The Quest for Hits - Graphic

Your "Quest for Hits" Starts Here

Welcome! You're at the beginning of a virtual journey, a quest that should lead to an ever-increasing flow of traffic to your website.

As you work through the material on these pages, you should find that your pageviews start to build like snowflakes, falling slowly at first, yet accumulating steadily until your efforts trigger an avalanche of traffic.

Quick Question
Do you know the difference between a "hit", a "pageview" and a "visitor"? If you're not sure, here's a guide to the main ways web traffic is measured.

More traffic is great, of course, but it's not the only thing that influences your chance of success on the Web. You need to take a well-rounded approach. If you're ignoring what happens to your visitors after they arrive on your site, you're missing half the picture. That's why we're going to be looking at things that impact the user experience, and how you can keep an eye on how your visitors are interacting with your website.

The Harmonious Triangle : Your Key to Success

graphic illustrating the 3 elements of successful web promotion: money, time and knowledge

The rather poor triangle graphic above (I'm no artist, as you can easily see) illustrates the 3 elements that contribute to successful promotion. Each can be substituted for the others:-

As you approach each tip of the triangle, the shaded area (representing incremental benefit) gets thinner. An extreme example would be if you had almost unlimited time on your hands, but no money and no idea how to go about promoting your site, you're not going to get very far. Similarly, if you have a lot of promotion experience but no time to implement it or money to pay someone to work on your behalf, you're going to find it pretty slow going.

This site is primarily focused on the needs of small business owner and individuals. As such, I'm assuming you won't necessarily have a lot of money or time you can devote to geting results. So I'll concentrate mainly on relatively simple, cheap things you can be doing to improve the ROI of your website.

ROI, or Return on Investment, is a fancy way of saying Does what I spend on my site make me money? Does your own website have a positive ROI?

Parting thought: despite what many expensive "web success" manuals suggest, there's no "silver bullet" to making a site productive and profitable. Learn what you need to do, put in some time and a splash of cash, and your efforts will be repaid in full by higher traffic.