If you are thinking about starting in social media, these are the channels that are available to you and how you can use them

Leveraging Social Networks Facebook, twitter, myspace, linkedin etc

Facebook

Best Facebook marketing approach

By creating a facebook business page and using that to market your services and/or products. Also make sure that you have a custom Facebook Landing Page and if you have an online store, you are showcasing your best selling products.

Great for Search Engine Optimisation (Facebook pages are now being indexed by Google)
Great for Lead Generation
Great for Brand Awareness
Great for Targeted Profile based advertising
Great to analyze demographics of your fans

Twitter 

Best Twitter marketing approach

By creating an individual or a business account and tweeting information and product/service updates. Twitter stats show that your followers are interested in basically two things 1. Information and updates about your product and 2. Discounts and Special Offers. Make sure you have a good mix of both.

Great for Search Engine Optimisation (tweets are indexed by Google)
Great for Lead Generation
Great for Brand Awareness
Great for mass communication
Great for tracking what your users are saying about your brand

LinkedIn

Best LinkedIn Marketing Approach

By picking a handful of your most prominent employees or yourself and starting to put content via your/their profiles. Connect your blog with your linkedIn profile and get very involved in discussions.

Great for Lead Generation
Great for Brand Awareness
Great for targeting Businesses (B2B Marketing)

No Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Value

MySpace

Best MySpace Marketing Approach

If you company deals with Artists/Bands or Media, create a page and start promoting via Videos. MySpace still remains as the 2nd best Social Network but is now more widely used by Artists and Bands to promote themselves.

Great for Lead Generation for Musicians/Bands
Great for Brand Awareness for Musicians/Bands

No Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Value

YouTube

Best YouTube Marketing Approach

Put all of your company videos on YouTube and make a custom channel in YouTube. Then embed those videos on your website. Also make sure to watermark your videos with your domain name so that other users can’t download it and use it themselves.

Great for lead generation. You are tapping into the YouTube visitor base
Great for Brand Awareness. Having a YouTube channel gives you more validity.
Great SEO Value. YouTube videos are indexed by search engines and show up in the top results.

Our first instincts when sending out B2B or B2C email communications is to make it long, put all of our product information and put keywords such as buy now, or contact us. Also we have a tendency to make the subject line more appealing by informing customers of discounts and sales and saving money.  And all of these tactics do work and get the user to open up the email.

Only if it lands in their inbox!!!

The problem is that spammers have been using these tactics to lure the general email users that most spam software now pick these up and consider these as spam and either block them, delete them or drop them into a spam folder.

So even though its a very good offer for your end customer,
most likely they will never see your email

How can you go around this?

One of the easiest ways is to use a template for most of your communications and to spam-check it to make sure that it has a very low spam rating.

At DzineClub we spam-score all of our email communications before sending them out. Our preferred approach is using the free SpamCheck tool provided by sitesell.com SpamCheck by SiteSell rates your email against SpamAssassin rules and gives you a spam rating.

SpamCheck will give you a TOTAL SPAM SCORE which is the total of all the spam points on your email. Then they will give you instructions on how to fix your spam issues.

If your TOTAL SPAM SCORE is under 4.5 then you don’t really have to change anything but should still know what areas are giving you the spam rating. Anything Higher and you must make the recommended changes to improve you rankings.

So how do you Spam Score your emails?

Easy! Send a copy of your outbound email to spamcheck@sitesell.net and you will instantly get a reply back with a spam rating.

NOTE: Please make sure that your subject line contains TEST in the beginning and then your normal subject line because otherwise SpamCheck will ignore your email and it will bounce back.

Concerned about your Spam Ratings?
Looking for a Robust Email Marketing Solution?
Contact us at info@dzineclub.com

Here are the top completely free Business Directories in Google in Australia. We recommend adding your listings to these directories to get more traffic into your sites. At the bottom you have some paid listings too.

Free Business Directories

Business.gov.au
Australian Directory of Government and Business Associations
http://www.business.gov.au

Hot Frog
Australian Business Directory
http://www.hotfrog.com.au

Local Business Guide 
Free Business Directory
http://www.localbusinessguide.com.au

Start Local 
Australian Business Directory and Search Engine
http://www.startlocal.com.au

Yellow Pages®
Yellow Pages® Local Business Directory
http://www.yellowpages.com.au

Paid Business Directory

AusDirectory
Free Business Directory Listings
http://www.ausdirectory.org

AussieNow
Australian Local Business Directory
http://www.aussienow.com.au

Nationwide
Business Directory of Australia
http://www.nationwide.com.au

The Live Plugin for Piwik – Open Source Web Analytics gives the following information for your visitors if you enable the live plugin.

Date:
Date when the visited

Time:
Time of Visit

IP Address:
IP address of visitor

Location:
What Country the visitor came from

Internet Provider:
Who was the internet provider

Pages per visit:
How many pages they visited

New/Returning Visitor:
New Visitor or Returning Visitor

Visit duration:
How long they stayed on site

Referrer URL:
What traffic source they originated form

Keywords:
If they used a Search Engine what keywords they used

Operating System:
What Operating System they used

Browser:
What browser they were using

Plugin:
What plugins they had installed

• java
• flash
• quicktime
• realplayer
• windowsmedia
• silverlight
• gears
• pdf
• director

Traffic flow:
What actions they took on the site? what pages they started with and what pages did they flow into

Internet Explorer 9 preview is out. Because of the way Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) uses hardware for speed, There are some amazing demos available of the browser capabilities.

Internet Explorer 9 – IE9 – utilises the following new technologies:

HTML5

HTML 5 is the next major version of the code markup that runs the world wide web.

CSS3

CSS 3 is the next major version of style language used to style most of the web documents worldwide.

