How Do They Find You?

By A.T.Rendon
Posted Thursday, July 8, 2004

The movie, "Field of Dreams", starring Kevin Costner and James Earl Jones, made this line famous: "If you build it, they will come."

That idea worked great in the movie but it is a whole different ballpark when it comes to a web site or an email campaign.

The only way to attract traffic on the Internet is to PROMOTE. And the key to successful online promotion is to know HOW your traffic found you.

Why?

Because when you know HOW your traffic found you then you will know what is working for you so that you can not only maintain it, but also increase it.

With an email campaign, it is absolutely essential to code your mailings in order to discover which one is bringing you results.

The easiest way to do that is by the use of Auto-Responders.

There are a host of FREE Auto-Responder services that will allow you to acquire as many FREE responders as you need.

For a "List of FREE Auto-Responder Services", send a blank email to our Auto-Responder at: mailto:freeautoresp@emailexchange.org

For example, you are promoting an ad service that pays you 50% commission. You run one ad in a newsletter, another is done via your signature in posting to a business list and still another ad is exposed via FFA Link submissions.

You can code your ads simply by calling them ad001, ad002, ad003.

When you receive a reply to ad001, you will know it came from the newsletter, ad002 will be a response to your signature and ad003 will be from your FFA Link submission.

Use whatever code is appropriate for you but the important thing to remember to code it and know to what it pertains.

If you have your own web site, your hosting provider might already provide you with the tools you need to track your traffic.

All you would need to do is access your log info and review which web pages are getting the traffic and study where the traffic is coming from to visit you.

If you do not have access to such info from you host provider, there are many good FREE online stat services you can use.

Here are just a few:

HitBox
(http://www.hitbox.com/)

What does HitBox report?
· Traffic - Hourly, daily, monthly and annual statistics for page views and unique visitors
· Referrers - Learn what sites link to you and how much traffic they send, the search engines and keywords users search to find your site, and total traffic from bookmarks
· User paths - See how users navigate through your site
· User profiles - Find out the browsers, operating systems and screen settings that your audience uses and their language, country and domain.
· 100s of statistics

Extreme Tracking
(http://www.extreme-dm.com/tracking/)

With the eXTReMe Tracker you get every advanced feature required to picture the visitors of your website. Conveniently arranged, numbers, percentages, stats, totals and averages. All the way up from simple counting your visitors until tracking the keywords they use to find you.

NedStat
(http://www.nedstat.com/)

Nedstat Basic provides you with accurate answers to all the important questions about your visitors, like which part of the world or countries that they are from, on which days and at what times they hit your site and if you're reaching a greater audience.

You may find that much of your traffic is coming to you from a search engine or directory like Yahoo, (http://www.yahoo.com/) or Google, (http://www.google.com/).

You may also be pleasantly surprised to discover that a web site with related traffic has linked your site and is now sending you new visitors daily.

It would be a good idea to contact the owner of that new traffic generator and let them know you appreciate the link and even offer to link back to them in return.

Once you know where your traffic is coming from to find you, it is important to maintain that flow of traffic and then try to find other sources that are similar.

Doing so will allow you to increase the visitors and leads you generate and hopefully, increase your overall sales.

About the Author
A.T.Rendon is an entrepreneur and published writer. Subscribe to FREE Business Classifieds Newsletter & receive FREE online access to our Password Protected "FREE Submit To Over 2.6 MILLION FREE Ad Sites!" mailto:subscribe_fbcn9@emailexchange.org Visit us at:(http://emailexchange.org/?articles)