I took a break from the Vzine in July and it never really got going again due to a proliferation of visitors and house guests out here in Greece. I had been a bit disappointed with audience numbers/growth and it's tricky and relatively expensive to produce, so I let it languish rather badly.

Until I realised my Clicks And Leads Academy membership sales were down and in the process of analysing why, I took a look at the traffic stats to my sales pages...

I realised that while the overall traffic to my website hadn't been affected by the lack of Vzine (and it's spinoff podcast), the numbers of warm prospects visiting those pages had HALVED! So I'm back and if you've missed me, do leave me a comment!

Clicks And Leads is a "tongue in cheek" digital marketing Vzine by entrepreneur, author, podcaster, speaker, Nicola Cairncross.

Mentioned in the Vzine

Clicks And Leads Academy

WickedReports.com

Google UTM link builder

Vzine Playlist on YouTube

The last Vzine 074 | Valuing Outsourcers

Leave me a Speakpipe message  on my contact page

On the blog

How To 10x Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

How To Be Everywhere Online

Write Club The Podcast | It’s Mental Health Week

Own It! 202 | Own It! 202 | Paula Gardner: Chaos Theory

Own It! 201 | Own It! 201 | Why Are Entrepreneurs So Annoying?

Own It! 200 | Own It! 200 | Our 200th Show

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Hi, it's Nicola here, and yes, the Vzine is back! I'm going to explain why I stopped it for a little while and I'm also going to explain why I'm starting it again.

In the meantime, it's mid-November and it's still glorious weather here in Greece. Interesting time of year here, because when you sit inside like this it's actually quite cool because the houses are all made to be cooler through the long summer months.

So when you go outside, it can give you quite a shock as it's actually pretty warm out - it's sort of, 20, 25 centigrade in the sunshine and you get a bit disconcerted because it feels cool in the house, so you dress for winter, then you go outside, and you think, "Oh damn, I'm overdressed, it's too hot." So you have to wear layers at all times, which is a very sensible thing to do.

Okay, so why have I given the Vzine a rest for, well, it was supposed to be just July and then it ended up being July, August, September and October. And why have I started it again, in fact?

Well, it's an interesting lesson in watching out what you measure, because I have no way of tracking whether this Vzine was making any difference to the rate of signups of clients at Clicks & Leads Academy or not.

Basically, to track where your leads and your customers come from right across multiple platforms you need to invest in some really heavy duty software like Wicked Reports - a very good bit of kit but it's a big investment, and it's a lot to set it all up. I'm not ready for it yet.

The other way you can track things, of course, is by using UTM links by using Google UTM Builder. It's a way of adding a string of code to your URLs, so when you put your URL into things like blog posts or into ads, all sorts of things really, it shows you when things come into analytics on the URL, the UTM is shown. So if it says Facebook, paid ads, this campaign, this ad group, then you know that you're getting leads, and especially if you've got your goal conversion set up in analytics, to track your UTM links, it's a really good thing.

Also, my Drip account measures when new subscribers have come in through a UTM link as well. Because it appends that UTM link to the person's records, so as each new subscriber comes in, I can click through and see where they came from. But it's a pain and I'm not very good at consistently putting the UTM links on.

So when I was looking at my Vzine numbers, I could see that Vzine number one only really had about 400 views on YouTube. On Facebook, it was going great guns, because I was able to boost it,