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 Issue #26 - July 21st, 2003 Internet Marketing Newsletter for Small Businesses
Brought to you by idesignbusiness.com http://www.idesignbusiness.com Issue # 26 Monday, July 21st, 2003 In this Issue: ARTICLES: ONLINE POLL: FREE RESOURCE: Welcome to another issue of the idesignbusiness Internet Marketing Newsletter. I am excited to tell you about a new feature we have added to the Newsletter this month - Newsletter Archive Search. You can now search our entire archive of newsletter articles by keyword(s) to quickly find information you want. Give it a try today by visiting our Newsletter Archive As always, I want to hear from you! Please direct all newsletter correspondence to newsletters@idesignbusiness.com You can view all past issues of the Internet Marketing Newsletter for Small Businesses at the newsletter archive. Click below to visit the archive: Newsletter Archive Neal St. Clair idesignbusiness Advertisement Do you need a reliable Webmaster? When is the last time you updated your website? Fresh content brings traffic to your website and keeps people coming back. idesignbusiness now offers Website Maintenance packages so you can have a professional webmaster for your website. Let us handle HTML, text, and image updates to your website so you can concentrate on your business. We are professional, reliable and best of all affordable! We can help you:
Email - info@idesignbusiness.com Phone - 213.926.2990 Online Poll Are your tracking your website traffic? ARTICLE Measuring & Evaluating Your Website Traffic by Neal St. Clair Last issue of the newsletter we covered the basic steps to getting a website online. This article relates to that topic because if you currently have a website or are planning a launching a website soon you should have a plan to add some type of Website traffic monitoring to your site. It is very important to know how many people are visiting your site, what pages they are looking at, and where they are coming from. The remainder of this article covers the importance of understanding your website traffic and sources of free traffic monitoring software. Why should you measure your website traffic? There are two main reasons I believe measuring and evaluating your website traffic is important, to evaluate the success of your marketing campaigns and to track your site‘s growth.
By tracking your website traffic you can determine what marketing campaigns, both online and off, are working and what are not. In past articles of this newsletter we have discussed how important it is to create unique URLS for different ad campaigns. By doing this and tracking your website traffic, you can easily determine what pages are being viewed and what are not. For example, let‘s say you are trying to increase traffic to your widget page using both banner ads on the Internet and local flyers around your neighborhood. For the banner ads, you redirect users to the page http://www.yoursite.com/widgets.asp?id=banner. For the flyers, you direct people to http://www.yoursite.com/widgets.asp?id=flyer. Each of these pages would show the exact same content, but by providing a ? in the URL, you can track each marketing campaign. Most website traffic monitoring software will show you how many times each page was viewed. Without tracking your site traffic, you may never know what campaigns work and campaigns are simply a waste of money. It is impossible to determine your website‘s growth over a period of time without measuring your traffic. Are you receiving more traffic this month than last month? What about this year versus last year? These are very basic questions that you should be able to answer. Tracking and evaluation enables you to make appropriate changes to your website and grow your business. The success of nearly all websites is directly related to the number of people that visit the site. Finding ways to increase traffic should be one of your biggest goals and monitoring your current and historical website traffic will help you accomplish that. I have tried many different traffic monitoring tools in the past and the best free service I have found is from WebSTAT. WebSTAT offers both a free service and a pay service. The free service is very good and provides key statistics including Page Views, # of Unique Visitors, Search Engine Referrals, Monthly trends, and much more. To use their free service, you must include a small graphic at the bottom of each page you want to track. I think that is a fair trade off for this valuable information. They also offer a premium service for a monthly fee that removes the graphic from your pages and provides much more robust statistics. Click here to begin tracking your website traffic. Advertisement Promote Your Products & Services Using Email Marketing Are you using email campaigns to market you products and services, communicate with customers, and generate leads? If not, you are missing out on the most affordable and effective marketing tool available to small businesses. The idesignbusiness Mail Manager handles everything required to execute a professional email marketing campaign including email collection, contact list management, email delivery, and reporting. Learn how you can begin sending e-Newsletters, greeting cards, email promotions and more today. FREE RESOURCE: Each issue of the Internet Marketing Newsletter for Small Businesses will include helpful free online resources to promote your website. Have you ever been curious about how your website traffic stacks up against the rest of the sites on the World Wide Web? If so, check out Alexa.com to find out your site's universal rank. Simply enter your domain name into the search box (i.e. - yoursite.com) and you will receive your traffic rank. This rank is a combination of the number of visitors your site receives and how long people are staying on your site. In addition to your traffic rank, you can find out how many sites are linking to you and read user reviews of your site. This is a great tool to monitor your traffic growth over time and your competitors... Visit Alexa.com ABOUT idesignbusiness idesignbusiness provides complete Internet services for small businesses. Increase Website traffic, build your customer base, and drive revenue using our cost-effective and result driven tools and services Please visit http://www.idesignbusiness.com for more information. SUBSCRIPTION NOTICE This newsletter is only sent to opt-in subscribers. If at anytime you would like to be removed from this list, please send an e-mail to newsletters@idesignbusiness.com with REMOVE in the subject line or click on the remove link below. Spread the word - Please forward to friends and colleagues. Copyright 2002 - 2003 idesignbusiness http://www.idesignbusiness.com |
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