Showing posts with label Marketing. Show all posts

Selling

I thought I'd share something I came across which I found powerful. I think it is a very nice way of providing the best service for customers. Used it in a meeting recently and it worked for me!



9 steps to selling from Dr. Demartini.


Step One: Greet and Introduce
Demartini says that the first step in sales is to introduce yourself properly. Let people know who you are and briefly what you do. Then, always ask a question. Sales are about what clients or customers need, not what you can sell them. The key throughout this process is to ask questions.  "To sell is not to tell," says Demartini. "If you start by telling a client about your product, you're trying to make him or her do something that you want. This does not plug into the client's motivation, which is to gratify his or her own values"

Step Two: Create Rapport
"The next step is to establish common ground. People tend to forget the elementary stuff," says Demartini. "Ask questions until you find common threads. The point of this exercise is not to hurry a sale, but rather to establish a platform on which to build a relationship. People tend to be skeptical until you find commonalities," he says. "If you can find something that connects the two of you, you stop being a stranger. Ask them about their interests, try and find people you know in common, places you have both been to, what they do, their goals and needs. If you can establish similarities, they will open to you. That's when people see that you care. You can't effectively sell to people who don't feel cared about."

"Remember this tip, if you go in high and arrogant, your client will bring you down. If you go in low and humble, they'll lift you up."

Step Three: Establish Needs
"Next, find out what the client's needs are. This is the most important component of the process.  It's all about data collecting," says Demartini. "The more needs you can establish, the easier the selling process will be. If what you are trying to sell to them does not speak to one of their needs, why would they buy from you?"

"Where people blow it in sales is they want to talk about the product," says Demartini. "Again, ask, don't tell. You need to find out what is going to make a client buy. Ask the right questions and they will tell you about their voids or concerns"

Demartini references one of his mentors, Walter Haley of K-Mart. Haley referred to a "dominant buying motive", but he calls it the clients' highest value. He says that you need to establish as many needs as possible. Don't stop until you have a minimum of five to seven needs, motives or voids that they want to fill.  "Walter Haley said that until they are asking you to help them, you haven't established enough needs," says Demartini. "The aim is to get to the point at which the client wants to know more about what you can offer them."

Step Four: Confirm Needs
He points out that up until this stage all you have done so far is ask questions - "You still haven't made a single statement making it feel like the client is doing all the talking, is in control of the conversation and making all the decisions," he says.  However, it is you, the sales person, who is actually directing the conversation by probing. 

"Now summarise your client's needs as it's vital to show that you have properly understood them.  When you have their confirmation, then you can make an offer," says Demartini.

Step Five: Now Offer a Solution
First, a warning: "If what you are offering doesn't match the client's need, you'd be a fool to offer it," says Demartini. "You'd be better off not trying to make that sale and finding someone who does match the offer. At his point you have to consider the long-term, rather than about your immediate goal to make a sale. The short-terms costs, the long-term pays," he says. "If you go for the sale and the product you are offering doesn't solve the client's needs, you will undermine the potential referrals that the client might still give you. Don't make them resent you."

"Either find a way to give them a product that matches or you can simply loop back to step three and establish a new or different set of needs. I often say to clients who want to come to a particular programme of mine that the course I'm running at this time may have less value for them than another I am doing in a few weeks. Their needs must be congruent with the product or service or they will not be satisfied."

"At this point, to make a sale, you have to be clear about your intentions. Admit that you want to do business.  Let them see that you're interested. The solution, as always, must be a win-win. Help them to get what they want, and you'll get what you want," he says. "Either they'll come back to you or they'll refer you to someone who needs what you're offering."

Step 6: Handle Objections
"This stage is inversely proportional to how well you established their needs," says Demartini. "Objections are symptoms that you have not established enough needs and are not offering the service that matches their needs. Once again, listening to the client is central and your preparation and product knowledge will be key to your success. If and when objections come up, you may need to skip back to step three and four, establishing and confirming needs, as well as identifying new needs. This is also an opportunity to try step five again," says Demartini. "Once all objections are taken care of, it's time to close the deal." 

Step 7: Close
"Be clear and direct about your intention to close - don't make it ambiguous. Ask: When would you like to fulfill your needs or objectives?" says Demartini. But he points out that once again, this is a question. You're not imposing terms on the client, but allowing the client to direct you - the decision is in the client's hands and he or she is made to feel in control of the decision.

