Learning to understand your website statistics can help you improve your website for visitors, measure if your promotional strategies are working, and find new opportunities to promote your business.

How can you measure your website statistics?

There are two common ways to measure this important information.

One is with software that analyzes the server logfiles. Each time someone visits your site the server records detailed information about the visitor and what they did on your website. With software like Webalyzer or AWStats that information is put into a form you can easily read and understand. Many website hosts offer this software already installed on their servers and available to clients through a cPanel or Plesk administrative area.

The second way to keep track of your stats is with a javascript added to all of your pages that sends info to another server each time a visitor loads a page, such as Google Analytics or Crazy Egg. With these services you sign up, then they provide a small snippet of code for you to copy and paste into your web pages.

You may want to combine both methods to get a better overall picture of who is visiting your website and what they’re doing.

What do the terms mean?

Hits: Each request for a file from a server is counted as a hit. This is an often misunderstood term. It does not mean you’ve had 5,000 people visit your site if you have had 5,000 hits. If your page has one html file and five images on it, then each time a visitor loads the page it would count as six hits.

Page Views: How many times a “page” as defined in log analysis has been loaded. This is more accurate than hits because it will only count the .html or .php files instead of every image on a page.

Unique Visitors: This is an even more useful piece of information than hits or page views. Unique visitors tracks how many different computers have visited your website.

Number of Visits: How many unique sessions were logged. The way this one works is that if a visitor comes to your site today, and then again in a week, that would be counted as two visits.

Spiders Visited: Some tracking/analysis software is able to show you which “spiders” from search engines visited your site. This is an easy way to see if your site is being indexed by different search engines.

Top Pages: Which pages are the most popular on your website? Look for the top pages section of your stats to see what visitors are most interested in.

Connect to Site From or Search Phrases Used: This may be called something different depending on what software or analyzer you’re using but most will include a section allowing you to see how visitors found you. It will show if they’ve followed a link from another website, a search engine, or typed in your URL directly.

HTTP Status Codes: Your analyzer may also show you if your visitors got 404 or other errors. Watch this section to see if you’ve got a broken link or other problem somewhere on your website that you need to fix.

What metrics should you watch?

Some of the basic things you want to watch are:

Conversion rates: What % of visitors to a sales page made purchases? There’s plenty of information available on how to optimize sales pages for better conversion rates. Once you have a base measurement of your current conversion rate, start making small changes to your copy, headlines, and other page elements then watch for a change in the conversion rate to see whether changes helped.

Page views per visit: How many pages does each visitor look at? If this number is very low – one or two – then visitors aren’t being engaged enough or finding what they were looking for.

Monthly unique visitors: Is the number growing over time? Your traffic should be going up! If it’s not, time to review your promotional tactics and strategies to see where you can focus on improving.

What can you do with all that information?

Website statistics offer you a wealth of information — use it to your advantage!

Here are some easy ways to use your website statistics to build your business:

- Contact sites that refer visitors/link to your site and send them a thank you note.

- Offer sites who’ve published your articles “priority notice” of future articles you release for reprint. With permission, email your articles directly to the interested sites so your articles are easier for them to publish.

- Watch the popular pages of your website then focus on building those pages with better copywriting, promote affiliate products, etc.

- Look for trends in the type of websites that are referring visitors to your site and use it to better target your marketing efforts.

Is your website running as smoothly as it could be? Here are eight important points to check the function and professionalism of your website.

1) Compatible

Is your website compatible with all the major search engines? Test it on as many browsers as you can, and do a check at browsershopts.org to see what it looks like in other browsers and on other operating systems.

2) Complete

Is your website complete? Be sure there aren’t missing pieces or incomplete pages.

3) Clean and Confident

Your design and layout should be “clean” and project a confident voice. Never talk down about your projects or your business. Owning a small business is nothing to be ashamed of! You can offer fantastic products and fabulous service to your customers. Do your absolute best and be confident in that.

