Your Google traffic has taken a plunge into the deep end, and you’d really like it to come up for air. You, in fact, are gasping for breath on its behalf.

Take a deep breath. We’re going to guide you in finding out more about what happened and how to bring your traffic levels back up.

Breathing?

Good. Let’s open your Google Analytics.

(If for some reason you do not have Google Analytics, put it on your site now! This whole post will then be worth it. Although if you don’t have Analytics I’m not sure how you would know your search traffic has dropped. In any event…)

We’re going to take a look at your search traffic. Here’s how you get there:

Set the date range to about two months and take a look.

Does it look something like this?

(Thankfully, we didn’t have any clients who were hit in the latest algorithm updates, so this is actually a graph from when a client made a change on his website and lost his Analytics code for a few days until it was restored. But this is what the graph would look like.)

Maybe it’s not this bad. Maybe you still have some traffic – but it’s significantly lower than usual.

So what do you do?

First off…

When did it drop?

First, look at the date when it dropped. Then compare it with this list of Google algorithm updates. (There was also a new Panda update yesterday, June 11th – which is not yet on the list.)

If the date corresponds with the Penguin or the Panda update, you can check last week’s post for likely factors that would have made your site prey to those updates. Check your site for those issues, and fix them.

If the dates don’t match, continue on to the next step of your investigation.

Even if the dates do match, and you’re pretty sure you got slapped by an algorithm update, still continue on to the next step. You might have been penalized for one keyword but not for another (especially with Penguin), and so it pays to find out.

What keywords dropped?

To do this effectively, you’re going to need a custom report in Analytics.

Wait! Don’t panic yet. I did say this was going to be “Easy Analytics”, so even if you’ve never used Custom Reporting before, it’s going to be easy. I’ve designed the report for you, and you can just import it straight into your account by clicking on a link.

https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?type=custom_report&uid=D_dAvHdjTDm5oHSySjRZKQ

Complicated link, simple report. It should look like this:

To see how much your traffic has dropped for each keyword, do the following:

Go to the top right where it shows the date range and click the little arrow to the right.  You’ll get this drop-down:

Then you’ll see a report that looks like this:

We’ve seen when there was a drop, we’ve seen what keywords dropped.  Before we start to analyze, let’s answer one more question.

What pages dropped?

Here’s your custom report to check that out:

https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?type=custom_report&uid=WzcF7lNASfirys_wm0ZdXg

This is what you should see:

Let’s compare with last month, as we did for the keywords above -

Time to Come to Conclusions:

Let’s give some options for what you might be seeing and what you would do about it.

1) A keyword or a page that is seasonal has dropped because it’s off season

What to do:

Absolutely nothing.  Wait until next season.  Put your efforts elsewhere.

2) Traffic has plunged for a particular page

What to do:

a) Put the URL into your browser and see if the page actually works.  Sometimes the drop in traffic might be caused by a page suddenly breaking and returning a “404 – Not Found” when your visitor tries to access it.  If that’s the case, fix the error, and your visitors will be back.

b) If the page does work, then go back to your Unique Visitors per Landing Page report and click on the page in question.

You’ll get the breakdown of how many visitors came for which keywords – for that particular page.

This brings us to option 3 -

3) Traffic has plunged for a particular keyword

a) If you suspect you’ve been the victim of a Penguin update, it may be that you over-optimized your links for this particular keyword.  Do you know if your anchor text is slanted in favor of that keyword?

(If you don’t, unfortunately there aren’t many good free tools that enable you to check.  If you have a PRO subscription to SEOMoz, then Open Site Explorer is a phenomenal tool that lets you slice and dice your link data – and other sites’ data – many different ways.  They do offer a 30 day free trial, so if this is a real issue for you, probably worth doing.  Majestic SEO will give you all their backlink data for your site, but it’s a laborious and “techie” process. You have to register, then go to the reports page, then click “Report Options” -> “Create Report.”  You’ll be asked to verify your site by uploading a file to the root directory, which if – like me – you’re not a born webmaster, this detailed explanation may be helpful for.  And when all is said and done, the data isn’t as easily analyzed as SEOMoz’s is.  If you export the report to CSV (link on very bottom left of page), then you can play around with filters in Excel – otherwise it’s reading a long list.)