SVG2

A new JavaScript Engine called Chakra

Download Internet Explorer 9 and view the available demos here
http://www.ietestdrive.com

So What does it mean for your business

IE is still the most popular browser on the internet for most websites. So we recommend that any new sites you build, test it in IE9. Assuming a 6 month turn around time for it to be final, your projects will be right in time and prepared to look good in the next version of the most popular browser on the internet.

You should be able to make this change yourself or ask your web designer/developer.

1. Identify Main Keywords

Identify the main keywords that you want to appear in search engines for. Find out how competitive those keywords are and use tools to pick the right ones. Try Using the Google Keyword Tool

2. Insert these keywords on Page Titles where applicable

Change the titles of your page to match the keywords you want to appear on Google. Make sure you use the main keywords on your home page title.

3. Change Meta Description for Pages

Change meta description on the pages to target keywords as well as a quick description of the pages

4. Insert these keywords on the front page

Insert text on the front page which describes what you do but making sure that you are inserting these keywords on the front page.

5. Manage Webmaster Areas

Go to Google Webmaster Central, Yahoo! Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster and add your site and your sitemaps

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If you are unable to make these changes yourself and would like to make these SEO changes on your site, contact DzineClub  at info@dzineclub.com for info on how we are enabling other Small and Medium Businesses to take control of their SEO.

Our staff have recently been certified as Google Analytics Qualified Individuals. That means that our knowledge about Analytics matches the requirements set by Google themselves.

One of the things we had to do to get the Qualification was complete Conversion University that takes you through all the ins and outs and setting up of a good Google Analytics system on any site.

The test was fairly hard with 70 questions and 90 minutes of time. We would not recommend doing the test unless you have read through the university slides at least a few times and can remember code snippets as well as set up information.

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Want to implement or improve your Google Analytics?

DzineClub can help you really dig into your visitor behavior and give you information on what to do to improve your site for better effectiveness and higher conversion. Contact us at info@dzineclub.com for a quote. Mention this blog post for a special price 🙂

Advanced Segments in Google Analytics are very powerful. This allows you to drop your website visitors into separate buckets/segments and view reports around those particular segments.

An Example of Advanced Segments in Google Analytics is

All Australian Users who have been to the site before

For DzineClub, these are high value customers for us. So we analyse this segment to see what they are doing. Some information that we can now find out about them are

– where did they originate (this will help us target more on that source so that we can generate more loyal and local customers)

– Goal Conversions (how is the goal conversion on our local and loyal visitors)

– What pages do these segments go to

An interesting fact for us was that our Australian Returning Visitors segments browsers were majority of Firefox and Chrome browsers. So we can assume that they are a bit more tech savvy and we can provide content which could be a bit technical.

Google Analytics is one of the most widely used analytics software in the world. Google analytics/reporting tool is free and provided by Google. Google Analytics is hosted by Google. Google Analytics allows you to track multiple websites that you run/operate.  For each of those websites you can then

• Track your Visitors, their attributes and how they interacted with the site
• Track your traffic sources and where your visitors originated from or how they found your site
• Track your Content, how often it was viewed, which pages were viewed etc
• Track your Goals that you have associated with your websites
• Track ecommerce if you have a shopping cart
• Track your email marketing, Google Adwords, Search Engine Marketing Campaigns

Here are the main areas of Google Analytics

Google Analytics Dashboard

The dashboard contains all of your custom reports in one location. When you set up your account, it automatically has the main reports on the dashboard already. You can remove the ones that are not relevant to you and you can add any report you like that are more important for your particular business. Dig deeper when setting up your dashboard and compare past results on your reports.

By default on the dashboard you get the visitors report, the site usage report, visitors overview, map overlay, traffic sources overview and content overview.Visits and Site Usage Report

These reports give you a line graph of site visits for the last month. On this particular site the blue line indicates the visit for this month and the green line indicates visits for the month before that so that you can compare. On the Site Usage statistics it shows you

-  how many visits you had for the month (compared to last month)
-  how many page views did you have in total (also compared last month) and this calculates the pages/visit
-  Bounce rates (visitors only visiting one page) compared to last month
-  Average time on site compared to last month
-  percentage of new visits (visitor loyalty)

Then its followed by

Visitors Overview

How many visitors you had for the month (not compared to last month) 

• What language do your visitors use
• What network locations are they coming from
• What browsers are the using to view your site
• What screen colours are they using
• What is the visitors screen resolution while viewing your website
• What kind of plugins do they use – such as java or flash
• what internet connection speeds do they use

Map Overlay

Traffic Sources Overview

• Where are your traffic coming from, what search engines
• What affiliate sites and sending users to your website
• What keywords they are using to find your site
• How successful are your SEM campaigns

Content Overview

• What are the top pages on your site
• Navigation analysis: how visitors found your content
• What entrance path they are using to get to your content and how are they flowing from there. So at Dzineclub, we can click on our services page and see how the traffic flows from that page > meaning what are users most interested in
• Top exit pages – where are your users dropping off

Site Search Reports

• What are your visitors searching for in the site
• What keywords are users searching on your site

Event Tracking Reports

• What custom events are you tracking
• What links they are clicking on
• Download tracking
• Events in Single page tracking

Goals Set up and Tracking

• Funnel Visualisations
  Tell how many users went to your quote, contact us page and how many completed.

Yes! We have hit big time – already a 100 close to a million followers

Watch out – DzineClub is here to stay.

Maybe its time to move out of the building and into a CBD skycraper. We are thinking Rialto, even Eureka when they make offices there. At DzineClub we are all about looking at the future 🙂

Jokes aside, 100 is always a good mark. It’s always hard to get to the first hundred, then it should be easy, we hope.

This inspired us to use our twitter more innovatively. See if you can find the difference. You might have to follow us on twitter. Click on the bird/penguin  right about down here