Depending on where you are in your online journey, you may or may not know what Google Analytics is. If you have a web site and you don’t know, then I really recommend you find out! GA or Analytics, as it’s affectionately known, is a great free Google tool which helps you understand who is visiting you web site, how often, and many other things besides. You need a gmail account to get at it, but that’s free. And once you have that, there is a whole world of handy little Google tools available which will help you with things like SEO and much more.

Now, if you DO have Analytics installed on your site, then you should definitely read this post from Leslie Samuel, guest blogging for Yaro Starak. In it, he talks about how to use GA to understand what people search for when they visit your site.  As he puts it, how to read the mind of your visitor: how to find out what visitors are interested in.

Mind you, I am still curious as to how s=kidney (and you’ll have to read the post to know what I am talking about!)

Currently, my little London garden is full of birds. A family of blue-tits is nesting on one side, and a wren family on the other.  The magpies are in full chatter in the early morning, the black birds dig for worms after the rain, and the occasional robin drops by. It’s a constant source of delight for me and for a neighbourhood cat who terrorizes the nester by lurking on a nearby roof and staring at them.

Watching the blue tits, I was reminded of a story from the business guru, Arie de Geus. He was one of the team of hot shots at Shell which brought Scenario Planning (the technique of asking off-the wall, what-if questions to help deal with business risk) to the attention of the business world. He’s also a personal hero of mine.

Some years ago I had the chance to go and listen to him speak at the London Business School. The talk was all about Knowledge management – how businesses can share and spread knowledge and learning across the organisation and beyond. I was beside myself with delight. The talk started slowly, and I found myself dozing, until I heard Arie mention that, in his research on Knowledge Management, one of the sources he had consulted was a specialist in bird behaviour, bird communication and how birds learn.

This sounded sufficiently quirky as to be interesting, so I paid attention.

According to the expert, different types of bird learn from each other in different ways. Before World War II, milk was delivered to homes in the UK in open containers. It was a common sight to see robins and blue-tits having a quick drink from the containers. Back then they didn’t do skimmed, or semi-skimmed. Milk choices were pretty much restricted to full fat, and the birds loved it.

After the war, the UK dairy companies moved over to supplying milk in bottles with a tin foil top. It was more hygienic, particularly as the mild bottles might site around on the door-step for several hours. At first the birds were foiled (excuse the pun), but the more enterprising ones soon figured out how to break through the foil and get back to their old habits.

Within a generation or two, in most areas across the UK, blue-tits could be found treating themselves to doorstep milk from these new bottles. I can remember my mother’s irritation when she went to take the mil in, only to discover the blue-tits had been there before her. But the robins failed to work it out.

The experts asked themselves why this might be. After all, both birds obviously liked milk, individuals in both species had learned how to deal with the new technology, yet only the blue-tits had gone nation-wide on breaking through the bottle tops.

They came to the conclusion that the reason for the differences in behaviour lay in the different social habits of blue-tits and robins. In the autumn, after the breeding season, blue tits flock and come together. New behaviours can be shared, and learning spreads quickly through the blue-tit population.

Robins, on the other hand, are solitary, territorial – even aggressive – little birds.  No flocking for them. The lonesome robin soldiers on, ignorant of how to deal with the new technology, and fiercely defending his right to stay apart from the rest.

I’m sure you know people who are like that too!

So here is the question, when it come to you and your business, are you a robin or a blue-tit? A flocker, or a solitary little bird? How do you develop your knowledge and stay ahead of the challenges and opportunities present by the new technology?

As  a follower of Perry Marshall, I really enjoyed his recent Ezine, ‘Google and your Ex-Wife’. It’s a humorous, racey read, but it makes the point clearly: if you think of Google as anything but a business tool, you are a sucker. Here are a few of Perry’s well-chosen words.

‘If you’re a thin affiliate, you don’t have a business. You have an unpaid market research internship at Google where you take all the risk and they gather all the intelligence. And store it permanently on redundant servers.

If you think Google is your Messiah, you’re just like the guy who thinks they built Vegas so he can make a fast thousand bucks this weekend. He’s gonna get screwed.

If you understand that Google is a TOOL, and only a tool – if you understand that it’s YOUR job to build a business that’s so irresistible that publishers everywhere are going to want to sell you traffic – then you’re going to be just fine.’

Ryan Deiss goes a step further – check out his video proposing that internet marketing as we know it is dead. Ryan reckons that ‘thin guys’ – that’s small advertisers – on Google and Facebook and the like will soon be squeezed out altogether. Google will stop selling direct to us, and we’ll have to go through a middle man. He predicts that the Internet will soon be ruled by 10 or so Walmart-like companies, and he uses some compelling arguments to back this up.

