Google Analytics

After looking at my analytics account I found that my visits each month is slowly decreasing. But it is not going at a fast rate. I decease about three visits each month. It started out with 32 visits in February. Then it went down to 29 in March. And finally now it is 29 visits in April. Even though I am not getting as much visits each month, I feel fine with the amount of traffic coming into my web site.  About 42% of my traffic is direct traffic. This means that people know my site and keep coming back to it making up 30 out of my 87 visits. The other 57 visits are coming from new visitors. Most of these visits are from organic searches made on Google. As far as content goes I am getting a good spread to visits to my blogs and pages. The problem is that people are going to my pages but they are not reading my posts. They only average about a minute on each page. This is a big problem that I need to fix.  Overall I am a little displeased with my results because the traffic means nothing is the people don’t stay on my page.

My Key Takeaway

One of the most important things I learned in strategic internet marketing was that everything you do to try to drag traffic into the site must be interesting and engaging. If your ads, website layout, or page content is uninteresting then no one will click on it and the ones that do won’t come back. This is the key to internet marketing. If it is not engaging then no one will care.

Looking to The Future

This class has really made me understand the work that goes into getting someone’s attention on the Internet. Internet marketing takes a lot of work. I am glad I took this class because I found out that I am really not fit for a job in this field. It takes long hours and hard thinking in front of a computer to do well in this field. I need to be out moving around when I am working. This class was a great experience and I will always remember it.

I did three things to make my web site more optimized. The first thing that I did was that I put the key phase love JMU in the title of my blog post. This was a great idea because the spider looks at the title and the url to find key words. By having the key phase love JMU in the title makes it more optimized and goes higher on the organic result page. This is important because the sooner you are on the result page the more likely you are going to get clicked for the key word love JMU. The next thing I did to make my page more optimized for the key phase love JMU was that I used it a lot in the body of text. I try to use it as much as possible while still making the post enjoyable to read. When optimizing a page you must find a balance between optimization and readability. I wanted to have people come to my post and read it without noticing how much I actually said love JMU.  Finally with the two pictures I put love JMU in the alt text of the picture. When spiders are crawling they will see that the key word is in the alt text and that will make the page more optimized. I feel I did a great job optimizing my page. Give my page a couple of days and it will start flying up to the top of the result page.

Now that I am graduating I am looking back and thinking about how I love JMU. But what is it that I love about JMU? One thing that makes me love JMU so much is how every student has school pride on Fridays during football season. You go to class and everybody is showing their pride by wearing purple shirts. It is a great place when you see a whole school showing their love for JMU when they unite and rock the purple. Every student is friendly and welcoming. I have yet to find a student that was rude or uppity.  They all love JMU and want to show why to every other student they see. Everybody on campus loves JMU and shows pride for their school. It is hard to resist on that feeling. You become part of this culture that is invested in the university. Another thing that makes me love JMU so much is how all of the professors are there to help you whenever you need it and how they get invested in your personal life by wanting you to succeed. The professors exude the small town vibe by getting to know each student. They are great people to be around because they truly care about the students they teach. It’s like they love JMU and everyone that is a part of it.  It’s a great place to be. That’s why I love JMU.

Webmaster lets you do so much. It is a great way for you to find out what is making your site more and less optimized. One of the cooler things is the search query information. Search query in webmaster shows what key phrases that are related to your site are being searched for and how many times has it lead to someone to see your organic ad and clicked on your site. Another thing that web master does is shows you that best keywords that relate to your site. This could be helpful when creating a Google AdWords campaign.  You could create a campaign and use these key words to drive traffic to your site. Another great thing I learned about was the crawl error section. After looking at it, it seems that I have one page that the search engine cannot get into. This is great to know because now I can go in and fit it to make my site more optimized. Finally I really like the links into my site section in Webmaster. It allows me to see all of the sites that are linking to my site. From what we have learned so far is that the more links that are going in and out, the better your site looks to search engine sites. Over all webmaster is a great thing to help you develop your site and make more optimized. I hope to use these tools so that by the end of the semester I show up on the first page of search engine results.