Step 8: Referral
"Once you have the paperwork done, you have served your client," says Demartini. "Then ask them if they would mind your asking one or two more questions. Do they know other people with the same needs as theirs?  At this stage of the process, remember that you still have to keep in mind what is in it for the client. If it's of no benefit to them, why would they do it?" asks Demartini. "The client always wants to know what's in it for them. Generally, when clients feel good about a product or service, they'll give you references."

Next 9: Continued service and follow-up.

"Keep your follow-ups informative and friendly, but don't become friends - it's important to always s keep it professional. And if the referrals didn't come the first time, get them now," concludes Demartini.



How to Pitch a Screenplay - Hollywood Pitch Festival







So this is something all writers need to learn in some format, regardless of what they are pitching. Here is some advice for screenwriters.

Pitching - Gah!

So I had a chat with my agent and basically he kindly told me he loved my work, but thought my pitches sucked. He used much nicer language but that's basically what he said!

So here is an article on pitching by Elna Cain who swears it works for her:



Are you pulling your hair out because you just don't get it? You're a new freelance writer so you know you have to hustle to land that first client. You know you need samples, so you got to it early on. You even know where to find freelance writing jobs and avoided places like Upwork. So, why aren't you seeing success? Why are you struggling to land any paid writing gigs?

My First Pitch
When I first started freelance writing over a year ago, I had no clue how to pitch my services.Two obvious mistakes I made are that I don't appear confident in my pitch and I mentioned that I'm new (psst... don't EVER mention in a pitch that you're a new freelance writer!) 
But, you know what? I kept on pitching. I found some good job boards and sent pitch after pitch. I think I sent around 20-50 pitches before I landed my first writing gig for an automotive enthusiast site. I was ecstatic that I actually landed this gig, because I just knew I failed the interview. The prospect emailed me back and requested we talk.
 This was my first ever phone interview and when it was over I was convinced I bombed it. I didn't sound confident at all and I didn't ask the right questions either.
But, I ended up getting the gig! That gave me a boost in confidence and I guess it showed because I landed my next client soon after (and upped my rate too).

Perfecting My Pitching Game
 I had my fair share of "bad" pitches for the longest time. But, that didn't stop me from landing clients. Prospects started contacting me and for a while I wasn't pitching... until some clients slowed down their content schedule. Suddenly, I went from writing four blog posts a month for one client, down to writing only one post a month for them. This cut my income so I had to go back to pitching.
I'm glad that happened because I really focused on optimizing my pitch and making it better than what I had. And I finally found a pitching process that works. If you're a new freelance writer and you're having problems landing a client, maybe it's time to look at your pitching process. Here are 4 elements to a winning pitching process:

1. Review Your Current Pitch

My current pitch looks nothing like my first pitch. It's come a long way. As a new freelance writer, you may be tempted to use the same template for all your pitches. 
While this isn't a bad or wrong thing to do (it's actually a great way to streamline your process and it allows you to pitch to more job ads), you might not realize that changing a few things in your pitch can dramatically change your conversion rate.
Things like:
Work to appear more confident in your pitch. Swapping phrases like "might be good at this" to "I know I'll be good at this" dramatically changes the view of the person reading your pitch. 
Be explicit. Mention exactly what you will do for them. If the ad calls for someone to write blog posts, explain to them what you will provide (an eye-catching headline, a call-to-action, promotion on social media).
Show proof you are a writer. Providing links to your published content is 100x better than providing attachments of your work.
2. Keep Track of Your Pitches
Whenever I do a round of pitching, I make sure to keep an Excel sheet or Google sheet tracking all of the pitches I sent out. This helps me with keeping all the information in one place.
Each job ad will have information you need to have easily accessible for when the prospect responds to you. Such things as their proposed rate (or if you proposed a rate), the topic and how often they need content.
So, when it comes time to pitch, I keep track of:
Where I saw the job ad (specific job board and link to the ad).
The email I sent the pitch to.
When I sent the pitch. This is important to remember as I tend to circle back a few days later when I don't hear anything from my pitch.
Important information.
I keep this sheet and just update it whenever I need to pitch. So, sometimes I can look back on all the pitches I sent and if there's a spot open in my schedule, I'll contact some of these companies and see how things are going with their content needs.

