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• 11 Ways to Use Twitter to Help Your Site Go Viral

  Twitter is one of the most satisfying ways to spread your website or idea. In addition to referrals, you can also gain loyal users, expert opinions, and possibly friends. It’s unlike any other medium in its ability to propagate interesting things. Word of mouth has always been the best advertising and Twitter is the best vehicle on the internet for word of mouth.

  tags: twitter, web strategy, getanewbrowser

• Boxee

  I believe Boxee will be the “Firefox of media center software”. It’s simple to download and install, it’s available on Mac, Linux, and Apple TV. It will soon be available on Windows

  tags: boxee, getanewbrowser, mediacenter

• Expanding the Cloud: Amazon CloudFront - All Things Distributed

  Amazon CloudFront will be useful for many different application scenarios such as giving your customers low-latency access to popular objects and protecting your site from popularity surges; other popular examples are low-cost delivery of rich media and sustainable fast transfer rates for software distributions.

  tags: getanewbrowser, amazon, cdn

• Murdoch: The Future Of Newspapers Goes Beyond Dead Trees

  Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive of News Corp., gave a speech on Sunday titled “The Future of Newspapers: Moving Beyond Dead Trees.” In the speech, he made the bold statement that newspapers would always be around in some form or other. “Too many journalists seem to take a perverse pleasure in ruminating on their pending demise,” he said. “Unlike the doom and gloomers, I believe that newspapers will reach new heights in the 21st century.”

  tags: newspaper, journalism, media, getanewbrowser

• Jerry Yang, Yahoo Chief, Steps Down

  In a memorandum sent to the company’s staff Monday evening, Mr. Yang, 40, said he would hold the post until the board names his successor, a process he said he would participate in. The Yahoo co-founder said he would then return to his previous job as “chief Yahoo,” a corporate strategy role, and would remain on the board.

  tags: yahoo, business, getanewbrowser

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Two months ago I wrote about Amazon’s plans for launching a Content Delivery Network (What’s a Content Delivery Network?). Today, Amazon announced CloudFront - “a service designed with ease of use in mind from the very beginning.”

So what does this CDN have to offer?

“Today marks the launch of Amazon CloudFront, the new Amazon Web Service for content delivery. It integrates seamlessly with Amazon S3 to provide low-latency distribution of content with high data transfer speeds through a world-wide network of edge locations. It requires no upfront commitments and is a pay-as-you-go service in the same style as the other Amazon Web Services.

Amazon CloudFront has been designed to be fast; the service will cache copies of the content in edge locations close to the end-user’s location, significantly lowering the access latency to the content. High sustainable data transfer rates can be achieved with the service especially when distributing larger objects.” via Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon

Sounds pretty cool right? We will definitely be using this at 48Web for a new project we are launching soon… What for? Hosting and serving multimedia, images, and some downloadable material.

Do you have any questions about using a CDN for your website or business? Ask us questions in the comments or ask me directly.

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Wow.

The new Google Mobile App for iPhone makes it possible for you to do a Google web search using only your voice. Just hold the phone to your ear, wait for the beep, and say what you’re looking for. That’s it. Just talk. Once the App is on, you don’t have to push any buttons to search. Check out the video below to watch engineer Mike LeBeau explain how this works.

And if you’re doing a local search, there’s no need to specify where you are because Google Mobile App now has Search with My Location. Search for “movie showtimes” or “Mediterranean restaurant” and you’ll automatically see results based on your current location.

via Google Mobile Blog

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• Joe The Plumber’s Landing Page

  But one problem nags at me. Local merchants like “Joe The Plumber” usually don’t have a web presence and many don’t really even want one. But if you are going to buy cpc advertising, then you’ll need a place for the clicks to go. The local ad agencies and local oriented web services are happy to create a web presence for local merchants, but they are often poorly designed and there’s no standardization of them.

  tags: web strategy, localization, media, getanewbrowser

• ROI for Social Media Marketing: It’s Complicated

  Know your objectives in advance. Start small, when possible: think “proof of concept.” Track the metrics obsessively. Make sure that your interactive marketing efforts are tied to the sales funnel (e.g., your vp of sales ought to be able to determine where most leads are coming from online). Report frequently.

  tags: pr, social media, roi, web strategy, getanewbrowser

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Web analytics information is KEY to analyzing, developing, and measuring an effective web strategy. There is NO EXCUSE to not be tracking analytics on your website because one of the best and most powerful solutions is free from Google in Google Analytics.

Installing analytics software is just the first step. Knowing what the data gathered means is step two. Most of you probably check your analytics once every couple months and then check only one statistic… “visits”. Although seeing the number of visitors to your website go up via a shiny line graph is cool - tells you only basic information about your site. If you are serious about web strategy you want to look deeper into your data. There are revelations to be had if you know what you are looking for and simple tweaks based on this information can have a tremendous affect on your site.

“We have the data, we have the pretty reports. But we do not have an educated team who can take the resulting statistics and turn them into meaningful plans. The process of creating Web strategy and executing on Web tactics has gone missing.” - Jim Sterne, The Feedback Loop Gap

Here are five basic features of any analytics program beyond “visits” that you should actively be looking at…

1. Bounce Rate - The bounce rate basically tells you how many people landed on your website and left without navigating to other pages. For a blog this statistic can be a little misleading. Since most blogs have a stream of content, visitors often come to read the five latest posts. For sales and landing pages, the bounce rate should be monitored extensively. If your sales landing page has an 80% bounce rate you’re landing page is doing a horrible job converting your traffic.

Regardless of the context of your website there are ways to improve your bounce rate. There are a multitude of reasons for people bailing on your site - ugly, slow, annoying. Or they may have landed on your page via the wrong keywords (see #3 below). Once you can address the problem of high bounce rate you can begin to solve the problem.

2. Traffic Source Mixture - The traffic source mixture often comes in the form of a pie chart and tells you where traffic is coming from. Usually the most prevalent sources are a) search engines b) direct traffic and c) referral traffic. Ideally you want a solid mixture of all three. If you have 90% direct traffic you should optimize your website for search to improve organic traffic results. On the other hand, if you have 90% search traffic you should really try to improve your inbound links from other websites.

3. Keywords Report - The keyword report tells you how your customers are finding you. This is a VERY IMPORTANT aspect to knowing your website and using this data in your web strategy. If people are arriving at your website from keywords that you are not targeting or are irrelevant to your company/product/content you will likely have high bounce rates. The keyword report may also give you ideas on how to promote your site by targeting your “hot” keywords. Your keyword report can also serve to let you know if your SEO campaigns are effective. Are you getting a high amount of traffic for the keywords you are targeting?

4. Visitor Loyalty - How many of your visitors come back? This goes back to the old saying that it’s easier and costs less to sell to your existing customers than it does to acquire or convert new ones. This is true in your web strategy as well. A successful website - regardless of context - should strive for repeat visits. This helps you to build community and trust. Obviously you still need to focus on new visitors but you must strive be sticky and get people to come back.

5. Top Content - Knowing what the top content is on your site provides several advantages. If you know what page or post is most popular on your website you have a great chance at converting them into subscribers or repeat visitors. This can also help to reduce your bounce rate. Often times people arrive to your website via search to read a popular article and leave. You have a great opportunity at those popular pages to get them to stick around, subscribe, and possibly purchase. Make sure your pages that generate the most page views give the user ample opportunity to a) find additional, relevant content b) subscribe to your content and/or c) buy something.

Do you have any analytics tips or tricks? What data do you find ESSENTIAL to track? What have you done to improve bounce rates? Let us know in the comments…

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