What to do:

If your anchor text is very unnatural, try to get some webmasters to change the anchor text to your brand name or something more natural sounding.

b) If your traffic drop doesn’t correspond with Penguin, do a Google search.  Make sure it’s done without personalization, which means putting this search string into your browser:

https://www.google.com/search?q=your+keyword+here&pws=0  (yes, obviously replace that dummy phrase with your key phrase, words separated by plus signs)

Check the results.  Are you ranking lower than you have been?  Has anything strange happened to your title and snippet? Has the competition around you changed so that their titles and descriptions now sound more compelling than yours?

What to do:

• If your rankings have dropped, you may need to step up your SEO efforts.
• If your title and description are turning visitors away, either fix them or try out some variations to see if you can get a better click-through rate.  Try each for a month, to make sure you have enough data to come to a conclusion.

There’s no one definitive answer.  Use your brain and your power of observation.  But now you should know what to look for.

Any other ideas of what might cause your search traffic to drop and what you would see in Analytics to hint to that?

Enlighten us all in the comments below!

First you collapse in a faint.

After someone has waved smelling salts under your nose and you’ve come to, sputtering, take a look at these THREE DIFFERENT, UNCONNECTED REASONS why your site might have lost its traffic. Only once you’ve identified the reason for the drop can you do anything about it.

Penguin

The most recent Google update, Penguin happened on April 24^th, 2012. (Important note: this means that if your traffic dipped any earlier, it was NOT Penguin.)

The general gist of Penguin was that it hit sites with artificial looking link profiles.

Example: If your company is Benny’s Bird Treats, and your site is www.bennysbirds.com, yet 60% of your incoming links are using the anchor text of “best parrot seed mixes” – it’s going to look just a tad suspicious.

Ever bought an item of clothing and seen on the tag: “Irregularity in the pattern is a result of the natural fibers used to make this shirt and is not a defect”? Natural phenomena – whether a fabric or a link profile – are irregular.

When you rave to your friend about that craisin-date-almond mix you bought for your parrot, do you call the company “Benny’s Bird Treats” or “best parrot seed mixes”? Natural conversation calls people and companies by their names more than it does by a very specific description of what they offer.

Google wants to make the internet as much about natural recommendations and authority as possible. Any factor that smacks of artificiality is slowly being pruned away.

So:

• Artificial-looking anchor text in links
• Links coming from known link networks (which are not natural; you paid, begged or bartered to have it put there)
• Links coming from footers (where it doesn’t make total sense and the text looks artificial)
• Large amounts of links coming from low-quality articles and blog comments

Are all UNNATURAL.

If you know or suspect you have these issues, and your traffic dropped on April 24^th, Penguin may have been the culprit.

Panda

The first Panda update happened on February 24^th, 2011. There have been periodic updates ever since, as seen in Search Engine Roundtable’s list of Panda updates, the most recent happening on April 27^th, 2012.

If Penguin is about low-quality link profiles, Panda is about low-quality pages.

What makes it low quality? Well, if you would click through to the page in question from Google search results and think: “Hmmm… I wonder why this page is on page one of Google. It has just as much ads as content, and the content that there is isn’t so hot” – that’s low quality.

And if you have lots of pages on your site like that, then your whole site is deemed low quality and is banished to the netherworld of Google rankings in favor of more attractive, content-rich sites.

Even if the pages aren’t full of ads, and any one page on its own looks decent, but when you take into account the rest of the pages on your site they all look pretty similar, that’s bad news as well.

So if your pages look low-quality, or your site as a whole looks like it has lots of irrelevant pages – and your drop happened right after one of the Panda updates lists in Search Engine Roundtable’s list… Panda might be the reason.

Less Searches for Your Topic

No, this is not a Google update. This is a natural sociological update.

For the past few months, your articles on protecting your home from hurricane damage have been drawing 200 visitors a day from Google. Sometime in December you check your Analytics and see that Google traffic has dropped down to about 40 a day.

