UnMar­ket­ing 101 (part 2) — The Tool­box and ‘An Hour a Day, Really?’

(I’ve asked sev­er­al non­prof­it CEOs for their com­ments on what I’ve writ­ten so far and I’m meet­ing some resis­tance. “This would require a major change in how we deal with our sup­port­ers,”  was a com­mon con­cern. I also heard, “This is a shoe­string oper­a­tion. Sure­ly you don’t think we have an extra hour in our day.” Actu­al­ly imple­ment­ing social media mar­ket­ing, to a great degree, is scal­able… and don’t call me Shirley (I could­n’t resist.) Anoth­er com­plaint was “It’s a lot of work with­out any assur­ance of a return.” This was the eas­i­est objec­tion to over­come because I’ve got the stud­ies that sup­port the claims and will point you to them in my next post. 

This post details how to begin to use tools to make your web site more effec­tive. This is the first step to releas­ing the pow­er of UnMar­ket­ing for your orga­ni­za­tion.  Sim­ply open­ing a Twit­ter account or cre­at­ing a Face­book page is rel­a­tive­ly easy. Choos­ing key­words and ana­lyz­ing web­site traf­fic requires some detailed work and calls for the mas­tery of sev­er­al soft­ware tools. How­ev­er if you’re going to put the effort into social media mar­ket­ing, you must able to eval­u­ate your results. That’s where the tool­box comes into play.)

Let me assume your orga­ni­za­tion has a web­site (If it does­n’t, that’s OK. Future posts will show you how to cre­ate a great look­ing site for less than $100.) But for now, here are some ques­tions about your site:

1. How many unique vis­i­tors viewed your site last month?

2. What pages did they visit?

3. What was the most pop­u­lar page to enter your site?

4. What was the aver­age time spent on each page?

5. What was your site’s most pop­u­lar exit page (the last page visited)?

6. How did vis­i­tors find your site?

7. If they found it using a search engine, what key words did they use?

8. If your site accepts dona­tions, what was the aver­age donation?

9. What are the key­words for each page on your site?

If you knew the answers to these ques­tions, then you are prob­a­bly using a sta­tis­tics or ana­lyt­ics pro­gram to mon­i­tor your site. If not, this is the first tool for your tool­box. I use Google Ana­lyt­ics. It’s free and mod­er­ate­ly easy to learn. You set up an account, include a short ID code on your site’s pages, and vis­it your GA account reg­u­lar­ly to find out who is vis­it­ing your site and how they are inter­act­ing with it.

The next pro­gram for your tool­box will help you choose the best key­words for your site. Key­words are the search terms peo­ple enter into a search engine when they are look­ing for your site (or when they are look­ing for infor­ma­tion that your site has to offer, even if they have nev­er heard of your orga­ni­za­tion.) The tool I use to choose key­words is the Google Key­words Tool. While you don’t need to open a free account, you can use the same free account that you use for Google Ana­lyt­ics. There is more work involved with choos­ing great key­words and I will offer sug­ges­tions in a future post. But for now, let me tell you about Lynda.com a great place to get train­ing on Google Ana­lyt­ics, choos­ing key­words, build­ing a Word­Press web­site and much more. (Dis­claimer — I am not affil­i­at­ed with or com­pen­sat­ed in any way by the com­pa­nies I rec­om­mend. I rec­om­mend them because I use them and like them. I will also report on prob­lems I’ve expe­ri­enced, if any.)

Lynda.com is a site that offers online train­ing on more than a 1000 soft­ware pack­ages. There are sev­er­al paid train­ing options avail­able and even a way to learn the mate­r­i­al for free. If your sched­ule per­mits, you can take all of cours­es I rec­om­mend dur­ing a 7 day free tri­al (can­cel after 6 days to be sure you won’t be charged.) Take the fol­low­ing cours­es to learn how to use the tools I’ve recommended:

• Search Engine Opti­miza­tion Get­ting Start­ed (2010) (2 hours 20 minutes)
• Google Ana­lyt­ics Essen­tial Train­ing (4 hours 54 minutes)

There are also good cours­es on Word­Press and site design and planning.

I have just rec­om­mend two cours­es that run over 7 hours and the key­word selec­tion process will take a few more hours. How can this be accom­plished in an hour a day (5 hours a week)? Easy. Take your time. Let’s look at a pro­posed week­ly sched­ule of effec­tive UnMar­ket­ing after three to six months of an hour a day of get­ting ready to use social media effec­tive­ly (set­ting up and using Google Ana­lyt­ics and devel­op­ing a great set of key­words for your site.)

• Post­ing 10 to 15 Tweets a week — 1 Hour (first few will take longer)
• Writ­ing one 500 to 700 word blog post a week — 2 Hours (two blog posts a week would be bet­ter, but give it time)

• Face­book main­te­nance — 1 Hour (10 to 15 min­utes a day)
• Research (for blog­ging and Twit­ter) — 1 Hour

Will this be worth 5 hours of your pre­cious time a week?  That’s the sub­ject of my next post.

Next Up: “UnMarketing in Action: Does it Really Work?’ ”