Archive for June, 2009

Internet Marketing Campaign Tracking and Analysis

Monday, June 29th, 2009

Internet marketing campaigns have been part of the Marketing for Mavens beta for a couple of months now. During this time we’ve continued to add new features which have expanded it’s use. Most recently, we added Twitter campaigns which allow you to directly post tweets to your Twitter account and track the URL’s through Marketing for Mavens. The next new campaign feature which will be launching soon is the ability to measure the success of your campaigns.

Measuring the Success of Your Internet Marketing Campaigns

Each campaign that you run should be measured to ensure it’s effectiveness. You don’t want to keep creating the same campaigns if they don’t work. It’s a waste of your time and resources. Instead, you should set goals for your campaigns and track them to see when and if they reach these goals. Depending on the tools you use, this can be a very tedious process which is why we’re adding this new feature to our application.

The next application update will add “success criteria” to your campaigns. You select different criteria such as visits and conversions, input the total number of responses that would measure your success, and the dashboard page will show each of your campaigns and how well they are performing each day and how well they’ve done over the last 7 or 30 days. With your success criteria set, you can quickly track your campaigns, make changes, and see, in real-time, whether your changes positively or negatively impact your campaigns.

We are testing this feature now with the expectation that it will be wrapped up later this week with an expected launch of next week. As always, if you have suggestions or features that you would like to see, please email them to us.

Top Web Marketing/Development/Design Firefox Add-ons

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

Many web marketers, developers, and designers have recognized the benefits of using Firefox as their default browser. Firefox provides several plug-ins or add-ons that make our lives easier. Here’s a list of our favorite that we’d recommend using. All of these add-ons are available from our new collection.

Web Marketing

SeoQuake: Excellent tool for those focused on SEO. SeoQuake provides detailed information on rankings from Google, Yahoo, MSN, and several others in your toolbar. You can also see seo statistics for each link on a page by hovering over them with your mouse.

Web Developer

Firebug: This is a must have add-on for developers. Firebug helps you debug and monitor JavaScript, CSS, and other coding problems. It also has separate add-ons like YSlow that provide additional functionality. This add-on will save you hours of development time.

Web Developer Toolbar: Another must have for any web developer or designer. The web developer toolbar will save you hundreds of hours, I’m not kidding. Quickly test CSS edits on your actual web pages and see the changes instantly in your browser, view all the JavaScript files for any web site, manage cookies, view generated page source…the list goes on and on.

XML Developer Toolbar: Similar to the web developer toolbar but with must have XML options. The downside is that it is not supported beyond Firefox 2.x. Hopefully an update will come soon…

YSlow: Requires Firebug. Helps you to determine why your pages may have a slow load time. It checks your site based on several criteria and provides suggestions for fixing potential trouble spots.

CSS Sync: Automatically syncs your CSS to the your client so you can be sure you’re seeing your latest changes.

Web Design

Abduction!: Capture sections of our web pages or your entire page and save it as an image. Abduction will help you mock-up new designs, highlight graphics changes, and help you create image galleries.

ColorZilla: I use this add-on all the time to grab colors I like from a web page. It has some nice bonus features like measuring elements on a page.

Firefox Collections

Download the Marketing for Mavens Firefox Collection.

Let us know what you’re favorite Firefox add-ons are. We’re always looking for better ways to use our favorite browser. As we find new add-ons we like, we’ll keep adding them to the collection.

Report Charts Updated

Monday, June 15th, 2009

A small bug fix was posted today to align chart data labels with there data points. Previously, these labels were improperly aligned on the first 4 and last 4 data points.

Help Shape The Future of Web Marketing

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

Community Powered Web Marketing Management

Help us get out of our heads! We’ve been coding Marketing for Mavens for over a year now. Each week, new features are added, new bugs are fixed, and the value of the application grows. Marketing for Mavens is raw, it’s rough, and it’s far from finished (is any application ever finished?) but that doesn’t take away from how effective it can be for you now, in its current state.

Marketing for Mavens is an application that I’m very passionate about. I love web marketing which is a good thing since I’ve been doing it for 12 years. This experience has brought about different frustrations along the way which led me to build an application to address them. The problem is that working specifically on my problems doesn’t mean that it addresses the problems that everyone else shares or experiences. That’s why I’m looking for your help. For Marketing for Mavens to become the essential tool for web marketing that I think it can become, I need your help and feedback.