Penguin? Panda? Pooh Bear?

You begin to swoon and then realize… hurricane season ends in November.

Oh.

No wonder less people are looking for this topic.

Even when your topic isn’t obviously seasonal, humankind’s searching patterns change.

We once did keyword research for a client and, as usual, chose the best words to target based on search volume and competition. When a few months later we reviewed the keyword research, we saw that some words that had had high search volume had dropped so much that we decided to remove them from our SEO strategy.

We’ve seen three reasons why you might have lost your Google traffic.

Which one applies to you? What do you do about it?

Next post, we’re going to show you how you can use Google Analytics to pinpoint where you’ve lost search traffic – and develop a plan to recover it.

Make sure you don’t miss it – get each weekly SEO and marketing update delivered directly to your inbox!

See you next week!

“Please sir, may I tell you the words that would touch my heart and the hearts of others just like me?”

Yes, it would be a dream if your ideal customer said that.

No, he is not going to.

But – you can still get that priceless information.

When we spoke last week about the 5 second test to see if you’re marketing effectively, we found that the key is the ability to answer the question: “Deep down, what really motivates a customer to buy your product or service?”

If your message matches what really drives them – you’ve got a win.

If you’re marketing ice cream as a heat-quencher when in truth your customers buy it so that they can feel like carefree kids again, you’re missing the mark.

This week we’re going to tackle how you can find out the driving force behind your ideal customer’s purchase.

There are 4 steps to the process:

1. Identifying the customer
2. Finding the customer
3. Motivating her to talk to you
4. What to ask

Here we go:

1) Do you know who your ideal customer is?

Who do you love selling to – or working with? Who can your product or service best help? If your business is B2B, who actually makes the decisions when it comes to buying your product or service?

Example: Let’s return to our ice cream shop. My shop’s ideal customer is a parent of a child ages 3-10 who comes in to buy his child ice cream. Why? I get satisfaction out of the children’s enjoyment, for one. It’s also one of the more profitable customer types, because once the child enjoys the ice cream here, she’ll have a positive emotional association with the store and ask her parents to take her back. Also, often the parent will buy an ice cream along with his child (and there are sometimes several children) – so this customer type garners larger sales.

2) Where do you find a customer?

If you have current or past customers who fit your “ideal customer” description, ask them if they have a few minutes to answer some questions. I could ask the parents who come into the shop with their children – the more the merrier.

What if I want clients like those – but I don’t have any right now? Then I have to go find them. My ice cream shop is an easy case, because I know quite a few parents with young children. So I call them up and ask them if I could ask them a few questions that would help me in my business.

What if I don’t know anyone personally who fits my ideal client description? LinkedIn is a fantastic resource for finding ideal clients to speak to, especially B2B.

Let’s say that in addition to my ice cream shop, I’ve also been developing a graphic design software program that rivals Photoshop, and even bests it in some areas. I want to market it to graphic designers who are not entirely happy with Photoshop or their current graphic design program. So I sign in to LinkedIn.

I use the people search box on the upper right hand corner of the screen when I’m looking at my profile or contacts. I can just enter in “graphic design” or “graphic designer” – or I can get a little more advanced.

Here are my results:

Wow, that’s a lot! And I think many of them may not be relevant. Let’s narrow it down. On the left side, there are filtering options.

Play around with the filters, and open the profile of any member who looks like a good prospect in a new tab as you go down the list.

Now you need to figure out how to contact them.

• If you can find people you are already connected to, or with whom you have a colleague you know well in common (and he can introduce you) – you can just send a message.  That’s the easiest.
• If they’re a 2nd or 3rd connection or in a group you belong to, you can “Connect” with them and send them a message that way.
• If you’re a Premium member, you can send a message to anyone.
• Even if you’re not a premium member, but your prospect is and she’s joined the “OpenLink Network,” she’ll have this little symbol next to her name:

That means she’ll accept messages from anyone.

• If none of the above apply, go into his profile and see if he has a website or a blog.  Often there will be an email address or contact form on the site through which you can reach him.
• Another option is seeing what groups your prospect is a member of.  If you can join at least one of those groups, you’ll then be able to connect with her directly.

