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Chapter Four: Tracking

As you are marketing your website, you will want to track your results to see which campaigns are working and which ones aren’t. Depending on your affiliate program, web hosting package or email marketing service you are using, tracking may already be taken care of, though it is probably somewhat limited in exactly what is being tracked. For example, most web hosting packages will only tracks how many hits your site gets in general, not how many hits a specific affiliate URL might be getting. They also can’t tell you where your traffic is coming from. Affiliate programs are better as they can track which of your affiliate links within their network are getting hits. But they can’t tell you where these hits are coming from, nor can they provide help with how much traffic your website itself is getting. Then, there’s email marketing services. As you might have guessed, they can only track hits related to your email campaign.

So, what do you do if you want website tracking that can cover the complete spectrum of what is going on with your site? You’ll need to use a website tracking service. There are hundreds available, but two of the most popular are Visitor Ville and Stat Counter. Each are discussed in more detail below.

Visitor Ville

Traditional website tracking services display tracking information in boring charts and graphs. This is not the case with Visitor Ville which actually turns website tracking into a video game. Specifically, the concept of Visitor Ville is like that of SimCily or The Sims. Take a look at the screenshot below to get a better idea.

The buildings represent pages on your website. The busses represent both traffic and where your visitors are coming from. Visitors, (which are not shown in the screenshot above), are represented by people that walk around the city or enter into the ‘buildings.’

If you click on one of these ‘people’, you will get more details about them including their IP address and country of origin. You can even initiate an Instant Message chat session with them if both of you have Javascript-enabled browsers.

The best thing about Visitor Ville is that you can get a free one-week trial. During this trial you will get access to a full version of the service. If you like it, you have to purchase a subscription which will vary according to how much traffic your site gets. For example, 1,000 visitor a month will net you a $14.99 subscription payment. If you have 5,000 visitors, you’ll have to pay a $49.99 subscription payment. Anything traffic higher than 5,000 requires you to enroll in Visitor Ville’s Enterprise Plan. To get the cost for this you will have to contact Visitor Ville directly.

Stat Counter

Stat Counter is a more traditional website tracking service. Everything is displayed in charts and graphs. This is more boring than Visitor Ville, but the pricing is much cheaper. Basically, if your site gets 270,000 page views a month, the service is offered for free. Anything higher than this will require you to pay, but the payment terms are extremely affordable. For example, just $29 a month will allow you track an astounding 15,000,000 page views. However, keep in mind that tracking by page views is not the same as tracking by ‘visits.’ Page views encompass all of the actions done by each visitor. On the other hand, tracking by visits just shows you how many actual visitors came to your site... their specific actions are not included in the count. So, tracking by visits is more reliable but Stat Counter allows for so many page views in their tracking service that you can still get use out of them.

So, what exactly does Stat Counter track? Well, like Visitor Ville, Stat Counter will tell you where your traffic is coming from. You will also get more specific information about your visitors, (though you won’t be able to IM them). However, unlike Visitor Ville, you get more detailed information on what keywords specifically brought visitors to your site. This is especially helpful if you use search engine marketing.

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This section will go over some of the most important elements that a page that hopes to get high research engine rankings needs. Make sure that you go through this while section very carefully as each of these can have a dramatic impact on the rankings that your website will ultimately achieve. Don't focus solely on the home page, keywords and titles.

The first step to sales when customers visit your site to see the products they were looking for. Of course, search engine optimization and better rankings can't keep your customer on your site or make them buy. The customer having visited your site, now ensure that he gets interested in your products or services and stays around. Motivate him to buy the product by providing clear and unambiguous information. Thus if you happen to sell more than one product or service, provide all necessary information about this, may be by keeping the information at a different page. By providing suitable and easily visible links, the customer can navigate to these pages and get the details.

Understanding Your Target Customer

If you design a website you think will attract clients, but you don't really know who your customers are and what they want to buy, it is unlikely you make much money. Website business is an extension or replacement for a standard storefront. You can send email to your existing clients and ask them to complete a survey or even

while they are browsing on your website. Ask them about their choices. Why do they like your products? Do you discount prices or offer coupons? Are your prices consistently lower than others? Is your shipping price cheaper? Do you respond faster to client questions? Are your product descriptions better? Your return policies and guarantees better than your competitor's? To know your customer you can check credit card records or ask your customer to complete a simple contact form with name, address, age, gender, etc. when they purchase a product.

