Go to http://search.twitter.com and use the search box to find discussions on certain topics and see the most popular topics:

Click through any of the “Trending Topics” to see the recent tweets in real time:

In the top right corner, you can also subscribe to the RSS feed for any of the queries you choose (even ones that are not trending):

Set up a Webinar with GoToMeeting is so easy. It’s great to do a meeting via webinar – you and your attendees can be anywhere as long as they have a computer and internet access.

GoToMeeting is a very powerful service that allows you to set up online meetings and webinars (think of it as an online semnar). Users can connect via the web or telephone. This guide will take you through setting up your first webinar.

You can get a 30-day free trial of the service. Go to http://gotomeeting.com to set up your account. Once you have done that log in and navigate to “My Webinars” in the left menu. Choose “Schedule a Webinar”.

Setup: Enter Your Webinar Details

On this screen, you will be asked to enter the details of your webinar. You can also choose the drop down box, to pull up information from a previous webinar.

We have entered the name, description, date and time. We’ve also chosen our time zone and indicate that this webinar does not recur. If you are doing a webinar series, you may want to choose the recurring option.

Audio Options

You can allow attendees to access your webinar via telephone or by using their microphone and speakers (VoIP) or both. We chose both.

With integrated audio, you can also choose to offer local toll-free numbers. Click “Add Countries” to choose your countries. In our example, we have selected all.

Optional Password

If you want your participants to enter a password, you have to think of one and send it to your attendees.

Optional Panelists

If you are having panellists on your webinar, you can specify them here, so they have appropriate access to your webinar.

Branding & Theme

You can upload your logo and select a theme for your webinar room. We have uploaded a logo, chosen a theme and uploaded an image.

You can also choose a color for the waiting room. Either choose a color from the drop down or enter a hex code:

Now you can make a list of your presenters and add their photos. Click “Add another presenter” to add more.

You can also add welcome message to welcome your guests.

Registration Details:

To enter the webinar, users will have to register, but you can control how much information they need to provide. You may want to request minimal information, if your attendees have already opted in or paid for access to your event.
In our example below, we selected “Clear All” and it will require the minimum first name, last name and email address to register.
You can also ask your registrants questions, so you can get to know them. Either they can fill in an answer or you can add multiple choice options.

Once you’ve saved all your settings, you can view your webinar in “My Webinars”. Here you can find the registration link to share with attendees:

Now you’re all set. Just make sure to download and review the GoToWebinar user guide, so you’ll be ready for the big event.

Some of the questions we are often asked are:

• Where should I start? Should you do it yourself (diy), or hire a designer to help you with the process?
• What do I need to put together a website? (Web Design Checklist)
• If I hire a designer, what should I ask? (Hiring a Designer Checklist)
• Should I sell products on my site? How do I sell products on my site? (See E-Commerce)
• Should I have a newsletter on my site?
• Can I manage my own site and make updates?
• What tools are available to help me work with my site?
• How can I market my site? (See SEO)

We are adding to these pages constantly, so if you don’t see your question answered – ask it!

It’s all about designing a website for your small business.

How to Use Google Analytics to Understand Your Website Traffic

Google Analytics is a free and very powerful program that allows you to analyze various aspects of your website traffic. All you need to do is enter a special code into your website in order for your traffic to start tracking. Your stats update on a daily basis and you can view the details inside your online account. This guide will show you how to use many of its main features.

Step 1: Understand Your Report Overview

When you log into your account, click on the “View Report” link beside the website you want to see. This will take you to view your statistics.

Then you will see an overview of your statistics. The default period is the past month and you can edit the reporting period using the drop down menu at the top right of the screen. Click “Apply” when you’ve chosen your report period.

You can also customize your overview by clicking the “All Visits” tab near the top right corner of the page.

Once you click it, you will have options to choose certain types of visitors and even create your own custom segments. You can choose to view returning visitors, paid search traffic, non-paid search traffic, etc. Click “Apply” when you’re done.