3. Pitch Daily
It's a good idea to build a metric around your pitches. Set a goal of how many pitches you want to send out and for how long. For example, for two weeks I will pitch one time every day.
This gives you a firm goal to stick to and helps you feel accomplished when you complete it. I don't know about you, but I like competing against myself. It just gives me a bit of motivation to outdo myself (and it usually works).
You might think this isn't important. You say to yourself, I'll just pitch whenever I have time. Well, I want you to think of this:
 You hit whatever you aim at. So, this means you'll hit your target when you have a plan in place. You just have to start!
4. Step Out of Your Comfort Zone
You go to a job board and all you see is a bunch of, "I can't do that!" type of job ads.
Instead of thinking what you can't do, start thinking how you can match the criteria in a job ad. Cast a wide net when you pitch.
Look at all the job ads at each board and see if you are remotely qualified for or interested in the ad. My first gig wasn't my first choice, but I was pitching to anything and everything at that time (and I'm glad I did. I still write for my first client and I still enjoy it!) 
Keep at It
Hustling is the name of the game when you're new to freelance writing. No one knows who you are or if you can even write.
 But, trust me when I tell you, the more you pitch, the higher chance you'll have at landing that first client. You may not land a gig if you're only pitching 5 times a week. But, if you pitch 10 times a week you might see a better turnout. Imagine if you pitch 30 times a week?


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How To Sell a Screenplay to Hollywood

Some interesting advice - a lot of people are trying to make comics these days just to break into Hollywood. We believe comics should be good and that usually means working with people who know and appreciate the medium.



Wondering how to sell as screenplay to Hollywood? Putting your screenplay online on Amazon Kindle is a great way to sell a screenplay to Hollywood. This is another strategy that is someone difficult to implement, as it very much involves playing a sort of "long game" and seeing how that ultimately turns out.
Basically, the underlying idea here in terms of how to sell a screenplay to Hollywood is that you novelize your screenplay and make the novel available on Kindle. The idea here is that, if the story is any good and the characters really pop, people will end up loving the novel and buying e-copies of it like crazy, thereby driving up the "buzz" about it and making it much easier to learn how to sell a screenplay to Hollywood.
If a literary property has a high enough buzz, a copy of the book will inevitably end up on the desk of some producer, and in a perfect world, they would end up calling you and wanting to option your book. The good thing about this strategy is that, when they ask if you already have a screenplay ready to go, you can tell them that you indeed, already do, thereby helping you learn more about how to sell a screenplay to Hollywood.
This would definitely be another avenue where social media is incredibly helpful, so you'll definitely want to do the following here:
1. See if you can get small bloggers to interview you about the work that you've been doing
2. Have your friends and family review the book for you online
3. Build a fan page on Facebook for the project
4. Use your personal network of friends and family to tell the world about the book
It is much easier to sell a screenplay to Hollywood when you can say that it is based on a best-selling novel. However, one word of caution here - screenwriters do not often make great novelists, as the two could not be further apart, so if you are going to go down this road, I would highly recommend that you collaborate with an experience novelist so that you do not short change yourself in the process. This is, of all the strategies that I can think of, the single most complicated one, so please do keep that in mind before you make any effort, at all, in an attempt to implement it, as it is complicated, tedious, and is probably the lowest in terms of the risk/reward ratio scale of work to rate of success.

Bounce rate

One thing we found with webcomics is the bounce rate can be high. Here is an article by Ron Haggerty

