Traffic Is The Lifeblood of Your Online Business

You Need Google Analytics

If you're serious about making money online, then you know by now that traffic is the lifeblood of your business. Unfortunately, there are thousands of websites on the Internet that are languishing in obscurity because they don't have enough website traffic. Today, I'm going to try to help you with that.

I apologize that I haven't posted for a week, but I've been extremely involved in multiple tasks and issues, but hopefully you can benefit from some of the information I'm sharing with you today.

As online entrepreneurs, we all know traffic is important, but most of us don't know how to get traffic consistently, get enough of a volume of traffic to our websites so that we can convert a sufficient number of visitors into customers, and we often don't adequately target the traffic we want or need to generate sales.

If traffic is one of the challenges to your online business, then I'm going to suggest that you do a couple of things.

First, let's be clear that the traffic that I'm talking about getting is the traffic that you don't have to pay for. Free traffic. In other words, we're looking for search engine traffic, and more specifically, web traffic from Google. Why Google? Because they're the biggest search engine, and the majority of searchers use Google to find what they need on the web.

Okay, now that we've clarified what traffic we're trying to attract, let's move on.

In order to know what to do to get traffic, you have to have information about the traffic you currently have. I know that many of you out there may have a web host that provides "cpanel". Cpanel for those who may not be familiar with it is simply a website management interface that allows webmasters to manage their websites from a centralized platform. Basically with the click of your mouse, you can access all of the different aspects of your website from file content to databases, email accounts, subdomains, etc.

Within your cpanel is a button for "awstats" and "webalizer" that provides you with detailed statistical information about your website; number of visitors, unique visitors, referring sites (sites from which visitors are coming to visit your site), page views, etc. If you have this information and you're using it, that's good. If you've never really paid attention to the information, you need to start examining and understanding it.

Your statistical information helps you to know what kind of visitors are landing on your site, how they found you, what search terms they used to find you (for search engine traffic), how long they stay on your site, how many pages they view while they're on your website, what browser they use, etc. There is a wealth of information here. From it, you can get a pretty good idea about your website traffic. However, there is something better. And that's Google analytics.

Again, if you are serious about making money online, I strongly suggest you use the Google analytics tool. Google analytics is a tool that provides an analysis of your website traffic. It provides detailed, easy-to-understand reports that give you an overview of the activity on your website or blog.

Google analytics allows you to easily see where your traffic comes from, including breakdowns showing how much is referral traffic, how much is direct traffic and how much of your traffic comes from the search engines. It also provides critical information such as your "bounce rate".

For those of you who may not be familiar with the term, a bounce rate is the number of visitors to your website that immediately "bounce" or leave the site. The bounce rate is important to you because it is an indicator of how well, and more importantly, when you're falling short, of accurately targeting your visitors.

For example, a high bounce rate indicates that the individuals finding your website through the search engines (Google) apparently didn't find what they were looking for. This could mean a couple things to you:

1.The keywords that you are using to attract people to your site and to describe what your website is about may need to be tweaked or completely changed, so that they more accurately depict your product or service, and communicate that information to potential visitors.
2.The landing page of your website may need to be edited or changed to provide a better or more pleasing experience for your visitors. If visitors to your website are bombarded with too many messages, if they're overwhelmed with information or if they don't understand what they should do or where they should go to find what they need immediately, they'll leave, post haste.

So, a high bounce rate tells you that there is something wrong, there's some type of disconnect between your website or blog and the visitors you are attracting.

Okay, this post is getting much longer than I intended for today. So, I'll wrap this up.

If you aren't using Google analytics, go get it. It's free. It will help you to improve your website and your marketing. I promise you within just a fews days of putting Goggle analytics to work, you'll discover things about your website that you didn't know, and you'll begin to get a much better overview of your web presence and promotional and marketing issues that may be affecting the level of traffic you're currently experiencing. We'll talk more later.

Toodles.