We all know that the purpose of having a website or blog or a combination of both is sending traffic to those pages.But the traffic doesn’t happen to just stop by. Your website isn’t a shop front where people walk by to peek in at their leisure. No, you will need to promote your site to the world so that others know that you are open for business. A common and often overlooked fact is the need to test your website traffic.To do this effectively however, you need to know the goals of your site first to be able to attract the right kind of people. What do you hope to achieve with your site? What is the exact purpose? A simple answer should be easy to give. If you have problems doing this, you might need to rethink your strategies and the aim of your site first.Further to this you need to track, analyze and tweak your marketing efforts to be able to double, triple or simply multiply your traffic without double the work.

You might wonder how you can do this effectively? If you have your own hosting account for your site, then this is fairly easy. You can analyze your traffic via CPanel’s web stats function such as Awstats. It will tell you a lot about your visitors and whether they leave your site the minute they arrived, only to never return. Or whether they while away to read what you so passionately wrote about in the hopes that somebody might listen. Failing to analyze our website traffic can mean $$$ lost. Just hoping for better conversions will not bring you more traffic. It will only further the fact that nobody is listening to you. In that case all your efforts would simply be lost energy. A total waste!

Another tracking method exists by signing up for free with Google Analytics. It allows you to test many things regarding your sites and includes some powerful tracking options. Upon checking my stats the other day I realized that the bookmarking/direct hits to my site had increased from hovering around the 34% mark last month to rise to 94% this month. This is huge and certainly means one thing for me: that I am on the right track. Why else would others search targeting my site’s URL or even bookmark it for other visits. Had I not checked up on facts like this one, I would be shooting blanks! Because I wouldn’t know what drives people to my sites and where they come from in the first place.

I’m actually fascinated by Awstats (in CPanel) because it will tell me so many things about my website’s traffic. Looking at past promotions I can pick up on what worked and what didn’t. And the more I’m using the easy to understand interface, the better I understand the more finer points of effective marketing. This allows me to spend more time doing the things I love (which is just about anything to do with what I’m doing anyway) and prevents me from making too many bad calls.

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