4) Focus Drawn Immediately to Product/Services

What do you want your shoppers to see? Should they focus on a crazy, busy background? Only if your background is for sale. Otherwise, you want the shoppers eye to be immediately drawn to the products or services you offer. Make sure your header area and graphics are a reasonable size and load quickly so they don’t take over the focus of the page.

5) Clean HTML Coding

This is important for compatibility, accessibility, and search engine rankings, too. Check your code at validator.w3.org and make any necessary updates.

6) Valid Links

Are there any broken links on your website? If so, fix them! Run a free check at validator.w3.org/checklink to get started.

7) Quick Download Time

Visitors will not wait long for your page to load. If it doesn’t come up quick, they’ll click away without taking time to browse. Avoid this by being sure that your images are optimized to load quickly and that your code is clean and error-free. Be especially carefully with flash or animated elements.

Consistent Brand and Voice

Keep your target market in mind as you write your website and use a consistent voice throughout your website. Also be sure that your branding is consistent throughout the pages of your website, your products, your emails, your sales invoice/packing slips, etc. Match your logo, your fonts, and your style so it’s easy for clients and potential clients to identify any piece of your business, marketing, or sales materials.

Are you considering starting your own blog? You may wonder whether you should:

* go with a blogging service that’s hosted on another server where you get a subdomain like yourbusiness.bloggingsite.com

* put your blog on your own domain and hosting space so your blog is at yourbusiness.com or yourbusiness.com/blog

Here are five great reasons to consider using WordPress on your own domain.

5) You can choose your theme.

There are thousands of free themes available for WordPress and you can only use them if you host your own WordPress blog. Just Google “WordPress theme” and you’ll find many websites offering stylish themes.

With many other blogging services you are limited to only the themes they’ve chosen to allow.

4) You can modify your theme.

With some HTML & CSS knowledge, or the help of your designer or virtual assistant, you can modify a theme to do what you need.

3) You can add any plugins you’d like.

One of my favorite things about WordPress is that there are so many fantastic plugins available. You can choose which work best for you and install anything you’d like on your own blog.

2) You’ll be building links to your own domain.

When you host your blog at a service where your blog is just a subdomain, links to “your” blog are building page rank and links for the main domain, which isn’t yours. Instead, host your own blog, and all those links will be pointed to your domain and helping to boost your domain’s page rank and links.

1) It’s free, but has a great support community.

WordPress is free to download and install. But that doesn’t mean you’re without support. Because it’s such as popular blogging platform there are many forums and sites dedicated to it where you can go to find answers to your questions.

Here are some easy and free ways you can promote your newsletter to gain subscribers.   Print off a quick copy and then check off each promotion strategy as you complete it.

- Add a subscription form to every page of my website
- Edit email signature to include info about my newsletter
- Edit signature on forums to include info about my newsletter (where allowed)
- Post newsletter info in any forums you visit regularly (where allowed)
- Tell people about it!
- Offer a cool freebie (ethical bribe) for new sign ups
- Add a free sample issue to your website
- Include a printed note about it on invoices or receipts with your orders
- Print the info about it on your business cards (the back works well)
- List it in free ezine directories
- Swap ads with other newsletters who share your target market
- Write and submit an article to the article banks with your info at the bottom
- Link to your newsletter or put a subscribe form on your blog
- Link to your newsletter or put a subscribe box on your social networking pages
- Run a contest for subscribers
- Ask your subscribers to share the newsletter with friends or family

Work at home mom extraordinaire Michelle Shaeffer publishes The Muses Brainstorm, a weekly ezine with tips to help you balance, manage, and market your home based business. If you’re ready for inspirational guidance and bright ideas sign up free at http://www.thesmallbusinessmuse.com

It’s a newsletter publishers nightmare–being accused of sending spam and then blocked from reaching their subscribers.

One of the most difficult things to deal with is being accused of spamming.   It can cause all sorts of frustrations.

If you use a newsletter script hosted on your own website it can result in your IP being blacklisted and then you’ll have trouble getting your regular business email delivered (not just your newsletter).