3) Why should she want to answer my questions?

First thing to get clear – both for you and for your prospect – is that this IS NOT a sales conversation.  It’s a market research conversation, and they are doing you a favor by sharing their experiences in the field.  Get that clear in your mind, and make it clear to your prospect when you contact her.

Start out your message by saying how you know they have expertise in the industry in question.  Did you see it from their current position, their past positions, their blog? After that, explain that you wanted to know if you could ask them some questions about their experiences with X, because that you’re doing market research for yourself (or a client, if that’s the case), and you provide X product or service.  At this point make it very clear that this is only market research, and that there are NO sales pitches involved; you don’t even have to tell them what company you’re representing.

Why should she answer you?  She may not.  But many people will:

• People like to see themselves as experts in their field.  By turning to her and telling her that her experience has value, you’re proclaiming her an expert.
• People like to help.  As long as they know it’s only a matter of 15 minutes and they won’t be dragged into a sales conversation – why not?
• Sometimes they see benefit in it for themselves, especially if you succeed in getting through to that graphic designer who is really fed up with Photoshop and just waiting to hear about a different option.  A simple market research conversation might turn into a sale – although don’t count on it.  That’s just the cherry on top of the whipped cream at my ice cream shop.

4) What do I say?

Your prospect responded, you set up the time, and now you’re waiting with bated breath for the phone conversation.  Well, actually, you’re biting your nails to the quick, because you’re not sure what you’re going to ask to make him reveal the magic words that will touch his heart.

Let’s give you some of my sample questions – a few from my ice cream shop and a few from my Photoshop rival.

• “When you decide to take your child out for an ice cream, why did you make that decision?  What made you go now – and not yesterday?”
• “What did you hope that ice cream would do for you and/or your child?”
• “What was your best ice cream experience with your son?”
• “Why was it so special?”

***

• “What issues have you had with Photoshop or other graphic design program you weren’t happy with?”
• “Why was that a problem for you?”
• “What would you be able to do if you had a program that worked exactly the way you wanted?”

***

Write out sample questions in advance and have them in front of you during the conversation.  As you ask the questions, keep probing deeper – sensitively, of course.  Take notes – or even better, ask if you can record the conversation for future reference. After you thank them for their time and hang up the phone, listen to the recording and make notes, or go over the ones you have.

If you’ve carefully planned, thoughtfully asked and truly listened, you should have a deeper answer to the question:

“Deep down, what really motivates a customer to buy your product or service?”

Now you can start marketing.

*

If you want personal guidance on how to:

• find your ideal customers
• conduct your market research conversation
• get the answers you need to do effective marketing for your business

We’re giving away 3 “Know Your Customers” strategy sessions until the end of May.

Contact us to see if we have one left for you!

You have five seconds to answer this question:

Deep down, what really motivates a customer to buy your product or service?

Did that take you longer than five seconds?

If you came up with an answer – no matter how long it took you – congratulations! You’re ahead of most other businesspeople out there. But here comes another question: how do you know that you came to the right conclusion?

We put hours – time and energy – into marketing our business to our potential clients. But even if the message is reaching their ears – how far does it penetrate?

Let’s take you as an example. Think of the last time you bought ice cream in an ice cream shop. Why did you buy it? Try to go beyond “it tasted good.”

Here’s a list of possibilities:

1. “It was hot and I wanted something cold.”
2. “I was in a bad mood and doing something nice for myself cheers me up.”
3. “I have hypoglycemia and I felt that I needed something sugary – quick!”
4. “I was exhausted and stressed from being up three nights in a row with my newborn, and I just wanted to leave my adult responsibilities and be a kid again.”

Very different reasons, no?

If you planned a marketing campaign based around Ice Cream: the Perfect Heat-Quencher – you would likely motivate person 1. You would have little to no impact on persons 2, 3 and 4.

Too often we start our marketing campaigns – whether they be our website content, Adwords, social media or a print ad in a magazine – before identifying what will motivate our audience to respond to our campaign.

