Counting Your Web Visitors

Wow, what a week! I worked my butt off this week and got three projects done and the newsletter out. I love a productive week like that. Getting so much accomplished allows me to feel okay with taking the weekend off, and that's just what I did. I read 4 books, and got some yard work done. To me that's a GREAT weekend.

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Just wanted to talk a minute about determining how many visitors your web site gets and tracking your web site visitors.

First of all, when you look at stats or analytics, "Hits" is not the thing to look at. Nor is it the term to use when referring to how many visitors your web site gets.

"Hits" refers to how many FILES are opened and viewed by someone going to your site. In any given single page there will be more than one file opened. For example, there will be the HTML (or XHTML or PHP or ASP or...) page itself, and all the files called by that page such as the CSS stylesheet, each and every image file, any JavaScript files, etc.

That means that you get numerous "Hits" for one visitor seeing one page on your site. That's why I cringe when I hear people talking about how many "Hits" they get on their web site. Hits means virtually nothing when determing how many visitors your site gets.

What does give you a clearer picture of the amount of traffic your site gets is the term, ready for this? VISITORS! or VISITS!

A good analytic or web stats program (not necessarily the same thing) will tell you how many PEOPLE visited your site, what pages they visited, how long they stayed, what search term or referring web site they came to your site from and from what page they exited your site from.

This will give you a much better idea of where your traffic comes from, what they do while on your site and why they leave. All that is powerful ammo for your web marketing strategies, if you know how to use it.

Way Behind!

Man, I haven't been keeping up with my posts as of late. I apologize sincerely to all my adoring fans LOL!

I'm up to my ears in design and programming right now, just got two new accounts late this afternoon.

Good news is I did finish up the Chamber's revised Business Directory, back-end admin section and all. Got some marketing work out of it too that's still to be wrapped up for the big launch at the Annual Meeting. We've only got a couple biz's up and running:
Royal Gorge Anglers
Fremont Economic Development Corp.
Arkansas Valley Drilling
and of course, CD WebMaker

I'll try to stay in touch a little better, but ya know, no promises!

Pre-launch Web Marketing Strategies

It may not occur to most people that you can actually start marketing a web site before it's even launched. It's actually a very useful web marketing strategy that's not difficult to implement and can reap huge rewards.

Purchase a domain name early. Do your keyword research, find a domain name and get it registered. Then set up a hosting account and throw up a Coming Soon page with your logo and contact information. You should put up a tentative launch date as well.

To get your mailing list started as early as possible, go ahead and put up a link to your subscription page or just an email address to subscribe to email updates about the launch and what the site will be about. After launch, you can use that list for marketing.

Set up a blog at your new domain name. I'm a Blogger fan, because it's easy for my customers to use. Just be sure to host it on your own domain name! Then make an initial post and set up Ping Shot at Feedburner so that your posts are updated. Your blog should offer an RSS feed so that visitors can subscribe and get valuable launch updates. Setting up a blog early on without a website will get you in the habit of posting too.

Write some articles and submit to directories. There are free content sites out there if you just can't write your own stuff, but do put your personal touches on them before submitting! Including your domain name and contact info in the resource area of the articles will get incoming links started.

Get other incoming links from your personal blog, friends' sites, and any other indexed and ranked web site. Once you get incoming links, you'll get indexed by the search engines and your site is on the radar before you've even begun the design!