Online Marketing Secret

Reap An Impressive Harvest Of Increased Sales

I have had the benefit of meeting with many small business owners. Most of them have business websites. It's interesting to note that many of them complain about getting poor results from their websites.

In thinking through this situation, I can't help but think about the American farmer. They depend on their crops in order to make a living. Each year they plant and hopefully harvest. If a farmer plants the seeds and waits for the harvest without any additional investment in a watering system, fertilizer, and pesticides, the harvest will likely be very poor.

In the case of the business owner, their site needs good structure and good content. If the business owner puts up a site without any additional investment of time and capital, their site will not be productive. They must invest in keyword selection, search engine optimization, advertising, and promotion.

With the aid of electronic technology, farmers have succeeded in dramatically increasing their crop yields. With the use of global position systems (GPS) and other electronic tools they are able to monitor the harvest yield real time. They are able to determine areas of their field that are producing the best and areas that need help. With this information, they are able to selectively control the dispensing of fertilizer in the coming season to get maximum yield throughout their whole field.

In the world of internet marketing, there are tools available for business owners to monitor their web site traffic. Like a farmer monitoring the yield from their harvest, it is imperative to actually track the website traffic to know where the traffic is coming from and to know the pages that are getting the most attention. This information provides insights on changes needed in the content, design, and promotion of the website in order to improve its effectiveness. The remainder of this article will identify tools available to track your website traffic in order that you can make the proper changes to get optimal results. The secret to Increased On-Line Traffic is in the tracking data.

Following are three suggestions of tools that can help to monitor and/or drive more traffic to your website.

Google Analytics is a free tool from Google that can be installed on your website and can effectively track your website traffic. It is a comprehensive tool that provides information about the popularity of the indivdual pages of your website and about the ads that have been clicked to arrive at your website. It also provides information about the search engines that are most used to arrive at your website and information about the geographic locations from which the inquiries came. Thus, investing in only productive search engines, using effective keywords while opting for SEO, and implementing the proper advertising strategy is made possible with the use of tracking. It also gives information about the potential advertisers who may want to advertise on your website. Google Analytics can be installed very easily through a Gmail account by going to http://www.google.com/analytics/sign_up.html and signing up for Google Analytics. After filling out the form, a program code is assigned. This code is to be copied and pasted below the content (code) of each page on your website that needs to be tracked. The status of tracking can be checked and the status report can be made available to as many users as you want. Also the extent of the reports made available to each user can be modified to suit the requirement. For this to happen, "Access Manager" in "Analytics Settings" must be set up. There is an option "Filter Manager" available that can be used to include or exclude visits from the reports.

Alexa is another tool that has many similar features. This is also free and does not even need to be inwstalled. One has to enter the URL of your website on http://alexa.com in the "Search" section. It provides data regarding the traffic on the website, distribution of visitors, location related information and other aspects that help in making decisions. It also gives comparative data as against the websites competitors. In the "Developer's Corner", by clicking on "Link Report" and entering an email address, the reports are delivered directly to this address. There is a facility that enables pasting of a thumbnail on your website. This gives dynamically restructured information pertaining to your website and its ranking.

Internet broadcasts represent a new generation tool that serves as a pre-sales tool. It too has tracking features to gain awareness of important facts about persons that are experiencing their marketing message as delivered in their broadcast. With the use of tracking, this pre-sales tool is optimized in order to drive more traffic to your website. To see an example of an internet broadcast, click on Increased On-Line Traffic

In summary, there are a number of tools you can use to track your traffic and drive more prospects to your website. This tracking data will provide valuable insights that will enable you to optimize your marketing strategy to get the harvest you expect from you marketing investment.

Date Added: July 14, 2007 05:24:25 PM