Even if we put time into thinking about the question, the answer we come up with will be of limited accuracy. That’s for one of two reasons:

1. You don’t know the product or service well enough
2. You know the product or service too well

The first problem happens when you’re an outside marketing agency. You’re stuck with the task of marketing industries to audiences when you know next to nothing about either.

A comment by Sha Menz to a recent SEOMoz blog post on marketing phrased it well:

You certainly learn on the job, but how long does that take you? Even if you can learn fast, it’ll often just end up giving you the second problem: you know the product or service too well.

That problem happens when you are an internal marketing person – either you’re the business owner, the product manager, or the in-house marketing team.

You know that product. You know it like the back of your hand. You could list all the features it has in your sleep. You know exactly why someone SHOULD want that product.

You just don’t know why someone in fact DOES want that product.

It’s hard to step outside yourself when you know so much.

And that’s when you end up marketing ice cream as a heat-quencher, when in fact it would be much more effective to market it as a way to be a kid again.

So what do you do? How do you find out how to really reach your customers?

Ask them.

Yes, just ask them.

No, asking “how can I convince you to buy my product?” is not what I meant. You’re going to need to be a little more subtle – but I’m sure you are.

We’ve been doing this more and more for our clients, and it’s been an eye-opening experience. Just speaking to a few people can shed light on the heart of an entire customer base. For one new client, we spoke to two people who fit his “ideal customer” profile and from those insights we were able to create his marketing strategy. It was a much more refined and deeper strategy than we ever would have created from just talking to our client.

I’m sure you have a few questions on how this works:

• Who do I ask? Customers I have? What if I don’t have customers?
• How do I find them?
• Why would they want to talk to me?
• What do I ask?

Next week, we’ll be covering these questions, and you’ll come out with a plan and the confidence to get answers from your customers. If you don’t want to miss it, make sure you’re subscribed to our email list (and you’ll also get a free practical guide on targeting your marketing more effectively).

Then it will take you less than five seconds to answer the question:

Deep down, what really motivates a customer to buy your product or service?  

You don’t know?

Then I’ll tell you: it’s figuring out what the most critical activity is for your business success right now.

If your goal is to become a world-class weightlifter, but your answer to “what’s the best thing for you to be eating right now?” is “I don’t know” – who’s betting you’re not going to make it?  Sit down right now, learn about nutrition and building muscle, and make a nutrition plan.

So if you don’t know, spend time making a plan.  If you need to learn more about business and marketing, do that first and then make a plan.

Let’s say you know.  You do know what the most critical activity for your business success is right now.

Are you doing it right now?

Well, apparently not.  You’re reading this blog post.

Wait!  Don’t press the X in the corner yet – you’ll do that in a minute.

Was this activity what you were doing before you read this blog post?

If no (as it often is for most of us) – why not?  Why do all the little activities that are really not as critical (if we’re honest with ourselves) push off doing whatever we have defined as the most important activity for our business growth?

A complete psychological study of why we don’t just do what’s important is beyond the scope of this blog post.  Now we’re just going to do an exercise:

When you finish reading this, spend the next 60 minutes doing the most critical activity for your business success.  If that’s too much, spend 45 – but no less than that.  Give yourself a chunk of time.

And JUST do that activity. Close all other browser tabs except for the one you need. If you can do it offline it’s even better.  Turn off the phone. You don’t know where the off button is? It’s the little red one you press to turn your phone back on after the battery dies and you plug it into the charger. Yes – that’s really the off button. If the thought of making your screen go dead intentionally strikes you as unethical, you can always put it on silent and move it to another room.

Just do it.

After those 60 minutes, you’ll have accomplished two things:

1. You’ll have actually progressed in helping your business.
2. You’ll have a feeling of solid accomplishment.  The more you can give yourself that experience, the more you will want it.  And then you may not need the complete psychological study – because you’ll be drawn to that feeling of accomplishment.

Okay, it’s time.

Take a deep breath.

Focus it in your mind: what really is the most critical activity for my business right now.

Press the X in the corner.

Go do it.

