How To Track All Your Website Traffic For Free

Copyright © 2005 Louis Allport

Do you know:

* Exactly how many people are visiting your website?
* How long they're staying on your site before they move on?
* Exactly where those visitors are coming from, each day?
* How much of your website traffic is repeat visitors?
* The exact paths people take as they click their way
through your website?

Here's what I'm getting at:

If you don't know your visitors, it makes it *very*
difficult for you to improve the performance of your website
and turn more visitors into customers - AND - get more
quality traffic. For the simple reason that you're
effectively working blind.

Without knowing how people visit your site and what they do
on your site, any attempts at growing your traffic and
improving the profitability of your website is working with
one armed tied behind your back, at least.

And unfortunately - the web stats that come with your web-
hosting are generally not enough these days.

Depending on your web host, chances are you've either got
Webalizer, Analog Stats, or AWStats installed on your
server. Here's how that software works:

It takes the "raw" (unreadable to the human eye) information
your web server stores of everyone that visits and presents
this in an easy to understand way.

Unfortunately, due to a number of technical reasons, this
information is often presented in quite an inaccurate way.

And in my personal experience, these software packages don't
present this information in a particularly helpful way
either for someone trying to improve the conversion ratios
and profitability of their website.

What I personally do, and what I would suggest you do is use
a "Tracking Solution" that accurately tracks and reports all
your visitors in an easy to read and understand way. These
solutions come in two forms: Software & Services

Both these options have their pros and cons, but what they
both do very well is present exactly what's happening on
your website right up to the minute, and in a way that's
very helpful to you for making good (and profitable)
decisions for your business.

To start with here's a software solution you can install and
use for free on your website:

Now before you go and install it, you should of course be
familiar with installing software on your server. If you're
not comfortable installing software on your website, a
tracking service (which I'll come to in a moment) would
probably be best for you.

And it's also important to note that installing software on
your website can often put more strain on the server. This
is particularly true if you're on shared hosting.

I've personally used the following free tracking software
and it works well. See what you think. Go to
http://www.curve2.com and look for "TrackPro". As I write
this, version 2 is in Beta and is downloadable from the site
at the following address: http://www.curve2.com/trackpro.php

You'll also find many further free tracking software
solutions at http://www.hotscripts.com.

But personally speaking, what I've found works very well and
avoids putting any increased strain on my existing websites
is using a third party tracking service.

The only things really to worry about when using a third
party service are:

* How long will this service be around? (If they stop their
service after a year, you wouldn't be able to access your
past data and will have to change all your tracking codes on
your pages too.)
* What is their privacy policy regarding my web stats? (Are
they honest and trustworthy in other words. You don't want
the service owners studying and then duplicating your
successful business plan.)

Over the past month I've been using ecommStats (
http://www.ecommstats.com). Now, this service isn't free,
but at this time they give you 50,000 free page views per
domain, and depending how busy your site is those page views
can last you a very long time.

The service works great and is very easy to add to your
pages -- simply add three lines of code at the bottom of
each of your pages (you can easily do this with Server Side
Includes if you're comfortable with that) and all your
visitors get tracked accurately and in great detail.

Alternatively - an entirely free (at this time) and very
established service is StatCounter (http://statcounter.com).
It even has a rave review from Tucows.com (one of the
largest download sites on the internet) which speaks for
itself and adds a lot of credibility to the service.

And just in case you're wondering how a free service like
StatCounter makes money, well - since it's such a popular
service with many webmasters logging in every day (and many
I'm sure even more than once a day just like me) that it's
made it very easy for them to sell a lot of advertising on
their site. They also offer an upgrade to their advanced
paid service.

But thinking beyond free services, as your business grows
you may choose to upgrade to high end paid services that
provide even more in depth information about your
visitors...

Services like Urchin (Urchin.com - owned by Google) or Deep
Metrix (DeepMetix.com). However, to help you grow your
business to that point you need to keep a close eye on what
your visitors are doing and where they're coming from, and
free tracking software and services is a great way for you
to start to do this.

--------------------

Louis Allport is an online product developer and marketer
and recently revealed a simple and *proven* four-step
formula for creating best-selling products practically on
demand: http://www.createoffers.com

5 Internet Business Myths That Keep Success At Bay

Copyright © 2005 Louis Allport

Interested in making a full time income running an internet
business?

Well, one of the first things you need to do is forget a lot
of the "myths" that keep being repeated online. Let's go
through five of them here:

Myth 1: "Running a successful online business is easy".