If you use a third party hosting service, your domain email won’t get blacklisted, but your newsletters won’t reach your subscribers.

You don’t want either of these things to happen!

How can you avoid it?  Some people will click the “Spam” reporting button instead of unsubscribing, no matter how easy you make it, and then you’ll need to deal with getting de-listed, but there are some ways to protect yourself from being accused of spamming.

1) Don’t Send Spam

This sounds obvious, I know, but many small businesses don’t realize exactly what spam is.  Spam isn’t just the ads you get for stocks, medicines, or winning international lotteries.  It’s any unsolicited commerical email.  Unsolicited means you sent it to someone who didn’t specifically request it.

What does this mean for you?  Don’t take your entire contact list of emails and add them to your newsletter!  Do not add anyone who has not requested specifically to receive sales related emails from you.  If at all possible, you need an IP address and timestamp proving they requested it (third party newsletter hosts will track and keep this information for you).

In addition, you MUST comply with the CAN-SPAM act by providing an unsubscribe link in every newsletter you send, as well as your complete postal mailing address.  If someone requests removal you need to remove them promptly and be sure they stay removed from your list.

2) Double Opt-In Only

Always require double opt-in.  This means after the person gives you their email address, a verification email is sent that they must respond to (usually by clicking a link or replying to the message) in order to be added to your list.  This ensures that the email address is correct and current.  It also means you’ve got two methods to prove to a service provider who thinks you’re spamming that the email address did want to receive your newsletter.

3) Ask Your Subscribers to Whitelist You

The process varies depending on what email service your subscribers are using, but include a note at the top of your newsletters asking your subscribers to please whitelist your email address or add you to their friends list.  If they take this step you’re much more likely to end up in their inbox instead of their junk mail folder.  You could use something like, “So we can be sure you continue receiving great tips from us to help you run your business each week, please take a few seconds to add yournewsletteraddress@yourdomain.com to your whitelist or friends list.  Thank you!”

4) Include a Permission Reminder and Note About Unsubscriptions

Sometimes people forget that they’ve subscribed to a newsletter (be sure you send out regularly so your subscribers don’t forget you!).  To help jog their memory, you can include a permission reminder somewhere near the top of your newsletter.  “This newsletter is only sent with permission to those who’ve requested it at our website www.yoursite.com but if you’d like to change your address or unsubscribe just scroll to the bottom of this email and click the link.”  If it’s easy to see where/how to unsubscribe, people will be more likely to use that feature instead of reporting you as a spammer.

5) Run Your Newsletter Through a Spam Checker Before Sending

Once you’ve completed writing your newsletter, take time to run it through a reliable spam checker.  Some services (like GetResponse and Aweber) have this feature built-in.  If your sending service doesn’t, here are two good free ones:

spamcheck.sitesell.com — This site will give you a “Spam Score” and recommendations on how to reduce it.

programmersheaven.com/webtools/Spam-Checker/spamchecker.aspx  — This tool checks based on SpamAssassin and SpamBayes rules.

6) Keep Tabs on Your IP and it’s Blacklist Status

There are lots of different blacklists out there that your IP address may get added to if you are accused of spamming.  Your IP address is sort of the numerical version of your domain name, except it’s not always unique to you and is probably shared with other sites hosted by your website host, unless you have an SSL certificate or other reason for your own unique IP.  You don’t need to worry about this with a third-party hosted newsletter service because they monitor their IPs, but if you’re hosting your own newsletter, then check your IP status at the following websites:

mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx
mail-abuse.com/lookup.html
rbls.org/index.html

What can you do if you’re blocked for spamming and stuck on a black list?  If you get placed on a blacklist you’ll need to request removal.  It sounds a little intimidating, but it’s really not a scary process.  When you receive a bounce notice that assumes your newsletter was spam, look closely to find the service provider who bounced you.  Start at their website and do a search to see what you can find about their spam list and removal process.  If you can’t find how to remove yourself from their blacklist, a phone call to their customer service department should help.  Your website host may also be able to guide you through getting your IP de-listed.

