Site Speed

I'm told that one of the things Google ranks site on, is speed.

So how do you know how fast your site is?

And if your site is slow, how do you know which parts are making it slow?

http://tools.pingdom.com/ is a free tool that crawls your page and tests every element. It then gives you summaries.

Love it!

Twitter revealed

I've often thought some people on Twitter post robotically. Some are admitted robots. But some just seem to maniacally post links.

I knew you could automate some tweets, but what I didn't know is that you can automate tweeting about blogs via RSS feeds.

http://marketingsurvivalskills.com/twitter_mastery_02.php is either corrupting me completely, or teaching me the secrets of google-fu.

They give a step-by-step tutorial on "mastering" twitter. You can go look for yourself, but it's taken me on a journey to twitterfeed.com

And my favorite tip??

Open a Social Oomph Account and setup your automatic DM Message. Example message:

Hey what's up? I'm more active on Facebook - add me over there and lets chat: http://www.facebook.com/yourusername

I love this because I hate typing in 140 chars and I'm much more comfy on FB at this time. Though I hate the idea of a robotic direct message and may not use Social Oomph....but I may try this by actually doing something crazy like typing.

I haven't finished the Twitter tutorial but may have more to report.

Stats and Stuff Update
- web hits are down
- sales remain sluggish, but steadily sluggish
- my mailing list is barely growing
- the contest still has almost no entries (40)
- Facebook page is not growing
- Adwords is calling and bugging me so I tried one last try
- I started a FaceBook ad for the contest

p.s. the contest is at: http://www.makeupdealoftheday.com/pages/makeup-tips-contest-200-worth-of-makeup-to-the-winner

I will have the contest Makeup Haul photos up soon and perhaps that will help.

More software reviews

Seems like there are always gee gaws and widgets that promise to make your site bigger, brighter, better, etc.

So I've been trying to figure out how to get Facebook to let me be more creative on my www.facebook.com/makeupdailydeals page.

FBML (Facebook Markup Language) is one of the least documented mysteries I've come across. It seems to be a crippled version of HTML that doesn't allow javascript or iframes. So, options for customizing are limited.

It turns out that AWeber can embed signup forms into Facebook by using HTML rather than forbidden methods.

http://www.facebook.com/makeupdealoftheday?v=app_7146470109

I can't figure out how to get something with AWeber as my "home" page yet.

I am playing more with Poll Daddy to bring more interactivity to my site. People seem to think polls are fun. I know I love the CNN polls.

Continuing

Things continue to be very slow. In fact, none of my metrics are doing well.

So what are my metrics?
- Mailing list growth (from about 5/day to 1-2/day)

- Facebook page growth (www.facebook.com/makeupdealoftheday), grew by 5 today after I sent out probably 50 recommendations to my friends list

- sales (probably haven't sold anything in a week. Shopping cart was broken for at least 12 hours and both people decided to not purchase after I fixed it.)

Those are my current top metrics.

Further, participation in the contest that seemed like such an exciting idea, has bordered on pathetic. 32 responses. That's it. For $200 worth of makeup. If it were me, I'd be all over it like a dog on a pork chop. I can't fathom what I'm doing wrong, but I figured the response would be in the 100's.

Maybe I'm on my way to a dot-bomb. :-(

Today is the two week anniversary of my web site launch. Woo.

Measuring things

My Klout score is 22 and per Klout's analysis, I'm now an up and coming tweeter. Still...no one is retweeting me.

There were only two contest entries today. I'm astonished and wondering what I'm doing wrong. $200 in free makeup? I'd be all over that like a dog on a pork chop! Maybe I need to figure out what the $200 is made of and get some photos and tweet specifics.

At the rate of entrants, the contest will end up being a huge lose for me. Suggestions are welcome.

In better news, if you google, "makeup deal of the day", I'm finally in the results and above the fold. In fact, both my ecommerce site and my FaceBook page are above the fold.

I don't entirely understand keywords yet. I'm not sure how to determine which ones to go after. Though "makeup" is obviously a ridiculous goal.

I explored www.alexa.com today, "claimed" my site. Alexa seems to be the arbiter of all web stats for marketers. I can see who currently does own any keywords I'm considering.

I'm surprised to find that "cheap makeup" leads to huge clicks. I hate the word "cheap."

Other cool apps for Sites

www.nabble.com makes an embeddable forum. It takes 2 seconds to setup and looks great inside of any page design. Best of all, it's free!

I wanted to implement a "Refer a Friend" application. There seems to be two main ways of doing this:

1) people enter in a friend or some friend's email address by hand, and then send the referral out.

There are free scripts that do this.

There are scripts that cost money that provide functionality to refer multiple people and to have reporting on the back end.

2) There are scripts that ask the user to login to their gmail, hotmail, yahoo, etc, account and it crawls their contacts and sends invitations to all of them.

I thought about this a lot. The obvious payback would be the possibility of large numbers of new people getting referred to the site.

But it made me twitch.

I've done this crawling for social network sites like www.linkedin.com. But that served MY needs. Not some sellers needs.

The people selling this type of software, don't seem to ever mention how twitchy it might make people.

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I decided to go with option 1 using a paid script from Optistar called Tell. I'm trying to figure out how to incentivize it before I launch it.

I need to vastly grow my mailing list. My goal is 500 people by the end of the month and I'm a long ways from there. But if everyone on my list told 3 people and if that continued, I could reach my goal.

So offer a dollar off of purchase for each referral? Offer a free gift for 10 referrals?

I need to make sure my software that I picked, won't let someone make up email addresses just to get the gift (or whatever the incentive is.)

So I'm scratching my head about it some more.

http://bxslider.com/ has a content and image slider. It's "buy me a beer ware" and I'm trying to figure out if I can use it anywhere. Great job, Steven!