When you have chosen your segment (or left it as the default of “All Visits”), you can take a look at your overview. Here is what you can expect to see near the top:

This is a graphic overview of your website visitors for the report period. You can mouseover to see details of a certain day. In the above example, we see that there were 998 visits on September 16.

Next you’ll see an overview of your site usage.

Let’s define some of the terminology above:

• Visits: The number of times a visitor has been to your site in a 30 minute period (called a “session”). If a user is inactive for 30 minutes or more, if they have more activity later, it will be counted as a new session. If a visitor leaves your site and comes back within 30 minutes, it is counted as the same session.
• Pageviews: The number of pages that has been viewed on your site.
• Pages/Visit: The number of pages viewed, on average, per visit.
• Bounce Rate: The percentage of visits that viewed only a single page on your site. A “bounce” is a visitor who comes to your page and then leaves without viewing any other pages.
• Avg. Time on Site: This is the average time a visitor spends on your site. It is shown in hours:minutes:seconds.
• % of New Visits: This is the percentage of all visitors in the report period that visited your site for the first time.

Note, you can click through any of those statistics shown above to view a more detailed report. For example, if you click the graph icon beside % of New Visits like this:

The graph at the top will change to show your % New Visits Stats. And once again, you can put your mouse over any date to see details:

If instead, you decide to click the link on % New Visits like this:

You will then be taken to a new page that includes a graphic and detailed statistics on this report. An example is shown below:

Going back to your report overview, you’ll see a few other items on your main page. The next one is “Visitors Overview”:

You can put your mouse over any day on the graph or click “view report” to get more details.

To the right of your “Visitors Overview”, you’ll see “Map Overlay” which gives you a good idea about which countries people are visiting you from. The darker the color on the map, the more visitors you have from that country.

You can click “view report” and you’ll see more details about this graphic include the country names, number of visits, pages per visit, average time on site, % new visits and bounce rate.

On this page, you can also put your mouse over the map, to see the country details:

Back on your main report overview page, the next report you can see is the “Traffic Sources Overview”:

In the above example, we see that most of the traffic comes to the site directly, followed by traffic that follows a link from another website.

You can click “view report” to see details like your “Top Traffic Sources”. If you click “view full report”, you’ll see a more complete list of pages that referred traffic to your site.

The other report available from the “Traffic Sources Overview” page is the keyword sources of traffic. Again, if you click “view full report” you’ll see a more complete list of keyword phrases that people used to find your website.

Going back to your main report overview page, the final report you can see on that page is the “Content Overview”. This shows your more popular pages on your website in the report period:

You can click “view report” to see more pages and their stats.

Step 2: View the Other Features of Google Analytics

On the left side of your account, you can see a menu called “Dashboard” that offers you additional features.

Intelligence

The first feature (currently in Beta) is “Intelligence”. It allows you to create custom alerts when certain things happen on your site. Click “Intelligence” and then near the bottom right of the screen you’ll see a link that says “Create Custom Alert”:

Once you click that, you can set up your “Custom Alert”:

In the first section (shown above), you can name your alert, optionally apply to other sites (profiles), choose the alert frequency (day, week, month) and set up an email address or mobile phone to receive alerts.

After that is complete, you can choose which traffic the alert applies to whether it’s “All Traffic”, certain segments, types of visitors, traffic sources, pages, etc.

Next, you can choose when to be alerted of certain activity. For example, number of visits, pageviews, bounce rate etc.

Click “Create Alert” when you’ve customized all your settings:

Visitors
The next item on the left menu is “Visitors” which gives you a number of stats you’ve seen already, but also allows you to see things like the language profile of your visitors, browsers, operating systems and more.

Another interesting report, you can see under Visitors is “Visitor Loyalty” and you can choose that from the left menu of your account:

Loyalty shows you how many visitors visited your site X number of times. In the example below, 868 visitors visited the site 2 times and made up 12.48% of all the visits to the site.

Traffic Sources
The next item on the left menu is Traffic Sources.

