates will send you targeted traffic and when a sale is made, the affiliate network bills you and pays the affiliate who sent you the traffic. You don’t pay for traffic that does not convert to a sale.

Buying links does work but maybe not forever

Buying links is very popular today but search engines vow to penalize sites who attempt to sell links for optimization purposes. If you buy a link make sure that it brings real customers. If you do buy a link for optimization purposes never pay for a link that is not on the home page or if there are more than 5 other links that look like they were bought. Pages with many many links don’t transfer Page Rank very well and are not worth your time or money even if they are a page rank of 8 or 9.

Optimization is the best for conversions and that means back links

The best source of traffic comes from optimization. So your true source of off page marketing will come from your link building campaigns. Trade partnerships, affiliate links, and purchased links all contribute to optimization especially if they are with giant sites with massive traffic. That is not likely going to be the case for any site just starting out.

Reputable news links are the most powerful traffic getting links

Powerful news links are where all the juice is and second to that is blog links. You can get news links with press releases, media promotions, and various gimmicky stunts.You can sponsor kids or some type of charitable foundation but normally that will only bring a local news report. Making the news in a big way is very difficult but very worth it.

Blog links are great and they are easy to get if you have the time

Blogging on other sites is a great source of back links to your site as long as the keywords are similar. Not many sites actually generate real customers this way it is typically for optimization purposes only. There are also government links (.gov) and education links (.edu) that bring a lot of SEO juice but they are very difficult to get. Make sure you build your links the correct way.

Click here for more information on building a great link building strategy.

Marketing will not work for your site if you are not using the right tools and techniques.

If you are selling t-shirts it won’t help you to market to a nudist community on the Internet.

You have to find out where the people are that are the type of person who buys your type of product or service.

Not all types of businesses work well online

Many look for a need and fill it. More power to them if they are successful. Internet marketing is a little different. If you see a need your only care from that point on is finding out if those who need are also the type of person who buys online. Many great businesses fail because they market to groups who can only be reached by full blown expensive marketing campaigns that include things like TV commercials.

Find people who already want what you sell

Your time is better spent of finding where the online communities are that talk and chat about things related to your products or services. For example we would likely not get much search engine optimization business from a flower lovers blog. Not to mention that flowers are a predominantly local type of market. You have to find where the big schools of fish are before you will have an easier time catching fish. Great fisherman have great tools that help them locate fish and that is what you need to do online to make money.

Make sure there is enough traffic searching per day for what you offer

The first concern you should have is whether your idea has enough people searching for it to make it a viable online money making machine. We will use us as an example again. We have plenty of information on Social Media Optimization which is connecting your site with many of the social networks and building up a following on social sites. If our site was dedicated to that specific keyword only, then we would be in trouble because there are less than 50 people searching for that keyword per day. Not enough to sustain a business especially for a site like ours that gives away almost all its content for free. We need thousands of visitors per day to make money.

Work smarter not harder with internet marketing tools

Researching tools is important. Our fist recommendation is to use certain sites to run tests on your site. http://websitegrader.com is a great tool put out by Hubspot. This tool examines your site, your content, your code, your links and your social presence and gives you a grade of 1-100. There are tips for improving on all the metrics they use to rate your site. The tool is design to help websites know where they can improve the overall effectiveness of their online marketing effectiveness.

Marketing Samurai is a great research and marketing tool

Another great tool is http://marketingsamurai.com. This tool is a keyword research and competition analysis tool. There are many great features like knowing which keywords have the highest probability of bringing a buying customer to your site. It will show you how fierce your competition is and what you need to do to compete. It shows you where to find places to blog and post comments that will bring back links with SEO juice to your site. It knows if the site allows ping backs, if it has nofollow linking in comments or not, and it also checks their Google Page Rank, back link count, etc. Extremely useful for anyone trying to make money online.

Keep up on which tools are available and use them often

Advanced Website Marketing

There are many other SEO tools online that will be helpful. We usually Google “SEO Tools” and check out what is new and find stuff that is helpful. Every tool is different and non of them work 100% accurately everytime. You have to become familiar with all the tools and then you will be able to stay up with what your site needs in order to continue to progress in your market.

Optimize well for your market and you can almost quite marketing

There are zillions of ways to market and make money. We are not the kind of people who believe that making money requires sales calls, mass mailings, TV commercials and all the other expensive forms of traditional marketing. No one has to trick people into buying their product or service unless they are marketing in a pond with fish that are not hungry or simply don’t like the bait. Research is key to finding a viable online market.

Search engines send you pre-sold customers if your site optimizes

We are of the mind set that optimizing your site to be in the top 5 spots in search engine results is the easiest way to make money. If there are people searching to buy your product then you do not have to talk them into buying it. If you are like us then that relieves a lot of unwanted negative feelings because we do not have to deal with or use traditional marketing. In short “Optimization is Marketing.”