No it isn't. No business success comes easy.

If money was really that easy to make, word would spread and
everyone would jump on it, including investors!

Business doesn't work like that - it's competitive, and
because of this requires hard work and vigilance.

If you treat your internet business like a job, and always
do your very best for your boss (you), then you're off to a
great start.

That said - if you're only looking to make $200 extra a
month, or even $500 extra a month, that IS easy. Just sell
some odds and ends on eBay. A part time income is not
particularly difficult to achieve online with online
auctions and other outlets like Amazon Marketplace.

But - if you're looking for a full time income, you need to
work at it. There is no "secret formula", never was and
never will be.

Myth 2: "Running an internet business costs next to
nothing".

Well, somewhat true, but it misses the point.

You can run an online business very cheaply (my basic
running costs are around $150 a month - hosting,
autoresponders...etc) but if you want your business to grow
at very low cost, you'll have to do all the promotions for
free.

Free online marketing tactics generally take time to work,
and require a lot of elbow-grease: writing articles to
distribute, writing pages to get search engine traffic,
creating products, building up an affiliate program, getting
links in to your sites...

Alternatively - if you want to speed things up, you can
advertise. And depending on how well your site converts
visitors into customers, and how targeted your advertising
is, you can grow very quickly that way.

If you're interested in putting a few hundred dollars aside
into an "advertising fund" and trying to build your business
quickly that way, pay-per-click advertising would probably
be the best way to start.

Focus on Google Adwords & Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly
Overture) for starters since they have the most traffic, as
well as the most responsive traffic.

But before diving in headfirst and potentially throwing good
money after bad on inefficient advertising, it's strongly
recommended you fully understand the subject, or get the
advice of a professional.

Either consult with one (if you can find a reputable one),
or devour eBooks on the subject.

Recommended eBooks are anything by Andrew Goodman or Perry
Marshall. Make sure the information is up to date though as
the pay-per-click field changes incredibly quickly. Twelve
months is a lifetime when it comes to the search engines.

Also recommended is spending time absorbing the Google
Adwords training site and also the Yahoo Search Marketing
training site.

Both these companies want you to succeed with your
advertising (since you'll advertise with them for longer)
and so have a lot of great information to help you get
started and build a successful advertising campaign.

Myth 3: "All traffic is the same".

This myth often presents itself as "Buy 10,000 visitors from
us for $9.95 and you'll make lots of sales!" (or something
along those lines).

Ignore such sales pitches - they're complete rubbish. And
here's why:

Bulk traffic like this is completely untargeted and a
complete waste of your time and money.

Just think - if you were selling a book through direct mail
on "How To Get Rich In Real Estate" and you had to choose a
mailing list to promote to, would you rather:

1) Mail your offer to a list of people who had already
expressed an interest in the subject by purchasing similar
products?

2) Or would you feel it was better to instead pick names at
random out of the phone book and make that list the offer?

Silly question, right?

Well, it's the same online - all traffic is not identical.
People surfing have different interests and motivations,
just like they do offline.

To maximize your chances of making money, you want to target
the visitors most likely to convert to customers for you and
get them to your site.

Myth 4: "Opt-in email doesn't work anymore".

From my own personal experience:

Opt-in mail does work, but not as well as it used it. Many
spam and email filters are over-zealous these days and
delete mail people have asked to receive (opt-in mail) at
the same time as unsolicited email (spam).

Plus - people are very worried about phishing emails these
days (emails that try to fool you into typing in your
private details) and often delete emails out of fear if they
don't recognize who sent it.

But these points aside, opt in email can still work - so
don't discount it before you try it.

Myth 5: "You don't need any technical skills"

Let's be frank - without technical skills you're going to
struggle big time.

If you're going to run an internet business, for starters
you want to be comfortable with computers and familiar with
the internet.

And you really want to get to grips with HTML and FTP. Those
seven letters are the building blocks of creating any kind
of website and getting it live online. If you don't know
them, get to know them. There's plenty of great tutorials
online.

Or even just for starters - you can easily create web pages
visually (without messing around with HTML code) by using a
visual web page editor. There's plenty to be found by
searching download.com.

So put these internet business myths out of your mind and
get cracking on building your business into a success.

--------------------

Louis Allport is an online product developer and marketer.
He recently revealed a system that can help you create best-
selling products practically on demand:
http://www.createoffers.com