5 (More) Reasons I'm Pumped for MIMA Summit 2011

Last week Arik Hanson posted five reasons he was pumped for this week's MIMA Summit 2011. Later that day, Greg Swan followed up with five (better) reasons he was pumped about MIMA Summit 2011. Turns out, I too am excited about this week's 10th annual gathering of one of the largest and oldest interactive marketing associations, so I've put together five (more) reasons I'm pumped for MIMA Summit 2011.

1. First Time for Everything

This year marks my very first MIMA Summit. I've never had the experience of seeing legendary past keynotes such as Gary Vaynerchuk, Baratunde Thurston or Seth Godin or seen the marvel that is one of the largest gathering of marketing professionals in the state of Minnesota. This week all that changes as I attend my very first MIMA Summit.

2. Avinash Kaushik is Coming to Town

Avinash Kaushik is the Digital Marketing Evangelist at Google, co-founder of Interactive Marketing education company, Market Motive, and author of the best web analytics blog and multiple books on the subject. Avinash gives common sense advice on how to incorporate measurement, accountability and customer centricity into any online marketing endeavor. If you haven't heard of Avinash, then you'll want to pay extra close attention to his morning keynote.

3. Learning and Blogging about Search and Social

I'll be covering the Measurement, ROI and Search track of Wednesday's breakout sessions for the MIMA blog, which will focus strongly on the measurement of social media as it relates to content and search marketing. This track includes incredible industry thought leaders such as Chuck Hemann, Marty Weintraub and Rand Fishkin (check out my interview with Rand on the MIMA blog!), and promises to be full of information on the ever-evolving space of search and social media.

4. Workshops, Workshops, Workshops

Many conferences are light on content and heavy on self-promotion. MIMA Summit 2011's Tuesday Workshops promise to bring a healthy dose of hands-on instruction to the thought-leadership and networking portions of the agenda. As a Google Analytics nerd, I have my eye on the Beyond Traffic in Google Analytics session, presented by Jeff Sauer. Jeff is partner at St. Paul's Three Deep interactive marketing agency, one of the state's few Google Analytics Authorized Consultants and #6 on the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal's recent Fast 50. These workshops are sure to give immediate tactics in addition to strategic insights.

5. Something for Everyone Interactive

There are experts across many disciplines of marketing set to speak at the MIMA Summit 2011. From local experts such as Arik Hanson, Greg Swan, Julio Ojeda-Zapata, and Lisa Grimm to national names such as Wired's Chris Anderson, Facebook's Sarah Cancilla, and comScore's Brian Hayes, I continue to be amazed by the number of big names set to speak this year.

Are you going to MIMA Summit 2011? There are still tickets left if you want to register. What reasons do you have for going? Let me know in the comments, and I hope to see you there!

What's the Best Thing About Squarespace?

What's the best thing about Squarespace? I get this question all the time from users of more popular blogging/website platforms. All too often people automatically assume Wordpress and Tumblr are better because they have more users. That's just not true. The best web publishing platform is the one that does what you need it to. Before you pick a platform, you should at least take a minute and learn about what Squarespace does really well.

I recently surveyed Squarespace users and asked what they liked best about Squarespace. I received over one hundred responses from a wide range of Squarespace customers: developers and casual users; bloggers and business owners; new customers and people who have been using the service for more than four years. What did Squarespace users like the best about Squarespace?

The Best Thing About Squarespace

Ease of Use is what people love most about Squarespace. The Squarespace team makes it incredibly simple to build a high quality blog or website without knowing a lot about Squarespace or developing websites in general.

Looking across all the answers, there were clear themes among the responses. Overall, four main categories emerged:

• Ease of Use - Squarespace users appreciate how easy the tool is to use
• Effort Required - People appreciate how little time or knowledge it takes to use Squarespace
• Support & Reliability - Squarespace has a rock-solid hardware infastructure and a 24/7 support staff. Squarespace users love the peace of mind that comes with the service.
• Quality - Squarespacers love the level of refinement and sophistication Squarespace builds in to its vast system of web building tools.

(Ease of Use is what people love most about Squarespace, followed by effort required, support/reliability and quality.)

Individual Thoughts on Squarespace

Write-in comments are my favorite thing in the whole world. What people say as an anonymous, unwatched survey respondent can be some of the most enlightening and unfiltered insights you could ever hope for. That said, below are the verbatim, unmodified responses to the survey question, "What's Your Favorite Thing About Squarespace?" Read through them, then add your favorite thing about Squarespace in the comments.

Without question, it's the community - those who ask the questions and the devoted who are kind enough to offer their time and assistance. I am continually amazed by users who go to great lengths to offer their time and care enough to help those users who...