Does Your Website Give Enough Contact information?

When you sell from a website, your customer can buy your products 24 hrs a day and also your customers may be from other states that are thousands of miles away. Always provide contact information, preferably on every page of your website, complete with mailing address, telephone number and an email address that reaches you. People may need to contact you about sales, general information or technical problems on your site. Also have your email forwarded to another email address if you do not check your website mailbox often. When customer wants to buy online provide enough options like credit card, PayPal or other online payment service.

In the field of search engine optimization (SEO), writing a strong homepage that will rank high in the engines and will read well with your site visitors can sometimes present a challenge, even to some seasoned SEO professionals. Once you have clearly identified your exact keywords and key phrases, the exact location on your homepage where you will place those carefully researched keywords will have a drastic impact in the end results of your homepage optimization.

One thing we keep most people say is that they don't want to change the looks or more especially the wording on their homepage. Understandably, some of them went to great lengths and invested either a lot of time and/or money to make it the best it can be. Being the best it can be for your site visitors is one thing. But is it the best it can be for the search engines, in terms of how your site will rank?

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Supporting documentation are attachments that help further aide in the process of the reader taking an action. It is highly common among business emails, though should be used with caution with marketing emails. This is because most email readers are not comfortable opening attachments that are from people that they do not know. Exceptions could be things that they signed up for, such as free e-books. Therefore, make sure to get a reader?s permission before sending an attachment.

Do you have a good understanding of the general idea behind writing email content? With P.A.S.S. hopefully you should, but it doesn?t end there. The next factor to keep in mind when writing email content is length and formatting. You want to make your paragraphs short, with no more than three or four sentences each. In terms of formatting, make sure you put spaces between each of your paragraphs, but don?t put in too much because too much means excess white space, which makes an email look unprofessional.

Also, don't put spaces within paragraphs, as these should be single-spaced. Additionally, do not indent your paragraphs; make it flush up against the left margin. Most importantly, make sure you spell-check your email before sending it out. Many email providers will even let you spell-check your email as you are inputting it. Emails that are misspelled or have grammar errors are classic among spammers and are quick to be deleted, even if they contained useful information.

The final thing you should remember when writing your email content is how you list your links. If you are creating an HTML-based email, you can do what is known as 'cloaking', which is basically when you provide a hyperlink within a word or phrase rather than having to list a full URL. This is especially helpful when providing affiliate links since: many people won't click on a link that they think is from an affiliate program. Even top-level domain names can benefit from cloaking, because it prompts the reader to take immediate action right there.

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Putting the cart before the horse?

Writing for the web isn't a case of collecting your ideas and then putting them online – and blog posting especially is a hidden and deceptively simple looking 'art form' all of its own.

Before you actually write one word of content though you need to think about what you're going to say. You should have your keywords organised into some sort of coherent list – and you should be weeding out the ones you're not interested in using. Once you've done that, you need to sit down and plan down your blog. You need to plan at least 20 posts and choose some sort of posting schedule.

Once you've planned your content, you can start writing your posts. In the case of WordPress, you can queue your posts as you are writing them, giving you the additional advantage of being able to post series and have them ready to go, without losing your flow. If you're using blogger, you should still write your posts as you can then simply copy and paste them into your blog on the day you want them to go live.

We always recommend that you stay at least three posts ahead of your posting schedule – that way, if you hit a dry spot, or find yourself too busy to post; you've still got 'emergency' content on tap, till you can re-evaluate. What should a blog post BE?

Blog posts should follow one of a few formulae, but before you look at them – you should probably consider what they can and can't contain – there are a couple of 'no no’s' in blogging.

First and foremost – your blog should be advertising light, if it contains any advertising at all. People don't want to talk about your latest and greatest advert – they want to read about your opinions and thoughts in your niche – they want to know that you DO actually know what you're talking about, and most importantly, they want to discuss, not be sold to.