KeenanInternetMarketing.com

Forget about flashy graphics, compelling content, or amazing usability. The #1 thing your website must have is web analytics.  Why? Well, without Analytics how are you ever going to know how visitors find your site? Or what they are doing once they are there? Analytics provides you the insights you need to make your website better.

If you don’t have analytics set up, I’ll show you how to do it in less than 5 minutes. We’re busy people after all, right? So let’s get started…

1. Head over to Google Analytics and sign up for an account. You’ll need to have a Gmail account, so if you don’t already,create one.

   

2. Once signed in click the Sign Up button
3. Enter your websites URL address, ex: www.MyWebsite.Com

   

4. Hit Continue and enter your First and Last Name, then select your Country and hit Continue
5. Accept the terms and agreement, which you probably won’t bother to read (who does)
6. Click Create Account

Congratulations. If you did it right, you’ll be staring at a bit of HTML code like this:

Now the trick is getting that HTML into your websites code. In most cases, you’ll just want to drop that code right before the </body> tag at the end of each of each web page you want to track (Which should be all of them). If you have trouble doing this, leave a comment below for help.

If you use WordPress, like I do, you have it real easy. Just install the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin, activate, and add the UA-XXXXXXXX-X code Google gave you into the plugin. It will take care of the rest.

Once your done, sit back and relax. It will take Google about a day to recognize the code and start tracking data. In a future post I’ll show you how to gain some useful insights from Analytics.

Hope this helps get you up and running.

After a few months of procrastinating and putting it off, I finally bit the bullet and did it. I bought my domain, set up a host, and installed wordpress to at least get a blog up and start getting some age to the site. Keenan Internet Marketing has, so to speak, launched.

To be fair, I wasn’t really procrastinating. I just had too many other projects going on. I work full time at an internet marketing agency, I’m a part time MBA student, and I’m doing some IM projects on the side.

But that’s life. I’m still crazy busy, but there is always going to be something to distract me or take my time away. So no more procrastinating. By setting up this site, I’m now beholden to work on it. Sure, it’s missing a lot of information and details. But that’s fine right now. That stuff will be added and taken care of in due time. If I try to wait until I have everything “perfect” I’ll never get it up and running.

So there you have it. If you have an idea that’s been floating around in your head, take action and get some sort of movement. Like Bob Wiley from What About Bob, just take baby steps. Eventually, who knows where you’ll end up.