The 9 Essential Statistics for understanding your site’s traffic

There are just so many factors that you need to look and analyze when it comes to traffic stats. Where to begin with? The Business Insider summarized 9 essential statistics that everyone who does website stuff should understand.

1. Unique Visitors
2. Page Views
3. Referrers
4. Search Terms
5. Entry and Exit pages
6. Bounce Rate
7. Visit By Hour
8. Visit By Country

Funny that the title says 9 but only 8 was listed.

The 9 Essential Stats for understanding your site’s traffic [via The Business Insider]

The Mindset for Success from ShoeMoney’s Story

As it states at the bottom of the newsletter ShoeMoney sent to all subscribers today that I have his permission to repost, here you go. Needless to say, it’s a wonderful story that sure provides me a lot of juice to keep moving on.

I am hearing a lot of great stories from people who have gone through my free shoemoneyx.com course and doing some neat things generating revenue.   Please keep sending me your stories.  I love hearing them! That is why I made the program!

Now I don’t mean to pee in your cheerios but I want to talk to you and share something with you. Something I feel is really important.  Making money online is easy.  Profiting from it over the long haul IS NOT.

Eventually everyone’s ship comes in.  When your ship comes in what will you do?  Maybe your ship just came in?

This is my personal story and dealing with my first big success and how I was able to position myself for the best outcome.

I hit rock bottom about 8 years ago.  I was 420 lbs, smoked 2 packs of cigarettes a day, about 60k in credit card debt, and just had lost my job.  I also sleeping on my friends couch.

Its important to know what rock bottom feels like.  Its important to know what its like to really be hungry.  Its important to know what it feels like to drive a 1990 rusty van with no muffler.  Its important to know what having massive amounts of credit card debt and what appears to be no way out feels like.  Its important to have that feeling that you are a failure at life and maybe that’s all you will ever be.
Now I say that its important but to me it was ABSOLUTELY crucial in developing my mindset for success.

I am guessing you have seen the image of me and the Google AdSense check for 132,994.97 for one month. 

Its actually hard to search for anything related to making money on the internet and NOT see it…

The one thing I have never really talked about was the back story on WHY I took a picture of me and that AdSense Check for 133k before taking it to the bank to cashing it.

As I am sure you know Google AdSense is run on your website and you get money when visitors click on your AdSense ad.  Almost all of my traffic was coming from Google so I felt it was really a house of cards.  If Google felt my website was no longer relevant for the keywords they were sending me traffic then over night I was done!

At the time I was totally new to making money on the internet and I never thought it was going to last.

I took the picture because I always thought that if my websites disappeared tomorrow I could leverage that picture into a book or something… I didn’t really know…

I always had in the back of my mind what rock bottom felt like and I never wanted to experience that again.

In hind site it was even more brilliant then I ever thought it was going to be.  Especially that that month was the last month that Google ever sent out paper checks for over $10,000.00  so really nobody will ever have a check.

But I never took my success for granted and I diversified my website income into many other forms instead of just Google AdSense.

I learned how to make money from donations,  affiliate programs direct banner sales,  selling my own products, and subscription.  Within a few months my subscription revenue, Direct banner sales, and affiliate revenue each by themselves dwarfed my Google AdSense revenue.

So I have all this money coming in from the website im all diversified but I still did not really feel safe.

So I started the ShoeMoney blog (originally on googleninja.com before I obtained shoemoney.com) basically just talking about the ins and outs of making money.

Because I had the Google AdSense Check for 133k and some pretty other large screenshots of revenue that I could use to make points on what I was talking about the blog VERY quickly became an authority in the space of making money online.   So much so that in its first year that we implemented advertising on shoemoney.com we did over 2007 $100,000.00 in revenue.

In 2008 we boosted that to $490,000.00

in 2009 shoemoney.com will make over $750,000.00 probably closer to 1m in revenue.

But lets take a step back.  Because we had built this authority we were able to leverage our audience into starting our own conference called the elite retreat.  We started the event in 2006 and have sold out events every year since.  Even at a price tag of $5,000.00 per person.

In 2007 we leveraged the blog audience and our contacts and started our own advertising network called Auctionads.  Auctionads is truly an amazing success story and one of my proudest accomplishments.  We took a company from 0 to 25k active publishers doing over 3 million per month in revenue in less then 4 months and sold the company.  That is simply unheard of.  It would not have been possible without leveraging our previously accomplishments and taking them to the next level.

So what drives me to keep doing more things?

I can remember that feeling of hitting rock bottom like it was yesterday.

ONLY now the steaks are MUCH bigger.  I am now married and have 2 kids.  I also have 20 employees that I am responsible for.

So why am I telling you all this?

I want you to recognize what you have and not take it for granted.

I had to hit rock bottom to find myself and really develop a work ethic and drive for more.  Maybe you don’t? 

Always be leveraging your current position and looking for your next thing. 

I have no doubt that everyone reading this will come into money/success eventually.  If you love what you do and you keep trying then its just the law of averages.  Eventually its going to work.  But when it does what will you do?

Does having a longer term of domain help to increase the search engine ranking?

This is interesting. I was renewing some of the domains my company own on network solution. And this tip box showed up during the checkout process.

I know that having a domain that has longer history helps to increase the search engine ranks but registering a longer term also helps? I don’t really know.

eBay Canada bowed down to CRA

Bad news for eBayers in Canada, as eBay Canada announced that they received a court-authorized requirement from Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) that requires the account information and sales data of Canadian resident eBay members who meet the following criteria:

• Sales of more than $20,000 and at least 24 sales transactions in any of the calendar years 2006, 2007 or 2008, (irrespective of membership in eBay’s PowerSeller program); OR
• Sales of more than $100,000 in any of the calendar years 2006, 2007 or 2008, regardless of the number of sales transactions.

