The number one rule when building a business website or blog which you are planning to monetize is measure everything, I think I learned that from Bob Parsons. Here’s some free tools to measure your success.
1. Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools
Every blog or website should be using both of these. They’re free and provide detailed statistics on your website visitors, where they came from and how you’re performing on Google for certain keywords. The dashboard of Google Analytics shows a high level overview of number of visits, average pages viewed per visit, average time spent on site and your bounce rate. You can then drill down into the categories: visitors, traffic sources, content and goals. There’s a lot of interesting statistics there for web developers too - web browser and operating system used, screen resolution and connection speed to name a few.
The amount of information Google Analytics provides could be overwhelming, you should concentrate on just the following for business purposes. Visits, bounce rate, pages per visit and traffic sources. Pages per visit and average time on site give you an idea of how long your website can hold the readers’ attention for.
If you run a business which targets customers in a particular area, you should also check out the map overlay in the dashboard. A website which is well written and optimised for search engines will have the largest majority of visits coming from the area in which the business operates.
Let me know if you want to start using Google Analytics on your business website.
2. Feedburner statistics
Best used on a blog with regular updates, Feedburner can display the number of subscribers to your blog via RSS or email.
3. Inbound links
Both Wordpress and Google Analytics can track links to your website. Wordpress only displays links from other blogs to your blog whilst Google Analytics displays links from anywhere. Links to your homepage suggest that people think your website in general is useful, or are making recommendations of your business. Links to specific pages or blog posts suggest popular content, you will start to gain an idea of topics which are popular, allowing you to concentrate on writing more of it.