Help Improve My Website's Bounce Rate


One of the easiest ways to decide how well your audience is engaging with your website is to review your bounce rate. After all, the bounce rate is calculated by the percentage of visitors that land on a page only to exit without visiting any other pages on your site. So, I guess it goes without saying that a high bounce rate is harmful to the success of your website. Well, that's not entirely true. Yes, a high bounce rate can be your website's demise; however bounce rates will greatly vary depending on the type of page we're analyzing.
If visitors find your website organically because they're searching for information, then having a high bounce rate is probably disadvantageous. SEO is not easy and definitely not cheap. Remember, our goal here is to create highly optimized, content rich pages that feed visitors with as much information as possible. So, when you have customers land on your site and choose not to visit any of your other pages, the result is a negative return on your investment. In addition to the bounce rate, metrics that are also important and should be monitored in this scenario are the number of pages viewed and the time a visitor spends on your site. On the other hand, if a visitor lands on your page from a sponsor ad and the page was created featuring offers and call to actions, then having a high bounce rate could actually be something positive. Your objective in this scenario is much different. When a visitor lands on your page, your goal is to get the offer noticed and then to convert (i.e. form submission, phone calls, etc.). Metrics such as the click-through rate (CTR) and goal conversions should be closely monitored in this scenario.
Knowledge is power and understanding the true definition of these key metrics is essential when processing your Google Analytics reports. This is especially true when analyzing custom reports created for targeting underperforming landing pages, blog posts, etc. Examine bounce rates by keyword, search engine, and landing pages to gain greater knowledge about why your bounce rates may be higher than the desired.
FACT: In the SEO community, many believe that the bounce rate is the rate of visitors on your site for less than X amount of seconds. This is simply not true.
Identifying the pages that you need to improve the bounce rate is the first step. Determine why the bounce rate is too high, and then create a goal and plan to reduce it. A visitor's first impression along with your site's ability to pull them in and keep them engaged is the key to reducing the bounce rate. We've identified a handful of the common website mistakes that result in higher bounce rate.
Annoying and Distracting Animation
As stated earlier, getting a visitor is not only difficult, but expensive. Don't annoy them with disruptive audio, video, pop-up and fly out advertisements and promotions. Instead, Provide your visitors with a clean site layout with content that is well-organized. Animation should be kept to a minimum.
A Confusing and Unclear Message
Many visitors get frustrated because they can't find what they want. How many times do you visit a site and the page is so confusing it's easier to exit than to try to find what it is you're searching? When a visitor enters your site, there should be no confusion about your website's purpose. Visitors don't always expect to find what they're searching for on the first page they land. But it's critical for the visitor to understand quickly the purpose of your website and for the design and content to be appealing.
Why would anyone hang around on a website that's difficult to read. Improving a site's contrast is often overlooked, but can make a big difference in improving your bounce rate. Many of us have poor vision so try to make the site as easy to read as possible. Lighting conditions and screen resolutions vary greatly, so improving the contrast of a website can be an enormously powerful means for guiding your visitor to your desired location.
Also, don't lose your audience because your pages are too busy and cluttered. Understand your target audience, give them what they want, and make it easy for them to find it.
Difficult to Navigate
One of the biggest reasons visitors exit websites is because the site is difficult to navigate. This is becoming a huge issue with visitors using smart devices. More and more customers are using their cell phones and tablets to search the web. If your site is not mobile friendly than you are missing out on a tremendous opportunity. Have you ever tried navigating a website from your cell phone that is not mobile friendly? Navigation plays a huge part in improving the bounce rate of a website. Too many drop downs and not being able to easily return back to previous pages are big turn-offs to visitors.
The main navigation of your website must be extremely prominent. Robust websites should have a search feature as well as a site map enabling visitors to easily find information on their desired topic.
It's also a good idea to duplicate the main navigation links on the footer of your website. This is especially important when your pages drop below the fold. Footer links allows visitors to easily navigate without always having to scroll back up to the top of the page.
Slow Third Party Plug-ins and Widgets
There are thousands of third-party plug-ins and widgets on the market today. Most of which are excellent tools that can enhance your visitors' website experience. However, like most things, too much of a good thing can be a detriment. The speed in which a page loads on your site is a key component of your bounce rate. The longer it takes for a page to load, the higher the bounce rate, and vice versa. Too many third-party plug-ins and widgets will slow your site down, causing your visitors to exit.
Advertisements that Slap You in the Face
For the most part, unless your ads are extremely clever, no one wants to look at advertisements. I understand that for some, ads are a necessary evil, but please show some respect for your audience. Most ads on the web should be subtle for obtaining impressions. Only a very, very small percentage of online ads will actually be clicked. If possible, display your ads below the fold and keep them to a minimum. Requiring your audience to scroll down to view your content because the top of your site is ad heavy will significantly increase your bounce rate.