Add to all this the fact that Google have recently changed the rules of their algorithms so that SEO tactics which used to work no longer do, and we start to see see several new trends emerging.

What does all this mean for the business owner wanting to marketing online? If nothing else, it serves to emphasise the importance of having a really robust business model. If your whole online marketing strategy is geared at getting to number 1 on Google, you might want to question whether it’s really a good model.

I recently had an email from Rich Schefren of Strategic Profits, a highly successful entrepreneur turned online marketer and online business guru. Schefren talks a lot of sense about business models, and his argument is that content marketing (where you write loads of articles, and tweets and blogs) has its place, but is not a good strategy for generating leads.

Firstly because its time consuming, even if you use automated tools to propagate your message, which Rich counsels against. Secondly because – in his view- content marketing is best used to create credibility and though leadership, rather than to generate leads. SEO marketing to generate  leads is, in his view, a hugely mistaken application of resources.

It all adds up  – get the business model right and use the Internet to support it, not the other way round. Even if yours is an online business.

I’ve always been fascinated by business, and I’ve been advising business owners for most of my working life, so I enjoy TV reality shows with a business slant, like ‘The Apprentice’ or ‘The Restaurant Inspector’ (where an expert restauranteur turns round failing restaurants). But it was a recent episode of ‘The Hotel Insepector’ that really got me thinking.

On this show, the Hotel Inspector was helping a hotel owner who saw his hotel as being upmarket with a ’boutique flavour’. One of the questions Alex, the ‘inspector’, asked him was what his costs were. He had no idea, and could soon be seen phoning a supplier to find out the cost of bacon, saying ‘there’s a resident tyrant who says I should know what everything costs’. His approach to pricing was to decide what he thought the market would bear, and charge accordingly. Grumbling bitterly he made a half hearted attempt to gather the information needed, but soon got bored.

After giving him various tasks, the hotel inspector left him to it for a while. It quickly became obvious that the most important thing she had asked him to do – get his head round his accounts – was the last thing he had in mind.  He could be seen on his hands and knees polishing the floors, servicing the rooms, hoovering, doing the garden.  Anything except go near the accounts. ‘I don’t have time for that – I’m too busy, I do everything myself, and there are more important, urgent things to get on with.’

The sad thing is, his attitude is typical of many entrepreneurs and business owners. Back when I used to advise garages and gas station owners, I found that several of my customers simply stuck all their paperwork in a large box, unfiled, unsorted and unread, and handed the box to the accountants at the end of the year.

These tended to be the customers whose businesses lurched from crisis to crisis, and had to pay cash in advance for their tanker deliveries because the oil company couldn’t trust them.  The people who couldn’t understand that if you want to run a business, you need to understand basic business management principles, as boring as that may seem.  Either that or hire in someone who does have this knowledge.

And it’s just as important for business success in an online business as an offline, bricks and mortar enterprise.

Do you know what you should be measuring in your business? What do you measure? And how often? Do you know if you are making a profit or a loss, and by how much? How well do you understand concepts like working capital, cash flow, assets, liabilities and debtors? Do you know what a balance sheet is and why it is important?

If this all sounds likes gobbledygook to you, then do yourself a favour and get some basic training or coaching around business finance.  There’s plenty of good information to be found just by googling ‘free business finance information’. According to an article in USA Today, around 85% of businesses fail within the first year of existence. Some statistics suggest that it’s nearer to 60%, but even so, that is an awful lot of failure, and pain. So what’s the main reason small businesses fail? Because their owners don’t spend enough time understanding what they need to do to manage the businesses.

I’ve been a fan and follower of Frank Kern for some years now. The Man talks a lot of sense about internet marketing, and business in general. He’s made a fortune out of the internet, and even survived the dreaded Google Slap.  So when he has something to say it’s worth listening.

His latest State Of The Internet Address is 30 minutes of straight talking. His theme is optimism in business, via the value of offline marketing, the importance of levels of service and faster answers, and the three principles of building a business.  Attract quality leads, turn those leads into happy customers, and turn the happy cusotmers into repeat business.  He doesn’t tell you how, but he will tickel your brain cells.

Recommended New Year viewing!

As someone who blogs and is involved in internet marketing I am always on the lookout for new resources.  One of the biggest challenges for any blogger is keeping content regular and fresh (I definitely fail on the ‘regular’), so I was really delighted to read this post by my mate Steve Watson on creating compelling content.

Steve is very modest about his own blogging, but his blogs are useful and to the point.  He doesn’t just blog for the sake of it. So check out his archives and see what other gems he has to offer.

Highly Recommended!

I have recently been asked to help develop online marketing strategies for a couple of technophobes.  In every case, what my clients wanted was some kind of guide to the questions they can ask developers, and the things they need to include in a developers’ brief.

