Achieving financial freedom with Network Marketing on The Internet - Part 16 - Time to analyze - Measure your progress
By Tasos Vasilopoulos
Posted Saturday, August 21, 2004
Introduction
This article makes part of a series of 20 articles. The subject of this series is the creation and promotion of a website as a cost-effective method to establish a profitable home based business on the Internet.
In my previous article, “Achieving financial freedom with Network Marketing on The Internet – Part 15 – Hiring Links from other webpages – Pay to become important”, I have given you instructions on implementing an alternative method to assist in building your link popularity.
In this article I will teach you why it is important to measure the results of your work and how to do it.
Measure your progress
It is always a good tactic to measure your results. This way you can confront them with your efforts and arrive to useful conclusions about your marketing methods. If you know the URL a visitor to your web page comes from, you may understand which sources brings you many visitors, which paid advertisement brings good results in confront with your investment and which not. So, you will need a tool to analyze the parameters below, regarding your visitors:
§ How many unique visitors you have each day? Each month?
§ Where visitors come from (which websites, which web pages, which Search Engines)?
§ In case they found your website from the listing of a Search Engine, which was that Search Engine? Which was the keyword used?
§ Which was the entry page in your website?
Definitely you will need a tool to measure the results of your efforts. To detect changes in the number of visitors you receive and understand what caused this changes. Was it a change in the pagerank of your home page or another page? Did another Search Engine included your website in each listings?
These last three years I used Hitbox (www.hitboxcentral.com), because it was free. Unfortunately Webside Story announced the discontinuance of this free product. Now a webmaster must pay over $30 monthly to get the services of this tool.
So, you have to come up with another free or low-cost solution to audit your statistics, unless you can afford to pay for the services of Webside Story, which services are among the best you can find..
First of all, most of the web-hosting companies offer log analyzer tools to allow webmasters audit their visitors. So, if you already have a web-hosting company, check if they use such a log analyzer.
If you haven’t used the services of such a company yet, include this parameter among the others that will affect your decision.Find a web hosting company that offers website statistics.
Another solution is the tool that Sitemeter offers (www.sitemeter.com). They offer a free version, but also the regular version does not cost much, about $6 per month. From what I have seen in their website it seems a good tool to me. And I will use it when free Hitbox will stop its operation.
If you search for “web statistics” you will found more products, free or low cost to use.
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Next article in the series “Achieving financial freedom with Network Marketing on The Internet” :
Part 17 – Your first visitors – Where do they come from?
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About the author:
Tasos Vasilopoulos is a successful Network Marketer on the Internet as Group Leader of SFI Marketing Group. His main method to promote his home business on the Internet is websites properly optimized to obtain a good rank in the listings of the major Search Engines. Get his ebook with an in depth analysis of all the steps of his method and find more resources on proper domain registration, effective website design and search engines optimization in his website at (http://www.netincome.gr).