You will see some of the information we saw in the main overview page and some new items as well including the ability to track your Adwords campaigns and other campaigns (ex. Feedburner, Twitter, Facebook, etc).

Content
The next item on the left menu, is “Content”. This section includes some of the information we saw in the main overview page, but also allows you to view your “Content by Title”. So instead of just seeing the URL, you see the site title as shown below:

You can also see your top entry and exit pages, but a particularly interesting feature is “Site Overlay” which shows you a visual of your site and where your visitors are clicking. You can click through to other pages and if you wait a moment, a new Site Overlay will appear.
Here’s an example of a Site Overlay:

Wrapping Up
Google Analytics is very good at catering to the way you interpret data. You can also view your reports in a variety of formats including, from left to right below, table (text & numbers), percentage (pie chart), performance (bar graph), comparison and pivot (allows manipulation of data).

There are so many features to Google Analytics and we’ve covered many of the main ones and some of the more unique ones. As you grow more experienced with the program, you’ll see many more features that you find helpful including Custom Reports, adding Custom Segments and more.

So, you’ve found a web designer and you’re ready to begin your project. If you haven’t already, sit down with these and get your plan together. These are a series of things to consider when planning your website. Every site is different, some questions won’t apply to your situation, and this list changes depending on the site…

• What will your website do? What functions does it need? How do you want to use it?
• What is the focus of your site?
  • Is it to provide information?
  • Is it to sell products or services?
  • Is to generate leads?
  • Is it to create a community?
  • Could it be all of these, and more?
• What goals do you have for your site?
  • Financial goals, making money, a return on your investment, generate leads
  • Visibility goals, being a name brand in your industry, being known as an expert
  • Other goals, charity, donations, fund raising, giving back to a community
• Think about your business, or the idea you want to present. Do you have competition? What are they doing?
• Will you present information only?
  • How will you organize this information?
  • Where does your content come from? Do you create it, do your visitors create it?
  • Will the information need to be updated? How frequently? Who will update the site?
• What about branding your site:
  • Do you have a logo and/or color scheme?
  • What other branding materials do you have? Brochures, business cards, presentations?
  • Do you have a domain name?
  • Do you have any industry affiliations, trade groups, etc.?
• Will you sell online?
  • How will the orders be processed?
  • Do you need a shopping cart system or software?
  • Do you need to accept credit cards?
  • Do you need to interface your online store with your accounting or inventory software?
• Will you offer customer service and/or support on your site?
  • How will you offer this information?
  • Will you provide a knowledgebase or other collection of support information?
  • Will you need a means of tracking support requests? Or will simple e-mail communication do the job?
  • Will you provide a special phone number for support?
• Will you include resources or other material valuable to your audience or the industry? How much will you include?
  • Will you include documents, white papers or manuals?
• Will you include video or audio? Podcasts?
  • Do these media types make sense for your product or service?
  • What technology is most likely to be used by your audience?
• Will you offer other features on your site:
  • forums or message boards
  • chat
  • a blog
  • rss feed
  • e-cards
  • newletters

So, you’re shopping for a web designer? Here are some basic questions to help you make your decision.

There are still many businesses that are just starting to work on their first website.

How long have you been in business? Is this your primary business or is this something you do as a “side-line’?

This is important, you want to choose someone who has been doing this full time and who is focused primarily upon designing and developing web sites. The internet and web are changing daily – and there is more to making a web site than being able to use FrontPage or Dreamweaver.

How do you charge for your services? By the hour, by the page, by project quote, or some other way?

Knowing what you’re going to be charged and when makes budgeting possible. You should have a budget in mind for your project, based on your business plan and your research into the market. A plan now will save you time and money later.

What’s in the proposal?

The designer should provide you with a detailed written proposal or contract. It should include information about the scope of the project, what’s included, what’s not included. It should detail what happens if the project scope changes, and how that will be billed. The proposal should also include a time line for the projects completion. You’ll need the timeline to coordinate your other marketing efforts.

