I beg your pardon? That wasn’t very friendly was it?

This error message popped up from one of the online systems at work the other day. Actually I thought I’d been pretty busy for quite a while, so this was pretty disappointing to hear.

My point here is: pay attention to the error message that come from your website. And the welcome message. And the login message.

These messages are your chance to interact with your visitors. How often do you get the chance to do this? This is your opportunity to speak direct to your customers, so please say something nice.

Also, remember that the only reason you have the error message in the first place is because your code isn’t working. That’s slightly controversial I know, especially if you are a programmer (like me). Your code should be designed to deal with everything that your visitors throw at your site. In fact, it’s probably worth getting a non-programmer to write your messages.

What should an error message say?

The first thing you should do is apologize. Then explain what happened (from your visitors’ point of view). Tell them what they should do next and show them how to avoid the error in the future.

After all, no one wants to be told off twice.

If you can avoid making any references to other blogs then should be able to limit the chances of:

1. Anyone else finding out about you
2. Learning about other interesting topics to blog about
3. Your Google Ranking ever increasing
4. Helping out your visitors by referring them to other useful information

You don’t want anybody to find you anyway, right? If you don’t need links to other blogs then this avoids the need to read other blogs, so this will save you a ton of time. Also don’t forget that Google values pages that link out to other relevant pages. You don’t want Google to think you are valuable, do you?

Finally, your blog is just for you anyway, isn’t it? Why should you help your visitors when they do find you?

It’s a great place for building focussed content and promoting it. Squidoo rates pretty high in Google and your pages can appear high up in search results.

It’s pretty easy to set up a lens and build some content, but making it successful and getting a good lens rank is a little bit harder. You can make some money if visitors click on the AdSense links which feature on your lens. This is what happened today!

I do know a Giant Squid and you can check out some of her lenses at EverythingMouse on Squidoo. A Giant Squid award is given by the folks at Squidoo to someone who creates top notch lenses (and lots of them). I’ll be following her lead as I develop more lenses and get started on promoting them.

1. Obsessively check your website stats

2. Book a round-the-world-tour

3. Go on your round-the-world-tour

4. Set up an AdWords campaign

5. Obsessively check your AdWords clicks and costs

6. Keep chasing links to your site

7. Watch an entire season of American Idol

What do you like to do while you’re waiting for Google? Leave a comment or you can Vote for your own ideas on my Google Alternatives Squidoo Lens

Part of the answer is to check in with your affiliate (or their provider) and look at your impressions, clicks and sales. But this is only part of the answer.

To get the complete picture you need to use your web analytics tool to track some key things on your site:

1. Page views on the pages with the affiliate links
2. How visitors navigated to these pages
3. Clicks on the links through to the affiliate sites

Why do you need to check these too? I knew you’d ask.

Page views should be approximately the same as the impressions reported by your affiliate. Hopefully your affiliate will report a higher number of impressions as visitors return to their site with the same cookie set. It certainly should not be less – this could be a sign that your tracking code is wrong

Navigation to these pages is useful to know because you want to know where visitors come from and which referrers are working for you. Your web analytics tool should be able to show which is the most successful, whether it’s organic search (Google etc) or direct referrers.

It’s good to start tracking the clicks out of your site. If you don’t track them they will just be reported as exits by your web analytics system. This will give you a terrible click through rate and make your efforts seem worthless! You can add tracking to your outbound links using Javascript onclick functions, or you can insert your own gateway pages that have their own tracking code.

If you can get started with these metrics then you can start to really understand your traffic and what it is doing for you.

Otherwise you’re just working in the dark…