Lindsay Crone graduated from James Madison University in 2008. After she graduated she went on to work for Advertising.com which is an AOL Advertising company. Later she got a new job and would go on to be one of eight people start a Baltimore building as the Creative Editor for The Search Agency.

In her lecture I learned three things that gave me a great view of what internet marketing is all about. First I learned that when you are working in the internet marketing field you could have a number of clients you are dealing with. You must constantly keep up with the ads you generate for them and make sure they stay relevant.  Another thing that I had never thought about until her lecture was how you need stay caught up on current events because it could affect how and when your client’s ads get shown. Lindsay told us a story about a lady that had flowers sent to her when she was in the house deceased. She had to go in and put up negative keyphases so her client flowers.com so it would not show up in results with the news story of the lady. The final thing I learned from Ms. Crone’s lecture was how we now must try to market to numerous forms of media. With people on the computer, Ipads, smart phones, and watching television you need to create all different types of ads to fit those devices.  With smart phone you want your ads to be simple and to the point. On the other hand, on the television you want the ad to be engaging. All in all I enjoyed the lecture and came out of it with some great knowledge.

5.) I’m a Huge Virginia Tech Football Fan –

My dad would always go to Tech football games. As years went on he bought more tickets and started taking my siblings and my mom. By the time I came a lot my family had season tickets and it was the thing we did on the weekends. Now I’m a huge fan, going to all the home games with the family and even some of the away one with my dad and older brother.

4.) I Love Baltimore Orioles’ Baseball –

A few years ago my girlfriend and I went on a weekend trip with my sister and her husband to see the Orioles play. As soon as I stepped into the ball park I fell in love with the team and the sport. The next summer I made it to twelve games and watched about 80% of all the games on television.  Now I watch almost all of the preseason games and plan on going to a least 20 of the game this year.

3.) I like to Bowl –

When I was 12 my grandfather would take me and my cousin London bowling. As the years went on my cousin started competing and every time I would visit him we would go head to head. Eventually I bought all of Landon’s old gear, started practicing, and eventually took a college course on bowling.

2.) I use to compete in Native American Dancing –

When I was young and in scouting I saw these people come and dance during one of my summer camps. I was fascinated with these people and thought it looked cool. When I got older I found out this group was part of the Order of the Arrow. The Order of the Arrow is a organization within Scouting that fellow Scouts nominate you in to. Once I got in I started dancing and at one point was third in the state.

1.) I Own a BMW –

When I was seven I saw a Z3 Roadster BMW. Right then and there I knew I wanted one. I told my parents when I was big enough I want to have that car. They told me that if I did well in school and never get into trouble they would get it for my birthday. As I got older I did well in school but I never thought I would actually get  the car. Sure enough the October of senior year my parents saw a Roadster at a great price and bought it for me.

Meetup is one of the top 15 Most Popular Social Networking Sites in 2011. It is a site that allows you to connect with people locally who have similar interests. It’s a place where you can meet up with people who have similar hobbies and enjoy them together. So if you enjoy playing board games and you live in El Paso, TX then you can join the South West Area Gamers. The South West Area Gamers have created a page on Meetup were people can get news, history, and membership information on the group. When I saw this I suddenly thought about how a local company where I live could market and benefit from this site.

The Incredible Flying Objects is a store located in Winchester, VA. This store sells a numerous selection of different hobbies and things of interest. Two of their biggest selections are in magic and juggling.  If the owner, who actually loves magic and juggling, made two different group pages on Meetup then he could attract local magic and jugging enthuses while only targeting local customers. It would be a free marketing campaign and he could have all the meetings at his store. In turn this would bring in sales because all the members would most likely buy their stuff from him. Plus if you have the meetings on a Saturday then the owner could have the people come in and get other people interested in magic and juggling through demonstration how fun it can be. This in turn brings in more customers and all is still free marketing. In all reality the owner could make group pages for all of the different hobbies his sales and have them meet on different days so there is always something going on at the store.

Welcome to my blog.  I am currently enrolled in Strategic Internet Marketing (MKTG 470) taught by Dr. Theresa B. Clarke at James Madison University.  As one of the course requirements, all students will be completing some of the assignments as blog posts.  This is my first official blog post for Dr. Clarke’s course in the JMU Department of Marketing.