Good luck.

(After you’re finished, you can always come back here and share your experiences in the comments.  We’ll be excited to give you a Bravo! and a virtual round of applause.  You might encourage other people as well.)

Don’t just preach to the converted. Convert them!

The most likely candidates to buy your products or services (yes, that’s what we meant by convert; we’re not advocating missionizing) are those who are already convinced.

Dov Gordon put it very well: Whose opinions do you consider intelligent? The people who think the same way you do. You’re more likely to listen to someone eloquently defending the beliefs you already hold.

Example:

If you’re a dentist who prefers hypnosis over Novocain don’t try to convince me that I should join your practice because hypnosis is better. You might as well be talking to your drill.

You’re far better off talking to people who have fear of needles or some other issue that makes them want to avoid the Novocain. Then you show how hypnosis is consistent with what’s already important to them.

(This is from Dov’s “Manual to Systematically and Consistently Attract First-Rate Customers,” which if you want a step-by-step manual with eye-opening insights, worksheets and exercises, is fantastic – very highly recommended.)

So when you want to make a sale, don’t look for those who need convincing. Look for those who are already convinced of the idea behind your product.

You’ll have a much easier time selling dog sweaters to pet owners who are convinced that their dog has to be fashionable (or that the fur covering he was born with wasn’t enough) – than you will be convincing dog owners who couldn’t care less that “It’s important that your dog be fashionable!”

How do you do this?

First, define “convert.” What do you want them to do? What do you want them to buy?

Let’s say it’s those dog sweaters.

Convert = buy dog sweater

Now, define what someone would need to be thinking if they were to go for your product.

Principle = My dog needs to look stylish.

So who are the converted?

Converted = People who believe their dog needs to look stylish.

When you put up a billboard saying:

You’ll have them nodding and saying either consciously or sub-consciously: Yes, of course it’s important that my dog be well dressed. This sweater manufacturer obviously understands that. So if that’s the idea behind this sweater… it’s for my dog.

Your niche may be less obvious than this one. But there’s still a principle behind it. And the people who believe it are the ones who are going to take you seriously, listen and consider buying.

So put a few minutes of thought into what that principle is. Then go out to find all those who already buy into it. Convert them.

Then you can move on to the infidels.

Would you like everyone to see a picture of you next to the blog posts you’ve written when they show up in Google Search? Not just the new personalized search for people who know you, but everyone in the world?

Great idea –

1) Makes your blog post stand out

2) Gives the post a boost in Google

3) Helps your personal branding

This is an easy, step-by-step guide on how to do this for a WordPress blog, based on AJ Kohn’s Guide to Implementing Rel=Author.

*Note: There is no guarantee if and when Google will decide to use your avatar.  For example, even though I’ve set everything up as I explain below, and it tests accurately in their testing tool, Google will never show mine because it’s not a photo of me.  From their authorship guidelines:

Your profile picture must be a photograph of yourself and of high quality in order to be eligible to be shown as a thumbnail in search results.

Oh, well.  I’m a bit camera-shy, so I’m sticking with my non-personal-photo avatar, which you’ll spot below.  But if you don’t mind using a photo of yourself, read on…

You need to have a Google+ profile for this. If you don’t, create one. I probably don’t have to tell you how to do that, because if you use any Google product (like Gmail), you’ve been provided with multiple prompts to get you to sign up. In case you haven’t, just go to www.google.com and click the +You link in the very top left corner. Follow the instructions. Use your real name – or whatever you want showing up in Google search results.

Now the real steps:

Step 1.

Find a page on your WordPress blog where you don’t mind having a link to your Google+ profile (the About page usually works well). Add whatever text you want to link from, and then go into the HTML tab.

<a href=”https://plus.google.com/yourprofilenumberhere” rel=”me”>

How do you get the number?

Open a new tab and go to your Google+ page. (For those of you who just opened one, that means signing into your account and clicking that +WhoeverYouAre link in the top left.) Then click on your name that’s right next to your avatar.

Take the number that appears in the URL (ignore the u/1/ or u/0/) and paste it into the code.

Save that page.