These six tips will help you keep your newsletter successfully able to reach the inboxes of the people who’ve subscribed.

Work at home mom extraordinaire Michelle Shaeffer publishes The Muses Brainstorm, a weekly ezine with tips to help you balance, manage, and market your home based business. If you’re ready for inspirational guidance and bright ideas sign up free at http://www.thesmallbusinessmuse.com

You need to know what you want and need before you start looking for an e-commerce solution.  The more details you plan in advance, the better off you’ll be.

As a website designer I worked with clients all too often who had chosen their e-commerce solution only because it was “free” or because their website designer recommended it.  Your designer can be a wonderful resource in choosing the right e-commerce solution, but only if they know enough about your needs and the available options, and are used to working with a variety of e-commerce solutions instead of focusing only one or two.  One size does not fit all in e-commerce.

Start with a “wish list” of all the features your ideal e-commerce solution would have, and rank them by priority.  Know which features are absolute “must have” and which you can be flexible on.  Digital product delivery may be critical for your business.  Or you might need a specific payment gateway but can be flexible on shipping.  These are the types of things you want to know before you start shopping for your ecommerce solution.

Here are some of the biggest areas you need to consider:

*    What level of technical skill is required to update/manage the e-commerce solution?  Some are more user friendly than others.  Be sure to try a demo before you make your choice.  All e-commerce solutions will have a learning curve, but some will be easier than others.  Look at the support options available for learning – what’s available?  User guide?  Video tutorials?  Support helpdesk?

*    What payment methods will you accept?  PayPal?  Credit Cards?  This is important to know before you choose because not all e-commerce solutions work with all payment gateways.

*    How will you charge shipping on your items?  Do you need real time shipping quotes (UPS, USPS, FedEx, or other carriers)?  Or will you use a table method, percentage or flat rate shipping?

*    Do you want to offer coupons or sales?  What kind?  Do you need to limit sales to particular categories or products or limit the number of times a coupon is used?

*    Do you need your cart to track your inventory for limited quantities or one of a kind items?

*    If you offer digital products (PDF ebooks, MP3s, etc) do you need instant delivery of the products through your ecommerce ssytem?

*    What is your budget for the total cost?  Keep in mind that in addition to any license fees, you need to budget for a designer, possibly an SSL certificate, and support for your chosen cart.  Often a licensed cart works out to be less expensive than a free cart when you add in the customization and support expenses.

*    If you are planning to have your sales drop shipped or are working with a product fulfillment company, check that it can be integrated smoothly.  Your drop shipper should be able to guide you to the systems that work with their systems best.

Some other features you may want to consider:

*    Can you manage your entire website with the ecommerce solution, or does it only manage your products?

Some shopping carts are designed as “whole site” solutions where you can add informational pages, change your site layout, and more from within the shopping cart administration.

Other carts are designed as “add on” solutions where you either add small “add to cart” buttons to your existing website pages, or you link to a webshop but keep your informational pages on a separate website.

*    Is it “search engine friendly” or will you have a hard time getting traffic from the search engines?

To be search engine friendly, a cart should allow you to control your page titles, descriptions, keyword tags, image names, etc.  The URLs it generates shouldn’t be full of characters like ? and & and = but instead look like real words (preferrably your product names).

*    Do you want something that’s fully branded and integrated into your domain name/website or do you want to start smaller with an ecommerce system that’s hosted such as an Etsy Shop (etsy.com), Hyena Cart (hyenacart.com) or eBay Store (ebay.com)?

Once you have a list of the features and functions you need in a shopping cart, it’s time to look at your options.  Compare them one by one to your list of needs and you’ll be able to find the one that will work best for your website.

Michelle Shaeffer is the CEO of Creo Communico LLC, a website hosting and design firm exclusively for small and home based businesses. Our mission is to provide affordable website hosting along with resources and support to help our clients succeed, including 300+ video tutorials, a choice of free site builders, and dozens of easy install scripts. Visit www.creocommunico.com today for a selection of free website management guides on domain names, website hosting, e-commerce and more.