So, if you’re looking for an opportunity to shape the future of an application which will make your web marketing life/job easier, now’s the chance to join our beta, use the application, break it, push it to its limits, and provide feedback, suggestions, rants, smoke signals, and any other communication channels to help us help you. I want Marketing for Mavens to be a product that we are all proud of. The goal, to transform web sites into highly effective web marketing machines. Let’s make it happen.

At this point, you’re either ready to join the beta and our community and get started or you’re asking yourself, what does Marketing for Mavens do for me? The first is self explanatory, the second goes like this:

  • Web Marketing Campaign Management: Track and manage all of your web marketing campaigns in one location. Know who clicked on what campaigns and when. Know which campaigns are most effective and which are under-performing. Create campaign specific calls-to-action that are only displayed to the people responding to that particular campaign.
  • Twitter Campaigns: Post Twitter messages and track responses to see which Tweets get the most click-throughs.
  • Dynamic Promotions: Share web page real estate amongst several promotions (calls-to-action or page content) and match them to individual visitors based on their interaction on your web site. What does all this mean? It means your promotions are matched to the people who are most interested in seeing them, making it more likely people will respond to your offers. Now you can easily create dynamic content regardless of how your site is configured. No extra cost and just a small amount of JavaScript code which we give you.
  • Dashboard: Quickly see how your site is performing on a daily basis and how the day is tracking compared to the previous 7 days.
  • Report: See how your site (page views and conversions) and promotions have performed over the past 6 months.
  • Citizen View: See what brought each individual visitor to your web site, what they looked at, and what they were interested in so you can do a better job of developing content to match their needs and determine where the holes are in your site that may be losing valuable conversions.

We have a lot of new features on the horizon as well. Both the dashboard and report pages will continue to evolve as they become more effective tools for showing what led to traffic spikes, what campaigns performed best and when, which campaigns should be retired, and where money can be better spent to generate conversions and sales leads. Campaigns will have goals associated with them so you can track how well or how badly a campaign is doing, allowing you to make quick changes or divert money to those that are more effective.

If all of this sounds interesting to you, please feel free to join the community and sign up for the beta. We’d love to have you as part of the community. If you have further questions just send me an email and I’ll respond as soon as possible.

Thank you so much for your time!

Easily Move Calls-to-Action to Different Locations on Your Web Site

Monday, June 8th, 2009

We added a new feature today to move promotions between promotion spots. Each promotion now has a drop down list of your promotion spots. Simply select the new promotion spot and save the promotion and your promotions will now show in that promotion spot on your web site.

Web Site Report Page Updated

Friday, June 5th, 2009

Today, the report page was refreshed to add a 6 month page view chart and add the RSS feed info to the conversion/promotion chart. Two bugs were also fixed on the report page. The first prevented the window overlay box from showing the citizens who responded to conversion pages. The second prevented RSS feeds from showing up properly in the 6 month RSS feed view.

Internet Marketers: Quickly and Easily Ensure Your Twitter Posts Are Getting Results

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

Manage and Track Twitter Campaigns with Marketing for Mavens

Today, we launched a new feature which allows you to manage and track your Twitter campaigns in Marketing for Mavens. Now you can post your tweets within the Marketing for Mavens application and have your links automatically tagged for tracking so you know which tweets referred the most people to your site and what resources they were interested in. Further, campaign promotions can be setup so that each person who responds through Twitter will see promotions that correspond to your posts.

How Do Twitter Campaigns Work?

First, go to the setting page and edit your account. Two new fields have been added for your twitter login and password. This is the Twitter account your Twitter Campaigns will post to.

Second, create a new campaign and select “twitter’ from the campaign type drop down box. Now, go into your new Twitter Campaign, you will be presented with a section called “Post Tweets” which contains two fields. One field for entering your 140 character Twitter post and a second for shortening and adding tracking code to your links.

Once you finish writing your tweet, simply click on the “Post to Twitter” button and your post will be submitted and tracked in real time.

Complete History of Twitter Posts

A complete history of all your Twitter posts can be seen from the campaign view. Each post has a visit total associated with it so you can see which posts drove the most visitors to your web site.

Who Did Twitter Send Our Way and What Did They Want?

Each visitor who comes to your web site from a Twitter Campaign is listed in the campaign view. Clicking on each visitor will give a complete history of what pages and resources they were interested in when they came to your web site.

How Do I Get Started?

Twitter Campaigns are available now as part of the free Marketing for Mavens beta. Sign up today and see how well your Twitter posts are driving people to your web site.