Step 2.

Every blog post of yours will need to have a link going to the page on your blog we just added the Google+ link to. The easiest way to do that is to put it in the author link that WordPress themes usually put automatically before your blog post text.

Go into your Dashboard, click Appearance in the side menu, and then click Editor.

(Do be careful here, because if you make mistakes you can drastically affect the appearance of your site. You might want to copy the content of the file you’ll be modifying to Notepad so you can always replace it if you do something wrong and don’t know how to reverse it.)

Click “Single Post” on the sidebar. (Hint: the list is in alphabetical order.)

Find where it says <div class=”meta”> in your code.  After that, it probably says something that involves <php the_author> and maybe <php the_date>.

Replace the entire line from <div class=”meta”> to the next </div> with:

<div class=”meta”>Posted by <a rel=”author” href=”http://yourpageURLfromstep1″><?php the_author(); ?></a> on <?php the_date();?></div>

If you prefer no date, use:

<div class=”meta”>Posted by <a rel=”author” href=”http://yourpageURLfromstep1″><?php the_author(); ?></a><div>

(Make sure you actually put in your own URL!)

Update.

Almost done! One more step – and no more code!

Step 3.

Go to your Google+ profile page.

Click the blue “Edit Profile” button on the top right.

In the right sidebar, click on the “Contributors To” section.

Click “Add a custom link.”

Put in the URL for the “About” page from Step 1.

Don’t forget to save!

That’s it. You’re done.

If you want to check it, you can go to Google’s Rich Snippet testing tool and put in a blog post URL to test it.

Hope to see you soon – appearing in the search results!

That plumber has been here for an hour already – and I have to go out for an appointment soon. What’s taking him so long?

You walk hesitantly into your basement, where the plumber is removing a section of your wall. “Um… how much longer do you think you’re going to be?”

He turns around. “Ma’am – your issue was low water pressure, right? It took me about 45 minutes just to track the problem down, to see where in your house’s entire plumbing you were losing the water. NOW I can fix it.”

Oh. “Thanks,” you respond. Maybe I’ll reschedule that appointment.

When it comes to solving your marketing problem – you need to first know what the problem is. Where are your potential customers leaking out and turning your customer stream into a drip?

Danny Iny was invited by Dov Gordon to speak to his subscribers on that very topic, and as I follow Danny’s marketing blog anyway, I made sure I put aside time on that Thursday evening to listen. Here’s a synopsis:

There are 4 links in Danny’s “customer plumbing infrastructure,” 4 key points that a person needs to pass through to become the customer you’ve always wanted:

1. Stranger -> Lead (“I heard you have something interesting to offer.”)

2. Lead -> Prospect (“I’m interested in buying what you have to offer.”)

3. Prospect -> Customer (“I’m buying what you offer.”)

4. Customer -> Repeat Customer (“I’m buying what you offer again.”)

Fixing your “low customer pressure” is about identifying where the people are leaking out of the stream. Do you have lots of people who hear about you, but no one is interested? Is everyone interested, but in the end of the day no one buys? Or do people buy, but they never come back for anything else, and so you constantly have to get new customers? Or does your business languish in obscurity, and no one ever hears about you, so they don’t even past the “stranger” step?

Think about it. Write out the above steps for your business. Here’s a sample:

Stranger = Random web surfer

Lead = visitor to my website

Prospect = sent in a contact form

Customer = became my client

Repeat Customer = hired me again

Which transition is “leaking” the most for you? Once you’ve figured that out, you can move on to the fix, which Danny described (in a very general sense) as:

1. Stranger -> Lead: need to define target market, figure out where they are and what message they need to hear to be interested

2. Lead -> Prospect: need to make target market and message more specific so will resonate more

3. Prospect -> Customer: need to improve offer structure or price

4. Customer -> Repeat Customer: need to let them know there is more available to buy

Plumbers take time to identify the leak source before they open their tool box. Before you pull out your marketing tools to increase your customer pressure – take some time now to find the leak.

Any ideas on how to fix the above leaks?  We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Sounds simple, no?

