Measuring Engagement

Social media marketing remains the buzz for now. Joining social media sites where your prospective clients are likely to be. Joining the conversation already taking place on those sites. Developing rapport and name recognition.

All of this takes time. A huge chunk of time. And what if none of the obvious indicators are taking place?

As we touched upon yesterday, just because you provide a way for people to comment on your blog doesn’t mean they will.

Just because we offer an opt-in to our mailing list doesn’t mean our reader is willing to sign-up.

You can use Google Analytics to tell which pages are getting the most hits and where readers click next. You can even measure the amount of time your readers spends on a page. All of these are good indicators. After all if you are getting 50 visitors to your site each day and over half of them click away in seconds you can safely infer there is something unclear in the message that brought them to your page in the first place.

This is where split testing comes in. If you change your headline or reorganize the information on your page will readers stay longer?

But you also need to know how often information on your site is being downloaded. Maybe you market to a busy audience, a non-contributing audience that does not willingly leave comments.

Do you know how many other sites are linking to yours? Those links not only tell Google something about the value of the information you are publishing but how others in your niche judge what you have to say.

How do you find that information about your site?

When you are starting out, free metrics are hard to interpret. Some aren’t even available to you until you’ve been up for a year. It was 12 months before I could check my site’s performance on Alexa, for example. Other services like Compete.com and Quantcast require their code to be added to every page on your site and only after months or a year will you start seeing your metrics.

A better choice for newer sites is Vistrac, which will let you add their code to 10 pages on your site and track the behavior of up to 500 visitors for free each month.

Patience is a virtue but it is in short supply within the internet marketing community.

That is one of the reasons why I recommend most people considering launching a home business get a job online instead. They aren’t glamorous; they don’t pay well; few offer benefits. However instead of wasting time and money investing in hosting, autoresponder fees, paid advertising and outsourcing with money and time you may not have, you could at least be bringing some money in to help out with bills.

Danielle is a work-at-home college student who recently published a Squidoo lens that offers numerous job sources online. Danielle also maintains a blog called Fast Recession Money.

For more online jobs, you can search Guaranteed Home Employment on my site.