A word about the time line of a project. All projects experience a certain about of scope creep, or delays. Scope creep is where you add to the scope of the project after you’re in the middle of it – can we add Feature Y to my site? Also, know that you can help the project stay on track, by responding to your designer’s questions and communicating with them about any changes or updates you require.

Most proposals also include a payment schedule, typically an installment is due upon reaching a specific milestone of the project.

Do you have a portfolio, or can you show me live examples of your work? Are references available?

Seeing examples of a designer’s work can give you ideas, and also demonstrates their abilities. Also view their site – although I can say that a busy design shop may not update their site as often as they’d like.

What other related services do you provide – such as hosting, marketing, etc.

This can be important to your plans. Some shops do design only, but no programming, some do programming, but not design. Others do only marketing or search engine optimization. Some cover all those areas and more. You’ll need to know so you can budget and decide what’s the best fit for your business.

More questions: What steps do you take to:

* make sure my site loads fast
* make sure my site works with major browsers
* optimize my site for search engine results
* help me market and promote my site
* organize my site for navigation

Finally, when you’re talking to the designer, are you comfortable with how they explain things? Do they talk in plain English or are you struggling to understand the concepts? If you have trouble understanding, sometimes this means it’s not a good fit. You should be able to ask questions – this is your business.

This entry covers interviewing a designer. I’ll be writing more about how to prepare your request for a quote, including some of the questions you should be ready to answer.

You optimized your website by creating compelling content and putting your keyword phrases in all the right places so you’ve done all you can do, right? No, absolutely not. What other people say about you truly is more important than what you say about yourself. This guide will walk you through some of the ways you can use your keyword phrases to increase your authority.

Before we get started, a word of warning. Off-site optimization takes time and it can be quite a bit of work but it’s absolutely critical to your success.

“What people say about you is more important than what you say about yourself.” ~Unknown

According to Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz, more than half of the SEO battle takes place OFF of your website.

• 23.87% – The general trust and authority that your domain has due to quality incoming links
• 22.33% – The number of links to a specific page
• 20.26% – The anchor text of links from other sites

Wow, an astonishing 66%. Did you realize that so much of your SEO success depended on factors outside your website? One source I read recently said the single most important factor for a page’s ranking is the anchor text of incoming links. Software like WordTracker uses the anchor text of incoming links to evaluate whether a link should be considered competition to your keyword phrase or not.

What are you waiting for? It’s time to get to work!

Step 1: Create Compelling Content

You absolutely need incoming links to your web page if you want it to be as high in the search engine rankings as possible. The first thing to do is create compelling content that inspires the reader want to link to you, share the link on their social networks, etc.

Step 2: Social Bookmarking

Another way to get incoming links is to go and create them yourself. Ever heard of social bookmarking? There are sites that actually allow and encourage you to add your link so that others can find your site. These are called Social Bookmarking sites. A quick google search would find lots of these sites. Here is how to add your page to StumbleUpon but adding your link to the others is simple as well.

1. Start the sign up process by clicking the Join Free button.
2. Complete the sign up form.
3. Prove you are human. Yes, that’s right. Just click on Connect with Facebook and then click the ALLOW button or you may choose to validate with captcha.
4. Choose a few interests from the list and click Start Stumbling.
5. At this point, you are presented some choices for finding people who are already using StumbleUpon. If you want to search your Facebook friends, click the Facebook icon, select which ones you want to follow and click on Follow.
6. Invite others or skip this step.
7. Install the StumbleUpon extension if you want to have easy access by simply clicking the link you are given and then clicking Install. Once installed, your toolbar will have the following button.
8. Load your website that you are building links for into the browser and click the “I like it” (Thumbs Up) button. If others have recommended it, you’ll see a page showing that. If not, you’ll be asked to give the following information. In case you can’t read the screen print, it asks if the site is safe for visitors to view on a work computer, what the topic is, and review. To choose multiple categories, choose one from the list and it will be added to the Topic box then you can choose another. Keep choosing topics until you have chosen several that apply. Once you are done completing the form, click on Submit.

