Profile views
Membership to the Learning Practitioners'
Association enables a trainer to have a profile on the TrainerBase web
site. As mentioned in previous articles there are 2 types of profile:
Basic and the Full Enhanced. I have already suggested what the potential
significant advantages to having the Full enhanced profile are and
tapping into these benefits are part of what I covered in the previous
articles.
In the previous articles I outlined:
In this article I will outline the major benefits to all
members of:
And in future articles will provide tips on:
- Networking (making contacts in a virtual world)
- Applying for opportunities (how not to get yourself eliminated
before you start)
Tracking views and downloads
The TrainerBase was set up as a market place. The Association
provides the space for a member to profile what they do but it is up to
the member to participate. One bit of functionality that the TrainerBase
web site provides over most other 'networking' sites is the ability to
track who or what has been visiting your profile or downloading your
resources. This is of paramount importance as it provides you will a
list of potential purchasers or associations that you can engage with
'at the next level'.
Profile views
When you surf the Internet your journey is potentially traceable and
it is this traceability that forms the backbone of web site statistics.
All visits to the TrainerBase web site are recorded in a log file for
each day. Just to get some indication of the amount of data that is
captured; on a typical day the TrainerBase log files will be in excess
of 10Mb. That is a 10Mb .txt file; a huge amount of data. For members we
record in a member log, the identity of all visitors to a particular
profile.
Why do we do this? We ask ourselves this sometime as we are aware
that a significant percentage of the membership have not appreciated the
potential of these logs. Let us address this.
The number of visitors to your profile in a month provides an
indication of how visible you are on the TrainerBase web site. If you
have less than 5 visits a month then your profile is almost invisible.
If you get up to 20 visits a month then your profile is beginning to
gain some presence on the site. Some members get over 100 visits per
month. These members have a good presence on the site and are in a
position to capitalise on their exposure.
But who or what is visiting your profile? The hope of course is that
the visitor will be a potential purchaser of training. But it is just as
likely to be another member of the Association or more likely an unknown
visitor.
How can you tell? The first thing to do is go to
Edit Profile and log in. In section 2, Your
details, click on the See who has been viewing
your profile link. The resulting page will display your profile
views by month and year. What you might see is something like the
following:
11/10/2009 08:03:15 - Unknown User
(202.89.68.110)
09/10/2009 14:56:42 - Miss Heather Girling
(Independent/Freelance Trainer & training purchaser) (email address)
06/10/2009 20:14:36 - Unknown User
(66.249.65.210)
05/10/2009 07:31:41 - Search Engine Robot
04/10/2009 20:16:50 - Unknown User
(66.249.65.9)
02/10/2009 06:12:42 - Mr David Cameron
(Training purchaser) (email address)
In the above list of visits we can deduce that 2 visitors are
registered on the system, 3 are totally unknown to the system and 1 is
recognised as a search engine robot.
The 2 registered visitors looked at your profile for a reason. You
should email them to find out what the reason was and whether there is
anything that you can help them with. This is about networking and
building up a list of fellow users and members that you can communicate
with in the hope and expectation that you will gain from the engagement.
The search engine robot suggests that there may be something in your
profile worth indexing however to only see one robot in a month out of
the 20,000 the TrainerBase site gets, would suggest that there is a
considerable amount of work you could do to raise your profile.
The unknown visitors are either search engines robots or human
visitors that the site is not able to identify. What we can identify and
do display is the IP Address. You cannot gain much from this alone but
you can over time gather patterns of visitors. In the above example on
the 04/10/2009 20:16:50 and on the 06/10/2009 20:14:36 there were 2
visits from very similar addresses (66.249.65.9 and 66.249.65.10). This
would suggest that these two visitors are either the same person or from
the same location. What could this mean? You never know. It is possible
to identify the geographical local for these IP Addresses but I would
err on the side of caution is this information. My own IP address is
identified as coming from the East Midlands; and I am based in Wales.
The fact is that your profile tracks who visits it. You should do
EVERYTHING to get people and robots to your profile so that you can
build your prospect list. If you do this well, the value of the list is
worth more that the membership fee.
Resources
And don't forget the article about resources. Only registered users
of the Association can download resources. This means that you will have
their contact details. This means that you can and should contact
everyone that downloads your resources to find out what they think.
Granted a large majority will not respond; but it only take one
purchaser to make your membership the best investment of the decade.
Download the list
In both the See who has been viewing your profile
and the See who has been viewing your
Sample Resources link you can download a CSV file for compiling
your prospect list in a spreadsheet for you email campaign. We do try to
make it straight forward for you.
As I said at the start of this article; it is not just about what we can
do for you, it is more about what you can do for yourself. There are in
the region of 6,000 profile views each month and less than 500 members.
Someone is generating a very valuable prospects list just by having a
visible and populated profile.
If there is anything else you would like to know about what the
Association is doing to benefit its members please feel free to contact us.
Peter Mayes
Chief Executive The Learning Practitioners' Association
incorporating
TrainerBase
www.trainerbase.co.uk
E: peterm@trainerbase.co.uk
T: 01239 711544
F: 01239 711724
M: 07970 746077
Offices:
WALES:
The Copse, Carmarthen Road, Newcastle Emlyn, Wales, SA38 9DA
LONDON:
Gable House, 18-24 Turnham Green Terrace, Chiswick, London, W4 1QP
The Learning Practitioners' Association: Company registered in England and Wales Reg. No.
6456450. Registered office address: 23 College Street, Lampeter, SA48
7DY
TrainerBase is a trademark of GirlingMayes Ltd
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