So if you have received a letter from eBay titled as “eBay to comply with Canada Revenue Agency request”, congratulation, you finally have made yourself to the CRA’s list.

Oh, what about privacy? Forget it! When it comes to Government and Money, who cares about privacy!!

You better check here if you are a serious eBayer or a serious eBayer wanna-be.

Keyword Meta Tags don’t mean a thing, at all

If you heard a so-called SEOer telling you that you should use Keyword meta tags to gain higher rank in your niche, you can tell them to shut up. Because Google now confirms firmly that Google does not use keywords meta tag in its web search ranking, at all. No matter how many keywords you put on and no matter how good they are, they don’t mean a thing, at all.

Q: Does Google ever use the “keywords” meta tag in its web search ranking?
A: In a word, NO.

Q: Why doesn’t Google use the keywords meta tag?
A: Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag.

Q: Does this mean that Google ignores all meta tags?
A: No, Google does support several other meta tags. This meta tags page documents more info on several meta tags that we do use. For example, we do sometimes use the "description" meta tag as the text for our search results snippets, as this screenshot shows:

Even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets we show, we still don’t use the description meta tag in our ranking.

Q: Does this mean that Google will always ignore the keywords meta tag?
A: Unlikely.

Nice, thanks Matt. You just cleared up another area that confuses people a lot.

Steps to get your site back in Google if it’s been penalized or worse banned

BAM, you woke up one day and only realized that your money-making site went straight to the hell and was completed removed, de-indexed, and banned from Google. It’s complete a worst nightmare to anyone involved on doing business online.

First, you should find out whether or not your site is banned on Google.

Second, clam down and check what to do if your site is banned.

And follow these steps recommended by John, the guy who was banned on Google over 3 years ago and got back in just a few month back.

Finally, pray and hope thing will turn around.

To recap, here are the steps in order.

1. Follow the webmaster guidelines and correct what you think you did wrong.
2. Fire a reconsideration request with very detailed information, and pray.
3. If still no luck after waiting a while, your last hope is contacting directly to the Googlers, Matt Cutts if you are lucky.

Are duplicate content allowed in Google

There is a popular myth about duplicate content, basically saying that Google penalizes sites for having duplicate content. Well, it is just a non-proof myth that now has been cleared up by Greg Gothaus of the Search Quality Team in Google from his blog post on Google Webmaster Central Blog along with a 15 minute video and presentation slide.

In short, the truth is that this not the case. Google won’t penalize sites for having duplicate content. However, that’s also not saying that duplicate content can’t have a negative impact on your rankings. There are actually a lot more covered in his video, so I highly suggest you take your time watching it through.

Are paid links implemented in JavaScript safe?

If you haven’t realized, Google now can crawl links buried in the JavaScript code, which means the old trick no longer applies. If you are the guy who uses this trick hiding those links that Google don’t like in the JavaScript code you probably should revisit them again to make sure they are Google compliance before the nightmare happens.

That also doesn’t mean you can’t have the paid links on your site. As the Matt guy says in the video below, you definitely can have them on your site, as long as they don’t affect the search engine. And there are a number of ways doing that. For example,

1. Make the link as no-follow by adding rel=”nofollow” to every single paid link.

2. Block them in the robots.txt file, if you are using link cloaking technique.

W3C validation does not factor Google ranking

Surprised? Yes, Video below from Google’s Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team, finally confirms and sets the record straight.

In short, that’s because majority web pages on the internet aren’t validate. Making it factor in Google’s ranking would effect search results. Well, make sense. But don’t put wrong that you shouldn’t care about the W3C validation. In fact, you still should, because it’s much easier maintaining a web page that’s W3C validated than a page that isn’t.

Does mass un-follow all your twitter friends make sense?

It looks like a trend that all of sudden a lot of big players on Twitter started unfollowing all their friends and rebuilt a list that is much smaller and meaningful. Does that make sense at all?

I first saw Scobleizer done that. He even blogged two posts that explained “how can anyone follow 10,000 or more?” and claimed “you are SO unfollowed”. Unfortunately, I couldn’t locate both posts on his blog anymore. But I can tell you that the tone in these two posts sounds so arrogant that I personally can’t take it at all. But that’s not the only reason why I don’t agree with him and his action that unfollowed everyone on his following list.

Then, my role model on Internet Marketing John Chow have done the same lately and explained number of reasons why he did that on his blog. While I agree most of the point he made in this blog, I still don’t see the strong needs that make him to take this extreme action.

I am not going to comment on those reasons one by one to against them but what I really want to say in this post is that don’t do it, especially when you are an ordinary user like me.

Those who did mass unfollow are the big guys who usually have more than half million followers. With that large user base, they basically can do and experiment whatever they want without worrying about too much losing the followers. They have the enough influence that can still make people to follow them no matter what. Besides, having the much smaller ratio of the number of following and the number of follower actually makes them look much better.

We, as the ordinary user in other hand, can’t really do that. If we did the same we would never be able to grow and gain larger followers. We still need to take the routine path and follow the make-sense steps to build our list. This mass unfollow thing just doesn’t make any sense and not belong to a regular user, like you and me.

By the time I am writing this post, I took the action in my twitter account and unfollowed all users who didn’t follow me. Hence, bye bye big guys, I am not following you anymore. What I want more is a two-way communication that not only makes me to hear what you say but also makes you to hear what I say.