Step 3: Blog Commenting

Another great way to increase the # of links to your page is through commenting on blogs. Find blogs that are in your industry and would target the same demographic that you do then go to the blog and find posts that you can make an intelligent comment on. “Great post” is not a great comment. Engage with the reader. Your post needs to have some value to the reader or the site owner may not approve it.

Some would say to only comment on “do follow” blogs. My recommendation is to comment on appropriate blogs whether they follow the links or not. If you have the time and inclination to view the source for each blog and your ONLY goal is to get the link, that’s up to you. My goal is to build relationships and authority in the process so commenting on a no follow blog is not entirely useless.

Step 4: Article Marketing

An awesome way to get incoming links is through article marketing. This is simply writing articles and submitting them to article directories. The most popular one is ezinearticles.com but a quick google search would find others for you.

To submit to EzineArticles.com:

Click the JOIN link at the top right.

Complete the form below.

Submit your article by going to “Submit a New Article” under Article Manager on the menu.

Select a Category and Subcategory.
Give your article a compelling, keyword-rich Title.
Enter an excerpt/teaser in the appropriate box.

Paste the body of your article into the Article Body box. I recommend writing your article in a text editor and then pasting it in so you don’t have to deal with timeout/login issues. Notice there is an editor you can use to format your articles.

Now add your resource box. Don’t give a boring bio with a blatant link to your website. Say something like “And now I invite you to visit www.makechocolatetruffles.com for your free guide on how to make chocolate truffles….”

Preview the article and make any necessary changes. When you are ready to submit your article, click on “Submit This Article”. Make sure you check the box below the button saying that you agree to the terms.

Step 6: Guest Posting

Being a guest blogger on other blogs besides your own is one of the easiest and best ways to get incoming links. Most site owners are hungry for good content so if you’re a decent writer, contact several site owners each day or even each week. You give them great content and you get an incoming link to your site. You also frequently get some traffic so it’s a win/win proposition.

Step 7: Encouraging Incoming Links by Linking Out

Many site owners frequently analyze what sites are linking to them. If they see that you are linking to them and your site is relevant to theirs, it’s quite possible they’ll return the favor. They may even ask you to guest post.

Step 8: Social Networking

Social Networking sites like Facebook and Twitter should also be part of your incoming link strategory. Use keyword-rich phrases in your profile and link to your website. Also, you can get incoming links by sharing your links on these sites.

Step 9: Get Creative!

There are countless ways to get incoming links i.e. directories, contests, press releases, etc. You can even do research on your competition’s incoming links and try to get those same sites to link to you! The point is to be creative and above all, take action!

If you navigate to the Products & Services page at http://comscore.com/Products_Services, you can see the main categories of intelligence they provide.

Currently the categories include:

• Advertising Effectiveness (digital and cross-media campaigns)
• Cross Media Measurement (Internet, mobile, radio, print)
• Custom Research (leverage the panel for custom research)
• Marketing on the Internet
• Media Planning & Analysis
• Mobile Media
• Search Marketing
• Technology Tracking
• Video & Distributed Media Management

They’ve also got free insights and information on their “Comscore Voices” blog. Subscribe via RSS, email or Twitter to stay up to date.

You can browse by category. At first, the categories might be hard to see, but they’re crammed at the top of the page:

You can browse by “what’s hot”, “new”, “controversial”, and “top.”

You can also use the search box in the top right corner:

You can then sort your results by relevance, how new the content is and how popular:

When you visit the site at http://delicious.com, you can immediately see some of the most recently bookmarked pages. You can also choose to view the “Hotlist” and “Explore Tags”:

The Hotlist allows you to see the most popular bookmarks right now and if you look to the right, it will show you the popular tags as well:

If you log in with your Yahoo account, you can also bookmark your own pages to refer to later and keep as content ideas and fodder. You can even mark your bookmarks as private, so you can take note of possible plans for using the content.