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Blog advice (to help market your comics)

Blog Statistics – A Guide for Small Business Owners (Part 1)

by Lynn Serafinn

Blog Statistics – A Guide for Small Business Owners (Part 1)
Lynn Serafinn explains how a deep analysis of your visitors, page views and bounce rate can help you understand the effectiveness of your blog marketing.
One of the business andmarketing services we offer our clients isblogging support. As part of that service, we review their blog statistics every six weeks, to get a better idea of how well our marketing efforts are working. While just the WORD statistics can make many business owners’ eyes glaze over, I find them fascinating. I like to look at them from different angles, and try to understand the underlying picture they are painting.
For statistics to be genuinely useful business tools, they cannot be examined solely on a quantitative level. You have to know how to get the ‘juice’ out of them, and how to turn numbers into qualitative information that speaks about how your audience is engaging with your brand. So, in the next two articles, I’ll be taking you on a whistle-stop tour of some of the basic statistics for your blog, and what they can tell you.
The ideas I’ll be sharing are taken from ‘Chapter 16: Pay Attention to Stats’ of my upcoming book The Social Entrepreneur’s Guide to Successful Bloggingwhich I am aiming to launch in January 2016 (you can get a sneak peek of it if you click the link). While abridged from what I share in the book, these two articles will hopefully provide some useful tips and insights.

Analytic Tools

To monitor and review your blog statistics, you have to start by choosing the right analytic tools. While I talk about these in the book, for the purpose of these articles, I don’t want to launch into a comparison of the various tools available. Rather, for those of you who do not have one in place, below are three free analytic tools that can perform the functions we’ll be examining. Of course, there are many others from which to choose.

Visits (or Visitors)

Depending on which analytic tool you use, this parameter is called either ‘visits’ or ‘visitors’. This refers to the number of times people have come to your website (per day, month or year), regardless of how many unique/individual people it represents. For example, if one person comes to your site four times over the course of a month, it counts as four visits. Simply landing on your website qualifies as a ‘visit’, regardless of how much time they spent on it.
For this figure to have any meaning, it has to be evaluated in conjunction with the next four parameters – unique visitors, page views, bounce rate and average time on site.

Unique Visitors

The ‘unique visitors’ parameter is the number of individual people who visit your site during the selected time period. Well, technically, it is the number of IP addresses(individual computers or mobile devices) that have accessed your site. ‘Unique visitors’ differs from ‘visits’ because one person/computer might log into your website multiple times on the same day/month. Conversely, one person might log into the same website from multiple computers or mobile devices. Here are two examples demonstrating how these two possibilities might show up in a site’s statistics:
  • A public computer at a cybercafé counts as one IP address. If 100 people a month viewThe New York Times online every day for a month on the same public computer, it would count as one unique visitor, but 3,000 monthly visits.
  • Let’s say you regularly read a specific blog once every week, sometimes on your home PC and sometimes on your mobile phone. On that site’s stats, it would show up as twounique visitors, but four monthly visits.

Page Views

As the term implies, pages views represents the number of pages people openedduring a selected time period (per day, month or year). Notice that I said ‘opened’, not ‘read’. Just because someone clicked on a link does not mean they actually read the content. (We’ll come back to this very important point in Part 2 of this article series.)
The ratio between page views, visits and unique visitors can tell us a lot about how our readers are consuming our content. For example, if your stats reveal you have had 1,000 unique visitors, 4,000 visits and 8,000 page views over the past month, it would tell you that – on average – each of your readers comes to your site four times a month, and reads two articles every time they are there. Of course, averages never tell the actual story.What is more likely true is that about 70% of your 1,000 unique visitors viewed your site for less than a minute and then clicked away without returning, and a small percentage (10% or less) consumed several articles in one sitting, or perhaps bookmarked an article to reread it later that month.
The only way to get a clearer picture of what might actually be happening is to look at this ratio in the context of two more parameters – bounce rate and time spent on site.

