Ten years ago you could include a hit counter on your website and announce proudly that your site was doing "very well" as soon as the number reached 100,000. The current process is not nearly as simple or straightforward. The internet works in complicated ways that have evolved to solve a number of small problems. Consequently, concrete statistics are often difficult to obtain. If you believe the number of online visitors is a reliable indicator to gauge the popularity of your site or the potential sales of your product, you should consider the following:

1. Hit - Every time a user requests a file on your site (a page, not a picture or link to another site) it counts as a hit.

2. File - When a file or page is actually sent to the user, it counts as a file. Files normally outnumber hits, but neither is very useful in measuring traffic. Any IP can request all of the files on your page several times in one hour without any actual involvement from the user.

3. Impressions - This is a concept that has existed in advertising for many decades. For example, a 2-page magazine advertisement counts as one "showing of a creative concept". This equates to one impression every time a reader sees it. If your web page contains five small banners, you could have 10,000 page views, but 50,000 impressions.

4. Page Views - Almost everyone believe this is the most important traffic statistic. This term simply refers to the number of times any particular page has been viewed. This metric can be useful. However, values can often be over-inflated and should always be considered in conjunction with unique visits.

5. Visits & Unique Visits - A visit is simply logged every time a remote IP requests one of your pages for the first time in a timeout period. A unique visit is usually defined as "one visit per IP per day", regardless of timeouts.

The above are all very important metrics, but understanding them properly is key. The best way to decide how your site's traffic is performing is by creating a formula. If you know what you are doing, you can develop your own formula. However, there are plenty of effective formulas currently available. A basic idea of how to evaluate your traffic involves reviewing monthly averages, unique visits and page views. This will give you an idea regarding how many individuals visit your site, how many pages they view, and how long they remain.

A basic formula from MarketingExperiments.com would be:

C = 4M + 3V + 2(I-F) - 2A

This formula shows that conversions are a product of motivation (M), value (V) and then the friction (F) elements minus the incentives (I). This will help you determine how many customers are likely to purchase your product. However, you need all the values first! You can purchase online analytic tools or download them for an upfront or monthly fee. All of them can return useful data to a webmaster.

If you are not an expert webmaster, or you do not understand many of the technical intricacies of web traffic, you should download Google Analytics. This is one of Google's new free products, and all you require is a GMail account and a web site. The program provides easy to read analytic data in a web-based form for your website. This can make it easy to determine which metrics would be most useful for analyzing your online traffic.

Michael Ehlert
RevUpYourWebBusiness.com

Creating a website and you already registered a domain name?

Trying to build a website around a name is very difficult to do, especially if you have not done a very important step for the process. Your first step in building your website needs to be the planning process. Many beginners do not realize this and when their website fails, they may believe they failed. But in reality they did not fail as long as they understand the missing steps and try again to rebuild their website.

Sure, many say it is very easy to create a website with only using three steps but not one of those steps is planning.

Planning your website

This is a very critical step when you create a website. You need to figure out the Who, What, Where, When, Why and How. It may sound difficult to do, but if you take the time at the beginning of your building process, you will find out that in the long run it will save your time (and money).

Who will be your audience? Have you chosen a targeted niche?

What is the content going to be about on your pages? What will be your keywords?

Where are you going to host the site? Will you use free web hosting or paid?

When do you plan on this website being finished? 5 days, 30 days. Be realistic and set a target date.

Why do you want to build your own website?

How is all the steps above to help guide you with your website creation.

The steps above may take you a few minutes or could take you a day or longer. But each one is important when you create a web site.

Even if you already registered your domain name and built your site and your site is not working how you want it to, take a moment and do the 5 W's and 1 H. It might show you what you are missing.

Most beginners get screwed up when it comes to website building. Often than not, this is what exactly holding them back to make money online. If you are one of them, let me tell you one thing for sure; building websites is not as difficult as what you might think. Well, I am not saying that it is just a piece of cake either, but learning to build websites worth the investment and effort.

This article is about that, learning to build websites the easy way; much easier than you might ever think before...

Easy Website Theme

Everyone knows something about anything, including you. This can be your passion, hobby or experience from the job. You will get nothing if you keep that knowledge for yourself and even if you share them in the offline world. However, internet can be totally different. You can get paid for your knowledge sharing through various monetization plans. It works for me and will work for you too.

But then you might ask, If building website is that easy, why most fails building a successful website?

The answer is simply because, they fail to recognize and act upon the significant difference between offline and online trade. In the Internet, people look for information through Search Engine (SE) and web pages that ranked in the first page will benefit the most. Therefore, it is critical for you to optimize your web pages for certain targeted keywords so that you can rank high in the SE Ranking Position (SERP).

Easy Web Building Tool

You can build your website with other free website building software. Wordpress and Blogger are probably the most popular free web building tool available in the Internet. However, both offer less flexibility and professional looks since they are geared towards personal blog or online diary than for business ventures. Nevertheless, you can use both to get some feel of how to build a great website.

In my opinion, you should consider buying advanced website builder if you are serious about making money online. These softwares offer additional features compared to free tools such as flexible web editing and built in SE Optimization (SEO) tools. The initial investment can be easily recovered by the earnings potential you will be getting. I prefer Site Build It as my web building tool.

Easy Traffic Generation

Traffic is the one that will determine your success. Although the more traffic is better, nothing can beat the targeted one ever. Therefore, keep your marketing campaign to the most reliable and targeted sources so that you can enjoy very high conversion rate (percentage of visitors that turn to customers). Article marketing is free and among the most effective Internet marketing campaign.

Since you are the master or the so called "guru" in your field, writing a good article should not a big deal at all. Keep on writing great contents to attract more traffic. Best of all, it works forever. Part from that, you can connect your website with others through some social networking. Networking builds relationship and trust, which then makes your monetization effort much easier.