One mistake to avoid when you start selling online is to offer too many products. Try to focus your site around 3-5 products at most and you’ll have get sales. Ideally, your site should focus on your money pages. To identify your money pages, use the advanced features in Google Analytics.

Identify Money Pages with Google Analytics

To get a better understanding of your money pages, log into Google Analytics.

• Select the blog/website you want to analyze.
• Select a 3 month range so you get better picture of how your site/products have performed.
• Select Top Content from the side menu.
• Select the top 50 pages from the Show Rows at the bottom of the screen. This is more than enough to determine and optimize your top performing pages.
• Select Percentage from the View option (far left of screen). This displays the top performing pages based on the percentage of traffic to the overall site. It’s also color-coded so you can identify the top pages faster.
• Click on the Second most visited page. This opens the Content Detail page.

Note: your homepage is probably your most visited page. Ignore this for now and look at the other pages as these are pages your customers (and prospective customers) are interested in.

Drill Down into Google Analytics

You now want to examine a few stats:

• How visitors found your content
• Navigation Summary,  i.e. Entrance Paths visitors used to get to your content and where they go next
• Entrance Sources per page
• Entrance Keywords per page.

To do this, you need to look at the Navigation Summary:

• Click Navigation Summary – this shows you the paths/pages visitors used to get to your content and where they go next.

This shows you the:

• Percentage of Entrances
• Percentage of Previous Pages
• Percentage of Exits
• Percentage of Next Pages

What you’re interested in is the Exits and Next Pages.

If you look at the Next Pages, you can see where they went next.

Did they go to your sales page?

Use this screen to examine where your customers are going and see what patterns emerge. For example, instead of going to the Buy Now page, they go to the About Us page.

That makes sense. They want to know who you are before they buy.

But, look at the About Us page in Google Analytics and see if they are going back to the Buy Now (salespages).

If they are not, then look at where they do and see how/where you can adjust these pages to return to the sales pages. Sometimes this is as simple as including a prominent link/button to the Sales page. Other times you need to be more creative.

Other Sales Stats to Examine

Once you get to know how Google Analytics works, look at the:

• Path they take once they enter your money page
• How long they stay on these pages
• Where they leave the site

Tip: if you’re running an ecommerce site, or any site that sells things, the Exit page SHOULD be the page where they buy the product, right?

You’re trying to get them to the site, read about the product, and then hit the Buy Now button.

Use Excel to Filter Sales Data

You can export all the data in Google Analytics into Excel (and XML and PDF). I often do this as I know Excel fairly well and can create charts faster in here. It also lets me compare the data against data from other sites such as Google Adwords, AdSense and other site analytics software.

To do this:

• At the top of the screen, click Export.
• Select CSV for Excel from the submenu.
• This downloads the stats to an Excel file you can examine when offline and /or data mine with Excel.

Next week, we’ll look at Entrance Keywords as these are the words, terms, and expressions that customers are using to land on your site. While the other information is useful, the keywords tell you what they are looking for and… how close your site/products meets their needs.

What other ways do you know for finding your money pages?

Action Plan Template – Responsibility Matrix

Originally uploaded by Tech Writer Boy

Anyone looking for an Action Plan template might be interested in this tutorial and template pack.

An Action Plan is a summary of what you are going to accomplish in your business over a specified period of time.

Use this template to:

1. Scope the big picture - Outline what you want to accomplish with objectives, budget, time and tie each deliverable to an action step.

2. Break out smaller tasks – Assign tasks to team members. Consider the deadlines in terms of allocating resources.

3. Create a list of action steps - For each task, prepare a list of to-dos ranked in sequential order.

4. Prioritize – Some steps are more important that others. Prioritize steps based on deadline, task, and the number of steps remaining.

5. Communicate - Circulate the plan to team members that have been assigned tasks.

6. Complete deadlines on time - Estimate when tasks will be finish based on the rate of action step completion.

7. Track results – Evaluate performance and implement continuous monitoring procedures to ensure the project stays on track.

More at www.mysoftwaretemplates.com/2009/06/action-plan-template/

This free PDF-to-Excel online conversion service lets you create highly-editable Excel files, making it simple to re-use tables and spreadsheets from PDF files in MS Excel, OpenOffice, and Google Docs. We haven’t tested it on Zoho yet.

In our PDF to Excel testing, it accurately detected tables and maintained the look and feel to match the appearance of original files.

The new service from Nitro’s adds to its free PDF software suite which currently has a base of over 25 million users and comprises the world’s #1 free PDF creator, PrimoPDF

Link: www.pdftoexcelonline.com

Now you can Microsoft Excel to read your Twitter Tweets and your own updates from within Excel. All that’s required to set it the feed and link it to the Excel spreadsheet. No other downloads are required.

To view your Twitter messages sent to you:

1.    Login to Twitter

2.    In the right-hand column look for the ‘RSS feed’ link

3.    Copy the link, e.g. http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/123456.rss

4.    Open a blank worksheet in Excel

5.    Open the Data tab and click on the ‘from Web’ button.

6.    Paste the link into the web address field.

Excel recognizes the RSS feed as an XML file. Let Excel choose the feed.

7.    Click Import. Next.

Excel will tell you that “the XML source does not refer to a schema”.

8.    Click OK.

9.    Place the results where you wish, for example, in a new worksheet.

10.    Choose ‘Wrap Text’ so you can see an entire tweet.