It's reliability and ease of use.

I greatly appreciate both the simplicity of the product, as well as the ability to customize the bits I want.

How easy it is for clients to update their own site!

Ease of use

Ease of use and you don't need to worry about bugs or hosting errors. Everything is managed for you server wise.

The ease of use for my clients.

How simple it is for anyone to design any sort of website. It's simplicity can attract anyone with whatever of web design knowledge.

Its UI is easy to use, yet it's also very powerful. what you see is what you get

Easy to use, quick customer service responses.

The ease of customization and the drag and drop features.

Ease of use and support

Diversity of templates. Ease of use once I get through the learning curve.

Wysiwyg

I couldn't believe how easy it was to build a website that looks professional. I built mine in about 4 hours and I had never had any experience with websites.

Fairly easy to use. Intuitive user interface.

Ease of use and simple templates. it is easy to use and get a website up and running

Not tinkering under the hood like with Wordpress.org installations. Not being a tech, that got me worried just about backup and update time, and it always seemed time to do that kind of stuff.

on page editing

simplicity.

Ease of use - and the fact that there is a buzz out there driven by other bloggers and podcasters on how great SQSP is - which drives clients to my business :)

Seriously - its a great product, solid and gets the job done fast.

I like how you can hyb

Ease of use

Ability to customize

easy to use for new designers and pros.

Simplicity - I'm non technical.

'Visual' interface

Support has always been very responsive.

The ease of use and customization.

The ease of input of various entries etc.

Easy to get in and edit from anywhere.

So easy to use; easy to maintain and beautiful.

Looks good for relatively little effort

It's fast (i.e. pages are delivered fast), streamlined, simple to use, the graphic styling tools, built-in traffic monitoring, and no messing with hosting yourself (Apache settings, the problems you run with Wordpress using too much server time, etc.)

Getting a functional website up & running is so simple on Squarespace.

The ability to build a custom website with no prior knowledge of a coding language.

The ability for anyone to create a website to fit their needs with little-to-no effort.

The ability to customize without using CSS, the galleries

I like how easy it is to add new content and change things around.

I can manage my website without being an HTML guru

i know nothing about web design, and this makes it doable

That I do not need to know HTML code.

Squarespace is for the most part intuitive. When I first signed up for the service, it was easy to pick up where things are situated within the software. I like that it's all managed by the Squarespace team and that I can just focus on my content and de

The overall integration of the bits & pieces; the ability to get advanced functionality up & running fairly quickly in some rough-draft way.

Support, the all-in-one software/hosting/support nature of the service

The support, unlimited hosting and as a cms its pretty robust

The support. They really do care about their customers, it's incredible.

Solid dependable platform. Not having to worry about security vulnerabilities or databas backups. Or managing plugin compatibility.

The quality of the hosting.

It just works!

Security and backend

The support via email is fast and often helpful.

Great platform and customer service

I like the fact that you can't screw things up - save the fact you mucking up the css royally. But Porting this to other users - the interface is clean and understandable. good customer support.

Hard to break

Instant feedback on style changes

I like the concept of squarespace more than the actuality of it. I like that it's hosting and design all in one. I live the looks you can get.

The support team.

It's a very, very sophisticated platform, and it shows. Even simple templates yield a very polished website, while availing oneself of advanced coding and customization tools makes the possibilities just about unlimited. All while the Squarespace team is...

The ability to build almost anything you want on a reliable and easy to use platform

The ability to control a high-quality website & blog WITHOUT having to spend a great deal of time or learn programming

Simplicity in design, development and the ease at which you can create a consistent interface. I also like the gallery pages and audience feature.

Real-time editing and plug-in areas.

The CMS and the fact that if my site was discovered, it would still perform well.

HTML editor for journal pages, customer service, help

The Ajax system it uses

Editing features.

Robustness. I don't need to worry about a crash when I make a change.

love how easy SEO is! customer service rocks!

I really like the notes features where you can list references to refer to. Love the interface.

That they anticipate and manage all the technological changes. I feel like I'm standing on rock. When the iPad, HTML5, etc. arrived, the WordPress ground under my feet turned to sand; I'm handy, but I'm not a tech. Also, I love the Website Mgmt area

Quality v Price.

Multiple user access.

Professional service.

Ten Ways to Show Inbound Marketing ROI with Multi-Channel Funnels

Often, people find you through blogs, social media and other forms of inbound marketing, but don't buy from you that day. When they do come back and do business with you, your inbound marketing channel may not get the credit it deserves for its role in the sale. As a result, inbound marketing ROI often tends to be understated. 