Bounce Rate

Years ago when I first heard the term ‘bounce rate’, it scared me. I thought it meant something was wrong with my site, causing people to receive an error page. Fortunately, ‘bounce rate’ doesn’t mean your site is broken; but a consistently high bounce rate is still not something you want to see in your stats.
‘Bounce rate’ refers to the percentage of your blog visits in which only a single page was viewed. In other words, if someone comes to your site, looks at one page and then leaves without checking out anything else on your site, that’s called a ‘bounce’.
Analysts frequently make a big deal about bounce rate, saying that a high bounce rate is always a sign that visitors are not interested in your content. But, again, without context a bounce in and of itself doesn’t tell us much. Here are a few different scenarios, ALL of which would show up as a ‘bounce’:
  • A visitor landed on your site, took one look at it and clicked away without bothering to read your article.
  • A new visitor read one of your articles from beginning to end. They didn’t feel the need to read anything else during that visit, but they liked the article so much they ended up subscribing to your blog so they could get future updates.
  • One of your regular blog visitors came to read your latest article. They didn’t read anything else because they’ve already read it all!
  • A new or returning visitor checked out one of your blog posts. They were on their way to work and didn’t have time to read it, so they bookmarked it to come back to later.
As you can see, not all ‘bounces’ are created equal. In my opinion, only the first of these examples is an actual ‘bounce’. While, as a rule of thumb, you want to see your bounce rate go DOWN over time, you cannot really evaluate the impact of this figure without considering the other statistics, including ‘average time spent on site’, which we’ll look at in the next article.
SOMETHING TO BEAR IN MIND: There is another possible cause for pages to ‘bounce’ – comment spammers. Most comment spammers use robots that simply land on your site, leave a spam comment and leave. While that might be a relief to know, you should also bear in mind that comment spammers are probably also responsible for a certain percentage of your other statistics, e.g. unique visitors, visits and page views. While many analytic tools are able to tell the different between a legitimate viewer and a robot, your stats may include visits from these insidious invaders.

A Few Calculations

All of these statistics must be looked at collectively to get a feel for their possible meaning. For example, let’s say your stats for last month looked like this:
  • Unique visitors = 5,000
  • Visits = 10,000
  • Page views = 20,000
  • Bounce rate = 75%
Now let’s see how these stats work together to form a clearer picture of what’s going on:
  • How many times did our visitors come to our site last month? Statistically, we can see that on average, each of our unique visitors visits our site twice a month (10,000 divided by 5,000) and views a total of four pages per month (20,000 page views divided by 5,000). Most analytic tools will calculate this figure for you. However, it doesn’t tell the whole story.
  • How many times did our visitors REALLY come to our site last month?Going deeper requires looking at the bounce rate. A bounce rate of 75% means that only 25% of our 10,000 visits resulted in more than one page been accessed. 25% of 10,000 is 2,500. Thus 2,500 visits resulted in more than one page view.
  • How much content did our visitors REALLY look at when they came to our site? To get a better idea of what that means, we could then subtract all the visits that contained only ONE page view (7,500) from the total page views (20,000), giving us a remainder of 12,500. That figure represents the number of pages accessed on those 2,500 visits where more than one page was accessed. If we then divide 12,500 by 2,500, we can estimate that an average of five pages were accessed on each of these visits.
  • How many people does this REALLY represent? The answer to that question is more difficult to pin down. As we said earlier, due to fact that people access our webpages from so many different points of origin these days, the ‘unique visitors’ figure probably does not give us an accurate picture of how many people are actually viewing our site. But if we were to ignore those inevitable discrepancies and take them at face value, I would be inclined to subtract the 75% bounce rate from the unique visitor total, leaving us with a figure of 1,250 unique visitors who viewed more than one page that month.
Putting all that together, we might estimate that about 1,250 individual visitors each came to our site on two separate occasions last month, during which time they accessed a total of about ten pages.
In real life, however, it is far more likely that a small percentage of these 1,250 individuals were significantly more engaged than the others. And as we said, many of those ‘unique’ individuals are likely to be the same person, accessing your site from different locations. Thus, your 5,000 unique visitors might actually boil down to about 500 – 1000 (5% – 10%) actively engaged readers.
Admittedly, I am being intentionally conservative with those figures. Many modern marketers talk about an ’80/20 principle’, meaning that the top 20% of your audience are the most likely to be the most engaged.
So that leads us to the next logical question:
To answer that question, we’d need to look at another set of statistics, measuring the amount of time our readers spend on our site.
That’s what we’ll be looking at in Part 2 of this short guide to blog statistics. I think you’ll be fascinated by what the actual numbers reveal. I know I was…but I confess I’m geeky that way.
If you’re not already subscribed to this blog, I invite you to do so, so you will be sure to receive Part 2 via email when it comes out in a few days’ time. I promise it will give you a real feeling for that ‘juiciness’ of your blog stats, which I mentioned at the top of this article.

And, hey, you just might learn to love statistics.

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