If you feel sick and you go to the doctor, you expect him to examine you before prescribing anything. If he just hands you a prescription as soon as you say your throat hurts, you’d probably find a new doctor.

Except in marketing we often don’t do that. I’m not selling as many products as I want. I must need – more marketing!

So I go and pay for Adwords, hire SEO and social media consultants, start a Facebook page… But did I ever figure out what the problem was? WHY am I not selling more products?

Am I treating the problem – or just a symptom?

Maybe it has nothing to do with “not enough marketing.” Maybe my website is turning people off. Maybe there’s no market for my product.

We saw that recently with someone who came to us for consulting. He wasn’t getting as many sales of his product as he hoped, and he knew there was very little real competition. We saw together that he was on page 1 of Google for some of his target keywords, and then he commented, “It might just be a bad business venture.”

Not necessarily, we told him. In order to find out, you have to actually see data. You have to go into your Google Analytics reports and see how many people are coming to your site and how they got there. His lack of sales could stem from a few VERY different issues, which would need very different treatment plans.

To name two possibilities:

If he had very few visitors, that could mean that people might not actually be scrolling down to where he appeared in the search results

OR

the search terms he appears for aren’t being searched for often enough

OR

the title or description in the search results is a turn-off.

If he actually had a large number of visitors, but still no purchases, that could mean that people are qualified customers but are being turned off by the website

OR

that the website is showing up for irrelevant searches and drawing unqualified customers

Which one of those issues it is could be determined by looking a little more closely into the data or at the website.

So next time you go to a “doctor” for your website, make sure he actually examines it. Are you getting some painkiller for a generic symptom, or you’re actually getting a cure for a defined problem?

(Up next week: coverage of Danny Iny’s “Chain of Conversion” – guidelines to identifying where your problem is, so you can take the right steps to solve it.

Make sure you catch it by subscribing to email updates – and get our free special report on The 5 Critical Steps to Getting More Customers from the Internet!)

Depends.

Was that a groan I just heard?

Yes, a number – like 2 – would be simpler. Details on the number – like Facebook and Google+ – would be even better.

But if you’re actually involved in social media to get more customers, clients or readers – life doesn’t work that way.

There are two steps to figuring out which social networks YOU personally need to master to help your business succeed.

The first is knowing with absolute clarity who your audience is. Are they:

• mothers who struggle to find a balance between discipline and positivity?
• vegans who have anemia and can’t find the right foods to get their iron level up naturally?
• email marketers who need their email open rate up another few percentage points?
• young Australian men who have tried every extreme sport under the sun and want a new thrill?

Yes, it does need to be that specific. “Mothers,” “vegans,” “email marketers” and “young Australian men” are not going to work as audience definitions. That’s important for the message you send as well as where you choose to send it, but we’ll discuss that another time.

When you’ve gotten that specific audience with a specific issue they’re looking to solve, now comes step two:

What social networks are THAT AUDIENCE on?

If they flock to Twitter, that’s where you go. If they congregate on Facebook, you may need to open an account, a page, a group there. Do they spend hours a day watching YouTube? Do they network on LinkedIn? Are they hanging out on Google+?

?  ?  ?  ?

How do you know?

General statistics are not so helpful, because it’s hard to find any that are as specific as you want. You can find out percentages of male/female audiences on the social networks, but to find out the percentage of anemic vegans on Twitter vs. Facebook – it’s just not going to happen.

Facebook is the only network that has a built in useful tool in its advertising center (which you don’t need to be an advertiser to use). Just start making an ad (you can type in nonsense), and when you click “Continue”, you’ll get the “Targeting” section. Select your target locale, gender, age and interests – and voila – Facebook will give you stats like this:

(Thanks to Marty Weintraub of AimClear for the suggestion of using Facebook Ad Targeting for general Facebook demographic research.)

Most other sites have a user search function, which usually searches for words in the profile or bio. The results will give you a general idea if there are a good number of users who fit that description.

The best way to know (like most other specific market research) is to talk to as many people you can in your target market. You probably know some if you’re writing content or making products for them. So ask a few: where do you hang out on the internet?

Then go.