That is, until Google rolled out Multi-Channel Funnels last week. Rejoice all those who love great content, then take a look at these ten ways to show inbound marketing ROI with Multi-Channel Funnels from Google Analytics.

Many Roads Lead to Rome (and Conversion)

Inbound marketing may not always be the channel that converts, but it's often responsible for paving the way to new business. Multi-Channel Funnels provides a new way to see how your visitors interact with your website as they work their way through the buying cycle. Now you can see which channels initiate and assist in getting new business as well as the channels that close the sale.

Here are ten ways to use Google's new Multi-Channel Funnels to illustrate the rich interactions inbound marketing creates and to show inbound marketing ROI.

1. Use Multi-Channel Funnels with Your Current Goals

The new Multi-Channel Funnels work right out-of-the-box with your existing goals from your Google Analytics account. If you've set up a goal on your profile, these new reports apply retro-actively with no further configuration. As a result, reports like the Top Conversion Paths reports can be filtered to only display data for the goals you select.

2. Create Custom Conversion Segments for Insights Galore

What fun would Google Analytics be without the ability to apply segments? The new Multi-Channel Funnel reports allow you to create and apply custom conversion segments to all your reports to hone in on specific channels or sources of traffic. For example, you can create a segment to report all conversions where the first interaction with the visitor ever was through Twitter. Segments like this are awesome for showing the value of social media and other inbound marketing channels and the effect on the bottom line.

3. Identify Where People "Meet" Your Brand

Are you making a good impression when people new to your brand find you online? Use the custom conversion segments to create multiple segments to highlight which channels your visitors see first when dealing with your brand online.

4. Learn the Duration of the Buying Cycle

People don't just suddenly get the urge to buy things on the Internet. Often the customer buying cycle can go on for weeks, months or years before prospects finally show up on your site and convert. Google Analytics shows the duration of the buying cycle with the Time Lag report. Applying conversion segments to this report can show how some channels lead to new business more quickly than others.

5. Discover When You Earn People's Trust

Google Analytics now also reports on the number of interactions with a website that occurred prior to conversion. This is great for content marketers, as inbound marketing builds trust over time to earn the sale. How many times did a person visit your site to read a blog post or watch a video before contacting you to do business? Yeah, Google Multi-Channel Funnel reports help with that too.

 6. Determine Direct and Indirect Effects of Channels

Inbound marketing channels often have both direct and indirect outcomes. Using multiple custom conversion segments, it's easy to show the full picture of channels like organic search. In this example, organic search not only converts directly about 60% of my website conversions, but it's also responsible for introducing my brand to another 7.5% of my converting visitors that went on to convert through channels other than search. As a whole, organic search plays a part in nearly three quarters of all my conversions at some point.

7. Use Custom Channel Groupings to Segment Channels

In addition to custom conversion segments, Google Analytics also allows you to create custom channel groupings to go beyond Google's default channel definitions (e.g., source, medium). For example, I created channel groupings to split out my organic traffic into channel groupings that show regular organic traffic, organic traffic that include "Squarespace" as a keyword and branded organic traffic (e.g., organic traffic containing keywords like "josh braaten" or "big picture web").

8. Summarize Your Helper Channels with Assisted Conversions

Google Analytics offers the Assisted Conversions Report to show which channels help support conversions on your site in addition to those that are directly responsible. Find the unsung heroes of your website or blog by highlighting the top assiting channels with these new reports.

9. Map Out the Well-Traveled Roads

One of my favorite Multi-Channel Funnel reports is the Top Conversion Paths report. Apply your custom channel groupings and your most common paths to conversion magically jump out of the report. People typically find my content within the search results (mostly my Squarespace how-to's), seek me directly, or find me through another site on the web before converting. This doesn't come as a surprise to me, but it's sure nice to see it quantified in the report.

10. Find the Common Paths for Each Goal

Identifying the most commonly traveled inroads to your site is a good first step, but you'll want to look at your Top Conversion Paths report filtered by each goal as well. I was stunned to see the different paths people took to fill out my contact form, download my Squarespace eBook, or leave a comment on one of my blog posts. This type of information could become invaluable in fine-tuning a content creation and sharing strategy.

(Click to enlarge)

These are just some of the first few uses I could think of to show inbound marketing ROI with the new Google Analytics Multi-Channel Funnels, but I'm sure there are countless more. Inbound marketers, now is the time to embrace the power of web analytics and to jump in to Google Analytics if you haven't already. 

If you're already a Google Analytics geek like me, what will you do with Multi-Channel Funnels?