Trust seems to be a big issue – understandably so, since many online marketing experts are only a page ahead in the manual from where their clients are!  I recently attended a great seminar on using Google AdWords with Brittany Lynch.  Brittany’s material was pretty eyeopening -as were the comments of some of the other delegates about their experiences of using ‘experts’ to place google ads for them, and doing it really badly.  By the end of the seminar, the delegates knew more about AdWords than their online experts!

So it is with online marketing generally.  If someone claims they are an SEO expert, how long do you give them before you decide they are (or aren’t) the expert for you?  A friend recently contacted me because the website she had had designed wasn’t generating any income, after 3 months.  Her question was, had she been taken for a ride by her developer?  The answer in that case was, probably not.  The developer had created a great site, and incorporated some good strategies for generating traffic and – potentially – revenue.

What the developer hadn’t done was to clarify just how long it might take before her client could expect to see real revenue coming in.  She had also let her client think that once the site was up, it could be left alone for months or even years, and like a beautiful little machine it would produce money all by itself.  Optimistic!

If you are a technophobe, or new to internet marketing, firstly insist on getting a proposal from your  developer/internet marketing expert.  Get them to state clearly what they expect the revenue profile to look like, and what guarantees they offer.  Get them to teach you how to use the various tools (such as Google Analytics) for monitoring your site – and then use the tools.  If you can log in to a google account, you can use Analytics.

It’s like monitoring your bank account.  If you want to have an online business, you have to be prepared to act like a business person.

Eben Pagan has just posted his third Gurublueprint video – all about how to make money online cheaply and easily.

Actually it’s not just cheap – it’s about as near to free as you can get.

In this video, he shows you how to make an online presentation (including video) in the space of about 10 minutes.  True, he’s using Screencaster, which is a bit of $97 software.  If you’re willing to keep your information soundbites down to under 10 minutes you can do what he did totally for free by using Jing – although you’re more likely to use short soundbites for advertising, rather than sellable product.

Of course, Eben is preparing for a big launch on June 1st, which is why he is giving away so much information. But it’s really good quality information for anyone with an interest in building an online business.  He’ll probably take the videos down soon after the launch – so go take a look now.

Meantime I am about to experiment with Google Website Optimiser.  An interesting tool that allows you to test different looks and feels and content. It’s been around a while, and I had forgotten I had access to it!  We’ll see….

One of the challenges most internet marketers face is how to build a list.  I’ve just been watching a video by Brendon Burchard which tells you exactly how to do this starting with a very small list, which may just be your friends and relations.

He calls it ‘collaborative compounding’.  The idea is that you get together with a group of people – maybe friends, maybe people you’ve met at seminars – who also have small lists, and you all promote one another.  It’s an extraordinarily quick way to double, treble, quadruple the number of people you talk to about whatever it is you are offering.  The only technology bit is that you have to create a squeeze/opt-in page for people to go to.

The snag is, that this particular hot tip comes near the end of the video, but to be honest, the rest of the video is well worth a watch (and no, I am not an affiliate, so I am not making money here!).  It’s just over an hour long, and full of realy useful information about how to position yourself as an expert in your field. More importantly, it’s how to position yourself as an expert that other people want to listen to.

The video was originally created as part of a promotion to sell a course from his Experts Academy, so I don’t know how long he’ll leave it up, and he is definitely someone worth listening to.

Many internet newbies imagine that internet marketing is all about tekkie stuff. Get some products, buy some get-rich-quick scheme form a guru (or not so guru) and bang! That’s it.

Not true. And the best gurus, people like Rich Schefren or Frank Kern, know this. (And yes, those are affiliate links – I really respect what these guys have to say.)

Before you ever get into the technical or product-selling side (whether you’re doing it as an affiliate, or using Adwords, or creating your own) you have to learn to think like a business.

Basic things like how much am I spending on all this, and how much money is coming in. If you’re spending more than you have coming in, you have a loss (or possibly a hobby). If you’re spending less than you have coming in, you have a profit. Celebrate! And then think about whether you have costed in your time.

If you want to start thinking in a business like way, but you haven’t a clue where to start, then try Nicola Cairncross’ book ‘The Money Gym’. Updated for 2010.

It isn’t just about Internet Marketing: it’s all about achieving financial freedom in a way that works for you. But first you have to start treating yourself as a business.

And think about what YOUR dreams are. As Frank would say, how do you come from your core self? Because when you come from your core self, the people have a reason to buy for you. Check out Frank’s video – it’s long ,and there’s a slow build, but the punch line is worth having.

Meantime, I’m off to Hawaii to pursue my studies of Hawaiian Huna – the ancient psychological and spiritual teachings of the Hawaiians. See you on the other side of the world!