How to Use Google Docs to Automate Nearly Anything

You've probably heard of Google Docs. Chances are, you even use them. But how well do you really know Google's cloud-based suite of Office-like software? I recently discovered a powerful feature of Google Docs that will allow me to automate many of my monthly tasks and, as a result, save me scores of hours each year. Read on to learn how you can use Google Docs to automate nearly anything on the web.

The Secret to Saving Time Through Automation

The secret to saving time with Google Docs is through automation with APIs (application program interface). An API is a way to use simple programming building blocks to pull information or perform commands with an application.

For example, each month you may like to know how many Likes your blog posts have received. You could manually tally the Likes for each post at the beginning and end of each month and subtract the difference, but this would take time. Or you could use the Facebook API and a Google Docs spreadsheet to create a list of your blog posts and pull in the corresponding number of Likes in a matter of minutes. 

Track your competitors' social media campaigns with APIs. Combine data from Google Analytics and SEOmoz with APIs. Track prices of Amazon.com products with APIs. Build prototype web tools with APIs. Basically, a life of automated information glory awaits those who master the API.

Why spend hours each month with boring, repetitive tasks when you can set it up once through an API and spend all that time on more productive tasks? Thankfully, it's now a lot easier to break through the API learning curve with Google Docs. And Google Docs Unleashed is the perfect way to get started.

From Zero to API with Google Docs Unleashed

Up until a few days ago, I knew about APIs but had no idea how to use them. Then I found Google Docs Unleashed through a recent AppSumo deal. (If you didn't know, AppSumo is a popular daily deal site for software. Just provide your email address and you'll get access to ridiculous deals on cool products such as Google Docs Unleashed.)

Google Docs Unleashed is a series of brief web videos that explains the basics of using APIs with Google Docs, produced by AppSumo and Tom Critchlow, Vice President of Operations at SEO consulting firm, Distilled. The beauty of these videos is that you can use Google Docs to do your API dirty work instead of requiring a complicated architecture of web servers and code.

The screenshot above from Google Docs Unleashed may seem intimidating, but each step is easy to understand with the helpful visual format of the video.

Tom walks viewers through each step in the process, highlighting and explaining the actual code and what it means. Everything from his screen is captured in the video, so you can pause, replay and analyze any part of the process in full detail.

You don't have to be a developer (not by a long shot) to use the tips presented in Google Docs Unleashed. APIs require combining simple building blocks of code, and Tom breaks this process down step-by-step. I can't imagine learning more about APIs in such a short amount of time.

A Stitch in Time...

Inefficiency is like nails on a chalkboard to me. If I can spend an hour or two today to save me dozens of hours in the future, I'm there in a heartbeat. That's why Google Docs Unleashed appealed to me so much. I spent an hour learning some API basics and gained an hour back each month for the foreseeable future. Efficiency like this helps me scale my efforts and be more successful overall.

What tasks would you like to automate using APIs and Google Docs and how much time would it save you? Let's chat about it in the comments below.

(Disclaimer: There were affiliate links for AppSumo and Google Docs Unleashed in this article. I only use affiliate links with products I recommend personally).

Speed Up Your Google +1 Button on Squarespace

A few months ago Google rolled out the ability to add the Google +1 button to your blog as a part of their new social media strategy. In the time since, they updated the Google +1 button code to make it load 3x faster. No one wants slow code on their site, so today we look at how to upgrade the Google +1 button code on your Squarespace site.

Installing the Google +1 Button on Squarespace

I wrote a post on installing the Google +1 button on Squarespace within a week of the button launching. If you don't have it on your site yet, go there to learn how to add the code to your site, as I've revised it to reflect the new process.

Read on if you installed the Google +1 button code on your site between June 1 and today. We'll walk through how to make the upgrade from the slow code to the fast code.

Upgrading the Google +1 Button on Squarespace

Speeding up the Google + button is a simple process that involves removing some of the old code from your website header and putting some new code into your website footer. Let's get started.

First, access your Website Management menu and then your Website Settings. Then select Code Injection.

Look for the Google +1 button code snippet highlighted in the screenshot below and delete it from your Code Injection area. Save the changes to your site.

Next up, switch over to Structure Editing mode on your site.

Scroll down to the bottom of your website and enter select the edit website footer option.

Copy and paste the following code into your website footer and save your changes. That's all there is to the process. Enjoy the 3x faster Google +1 button!

<script type="text/javascript">

  (function() {

    var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true;

    po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js';

    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s);

  })();

</script>

<!--  Place this tag after the last plusone tag --><script type="text/javascript">  (function() {    var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true;    po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js';    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s);  })();</script>